0 offramp

2010-03-24T20:21:00.003-05:00

In the next World War

In a jacknifed juggernaut

I am born again

epiphany in 6 sides of black vinyl

2010-02-25T17:57:00.015-06:00

Tonight is date #2. Last weekend went well but I don't know how long to play this out. I want the perfect fit, after a lifetime of "almost" I want the perfect fit or nothing, and this isn't the perfect fit. It's not even about sex, I could give a flying fuck about sex any more, it's about wanting a partner in crime. Where my head is at now, immensely enjoying basically being totally free for the first time since I was about 15, I want all or nothing. To tell the truth, I don't know if I want the compromises that come from being in a traditional relationship. All the women I run into are so sensitive and superficial and insecure. Looking presentable and stylish and cool is one thing but the whole makeup/fashion thing has deep tendrils rooted in insecurity and the need for approval. Most women have the odd idea that they are judged by their makeup and clothes, they have been force-fed shit by the media as to the lie that every woman is judged by their appearance, and they continue to eat the shit and some even like the shit because their self-worth is wrapped up in insecurity. Buying into that doesn't make a woman look good to anybody but shallow men who just want to secretly fuck their daughters. I want, basically, a woman with a woman's body but a man's mind. And not a gentle understanding effeminate vain man's mind, but a tough aggressive manly man's mind that is full of balls and testosterone and piss. I want a lady that is full of fight and and an unshakable intellectual rigor and a sense of self. No anxiety cases or ones that haven't figured out how to control their depressions or who live in illusions because the real world scares them and they need to talk to their mommy or daddy and who have lapsed into passive-aggressive narcisism as an empowering act but don't realize it really is insecurity manifesting itself as attention-seeking behavior blatantly stroked by comments from men (which they then complain about, which is really so fucked up passive-aggressive that it boggles any critically-thinking mind). Fuck that. I want a lady who, in a figurative and nearly a literal sense, knows how to be a man. An ass-kicking one who also knows the difference between challenging literature and garbage escapism. Who walks the walk instead of just talking the talk.

******

*this photo not be me

The very audacity of Joanna Newsom, the sheer nerve of her ambition, should be a lesson to us all to try harder, and especially hits home while I'm in the midst of a minor crisis on why to even blog at all when the blogverse is full of shallow narcisistic blogs that exhibit a total lack of trying to go deeper. On my bigger weekend posts I spend sometimes 4 hours on the word streams and heavily art-directed photographs and the raw spilling of interior emotional wounds, and seeing people posting snapshots of themselves and what they had for breakfast and not a single hard or challenging word or emotion really makes me wonder if it's worth it sometimes to try. The level of culture and ambition, once you dip below the elitists and artists, is just disheartening. There's no art or soul in most of it, not even writing, just typing. Aside from a few specific others I feel alone, almost all the good bloggers that I know of have either burnt out or faded away. Why bother putting something out in public unless you're fucking bleeding for it and challenging yourself with it and willing to keep trying to step up your game?

A quirky helium-voiced songwriter playing an antiquated instrument who leveraged a surprise indie hit debut into an audacious symphonic double vinyl second album of borderline prog rock and esoteric wordplay that didn't have a shot in hell of any airplay and required a Lit Major education to discern the submerged themes, it just is a huge display of balls that Joanna Newsom stood up and dared to take it even further with a 2-hour long triple vinyl album that consolidates all her past and everything she sees in her future into a work of art that pushes even further away from anything the unwashed masses are likely to connect with. That is pushing. Fuck the 99% of people who choose the easy unintellectual unartistic and shallow road, she is proving (more than anybody else in pretty much any art form right now) that if you push the envelope in every way you know how and if you dare to reach for things that are just beyond your grasp you can transcend beyond belief. There's so much shallow everywhere, people reading shallow books and watching shallow movies and trying their best to avoid the agony and ecstacy of real deep thought and really laying your veins open with real heavy and complicated emotions. That's not cool, it's lazy and it's playing it safe. If you're playing it safe and accepting shallow you might as well be dead. Bravo to Joanna Newsom, she's inspiring people to go deep or go home.

I have only listened to select tracks so far (looooved her last album Ys), but tomorrow night I am going to turn off the phone and pull the shades and sit down with a big fat fucking bomber joint and a bottle of expensive wine and I'm going to go beginning to end on it. And then if I have to I'll put on disc one and do it all over again. If my own mother dies while I'm in the middle of it then she's going to have to fucking wait, because inspiration and art are two of the most important things to live for. Joanna inspires me to tighten my own shit up and turn up the level on my own game, and when you find something that does that for you then if you have any integrity and soul at all you will grab it and hold it inside of you and burn yourself with it's flame until you're exploding out of your own skin.

I know this whole post is heavy. Life is heavy. I've got nobody to answer to but myself, and nothing to lose and everything to gain by reaching further inside and dredging up more, be it ugly or beautiful. I hope if you've actually stuck with this and thought about some of what it is driving at that it compels you to act. Whether you agree with it or disagree, the point is to react. We have brains and muscles and emotions. Do something with them. Whatever it is you are doing in your life right now, RIGHT FUCKING NOW, try harder. Like there's no tomorrow. This is no game. It's as serious as a heart attack. The next time you or I walk out the door might be the day the drunk driver falls asleep at the wheel and takes us spiraling into the cold blackness of infinity. So don't coast. I am begging you. Don't coast.

st. ides heaven

2010-02-23T21:08:00.010-06:00

Thanks to the two peeps who pointed me towards some new blogs. It's really hard to break out of the habits of just staying in a closed blogcircle, because the circle reinforces itself and becomes insular and solipsistic and stops pushing each other. I miss the people I used to push off of, but it's really hard to wade sensibly and efficiently through the 99% of blogs that don't appeal to you or don't light a fire under your ass. Here's a cover of a song by Elliott Smith called St. Ides Heaven that I will sing 4 you except I'm just lip synching and there is a record of it playing in the stereo behind me and it's performance art. It's good and short and that's good because I'm going to bed because I'm in an experiment of getting 9.5-10.5 hours of sleep a day during the week so I can stay up all weekend listening to Black Metal and knitting booties for the bbay I'm having next month. You're going to die someday. It will probably be painful. It's not going to matter because nobody is special. Except Winkie is going to live 4ever, I can tell. Where are Flagrant and the O.G. Trueboy when you need them? Hardly anybody is pushing at the envelope any more.

waiting for the stars to shine

2010-02-21T11:05:00.005-06:00

in the end
there will be no war

After the war we found each other in smoldering cities, streets paved with broken glass and gnarled twisted steel. We moved in the dark to avoid being detected by whoever, whatever, was still out there in the shattered wasteland. The smashed-out windows of storefronts looked like jagged caves carved into the sides of the dark towering monoliths that stretched towards the ink black sky. Survivors scurried like rats under cover of darkness to scrounge everything we could. Food, tools, weapons, clothing, anything to help survive as long as possible. Sad eyes sad eyes, turned your head I read your mind. Did you dream about this place?

