Evil Mega-Biotch

I know she was trouble by the way she held her beer: with a pinky
underneath it to support, as if she didn't trust the friction of her
own hands. That lack of trust tells the whole story: she's as
suspicious as homicide detective on PCP who's just been told someone in
the grocery store is about to knife him when he leasts expects. She's
that way, all day long, constantly jerking from side to side, looking
for would-be attackers, but always ending up picking a fight with
someone.

The first night she slept over my brother threw a pile of blankets in
her face and she walked out--it took my honey tongue to coax her back
in and into her bedroom. There her suspicions arose to a mighty fury,
and she accused me of every inequity ever recorded since the first
edition of the Holy Torah. She still elt me have her though.

That next morning I made us bacon, eggs, Texas toast, a plate of mashed
ham and six pints of gin-n-orange juice; she took her food to go,
eating from our stolen ceramic plate as she tore down the road and back
to her tiny home-hole in the foot of the mountains. She was 16, I was
21.

I was summer wore on, her madness exploded like a roman candle in a
Civil War armory: with color, with noise, with heat, with flash. She
accosted my mother at a drive-thru window. She followed my dad to a
dentist appointment. She swore at my sister from a passing school bus,
then made rocks with our names on them and made them fight with each
other in a little circle she'd painted in blood on our back deck.

Mom and Dad were divorced soon after, and my sister huffed anti-freeze
and wound up in an air conditioned group home outside of Tallahassee.
But my brother took top prize of them all: he actually MARRIED her on a
tiny beach in a Hawaii-themed resort in Vegas, even going so far as to
dip her in the stolen/cholirnated waters of the captured Colorado River
as if to baptize her.

But of course, it was too late.

Proposal: Indie Rock Group Blog

Imagine Generation Sit's answer to Pitchforkmedia.com, a daily group
blog dealing with deeper perspectives, musings, and opinions on the
current global independent music scene, preferably something based here
in the Mountain Fortress (the Rockies) and/or internationally rather
than the infernal twin rockstar terrors of New York and Chicago (LA
doesn't count, cuz I can't speak Spanish). Seriously, there's money in
indie rock group blogs, and I have yet to see a good one, have you? We
could get mad ads and give the 'Fork a run for their money, plus have
something to do at rock shows during boring opening bands rather than
drink too much and fall in cacti. Whatcha say?

Apolitical Times

I haven't the slightest impulse to get politically active right now. I
used to be up-to-the-minute on the latest Global Justice news via
indymedia.org. I used to design flyers, participate in teach-ins, and
lecture girlfriends. Now I don't do shit. This whole Bill Frist/radical
Republican judges/"nuclear option" scandal? I totally ignored it. Am I
proud? Fuck no.

But I give props to Conner Oberst and Bright Eyes for singing "When the
President Prays to God" on the Tonight Show, even if it might have been
a futile guesture (was it). I sorta resonate with the remaining Jedi at
the end of ROTS, when they go into hiding and vow to make their
reappearance "when the time is right." Perhaps this psycho-Republican
nightmare is just something we need to live through. As Zizek counsels,
a second term of W. is exactly what we need right now, as it will awken
the world to the searing reality of Christian Dominionism and
Idio-Capital the way a stealthy faux-populist Kerry campaign never
would have. Through our (my) apathy, we got the president we deserve,
and it may get worse and worse and worse and worse and worse until we
all do something about it.

Are we looking for a hero? Do we need a savior? Do we need another
demigod descending from the political heavens to pull our collective
arses out of the flames of the Neocon Ascendency? Perhaps. But also
perhaps: we may find this demigod/savior/hero in ourselves, closer to
us than our own skin, deeper and stronger than our own bones, more
honest and brutal than the fact of our own death. The world will
suffer, and we may one day die, true, but the Hero lies inside, ready
to fight/handle/deal with all of this.

How/where do you find this hero? Go for a long walk. Quit doing stuff.
Strip, excise, pare down. Let your laundry go, fuck the mail, fuck your
email, let your room get dirty, smash your tv, forget to call your
friends, throw out your shitty magazines. Just walk. Or just sit on the
porch. Make notes in a legal pad when needed. Take a retreat from the
world in the midst of the world. Remove all barriers between you and
your Self. Maximize the amount of alone time you endure, for a week or
so. Record your dreams, Wander in strange neighborhoods. Put on
different clothes. Get new perspectives on who/what/where you are.

And above all, don't wobble.

saving 50 bucks

according to dan allison, each subsequent day i miss posting to this
blog, i owe him 50 bucks. here's to making sure i have today
covered.....

Bolder Than Boulder

Tomorrow is Boulder's world-famous Bolder Boulder 5k Race, which will
include running legend Frank Shorter and a bevy of competitive races
from the international scene. There's truly nothing like being a
distance runner at the peak of his game, which is where I was fortunate
enough to be in the fall of 1997 as a junior in college. Running well
takes both disciplined effort and an openness to not being able to
control the results of said effort. Train your ass off, but care not
for results (don't "lust" for them, in the Crowleyian sense). For two
months that summer I did nothing but work (I cleaned whirlpools in the
Physical Therapy department of a hospital in the city), purchase
obscure music, and run, sometimes even twice a day. I was doing
hardcore track workouts in the middle of the night at my old high
school track, running 12 and 14-milers at various state parks, even
timing myself on old race course. Hell, I even did a 15k.

As David Deida might say, it takes constant effort and discipline to
become effortless, and that's what I experienced in a nutshell. My legs
and lungs were so used to running as hard as possible that I could
almost feel the actual hills and loops and track workouts in my body,
like an invincible mountain of power resting inside of me every time I
stepped on a starting line. School? Fuck it. Drugs? Bite me. I was in
college to run motherfucka!

Pleasure is Lame, People Who Fuck Are Fuckers

More ammo in my never-ending quest to decry all things romantic: Baltic
philosopher Slavoj Zizek has somewhere and recently come out with the
notion that, essentially, "there is no inherent emancipatory potential
in pleasure." Meaning: drinking, screwing, eating fast-food and
carrying on are not all they're cracked up to be. This became
particularly relevant this weekend as I attended a disgusting
couple-fest of a party where the dictatorship of "hooking up" seemed to
take full precendence -- even amongst the most mature members of the
gathering, meaning mid-30s -- over other potentials we may have
contained. Ken Wilber talks about declaring an open and global ban on
all sub-worldcentric behaviors, so why shouldn't this include public
displays of affection? Aren't such acts the ultimate in stating ones
overemphasized regard for some beings (usually one) versus the rest of
the world. Couples making out, codependent and lost in their
hot-breathed lust, versus caring and independent autonomous individuals
engaged in deep--and painful--conversations with actual, rather than
apparent, emancipatory potential.

Those of us learning to play music for the first time know this deeply.
Playing music, for the beginner, is the exact opposite of pleasure, in
fact it is WORK in its most gruesome sense, a form of work that a true
artist must engage in to manifest the deeper energies attempting to
pierce his/her skull and enter the world. Couplehood, from what I've
been seeing as of late, acts almost as a direct impediment to this
(disregarding the rare cases of mutual support), miring eager young
idealistic males in the circuituous emotional maelstroms of the fairer
sex, leaving all creative potential to grow old and gather must.

