Hot Fudge Sundae

Metabellatristics and the Obsequious Writer

2011-10-06T18:25:00.000-07:00

*
Maybe it's because I've gotten tired of the fluttering, unedited pages of barely legible scribblings covering my bedroom walls. Maybe I'm tired of interrogating my characters and finding their personalities to still be about as rich as a Saltine cracker. Perhaps I'm tired of thinking of [CK]** as this tri-fold amorphous blob of interests, themes, and overarching questions.
*Upon googling the word "obsequious" for images, found this one, attached to one DJ Obsequious. Who, you ask? "Think about an orifice. Now think about the stimulation of that orifice. Imagine the blissful pleasure induced from such stimuli. Now you know what it's like to experience a mix by DJ Obsequious." (http://8tracks.com/obsequious) Do yourself a favor. Get obsequious.
**Cicada Killers

Whatever it is, I find myself drawn to some pretty extreme examples of inventive 20th century fiction, particularly David Foster Wallace, William Burroughs, and Donald Barthelme. These guys, my lovable tortured alpha male running crew, represent the dino-myte successes and epic William Tell Overture failures of the novel in the wake of WWII.

Who is SM?

One of the greatest parts of my albeit part-time job at the Maryland Institute College of Art is my access to such campus resources as the library. I wandered through the most eclectic collection of fiction I've ever seen, opting to round out my paltry knowledge of Bill Burroughs. I've read Naked Lunch, as is my contractual obligation as a self-proclaimed renegade bohemian madwoman. I've seen the movie A Man Within or whatever it's called, that biography that's on Netflix Instant Watch. I'm fascinated with his persona as he floats through the novels of Kerouac and most recently Patti Smith's Just Kids autobio. I'm intensely amused with his use of the orgone box to achieve equilibrium during junk sickness. So I picked up his 1964 novel Nova Express, I guess the third in his cut-up cycle. It's written in halting prose, words or phrases separated by hyphens, often degenerating into Morse Code collections of dashes and dots.

Please note: I have no idea what it means other than perhaps a commentary on humans/machines, moreover I have no idea why it excites me. It also bores me. But I suppose it's my previous faith in his ability to use strange words and phrases to evoke nothing other than the feeling of strangeness itself. I am more comfortable with absurdity, I guess. Unlikely that I would employ the same method in [CK], cutting up the phrases and bits of dialogue and fitting them together piecemeal, mostly because I'm afraid I would begin to think of the project as exactly the kind of self-conscious, perhaps even narcissistic aesthetic goal, designed to alienate and project false superiority.

Orgone box.

A couple decades later, Barthelme blew minds that thought they couldn't be anymore blown. I read The Dead Father in one of my favorite classes in college, Postmodernism. I wrote a paper on it. Maybe I'll find it and throw it up on Jukebox sometime. Anyway, for the uninitiated, he writes in an extremely minimalistic prose, often relying solely on dialogue (no quotes, each line tabbed and dashed like supporting points in an outline) for the dramatic action. Not unlike B.B.'s prose.

The dialogue comes in waves of repetition, echoes and variations. It's often more like listening to Bach's Inventions than reading a novel. The whole time you're imagining this guy (who looked an awful lot like Ginsberg) smirking coyly at you from the page, laughing and farting in his chair as he hums himself a merry tune at your expense. Diabolical, hilarious, worthy. To enrich my appreciation for the madman who wrote one of my now favorite novels, I also picked up his 1979 collection of stories, Great Days, which I'm still working through. Many of the stories are written in this same style, dialogue spoken in clips as if eavesdropped from the table over.

(from "The Apology")

--Sitting on the floor by the window with only part of my face in the window. He'll never come back.
--Of course he will. He'll return, open the gate with one hand, look up and see your face in the window.
--He'll never come back. Not now.
--He'll come back. New lines on his meager face. Yet with head held high.
--I was unforgivable.
--I would not argue otherwise.

For example. We speed through it, we get the general idea, we have flashes of utter profundity in the midsection, and it ends devastatingly. How else can it be described.

I've been muddling through the appropriately titled Infinite Jest now going on two years, off and on like a sometime lover who delights and frustrates and intrigues and enlightens. The pages are worn from the endless flipping you do with the like 800-page novel, which is so heavily notated and annotated and footnoted as to truly either drive you insane or drive you to try to write something exactly like it, which one should never do. DFW's prose forces brutal honestly on the reader, encourages her to take nothing for granted, to see Note 482 for a complete run-down of this or that past situation, aside, or graphic representation of tennis technique, complete pharmaceutical run-down of X Rx. I've also read his essays in Consider the Lobster which uses footnotes in the traditional, non-fictional custom of leaving NO HOLES. But especially in the case of the article "Big Red Son," about attending the Adult Video Awards, it really is to the reader's advantage that no tale be untold.

Las Vegas 2008 AVN expo

After seeing the movie, I bought Brief Interviews with Hideous Men from Atomic Books. Again, maddeningly long footnotes and extremely verbose prose you practically have to fly through to get to the verb before you forget entirely what the subject was. Amusing since this is precisely the style of writing I am paid to discourage. But it's fiction, after all. And DFW caters to the fiction reader, who--let's be honest--is more often than not a fiction writer h-im/erself. This seems intentional, especially given his propensity to break his fourth wall, to employ a little meta, specifically when he begins tangentially rapping rhapsodical about "belletristic fiction," the work that is constructed not with content in mind as much as aesthetic. Immediately it calls to mind B.B.'s cut-up method (which he abandoned after the trilogy), and begs the essential question which ought to be asked of every work: DOES IT WORK?

We might consider how perhaps the fragmentation of the prose mirrors the fragmentation of the society which he satirizes. Too easy? Or Barthelme's super-colloquial (beyond, surpassing) lines of dramatic dialogue mirroring the obsession we have with voyeurism. A stretch? What about DFW's interlude right smack in the middle of these otherwise accessible confessional accounts, in which he proposes that You, the Reader, are hypothetically constructing a cycle of stories and having a very hard time doing so?

His recommendation? Come clean.

If all your stories give you the feeling there is something of great urgency in which there is something of urgent importance happening, he says, and your deepest desire is to ask the reader whether or not she feels this weird urgency too, just to make sure, to just know, then you better suck it up and do it.

"You'll have to ask [the reader] whether she thinks the whole ragged jerryrigged heuristic semi-octet 'works' as an organically unified belletristic whole or not. Right there while she's reading it. Again: consider this carefully. You should not deploy this tactic until you've soberly considered what it might cost. What she might think of you. Because if you go ahead and do it (i.e., ask her straight out), this whole 'interrogation' thing won't be an innocuous formal belletristic device anymore. It'll be real. You'll be bothering her, the same way a solicitor who calls on the telephone just as you're sitting down to unwind over a good dinner is bothering you" (Wallace 157).

How gauche to come right out and ask! he says. This is the risk he's talking about: turning off the reader once and for all with a single awkwardly interrogative question. How often do we tire of that person who desperately, pathetically, asks you whether you like him or not? Equally do we tire of the coy, cool, aloof and impossibly pretentious attitude of others. Both are socially repugnant, and yet are not both in our nature? Can we pretend to be thinking any differently to some degree? Could we admit it if we did?

How you like me now?!

We return to our prosaic defendant. This smacks of absolutely shameless rampant detestable irony, no? To be condemning the very thing it is so obvious--to all parties, especially him, oh my god, TOTALLYMETA-IRONY--that he is doing? To beg the question: IS IT WORKING?? He's come to us naked, hat in hand, prepared for the worst. I haven't even gotten to the end of the section, but I already kind of wish it would come, like asking a friend to call you during what you just know will be a terrible date. (Sorry, high school newspaper boy.)

