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[Dec. 30th, 2009|12:36 am] |
SAYING
Lil' Wayne is the most important rapper in the world and of the decade. Lil' Wayne is the most important hip-hop artist in the world (and this by a long shot, by a really long shot, and all others cower beneath him, crushed and driven while he rhymes over the lamentations of their weak) and probably the most important musical artist in the world.
Let's talk about it. That's an invitation. Bring it.
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[Oct. 2nd, 2009|01:55 pm] |
SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION
New post up over at SAVAGE NIGHT. Theses on the Philosophy of Hip-Hop, part 1. READ THAT SHIT, SON!
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[Sep. 15th, 2009|11:01 am] |
CAVE PAINTINGS FROM LASCAUX, FRANCE
Experts estimate these renderings date back to about 14,000 BC. Their purpose is unknown; however, given that the caves show little sign of habitation, they are probably not purely decorative pieces. Many anthropologists speculate that the art held some kind of mystical function, perhaps as a sigil for good luck during the hunt, or as an illustration of visions during shamanic trance states.
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[Sep. 14th, 2009|02:25 pm] |
ONLY BUILT 4 CUBAN HYPERLINX
So. Things are in the works (as always), and I will tell you about some of them.
First, I've created a new blog over on blogspot called SAVAGE NIGHT. This will host the sort of micro-essays that I sometimes post on droidlocks, but I'm going to try to update it on a more regular schedule than I've been keeping over here. The first essay (addressing Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor) is already posted. Droidlocks is not going away; I will be using this as an aggregation site as well as to post material of a more personal nature. Anyway, give the new spot a look.
Second, I can now confirm that Nick and I are working on a new murder mystery game, which will serve as the launching point for our business doing this sort of thing. It is still in a relatively early state of development, but things are moving and it should be coming together in the next two or three months. As far as I'm concerned, the first four games were interesting creative and social exercises but not really realized products. However, the practice runs are over. This one is going to be really good-- I'm talking knock-your-socks-off break-your-ribs-with-a-2-x-4 drag-you-across-the-parking-lot slam-your-head-in-a-car-door good. I can already feel the old delusions of grandeur stirring in the black inferno of my leathery heart.
ONLY BUILT 4 CUBAN HYPERLINX II
I spent a long time studying the design aesthetics of vintage pulp paperback covers (over at the Bookscans Database) while doing the SAVAGE NIGHT layout. Some really crucial stuff out there, my friends, and I thought I'd share a couple of favorites. Enjoy.
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[Aug. 11th, 2009|04:22 pm] |
HUNG UP
I've got a wild story to tell, kids, but it will have to wait for another time. For the time being (about 4:45 of your time, being) bounce to this one. The Soul Children are one of my favorite Stax bands, due in great part to the raw, perpetually anguished vocals of J. Blackfoot. This one's from 1974, with horns provided by the mighty Muscle Shoals.
"Your love is so good, I don't care about manhood..." |
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[Jul. 16th, 2009|05:30 pm] |
SOULFUL DISPATCHES FROM THE DARK SIDE OF THE SUN
This is Mission Control in four dimension broadcasting a couple of soulful transmissions across time and space in the general direction of your domepiece. Here's the catch: for once, I am eschewing my '66-'74 fetishism and posting some contemporary stuff. All of these artists are worth investigating, but if you only have time for one, peep that first track. This shit will flood your circuits with sublime light.
Let me know what you think, ya heard? |
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[Jul. 10th, 2009|10:21 pm] |
NOTES FROM A WORK EVER IN PROGRESS
Ideas are unruly bastards, and sometimes when one strikes you, its best not to try to exert too much control, just let the fucker ride out for a while. Eventually, you start to gain a sense of it contours and rhythms and then you can recognize where its trying to go. I was looking through a story that I've been working on, draft after draft, for a couple of years. It's been kicking my ass for pretty much the duration of that period, and I believed that I had put it aside for good, until a new angle occurred to me. So I am back at it again.
I was giving it a reread and picking out a couple of sentences and fragments that I wanted to remember or that served as markers or metronomes in the vast mess of the piece. Isolated from the body of the piece, I think they form a weird, kind of cool thing of their own, and I thought I would share:
A place abhorrent to god and devil both, and indeed a horror beyond which either could devise
acts of men speak to no deeper principle than will itself.
(Forever is man possessed by the force of history, yet acts of men speak to no deeper principle than the will of the act itself.)
Before I even knew his name I sensed his inevitability.
(and before his name I sensed his inevitability)
You wouldnt think something so small could scream like that.