Of course, I did get a girl's phone # tonight......

Addenda to previous post

What I forgot to mention is the one main area where Steve and H.P
differ: the use of horror. Both, of course, had a deep appreciation for
their artistic forebears (HP for Poe, SM for The Fall), but you'll
never be freaked the fuck out by a Pavement/SM album (unless you're
fatally allergic to pastoral mid-tempo melodies), but with Lovecraft,
entire creative epics are centered on the notion that there is some
terrifying shit just beyond the limits of human understanding. That, to
me, is one of Pavement's chief failures: to never look beyond their
genteel aristocratic horizons at some of the more grotesque features of
life on this planet. For them, the ego remains central, and that beyond
my immediate horizons, more or less doesn't exist. And if they did do
that, it was buried under mountains of ear candy.

FYI.

Stephen Malkmus: Melody-obsessed heir to H.P. Lovecraft

A recent review of the new album "Face the Truth" proclaimed that
Malkmus, once the "prince of indie rock", was now settling into an
"almost British-like eccentricity", which reminded me immediately of
Lovecraft. Both artists possess an odd paradox of high aesthetic
innovation and achievement, mixed with seemingly conservative social
values (HP's notorious racism, Malkmus's belief that the "dance
faction" was "a little too loose for [him]", not to mention his open
pining for the "range life"). Perhaps Malkmus is an example of the
newly-coined phrase "South Park conservative", one not afraid to offend
the status quo in pursuit of art, yet decidedly wary about some of the
more extremes of postmodern liberalism. Perhaps its the University of
Virginia in him, or his blue blood roots, who knows.

But that "eccentricity" is posited in the review as something directly
askance to the emerging new "dance faction" of pseudo-New Wave dance
punk bands (many of whom I dig), and in fact Malkmus brags about his
ignorance of the current music scene he once presided over. The
question for me then is: can one be BOTH? I've been to Pavement shows,
and one of them in particular sticks in my head: the date they played
in Buffalo, NY during the "Brighten the Corners" tour. I have NEVER
seen in a more uninspired, dead-from-the-neck down bunch of dark-rimmed
slackers in my life. NO amount of rhythm would have gotten the boring
hipster fucks to budge beyond so much as a slight repeating head-nod,
let alone the more subtle tempos of Pavement's latter work.

And so it was a blessing in 2001 when hyper-cognitive Pavement-style
literary indie rock lost favor in the face of the
Dancepunk/Art-funk/Garage-glam charge lead by everyone from the Strokes
and the White Stripes to Liars, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and even noise
freakers Black Dice, who all put the BEAT front and center and made
sure that, no matter how many obscure 1970s British bands they
referenced in their guitar licks (very few compared to herr Malkmus),
they at least let the audience leave sweating, exhausted, happy, and
hopefully, laid. But, as all things do, this wave has gone trendy, and
it's not just a few people who've noticed some of the more unsavory,
anti-intellectual white-belted fashion-obsessed kids caring ONLY for
the Beat, art bedamned.

So it's refreshing to see eccentric ol' Malkmus giving it a go once
again, stretching our sensibilities beyond the incessant 4/4 hi-hats
and sleaze keyboards of The Rapture's many apers. And the tide may
indeed by turning, if the neo-folk thing gains a bit more ground. But
then again, motherfuckaz still need to dance....

Music: What's the Point?

While obsessing over the new Malkmus (ex-Pavement front man) album this
week while teaching myself some guitar chords and bass riffs, it's
dawning on me that I really don't know what the fuck music is for. See,
I aspire to be an indie rock band, tour the indie rock scene, play in
indie rock clubs and make out with indie rock girls, but simultaneously
a higher/better/simpler side of me is wondering if there could be more
to music than drinkin' and screwin'. The Malkmus album is great, but it
doesn't hit you over the head with a Message, to say nothing of
Transmission, and I am reminded again and again of Stuart Davis's
brilliant marriage (in recent albums at least) of punk-pop and tunes
with REAL emotional/spiritual depth, heft, rigor, and ruckus. This all
comes out, of course, of both Stu's exhaustion of the "rock stars and
models" lifestyle, and his current and deepening commitment to practice
as both an artist and a meditator. Dig enough in one spot, and
eventually oil's gonna come up is what I say.

So where does this leave the beginning musician, who one day hopes to
shine and radiate with Kosmic energy, squeezed through the indie rock
filter and infiltrated into clubs and galleries across the contiguous
48? Which do I focus on: the music or the message? Duh, the music dummy
(I can barely play bass for more than 20 minutes without wanting to
finger puke). Our going model is: come up with some kick-ass chord
progressions, perfect these to a relative degree, then sit back,
reflect, and absorb, then see what lyrics your intuition tells you to
write on top of them. A long time ago, in the liner notes to Pavement's
3rd album "Wowee Zowee", Malkmus famously wrote about the current state
of the mid-90s music scene: "there is no art in these songs, they
become exactly their limitations."

In other words, those who don't try, who don't reflect and don't ponder
the states their raw music/demo tracks evoke deep in their being,
inevitably pump out more of the same clichéd drivel we find clogging
the campus radio closets across the country. Music today lacks
surprise, emotion, danger, so caught up in posing and sleazy guitar
riffs are these new wave jokers, or "weird for weird's sake" are the
neo-folk progabees (my beloved Fiery Furnaces of course), that
something is still deeply, deeply amiss in post-9/11 independent music,
and I'm here to fucking change that.

Uh, once I learn to play bass.

Playing Music With My Brother

Picture two Salamone boys, armpit-stinky, dead broke, and somewhere
between the ages of 24 and 28, rocking out in the living room with
their rich roommate's music gear. Bass, bass amp, acoustic guitar, some
pics, and a glass of water for me. It's easy, this music gig. Learn a
few chords, learn to string them together in a compelling sequence,
repeat that sequence. Then change it up with a different sequence. Then
figure out the corresponding bass triads, let them walk all over the
chord structure, then start playing out with rhythm on the guitar
proper. Hot night, a few cars going by.

Song starts to morph, the need for vocals announces itself. The image
of the rich roommate pops to mind, song morphs into a "day-in-the-life"
diatribe showing the pussy-whipped roommate feeding dogs, watering
plants, washing dishes, and making the beds while the near-wife sleeps
sleeps sleeps sleeps. The joke is there is no chorus: right as the
refrain ends, it reverts back to the next verse, proving the endlessly
futile round of repetition said roommate is a slave to, the poor guy.

Song stops, declarations are made. "This is so easy!" says one of us.
"No shit," says the other, "our roommate should be here!" But alas he
is not, which is probably a blessing. His skills were too advanced, and
his tastes too specific. Every experimental chord progression we came
up with reminded him of an old song by Weezer or Johnny Cash or Weezer
or the Melvins, which he would inevitably slide into. New material
became cover songs, over and over.

