New Orleans: America's Second Chakra?!

Former GenSit contributor Nicq MacDonald's true story of a conspiracy-ridden one-night stand in New Orleans (a phenomenal piece of writing by the way, equal parts CrimethInc. and Andrei Codrescu) really got me thinking today about the Big Easy's deeper role in the social body that is the United States.

If you'll forgive this New Age tangent, I've always been intrigued with the idea of macroscopic social correlates for the purported chakra energy system of the human body. For the sake of argument, let's consider the United States as a living superorganism, with its own chakra system. The chakras, or wheels, represent extrasensory "energy centers" which supposedly regulate the basic needs up and down the spectrum of this living creature.

The second chakra for the human being, centered just under the navel, is what supposedly regulates the body's sexual and creative energies. Anyone who's seen a Girls Gone Wild Mardi Gras video or can't go to bed without an hour of classic jazz 78s knows that sex and creativity are two things that New Orleans, in all of its depraved and decrepit glory, excels in. Nicq's story only drives the point home.

Therefore, what might look like a drug and crime-riddled abberation in a supposedly law-abiding and safe nation is what actually helps to keep the nation energized and alive. Just as it wouldn't survive without addressing the root chakra needs for food (the Midwest) and transportation (Detroit, or what's left of it), or the third chakra needs for power (NYC, LA) or 4th chakra needs for compassion (sigh, Boulder? Madison?), the United States would be helpless, locked up, and dead from the neck down without the swinging, slimey, sexy slithering Beast that is New Orleans.

Now read what Hakim Bey thinks of musicians.

Technorati Tags: New Orleans Chakras Hakim Bey

Heads up 2006: here comes Informa!

My friend Jay's been working on this ridiculously complicated system of (in my words) "information activism" which makes integral theory look like a pile of Playmobile. Inspired by the cyberpunk classic Snow Crash, Informa hinges on the distinction between information that informs one's personal indentity, and pure data-junk (the latter of which this painfully under-read blog seems to exclusively traffic in). Check out Pash's write-up here.

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Moving Across Town Proves the Self is Empty

From an interview with Anime legend Mamoru Oshii, director of the Ghost in the Shell series:

"A few years ago," the director explains, "I had a shock when my cat Nene died. There was a hole in my heart, a hole that could not be filled, even though a new cat, Mina, came along. I started to wonder why. Why can't one cat replace another? And I started to think that the 'I' is not just one person, but the sum of everything you love - your dog, your wife, your child, your computer, your doll. This led me to the conclusion that the self is empty. What is essential is this network of connections."

Can it ever be argued otherwise? This point is brought home to me each time I move to a new place. It is amazing how contingent my state of mind, thought processes, physical well-being, social life, and cultural involvements are on where I live. Considering them in total reveals very little left over: the self is what it does and where it lives, and little else.

Today my brother and I shipped the rest of our boxes and furniture four blocks west to our new place. Our old joint was a turgid cesspool of stained rugs, mysterious smells, and dark cramped corners. The new place is light, airy, spacious, and racked by traffic noise. Bicyclists ride by two at a time every five minutes where once nought but Mexican maintenance crews trucked by. The sun has a different quality, the trees are bigger, and for once we have our own door.

But beneath these new surface impressions lies a deeper dynamic: the embeddedness the organism within the larger wholes of social organization. It's not just that the scenes I see before my eyes have changed: the invisible webs of in-flow and out-flow, the means by which my seemingly "isolated" body is connected -- for good or for bad -- to countless materialist systems, from the turds I cast floating through the sewers to the tap water I consume and piss out to follow the turds, the winds circulating down from the sky into my lungs and back up, the sun shooting through space only to strike my eyes 8 minutes later, the layers of electricity EM radiation microwaves wireless networks cellphone towers, the sounds I make with mouth and hand, the sounds of cars and birds and bats and bugs and rats.... all of it a mad symphony of movement, fear, desire, terror, confusion directed by no one, yet exalting in itself nevertheless.

I raise my hands and the new neighborhood sings, I lay my head and the new 'hood rests, all of it one being waving in the breeze of space-time, with me only here to check it out, check it out, check it out....

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Obsession: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!

Maybe it's because it's the middle of the summer and I'm thousands of miles from the Atlantic Ocean, but damned if I'm not listening to Clap Your Hnads Say Yeah's eponymous debut every day of the week, dreaming of the boardwalks of Brooklyn and the decayed, garbage-strewn streets of the cities of the Northeast, squinting through beer-soaked eyes as the sun dips over the gently rolling hills with my indie rock T-shirt on. I won't lie, it's been a rough, hungry, twisted-in-knots summer, and I credit these guys -- all around my age if their photos are any indication -- with propping my posture up a bit more where it would have otherwise slumped. Read: I love this album.

Without getting into a track-by-track analysis, suffice to say these guys excel in tackling a hard-bitten world and rendering it something lazily, drunkenly hopeful, like a sunny/green-grass Sunday morning walk of shame from a night spent with someone of actual interest. In the maniacal Coney Island call-and-reponse of the opening track, singer Alec Ounsworth pleads with a cynical, late-20 something chorus of voices to give a shit, in spite of all post-9/11 indications to the contrary:

ALEX: Just clap your hands! -- CHORUS: But I feel so lonely...
Just clap your hands! -- But it won't do nothing...
Just clap your hands! -- But i have no money...
Just clap your hands! -- But it don't seem likely...
Just clap your hands! -- Are you up to something?...
Just clap your hands! -- Where's my milk and honey?...
Just clap your hands! -- But it does look funny...

You can hear more here.

Technorati Tags: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! indie rock

Apathy At Your Doorstep

Mr. Overachiever here has just added an email subscription service to this site (see sidebar under "Subscribe"). Just pop your email in and Bloglet will send you a daily email of the day's updates. You're welcome.