At the same time, I also don't feel it necessary to come down on him too hard. How can you? He's eliminated the option for severe laceration, and he is aware of it. Deliberate alienation is a Creative Writing 101 no-no, and he's fucking DOING it. Why? Maybe he's bored. Bored of pedestrian language, bored of traditional prose, bored of nontraditional prose, bored of men, bored of women, and simultaneously enthralled by it all.

Truly he has found the sundae, in all its goopy fudgey glory, too delicious to turn down.

If we normally think (and we should) of the novelist as a sadistic freak hellbent on destroying our illusions of comfort, this kind of writing is totally sadomasochistic. This is a man who has tortured himself into submission before finally kicking the proverbial can--his OWN can. Not to say by ANY means that we should be reading into his every work now as a suicide note, but surely readers in the late nineties had to have thought, "This cannot last."

But I can't feel sorry for him, because words are living organisms once someone gives them life. His is prose I can trust, even as it proclaims its own failings, and urges the reader not to fall into the traps he sets along the way. I won't, but I have, and I will. I will not, yet I must, at the risk of encountering the unencounterable, or at the risk of not encountering anything (i.e. death).

DFW

This is work worth exhuming for its utterly unapologetic bravery--
I will not give up the ghost.

"When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their face. The man who'd introduced them didn't much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one" (Wallace, 0).

And but so
w/r/t
h/t/t

Flora's Fall Lookbook

2011-09-17T13:41:00.000-07:00

What happens when I get goofy and play dressup.

Poor Brigitte Bardot

Pleather shorts cut from pants...became a skirt pretty fast.

Urbane Farmhand Dandy

Getting down to work.

Where's that lighter?

Where I come from, there are consequences when a man lies.

Victorian schoolteacher

Fuck Jackie O. This decade belongs to Bill Nye and his morbid candyraver lab assistant.

(Kills What's Inside of You)

2011-09-03T19:49:00.000-07:00

My friend--we'll call him Strange Fruit--makes noise sometimes http://www.mediafire.com/?bj24ou0y1bbj51f it's good listen:

Udder Disdress

2011-08-17T19:30:00.000-07:00

Taking a suggestion from a friend, I've added studded tears to Brigitte Bardot's perfect face. I also ended up just tearing up the sleeves after I realized the material was too thin to properly stud in a sort of box formation.

Boohoo

On To the Next One

2011-08-15T11:56:00.000-07:00

There's much can be said for unemployment, I suppose. To say nothing of increased boogying activity abouts town, my little studio has grown. This new tri-leaf wooden table has upgraded my living situation tenfold, doubling as a writing desk and craft bench. At the moment it is strewn with strips of cotton, English standard silver studs, scissors, pliers, pens and notebooks.

One of my latest projects has been slicing up some shirts for a friend who screenprinted his own designs onto American Apparel tees, but was dissatisfied with how neat and boxy they are. Fabric is nice and thin, supersoft 50/50 cotton/polyester, which makes it nice to cut into drapey and distressed styles. So far I've played with his Brigette Bardot prints, and am eager to get my hands on his palm tree Jesus prints.

(check out that sweet racerback!)

Today I went out and found an Xacto knife to make the business of studding a pair of leather boots that were gifted unto me much less painful. I am grateful also to Artichoke Haircut for providing me with incentive to produce my poetry. I think it's the combination of high-level proficiency among the editorial staff, the professional look of the chapbook itself, and the encouragement to be utterly batshit weirdo and humorous in approach that endears me to its monthly reading series. Brand new turds on Jukebox. Word.

Also completed the first step in my introduction to Henry Miller, vis-a-vie his 1930 novel Tropic of Cancer, containing some resonating passages I've rewritten in my journal for the penstroke experience. I'm also fifty some pages into The Colossus of Maroussi, a literary 180, about Greece. Decidedly more upbeat. In fact, some of the passages on his "bliss" are starting to irritate me. But presumably he deserves it. His time throughout Cancer is addled with syphilitic prostitutes, vomitus, lice and homelessness. This is also why I like it. I just imagine a Paris, entering the second decade of the twentieth century stretched sooty with growing pains from the Industrial Revolution, where people used many of the same endearing expressions of disgust and nuances common to our day. I will find some and list them later. But here are a few literary gems:

(from Tropic of Cancer. Henry Miller; 1961 Grove Press, New York, NY.)

"I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul."

"Let us have a world of men and women with dynamos between their legs, a world of natural fury, of passion, action, drama, dreams, madness, a world that produces ecstasy and not dry farts." (257)

"Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song. Out of the dead compost and the inert slag they breed a song that contaminates." (254)

And:

"If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world." (248).

Yeah, he's got a thing for verbosity and that thing I do, the list of ever-expanding images and adjectives within one thought. It's just that once you put down what you think is a good word, there's a better one to follow it, and a better and a more perfect and a perfecter, and all of them seem to reflect one another's glow. Word addition as opposed to word choice, maybe. Word Addiction. Or just over-choiciness. Whatever. This is Miller country. If it weren't a little messy it wouldn't be beautiful.

Another beautiful thing I've discovered is this band Lost Tribe, kind of goth punk out of Richmond, VA. Not just because I'm so wooed by the idea of subcultures as tribes, but listen to their samples on their page.

<p><a href="http://losttribe.bandcamp.com/album/unsound-ep">Unsound EP by LOST TRIBE</a></p>

And when they played at Golden West on Saturday night I wasn't disappointed. In fact, even though they were opening for Ice Age, a Danish hardcore band, who are also pretty awesome, a lot of us thought maybe Tribe was better. I noticed the lead singer right away, with his Hendrix fro, light brown skin and sweet studded boots. Their set involved A LOT of fog. I mean, we were choking on it in the front row. The drummer and bass player all but disappeared, and they were all backlit by one single white spotlight.

The guys from Ice Age are teenagers, which may be why Tribe struck us as a little more put together--they're like ten years older. But doesn't mean that I didn't sustain a bunch of arm-bruises and soreness from pushing around a bunch of sweaty dudes during their set. And check out this homemade video they did.

Iceage - New Brigade from iceage on Vimeo.

The lead singer is pretty adorable, but also commanded the stage and audience with a true-blue death glare and spitting range. (There was also a guy behind me spraying beer out of his mouth onto us. It was a salivatingly good time.) Nice to see exciting live music, especially hardcore/ish and Euro to boot.

I will have to write a love poem to Baltimore someday soon.

Um...

2011-08-09T10:34:00.000-07:00

Still not sure how I'm supposed to watch this video by Best Coast without giggling. But I dig her tights nonetheless. And, you know, the whole absurd West Side Story a la Drew Barrymore thing.

Get More: MTV Supervideo, Music, Best Coast

Brand New Audio-Gasm

2011-07-19T17:42:00.000-07:00

Just been listening to Syd Barrett's long-lost lovechild with Marc Bolan, Unknown Mortal Orchestra. Not from the vaults, freshlickers. Enjoy.

Word Turds

2011-07-10T08:47:00.000-07:00

I wish I could quit and just shrink back to normal not this inflated pustule of ambition and rubbed raw idea corpse. But sometimes I find a crumb to the candyhouse, like the monthly reading series You're Invited from the venerable rag in its sophomore publishing, Artichoke Haircut. It was at Dionysus last Thursday that I read some work for the first time since--oh jesus--college. Hopefully I beat out that last reading in its sheer shittiness, I mean at least this one I really went for the shit jugular and read two poems ie bowl full of word turds. I'll probably regret this very soon, but here's the link to Jukebox where I've splayed these images gratuitously.