Said roommate sleeps in another town now, and Los Hermanos Salamones
have numb fingers and chord-echoing heads.

Lazy Summer, Full of Excuses

This week marks the release of Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus's 3rd
album, "Face the Truth". Malkmus, once the undeniable Prince of Indie
Rock, has recently faded into a laconic, 30-something-afraid-to-grow-up
slump, but this new album promises a return to the "sunset nostalgia"
of Pavement's glorious early pat. And what better time for a new
(essentially) Pavement album to come out, here on the cusp of the
summer when yours truily is -- once again -- considering dropping any
and all free-time web ventures (blogging this year, The Manifest last
year) in favor of a more embodied, cavorting dalliance across the
summer grasses 'neath the summer moon with all of the female summer
swoons.

And what of awareness? And meditation? Does one sit when one is
sweating and craving spiked lemonade. Does the Buddha ogle neighborhood
girls by the makeshift pool, run down beer-drenched slip and slides,
and start makeshift folk duos in the tiny public spaces left by the
cool breezes of the 70-degree moors and marshes. A frog darts into a
slender little stream, a mountain bike tire is being fixed in the
center of a cool glade, sweat beads and glistens in the armpits of
Wendy, age 23, on her 3rd mile with the 4th song of the new Malkmus
album blasting on her 'Mini.

And rainbows coat our bomb pops, hiking trails spiral into my
dreamscapes, a yoga book is stained with Annie's salad dressing, and
even the anarchists eschew black clothing. Two dogs fight over a stick
behind a coffee shop dumpster, while a magpie shoots straight into the
sky, nearly missing what looks to be a far-off Concord jet thousands of
miles outside of its theatre of operations.

And we are lost, lost, lost in our dreams of new vacations, visions of
bactrian camels reflecting off the hula-hopping molecules of our
sunglass lenses. And the gravity cops hold sway over the frisbee
fields, with softballs pelting little children in a soft rain of round
leather red-stitched balls; watch the Milfs cheer, watch the Milfs
cheer.

blog confessions

ok, so it's apparent i skipped two days this weekend, a sign of the
impending demise of this project? i've got friends placing bets on when
i'll give it up. thing is, i spend all day working on the computer
anyways, why extend that time? also, other non-computer art forms are
calling me right now, namely the bass guitar laying on my couch. Just
Write was intended to further me along in my writing career/practice,
but right now i'm having other impulses.

but it's all good whatever i choose to do, as long as i do SOMETHING.
As the sculptor Rodin told a young Rainer Maria Rilke-- "You must
always work!" It just doesn't always have to be through a screen....
-p

Star Wars Question of the Day: If Anakin Was to Bring "Balance" to the Force, Why the F--k Did the Jedi Keep Doing Their Thing

Unless the Jedi meant "balance" in a pejorative sense, by prophesying
that only Vader would be able to bring "balance" to the Force, they're
basically admitting that their "Religion of the Light Side" is
one-sided, false, wrong, and bad. If they can't bring balance, if all
the Jedi do is increase imbalance, why did they persist in their ways?
Force of habit? Bureaucratic hand-tying?

Lucas theoretical inconsistency #812,404. But hey, what do we expect--
the guy doesn't even have a chin!

Another Skip Day

Sorry folks, skipped another day yesterday. What can I say, the SITH
got me!!!
will post later today....

Hacking the Brainstem

The plot of Snow Crash revolves the ancient Sumerian myth of Enki.
Basically, before Enki came along, the people of the world all spoke
one language, and it was driven by programs called ME, which programmed
people to do all sorts of tasks, from farming to fucking to fighting to
taking out the trash. Thing was, this language, what today we might
call "babble" or "gibberish", sprang directly from the primitive
brainstem, bypassing humanity's higher capacity for rational thought.
This made brainwashing as easy as breathing, and because of this
memetic "plagues" could spread through the population, rendering all of
Civilization a depressing mass of blithering, Kansas-style zombies. In
order to free humanity from this slavery to their Sumerian overlords,
Enki basically enacted the Tower of Babel, smashing this one language
into a thousand different tongues, ensuring that enslaving "viruses"
couldn't spread, giving humanity a fighting chance at evolving out of
the Precambrian ooze from which is sprang.

In Snow Crash, L. Bob Rife, monopolist of the global telecom system AND
an investor in Pentacostal "speaking in tongues" type of religion, is
attempting a massive conspiracy to bring back the rule of ME, and
enslave humanity to be the babbling idiots they outgrew so long ago on
the plains of Iraq. Arrayed against this superpowerful villain are Hiro
and Juanita. Juanita has figured out how to use the language of ME to
her own advantage, meaning she's "hacked" the babbling glossalalia of
the brainstem, giving her power to rival Enki's himself. Luckily, Hiro
convinces her to use this power for good, to resist the encroaching ME<
much the way Enki did, to set Rife's blithering masses free once again.

Why the fuck do *I* care?

Because not long ago -- a month ago actually -- I was playing around in
my own intuitive way with the idea of MEs, of creating and spreading
behavioral codes for the purposes of liberating humanity, or at least
to help them practice a more comprehensive approach to personal
development. When one sits and contemplates the nature of reality, and
sees how wide open it is, one realizes how funny and arbitrary our
everyday behaviors are. Stephenson writes (p. 398):

"At some point, Enki realized that Sumer was stuck in a rut. People
were carrying out the same old ME all the time, not coming up with new
ones, not thinking for themselves."

in other words, people were carrying out the same mind-numbing
routines. Look at the routines of today: work all day, go home and
watch TV, go out drinking, fuck some random stranger you met at a seedy
dive bar. Repeat. But what if we could "hack" our own consciousness
(much the way they do in NLP), and reprogram ourselves to do, with
minimal amounts of mental energy, whole new sequences of wholesome,
Self-building tasks, beyond the stereotypes and compartmentalization we
find today. Even with positive things, "going to the gym" just doesn't
hack it any more. Imagine if there was a "button" one could push to
carry out a complicated ITP sequence, such as "Meditate 5 minutes / 5
minutes energy work / talk to stranger 5 minutes / 5 minute jog / 5
minutes yoga / eat seaweed / write in dream journal." What if there was
a sequence of glossolalia-style syllables which would bypass one's
reasoning mind to imbed these life-enhancing behaviors WITH THE
BRAINSTEM, waiting to occur at a moment's notice given that the right
trigger is pushed?

Topic for another post, duh.

Fiction: All Hail Domestication

Mary needs me every night. I take the J home, slurp down a plate of
spaghetti, watch 10 minutes of Sportscenter and 5 minutes of That 70s
Show, then brush my teeth, slick on new deodarant, run the frying pan
under some hot water, grab my bag and head on out. I grew up alone,
lonely, an only child in a tract home just south of Trenton, with an
Latino mother and heartattack father, me and them and the suburbs and
denial. Mom worked in The City, I would visit once a week and buy
music, listening to my new CDs on the train ride home and dreaming of
rock and roll glory. But I had more basic needs that weren't being
met-- needs for comfort, needs for security, needs for someone to talk
to, someone to hold my hand. I was in and out of hospitals on
anti-depressants, but managed to cobble together a hardcore band or
two, but it was not enough. Nothing was enough.