Jethrosexual: the Anti-Metrosexual

Paul's neologism of the day: jethrosexual, the photographic negative of metrosexual. A friend and I were talking about our mutual distaste for obsessive personal hygiene, being that it gets in the way of more manly things like reading theory, coding APIs, and scratching one's balls. Like the lower middle-class street philosophers we are, we feel a certain kinship with rednecks everywhere, hence the new name. And yes, I'm always this stupid on Fridays.<

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American Psycho-Reductionism

I f--king hate pop psychology. Everything is reduced to "chemicals" or "genetics", context be damned. A close aquaintence of mine was put on pills after a particularly gruesome ending to a relationship, and he was seeing things and hearing pops in his ears for months, while the root problem was never resolved. RIPope at CProbes would agree:

But the larger issue is that people are running headfirst away from their own lives. Into pills, into soma. Literally.

I call the bastards the Pharmafia, the worst form of sanctioned drug running ever known. At least old-school drug runners got to wear gold chains, drive speedboats in the Gulf, and hang out with the strippers. The Merck Nerds, on the other hand, craft their discombobulating poisons of the future in white lab coats with Muzak playing softly in the background.

Look, I don't need a boner, and I don't to be happy. Give me some coke and a notebook and I'll be fine.
<

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First Night as a Karaoke DJ

Last night I received initiation into the sacred order of karaoke DJs at a local townie dive. The lineage extends far into the distant past, when early humans would sing bad disco songs by the fire to keep away predators at night.

In some ways, karaoke appears to be a folk reclamation of an alienating pop culture. Where once we had our regional and ethnic songs, capitalism has flattened everything into one-size-fits-all global (and American) pop, available at the flick of a switch anywhere in the world at any time. Karaoke is where this pop ephemera re-enters the manifest realm, re-enters locality, and is squeezed through the dialects and deficencies of those participating, become something both grotesque and beautiful, like a bonsai tree in the key of D. The worst karaoke singers then, in this view, are not those with the bad voices, but those show-offs who sacrifice everything to remain faithful to a song's "original" performance. In failing to make a song their own, in failing to substitute words, spoof the chorus, change keys, change the rhythm, and give shout-outs to their Mexican homeboys in the back row, these singers are playing the game on Pop's terms, endlessly perpetuating the indifferentiated Machine. The real task is make a song something entirely new and make it good.

Last night's featured performers included a Milf-tastic mother of two, a drunk bouncer with a fondness for late-80s hip-hop, a mustachoed garbage man in Civil War boots, a black pimp flanked by three floozies, a meek librarian-looking girl with lungs of steel, and yours truly, Creedence Idiot Boy.

Look for further updates on my new career next week.<

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Site Poll: New Additions to this Site?

Two ideas I have for additions to paulsalamone.com:

-A second blog site devoted solely to an ongoing, serialized book-like thing, i.e. a novel or a longer thesis.
-A reading room featuring longer-form articles developed from ideas previously posted to this blog.

Any of these grab you?

Quote of the Day: Dana Gioia on Passion/Poetry

From the SF-area critic/poet's essay "Connect the Prose with the Passion"

Passion, therefore, is essential to the artist. Most people don't understand that real artists never choose their vocation. Their art chooses them -- just as love selects the lover as its vessel. We do not calmly walk into love. As the metaphor tells us, we fall into it -- helpless, dizzy, disoriented. There is no sure resistance to the gravity of desire, nor any guarantee of a safe landing. We can either spend all our energy fighting it or surrender and make it energy our own. Weak artists emulate the fashionable passions of their age; strong artists have the shameless conviction of their own tastes. Sometimes refusing to be revolutionary is the most radical form or rebellion.

Technorati Tags: poetry writing

News and Updates

1. Google AdSense rejected me for a second time for "excessive profanity". Assholes.

2. I changed the name of this blog. I figured, given my excessive output as of late, "just writing!" was the least of my problems. I also toyed with "Boulder Visionary Cell", but it just seemed too damn happy.

3. On the happier side: big congrats to Matthew Dallman, whose amazing wife Hannah just gave birth to Twyla Christine Dallman. That is going to be one talented baby, let me tell you....

4. You can now email my posts to your friends. And I added XML. Yippee.

Silver Jews: "Old New York"

"Old New York" is an obscure track by the amazing Silver Jews released on 7-inch in 1993, filled with plenty of singer Dave Berman's bon mots on living in the ancient ciudade. My favorite line:

The Chrysler Building will never fall down / as long as you frequent the bars in this town

While perhaps not the prescient 9/11 prediction we might expect from Berman's otherwise razor sharp intuition, the sentiment is a compelling one: the more you drink, the more the city stays alive. While at first glance this concept wouldn't seem to bear out in an alcoholic doomtown like Buffalo, New York, where buildings fall down faster than Bills quarterbacks get sacked in the pocket, in other ways it makes sense. Berman is only addressing the skyscrapers, not the city as a whole, and while Buffalo's residential infrastructure rots into the ground, its office towers thrive.

Then again, the Chrysler Building is not your typical soulless 90-degree glass office tower: it is in fact, the stuff of lore, Annie's ultimate symbol of hope, a glittering Art Deco jewel on an otherwise utilitarian skyline. A beacon of art and an older world, the older world supported by the true drinkers in the world, those old men in the neighborhood bars Berman eulogizes. The half-hearted yuppie martinistas just didn't have the liver strength to keep the twin towers standing, but the old whiskey-soaked souls, like Antigones pushing a shotglass-shaped boulder up a barstool every night, toil away, deepening the foundations of the classier towers into the bedrock far underneath.

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When Space Fights Back

I've always been fascinated by the ability of weather to affect mood. As a child, a heavy snowfall was a time for rejoicing, for it usually meant a day off from school (assuming it was over a foot deep--damn those competent Northeast snowplows!). For my friend back in Buffalo, however, it was an endless grey expanse of depression. Ironically, she moved to Portland, OR, a place with suspiciously similar precipitation patterns (rain arrives in Portland the way snow arrives in Buffalo: 10,000 dumptruck loads at a time). Her reason? To be near the coastline, the gentle Pacific Northwest sea breezes and mist-strewn summer sun. Another friend, this one from Phoenix, found a supreme feeling of safety in that state's rare rainfall (as it "kept the burglars away").