I fortified my position in what used to be a low-budget recording studio in the basement of a neighborhood building. With no power all this electronic equipment is useless, but the building above is half-wrecked and the only access is through a rusty vent shaft. I've found some guns and some drugs, first places I hit were all the dealer's apartments that I could get to and I got some good stuff. Enough stuff to stay straight for months and months and miles and miles. I don't know how many of us are left out here, it took weeks to make the first visual contact and all recent encounters have ended up as running gun battles, bullets ricocheting through the darkened cobblestone alleys. This is fucked.

I think there is a girl living in the ruins of the Art Institute. I've seen flashes of blonde hair across the piles of rubble. Maybe, in time, I can get her trust me. The power of two. From on top of the cooling tower of my building I can see where I think she goes in and out. I often sit up there on clear evenings looking through my rifle scope at what is left of the neighborhood. From up here I can see the tops of the trees and spires and peaks poking through the canopy. If they came for me I would see them first, I think. I can feel every molecule of my body vibrating in narcotic warmth even though the blue steel of the gun is cold and icy. I can taste the dark sharp sweetness of life as I lick off the blade of my knife. Dissonance. A jangling that hurts. The smell of female mixed with the smell of cold metal. Grease sliding on steel. A bullet lubricated with sex juice.

Small things keep one going through times like these. An old Village Voice newspaper opened to the music listings. The way a fix feels. An old cracked guitar with rusty dirty strings sits in the corner, tuned to arcane occult demonological intervals. A pair of nice high technology running shoes looted from what was left of a sports store. Old musty books that open doors to secret passages that only exist in a fever dream mindscape. An aneasthetic gaze that reveals nothing but sees everything. Candles burning in dark corners of peeled wallpaper rooms and dark hissing steamheat hallways that lead to places you don't want to go to but you have to go to. I've got it all spread out before me in my little room, everything arranged according to the ancient rules, everything aligned along precise cosmic pathways, everything humming to the vibrations of the night skull.

berlin

2010-02-20T16:56:00.012-06:00

*my opinion of Antony of Antony and the Johnsons has changed immensely in the last 24 hours. He fucking floored me.

I agreed to go to Heather's place to watch the cats for the weekend on the condition that she picked me up in the city. She was going to dinner at a friends and would be there until fairly late. I was out of maryjane and no vicodin and nothing else was available so I did what any sensible person would have done. I stopped at CVS and got two bottles of cough syrup and bought a ticket online to see a screening of the film adaptation of Lou Reed's depressive concept album Berlin at the Walker Art Center. Told her to be in the city at 10:45 and to call me then and find me wherever I may be. Chugged down the awful nasty surple and waited a million years for it all to kick in while writhing on the couch. When properly aclimated to the elevation I dressed warm and strolled oblivious into the night.

I don't ride bike at night while on cough syrup. You can imagine how well that goes, you can't see in the dark you can't ride a straight line you can barely even stand up at red lights and the ground seems 100 feet away and ten mph feels like thirty. Walking is the only self-propulsion option. Forty minutes is the walk across the South end of the downtown from my pad, with a treacherous dark and slippery isolated stretch across Loring Park. I love walking at night and looking into windows, you can see little framed movies of the life happening within. I've seen it all through night city windows, families, lovers, desolate cracked and grease-stained kitchens, peeling paper bedsit walls mildewed with steam heat and depression, dank mildew hallways lit by flyspecked yellow bulbs that hang in the air like glowing teardrops. After slowly traversing the icy paths across Loring Park, a local gay cruise area in the summer that is by the semi-secret needle exchange and is infested with homeless and winos and where where I've been propositioned before on nighttime walks, I walked up the block where my old haunt The Loring Bohemian Cafe was located before it shut down in a flurry of accusations and intrigue. The Loring was the best, boho shabby chic in a grand European theater-esque setting like Paris and good live music and drinks and a beautiful pansexual metropolitan crowd of artists and dreamers. I got laid out of that joint far more than any other anywhere, and that shit counts. I went there so many times so blasted I could barely walk up the front steps. I had sex with Kelly in the alley there. It was one of the few places in MPLS I felt good wearing leather pants paired with my Fluevogs and a good black dress shirt. When it died my whole youth basically died, there has never been and never will be another place like it in MPLS. It was too good for this city, too Euro and too urban and too NYC/Paris/Amsterdam/Berlin for MPLS. Walking by the front windows of Nick and Eddie's, the restaurant that took the Loring's place, I hear loud knocking on the window and it's my friend Eric but I had to get to the Walker.

Walking up to the Walker entrance I either hallucinated or it really happened my witch psychic friend Crystal was hanging out of the window of a silver Jetta yelling at me asking where the closest parking was. Higher than infinity I just waved and motioned I didn't know and then hurried to get inside and escape them. Crystal shows up at odd times in my life. Like I said, she has some sort of powers and is a psychic vampire. The night Heather and I broke up she forcefully interjected herself into my life out of the blue after not seeing her for two years and she talked me down from a psychotic break. Before that I got her a job when she was unemployed and in a couple months time she got so far inside my head I lost track of who I was and what was real. Before that, after I had met her, she blogged online incognito under an assumed name and somehow I found her online and we developed an odd relatiuonship before she admitted who she was, that I knew her in real life. She has done things that have fucking floored me. I believe she has some sort of power. I don't know what it is. She slides past me in moments when my life is going apeshit all the time like a really cute slow motion ghost, and then is gone again. Heather thinks I cheated on her with Crystal, I think, but I didn't. I was true the whole time. Crystal is more dangerous than a random fuck, that's why I was trying to escape her by running into the Walker Art Center Theater and it's welcoming darkness.

I was soooo fucking flying on the cough syrup and I didn't want to deal with Crystal or any other people who might know me because I was visibly fucked up and slipping in and out of unreality. It was a double-feature of the lousy movie I Shot Andy Warhol first and then the Julian Schnabel-filmed Lou Reed concert movie. The first movie was boring, I have seen it twice before and it kind of was a dumbed-down suckoff story anyways, sensationalizing somebody really not worth sensationalizing and candy-coating a bunch of stuff. The definitive Factory film has not been done, and when Billy Name dies any chance of the real deal dies with him. I'm glad I was flying during this movie, high enough to throw my eyes out of focus and focus on the John Cale score. Shitty movie. At least I avoided having to talk to anybody, all scrunched down slumped in my seat in my glassy-eyed chemical fog.

The second movie Berlin was absofuckinglutely fantastic. Julian Schnabel is best known as an artist but he directed this abstract concert film and also another one of my favorite movies Before Night Falls, the excellent biopic of the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas. He shoots in a lo-fi stylized gritty saturated manner, almost deconstructionist in that there are all sorts of glitchy artifacts on the film and the filmstock itself looks like it's pushed to the point of disintegration. It worked stunningly in this film, a playing of the whole 1973 Lou Reed concept album Berlin, a harrowingly depressive story of two amphetamine addict lovers under the shadow of the Berlin Wall before it's collapse. I'm a major Lou Reed/Velvets fan and the second side of the Berlin album is one of the most awful depressing suicidal things I've ever heard (I mean that in the best possible way...).