Distilled. Crystal. Innocent.
and the faces they made I never wanted to make faces like that
It is by degrees of loss that the game is unfolded.
this wraith of the blood-path, lust of cages
a whisper in the fire.
I can say only this: his dream in the anaconda's dream, who sizes himself against the world by measure of what he swallows
How lonely to be nothing, nothing but a voice.
You would never believe somewhere a war was on.
We persevered.
By its audacity it will sear the world in its own image.
Kill the men. Kill the women. Kill the sows. Sew the crops with salt.
true as truth endures; true as brother and brother are
Numb fire.
weird crones
an ancient nightmare of the earth.
the fundamental moral movement has already occurred and been absolved and I am exonerated, let history show it so.
(the moral gesture is already occurred and absolved and I am exonerated, let history show it so)
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[Jul. 9th, 2009|04:31 pm] |
2:12 TO BLISS
Morricone's "The Carriage of the Spirits" from his score to the The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly must be one of the most beautiful pieces I have ever heard.
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[Jul. 4th, 2009|07:01 pm] |
YA HEARD?
Lately I've been in the mood to listen to glam rock. For a lot of people, the genre basically means Bowie and maybe T. Rex, both of whom are beloved to me, but there is also a lot of terrific stuff out there that is tragically underappreciated. Sparks is a band that I am always trying to play for other people. In form and aesthetic, they occasionally seem related to a school of glam rock of which I am not so fond-- the super-cutesy, super-kitschy, super-corny, etc.. However, there is a vicious black humor to Sparks that distinguishes them from the twee cheesefests spouted from Elton John and the like, as well as some surprisingly muscular riffs. Thought I would share a couple of pretty cool videos. Let me know what you think, and please by all means be forthcoming with any musical suggestions that may occur to you.
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[Jul. 3rd, 2009|09:31 pm] |
ON DETECTION, REASON, AND HISTORY
The figure of the detective, as he first takes form in the recognizable archetype during the 1840's in Edgar Allan Poe's three C. Auguste Dupin* stories ("The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Mystery of Marie Roget", "The Purloined Letter") is in his essence an Enlightenment creature. His art is ratiocination-- the careful survey of available facts to create a picture that reveals a solution, in his instance, the heart of the intrigue. Indeed, the process exhibits the Victorian obsession with cataloguing, as if to place an event or phenomenon within a logic system is to gain mastery over it.
The fundamental execution of this attitude is in the detective's cultivation of self. There is little room for emotion or impulse in the rational man. In Arthur Conan Doyle's "A Scandal in Bohemia," Watson writes of the famous Mr. Holmes:
"All emotions...were abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind...They were admirable things for the observer-- excellent for drawing a veil from men's motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which
might throw a doubt on all his metal results."
(Ironically, this story details the rare crack in the sleuth's legendary stoicism.)
However, the roots of this distrust run deeper than merely the desire for a clear head. The Enlightenment detective is possessed by an anxiety that pervades his age, a categorical crisis: that man, for all his advances, is yet not far removed from beast, subject to being overtaken by his emotions and driven thus to atrocity. How appropriate that the culprit of the shocking violence at the Rue Morgue is in fact a primate, the avatar for the fear of his own urges! An eternal war between instinct and will is waged within man, and by reason alone may he suppress the basest parts of his being.
Yet for all his worship of reason, the detective is in a sense profoundly devout. At the center of his craft is the faith that there is an Order that governs things, and that by precise enough observation it may be discerned (in Poe and Doyle's work, this Order is often equated with the predominant social order of the times-- the State, the Crown, etc.).
In this light, the true villainy belongs not to the petty thieves, marauders, and blackmailers (whose acts are generated by the baser impulses), but what Poe dubs in "The Purloined Letter" the Monstrum Horrendum, "an unprincipled man of genius." This figure is represented by Holmes' nemesis, Professor James Moriarty, the "Napoleon of crime" described in "The Final Problem":
"His career has been an extraordinary one. He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by Nature with a phenomenal mathematical facility...But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more
dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers."
The Monstrum Horrendum embraces crime in spite of his rationality, and in doing so threatens the detective not only as a rival but as a challenge to his entire ontological system. He consciously defies the Order Of Things; in this, he is unexplainable, almost satanic. Moriarty's criminal misdeeds are the lesser offense. His true transgression is to scoff at the sanctity of Order, revealing its transience and artificiality.
*Dupin is something of a contradictory character, for though his cataloguing habits are even more obsessive than the more refined figure of Sherlock Holmes, he is also prone to bouts of Romantic fervor, drifting madly through the nighttime city in the pulse of the urban organism.