Summer Babes

2011-06-03T18:44:00.000-07:00

Sundresses, margaritas, long candelit porch chats...summer is a woman's season.

Not surprising, then, that my ever-growing Summer 2011 Mix is dominated by female voices, old and new.

L.L. is a standby on nearly every mix I make, and a good anthem for the reckless love of summer youth.

Youth Knows No Pain by LykkeLi

Cults, who seem to be a newcomer, will be releasing their self-titled album on June 7 I believe the website says.

Cults - Go Outside by wereofftherails

The hazy lethargy of Beach House suits this wretches swampy Maryland season.

Dirty Gold and Best Coast bring back the Cali dreams which by now we should all know are only shadows but are convincing nonetheless.

Dirty Gold - California Sunrise by isaidahip

Pussypower!

2011-05-16T19:51:00.000-07:00

The Lykke Li show at 9:30 last night was one of those times I didn't want a camera. Such emotional hypnosis is pretty hard to capture, even if you and your galpal are looking fresh. Just not worth it. More worth it to try to do the reality screen-shot, which maybe we're forgetting how to do now that we have cameras on us almost constantly. So that's what I did--click, click, click--and now I have an indelible memory that was hand-crafted to selective perfection.

Four long billowy black curtains hung from the ceiling and a red fog covered the stage floor. A few white strobe lights initiated the hypnosis as the track from "Untitled" filled the speakers. The band came out in the dark and started up "Jerome." You knew she was about to come out in a black unitard and black flowy something. Sure enough, the drums signaled her arrival and there was her chin-tipped silhouette--come forth blonde raven sadness queen everyone's yelling, the tiny pubescents and their eager 6-foot boyfriends.

They played pretty much the entirety of Wounded Rhymes and "Little Bit," "Dance, Dance, Dance," from Youth Novels. Songs like "I Know Places," "Sadness Is a Blessing" crushed the soul, absolutely, to smithereens. She stalks around the stage with such authority and deep moaning pain and that face that breaks apart in front of a sold out crowd. You kind of feel worried for and intimidated by her. It's awesome. She interacts with the crowd, literally pulling forth our energy, alchemy for dark metals. It transcends the pleasure of one and becomes the connection of many, yes including the douchebags who you kind of wonder why they are there. So I tried to imagine them away (shit to gold folks) and connect the pyramid of interest amongst her and us. Her voice was even a little hoarse but I'd like to see my voice hold up against a world tour. Plus she uses such a more daring range in the new album, and I suspect she's following up with the goal to have a rougher female voice like latterday Joni Mitchell by keeping a healthy cigarette regimen. (Good thing those ladies made their impossibly high register albums early on, 'cause hearing Mitchell sing "Big Yellow Taxi" these days sounds more like a campfire than a songbird, no disrespect.)

The residual feeling is that of relief. LL has said in interviews she really is disappointed with where pop's gone. What she's accomplishing is a more artistic fusion: using the pop song form when it's appropriate, but not adhering to or dependent upon it for expression, departing pretty dramatically from it in songs with more abstract or overly despairing concepts...which is to say she has as much to contribute musically to her sound as she does lyrically and compositionally. She turns the focus inward, where art is most sincere than your daily marketing images. But when it comes out,it sounds the way it feels, but made new: into something pleasurable. We are saved from the vacuous monotony of "Partypartyparty let's all get wasted Friday Friday Friday partyinpartyin--yeah!" Pop has lost that nineties self-deprecating anthem of "I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me, get funky with the Cheez Whiz," etc., in favor of and "I Whip My Hair Back (and Forth)" which is just the ultimate self-indulgent act...but seriously are women so deprived of examples of their innate virtues that we have Katy Perry and Ke$ha telling us the best we have to hope for is to get dressed up, drunk, and make everyone want us? Materialism is so out. Heart is in. And Lykke Li fuses her talent with her heartbreak, causing this sinewy, seductive dream haze or stormy wild woman. It's common, when she's onstage, for her to grab a drumstick and leap around a cymbal or two. Then she comes back to the mike with two in her hand and uses them to sing. If conversation is no easy thing for her, sexual expression is like breathing. And yet it's the heart she wants to seduce, I think that's probably not so clear to everyone. I feel a little protective of her actually. She rips open her own vulnerability for us to come and inspect--but it's really her courage we're looking at.

The main idea here, I guess folks, is that I have a raging girl crush on Lykke Li for her warrior bravery and stylish femininity: pure pussypower.

Therefore I hereby present the artist Lykke Li with the enviable Pseudo-Bi-Monthly Hot Fudge Sundae Pussypower Award, hip-pip!

All You Need to Know about this Weekend

2011-05-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

Possibility

Lykke Li from Black Cab Sessions on Vimeo.

Self-Damned and Drunk.

2011-04-20T11:29:00.001-07:00

There is work to be done. That's as much as I know. The rest is a cacophony of advice, ideas, urgings, scoldings, useless reassurances, flattery, and dream dream dreams. The memory is the torturer of souls. Among other forehead-slapping memories in my newborn giraffe-stumblings through a smithereened economy, death rattling print industry, and retching, aching malaise is a summer at Tin House.

I spent long hours up at night after full days of workshops, screaming into the receiver of a phone containing the voice of a drunk and infantile man child who had only recently been the unspoken cause of a left-favoring limp. My bathroom stall conversations when he was attacked by hoods at his security job became the topic of one author's seminar on "Good Openings." Apparently, the eavesdrop is as good a method as any to begin to weave a tale, from as little information as, "Did you bleed? How many were there? If there had been more...God, you're lucky. If there had been any more, you would've really been in trouble." The author on her podium glanced up and winked at me in the auditorium. I felt used, but this time it wasn't a bad feeling.

There was my interview with the Editor-in-Chief's young and precocious ten year-old son for the conference newsletter in which, gushing, I asked if he'd be my conference boyfriend. The closing gala involved me creeping up into the Student Affairs "office," (which at Reed College is wall-matted with hyper-intellectual graffiti and newsclippings of anarchic student activity) to smoke a few joints with, among others, an apparent student who used me as a scapegoat that night for her hipster-hate diatribes. Then back to the bar to down a few more free-ish beers, and dance with aforementioned ten year-old son of the man who I hope will someday publish me, leaning down to execute a proper Twist, only realizing later my dress had slipped in the front, and perhaps explains why his parents were looking on in horror and amusement. I also seemed to have acquired a friend in who I thought was a flashy Bukowskian novelist but turned out to be a self-glorifying, not-as-funny-as-he-thinks, forty-something married gentleman who nevertheless made me the recurring muse of some candid photography, and wrote in my autograph book that in order to help me develop my voice, he would "beat, bludgeon, and--did I mention?--beat" me out of me. I'm continually haunted by his facebook requests.