The film was concert film with a movie-within-a-movie, parts of it were projected on the walls of the venue behind the performers and parts were just cut into the concert film at corresponding points in a very impressionistic and abstract manner. The band was wonderful, Dick Wagner and Lou Reed sharing guitar duties and a full vocal choir and small orchestra and also featured backup vocalists Sharon Jones (from the Dap Kings) and Antony (from Antony and the Johnsons). They played muscular and stretched-out versions of the songs from the album Berlin track for track in order as intended. The most shocking part, for me being a fan of the amphetamine head Lou Reed that is nearly an inhuman monster, was seeing an aged Lou Reed getting really emotionally shaken up during some of the slow heavy songs. His voice cracked and quavered and he looked like he was going to cry, and at the end when Antony did a lead vocal on an extra version of Candy Says and absolutely brought the house down with his emotional vocals Lou looked at him with such a look of love and tenderness that it was almost hard to watch. A wonderful movie, I highly recommend it to any fan of Lou Reed or The Velvet Underground. Some of it is on Youtube.

Here is Lou Reed getting really emotionally overwrought while playing Caroline Says:

And here is Antony going almost out-of-body on his lead on Candy Says, and the look of love and respect Lou gives him at the end is priceless:

After the movie was done I was still flying, wandered off into the city canyons of concrete and glass until Heather called and I talked her in to where I was at and I jumped into her car in a Nicollet Avenue parking lot and was carried off into the night and dreams of star-crossed drugged-out lovers in foreign cities of glamorous urban decay.

meta addendum: blogchanges reflect constantly shifting realities, current new template is scalable and and rss feedable and xml validates + no real need for archives with the Google searchability built into blog infrastructure and also newly functioning back-linking + no need for blogroll because of rss feeds + no need for dumbing down cross-references to flickr and other sites used as gadgets because people understand how to follow threads weaving through various interstices/dimensions + deflect attention towards content by reducing variables = most attractive end product via social engineering using minimalist theory. Fuck yeah.

new age (slide guitar remix) b/w starfucker starfucker

2010-02-17T08:14:00.000-06:00

I'm starting to get the slide playing together, the whole reason I got this resonator guitar was because I've spend years tweaking the actions on my regular guitars to get them as low and as fast as possible and they are all too low to play slide on without fretting out. The resonator guitar has a super-high action and flatter fretboard radius specifically to play slide on. Slide is a whole new thing so I'm rusty, I'm used to playing in the oddball open tunings but on a slide there's no frets to stop the strings in the right places so you have to really get your accuracy together or else it's all out of tune. It's like playing a fretless guitar but I'm really getting better fast on it now, I've gone from zero to functional on it in two months. Maybe someday in this lifetime I'll actually be good at it. I'm not good at this sitting down and playing acoustic and singing, I'm a much better electric player and much better when somebody with a good voice is singing.

The first song is a slide arrangement of the Velvet Underground song New Age off their "Loaded" album. My version is closer to the Tori Amos cover of the song because the Lou Reed original has an oddball structure and Tori Amos remodelled it and chopped some words to make it more structurally linear.

This is a cover of the song Starfucker Starfucker off the Rolling Stones album "Goats Head Soup". I blew some of the chords but this is a fast motherfucker to sing and play at the same time. It's for a real-life friend, and I hope the friend doesn't mind because the lyrics are kind of pointed and borderline misogynist. Sorry Winkie I can't work out a good cover of Beast of Burden, it's too electric-based and also dependent on two guitars weaving in and out. I can't make it fly, or even get off the ground, on acoustic guitar.

canned fucking heat

2010-02-14T17:47:00.003-06:00

Watching Woodstock as night sets over the city. And flying.

goodbye 20th century

2010-02-14T09:00:00.003-06:00

Boring week. Got an elaborate handmade Valentine from a co-worker, have not discerned whether it was a friendly gesture or covert overture. Hanging out with S. a lot lately, smoking left-handed cigarettes and talking. I think it's really cool to have a nonsexual relationship with another person that is so loose and casual that we can both just hang out together doing our own thing and basically doing nothing, me voraciously reading her travel and cooking books and her aimlessly surfing the internet on opposite ends of the couch.

A friend who owns a record store bought up a huge collection of vinyl albums and I got a shot at them before the unwashed masses were able to get their grubby dirty fingers on them and I scored bigtime but had to lay out some cash. Best score was a mint gatefold copy of Sly and the Family Stone's "There's A Riot Going On". It's nice to know serious record collectors, and by serious I mean they own record stores and can produce vinyl copies of almost any album you can think of in whatever condition you are willing to pay for. I've got two solid (and one theoretical) contact in the world of serious collecting, people who buy whole collections from others. When I wanted an A+ copy of "Exile on Main Street" my #2 dude asked me what price point I wanted him to hit and I told him I wanted a $35.00 copy with emphasis on playability and he custom mixed-matched me up dead mint barely played reissue vinyl with a later reissue sleeve in fair condition and he kept the original postcards that came with the record and knocked $10 off the price, so for $25.00 I got a perfect player with a slightly worn jacket (record and jacket from different reissues). That's working on a little higher level than just scouring the used record bins and it's a great help when academically working on a collection. I've got maybe 1200 vinyl records. My #2 dude has a stash of 40,000 he's working out of for sales purposes, and his actual personal collection is almost that again, so he's got around 80,000 records in a house! My #1 dude is cagy about his numbers, refuses to divulge much in the way of numbers or details, which I totally can understand. I just love that people working on this level can mix and match vinyl pressings and jacket reissues to hit a price point. I just want really clean playable records, these people are beyond that and into which edition pressing it is and all the tiny details.

This morning I dug out the ticket to paradise I had stashed from the other weekend. Tripping alone is something some people won't do, but I jump at the chance. Instead of paranoia and insecurity and loneliness I see endless vistas and wide-open chances free from distractions. Down the hatch with a glass of orange juice and now the countdown begins. No plan today except to lose myself in some good music and maybe try to write some songs. Just time out of mind like a gift like an idea like a wind blowing through trees. Sundays with no plans or obligations are like an oasis. The couch is my boat. The record collection my universe. With this, I set sail...

"I take drugs just because in the 20th Century in a technological age living in the city there are certain drugs you have to take just to keep yourself normal like a caveman. Not just to bring yourself up or down, but to attain equilibrium you need to take certain drugs. They don't even get you high, they just get you normal." - Lou Reed

Is this what you wanted? Is this what you need? When you look at yourself do you still say I'm glad to be me?

shadow on the door aka waterface feels the burn

2010-02-09T09:23:00.007-06:00

Baker California is a small community known only for being a convenient halfway point between Lost Angeles and Lost Vegas, an easy oasis for travelers on the long busy highway between the two glittering beacons of facade. Unexplicably there is a large gaudy and bustling Greek diner at a major crossroads in Baker. It is at this diner that a pretty young lady sat at a solitary booth and tried to attract no attention and stared out the dusty window at the traffic sliding noiselessly past. She sipped a cold Pepsi and looked in her purse for the microcassette recorder, made sure it was ready to go. A large sweaty man in a dark suit and carrying a briefcase stepped into the air-conditioned refuge of the diner. The girl motioned toward the man. The man slid his considerable girth into the booth.

