Song: "D-Day in the Rockies"

Here's another weird one, albeit of the higher-quality, multi-track recording variety. We actually wrote this song last spring, and it has something to do with the commonality that the rampant development in and around Boulder shares with the beachheads of Normandy.

D-Day in the Rockies (mp3)

Notice the faux-Amerindian chants in the background, along with the copious toms and my brother's strained yelling. This one was a hell of a lot of fun, by the way.

Schneider Reviews the AWP Writer's Conference

Apparently, former TM contributor Dan Schneider is hanging out in Texas now, and was on hand in Austin for the Association Of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference which ran during SXSW. Dan is on a one-man mission to shake up the literary establishment, and if this cherry of a review is any indication, he's well on his way.

Dan on small publishers:

One of the things that would strike an outsider as funny is how, despite the airs of camaraderie, most of the little journals really loathed each other, even as they refused to state they are in competition for readers. I heard badmouthing, on the sly, of course, of mags by other mags, at about every 4 tables I spoke to.

Dan on grammar:

[I]ssues of grammar are perhaps 1-2% of the reason writing is bad. The main reason is lack of depth, a lack of tackling larger issues, solipsism, bad characterization, cliches, and writing oriented at writers rather than readers. For example, in the last three days I've perused dozens of the journals on hand, and seen at least three dozen poems, and 7-8 stories, that ended with the metaphor of coming out of darkness and into the light. Such use of horrid cliches is far worse an issue than mere bad grammar.

Dan on literary elitism:

There is this active disdain for the masses that these effete elitists feel, so they charge these unconscionable fees, to further distance their bodies from the hordes as they do their minds with their writings' solipsistic and masturbatory obsessions, written for themselves and not a neutral audience. These writers want to live on the public's grant money without having to produce anything the public might want. They believe quality and mass appeal are always mutually opposing. They sneer at large reach as political suicide, or the like.

Zing! Check out Cosmoetica for more of Dan.

Urban Pollution review #2: Tapes 'n Tapes' The Loon

Another hack piece for the clip book here. For those who don't know already, Urban Pollution is a brand-new review site based in Austin bound to give Pitchfork a run for their money, and I've muscled my way onto their music staff. Now if they would only include my author photo. ;)

The Party

I regret to inform those who missed it (ahem, Kismet!) that our party this weekend did kick much a$$. Special thanks to green beer-swilling Mr. Ballard C. Boyd (pictured above), first-time-ever performers The Stand Still, and Bucky Coe for rocking the spot, along with visual artists Jeff Lohrius and Devon Bryant.

It seems weird to consider, but this may indeed be the small modest birth of a brand-new art scene here in Boulder. That, or I was just too drunk to know the difference. Regardless, the confluence of interactive art installations (see below), live music, and kite store employees hopefully made for a decent antidote to the usual booze-n-puke. At our parties, you puke on the walls, not behind them.

My First Professional Record Review!

Ok, so it's not really a big deal, but here it is. I reviewed the Q and Not U dude's solo album. Congrats to Austin-based Urban Pollution for finally launching (nice timing too).

Typing in Safeway [text-audio experiment]

[CLICK HERE and open 3.8mb Quicktime File for accompanying audio, recorded live at Safeway just now.]

Writing in a pioneering Safeway "lifestyle" store at 10:34 pm, deciding that the future of the suburbs lies in our ability to explode the culture-creation potential of the omnipresent strip -- CAN YOU HEAR ME TYPING. A 30-something D&D dude shuffles past with his mini cart. The Perfect Voice Man advertises March as National Nutrition month. Holy shit! The D&D dork just approached me with a business card for some music downloading website, link here. Dude this is so post-modern, I am flipping out. So here's the idea for my new music/digiarts project: I go all around the strip -- to whole foods, barnes and noble, target, all of that, doing location recordings and writing about it at the same time, then YOU read these words AND hear that bullshit at the same time! Sound enticing? Sound compelling? Sound like I'm aping the marketing gab of those dudes in the PA above? Perhaps. Seacreast, out.

[Note: You can hear the actually here the convo with the D&D dude about halfway through the 4:00 track. Listen to me humor him, and then get all excited with the typing after he leaves.]

Larry David: 80/20 Genius

There's an interesting bonus track on the Curb You Enthusiasm: Season Three DVD where series creator and star Larry David confesses his writing process. To paraphrase: he does not write dialogue, he merely writes the "story" of each episode, weaving a dense of web of things each scene must accomplish. His actors and many quest stars (Ted Danson, Julia Louise-Dreyfuss, that "Crazy Eyez Killah" dude) are on their own when it comes to touching all of the bases of a scene, getting from Point A to B in their own interesting, idiosyncratic way. As his co-stars attest on the bonus track, this makes shooting an episode of Curb Your Enthusiam a whole lot of fun. It's a far more laid-back approach than he took with Seinfeld, where every scene was tight as a drum, and the loose style shows in the inner-scene laughter of the actors and the weird, life-like turns the dialogue will take.