Then also:

A girlfriend of mine worked at an artsy boutique hotel in a popular gay restauranted area of Washington, D.C. She made a killing at a full-time job as front desk agent, with front row seats to interact with the likes of Diplo In Armani and Jack White's crew of disaffected vampire punks. I wanted in. Unfortunately, after five separate interviews, I was shoved into their adjacent, extremely mismanaged yet celebrity-chefed Japanese restaurant. Hostessing there I learned the art of peeling coats off the elderly and addressing the politically significant, and likewise the value in matching coat to coat number. I also learned the true meaning of "boy's club." My bosses were male, gay, and at least one was extremely lecherous, charming with woman, but with men...a more wanton asshole I'll never meet. The chef, celebrity or no, had an inflated ego which protected him in his clandestine comments and lashings whenever I needed to conduct business in his area. The issue of my growing discomfort at being the object of such rough and violent sexual imagery while in my corporate-issued Club Monaco back-zippered lil' black number was overlooked and awkwardly unaddressed. On one particularly frustrating day, after being called "Blondie," and then told I "didn't know my place," I stood, fuming at my prison stand when a large man with a glass eye approached me. Arrangements were quickly fussed about between my managers, where this man would choose to sit. He chose a seat with the clearest view of me, and fixed his tattooed face on me. He limped, as if from sciatica, and wore, despite his apparent association with the President and other luminaries, overalls, with a ridiculous Jack Straw plaid shirt underneath. One overall was undone and draped over his pot belly. The GM offered him graciousness and charm as he sat, but he pulled her close and they whispered for a while with periodic glances my way. This, I was certain, would be the final clincher of my employment. I was, apparently, much too controversial with my elevated education and ideas of proper management. I knew I wouldn't last. What had I possibly done to raise this man's ire, though, I wondered? He motioned me forward once she had gone, and pulled me close so I could smell the whiskey. He slipped something in my hand. "I've been saving this for you," he whispered. I was creeped out. "Don't be creeped out," he said. "I've spent many years with the mystics of New Zealand, and I spent time collecting gifts for the people I would meet in Washington. I am going to see the President, Obama, an old friend of mine, to receive a medal of honor tomorrow. I want you to have this before I leave." He pressed something small, smooth and cold into my hand. It looked like a small piece of flint with markings. "This is a very special protective talisman," he told me, looking deep into my face. "It will protect you from the evils of men."

"So, it'll repel all the D.C. snobs?" I asked.

"No, no. From men. Bad men. It is for you. I didn't know who it was for when I found it, but then I saw you. It is for you. But you must wear it all the time. Promise me, or I will be worried about you."

And this:

An old friend texted me about coming to his art studio to be an extra in an indie film being filmed in the warehouse. It was the end of October, two days before my birthday. I had successfully escaped all the horribleness of my life in Washington and was clean-slate living in a brand new one-bedroom apartment all to myself and my cuddly tiger friend. My spidey sense was tingling. Baltimore is a city of loud, beer-and chicken-laden women and introspective, moon-eyed artist boys. I was feeling the seduction of possibility. Ego brimming, I showed up on set to join up with old college acquaintances who were also to be extras in this film no one knew the plot to. I checked in with wardrobe; after a requisite once-over, I was told I looked cute, but lose the white jacket or it'll wash out the camera. So I spent a freezing nine hours sitting on dusty warehouse floors in holding, just a tank top and miniskirt to mention. Buzzing, buzzing buzzing I was, and I felt like everyone else could feel it. I felt certain I'd be taking someone home, or perhaps...taking someone in. We danced in front of a fake band, following direction as to heightening frenzy and delirium. Could one make a career of this? Background dancing? And how cruel was the casualness with which I was beckoned to this, my dream of vanity and exposure and--and--and then, those eyes. And that gesture, and that flashlight to light my way back from the smoking balcony. And in and in and in.

We are self-prophecies, when will we realize?

Innocence as an expectation cannot survive, I think, once this self-prophecy starts spinning. Why have I been so surprised? Nothing of what was in the head does not somehow materialize--and yet every time feels like a club to the temple. Why should we be so off-guard? It is unbecoming, the assumption of innocence. Good Intent does not beget innocence, nor does mal-intent beget evil. I can't accept it. I've seen the most evil from the most lovable, and therefore I routinely distrust that old, rehearsed charisma. In the past, my acquiescence has been my defense, a death-by-agreement. But we can't agree to everything or surely we'd die.

Nor should we be slinging into the streets with all the grandiosity of a lion during zoopocalypse (the sudden, anarchist-initiated liberation of our city's fine captivities). This too is self-prophesying, as I frequently remind my paranoiac love object that a shotgun above the bed will-and-must be used, therefore forget zoopocalypse and wait for the inevitable: zombiepocalypse. (Or perhaps like the umbrella rule, having one prevents one from having to use it?)

I'm not sure how to answer myself. Probably I'll have to wait years and years to define my position in relation to the others. I have to craft it, that position, baffling and anguished and tremendously high, and it's the one thing I'm terrified I won't have the courage to do. I'm afraid of everything I've already prophesied into reality, of what it forced me to be in order to conquer it. Now a thirst left to dry out and crisp in the mouth, the burning, bleeding, throbbing opulence of ambition dashed dashed dashed and again--too soon? Too late?

Is there a talisman to defend against the imagination?

Go ahead and try--bid the scorpion not sting itself in dead freezing desert apathy, a shadow under dark sky amid sharp things.

Again, and again, and then.

And now--

Note from the Author

2011-04-12T15:02:00.000-07:00

For it is written: When it rains it pours.

I've had the recent opportunity to try my hand at job searching again, this time looking for some sort of teaching gig. In this application for the Institute of Reading Development, I was asked to answer a few questions as a writing sample. I won't provide the questions because they should be evident from the answers, and besides, I felt it was time to sort of update my attitude towards my passion in a renewing-of-vows sort of thing.

Each time I revisit Lolita, I am seduced by the details of Nabokov's craft, and the way in which he allows his novel to take on a life of its own. It is one of the seminal works in which the definition of love--particularly the destructive and volatile nature of an artist's love is explored to quite tragic and sublime results. The grim humor behind pain and pining, and the casual cruelty of youth are treated with such artistry and careful construction that it both softens the blows and digs the knife deeper. I am greatly inspired by the unflinching bravery of Nabokov's surrender and devotion to his characters, to the story, and to the craft.

Additionally, I find myself frequently becoming entwined in J.D. Salinger's Glass family stories. It is a world of laden dialogue and forged connections which frequently miss intended targets, and create a heritage of secrets, style, and pride. The way in which the characters attempt to maintain their own illusions and dignity through obsessive memories of the past creates a tunneling effect between past and present. Ideas of consciousness, its deceptive games and the increasingly limitless methods of softening reality are still relevant seventy years later. The characters search ceaselessly for a balm which may not exist at all, least of all in the material world. In fact the balm, as Salinger seems to have found, may be literature itself.

Increasingly, and as I develop my own voice, I am drawn to those writers who exhibit the most freedom and playfulness in their writing. Tom Robbins is as colorful a character as the ones he creates, and I am given to frequent laughter at his sneaky cleverness and circus ringleader style of narration. I gladly suspend disbelief due to his unflinching authority and seductive prose. Reading should involve the joy of connection, whether between author and reader, author and character, or reader and character. And as laughter is essential to the sheer pleasure of interacting with literature, Robbins' writing is an abiding favorite of mine.

My plans for the next year include taking the GRE's and applying for a Masters program in English Education. I have been fortunate enough to have great English teachers and professors who have inspired me to develop a natural talent and personal passion into a rich career. Specifically, I developed a strong interest in the crossover of philosophy and literature in my high school AP English class. My teacher brought to the works of Sartre and Camus the greater context and influence of thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud to fuel our basis for comparison. The idea of the character as mortal plaything, independent of spirit but submissive to the will of the author posed questions beyond the sphere of my own experience. I became greatly interested in different ways of thought as I matured and encountered the seemingly limitless number of options. But no matter where the dark realms the implications of fate or free will took me, words could turn that terror into a thing of beauty.