You've already read of my extreme distaste for Boulder's overbearing sunlight, but that's nothing compared to my distrust of wind. What else reminds us of our painful fragility than the manic rappings of otherworldly beings on the door of our world-as-it-seems? We believe we've conquered space, have thrust our human phallus succesfully into the face of circumstance, have conquered vast swaths of the cold unknown, but we haven't conquered shit. Earthly wind is but a squadron of the weakling nuisance scouts (like zerglings, to you Starcraft fans) sent to our obscure solar-ghetto by the Grand SpaceWind Army, which has wind-weapons we'd be terrified to consider: galaxy-smashing blusters, nebula-crushing tornadoes, universe-flattening dark matter hurricanes-- watch your fucking back.

A semi-relevant quote from K-Punk's thesis Flatline Constructs:

I remember once looking out onto an empty square, watching huge scraps of paper whirling angrily round and round, chasing one another as if each had sworn to kill the others; and I couldn’t feel the wind at all since I was standing in the lee of a house... As I watched, I was filled with an ominous foreboding. What if, after all, we living beings were nothing more than such scraps of paper? Could there not be a similar unseeable, unfathomable ‘wind’ blowing us from place to place and determining our actions, whilst we, in our simplicity, believe we are driven by free will? What if the life within us were nothing more than some mysterious whirlwind?

Windless days we walk around self-assured and free, but when the Safeway bags start kicking up and the dust of uncovered construction sites invade our eyes, we are reminded by the Universe's most gentle of breeziest that we are laughably, painfully insignificant.

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The Two Most Depressing Facts of Suburban Existence

"Long live the mall kids; may they show no mercy when their day comes." --John Dolan

If we mall kids and rootless suburbanite lit-drifters are to have our day in the cultural sun, we're going to have to tap in to some deep sources of pain as fuel for our aesthetic vengeance. I can think of nothing worse than 1) awkward neighborhood gatherings, and 2) the local nightly news.

1) Nothing is more depressing than mixed-age people forced to act interested in each other's lame lawncare lifestyles, eat bad picnic food dripping in mayonnaise and processed sugar, and throw the whole styrofoam mess away in a heaping kitchen trash pail. I call it The Bloat: that feeling of hopeless malaise that accompanies a stomach stuffed with food it can barely assimilate as you heartbreakingly struggle to explain why you chose to dual major in Painting and Philosophy to the guy down the street who blasts Bill O'Reilly while he waxes the pop-up camper. No one is introduced properly, elderly people stare off into the distance while kids yammer back and forth about the latest video games and DVD releases, barely-grown adults chirp thoughtfully on the merits of 401Ks and the new Walmart down the street, and cancer and war lurks just behind every whiff of petrochemical cleaning product and body fragrance.

2)That's nothing, of course, compared to watching your parents pass out every night to the nightly news. Mom with her latest cross-stich project, Dad drooling on his Yankees shirt, and people in a provincial version of "perfect hair" and orange pancake make-up feigning concern as they tick off the latest South Side drug deal killings before segueing with frightening ease into the 5-day forecast and a failed high school tailback's voluminous paeons to the local college football team -- all of it encased in a hard plastic bubble, opaque and dripping in Tesh-inspired muzak, obscuring the fact of a real world existing just beyond the weed-whacked edgings of the middle-income industrial products storage facility, meatspace's answer to the safe, primary-colored filterings of America Online's crypto-fascist omnipresence.

That's our launchpad kids, lets get to work.

Technorati Tags: suburbs news mall

Teenhilistic Death Force vs. the Big Retarded Baby

From today's k-punk:

Suicide by young men is such a serious problem in Britain that it is a declared NHS target to reduce the occurrence. So it is no coincidence that these bombers are broadly of the same age and gender as the many others who kill themselves at the stage between adolescence and manhood when the pressures can seem too great and the only way out is seen to be death.... Too much commentary on the suicide bombings has presupposed that the perpretrators of the attacks are committed zealots rather than confused drifters, carriers of thanatoidal teenihilstic death force for hire.

"Hey kids, while you're on your way out of this world, mind strapping on some C4?"

This idea creeps me out, as it essentially means that the West is not only breeding new terrorists abroad through the War on Terror, as many might contend, but also that it is breeding them at home through the ennui-breeding idiocy of too-late Capitalism. It's not that these kids feel left out of an ultra-complicated, hyper-intelligent adult world: they feel too smart for it. They're revolting against the lying, smiling logo-face of Walmart, against Tony Blair's ex-corporal joker grin, against George Bush's aw-shucks affable Cracker Barrel persona.

Comedian Patton Oswalt has likened the United States to a "giant retarded trust fund kid with nuclear weapons":

American: "This country's nice, could we have Disney World here?"
Frenchmen: "Well, this is Paris--"
American: "DISNEY WORLD!"
Frenchmen: "Jesus, alright, please don't blow us up..."

Nowhere was this more apparent than when I was a teen growing up in a dying suburb, watching new subdivisions growing farther and farther out from the city like a bomb blast, childhood forests plowed over to build Home Depots and Auto Zones and Burger Kings, the constant question ringing in the back of my head: "what the fuck is wrong with adults?" There isn't much heroism to be had in maze-like housing developments named after the natural features they're built on top of, with spindly new trees taking timid root and FedEx planes shooting overhead, the calming blue glow emanating from the living room window of every home at night, docile Consumo-Drones busying themselves with lawn care and 5-day weather forecasts while vast and ancient empires of desire lay dormant and unacknowledged.

Civilization, in other words, isn't going to go from the glories of Alexander the Great's blood-drenched battlefields to "Everyone Loves Raymond" without a little friction.