"Want a drink," the lady asked, "a beer or a pop?"

"Shut the fuck up and listen," the man said, and leaned across the table.

Underneath the table the girl thumbed the button on the microcassette recorder and the tape started to spin. From more than a couple feet away the whispered conversation was lost in the clatter of dinner noise. The man pulled out a map with red dots drawn on it and traced lines, and then pulled out a printout of cellphone numbers and cellphone tower locations.

The man and the lady walked out the front door and across the road to the motel and walked into a room. Twenty minutes later the man walked back out of the room and got into a black sedan and drove away. Shortly after that the girl walked out into the parking lot to her car. She leaned against it and stared up at the sun, a lone tear sliding down her dusty cheek. She looked in the mirror of her makeup compact to make sure the cum was off her face and hair and then got into the car. She wondered how long before the man figured out she had taken his gun and the wallet out of his briefcase while he washed up. She wondered how long before she would be able to wash the taste of him out of her mouth. As she drove off she slid the gun under her coat on the passenger seat, and patted it reassuringly and started to laugh. It was either laugh or cry.

Five miles away, in the other direction, a man pulled his car over and screamed and pounded his dashboard. Over and over. Pounding harder and harder until blood ran down his arms.

Hours later outside of Twentynine Palms, in a $20.00 hotel room, the lady slid the dresser across the doorway so somebody would literally have to punch a hole through the wall to get in. She shook out a half-dozen Adderal and gulped them down with a dirty glass of warm brown water from a low pressure hell. She popped the magazine on the 9mm pistol and clicked the bullets out one by one while counting them. She wanted to know exactly how many shots she had. She pulled the action back on the cold gun and saw the one in the chamber like a baby in the womb. She pulled out the roll of dirty canvas that jangled from the tools it held inside, and she unrolled it across the bed. Pliers. Wire cutters. A box cutter. A soldering iron. A ball peen hammer.

She put on the necklace, the collares, three red beads alternating with three black beads, all strung on cotton thread which has been washed in a river and consecrated with the beheading of a chicken and an offering of honey by moonlight on the riverbank. She arranged magick candles on the dresser and carefully lit them, and then unwrapped the head-sized package from the dusty velvet cloth it was wrapped in. The Eleggua. The messenger of the Orishas.

The Eleggua is the messenger of the orishas, the one who opens and closes all doors. The Eleggua is usually made of cement, with the eyes and mouth made of seashells. The simplicity of this image of the Orisha is deceptive, for the head is not merely a representation of the the Eleggua, but is the god itself. She was a neophyte. The Eleggua was the product of a brujo, a mystery handed down through the ages from adept to adept. The head of the Eleggua is always kept near the front door, as near to the floor as possible. As waves of energy swept through her she slid the Eleggua under the dresser and against the door.

On a white candle the girl wrote a single name. Waterface. Then she lit the candle and turned out the room lights and sat back in the enveloping darkness. She thought of the small wax image of Waterface in the little wooden miniature coffin that she had buried by moonlight last night. The wax doll was baptized as Waterface, and was buried with coins to pay for the passage from this world to the next. The girl made two cuts across a lime with the knife that was used to behead the chicken, one cut horizontal and one cut vertical. Into the cuts are placed a folded up piece of parchment paper with the name "Waterface" written on it. The lime is then pinned closed with steel pins and placed in a glass. Into the glass is thrown some salt, some vinegar and some ashes. The ashes and salt will destroy the enemies attempts to cause trouble, while the lime and vinegar will sour his affairs and weaken him for the kill. The girl begins to chant. Darkness enfolds.

"IBARAKOU MOLLUMBA ELEGGUA IBACO MOYUMBA IBACO MOYUMBA. OMOTE CONICU IBACOO OMOTE AKO MOLLUMBRA ELEGGUA KULONA. IBARAKOU MOLLUMBA OMOLE KO IBARAKOU MOLLUMBA OMOLE KO. IBARAKOU MOLLUMBA AKO ELEGGUA KULONA ACHE IBAKOU MOLLUMBA. ACHE ELEGGUA KULONA IBARAKOU MOLLUMBRA OMOLE KO AKO ACHE. ARONGO LARO AKONGO LAROLLE ELEGGUA KULONA A LAROLLE COMA. KOMIO AKONKO LARO AKONKO LAROLLE ELEGGUA COMA KOMIO ACHE. AKONKA LARO AKONKO LARO AKO ACHE IBE LA GUANA ELEGGUA. LAROLLE AKONKO E LAROLLE E LAROLLE AKONKO AKOMKO LAROLLE AKONKO LAROLLE AKONKO LA GUANA E LAROLLE.

Night falls over the Mojave desert. In room 219 a strange faint sound can be faintly heard behind the locked door. The swish swish sound of knives being sharpened.

*Latin American magic, also known as Santeria, is an ancient wind that blew in from the banks of the Niger River in Nigeria. The Yoruba people who lived there were brought to the new world by slave traders 400 years ago. Santeria is a mixture of Yoruba rites and the traditions of the Catholic church. There are two forms of evil, negative evil and positive evil. Negative evil is the opposite of good, the principle of resistance. Positive evil has, as it's negative aspect, pure chaos and imbalance. It is all that is unnatural aand is in direct opposition to the creative principle of the universe. Some of the most devoted followerrs of Santeria have extensive cultural and educational backgrounds. In the Americas it is a yellow glowing light that shines in purposeful obscurity down dimly-lit hallways of tenements and botanicas, far from prying eyes and oppressing systems of authority.

**It is not generally recognized that when a high velocity missile strikes the body and moves through soft tissues, pressures develop which are measured in thousands of atmospheres. Actually, three different types of pressure change appear: (1) shock wave pressures or sharp, high pressure pulses, formed when the missile hits the body surface; (2) very high pressure regions immediately in front and to each side of the moving missile; (3) relatively slow, low pressure changes connected with the behavior of the large explosive temporary cavity, formed behind the missile. Such pressure changes appear to be responsible for what is known to hunters as hydraulic shock--a hydraulic transmission of energy which is believed to cause instant death of animals hit by high velocity bullets (Powell (1)).[8]

******

In a dimly-lit bar on the edge of the California desert a man drinks a bottle of beer and watches a girl dancing on a raised stage. The girl wears tassles on her nipples and platform shoes and not much else. Country music plays and colored lights throw splashes of light across the darkened room. The dancing girl gyrates around the silver pole and the man slides a twenty dollar bill up onto the edge of the runway and the dancing girl approaches the man and squats down so close he can smell her tangy sex and he can almost taste her glistening dripping unwashed lust as it hovers inches away from his old wrinkled face.

Out in the parking lot a car door opens and a young lady steps out. She slowly walks towards the door of the bar. In her hand a small clutch purse. In the purse two Rohypnols and a boxcutter.

She walks up to a car parked next to the door, a dusty 1967 Chevrolet Impala.

The finger of the young lady traces a name in the dust on the trunk of the car under the jangling yellow fly-spotted flourescent lights.

Waterface.