I am frequently moved to think of those younger generations struggling through the same or worse series of average tragedies as I have, and hope to offer them possibilities for refuge. Literature may not be the ultimate balm for all of human suffering, may in fact be the "hot fudge sundae" Kurt Vonnegut spoke of when scoffing at the ire with which some people react to a novel. But without it, we would be deprived of a great source of pleasure, empathy and self discovery.

Teaching is a two-way process by which both parties, instructor and pupil come to a higher perception of experience. The pleasure of a good story is universal, and the positivity formed by the critical deconstruction of prose increases sophistication of expression by which people can come to a better understanding of one another. In this age of increasing technological advances, we have encountered a splintering of community, with alienating results. I see myself as a champion of sincere human encounter, and I see teaching as a method by which to help myself and others regain a sense of history and belonging.

Dearly Twitterpated

2011-03-25T15:47:00.001-07:00

Adjective

twitterpated (comparative more twitterpated, superlative most twitterpated)

Smitten or love-struck. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/twitterpated)
Not to be confused with the narcissistic disorder involving the overuse of a certain social online forum

It is indeed the time of year for things to spring, including those things that don't need the sunshine to do so. In honor of us poor daft fools searching for our own heads in the weeds, and to the myriad distractions and projects we become involved in to keep us from defenestrating, I dedicate this playlist. Let it, and this poem by my sometime friend D.A. Powell fill your orifices.

"Sprig of Lilac"

in a week you could watch me crumble to smut: spent hues

spent perfumes. dust upon the lapel where a moment I rested

yes, the moths have visited and deposited their velvet egg mass

the gnats were here: they smelled the wilt and blight. they salivated

in the folds of my garments: you could practically taste the rot

look at the pluck you've made of my heart: it broke open in your hands

oddments of ravished leaves: blossom blast and dieback: petals drooping

we kissed briefly in the deathless spring. the koi pond hummed with flies

unbutton me now from your grasp. no, hold tighter, let me disappear

into your nostrils, into your skin, a powdering smudge against your rough cheek

(from Chronic; Graywolf Press, St. Paul, MN; 2009)

Tristen

02 Baby Drugs.mp3

Nico

02 These Days.mp3

Geotic
10 The Sprawling, Glorious Newness.mp3

Yeasayer
04 I Remember.mp3

It could happen to YOU.

The Worst Song EVER?

2011-03-10T15:28:00.001-08:00

Usually I opt for more positive reviews on here, not because I'm a journalistic push-over or crotch-licker of the indie-famous or anything. A close friend (my oldest one, in fact) has named one side of me the "sardonic shark." But still, my overall attitude is usually, why waste breath on the unworthy?

Sometimes it's just impossible to ignore. Take this tune from Yann Tiersen, entitled "Fuck Me." Note, if you will, the apparent contradictions--the juxtaposition of the lamb-gentle male and female vocals over top some deeply emotive guitar weavings. With apologies to Iron & Wine, I'm sure. Then we have these lyrics:

I know you know we’re all falling into a deep oblivion

I know you know we’re all falling into a neverending mess

So we have to take care, take care, and share it, share it, share it together (x2)

So let’s get undressed, we need to feel it

Please let’s get undressed, we need to live it

and sing: fuck me fuck me fuck me fuck me you make me come again, you make me come again (x2)

I know you know we’re all falling into a deep oblivion

I know you know we’re all falling into a neverending mess

So we have to take care, take care, and share it, share it, share it together (x2)

So let’s get undressed, we need to fill it

Please let’s get undressed, we need to live it

and sing: love me love me love me love me, you make me love again, you make me love again (x2)

love me love me love me love me, you make me love again, you make me love again love me love me love me love me, you make me love again, you make me love again love me love me love me love me, you make me love again, you make me love again

More lyrics: http://www.lyricsmania.com/fuck_me_lyrics_yann_tiersen.html
All about Yann Tiersen: http://www.musictory.com/music/Yann+Tiersen

Kinda reminds me of some of the more grueling creative writing workshops I've attended: the short story, "As Told By My Cat." The song-turned-poem entitled, "Sealed With A Kiss." (No redemption for these innocent dumplings.) And then imagine being prompted--called on, by name--to comment on the various THEMATIC ELEMENTS of this drivel. Pray tell, what was your FAVORITE line? Reminder to act in sincerity, with an unerring, unflinching yet courteous CRITICAL EYE when phrasing your response.

Fuck. Me.

Hiatus

2011-01-30T12:22:00.000-08:00

Yes, I abandoned blogship for over a month, but in favor of some very worthy projects, not the least of which is the fairyland painbliss of truthbeauty that killed lesser women than myself. Among those still standing is my favorite current artist, Lykke Li, born in my same year and sharing some of same Nordic lineage. She's a girl after my own heart not only for the eyes searing from underneath baby-blonde, but the courage to be thrown to the wolves of passion, and the fortitude to be swallowed alive and reborn with new faith.

She has said of her first album, Youth Novels, that she was fresh off the street and into the studio. She has said she has come to resent the apparent demure image that was born of the reticence in her voice. The feather-soft voice might have been what attracted me to her (what can I say? Apparent vulnerability appeals to me.), but what has increased my interest in her artistically is the contrast you hear behind her, and even more so the intensity of her live performance. Hearing her launch into a freestyle over top an old Lou Reed favorite at the 6th and Eye Synagogue in D.C. exploded all expectations of what you might expect from an indie pop princess.

Her second album, Wounded Rhymes seems to emerge from a much darker place. In interviews given to Fader and Dazed and Confused, she discusses her recent involvement with certain occult tribes in the California deserts, and her interest in ritual, seance, and voodoo. Has our Swedish beauty gone off the deep end? I hope so.

She has a new video out for the single "I Follow Rivers," and I'm hearing a more cohesive pop anthem that has already been remixed by Dave Sitek and some others. A bit disappointing in its seeming accessibility, but her personality is in no way compromised in the lyrics. Much harsher is the single "Get Some," a kind of vindication of the ways in which people use each other. Her voice in these sounds very different--deeper, harsher, stronger, more confrontational and mature. She's said she can't wait 'til she smokes enough cigarettes to get the tone of voice she most admires. (Think Joni Mitchell on Court and Spark vs. Both Sides Now!)

Lykke Li seems to be pushing constantly at her own boundaries, challenging herself to live more deeply than any normie would voluntarily. I admire her weirdness, in fact it's the most beautiful thing about her. But she also has a shifting aesthetic that relates to her personal style. She has an effervescent but extremely lucid quality that's attracted designers. BUST Magazine feature took some gorgeous shots.

I hope she has the courage and the support to continue what seems to be a very serious quest for her. I hope she maintains her vision and her weirdness, and that she's not afraid to be terrified and strung out in the best ways possible. Keep that heart broken, baby, let it fill you up.

South Afreaky

2010-12-03T14:44:00.000-08:00

Recently this group Die Antwoord (in Afrikaans, 'the answer') has been blowing up all over the place. I first witnessed the weirdness at Sticky Rice when John started playing this video after dinner:

As I previously expected, based on hints of tongue-in-cheekness in there, these folks are spoofin'. Much in the vein of that guy with the big nose and curly hair from SNL who did the video with T. Pain, it's all apparently a satire of the young white Afrikaaners, those sons-of-apartheid-turned-poseur in the realm of South Africa's Zef style street hip hop style.

And yes, that video plays at Sticky every single night as well.