What This Writing Does For You

[With special thanks to M. for asking me last night why I bother doing this blog.]

Words like Gatorade: refueling, tanking up, flowing through your circulation system.

What the writer wants to do for his readers is give them a piece of furniture to aid their getting up in the morning. The writer provides a second form of oxyegn-rich blood for those who are crippled by the complexity and conflict of the world-as-it-seems. He writes what amounts to an article, an essay, a book, a play, a poem, a song, a sonnet, a jingle, a catch-phrase -- some sort of glistening jewel-pellet dropped into the tiny hole at the crown of the head and into the vast labyrinths of the human nervous system. Each sentence, empty in itself, is by virtue of its relationship to all the other sentences, a thing of holographic beauty, an illusory energon-blast for someone who, in the last analysis, doesn't really need one to begin with. Writers remind their readers there is light in the world, and for that the best thanks is the removal of sunglasses, blinders, sleep masks, and blast helmets. Writers are the thin rivulet shock troops of the whole mighty ocean aching to storm ashore, and to follow a writer, to buy his books and to concern yourself with his career, is to be a caught in a riptide and pulled out to sea, where the sharks and idea fragments commingle and dissolve the hulls of aircraft carriers and manmade islands built of steel.

Phrases like food: filling, stuffing, delighting, gathered around, shared.

To quote an old indie rock band: I've got a magnet in my head, and the world is made of metal. Or rather, the plastic world contains bits of metal, stuck in enjambments and corners and in the crawl spaces between dumpsters. These bits of metal crave assembly in my head, and the assemblies crave to be displayed on the written/typed/blogged page. This is not to reduce the act of writing to mere bricolage, or metal-detecting; I'm not wearing gym shorts on a beach with zinc on my nose, oh no, not for you motherfuckers ;) This is to transduce the every written act, provided it is suspended in a tense magnetic/polar orientation between various sources of metal, as an act of needed, necessary, divine assemblage. In the Kabbalic sense: the world is made of shards of broken pottery, bits of broken light strewn about the globe, and it is our task to (re)assemble and share these shards.

Sentences like alcohol: loosening, strengthening, emboldening, dizzying.

All artists, then, have magnets in their heads, and hand grenade hearts, and ice skate fingers, and lamprey feet, and VTOL light show sabre stomachs, bursting through the Black Iron Empire's endless fiberoptic nets, granules of coagulated lichethin and blobs of small mercury raining down as we high-knee it through the rain, looking for metal, looking for shards, dragging a wagon and looking for shards.

Paragraphs like coffee: hot, dangerous, black, electric.

If you hold your blink down for too long, you know what I mean, for you feel the magnet inside aching to see once again, to perceive and conceive of Metal, Heavy Metal to be exact, razorblade powerchords of worldly experience/suffering shining forth in a shimmering vacuum of slipper desire and shallow Ultimate Concerns.

And then you open your eyes once again, and the plastic fills the page, and the coffee spills on the floor, and the food spoils in the midday air, and humanity rewinds to 1569 before magnets were ever known. Again.

St. Elmo's Fire, Revisited

As a child of the 80s, it is quite embarassing to admit that I have never seen Brat Pack magnum opus St. Elmo's Fire, until today. The adult yin to The Breakfast Club's childish yang, St. Elmo's acts as something of a prequel to American Psycho, giving hints of the true Reaganomic horror that Ellis' Patrick Bateman would one day wield across the silver screen. In Judd Nelson's philandering freshman Republican campaign assistant, in Rob Lowe's hard-drinking sax player, in Emilio Estevez's obsessive med school dropout, and even in Andrew McCarthy's chain smoking newspaper writer, we see the children of privelege breaking free of the organic community provided by life in college and rocking unhinged into the deregulated free marketplace.

A redemptive character through all of this is the chaste, innocent, frumpy Wendy Beamish, played by virtual unknown Mare Winningham, who works a thankless social service job while maintaining her virginity and resisting the blue-blood ambitions her Fortune 500 father holds for her. That she ends up banging the atrocious Lowe on his last night in town before pursuing his dreams in New York City (how many frat boy saxophone players do you remember from the 80s NYC post-punk scene, by the way?) is but one fault to her otherwise admirable innocence.

Contrast this with Demi Moore's trainwreck drunk Jules, who lies (lies!) about sleeping with her former (former!) boss in order to fend off the concerns of her circle of friends. Behind closed doors, she admits to being "tired", feeling like an old woman at age 22. A working-class girl herself, Jules vis-a-vis Wendy proves the point that capitalist excess and ennui is by no means the prerogative of the rich, and that the aristocracy, contrary to what might expect, may hold the last keys to decency.

The three-way love affair betwen McCarthy, Nelson, and the stunning Ally Sheedy tells a different story. Nelson wants her to marry him, she wants him to stop cheating on her and to let her pursue her own career, while the Romance-hating McCarthy bides his time and admires from afar. When the inevitable happens, and Nelson catches his former beau in the sack with his best friend, Sheedy performs on almost Christ-like act of self-denial: she declares her need to be alone for awhile, thus salvaging their friendships.

Yes, it is the women who save this circle of friends, who maintain the links and regulate the transferance of pleasure so that the Hot-Blooded Males may romp and stomp as they see fit (and let's not forget Andie McDowell's compassionate treatment of Estevez, who essentially becomes her stalker). Without the female presence within the circle to temper the furies of these yuppie-animals, three of the boys would be in jail and one (McCarthy, courtesy Nelson) would be dead.

Is that what woman do best: contain and distribute the flames that these wild dick-havers everywhere breathe out through their very existence? Who knows...

[ps, you may have noticed that the above post doesn't actually make a point or say anything of actual intelligence. all i can say is: it's sunday, and i'm boiling....]