Now I'm in Albuquerque working a customer service job, working in the
back room of a tackle shop (who the fuck fishes in New Mexico),
masturbating under the desk and thinking of Mary. She was in a
Starbucks on Center when I made a rare piut-stop for a rare shot of
thier not-very-rare espresso. One gasoline black gulp later, I'm
setting the tiny ceramic shot glass on a napkin and gazing out at frat
boys and skate punks and anarchists and cheerleaders stomping by in the
waning Southwestern sun.

She doesn't so much nudge me as bump into me. I look up, she looks
down, and then I just know that I have a reason to be New Mexico after
all. My roommates balk, declaring her unworthy qualities and urging me
to continue with the dream of having a band, even if they aren't
contributing in the slightest. But she is nice to me, she needs me, she
is a warm fuzz-filled black hole, a rollercoaster drop into an abyss of
passion, the most terrifying and the most liberating person I've ever
encountered.

She never asks me about the band, nor asks me to do anything with my
life. The tacklebox job is fine, she's a marketing rep and can buy all
the food I don't put on my credit card. I buy her duplicates of all the
DVDs I own, just so we can stay on the same page when we talk movies.
She has a small cottage by the river her uncle lets her stay in, picket
fence and everything. I take the M bus, passing through downtown, past
the Launchpad where in a former life I dreamed of one day playing
guitar inside.

But now I am a moth, and she is a candle, and I move through sand-blown
avenues to get closer and closer to the flames she emits. I may stink,
I may hurt, but she envelopes me and makes it all better, makes it all
comfortable, makes it all just fucking great.

And all I have to do is show up.

Paul = Neil Stephenson (?)

In reading a "Snow Crash" i'm finding it eerie how similar (though more
polished) Stephenson's style is to my own. A few years ago, at the
height of the war in Afghanistan, I penned a little ditty called "Ricky
on the Mountain", which naively apes Stephenson's predisposition
towards a franchise-dominated future, blurred lines between virtuality
and reality, Japanese culture, and really odd forms of terrorism. Bear
in mind I had never read a cyberpunk novel, nor did I read much fiction
in general (beyond the amazing George Saunders and a few other random
writers), but I felt intuitively drawn to the breathlessly creative
hodge-podge pop, marketing, and neologism-obsessed futuring of dear
Neil. Was it because I was (and still am) a genius? Or was I tapping
into a rather thick and juicy emerging morphogenetic field, badly
expressing in my own way what Neil was getting accolades and blowjobs
for expertly articulating. In short, pop-cyber is the cultural stew we
all now swim in, and all but the most dull and insensitive can spot the
cross-pollinating spleen-passion of a hundred million bits of informa
flying around to create new and higher (w)holes.

So here I am, c.150 pages into Snow Crash and loving every minute of
it. How, oh how, could a writer ever get beyond such densely-imagined
mythologizing of the Age of the MiniMall? Two ways: 1) add the
esoteric, and 2) go multimedia.

1) While Snow Crash's Black Sun centerpiece has an esoteric mythology
of sorts (witness the way in which avatars "die", get hauled into
"hell" by a bunch of little black eyeless men, then give way to a new
avatar by the very same user), Stephenson's knowledge of the occult and
mysticism in general seems lacking, thought its these very mental
frontiers that it seems one must ponder in navigating the info-space of
the psychonautic MetaVerse. The whole thing is an altered, if "faked",
state, and states and altered states seem to have their own native
properties, structures, behaviors, and the like. That Hiro Protagonist
(at least thus far in the novel) does not practice Centering Prayer or
Kundalini is not to Neil's disadvantage, but it is to our advantage,
for it highlights a new space into which eso-fiction may step. I'm
looking for a novel which would express what the World Soul sees
through the eyes of the witness.

2) Go multimedia. The tendencies of cyberpunk already indicate they
need an operatic, wagnerian usage of multiple media streams to fully
convey the whole smear. Emmy-deserving sci-fi series Wild Palms did
this for TV, but these pulp novels leave us hungry. As did The
Lawnmower Man, which equated cyber with VR, and we all know how far
along VR has gone (yeah right-- where are my $20 wraparounds god damn
it?!?!). But there is much to be done with cheap A/V technology,
blogging, dynamic programming, noise music, etc. that has yet to be
exhausted.

Topic for another post.

Enjoy Your Brainfood: The Slow Internet Movement

I mentioned the Slow Food movement in a previous post. It started in
Europe about a decade ago in reaction to fast food. Apparently all of
those French and Italian gustocrats want to ENJOY their food, and the
friendly conversations that occur around a meal, rather than rush
through a microwavable burrito and a Red Bull or two while answering
emails like a certain over-worked Production Manager I know. But food
is primarily a biospheric phenomena-- what would be its analogue in the
Noosphere? Simply put: information. And broadband internet access is
essentially the drive-thru window of the info economy (especially with
such time-saving enhancements as RSS aggregators and AJAX
applications), allowing one to blaze through reams of data no hacker,
zinester, or bibliophile would have dreamed of even a decade ago. But
what, with all this speed, might we be losing out on? Do we reflect on
the information piling into our brains? Do we digest it? Enjoy it?
Share it with friends?

Sadly, it doesn't always seem so. As every blogger knows, its quantity,
not so much quality, that drives the informed lifestyle. But ripping
through blogs 18 at a time every day the way fat mexicans rip through a
pile of Gorditos leaves much to be desired: ALL food (biospheric and
noospheric) begins to become bland and indistinct. Blogging software
allows any Joe Schmoe with access to a meat pile to have his own
mini-grill, and we infonauts run down the Strip of info franchise
heaven stuffing our faces and tasting none of it. Little nutritional
value, little processing time.

So I am proposing a conscious reorganization of our attitude towards
info-consumption: SLOW THE FUCK DOWN. Enjoy it! Ponder it! Reflect on
it! "But I need to get more perspectives on this issue!" You can't
think yourself into these? "But my own brain is boring and dull and
uncreative!" Have you given it space to try? "There are so many blogs
to read!" Pick three (Just Write! plus two others), and read the shit
out of them. Read posts 4 or 5 times over. Comment on them ten times.
Draw a mindmap in your sketchbook and plot out all the tangents and
considerations this one blog post has you considering. Chew, mulch,
mull over. Quantity of info and opinions is no match for quality. Find
three good blogs and learn to prepare, cook, and eat them correctly.
Unplug your computer and go for a walk. Keep a journal or use a tape
recorder. Insure that no bit of information goes unprocessed. Restrain
yourself from consuming "junk data", information you don't need which
will only fill your mind with lard and cholesterol.

And then read Snow Crash.