This reminds me of the struggle I'm having with music right now, where we're wrestling between having an established list of pre-written songs, versus "scenes" where we have a few chord changes in mind (and the desire of getting from point A's badly-fumbled opening chords to point B's musical silence and audience applause), but the lyrics and solos and tempo changes and instrument swithcheroos are left up to how we feel in the moment. The trick is to have a group of players who can read each other for cues, not an easy task when certain players are only available once a week, whereas the dense core (me and my bro) play more or less every night. When you've got a team familiar with each other's habits (as well as strengths and weaknesses) the band can stop and turn on a dime. If you've got session players who can only make it every once a while, a script is usually needed. "We have this song, with these chords, and these lyrics, and this many verses/choruses." Does this kill musical innovation (Curb Your Enthusiasm) or make for a better, more-conventional show? (Seinfeld).

Not sure.

New Song! Bluesy! 7th Chords!

Here we go again, my brother and I live in the basement with a two parter mash-up, "Coney Island / It's Not My Fault"(mp3). Please note that, as with most of our originals, this initial recording is totally improvisational, both in terms of composition and lyrical content. Only the chord changes were concieved beforehand. But more importantly, it's our first song with the drummer whistling, and the word "breast." Rock.

John Zorn Explains His Method of Composition

"Creating a problem for yourself to solve." [From Pitchfork].

New Fiery Furnace Tracks!!!

Last year's PS obsession is back with the far-poppier (contra the critically-HATED Rehearsing My Choir) Bitter Tea, which has gotten some relieved glow-views so far. But hey, decide for yourself here (two new tracks!). Now that the critical honeymoon has advanced far into the tired-n-sore stage, it will be interesting to see how much leeway these sudden vets will recieve.

Now if I could just track down the rest of Eleanor's modeling photos....

Eat Your Heart Out Sebadoh!

You want LO-FI? Try this out: mini-cassette recorder, one take, improvised lyrics, shitty basement acoustics, insane drummer, me on vox and $20 keyboard. The Salamones live with "The Children's Militia of Old New York" (mp3).

(Who was Sebadoh, you ask?)

Expertise

How do you convince people to listen to you? How do you become a respected technocrat without possessing any actual knowledge? Can you offer something of use if it is not based on reality? On any more than 30 years of direct experience (maybe halgf of it conscious)? Can you offer advice without the support of hard facts? How do you advise on the unadvisable, get paid to promote the unimagineable, win funds for the service provided by your ungrounded imagination? Is it possible? Is it something the market allows? Can we get There from Here?

Thoughts plague the periphery, roaches check in to your ethical sub-strata. You've got hotels filled with poetic impressions, but no rational way to explain it to the ISBN market, to justify its material existence and provision of well-being.

And yet, you carry on.

Carry on writing/reading/dreaming. Carry on singing/dancing/laughing. Carry on collapsing and hurling, unfurling and winnowing, refining and dining, honing and boning: you keep living, trusting your full commitment to that very process as all the experience you need. It is hard to accept that other people have "more experience" than you, but only because you will interpret in such a way. You are not, in the end, paying for the quantity of their experience, but the quality with which they convey it. You are paying for the sheer obsessive thought-power they've put into explaining their unique world to themselves, a process which inevitably leads to a handful of "useful universals".

For one, the authority of experience. How can you deny that you are experiencing something? And how can you deny that, while others spend their time honing their MySQL skills or facility with a paintbrush/carburator/cash register/people skills, you've demonstrably honed your capacity for obsessive-reflection and meaning conveying. Some people keep themselves afloat by winning at work: you do so by winning at play, by maximizing the things you do in your free time such that they do become your sole means of employment-enjoyment (save those careers you'd embark upon for the sheer fact of the "case study" effect).

Trust in this voice, in this "legal pad expertise". Trust in the gallons of coffee and Red Bull you've imbibed, in the noises inside you've survived, in the precious/precocious nature of the intellect you've cultivated. List your attributes and activities, know what you've been doing with your time, and sell others on the fact that you can say new things in a new way... new things that NEED to be said. Trust that you can suggest wholly novel-tentative ways of beings (designer realities, ficto-fluxu mindware), run the experiments through your own OS, and lead an entire movement through the windfalls of ontological experimentalism.

Trust in that, and flow/float from there....