The End of Albums

Fascinating article on Pitchfork by Chris Dahlen the other day about the end of albums. Chris's point is that musicians today are failing to keep themselves in the public eye with any consistency and that their careers might be suffering because of it (see Bright Eyes' recent flash in the pan). Instead of continuing the stale "release an album every other year, tour a lot and update the website once every 6 months" model of most bands, musicians should consider taking a cue from television by offering more consistent, serialiazed content. With many people plugged into the internet craving a 24/7 feed of entertainment, iTunes, and Mp3s, it's stupid to have to wait months/years on end for anything new from your favorite bands. That's why I dig artists like Matthew Dallman and Stuart Davis, who maintain regluar web presences and offer new content on a consistent basis (especially Matthew). When my band actually starts recording, we might consider this model as well, perhaps to the point of releasing singles online as we record them (at least the demo versions).

Keepin' Me Blogging

I step away from this blog for one day, and the comments fields go crazy! Special thanks to Devon, Brandy, David, Matthew, Dan, and Eric G. for taking the time to drop me a line this time around (especially Eric-- it's been awhile!). And lets not forget the person in meatspace I've been hanging out with lately as well -- every nice word keeps this ridiculous Panopticon going a little bit longer, and I mean that in a good way. Today's #1 reason to be a blogger comes from Dan, who offers some stunning reflections on his own experience of hopelessness worthy of Houellebecq himself:

another person offered a bit of his experience with hopelessness, basically saying (again, my words) that it is hopeless, but it is not only hopeless. "it's hopeless, and..." the "and" dot dot dot is what keeps him going. that doesn't negate the hopelessness. it just means that it's hopeless, and... [the world is] hopeless, but it's so beautiful it makes me cry. it's hopeless, but i'm so in love with it that i could never turn my back. it comes back to that classic question in response to the "it's hopeless" statement, which is "but would you have it any other way?" and my answer is an emphatic "no" (with a hint of skepticism of my certainty).

Thanks Dan.

Full Words, Empty Words, and Writing to Scab the World

From Chapter One of Rudolph Flesch's How to Write, Speak, and Think More Effectively:

For, thanks to research, we know now that thousands of years ago the Chinese language had case endings, verb forms, and a whole arsenal of unpleasant grammar. It was a cumbersome, irregular, complicated mess, like most other languages. But the Chinese people, generation after generation, change it into a streamlined, smooth-running machine for expressing ideas. This isn’t just a figure of speech: the main principle of modern Chinese is exactly the same as that of modern machinery. It consists of standardized, prefabricated, functionally designed parts.

He goes on to make the point that the Chinese do not think in terms of verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc. but rather classify all words as either "empty" or "full", that is, words which carry meaning, and words which connect meanings but haven't much of their own. Example: in English we'd say something like "the man felt depressed about the untimely demise of his doberman", while the Chinese might say (in translation) "man sad dead dog".

Looking at my previous post, it's obvious I pack my writing with plenty of "empty" words, which might heighten the appearance of complexity or profundity, but robs the Word of its snap, crackles, and/or pop. Tragically, it's when I'm trying to offer my best insights that my language starts growing extra limbs and layers on the useless verbal clothing and decoration. I need to get to the point.

And getting to the point is crucial, if I ever hope to do something more useful with my writing, such as "save the world". Regardless of what you think of such a trad sentiment, it goes without saying that the world (as always) is in trouble, and the best and the brightest need to be foregoing their animal urges to do their Best and Brightest. Or, as French theorist Badiou says regarding Evil: "To give up is always Evil. To renounce liberation politics, renounce a passionate love, renounce an artistic creation.... Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me."

Evil is the moment when I let my writing grow lazy and bland.

Regardless, every artistic act, though it may die on the vine, though its author my go unrecognized in his/her lifetime, is like a white blood cell pumped to the surface of a lacerated Earth. By itself it does little to quell the bloodflow, but as it dies and knits with other dead blood cells, a scab forms, the bleeding stops, the wound heels, and the organism regains its health.

Or, in Chinese: "artist dead humans live".

Satsang / Watching

People ask me about my experience, about my plans, about these Things I sense but cannot express. I tell them it's something analogous to a 2D lifeform's perspective of 3D object passing through a 2D plane. Whatever we can see/sense here in our human world with our humans eyes ears hands nose mouth is but a flat 3D projection of a (?) possible "4D" reality, of something beyond our understanding "passing through" the dimensions of our experience. Just as an amoeba no doubt experiences the world as faint glimmers and slight vibrations, what to us seems like heat and flash and stench and electricity and love and death and fear and horror is -- to the "4D" objects observing us from beyond our sense -- like so much fuss and faffle. An artist writhes in complicated contortions on a highly decorated stage, while Mr. 4D sees but a few twitches and gasps. You could upload your entire consciousness into the Internet and never get a glimpse of the qualitative complexity and expansion I'm talking about here. It literally can't be conceived, much the way a termite can't explain Spinoza's Ethics to a colony of his mates using scratches in the sand. We simply don't have the tools to express what subtle blades pass through the soft flesh of our world, yet express them we must.

I am here, I am there, I am everywhere. I am simultaneously in love and out of love (or "in hate") with the entire world. I scowl and grin uncontrollably, I dance like I've got an electrocuted python in my spine and yet I sit as still as a block of granite in a light breeze. This mind lets all thoughts pass through it, becoming none of them, yet it desperately believes/wishes that it is all of them. But the old mystical notions of "unity", "emptiness", "the causal", "the witness", the "true self"-- these are but termite scratchings of Frank Gehry buildings of the future. God, Spirit, the Devil--all of it complete bullshit.

And I'm not just saying this because I've been listening to Lewis Black all day.

This experience consists of an assemblage of energy-information-emotional flows, a complicated/conflicted knot of multiple beings with multiple priorities vying for the body-mind's attention. Do this now, do that later. No, do THAT now, and do THIS later. Fuck that, do neither of them, instead do THIS. The task before us is to cut through these myriad voices to find the one true mission/calling, even though said mission/calling could very well be an illusion.