Okay, I'll admit that for a while they had me going too. I mean, I thought it was entirely possible that they were for real, and for real really weird, with a healthy sense of humor in their videos. It brings warm Xmas cheer to my heart to watch the expressions on the faces of diners and bar rats when they see Yolandi Va$$er, the toe-headed mouse-wonder with her dead white rat coat and long nails carving a pentagram on Diplo's chest. And I'm just tickled with tender amusement of articles like This One from "Music Industry Online," that calls them "courageous" for using such controversial language and subject themes. It would be like if a Japanese music blog hailed this video for being "courageous," in the important sense:

SNL Uncensored: Dick In A Box

Come to think of it, this might actually be the beacon of anti-censorship we've needed on major cable television network conglomerate shareholder-owned blah blah blah!

Indeed, the American public needs its fair share of blah blah blah, otherwise what the fuck are we doing here anyway? I've got a headache, don't bother me. Ahhh.

Spotlit on: The Twentieth Century

2010-11-13T10:31:00.000-08:00

It's an obvious pick, and soon we'll all get tired of rehashing the "significance" of the last millennium, specifically the last century. But somehow it never gets tiresome to keep learning from our modern patterns, the reactions to life that cause inventions, and the reactions in life to those inventions including that of the God-corpse (with apologies to Donald Barthelme)

In the last week or two I've been stumbling across gems from the past, including this book my new boss lent me in hopes that I would "dig it" as much as he. It's called Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, and check it under the Spotlit navbar thingy---> Czech writer Patrik Ourednik is no Howard Zinn--this is not your average prep school required reading. Neither is it Cat's Cradle. If anything it falls somewhere in between, a gray area of lyrical prose on par with Burroughs and David Foster Wallace. Clearly it is an absurdist take on the wars that made us confront other cultures and the revolutions that reformed the future. The tone is without whimsy or condescension (or condensation), and we're often forced to reread the same phrases on several pages, sometimes in making a discordant parallel to something very different.

Oh stay! three lives in one flea spare

Where we almost, yea more than married are.

This flea is you and I, and this

Our marriage-bed and marriage-temple is.

-John Donne, "The Flea"

I'm not fifty pages into it, but one of these passages struck me:

"Trees were important in cities as they ensured regeneration of oxygen and the ash from the corpses could be used as fertilizer in fruit orchards and vegetable gardens, because organic fertilizer was starting to be in short supply in Germany. The corpses in the ruins of buildings were huddled up together and sometimes two or three corpses were holding hands or hugging each other and had to be sawn apart to free them. And one woman did not want to cut apart corpses and the commander of the squad in charge of the operation wanted to have her shot for sabotage but in the meantime the soldiers who were supposed to shoot her had deserted." (20)

It's going to be a fast ride through this landscape, and I have a feeling it won't be all too comfortable.

While Mr. Zinn may have the socio-political field covered in terms of exhaustive historical archiving, we have two others that have arguably had equal impact on the arguably most impacting social/artistic phenomena, Rock'n'Roll: Joan Didion and Lester Bangs. Didion served a very important role as the pinprick to the giant pink balloon that was the capitalized Sixties. Her essay,Slouching Towards Bethlemmaintains a venerable position in the cannon of compassionate journalism, and I'll always look to her example of grace and integrity in her writing. It should be pretty obvious my affinity for Lester Bangs given my choice in quotes for the disclaimer of my blog. I became increasingly interested in rock journalism when I read--and subsequently forgot to return to my high school library--Rolling Stone'sIllustrated guide to Rock and Roll in which were included articles by Lester Bangs.

Then he appeared, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, in the 2000 movieAlmost Famous as the lovably brash mentor to William Miller. Anyway, somehow or another I caught onto his book on Blondie which I just bought, and which will hopefully be arriving on my doorstep, gently loved and awaiting me on top of the reading list.

Birthday Tunes

2010-11-02T13:03:00.001-07:00

I've been working on a "Flora" playlist, which means those songs that make the little girl named Flora in my soulest of souls dance around the kitchen in front of a mirror with cookie dough all over her fingers. I'm still experimenting with Opendrive, so apologies if these links don't quite work at first. There's a Floyd track there that no one's probably listened to for a long time, but it's one of those little gems in the mid sixties that got lost in the weight of later epic concept albums. But the most significant of this playlist are definitely the spritely tracks from Sweden's de Montevert.

High On You.mp3

de-Montevert-Skyll-på-mig-www.esau_.se_.mp3

de-Montevert-The-Ghost-www.esau_.se_.mp3

Crumbling Land.mp3

04 I Want The World To Stop.mp3

And then, because I'm in a particularly wistful mood, a Best Coast song.

When I'm With You.mp3

Halloween Playlist

2010-10-26T12:53:00.000-07:00

It is that happy time of year again when everything dies and all the spirits come out to lurk. I too have been lurking, and I've come up with a few gems. The following are tracks that I'll be using as the soundtrack for this, the season of death and renewal, and are the result of Googling "Halloween." Play close attention especially to my new Audiogasm track, which would be from the LA trio Halloween Swim Team. Also, note the prevalence of Danny E:lfman tracks, because after all he is IS the mayor of Halloweentown!

02 Pitch Black.mp3

01 Grey Matter.m4a

A little Kills:

03 Pull A U.mp3

More Danny Elfman:
Beetlejuice Theme (Kamei Halloween Edit).mp3

Punks do Halloween best (Misfits and Dead Kennedys)

Halloween.mp3

07 Halloween.mp3

Bmore Hearts Sticky!

2010-10-16T00:35:00.000-07:00

Although this IS NOT A FOODIE BLOG by any means, I feel cheerfully obligated to announce that Sticky B'more is off the proverbial chain. By which I mean that the Baltimorian newcomers are coming to understand what it is to be truly Sticky in the sense that you know how to work hard/play hard and keep it classy. The Examiner concurs.

The new opening marks the third in a Northerly-encroaching creep up the East Coast, from RVA to DC to Bmore...will we one day add NYC to these charming abbreves? One can only hope...

We've been graced with the presence of DJs the likes of Dave Nada and Kom-Toki every weekend, and we've enjoyed cutting rugs with the back of house. The space is significant for many Baltimore natives who recall when it was a bar called Friends. A spacious room with booth/tables and the original grand ol' divey bar lead back to a little offshoot enclosed room with three small tables and stained glass reminiscent of cathedral decor is called the Church, and the Boom-Boom room has its own backroom-near-kitchen charm. Rickety warped stairs lead up past the beautiful stickycoyfish mural by House Party Dave to our office floor with dry storage, etc. The upper levels are currently being occupied by a few of the owners during extended workweeks, in addition to some surly brothel/addict hauntings, no doubt. This was the enduring charm of the bar Friends, which apparently everyone was sad to see go out, though not surprised (I've heard they gave away the bar). During the first few weeks we were open, our sandwich board read "Sticky Rice...We Can Be Your 'Friends' Too!"

So far we've enjoyed GREAT reviews on Yelp, and the LivingSocial promotion has brought out a lot of sushi lovers and curious casual diners. Dinner is delicious, but you really want to stay late and drink with us. I hear the staff gets kind of nuts. You might even get to bang on a gong.

Art in Death's Capital

2010-10-12T15:21:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I get that weird little feeling as if the universe is conspiring in my favor...and today's events have definitely left me buzzing with pronoia...