Dave Chappelle & The Highs and Lows of Hip-Hop

Tonight I saw Dave Chappelle's Block Party, a film by Michel Gondry which recaps a concert put on by the comedian in September '04 in Bed Stuy, featuring such progressive hardcore acts as Kanye West, Common, Twalib Kweli, The Roots, a reunited Fugees (!) as well as hood divas Eryka Badu and Jill Scoot. What I liked about the film, besides Chappelle's hilarious send-ups of James Brown, blues, and yo' mama jokes, was the positive, human spin on what can often be a devastatingly shallow form of music. Take it or leave it, but hip-hop represents both the best and worst that humans have to offer.

Unless you know the music being presented, live hip-hop is not about the lyrics, which are barely discernible through the acoustic mush of beats echoing over rooftops or in crowded cement chambers. Good MCs transcend the fact that their painfully-wrought syllables are lost in the air by presenting with such vigor and ethusiasm that it makes hating their mangled word salads all but impossible. Add to this the dynamism of a live band, and you've got what nears true transcendence.

That's certainly something this film flirts with, particularly with the performance by Dead Prez, the controversial Brooklyn-based act who takes on state-run media and the government. Despite the awkward racial semantics (it's hard to lay back and nod your head when the word "Cracker" comes up ad nauseum), the force of their wordplay and delivery, combined with the reaction and participation of the audience, reminds one that, despite all our pomo cynicism, true unity is indeed possible.

Throw the Fugess in there to round out the night with a spot-on rendition of "Killing Me Softly", split with shots of dancing grandmas, laughing kids, and Lauren Hill in tears, and you've got something a bit more interesting than, say, the Killers vs. The Bravery controversy.

Problems, Solved. (an interview)

What do you do?

I solve problems.

How?

Creatively.

Creatively?

I generate a solution no one's thought of before. Some people prize "out of the box" thinking, whereas my claim is that there is no box.

And?

And it works. I've had more success with high-end clients than I could have ever dreamed of. And I did it without compromising my principles or being forced to work for ass-holes. People know I will solve their problem if I believe enough in their authenticity, and they will pay me for it. Well, I might add.

Interesting. And so how did you get your start offering this "service"? Is this the sort of thing you can go to school for? Did you apprentice with another "creative problem solver"?

Nothing of the sort. I went to art school, just like everyone else. I studied design, and on the side I studied theory, improvisation, anarchism. I had a two-year obsession with Portland-area noise music, and a one-year obsession with Hakim Bey. I ran track and got in fights with my mind. I got a "C" in sculpture because I thought art was meaningless, and I had a drawing professor who drank beer in class. It was crazy.

So how on earth did you go from a typically middle-class liberal arts education to wearing black suits and flirting with the techno-jet set? At what point did you go from slovenly jeans and loud weird music to "doing the sketchbook dance" for corporate clients in hotel bars? How did you get to design an island, for God's sake?

Another good question. I'm still trying to "unpack" that one myself. I think my troubles, so to speak, all began when I went to work for the philosopher [clears his throat]. I was surrounded by geniuses, and at times, given the right amount of caffiene and obsession, I was pulling genius out of my ass as well. The "Einstein enema", as we called it then.

You did?

Ok [sheepishly], maybe that was just me. The point is, I was swimming around in a painfully fertile Cambrian stew of excited, creative lunatics with connections all over the place I'm still finding about to this day. It was a very dense ganglion to pile upon, that's for sure.

And then...?

And then nothing. One second I'm outlining fonts and packing up .tiffs and .jpegs for printers and HTML guys, the next second I've got $500,000 in the bank and six cars. Three of which, I should remind you, were top-of-the-line eco technology.

What?

Ok, they weren't all mine. Most were for jet-setting famous friends who wanted me to pull a "Salamone" on them.

Is this when you started the animated word paintings? The story spray? The fuel-passion hyperbole engines?

One thing at a time. To back up for second: I got obsessed. Very obsessed. Where once I delved into theory, or grew 8 billion art ideas out of a spiral-bound, I was suddenly augmenting that with business thinking, which to me was heady, black-magick stuff.

Really?

Really. You don't know how hard it is to concentrate on business plans for someone like me playing mental video games all the time, but it was. For someone like me, tracking numbers and imbibing intractable economic models was akin to a meditation. To the Nth degree. And I've done meditation, I know all about it. Business thinking was completely alien to me, like learning to speak Robot Martian in a zero-G field with nothing but Aeron Flippers and an Expression Tail to use for communicating. It was this entire alternate dimension I knew nothing about, but once I'd cracked a few of its codes and explained a few of its key ideas to myself...