You, dear reader, know exactly what the fuck this mission/calling is-- you're just afraid to do it. You can feel it, hovering somewhere in front of your chest. You can see it in your mind's eye at night or when you go for a walk. The mission/calling HATES the world as it is, refuses integration with it, never knows nor even craves satisfaction or stability. This mission/calling is hell bent on destroying things as they are, it intends to fully reach deep into the darkest recesses of reality, where the plugs and powerplants and trestles and I-beams and dumpsters and the other ugly utilitarian things of existence reside, to shake this place to its very foundation, remixing the very spatial sense of humanity as a whole.

Imagine the planet exploding, yet somehow you survive, hurtling through space, absolutely rootless and alone, yet breathing, yet thinking, yet mapping out new strategies for cobbling together the Next Round of Form. Imagine for a moment that this is what God [sic] felt right before he made our own world: the lonely exile of a forgotten planet, given a mission/calling and but a few tools to execute it, entrusted to work his ass off for all time to see what sort of Form-Tornados he could whip out of the blank black rocky inky stupid brutal nothingness.

That's a little what it's like.

The London Four: Rockers of the Real

Yikes:

The rage and self-loathing that were sublimated into something like punk have in the case of these young men short-circuited and made direct contact with the Real. Terror, particularly self-annihilating Terror, seems to resolve certain conflicts in masculinity. It seems reasonable to posit a drive in young men towards self-annihilation (needless to say, rock provides ample evidence of this; indeed, it could be argued that the whole of rock is a 'trace' of this impulse). Terror seems to give the male drive towards self-destruction an ethical dimension, transforming idiotic self-destruction into heroic self-sacrifice.

Story of a Blogger

Against his better judgment, he created a blog in his own name. His daily, personal thoughts were now a Google search away from the entire world. Literally, anyone from a knitting grandmother in Osaka to a naked bus driver in Paraguay to a highly-literate chimp in a computer lab in South Dakota could suck on a direct feedline to his brain, could know him right down to the most insidious insecurity in mere nanoseconds. His subjectivity had been voluntarily been offered up to the world, a possibly indifferent world, and the vultures gnawed at his bones day and night. Then one day, a talent scout, an agent, an editor of Highest Regard contacted our young blogger and offered him an even larger spotlight. Not only now would his deepest subjectivities be potentially known by the world, but mountains of monetary might would now be supporting him, buying his mochas and paying for his web hosting service, getting him linked to by Slate and Suck and Feed and Technorati and a million other completely virtual filaments of human imagination and a bit of code. That's what holds up the Blogosphere, after all: a bit of creative self-deception ("people read my blog!" "what I'm writing matters!" "there's no way the government will use this against me!" "my time is best spent posting quotes about HP Lovecraft!") and some code. Code....

His subjectivity, his brain, his mind, his experience, his Self, displayed to the world with the aid of numbers and programmed routines. Subtle-realm robots exposing his insides, info-devices eviscerating him for an audience of millions. He has willingly submitted to these code-contraptions, he stands now in the gladiator arena, naked but for a belt with a Blogger belt buckle, spitting at those who even care. "My subjectivity is shit!" he declares, "go ahead, have these opinions, takes these memories, keep these sequences of URLs and these collections of topical quotes!"

And with that, a mountain lion sprang from the depths of the ampitheatre and bit his head off.

An Exemplary Life

From Houellebecq's highly-recommended book on horror writer H.P. Lovecraft (emphasis mine):


"The fact is therefore even more remarkable that Lovecraft was throughout his life the model of a discreet gentleman, reserved and well-educated. Not at all the type to speak of horrors, or to rave in public. No-one ever saw him get angry; nor weep, nor burst out laughing. A life reduced to the minimum, of which all the vital forces have been transferred to literature and to dreams. An exemplary life."

Half the summer...

is fine, a cooling comfort on the skin. But when the evening's pure night vaccuum is invaded by the hazy sun-blasting woolen heat obsession, there's no room outside for humans to walk, and we stick to the nooks and crannies of shadows and cool spots, lawns and public water works. Light is the invading army, the sidewalks are the beachhead, and the pro-sun propoganda poisons us all with the supposition that Bright is Right. But the bright's might fights us back into the bushes, slaps us in the face with its intensified pain, the whole sky a magnifying glass and we clothed bipeds the lowly ants crushed beneath the Foot of Sol....

Doomed Doomed Doomed

SHE rode in on a waterspout, a cross-country dart/dive touching down in Tempe, Coral Gables, Olympia, Decatur, Belmont Stakes, Montreal--- pausing now as she did for an evening of inquity at small bar on a big street by a big box by a big truck dealer by a big big big. A heart tearing her apart, a love for the Everlasting Globe shoot-twisting her 'cross its vast expanses, unable to build a single human connection, unable, unable. When your YOU is big and vast, to tie down to one person is tantamount to picking one arm-hair follicle and doting on it at the expense of the rest of the body. But such is romance.

They meet, they dance, they hold hands and walk home, they kiss on a sofa and drink water in a kitchen, he fumbles a few chords and sings a few verses, she swoons and shivers and looks up where the moon should be only to see the MOUNTAIN OF CIRCUMSTANCE obscuring it from view, that goddamn Relative-realm Knot of Obscured Angles preventing this Absolute Crush that cares nought for the Limits of the World. They will be together, even if in memories.

He thinks he loves her, but knows its just the chemicals in his brain doing their ancient chemical thing, the bio-dance that cares not for the Civilized, for progress in the world and the actualization of the self. Star-crossed lovers, they dare not kiss again, for a world rests on their shoulders, on their shoulders, on their shoulders.

Christ on a Pogo Stick -- Dave Attell!!