She walks into the bar.

as bad as it gets

2010-02-07T18:24:00.004-06:00

A week ago I watched a documentary about the Jonestown mass suicide, where almost 1000 people drank poison Kool Aid. Thinking back on it I started digging around a little bit on the internet and came across a 45 minute streaming file of a tape of the speech that Jim Jones gave just before, and as, people were drinking it and dying. Kids crying. Various speakers exhorting the revolutionary act they were undertaking. I listened to the whole thing, and it was heavy. I'm not going to link to it, it's easy to find by Wikipedia. That's how I stumbled across it. I'm a firm believer that a realist needs to look hard at both the good in life and the bad in life in order to see things the way they really are, but holy shit is that audiofile a downer. I listened to every second of the tape and now am going to bed to probably have bad dreams about it.

as good as it gets

2010-02-07T17:28:00.002-06:00

*obviously photo by notme

existential owl

2010-02-06T19:03:00.003-06:00

Slept all day after being up all last night tripping. Ventured out once because my record store friend finally had an A+ vinyl copy of Neil Young's out of print classic "On The Beach" come through. It's nice to be able to post wish lists. Sleep. Getup to go buy a record. Get baked. Sleep. What a lazy saturday. Sleep. get baked. Make a drawing. Get baked. Sleep. Get baked. Listen to records. Sleep. What an industrious Saturday! How can I explain? It's so hard to get off, and these visions of Johanna have kept me up past the dawn.

cosmia

2010-02-06T09:03:00.004-06:00

“The thing that I was experiencing and dwelling on the entire time is that there are so many things that are not OK and that will never be OK again,” says Newsom. “But there’s also so many things that are OK and good that sometimes it makes you crumple over with being alive. We are allowed such an insane depth of beauty and enjoyment in this lifetime. There are so many joys that do not assist in the propagation of the race or self-preservation. There’s no point whatsoever. They are so excessively, mind-bogglingly joy-producing that they distract from the very functions that are supposed to promote human life. They can leave you stupefied, monastic, not productive in any way, shape or form. And those joys are there and they are unflagging and they are ever-growing. And still there are these things that you will never be able to feel OK about–unbearably awful, sad, ugly, unfair things.” - Joanna Newsom, on the making of her album "Ys".

"Well I'm caught one more time up on Cypress Avenue. Caught one more time up on Cypress Avenue. And I'm conquered in a car seat, not a thing that I can do..." - Van Morrison from the album Astral Weeks

Late last night slowly bled into early this morning and as my guests left the sky was getting light out. Meeting for a few drinks with Joe and Rebecca at the C.C. Club and totally hijacking the jukebox turned into the casual mention that one of them had a half-dozen tickets to paradise, leftovers from a summer festival, hidden away in a jewelry box at their apartment, so we called a cab and made the loop from South MPLS to NE and then back to the safe confines of my apartment where there weren't any nosy neighbors or noise restrictions or buzz-killing roommates. My apartment is like a shrine for introspective inner astronomy, with good trusted neighbors who knew the meanings of both discreetness and helping hands and also is dimly-lit and womblike and the walls are electric blue and crimson red and dark mustard yellow and the sound system and vinyl record collection and dvd and reading library is of rare quality and the coffee and liquor is personally picked with no eye towards economy, and though I don't own a relatively large amount of belongings compared to the typical consumerist everything I do own has been winnowed-down and battle-tested through the years and is of good design and high quality and has aesthetic design. No fussy new furniture or rules to follow here either, and it comes with a guide who is well-versed at navigating unsteady states of mind. It's a good place for intimate gatherings.

Waiting for the warm glow to spread we talked about how hard the last few years have been. Joe lost his job and they had to scramble for six months. Rebecca lost her mother to the cancer. I lost a good-paying job and an 11 year relationship and had a health scare. All three of us are living paycheck to paycheck right now but in odd ways all three of us are at the sharp edge, riding on the cusp, living in bullet time. Hardship strips away the comfort levels and leaves a person naked like bare wires throbbing with excess electricity, raw and dangerous with defences shot down and aspirations lowered. However hardship also brings out the elemental, the archetypical. If you're strong you get past the anxieties and neurosis and setbacks and you hit back. You cry yourself out until you cannot cry anymore and then you clear your head and curl up your fist and come up swinging. No anti-depressant drugs or self-help books or time with a shrink will help as much as just taking it all into your own hands and deciding to live or die by those hands. If your archetype is strong all you have to do is aim it and pull the trigger.

Joe and Rebecca feel the same way about music as I do, but with different tastes, so they brought albums over, along with the acid, and I provided the Absolut vodka and their cab fare back to their car in exchange. I'm happy when with people who approach music in the old way, the ritualistic way from before MP3s, when music was accorded an almost mystical reverence. The album is put on in a dimly-lit room and from the moment the needle drops the tone is hushed and minimal. Cellphones turned off. Attention is focused and multi-tasking becomes forgotten. Attention is a problem people have these days, always rushed and focussing on many things on a superficial level while giving nothing the deep attention it deserves. I don't believe in multi-tasking or the various excuses people use to justify their short attention spans and inability to go deep with things. It's all a choice. I choose to to go deep, to investigate the long tail and find the devil in the smallest details. It's more spiritually satisfying and doesn't perpetuate bad behavioral loops or try to medicate the symptoms without getting to the root causes.

Joe and Rebecca are deep into the freak folk/new psychedelia and while I really enjoy the likes of Devendra Banhart and (especially) Joanna Newsom they can go much deeper into the roots and as the nice tripping vibes permeated every molecule they, at my insistance, talked of the context and influence of the artists. From Shirley Collins and Vashti Bunyan to Six Organs of Admittance and Jack Rose, as the needle dropped on each one we dreamed in reverie on the couch under blankets. I love the new psychedelic folk music because it's pushing as hard as it can at every envelope, using old infrastructure to pave new roads. This, to me, is "real hippie", pushing out into both good and bad unknown voids better than the 60's version peace and love ones who preached an optimistic yet naive and simplistic (though well intentioned... ) version of love saving the world. There's too much collective negative energy for that to have worked. It didn't work. It won't work. I beleive the answer lies in existentialism, but not the doomy picture that borders on nihlism that uninformed people think of when trying to visualize a definition of existentialism. I believe in the theories of existentialism that define life as a sum of what we purposefully make of it. Will. It will become whatever we make the effort to make it. The world isn't going to hand you anything, oftentimes it's going to be nasty because the world is often nasty. You have to work from that datum, that line of reference, and constantly strive for that which lifts you above it all. Transcend the shit or swim in it.

A couple of hours ago the sun started glowing in the city sky and Joe wanted to go walk around by the Institute of Arts but neither Rebecca or I wanted to so he borrowed my good winter boots and gloves and ventured out while I made coffee and cracked the cellophane on the brand new 180 gram vinyl copy of Joanna Newsom's "Ys" album that I bought yesterday at Cheapo and she pored over the convoluted complexities of the lyric sheet while I put my camping mattress pad down between the speakers and unrolled my sleeping bag so I could lay down on the dirty hardwood floor between the speakers and lose myself before the buzz started to fade away. After an hour Joe came back wide-eyed and tired but smiling and they got ready to go back to where there car was parked around the corner from the C. C. Club. I wasn't tired and the buzz tailed off but I'm going to have that after-trip feeling all day, the state of mind where you say hello to strangers and walk around happy and glowing until the crash sets in. I did manage to talk them into selling me an extra hit so it's safe in my dresser until needed. If you trip on consecutive days the power of the second day's dose is reduced considerably so I'm going to try to will myself to forget about it until next weekend.