Boom: creatine imago-strategy.

Strategerie -- I prefer the G.W. Bush version. But yet, that's the idea. You combine an already dangerous imago-intellect with some infectiously potent biz-memes, and you've got a Purpose Potion ready to rock things. And indeed I did.

And you pretty much came out of nowhere.

Indeed. It was crazy: I'd never imagined myself succeeding so much. As an Enneagram #4, I'd long ago resigned myself to mild anomie and dissappointment. To win was scary. People suddenly gave a shit. Luckily, it didn't get too out of hand. I did the GQ interview, but that as far as I went into the high-visibility A-list.

It wasn't something you wanted to delve into.

Exactly. It's not something you can win, at least not until I take it on later in my career [makes note to self]. For now I'll stick to consulting greenmobile companies, hanging out with hyperfoodists, and spitting in the face of the people who pay me to do it. I'll write linking screenplays, play blog tennis and Photoshop alley gambling, but no bluehair supermarket shelves for me. The minute my animated face is sharing People-space with Jennifer Garner's daughter, I'm finished.

Fascinating. Now, if I may, a bit more about the Process, if you please.

Of?

Of getting from A to B. In the early days, and now.

Like I've always said: caffiene X solitude = boom. Genius X biz-memes = bang. Indie-rock consiousness X leveraged networking = zowee. I come from a long line of shipbuilders, and we've all but one concern: is it seaworthy? Is it viable? Can people live on it? Does it add value?

Which you discern by...?

By testing. By tentative missioning. By setting up and tearing down memetoplexes, by courting adventure capitalists, by doing usability scenarios on the Feasible Few. That, and relentless time macro-managing. I'm obsessed with it. Time X appropriate action = motivation. We invented a form of cognition which constantly asks: "which of my tasks do I really feel like doing in the moment?" We learned a long time ago to get out of the way of our obsessions: they drive the business, and the businesses.

Hmm, interesting. But I'm still not getting what I was assigned to get: how did you do it? How did you bootstrap so well?

It was a series of obsesso-vacations pointed in the right direction. The "sketchbook dance" is a loaded weapon, so some work needs (and needed) to be done on discerning the focus at first. It's like building stuff with dynamite, getting creative with TNT. Set those blasts off in the right place, and you've got a new nickel mine, or a spacious recreation canyon, or a drop-dead gorgeous hydroelectric facility. Fuck it up, and you've got earthquakes, floods, pollution, and blasted fingers. It took me a while to learn this, but at last I did: my creative problem-solving obsessions are both my greatest blessing and my most devious curse. The trick was figuring out how to amplify the former, and disarm the latter. That activity has been my true life's work, so to speak.

Life mastery.

Yes, but more so... more than that. "Mastery" is so one-dimensional, and linear. It suggests an endpoint, and a focus.

But you do have a focus!

Ah [smiling], so it would seem. In 1-D at least. We'll switch gears here though. It was like I was riding around on a pack of beasts, and had to get them coordinated in the same direction in order to move earth and gouge farms tracks-- dig? [Snickers.] To do that took a lot of effort, combined with using those very skills to point the way further. Once I had posited "creative success" as a real and actual-existing Omega/Telos point, the gameshit was on. I really had to take every step necessary to put myself in the mindset on a daily basis. I had to cultivate in my awareness a crystal-clear magnificence of what my life could be , and then act on it.

And?

Well, needless to say I did it, and I built some lasting friendships with some affluent people along the way. For the longest time I'd envied and villified the rich, but at a certain point I saw the humanity behind the fancy clothes and brand-new gadgets and top-heavy bank accounts. I was just lucky to find the humanity in such players, to whom I owe everything. They were patient, they explained the biz-memery to me, they advised me into high-leverage positions and even did some of my promotion for me. But still...

Yes.

I know it sounds arrogant, but a lot of was still me. I got in this fight with the world, I'd been doing it for a long time, and I came to know its moves and out-foxes very well. And by "world", of course, I mean my "self" and everything surrounding it. I came to see it as this one unitary object with which I had to work, thus resolving the subject-object/self-other split. I considered it to be this one flowing, total-living thing, which "I" could step into and manipulate at will. In so doing, fear dropped off like a fat camper sheds cellulose, and to be honest, it was fun, and I had a blast. Even more so now.

Would you dub this a "mystical" experience?

[Shouting] I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU'D CALL IT! [Calming down] For me it was everyday living, the craziest, stinkiest video-game I've ever played. If Kubrick did video games, it would have been my life.

What does that mean?

Meaning: long stretches of nothing-silence-boredom and contemplative landscapery, remixed with all manner of drama and intrigue and plot twists and insane characters and rational resolutions and hard-winning inspirations clawing for victory throughout the mountains of compassion.