Sir Dave Attell of "Insomniac" fame is absolutely the dirtiest, barroom-ballsiest comic working today, not that he'll remember a single second of it. Frequent references to his own repressed homosexuality, getting molested at summer camp, sucking off dolphins, burying dead hookers, watching his cousin breastfeed-- he's a crude, brutish shock comic, far less intelligent and self-aware than Denis Leary, yet highly charismatic. I mention this because Attell is quickly becoming one of my guilty pleasures, a mile-a-minute freight train of depravity, the best accompaniment to a long night spent designing logos for mortgage companies and DVD covers for gurus.

Speaking of Dave Attell, it's time to go drinking. Yes, to quote the title of a Will Oldham song, "I Am Drinking Again."

more on Mr. Oldham

Spike Magazine, of course, ran this incredible essay on Mr. O a while back. Matthew Dallman, for you.

I See a Darkness

Been listening to a lot of Will Oldham / Palace Brothers / Bonnie "Prince" Billy lately, absolutely astoundingly weird folk/country/blues dude who's been kicking around the Louisville/Chicago indie rock scene for over a decade. He's got a crazy beard, has starred in a bunch of smaller movies, and has strange/weird/sad voice to boot.

Anyways, he's got a song called "I See a Darkness" (on the album of the same name) which blows me away every time I play it. The fact that Johnny Cash covered it on American III only proves its status as a classic. Slow, mordant, explosive, its a spare, haunting little track wherein Will/Billy confesses to a close drinking pal the dark visions threatening the edges of his consciousness. Imagine if Houellebecq was from Memphis, grew up on country and blues standards, and changed his goddamn name every album. Excerpt:

You know I have a love for everyone I know
and you know I have a drive to live, I won't let go
But you see, its opposition comes a-rising up sometimes
And its dreadful imposition comes blacking in my mind
and then I see a darkness....

I've been thinking a lot about the concept of "darkness" a lot lately myself as I've started to write my own songs, and can't help but notice that the best ones I come up with are all tragic, geographically-specific love/drinking/disaster songs. Does that make them a pathological/unwanted entry in a world already dripping with negativity and despair? Here's Will on the same topic, from an interview in Free Williamsburg:

FW: I read somewhere that you said that the reason that there is sometime such dark themes in your songs — this darkness, lies and blood and disease, I think you said — is because it is out there in the world and that the songs are a good place for this stuff to be. Do you still believe that?

BPB: Exactly, yeah. It has to go somewhere, it can't just sit inside of people.

FW: Yeah — I mean you look around and it seems like people are constantly trying to figure our where to put all this shit.

Personally I think I'm doing the intuitive service of "balancing" Boulder's annoyingly sunny disposition, its cluelessly self-obsessed white richies running around on designer bikes pursuing the finest in yerba mates as they obsess over their Macs and matrimonies (i'm guilty of at least two of those offenses myself of course). Darkness is there, we may as well acknowledge it, strip it of power, and beautify it, the way one might take out a sabertooth tiger threatening one's life and then stuffing it and hanging it on the wall.

Houellebecq, of course, has something to say on this as well:

Delve into the subjects that no one wants to hear about. The other side of the scenery. Insist upon sickness, agony, ugliness. Speak of death, and of oblivion. Of jealousy, of indifference, of frustration, of the absence of love. Be abject, and you will be true.

[note: i've been bumming lately about the lack of comments on this blog, so if you've read this far at least give me an emoticon, a "word","... something!]

more on the Starving Artist

I should clarify: Houellebecq isn't necessarily advocating the Romantic Artist stereotype. His aim is the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, not so much the expression of the artist's wonderful ego per say. He sees the Artist as a friend of suffering, who uses suffering--the world's--as his primary material, wrestling with the impossible angles of pragmatic existence and his own apathy in order to get his truth/clarity out into the world. Having said that, Houellebecq's whole schtick seems deeply, heroically self-destructive (he is French, after all), his books often beguile more than they embolden or inspire. but damn are they good.

The Starving Artist: a Myth Reborn

I know certain friends of mine will be staunchly opposed to this, but Michel Houellebecq's essay "To Stay Alive: a Method" is absolutely the most jaw-droppingly amazing manifesto I've ever read for starving (read: suffering) artists of every stripe, to say nothing of poets/writers like him. (Houellebecq, if you'll recall, is currently the scourge of the French liberal literary establishment, author of controversial novels Platform and The Elementary Particles). Brutal, insidious, conflicted, sad: these words may tag such an era-defining statement. One of many great quotes:

"The truth is scandalous. But without it, nothing has any worth. An honest and naive vision of the world is already a masterpiece. Compared with this prerequisite, originality matters little. Do not preoccupy yourself with it. In any event, a certain originality will necessarily emerge from the sum of your defects. Of that with which you are concerned, simply say the truth; simply say the truth, neither more nor less.

You cannot love the truth and the world. But you have already chosen. The problem now is to adhere to this choice. I urge you to keep up your courage. Not that you have the least cause for hope. On the contrary, know that you will be very alone. Most people come to terms with life, or else they die. You are living suicides."

Lovers vs./for the World

"But what could be less perverse, more militantly normal, than the idea of 'the intimate couple against the world' that John invokes? As Zizek rightly points out, drawing upon Duras, the only positive model for the couple is not two people looking into one another's eyes, but both looking outwards to a Cause to which they have both pledged alliegance." -kp

"i liked it best how
we took the whole world on
back to back
long knives drawn"
-rainer maria (the band, not the rilke)

In a typically drunken Saturday move, your truly meets a girl, gives her his number, then feels bad for the other guy courting her, as well as her left-out roommate, and so ends up failing to seal the deal with a good-night kiss. That, in microcosm, tells the entire story of my antipathy towards romantic relationships (RRs), which in previous posts I've all but labeled as a minor forms of terrorism. The worst examplars of the RR are those couples (i.e. my roommate and his gf) who can't keep their hands off each other in public, to the point of excluding the entire world around them in their selfish bliss-lock bubble of "fuck you, World". Could anything else be more narcissistic and postmodernisticly QUIETIST than the couple who have decided that all that matters is their relationship to each other, the only Truth they will ever believe in?