What a pleasant evening. Good to be with people who know how to shut the fuck up and ride the waves, who realize the journey is the end in itself. Satisfaction isn't found in material possessions or career achievements or children or friends, it has to be found inside. It has to be truthful with no "glass half-full" self-deceptions and no illusions that external things can fix internal problems. Life isn't perfect, a good portion of the time it just plain sucks and seems mean-spirited and cruel. Life, however, tends toward a natural balance, and where one is on the roller coaster can be influenced by ones actions. Up down. death life. It's all one.

Winter is breaking. Not over, but over the hump and rolling slowly downhill. Finally. It can be felt in the air. It's a good feeling.

wild horses

2010-02-04T19:52:00.000-06:00

waterface fades into view

2010-01-31T17:34:00.004-06:00

Hello Waterface my old friend.

It's good to hear that you are in good health and managed to get out of that concrete cube they had you in. You've always been an industrious fucker. I imagine there wasn't much else to do inside besides trying to keep the mind and body sharp. You certainly are sharp. Remember that nasty Lysol-drunk Indian that rode with us out of Tahoe that one winter when we had to put that horse down? Well that fucking half-breed said that time inside was the best thing a man could do for himself. Good meals. Good sleep. Doctors. All the shit. Git you running right as rain. I'm glad you're doing well because I got a surprise for you. I got somebody that wants to meet you. Somebody you might remember.

Only she ain't a little girl no more.

She done grew up as tall as the day is long. And the damage you done did? Shit, it it sat inside and festered like a boil for years. Imagine having a boil. Now imagine having it for comin' on 20 years. Imagine how bad you wanna pop that motherfucking boil but could never quite get at it. Now you're getting in the right neighborhood you stupid fucking reptile. You beady-eyed son of a bitch.

You know the sound good steel makes when it cuts through flesh you worm-riddled fat fuck? Cheap dull steel makes a tearing noise when it cuts off a sheet of skin, like a wet maggot-ridden blanket tearing. Good sharp steel sounds like a wet young tongue lapping at a nice ripe asshole, all slippery slidy sounding like fucking a goat with vasoline. I think you're receiving the signal I'm transmitting you stupid angry little man.

Baby knows her good sharp steel. Baby knows that it takes a long time for a man to bleed out if the cuts don't hit nothing important. Baby also knows that there's a time and place for surgically sharp steel and there is also a time and place for a pair of pliers or some dull wire cutters. Baby done and got all grown up and went away to doctor's school and now she's back and she says it's time to settle some old scores. If you're really unlucky she might pour some of her benzedrines down your throught before she starts taking you apart, she might figure that the faster your mind is racing the better your fear is tasting.

Now I know you're out there you ignorant fat fuck. I know you're just another person in another car on another highway lost somewhere in America. That alone would seem to put the odds in your favor, but you done forgot something. You forgot to tie up a loose shoelace motherfucker, and know that shoelace is gonna trip you up and fuck you in the ass with sand for lube. Do you hear the song I'm singing?

I would make a "your mama" joke here for your benefit you stupid stupid man, except that I was brought up to respect the dead. That's right. She's dead. Before she died she gave up a lot. Names. Addresses. Who you been fucking and who you wanna fuck. She gave up the biker in Gilroy California. She gave up the meth chemist in Santa Fe. People tend to give shit up when their toenails are being peeled off. They tend to talk real quick, usually right after the first toe. Bravado is one thing, but you ever had a nail ripped off? It ain't fun my fat walrus-looking stinking piece of shit friend.

One of these days you gonna pick up a nice piece of hot young ass just like you like, and you ain't gonna even let it trip you out when you be thinkin' you saw this bitch before somewhere. Your shrivelled up old dick gonna be so hard for this piece a pussy you ain't even gonna wonder why she's going home with you even though she could be your grandaughter you greasy sick purple pimple ass sonofabitch.

So watch your back man. Feel the eyes because they gonna be burnin' on you like a motherfucker. Like burnin' cigarettes you motherfucker.

Sincerely, your friend the last night on earth.

wwwhirlwind

2010-01-30T19:13:00.014-06:00

What a week. Shit. Written in reverse. Had to totally clean my apartment before my guest got here and it was fucking nasty tracks filthy like piles of bike parts and records and books and dirt dirt dirt. I seriously hadn't cleaned it since Heather and I were still together glitter and sparkle stuff just started piling up because I am an oblivious moron glimmering who lives in a dreamland constructed out of everything a normal well-adjusted person goes out of their way to distance shimmer themselves from. It looked like a crimson junkie's exsanguination chamber, and not in a good way. Somebody call a hearse. Now it looks oscillation inviting negative energy shabby bohemian opium den dusted way. Leaving on a jet plane, la la la however that song goes, it was good to clear some air and sparkle and glimmer get past some old grievances. Situations have changed, pretty much reversed, but now everything is. Almost got thrown out of Brits Pub downtown for being glitter awake and unconscious at the same time, but hey it was probably a once in a lifetime occasion that called for a soul celebration. Big nothing. I don't get drunk much, maybe once or twice a year, but when I do it's a good one, epic and whirling and shimmering. Stuff gets broken. Things get said. Things happen oscillating that are unethical and morally wrong shimmer and make no sense. That's why a person should always avoid demon alcohol and stick to safe stuff like illuminate hallucinogens and narcotics. Walking on air. Seeing glitter stars. Head in the clouds. Heart pounding. Alive.

This is a mashup of "I Got The Blues" by The Rolling Stones and a nasty little song called "Brand New Vein" by the band Come. I had to invent a downward modulation to graft the songs together and the guitar is downtuned so far below standard tuning it's tuning is getting wobbly. The picture quality on these is lo-fi to the point of being like a hallucination at some parts, and the odd lighting and smudges on the lens just make it more opaque and abstract, but the music turned out so good I kept the take. I like the lo-fidelity of it, all blurry and smeary like a transmission from the satellite heart of planet zero.

cleaning up an old mess

2010-01-25T08:36:00.005-06:00

A friend that I had a bad falling out with years ago is flying into MPLS for a few days on a business trip later this week and it is important to us to patch things up so I'm going to take a little break from this webpage for a week or two to concentrate on real life. We haven't really spoken for years so it will be really nice to be able to try to close up old wounds that never really went away. I've wanted this to happen so bad since she told me that it might that I've been having dreams about it. Blog vacation starts now.

a long time ago in a galaxy far away

2010-01-24T14:24:00.002-06:00

slanted and enchanted

2010-01-24T10:23:00.008-06:00

Time out of mind...I woke up out of the most realistic dream that one of the wheels on my bike had been stolen from where I park it downtown where I work. It was so real that I turned the computer on and was getting ready to send an emergency e-mail to either Hurl or Jim that I needed a new front wheel built up like emergency right fucking now fast. Then, as I was waiting for the computer to power up, dreamland faded and reality started to seep into my thoughts and I looked in the corner of the living room at my bike and realized it was all just a dream. Thank goodness, the last thing I need is to have to dish out a few hundred on a wheel.