I was eating a delicious portabella sandwich today at Liquid Earth on Aliceanna (basically next door to Sticky Rice), and picked up a copy of the Urbanite , my new favorite Baltimore rag to read a couple articles on local graf art. Naturally that put me in a sweat, but I was a total mess by the end of the second article where it so casually referenced an XTC song from the early eighties that has been adopted by local great Cuba. (Song would be "Living Through Another Cuba," and yes you would be correct in the assumption that it's brilliant)

But let me back up. Looks like there's a dude calls himself Gaia who has been throwing up beautiful drawings matted onto sagging overhangs and derelict building fronts. He's twenty-two and goes to MICA, where I just interviewed for a position at the Writing Studio. There's one of his grandfather on Park and Franklin, but other than that the are mostly figures with animal heads and human bodies and hands, usually wrenched in some sort of anguish, presumably because what was once a human head has gone animal. My plan is to become infatuated with spotting these around town now. My next stop is at W. North Ave. and Pennsylvania, but I'll have to take some breed of large male with me. The images, according to the article, are affixed with wheat paste and glue, and go up in a matter of seconds, (obviously he couldn't do the drawing on the buildings themselves for reasons of bad medium and the small legal issue), the way graffiti artists choose names that are short and sweet and go up fast under the cover of night before anyone can hear the tell-tale rattlerattlerattle, ch-shhhhhhhhh.

The next article was about this guy Cuba, an older head who also went to MICA, and was a good friend of the author's until he faded into legendary obscurity. The author, Charles Cohen, said last he'd heard of his boy, he'd O-Ded on heroin in like '82. Not only false, but a direct quote I'll take the liberty of snagging from the article went like this:

"Doing drugs was a way to do myself in and still enjoy it until I got close [to death]. Then I realize I ain't going out like that. I'll take a bullet in the head. No I won't. Fuck it, I'm never going to die."

...which I think really eloquently sums up the impetus these artists have for doing what they're doing. While the one motto goes, "nothing is sacred," in that most people who actually notice street art are liable to erase it, the other one is about marking out your space, the art making you immortal. In an environment particularly like Baltimore's where death marks just about everything (see R.I.P art), there are those who know their days are numbered. So what do you do? Write up your will, spit in the ocean, become a makeout bandit, make a baby, make a song, or imprint your soul on a slab of concrete that couldn't care less how you make it?

Even if you're not involved in a gang war, this is probably the most relatable existential fear, of the Nothing eating you alive, wiping you out forever with nothing to show for it. A professor from Pratt and a kind of friend of mine told me he started smoking cigarettes as a way to kill himself as slowly as possible, all the while

dutifully scribbling, etching the mirror of beauty he encounters for whomever will care about it later. When I think about the kind of writer I'll be known as, I know I won't be a Stephen King, who will survive the eons perhaps as a cultural icon, a genre writer who gave words to some of our darkest nightmares which necessarily illuminate our assumptions and attachments to the things we care about most. He's experimented with writing under a pseudonym to test out whether his success has been valid or just a clever marketing scheme. The essays still sold really well. So, props to him. He's no literary giant, just a guy with a great thing going. I've toyed with the idea of writing some great erotic trash to make my millions before The Cicada Killers breathes life of publication, but I can't see myself doing it. Nope, I'm going to fiddle and fuck around and produce some terrible trash until finally, on my deathbed, I produce my life-affirming work, only to be appreciated by a handful of maladjusted teenage art students decades after I die. And what's really sick about it all is that I've resigned myself only in hopes of the opposite actually happening.

These articles found me just a week after I bought Style Wars about the early hip hop/graf art scene in NYC, and two days after British street artist Banksy was commissioned to draft a new couch gag for this Sunday's episodes of The Simpsons.

I for one am impressed that no heads have rolled over this. Impressed and hopeful. We are fortunate to be so immersed in The Great Recession that (IMHO) the highest art forms like satire and street art have room and audience to thrive. I'm becoming very excited about living in Baltimore, where there are more gravestones than citizens, and there is an urgency to the art being produced. Live live urbania!

Spotlit on Tim Winton

2010-10-08T12:55:00.000-07:00

I realize the lit portion of my blog has been somewhat lacking due to the influx of better and better jams, and the relative absence of good fiction out there. When I was down under, my sister turned me onto an Aussie writer Tim Winton, and his novels Breath (Penguin, 2008) and Cloudstreet (Penguin 1991). Two very different novels in almost every angle, but somewhat familiar in their apparent disconnect.

The character in Breath is a middle-aged paramedic who encounters a ghost from his adolescence in the form of a teen thrill gone wrong. Readers are transported back to the beginning of Bruce's friendship with insatiable risk-taking Loonie and the old surfer hero Sando who takes both young surfers under his wing. The language is brief, tragically clear. It's a quick read, and offers a lot of those "surprises" for which space and expectation is made early on. Specifically the story spoke to me on the levels of youth and the addiction to risk, the fear of mediocrity and the threat of being lost to the eons of ordinary. And to these extents it's very sexually driven, the danger, the bliss, the life pulsing through a skull and crossbones.

(excerpt)

Shoulder to shoulder in the cab, Loonie and I exchanged furtive looks. There was something of the classroom about Sando, the stink of chalk on him when he got going, but my mind was racing. I'd already begun to pose those questions to myself and feel the undertow of their logic. Was I serious? Could I do something gnarly, or was I just ordinary? I'll bet my life that despite his scorn Loonie was doing likewise. We didn't know it yet, but we'd already imagined ourselves into a different life, another society, a state for which no raw boy has either words or experience to describe. Our minds had already gone out to meet it and we'd left the ordinary in our wake.

(p. 94)

I'm only about halfway through Cloudstreet, but already it's as if it were written by an entirely different writer.

The cheeky Aussie humor is abounding, but for starters, it's concerned with about ten major characters, all

of whom get POV in the third...except one, the boy named Fish whose heart stopped when he fell overboard

the fishing boat and got caught in the net. He survives, albeit with scrambled eggs for brains. His sections (the novel

is divided amongst the characters and the two families living together by small headed vignettes) are by far the most

beautiful and the most wrenching. They are written in second person, as a conversation across some great divide and always

addressed to Fish. Is "I" the author? I tend to doubt, as it would be tremendously risky with all the other characters

involved, to suddenly spring some sort of authorial involvement and crowd the novel.

At the risk of total literary blasphemy (and giddy is the thought!), I say these two juxtaposed works remind me

of none other than Joyce's Dubliners and Ulysses. Think about it. If I were to introduce Winton to a classroom, I would

most likely give them Breath to cut their teeth before they jump into a dual-family historical epic like Cloudstreet.

The stories in Dubliners mirror the close scope and developed private interiors of the Bruce character. (I think

Bruce and the boy from Arabia would have a fine time bitching about girls and sexual competence.) The

sheer breadth, volume, involvement and elevated-low-brow wash of language in Cloudstreet is an instant

likeness to the one-day spectacle that is Ulysses, the novel which Joyce claimed contained not a single extraneous

word. Deliberate is the word we're looking for, and we're sticking to the one, thanks J.J. I've stumbled

across some effortless beauty on page 164:

(excerpt)

Across the planes all things still play themselves out, all fun and fear, all the silliness and quaking effort,

all the bickering and twitching, all the people going about the relentless limited endeavour of human

business, and the sight of your body rolling like that, bursting with voice and doubleness, reminds you that the

worlds are still connected, the lives are still related and the Here still feels the pangs of history.

Obsessed as I am with "relentless limited endeavours" and of course the "pangs of history,"

this passage was meant just for me...and Fish, apparently. It's worthy of note that in spite of the grand

scope and the way the family names (Pickles and Lamb) are difficult at first to assign to the characters'

first names, one becomes very quickly entangled in the matters of the two trying to live under the same

roof during a time of great economic depression in Australia.

Oh, and flipping over my copy here, I notice Elizabeth Ward of the Washington Post, no less, has

already paid tribute to my undergraduate mentor: "Cloudstreet gets you inside the very skin of post-war working-class Australians the way Joyce makes you feel

like a turn-of-the-century Dubliner..."