Explain.

I can't. But the point is this: I stopped hating my limitations, and started hacking and working around them. The "lifehack" meme was very powerful for me back then. I saw my main source of employment to be that very thing: hacking life, ripping it for source code, re-combining for sustainable activity, breathing new life into old algorhithms. I took those solutions, those out-foxings, and started selling them. I spent three hours on researching some basic e-business technology, and that 3-hour investment won me millions in my first year alone. Suddenly, everyone wanted one of my lunatic creations, and I found myself in the impossible position of rebelling against my own rebellion. The cycle happened again and again (and still does): they'd pin my down, I'd wrestle free and escape, only to generate something even more amazing, for which they'd pay and pay and pay. Me: a fledgling creative writer, a failed novelist, and sometimes-ok flash designer: I was making wagon-loads of crisp bill appear like magic.

And you did what with it?

Invested in my future of course. Paid off my family. Supported various people, hired the lunatic artists I've been working with until this day. Did some nude modelling, started three bands, but mostly worked on perfecting my workspace, which I soon came to call the runway.

And how did that work?

The idea is simple, really: energy capture. I began to see my creative prob-solver as an endless natural resource, and in my downtime I set up "buckets" with which to capture it. There were weeks where I couldn't go near a computer, but thanks to some forethought, I had easels and brushes and paints and canvas and pastels laying around everywhere. That's how I came up with the "cross country series", for one.

Which became...

The movie, yes. It was thanks to these buckets, to these channels and irrigation systems that I'd set up, that I could take advantage of all the creative energy pouring down from inside of me. It turns out that even that was a very creative act, in the end. Daring to leverage my "20% spike", and building upon that. By being authentic, by being a mensch, I could sleep with the fact that I was making a lot of money. I knew deep down that I could only allow myself such successes if I had a plan for using that "money capture" technology (my career) to help others. There were all these rich people with money just laying around, and they didn't know how to put it to good use. So I -- we -- did that for them. Nothing could be more satisfying in this life. Nothing.

So it wasn't really a Robin Hood sort of move?.

Not really, since most of these investors were my friends. All I did was give them a vision, and a way to get it spent. It was really quite remarkable.

Mr. Salamone, thank you for your time. [extends hand]

[Shakes hand] No problem -- any time!

Battle of the Hebrew-Hoppers

Matisyahu? Or So Called? One of these dudes samples klezmer and enlists the help of Wu-Tang members, the other finds little of sonic use in his own culture and does the reggae/jam-rap thing. You decide....

Transmutation

The Holy Ghost yearns for movement, for release. It sees the world, and it wants to touch it, hold it, be inside of it, be outside of it, inside, outside. The Holy Ghost grows and wanes, swallowing all minor emotions in the grandiouse sweep of its desire. It starts as mundane impulse, yet rises up, a burning bird along the spinal column. Watch it hover, sing, spin.

The Holy Ghost sees the flesh and wishes to hold it. The Holy Ghost drives by islands, inside of eyeliners, around the backs of gaskets and tanks alike. He/she rests not until the job is Done, but with Holy discipline, s/he knows that the job can never be finished, that the flaming bird arises in perpetuity, that something greater, a Great Need, whispers and calls like shadows falling all around, and the Holy Ghost knows it must feed those shadows (and not itself).

And so the Holy Ghost waits, waits to rise in the only mundane way it knows: it pushes down its hope, sequesters its desire, quarantines its yearning, wishing -- dreaming -- to make of that dripping electricity something more passionate: the suffering of the whole world, divinized.

The Holy Ghost, nailed to a cross of two-by-fours, its hot white blood seeping into the grain of the wood, feeding pigeons and gulls and children and donkeys, making the clouds move overhead, the tectonic plates shift deep beneath, seeing the blues and the reds and the spiders and the flames, and feeling the pins stuck into every martyred hair on a human skull. The HG sees all of this, sees its participation in all of this, sees the way his/her in-breathe and out-breathe corresponds to the gaps and the fissures in this divinized union, and sees that its will is to plug up these lacerations in the otherwise undeniable holiness, and sees how its mundane preferences are one and the same with this plugger's will.

And so the great phoenix rises, shedding its gasoline and spreading the wings of the things it remembers seeing, and it hovers around the spine, declaring the death of the HG's separated selfish existence, and it pulls the HG up by the wispy ghost-chains of its arms, hoists that howling mad spectre into the places it has no business being in, and sets its holy haunting up where it can light the way for the world, the world crashing on the rocks far below, the world falling prey to the pirate ships of fate....