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[Jun. 30th, 2009|11:49 pm] |
DREAM NO. 342 AND ALSO A TRUE STORY
I awoke last night from a string of unpleasant dreams to an unusual sound.
I dreampt in two distinct cycles. My recollections of the former are a bit hazy, but the impressions were very strong. First: a meal with my family at a very tacky restaurant seated in an obscure an obscure tower in some sprawling mallplex. Later, I attend a cocktail party at a haute futurist condo. It is nighttime. Drinks are served in glass carafes, shaped in tall slender rectangles arrayed in a small geometric pit inset in the floor. I drink a viscous translucent spirit from a small bowl. Glancing down into one of the carafes, I see live shrimp swimming around inside the liquid. Immediately I gag and spit my drink back into the carafe. Legs and bits of shell scrape my teeth as the fluid passes out of my lips.
Soon I am seated on a bed in a well lit rectangular room, very tall ceiling. The walls are papered in a dense fractal pattern of triangles within squares that generates a queasy hypnosis. I lie back on the bed and stare up at the patterned ceiling, marveling at just how high it is. Gazing at the shapes, a strong but ineffable feeling of terrible realization comes over me. The shapes begin to transform and fold in some forbidden dimensionality into a new and horrifying geometry. I start to scream and but the sound comes out as a hoarse gurgle and my skin becomes sallow and thin and began to peel away in husks and my eyes melt out of their sockets.
Within the dream, I awake suddenly, believing myself conscious. I am inside a hallway in a house. I know intuitively that it is a very large house, a house I am familiar with, perhaps my own house. Ahead of me, the hallway connects to another perpendicular corridor. A fitness class led at the the front of the line by a squat man with a bald head and mustache passes across the channel.
There is a door behind me. I think it leads to my room, but I realize as I enter that in fact it is a girl's room. I am not sure who she is or even if I know her. My first instinct is to hurry away but I decide against it. I am afraid to be seen leaving this area, lest someone see me and think I was up to some perverse voyeuristic undertaking. And in truth, some perverse voyeuristic desire also prompts me to stay and explore. I approach her vanity but decide not to sit down. Staring into the mirror, I realize where this room is situated within the house, and I understand that this mirror must be a two way mirror, allowing one on the other side of the wall to look through into the room. The voyeur caught in a voyeuristic trap. Indeed, staring closely into the glass, I can make out the vague movement of shapes. The chamber on the other side of the wall must be very large.
Realizing this, I become very alarmed and flee the room. The hallway is now very dark, but as I try to slink away unnoticed, a glowing cat leaps onto my arm. I hold the arm away from my body and the cat begins to grow larger and larger. I am very frightened but I now cannot move my body. I start to shout. "Help! Help! Help! Help! Help!"
I was shouting this when I woke in a start. I was still very woozy but managed to write down some of what I could remember. I believed from the length and intricacy of the dream that I had been asleep for some time, but I was only out for about 75 minutes. There are some bits on the paper where I recorded my impressions that I do not now recall. "Taking pictures" "Nick pours in a ..." Much of the writing is illegible.
Strange labyrinthine houses tend to be fixtures in my dreamlife, perhaps the grim Lovecraftian wonder of silent cyclopean crypts channeled through the lens of New Orleans' grand ruinous architecture. I can pinpoint the prompt for the image of the two-way mirror. There is a curious looking house on Carondelet and Toledano that passed frequently on the bike ride to my old job. The route to my new job takes me by the back side of the house. I realized yesterday that the place has a massive window in back that gives a full view of a staircase from the first to the second floor.
I turned on the lamp by the bed and read an issue of Heavy Metal for a while then went back to sleep. Here the dreams are less clear, but I feel this cycle was in some sense a continuation or a tangent from the prior cycle.
The gym class theme recurs. I have vague memories of a winding room with a number of open stalls containing pod-like cast iron bath tubs. I speak to a girl inside the locker room. I believe she may be Paris Hilton, or at least bears a strong resemblance. (If indeed it was Ms. Hilton, this would be her third incursion into my dreamlife.)
Later I am driving with Dave in his pickup truck on I-10, headed east. The radio reports bad weather, and looking out a cyclone is coming. We veer off the ramp just as the black cyclone tears by us. I wander around the decimated city. I am looking for my sister. I cannot find her. She turns up later at the house where I stay, badly frostbitten. We climbed onto the roof to look out at the damage.