I'm sure the dream is because I have been watching some idiot's fairly nice Swobo Sanchez fixed gear, one of those cool dull silver galvanized-finish frames, that has been left outside in front of my neighborhood coffeeshop get slowly stripped down as it sits chained to a bikerack. First the seat. Then the front wheel. Then the fork and stem and rear wheel. Now it's a nice-looking frame chained to a bike rack. Sad because it was a pretty bike, the galvanized frame was a refreshing minimalist new look. If you don't want to park your bike inside after the sun goes down then your values are such that you should reconsider having a nice bike because anybody walking around carrying basic tools (which means almost any potential thief looking for an opportunity...) can remove anything not locked to something solid.

I've been ignoring internetland lately, especially blogland. Have been going out a lot to see bands and have been purposefully leaving my camera at home so that I spend more time watching the bands and socializing rather than constantly being trying to get the best shots. Real life, in general, is so much more healthy and gratifying and fun than the internet. It's easy to get sucked into the electronic stream.

The other night while buying some guitar strings I was talking to the dude at my local guitar store he was telling me about selling a lot of guitar strings to people who were using them for homemade tattoo needles! They are thin and stiff and sharp as fuck, and homemade/jailhouse tattoos are done by wrapping thread around a thin piece of wire and then just dipping the wrapped wire into ink and jabbing it into the skin repeatedly. The guitar store dude finally caught on after having lots of people come in asking for single strings and not really knowing what gauge strings they were looking for. Guitar players always either buy complete sets of strings or buy individual strings specified by gauge/thickness so they know what gauge they need. These people coming in to buy strings to use as homemade tattoo needles were confused and vague and didn't look like the the typical person who hangs around a guitar shop. He finally figured it out, after talking to a confused customer, that it was because it was way cheaper to buy one guitar string and cut it into little needles than it was to actually buy real needles. I guess it makes sense, the thin gauge guitar strings are sharper than hell and really hurt and make a deep puncture wound when you accidentally jab yourself with the cut ends.

Here's a version of the Victoria Williams song Crazy Mary. I didn't do a very good job of it, was stoned and shambling and out of it and kept forgetting the words. The song is probably better known from the Pearl Jam cover of it but Victoria has a quirky charm all her own. I was lucky enough to see her a couple of times before Multiple Sclerosis derailed her career, one of the times was in Oarfolkjokeapus records (now Treehouse Records) and the room held only about maybe fifty people and it was magical. My version of Victoria Williams, on the other hand, is kind of lacking...

a couple songs and almost Free Bird

2010-01-19T20:39:00.004-06:00

This is a beautiful song by the late Sandy Denny who is probably best known in America for singing on the song The Battle of Evermore on Led Zeppelin's fourth album but over the pond she was famous for singing in the late 1960s for the excellent band Fairport Convention, a band that was among the first to mix traditional British folk with electric instrumentation. They pretty much did what Bob Dylan did here in the US when he crossed the line and went electric. Fairport occupies much the same musical headspace as Led Zeppelin did on their lighter acoustic stuff, and the great guitarist Richard Thompson was a founding member of Fairport. They were an absolutely great band and there is no way I can do this justice because Sandy Denny had a stunning voice, clear as a bell and soaring. Unfortunately her career never really kept progressing and she turned to drugs and depression and ended up dying from complications of falling down a flight of steps.

Here's one by Pink Floyd, a pretty little song that classic rock radio killed by playing it to death. I'm singing a little flat on it, but hey you get what you pay for. Sometimes when I'm stoned I have pitch problems.

Christopher jokingly requested Free Bird and I actually almost took a shot at it just because smartasses that request Free Bird, if they are really unlucky, might end up having to sit through a 20 minute version of that redneck trailer park piece of shit song. Requests are kind of fun to do, but Free Bird just plain sucks.

an argument in which its conclusion does not follow from its premises + a poem

2010-01-17T18:03:00.005-06:00

Philip Larkin - This Be The Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

minneapolis at night

2010-01-16T16:12:00.003-06:00

Sometimes my mother is beyond deranged. She's on a lot of medications since her heart operation and you never know what kind of bizarre statements and mangled syntax is going to spill out. One time she told me she knows stupid people when she sees them, and then right after that she said that I was a stupid person! One time I thought she was drunk when I called home because her responses had no correlation whatsoever with what I was saying, like she was a random word generator, just odd strings of heavily-accented (she's Japanese) English that made no sense. After I asked her if she was drunk every time after that when I spoke to her on the phone she keeps telling me to stay away from drugs and not to get any tattoos or she will quit giving me money!

So my parents are in Minneapolis because my mom wants a digital camera, even though she has only a tangential and abstract idea of what a computer is. She got a digital picture frame for Christmas that plays slideshows off of whatever SD card you insert into it, so now she wants to take pictures. So I can't take my parents to any of my usual places because they are scared of people with funny-colored hair and piercings, so we go to the blandest possible place for breakfast and my mom starts unloading her philosophy onto me.

So over breakfast she suddenly says she had something she wanted to tell me. I was only half-listening at this point, more busy gazing longingly at the long sexxxy waitress a couple table over, so I just kind of half responded to her.

"I think OK if you quit job and go help them..."

I have no idea what she's talking about and who "them" is. I just look at her puzzled, still half-distracted.

"You can quit job go help earthquake."

I see my dad roll his eyes and I started laughing. She watches the television news channels all day long and her mind must be full of disaster images.

"If I go help the earthquake victims..." I say, playing along because I never know where these conversations are going to lead to, "...then I won't have a job after I come back."

"Well then you can adopt a black baby. Some of them are cute."

I don't even know how to answer this.

A conversation with her is so confusing that by the time you get a few seconds into it you have no idea what it was originally that you were talking about.

I say that I'm starting to get a headache so she reaches in her purse and gives me two prescription bottles with the labels peeled off of them and replaced by pieces of masking tape with her scribbled writing on it, one says "PAIN" and one says "SLEEP". Great. I tell my mom I am getting a headache and she gives me 50 vicodin and 50 trazadone. Works for me. Then she tells me that she doesn't want me to find a new girlfriend that takes drugs. Every word and every action with her is riddled with cognative dissonance and bizarre reverse-logic.

Taking my time choosing my line trying to decide what to do. Looks like my stop, don't wanna get off, got myself hung up on you. Went to Best New Bands of 2009 Night at First Avenue, mostly to see stoner psyche-warpers Daughters of the Sun and the progrockmathnoise of Gay Beast. Forgot my earplugs, walked home 18 blocks with ears ringing and mind yearning.