To Be Integral With Art (Response to Dallman)

[I read Matthew's blog every day because it gives me encouragement and insight on the path of becoming a more inclusive and well-rounded artist. What follows are some comments on his recent post "TO BE INTEGRAL WITH ART". His text in italics, mine in roman.]

TO BE INTEGRAL WITH ART: is to be inclusive. It is to ask, 'is this as full as I can make it?' It is to ask that again, and again.

Fullness, fullness, like a big plate of spaghetti with sausage, salad, garlic, cheese, olives, herbs, and wine. Integral Art is the Slow Food Movement of the creative sphere, the intention to give that sated, satiated feeling that accompanies a good meal, a good lay, or a good day at work. One has tested and expanded one's pallete, refined one's tastes, explored the spectrum of one's own experiential apparatus.

It is to create at your edge of honesty, and just over it, as you leap into the unknown.

Many of us interpret this as "put yourself in a fucked-up altered state and see what happens." Shrooms, booze, sleep deprivation, moral depravity-- we artists often interpret "the unknown" as "the unknown vices". But what about plunging UPWARD, into new levels of self-control, self-disciplined, self-awareness, increased ethical commitments?

To be integral with art is to open your areas of contraction, to open as the contraction, and make artifact of this tender, delicate new awareness, as do so transparently.

Matthew is using "contraction" in the Adi Da meaning, as that sense of being a separate self in a hostile world, a selection of matter which "contracts" or recoils from the rest of the world and deems itself an island floating in a sea of random, fleeting connections. This contraction, though ever-present in our every day reality, may itself be an illusion, but nevertheless it is useful to the artistic soul as a vehicle for the expression of his/her vision. The idea with integral art is to further expose the flasehood of this contraction, and to stand as firmly as one can in those fleeting glimpses.

To be integral with art is to commit to a practice of openness and fullness, through activities and experiments that jog our consciousness awake and vibrant.

Now we're getting to where the rubber meets the road. Activities and experiments: in other words, DO SOMETHING! JUST WRITE! JUST DRAW! JUST PAINT! JUST COOK A LOBSTER BISQUE IN A VODKA CREME SAUCE. JUTS GET ONSTAGE AND CRACK JOKES ABOUT YOUR LOVE OF PHLEGM AND THE DISTURBING PALLOR OF GEORGE BUSH'S SKIN. Support your main creative practice through a smorgasbord of cross-training activities. If you're a musician, lift weights, pray to the the God of Jim Morrison, eat a ton of fruit, and improvise on keyboard 30 minutes every day. Design a little icon for each activity and hang them on your wall, then touch them like buttons each day as you program yourself to do a sequence of art-supporting activities.

It is to realize the spectrum of ways that people view, absorb, and interpret art. It is to realize how the same spectrum of capacities can operate in your own thoughts, actions, opinions, and beliefs, as a creator/artist.

This seems like the one area today's artists are most loathe to tackle. The general feeling is either a) fuck what everyone else thinks or b) do what everyone likes so I can get laid and make money. Why aren't the Fiery Furnaces concerned with how their music is interpretted? And if they were, what would they do to collect that feedback and make use of it without compromising their onw personal (and lovable) sound and vision?

[Matthew's post continues, but I'm out of time....]

Review: Stand-Up Comedy at Red Fish

[I missed another post yesterday, my apologies. What can I say, I was
hungover....]

Boulder's brewery and restaurant Red Fish hosts an open mic stand-up
comedy night every Sunday, and true to Patton Oswald's observations,
it's filled with freaks, boring status quo comics, and true
visionaries. The freak had to be the MC, a bearded gay fellow in his
30s whose "bits" amounted to long, rambling accounts of his encounters
with Denver queers while getting high. And I thought the MC was
supposed to be the best comedian in the room? The boring comic was the
first guy I saw, a huge black man who did the standard "I got a job
with the cable company" type of schtick, peppered with copious
expletives. Copious expletives were the theme of the night, actually,
and even though I might the last person you'd expect to take offense to
frequent F-bombings, it really seemed lazy and, well, undignified.
"Fuck" and "shit" are a sure sign of both an undisciplined mind and
weak writing skills, vacuous emotion-triggering filler used in lieu of
more interesting nouns, verbs, and adjectives. It also gives one the
patina of being a "badass", which the comedy scene has seemed to have
devolved into becoming a home for. Following the black guy was a comic
known as "Hippie Man", a tall, 40-something authentic Boulder hippie,
who read his jokes from a clipboard and was full of self-deprecating
quips and hemp-tinged dick jokes. He was actually the best comic of the
night in spite of all of this, even using the clipboard to keep track
of which jokes bombed and which ones killed. Following him was a Denver
indie rock kid who bragged about shitting his pants and offered topical
perspectives on dolphin gang rape and other fun. He gave early signs of
visionary status only in dealing with a heckler in the crowd, a
"jackass in a Gap shirt" as he called him.

...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead Suburban Kids

[Lunatics. That's the only word coming to my strained lips right now:
absolute lunatics. My ears buzz, my neck hurts, my legs are weak --
indeed, ...And You Know Us by the Trail of Dead is back on tour, and
this time they have TWO drummers, a brand new bassist, and even a
keyboardist. Meaning, MORE equipment to trash each night. I have never
seen a bunch of techies run so fast as they scurried across the stage
to recover what Conrad, Jason, and the others attempted to render
unrecognizable. They are Trail of Dead, and they put on a sick live
show. Truth is, the music isn't even that good (especially the tedious
recent album "Worlds Apart"), it's the DELIVERY that counts.]

My eyes blister and I am happy, hopping up and down on chewed gum
waiting for the band to start. T-shirt tight on skin, jeans ripped at
the knee, memories of past shows and past brushes with death (they
whipped a snare drum at me in Albuquerque in April 2002) in the
forefront of my mind. All ages show, long-haired teens in braces and
corporate deodarant bounce to the strains of Van Halen's "Jump" as two
roadies put the finishing touches on a set-up sure to be slammed to
smithereens within an hours time.

Kill the lights. Black-clothed figures slink into the din of smoke and
applause, a backing track blasts an ominous choral piece, my heels
scream for relief but I am too happy to be standing on solid ground,
ready to fly. First chords strike, mosh pit ignites, armpits go wet and
even the girls are slamming into each other. Verse, chorus, verse --
rest, slam, rest. My asthma proves no match for these Sonic
Youth-inspired songs from the first album, my heart yearns to connect
with each and every soul through the meta-bliss body of the more
pop-romantic tunes. Jason Reece leaves the drums to grab the mic and
douse the crowd in water, we open up our mouths in gratitude, in song.

A 12-year old jumps on the back of a tight end and propels himself atop
the audience, surfing through clapping hands like a hyperactive puppy
in a snowbank; he is dumped onstage, winks at the guitarist and dives
back in, we pass him around and then he comes to me and --FUCK. Kid
falls on his head, on his neck, I was too weak and suprised. Down on
the floor, concerned moshers stop moving to pat his back and assess the
damage. It wasn't my fault, I tell myself, swearing to lift more
weights from now on.