She's right, but not as right as I am, of course, about the two novels back-to-back. And then there's

the wordplay...

I'll decide when I get to the end of this one if anyone else should bother reading it. I highly recommend

the first half, however, and it is up to you whether you'd like to continue on, asphyxiate your breath with the

witching rhythm of Winton's phrasing and the quivering potential for tragedy.

DJ's and Crust Punks

2010-09-30T15:27:00.001-07:00

It was a very sweaty and dusty day at Merriweather Post last weekend for the Free Fest. We started off the day sipping lime flavored vodka and sprite under a tarp we strung between two cars. Everyone was wearing green bandanas around their nose and mouths because of the dust and smoke rising from the Dance Forest. People were sniffing the air and exchanging glances with their friends and then looking around suspiciously to see who the pot culprit was. Wow, we really are at a rock and roll festival, do ya smell that??
Joan Jett looks fantastic and sounds even better. It was bizarre to watch a rock concert so traditional when everything else we heard that day was inspired by ironic looks back at her genre. She played "Cherry Bomb" and "Crimson and Clover," and ripped up a guitar solo. I wonder what it must be like to be a grungy-ass crust punk one day and the next Hollywood is sucking at your fame teat, and casting teenage heartthrobs to play you in a movie about yourself, and how hot it is that you were a raging young lesbian rocker back in the day. It's gotta be weird. I'd hate to see that mainstream depiction of my private life while I'm still living. Must be creepy to see how Hollywood interprets your motivations in life and shit. I haven't yet seen Runaways, so I may be revising this assessment accordingly.

I think it's safe to say women really dominated this show. From Kim of Matt and Kim, who is irritatingly adorable standing on her drum stool, to Alexis Krauss of Sleigh Bells teaching the crowd how to scream, to the absolutely gorgeous albeit bitchy and demanding MIA, in my mind these were the best performances. Seeing Pavement back together was great, but after the mosh pit and crowd-surfing at Sleigh Bells, it was a sit-down show. LCD was fun but my friend couldn't stop punching at the "From this position..." song, so pretty soon it was more funny than badass. Neon Indian, as I previously predicted was my favorite in the electronic music. But Chromeo killed it, and seeing Dave 1 in person, it's clear now what look my friend John Q is going for, and apologies for the oversized photos.

Maryland brought out a funny crowd, mostly because it's a funny place. In the one section, you have hyper-functional teens growing up in Montgomery and Howard counties, being groomed for government and finance, journalism and medicine. Then you have the rest of Maryland, all hopped up on Starbucks and trash T.V. They've carved out existences in corn fields and cubicles, then show up to these shows after hitting the neighborhood tattoo parlor, and look like it's maybe the first time they've bothered to shower or leave their pet-infested apartments they share with their grab bag, significant-enough other. They show up way too early to each show to set up camp with the girl in the front and the dude with arms around from behind. The goal of this game is to try to stand perfectly still, no matter how awesome the music is or how everyone else is dancing.

I have a hard time understanding why these people bother to show up to anything. Stay at home with the comforting scents of cat piss and cock breath on your unwashed sheets.

I love going to shows, obviously. And a good festival where you're torn between great acts can be life-affirming. To be sure, the whole thing was the highlight of my month. Getting to dance hard in the middle of a bunch of other sweaty hard dancers is the stuff of ecstasy. I don't let the lame-asses giving me dirty looks for stepping on the blanket they plopped down in the middle of a standing crowd ruin my fun. But I will say that it's exhausting to have to look around at all the douchebags who you apparently have something in common with. I'm egalitarian as hell, but I like to think of myself as part of a group of genuine music appreciators, so it bums me out to be breathing the same air as some people I see at concerts. Sometimes I much prefer to blast out my apartment windows, get all dressed up and do my own music video in front of the mirror. The music fantasy transcends all the realities of band drama, egos and the sheep mentality of the bandwaggoners, and on some days I think this is how I prefer to keep it.

Speaking of crustiness, the last show I caught was Laughing Man opening for Wavves at the Rock and Roll Hotel, D.C.. LM is a trio, and I know of them through the drummer who is a server at Sticky Rice down there. Their sound is slightly psychedelic yet early funk-age, they've all got great chops and really tight style. And everyone should know by now how much I sweat Wavves, even though they put on a weird show. I ran into an old coworker who was wasted and trashing Nathan Williams regarding his stage water. Then they got onstage and I saw what he was talking about. He's the asshole you love to hate. He makes himself accessible that way, an easy target because he's goating you on and taking hits at everyone, everything, the venue, the crowd, themselves. So in between songs when the stage banter gets passed amongst him and his ex-Reatard rhythm section, and people are started to walk out, and others up front are yelling at them to play a fucking song already, some people are laughing including me and I'm kind of enjoying all the flack they're getting for not playing the show.

Fuck man, if you want to hear the songs, go the fuck home and listen to the album. You're here to see US, don't forget. This is who we are, and we are wasted, and the band leader is famously stoned and the drummer is on acid, and this is what you came for. This is the image you get off to, so deal with it.

I, for one, moshed the shit out of that show which I was not prepared for in boots and a threadbare see-thru T-shirt. All the dickbags ogling me in the five minutes I was at the bar I got to shove back into the shit and have them turn around and look completely baffled. The spooning couples got pushed out and shoved to the back or the sidelines. (Have I mentioned I hate concert couples??) The band members are complete and utter assholes, and pissed off nearly all my friends that night who either worked at the Hotel or were playing with them. The nice musicians in Laughing Man were taken aback, and the rock band Christmas Island from sunny Sandy Eggo were politely baffled at the rudeness of these Adolescents-wannabes who look like they haven't showered in weeks. And I'm loving all of it. Long live obnoxious punk rockers, but maybe should stick to the studio if a tour is just a good excuse to weed out the weak in your fanbase.

The Visual Component

2010-09-24T12:09:00.000-07:00

Baltimore has its head screwed on right. There is no better evidence of this than the naming of their home team and many roads after native son E.A. Poe's "The Raven," and most recently the pride in acknowledging its own Frank Zappa as deserving of his bronzed head on a column outside a library in east Bmore.

From the LA Times:

“The spirit of Frank Zappa is alive and well in Baltimore,” Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said.

“He’d be wildly amused by this, because of the absurdity of these guys in Lithuania coming up with this phenomenal sculptor who normally does busts of Stalin,” Gail Zappa said.

"Baltimore is the kind of the city that resonates with Zappa's work," he added, citing another iconoclastic Baltimorean, journalist and social critic H.L. Mencken. The ceremony came 25 years after Zappa appeared at a Senate hearing to rail against censorship of rock lyrics and calls for an album rating system.

Then today at the Baltimore Book Festival, I happened to root through the precise bin containing a book called Viva! Zappa by Dominique Chevalier, a collection of photos and details of his work. Maybe I have an even better idea for a Halloween costume...

And speaking of genius rock stars, David Byrne did something a few years after I was born that I wish had been a part of my life forever. Take a look at this clip from his musical featuring John Goodman, True Stories:

On the whole, I found it visually stunning and sensibly baffling. Which is to say it finds a good home in this little heart, being of the Sundae variety. The songs are kind of hit-or-miss, for instance when the witch doctor is performing the ritual to make John Goodman not humiliate himself onstage. But watching Byrne deliver his lines deadpan and detached is a treat not to be missed. You'll like the fashion show too, when the little girls are dressed like inanimate objects and there are whole families decked out in clothes made of fresh-cut lawn. A few spoonfuls of the absurd never hurt anyone, after all.