Big Hard Sun

2010-01-13T21:29:00.005-06:00

This was request, an Eddie Vedder song from the Into The Wild soundtrack I only vaguely am familiar with so I'm totally winging it after about 15-20 minutes of watching it 3 times on Youtube. I don't have Eddie Vedder's range, he goes lower and higher than I can, so I had to transpose it into a different key and I messed up some words and started laughing in the middle of it and I think a whole verse might have fallen into a black hole somewhere. Sorry it's so half-ass but I'm working on my own songs and don't have a lot of time so I'm winging it on these, giving these about three run-throughs from the point of not knowing them and am just getting them to a point where I can fake them and stumble through. It's kind of fun learning songs so fast though. One band I used to jam with would cover stupid pop songs and punk rock songs and they would generally try to run through stuff ONE time through before going for it and they would be calling out chords over the playing in real time and I had to always write chords and flow charts out on sheets of paper because they were really good and I was swimming in the deep end with them because they were so good and I suck, but it did give the ability to fake shit really fast. They used to play games where they would start a beat and then start calling chords faster and faster so every beat the chord changed and they would start calling really fucked diminished chords and 7ths and laugh at me when I had no idea how to play them. Another game they played was to write out strings of chords like A B C D E F G in various orders, long strings that went on and on and then have races through them. I would usually just give up because I suck.

method acting

2010-01-09T18:45:00.006-06:00

Hey!!! As much as I dug that crazy doubler I didn't like it's autolaunch and felt like it was gimmicky and distracted from this post, which I put some time and effort into getting wasted for, so I moved it here if anybody wants to see it. Otherwise just hit play on both posts below, but at least check out the songs individually before watching them at once. Or don't. Whatever.

***NEWS FLASH*** I just discovered accidentally that these videos are 10 times better if you play them BOTH AT THE SAME TIME!!! One at a time they are just some person sitting in an apartment playing guitar and getting progressively wasted, but if you play them both at the same time it enters the Captain Beefheart zone!

This is hilarious, I was laying flat on my back in bed trying to work out some demonic occult inner-movement open-chord structures that moved around in a witchy Celtic pagan kinda manner and at the same time I was thinking about the 10 vicodin I had left that were in my messenger bag. I got the idea to do a before and after sort of thing to see how different it really looked. I mean, fuck it, might as well do it as a science experiment, right?

First song is Tim Buckley's "Song To The Siren", with maybe the trailing edge of a maryjane buzz and some Absolute vodka. Oh yeah pay no attention to my hair it's all fucked up I've been laying in bed all day working chord progressions.

Next I'm trying to approximate the Lucinda WIlliams song "Essence", and she really sounds like narcotics users sound with that low scratchy throaty drawl so I took 10 Vicodin and it took a couple tries because my fingers started sloooooowing down and feeling uncomfortably numb. It's easy to play and sing when your head in La La Land but everything is sloooooow and looooooow. It's highlarious how out of it I look at the beginning of the video. Some next dimension shit for real!

this war

2010-01-09T07:54:00.004-06:00

The letter came last night but you wanted to save it for your Saturday morning. Things have been so hard lately, both jobs have crushed you inside. Your lover cried herself to sleep last night because they came and took the car away, but you tried to tell her it didn't matter because since the rationing you couldn't afford to drive it anyway. The bombs have been getting closer too. The radio said that the museum was hit yesterday, 11 people dead, and that the highways were closed again too because of the snipers. Grocery store shelves were looking barren again too. You put the pennies and dimes in little piles of 10 until you have $5.00 for a cup of coffee, and you dig around in the drawer and find the half joint you've been saving for the weekend.

You look at her, her shape rising and falling under the blankets with her breath. Sleep is where none of this can touch her now and because of that you let her sleep as long as she can. You grab the medicine from the medicine cabinet and your keys off the table and slide the letter into your back pocket and the cat sits on the window sill, tail swishing back and forth as it watches a bird hopping around outside on some branches. You lock the door quietly and step outside and the sun feels warm but you feel tears struggling to break free.

The smoke from the joint goes down hard, since the clampdown they've been spraying pot plants with chemicals because they said drugs fund terrorism, and the chemical sting burns your lungs. They say it's the same stuff the government used in Vietnam, the same stuff that fucked up generations of soldiers. You don't care. Not much matters anymore. In the handful of blocks to the coffeeshop you get a good buzz on. Anything to block this last decade out. It's been so fucking hard. So many friends gone and so much lost. So much lost. You walk in and slide the plastic bag of change across the counter and the barista smiles and doesn't count it. Instead of one small cup of coffee he gives you 2 large ones. This was the remnants of the revolution. The revolution that could have been. We had thought that if we fought back on a day-to-day level we could have made a difference, so those of us on the streets treated each other better, we shorted the cash registers and and did small services for free and helped each other. It was the largest conspiracy in history, a secret movement that aimed to shake the foundations that our world was based on. That's why it felt so bad when it didn't make one damn bit of difference.

You sat down at the table by the window so you could watch people walk by. That is, if anybody actually walked by. Curfews and random violence had changed things, people now only usually walked in groups. You shook your medicine out and choked the pills down one by one with your coffee. The coffee tasted good. Coffee and marijuana was one of life's better mixes. You hoped she was still asleep. You wished she could sleep forever and not have to face this anymore. All the bombs and death and shortages and fear and anxiety. No more television and no more news, because the government wanted to quiet the unrest. No more travel and no more good jobs and no more time spent with friends and no more hope. You never were good with pills so it was a relief when you choked the last one down. The coffee tasted amazing now. So hot and pure and sweet with real sugar. You haven't been able to buy sugar at the stores for years, but some businesses had been smart enough to stockpile. You pulled out the letter from Jacques, addressed in his blocky handwriting. Datestamped five months ago from France. That's how long it took letters to get around the world now since airplanes were banned.

You slowly unfolded the paper and made sure nobody was watching you, and then held the letter up in the dusty light.

"WAR MAY BE OVER. SOURCES SAY WORLD LEADERS WORKING ON SECRET ACCORD."

It wasn't signed. Nobody could know or you would be labelled as a collaborator. The letter didn't make any difference anyways, because you know that a month ago Jacques and Veronique were hung from streetlights. Their bodies beaten like pinatas. The resistance was wiped out. The efforts to erase the names and details from all of history was already well underway. Cold raindrops start to bang against the window glass as you stare outside and remember growing up in the country. Things you haven't thought of in 20 years have been coming back to you lately.

You start to feel sleepy. You wonder if she was awake yet. You hope maybe somehow her soul escaped while she was dreaming. The jail time you were facing, two girls who dared to sleep together, who dared love each other, was looming large like black clouds. Jail didn't mean jail anymore. It meant ovens.

You smile at the barista as he comes and wipes your table. He looks around and makes sure nobody is looking. Without looking in your eyes he flashes you the hand signal and whispers "viva la resistance..." and quickly walks away.

You close your eyes. It's raining harder. You put your hand in your pocket and feel the empty medicine bottle. 100 sleeping pills. It took you years to save them up, the only thing that gave you hope for so long.

You stare out at the rainy street. Your only regret was that you didn't take her with you, but conspiracies meant torture these days. It was getting hard to stay awake.

Outside a dog barks. A bird on the sidewalk eating crumbs chirps and flies up into the rainy gray sky.