The Rainer Maria song quoted above ("Long Knives Drawn", from the LP of same) is the perfect articulation of the RR stance. Compare that to the Zizek quote above. His is not an absolutisizing rejection of RR (as this author might advocate in his weaker, terrified-to-deal-with-the-drama-of-another-relationship moments), but a plea to turn it OUTWARD, to turn this intense couplehood towards a Cause/Purpose/Truth/Good/Beauty greater than itself. (Ironically, the Rainer Maria song was actually recorded after the couple fronting the band -- guitarist Kyle Fischer and bassist Caithlin Demarrais -- broke up, which completely redefines the "rah rah, love love" vibe of their previous work.)

The most endearing couples to me are those elderly, life-long activist/artist couples who supported each other in the pursuit of greatness, whose love of each other was but a by-product of their absolute love for the world (though not, i should point out, a love for the worldly per say). Perhaps even in my drunken state last night, I felt a slight glimmer in this in my desire to include the room in our dancing and revelry.

Or I'm just a pussy.

Boomeritis in a nutshell.

"Islamic absolutists [or those of any tradition --paul] have exploited an aporia in the philosophical logic underpinning multi-culturalism. This logic, cultural relativism, quickly leads to a paradox, in that it is forced to defend the very cultures which would totally reject the tolerance to which it is constitutively committed."
-k-punk

Also: the dictatorship of relativism

Black Gold Warz: Oil vs. Coffee

[some hazy emerging ideas, half-inspired by this old hyperstition piece on the occultish energies surrounding oil, and half-inspired by this crappy cup of coffee i'm having at the office after-hours]

Coffee and oil bear a particularly symmetrical relationship in the Pomo Info-economy, as they seem to the two essential -- and unsustainable -- liquids which keep the EconoRush going and going and going. One wonders what would be more devasting: the sudden loss of all oil supplies in the US, or the cutting-off of coffee (actually an easier answer than we might expect: since most people have to drive to get their coffee anyways, any oil shortage automatically implies a shortage of coffee, meaning we'll have 250 million cranky pedestrians roaming around).

Coffee and oil: both more or less discovered by the West in the last couple centuries, both stinky, dangerous, dark, chemical, otherworldly, from which no light escapes. People believe they need coffee to work, cars believe they need oil to move, despite the alternatives in both cases. What is a latté other than a coffee hyrbid, a Prius in a paper cup?

One hopes that Coffee and Oil have our best intentions in mind. But what if, at some fundamentally subtle level we can barely understand or empirically "see", Coffee and Oil are working in collusion with each other, and are up to something quite other than the Goals of Progress we civilized ones subscribe too? I'm not talking about the greedy humans in charge -- Bob Starbucks and Frank T. Gasoline -- I'm talking about the molecular aggregates themselves, the "living", global fluid-structure which is the Oil-Coffee Metaplex (OCM).

The OCM's main fetish, as far as we can tell, is SPEED and PRODUCTIVITY, that is, MEANINGLESS ACTION CONDUCTED IN NANOSECONDS. Hands shake, eyes go bleary, manifolds quake and tires shred, run by this demonic dark hot fluid-energy, the OCM. And the OCM is reproducing, until the day when EVERY street corner will feature both a Starbucks and a Gas Station, sometimes combined in one building (that day, of course, was May 7, 1999).

The reproduction of speed, which begets more speed, which begets more speed. At a certain point, this geometric increase reaches the point where it occurs so quickly it defies human comprehension, at which point we enter the OCM Singularity, the Mother Bean, dripping in Crude, at the center of all existence, the hot sticky-bad Kona Telos, the Sumatran Omega Point spilling on the floor of your living room, in the cement cracks of your driveway.

Coffee and Oil: the dark blood of planet moving through and beyond us, the animating force that gives not a shit about that which it animates.

Postscript:
Given their dual nature, might we attribute more archetypical considerations to Ms. Oil and Mr. Coffee? Oil from the deep, dark, heaving trenches of the earth, and coffee the product of aeons of agricultural, breeding, land-holding, and cultivation? Oil the Wild, Coffee the Tame, conspiring together....

Pain Without a Name

You know that everything is fine, but you have your doubts. You can name various mundane reasons for your current depressive self-climate -- lack of sleep, overwhelming workload, constantly shifting workload, physical concerns arising with getting older, Saturn's Return, the oppressive 90-degree heat, the unceasing poverty, the lack of nookie -- but you have your doubts, you expect more. Oh, how gradiose the self can be, looking for an Uber-Romantic Ontological reason for his/her sufferings when the actual source may be something more worldly, usual, and commonplace. YOU are not special.

But still, that scowl you wear on your face every day of the week, your inability to control your passions, the discipline you've discovered in spending less and less, the anti-social avoidance of former friends, the whittling away of obligations, concerns, projects-- all of this bespeak, perhaps, something bigger, larger, more grand and more expansive billowing and bubling on the horizon of the Self, something Unspeakable, Unrepeatable, Unknowable--something unlike anything that has ever been before.

The future is gestating in your own heart, and it hurts like hell.

Then again, you could just be courting a horrible degree of holisitic imbalance, like a backed-up emotional plumbing system, in all of your self-denial, avoidance, hatred, failure to reflect, giving up on meditation, and 0% interest in going for fucking therapy or buying one of the elicit products of the Pharmafia. Zoloft can't write, coffee and loathing can. But the flameout, the throwing of fists and the breaking of glass, the glaringly unfair judgement-making, the *duh!* of self-serving behavior, the frightening congruity with the hippies and bourgeousie you claim to hate--certainly it makes for good theatre. Drama in the repetition of the Bohemian Rap-soddy, writ large in a safe city tucked at the foot of the big dangerous rock hard dagger-faced Moutains Grandioso.

Colorado makes everything seem more important.