10 minutes later, he's back in the fray, spinning around with fists
bared as the band rips into the speed-number "Perfect Teenhood" from
the album named after the holy mother. Conrad ponders the history of
music as he shakes his tambourine into the mic and brags about how good
his life is. The old bass player goes conspicuously unmentioned.

In 2002 I was a lonely youth hostel resident wandering New Mexico by
day and drinking by night. A redheaded girl gave me her number at the
pool hall Dave Attell would raid in an episode of "Insomniac" three
months later, but when I called she never answered. Each day at the
youth hostel I made a new friend, we went for beers and they were gone
in the morning. A kiwi blogger wandering the country by foot was jumped
by a brick-wielding bum in the alley behind the hostel that night after
the Trail of Dead show, nevertheless the Kiwi had a great visit and
seemed to hook up with any girl he came across. Romance of the open
road, or attractive qualities of his skewed Aussie accent?

I laid on the sofa that night with my discman, blasting "Source Tags
and Code" and dreaming of rock-n-roll glories of a far-off future.
Trail of Dead may be closer to such a level of glory than any other
band, if their cathartic destruction and politely violent reverence for
the audience are any indication.

Then again, they did request all beer to served in plastic cups, the
pussies.

:op

For Stacey

[Do you ever think back to some random fling you had back in the summer
2003 and what would have happened had things gone differently? Me
neither.]

That night at the bar I wasn't Paul, I was rock star called Mr.
Nihilistic Alternative Newspaper Editor, and you were a willing fan, a
knockout blonde standing an inch taller than me, deeply impressed at my
many life experiences. It was our newspaper's 1-year anniversary, and
every friend I ever knew in the city was in that tiny bar built of
bricks. You with your Polish face and fishnet top, tight jeans and
high-heels-- we sat on the covered-up pool table and I continued to
impress, disbelieving a woman this attractive could be this smart AND
so seemingly caring. You were married, but that was ending soon. I had
a mullet, but that would be fixed in due time. A back room to the bar
beckoned as people began emptying out front. I got you down to your
black french cuts when the owner barged through, hauling trash. He got
a full view of your perfect breasts.

We emailed over the next week, met for coffee and watched Donnie Darko.
My roommates bit their hands you were so hot. I would hold that night
you and I made out watching the Glyllenhall kid build his career over
their heads for months. You were going to technical school, living on
your sister's couch, dating two other guys but seemed to have room in
your heart for me. I was the willing sucker.

We went to a martini bar the next weekend, that's where we dry-humped
on the patio while asian University of Buffalo students walked by and
laughed at us. We made love in my dirty thin-walled bedroom, your
screams lit up the night sky like so many sirens and one very loud,
pink-lipped megaphone. My roommates did not wake. 18 positions later,
we were exhausted, and you woke up with bronchitis.

The dust in my room, the money missing from my bank account, the fact I
wasn't doing much with my life, these eased your decision. It was time
to be a one-man woman (besides the husband), and that man was not to be
me. I wrote email after email in protest, but you sadly declined my
last-ditch advances. We met for one more beer, you had on white jeans.
I kissed your cheek in the rain, you thanked me for being a great
person to talk to. (Why not just call me gay?).

Half a year and half a continent's worth of travel later, I saw you
once again in that same bar where we first met. You had a huge leather
coat on, your hair was died black, and you had to look over your
shoulder before you could hug me for fear your meathead boyfriend (the
one who was "going somewhere" with his dull blue-collar provincial
home-owning lifestyle) would catch you and beat the shit out of you,
presumably. I hugged you again and my glasses broke against your face,
the tiny screw fell on the floor and out of view forever. I made a
nasty comment to you an hour later down the street -- "have fun with
your meathead, bitch!" -- and that was it.

That was it, that was it, that was it.

The Famous Blogger: A Christopher Guest Film

Just ran through Guest's flick "The Mighty Wind", not as gut-busting
hilarious as previous entries ("Best in Show", "Waiting for Guffman",
and the unstoppable "This is Spinal Tap"), but still maintains all the
essential eccentricities: massive ensemble cast of Guest "regulars"
(co-writer Eugene Levy, Micheal McKean, Harry Shearer, Parker Posey),
the mockumentary format, largely improvised scenes, etc. Guest brings
lightness and compassion to the subjects he skewers, tempering his
deadpan irony with whimsy and, dare we say it, tongue-in-cheek
sincerity? [SPOILER ALERT -->] Witness the stage kiss of faux folk
legends Mitch and Mickey, surely the emotional peak of the entire movie
(if not Guest's career, nothing he's done up until now leaves you
quivering in your seat).

Another enduring theme of Guest's films is the general focus of subject
matter: the performing arts. Whether it's dog shows, community theatre,
folk revivals, or arena rock, Guest's love for the stage is undeniable.
How, then, do we explain his latest project, another mockumentary
spoofing -- get this -- bloggers?! Tentatively titled "The Daily Feed",
Guest's new film will star "Kids"-auteur Harmony Korine as a late
20-something blogo-fiend who organizes a meeting of Blogosphere
luminaries in his tiny Williamsburg apartment. Just the thought of
hearing Fred Willard riff on the unethical journalistic practices of
Gawker.com or Jennifer Coolidge stuffing her face with tofu snacks and
Red Bull drinks while drunkenly pondering the editorial intricacies of
Fleshbot.com has me so excited I can barely get through an article on
LowCulture.com.

The one glaring omission made by this new media cinematic fiasco has to
be the sheer absence of one Rommel "Coolmel" Deleon, by far one of the
most prolific bloggers working on the web today. If they can't get the
'Mel to cameo as himself, they could at least find an adequate -- and
improv-trained -- stand-in. My nomination is SNL utility man Chris
Parnell -- he's upright, loyal, well-spoken, and with enough coaching
by the 'Mel himself, will kill audiences from Silver Lake to Montauk
with his quirky-Jew interpretations of 'Mel catchphrases like "Oh
Fart!", "Right on dawg!", and "Very fluffy."

Personally, I am excited. I've been kicking around the idea of a Blog
movie for a couple years now, only mine was to occur entirely online,
with no characters actually meeting in person. Strangely, my lead
character was a thinly-veiled send-up of Guest go-to guy Bob Balaban
posing as a right-wing political blogger (a JEWISH right-wing political
blogger), who hires his hacker son Dax to spam-attack a rival left-wing
blog called GreenFrogAnonymous.org. An all-out flame war erupts,
dragging everything from Beer Blog to Technorasmic down with it,
prompting the government to impose strict new regulations on blogging
and thus suppressing the emerging new medium.

If you've been reading this blog in the past few days, you know where I
was going with this: stymied bloggers discover a new technology to mess
around with, namely biotechnology. Suddenly the "BioNet" (a global
network of high-speed biological "transfer tubes" which gush biological
materials -- plants, animals, alcoholic uncles from South Carolina --
around the world at lightning speeds) is alive with the self-expressive
creations of millions of no-named "bio-bloggers", and a new Cambrian
explosion of previously-unimaginable life forms springs out of nowhere
and wrecks havoc on the farms, villages, and cities of the world.

The film ends with Microsoft getting into the act, morphing its
much-ballyhooed "Longhorn" OS project into an ACTUAL LONGHORN -- a
bull-like beast with six legs standing 22 feet at the shoulders which
copies itself in the millions and tears into every last genetic anomaly
on planet earth, leaving precisely sixteen Amish people, a squirrel
named Baxter, and a handful of sesame seeds left to mop up the mess.

Injunction: "Yes, And?" Practice

[Matthew Dallman recently blogged about the improv comedy practice of
"yes, and", which operates on the principle that each "player" within a
comedy troupe must always add to (and never subtract from) a scene by
accepting where the scene is going -- no matter how ridiculous -- and
adding to it. I've done this practice in my own improv class with my
classmates, with hilarious results, but I wonder if it will bear much
fruit in the written medium? To wit:]

Today I was too tired to get anything accomplished.

YES, AND?

And so I shot up arm with 200mg of government-approved NanoEnergy.

YES, AND?

It made my robot girlfriend insanely jealous, so she sprayed
nano-vaginas all over her body, nano-penises all over mine, then rolled
around on me for 5 hours straight, elliciting 25 million separate
micro-ejaculations. How she got all those condoms on I'll never know.

YES, AND?

Did I mention she was a safe-sex 'bot?

YES, AND?

Did I mention that she went to Robo-Bovine University in Pseudo-Denver
for an advanced degree in Genetic Sexual Pleasure Engineering?

YES, AND?

She also built me a small hobby horse for my birthdays with multiple
living/pulsing orifices to with what I willed.

YES, AND?

She built a second one for herself, this one pink, and I would come
home from work and find them mating in the closet.

YES, AND?

There "secret" nighttime matings grew to be so loud that they drowned
the regular plane crashes we kept having in my neighborhood, even with
the lead-lined Protection Dome pulled down.

YES, AND?

My girlfriend eventually got fed up with our little toys and kicked
them out, so now they panhandle for nano-fuel down on the mean streets
of Kinda-Boulder in the summer snowshine, oil slicks gleaming little
rainbows wherever they show their (w)holes.

THE END.

So So Tired / Buddy Lists of the Future

Sometimes I seriously think I have AIDS, or Cancer, or Super Retarded
Being Tired All the Time Syndrome times a million. Its all I can do to
put in 3 hours of work, have some food, and pass out on the couch with
my contacts in. I need a robotic manservant, or a Red Bull drip, or a
swift boot in the ass (a live-in drill sergeant?), SOMETHING to keep me
going all day.

In the future, we will all by hyperlinked to a buddy list of teachers,
mentors, mentees, and students who will net us in a web of mutual
support and transparent regard. No more of this writing out of long
emails to people confessing one's daily weaknesses. From now on you
will have a constant 24/7 instant messenger video feed connected
directly to your brain. You will be able to lay on your couch, food
coma in full effect, and poll your teaching cluster about your next
actions for that evening.

"Should I keep sleeping?" you think aloud.

"Only if the Emptiness compels you," thinks back Barry, the gay Zen
teacher you met in Minneapolis.

"Not while there's a world of suffering," replies ZZiggy-Zoggy 24-j,
and egregore of 147 different mensch-type souls form throughout the
world across the ages.

"Fuck dude, sleep all day!" says your comedy supervisor from the
conmforts of his space station.

"Consider masturbating again," says Gwendolyn, the men's health expert
whose video blog you've been a subscriber to since July 2008.

You may, of course, just continue to lie there, staring at the cieling
as your eyes blink madly, seeking to conjure an entire new life for
yourself where the energy suit/armor you've donned does NOT physically
quail at the site of a pile of quinoa with kale and bean sprouts on top
(today's healthy meal course today, by the way).

But then you rollover, spilling your half-eaten robobowl of
pain-flavored Nanocrisps, and Reach for your glass of Meth-Enhanced
MegaFuel Green-T Cyborg Lube for Dummies.

Sudden Health Freak

I had a 2-3 year period of hardcore veganism, but gave it up in recent
years in lieu of the "Boulder online journalist diet", which means
coffee, spaghetti, eggs, and Red Bull, and nothing else. But today, out
of combination of vanity, fear of death, and Google, I've turned into a
raw food vegan nazi once again. At least for today. Whereas usually I
pile pasta and sausage on a plate and wash it down with beer, tonight
I'm health-bombing my frail half-Italian body with a salad made in
yuppie Whole Foods heaven, which includes:

-lemon
-fresh pressed garlic
-arugula
-daikon radish
-clover sprouts
-pumpkin seeds
-flax seed oil
-avocado
-Dulse seaweed flakes
-green apple

This obnoxiously healthy/expensive combination may seem foul-tasting,
but it's actually pretty good and (for once) light! And the main
course? Quinoa, protein-heavy king of all grains, cooked in clarified
butter. It might be healthy, but I can only afford to eat this well
once a month, if that.

There is something joyful about eating living foods. Bright greens,
yellows, whites, all of it filled with water, plants plants plants. But
for such a diet to "stick", it seems it must run concurrently with a
philosophical re-orientation. For me, pounding 'Bulls and slurping down
semolina is a function of my high-paced, high-stress lifestyle, which
values productivity and communicative efficiency over everything else.
With an overflowing inbox, a task list that just won't go away, and a
hyperactive imagination inventing entire new career plans in a matter
of days (see previous posts), there's hardly an extra minute left over
to slice some pears and steam a carrot or two. To eat healthy, while it
is deeply invested in a future state of being where one is still
healthy or even healthier, is also paradoxically firmly grounded in The
Moment. If you're doing it right, eating is no longer a chore, but a
knife-wielding adventure, a daring act of combinatory food preparation,
with new astringent tastes, bitter smells, and exotic oils dripping all
over your finely-tuned body.

And this notion that raw veganism is for pussies is pure BS. Have you
ever tried to eat nothing but kale leaves, raw garlic, and brazil nuts
all day long? Do you have the balls to skip TV for an hour in order to
juice 2 yams, a bunch of spinach, a lemon, and sixteen kumquats? This
ain't yo' little sister's garden burgers and soy milk lattes: raw
veganism is for men. Seriously, raw veganism is to vegetarianism what
the meat lover's pizza is to carnivores: an extreme overdose of
typically boring, tasteless food. Eat nine pounds of seaweed and tell
me i'm wrong.

Getting Retarded: How to Throw an Integral Party

This is in response to Dan Allison's "integrals are social retards" post, which
was in response to the party I was getting pumped for two posts
previous to this. Do blogs get tedious? Yes they do.

1. Abandon all notions that you or anyone you know are on the leading
edge of anything even if the party happens to be thrown in Abe
Maslow's daughter's house (which this one was). It is not the purpose
of a party to push the leading edges of consciousness, unless someone
has just invented a brand new hallucinogen and wants to try it out on
everyone. At a party we DEVOLVE, or as Fred Kofman might put it, we
sink down to the bottom of the pool so that we might later push off
from it in order to get our heads even farther about the surface. The
vajrayana kids might call this "the law of
inversion", wherein formally taboo passions (to the practicing
Buddhist at least) such as sexual pleasure, fear, hate, and loathing
are transformed into their opposite via the mystical processes of
tantra. Imagine doing this in one night!

2. Make a list of all the social taboos, nasty passions, and super
vices you'd like to break that night, then have a "decadence treasure
hunt" where teams attempt to beat each other out in accruing the
necessary "sin points". One might be to start a fistfight between
friends. Another might be to engage in some form of sexual activity for
all to see. A third might be to devour an unusual concoction of food,
such as spaghetti covered in Pop Tarts, Fruit Loops, and cum. Cars
could get keyed. Demonic spirits summoned. This would/should occupy the
first half of the party.

3. The second half of the party is for repentence, forgiveness, and
kundalini transformation. After everyone's ethical awareness has been
blown wide the fuck open, sincere attempts are made to heal all wounds
and gain superior wisdom from the proceedings. This is done through a
mutual embracing circle of dialogue, preferably with the help of a
"peace pipe" (er, bowl).

4. Music: always best when made collectivity (rather than just being
bludgeoned by a single DJ). Drums, ukeles, fifes, guitars, trombones,
slide whistles, triangles, singing, clapping, tonal boasting, harmonic
tantrayana arguments. All participants compose a "march and fight"
theme song which grounds that nights wisdom within the social
institution of a pattern of repeatable noise. We suspect this is how
some of the best Irish drinking songs began.

5. Promotion: PLEASE remember to take pictures. The party
"follow-through" is just as important as the party itself. Assign a
"party reporter", much the way a court assigns a stenographer. Take
copious notes, to be used for purposes of blackmail in the near future
(yet another vice/taboo to be broken later on-- have you ever been
"ironically blackmailed"?). Audio and video are also a must. Then put
up a cheap blog site, and enter this all into your blog.
PAssword-protect as necessary.

6. Rinse, repeat.

Personally I think it's silly to expect too much from a last-minute
graduation party attended by one's co-workers, most of whom are in
their tired late 20s. Parties such as these need a mutually-agreed upon
"instigator" or "party leader", who in autocratic fashion directs the
night's multifarious, poly-decadent proceedings from behind a
jewel-encrusted "AQAL" pimp cup. We wonder who might take up the
challenge....

It Seems That I Forgot to Write

Yesterday. Will make up for it today.

I'm Going to a Party

...a party, a party. I want mushrooms, bliss, floating social
interactions, chaotic displays of joy, the celebration of the Emptiness
of all phenomena, LOUD hip-hop, quiet dirty jazz in the bathrooms. I
want a coffee table covered in sticky old rum and coke, I want weed
stems slipping through the cracks of busted wicker furniture, rats
dressed up in little fuschia hats, a television showing "Making the
Band: Season 3" upside down and green, with sparks and flicker popping
out the backside. I want 10 brands of cologne and 38 brands of perfume
intermingling amidst the slow spins of the ceiling fan, I want breast
sweat falling into bowls of stale, soggy chips, I want the stench of
urine covering old bars of soap in the sports equipment closet, I want
chain of hand holding and burned hands of chain smokers, broken glass
filling up coffee filters, old men with new cars peeling out in the
street out front, fondue forks jammed into sides of raw beef (whole
cattle), I want rain reflecting the stars above falling into my open
mouth as I sing the songs of Southern rock bands and kick old boxes
into fetid swimming pools. I want YOU to pour me another beer form the
keg out back, I want frogs and gnats and old parrots and blue paintings
and dangerous metal sculptures and anarchist history books and rooms
full of people kneeling around small ceramic appliances getting high in
entirely new and unknown ways. I want to party, and I want to do it
now.

Injunction: Skip a Night of Sleep

The Buddhists talk a lot about "getting off the wheel of birth and and
death" so that one might attain Nirvana and, if you're from the later
schools of Buddhism (and not those tight-assed Hinayanas--just kidding
guys!), come back to liberate all beings. But one need not need to
devote 2-3 decades to constant spiritual practice to recognize the
sheer absurdity and inherent Emptiness of all existence: just pull an
all-nighter instead.

When you keep yourself up through the next sunrise, two things happen:
1) the supposed "barrier" between days of the week becomes flimsy
indeed, and 2) you realize how ridiculous the whole consumer-capitalist
cycle of sleep-eat-work-fuck cycle really is. Not sleeping is a rupture
in the habitual pole-fluctuations we take for granted, a rip in the
waking-sleeping weave of life, a flirtation with the death of all
meaning.

Regarding 1): we humans maintain a coherent identity and role in the
world via our ability to make distinctions between Self and Other, This
and That, Inside and Outside, Day and Night, etc. Skip a night of
sleep, and you'll see how truly arbitrary these distinctions are, for
there is no true "night" as separated from a truly coherent "day". The
night time can be broken up (by my estimation) into 4 or 5 or even
endless completely distinct units, from the dusky hours of dinner time
through the peppy early dark night through the silent late night to the
beginning of traffic noise and birdsong at 4 or 5am. Likewise the day.

The point is that without the barrier of sleep for you to mark off one
day from the next, DAYS DISAPPEAR, and you're suddenly thrown into this
hazy eternity of ever-fluctuating continuums of light, noise, and
activity. I'm tempted to keep myself up for an entire week, just to see
how much I can fuck up my mental "feng shui" by doing this. (Staring at
oneself in a mirror for an hour+ is another one).

Regarding 2): last night I worked straight through the night until
about 10:30 this morning. At 7am I went to the local yuppie espresso
joint with an iPod and a notebook to write down some comedy bits and
make some IU sketches. While a large part of my impression was due to
the fact that through one lucky circumstance or another, I live a
rather non-traditional neo-bohemian techie lifestyle, I STILL felt a
little absolute disgust at all the furious activity of the people
there. I don't mean this out of malice: not sleeping seems to liberate
you from the ROUTINE we all accept and take for granted. Not sleeping
makes you see that this routine isn't an absolute imperative, but an
arbitrary choice or pattern (a kosmic/karmic groove if you will), a
line in the sand of eternity that helps us keep our lives organized,
but ultimately, falls prey to the Void like everything else. Seeing
through the illusion of this Sleep Wall is a liberating act: our
routines need not be such.

Days are not real, nights are not real, there is only this moment, or
whatever bullshit Zen interpretation you want to give to it. Now to
pour some tea.

Writing Advice from "Just Ask Morris"

The guy I told to bite me just posted some advice to myself and another
aspiring writer on his comment-barring blog "Just Ask Morris", see it
here:

http://www.crazypromofun.com/2005/05/write-me.html

Getting lectured on my craft by this self-centered lunatic is a bit
like a doctor being lectured by a first-year biology student at a
community college about brain surgery. His basic injunction: study the
writing of other bad writers. Guess I'll start with his.