I shuddered awake once again. It was about 3:00, and outside a car horn blared a continuous note. I was still very tired, and lay there and listened to it for a while, wondering if I was still dreaming. Soon I realized that Jill was also sort of awake and we wondered what the fuck was going on. Neither of us were quite awake enough yet to get out of bed. The horn went on for several minutes and I started to get very anxious. I wake up at about 5:30 AM to go to work, and I was paranoid about not being able to get back to sleep until then. Suddenly, there was a loud pop and our westward window was lit for an instant with a burst of red light. Three more pops followed in quick succession. We got out of bed and looked out the window. We could see that there was a fire, but the tree outside obscured our view.
I pulled on a pair of pants and we went downstairs to the yard. A car was aflame, parked outside the house just two doors down. We stood barefoot in the wet grass as the fire engines rolled up and later, lazily, the police. One of the officers stayed in the car. The other wandered slowly closer, and stood with his hands in his pockets, watching the firefighters douse the flames with water and foam.
I took some pictures of the car when I got home from work. The remains were very beautiful.
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[Jun. 3rd, 2009|03:18 pm] |
YO PUT IT ON BIG L PUT IT ON
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[May. 31st, 2009|02:45 pm] |
THROW A DOG A BONE
Mix:
1 part computer trouble
1 part inward pursuits
75 parts black iron prison
Shake and set aflame, and that's about where my head's been at and why I haven't been writing in here too much. I've been working on the comic book and practicing drawing and trying to find a job (I'm mostly unemployed these days). However, I'm still listening to new tunes and I'll shoot a couple of gems your way.
A big one:
"All Around the World," by Jay-Z, from The Blueprint 2 (2003)
I classify this in the ephemeral hip-hop daydream file. This makes me feel sentimental, I guess, not that I've ever bounced 6-4's up and down Crenshaw or anything like that. I don't know who LaToiya (the backup singer) is, but she's soulful, man.
Some others:
"Fire" by Arthur Brown, from The Crazy World of Arthur Brown (1968, obviously)
"Across 110th Street" by Bobby Womack, from the Across 110th Street OST (1972)
"(We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet" by the Blues Magoos, from Psychedelic Lollipop (1967)
Put your hand on your heart if you feel me.
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[May. 30th, 2009|09:24 am] |
JACOB MAZER'S DREAM #442
A good one. I was holding a metal festival in the back yard at my parents house. The house was as it was when I was younger, when the back porch was enclosed with all of this torn up up mosquito wire and painted an ugly shade of pale purple. I was a bit dismayed at first, as I was caught up in securing some logistical details-- waiting for some people to arrive, giving directions, and eventually getting stuck inside a bus with a bunch of little kids, which was tense and definitely a drag. I missed every act who was playing except for the last one, which was Iron Maiden, but I was so stoked to see Maiden that I didn't even mind.
For a while, Maiden were sitting in the space below my porch, just talking and getting ready to play. Bruce Dickinson was absent, off roaming around the house, and it was pretty dark down there, so I decided to put on a big fluffy wig and go down there and pretend to be Bruce Dickinson. I fooled them for a while by being pretty quiet, until the real Bruce Dickinson came down (his hair was much shorter than my wig) and in facetiously challenged me to a swordfight for his place in the band. All of them kept talking about someone named "Annie" upstairs, who I variously believe to be either Andy Warhol, Annie Leibowitz, or me (the name "Annie" would have been short for "Manishevitz" which they had dubbed me on account of my jewishness).
I went up the steps back into the house to put on some different shoes and take off the wig, passing several members of the 90's X-men on the way in: a short-haired Rogue and Storm, who smiled at me with very bad teeth. I got paranoid about my own teeth and went inside to brush them but someone else was in the bathroom so I just checked them in the mirror and they seemed to look ok.
Iron Maiden was about to start playing so I went back out to the back porch. They were set up in the middle of the back yard. It was starting to rain, so everyone was standing either on the porch itself, or beneath it. Meanwhile, most of the yard had flooded-- waist high water, except for where Maiden were set up. Everyone except Bruce Dickinson were wearing menacing robes of purple. Carni was standing next to me and we were both very excited and staked out good spots on the porch. Maiden started playing (I realize now that the song they were playing was not in fact an Iron Maiden song, but rather "Into The Void" by Black Sabbath. We looked down and saw that some people had found some kind of ford and were making their way across the flooded area to stand right next to the band. Carni and I immediately went down to join them, even in the rain.
We got up very close to the band, basically standing right next to them. Bruce was blocking most of the band, but then stepped back so that Dave Murray could take the foreground. A pendant around his neck began to glow, causing Carni to jump back in alarm. Murray began to manipulate the pendant and the beam of light it cast, which seemed to alter the tone of feedback emitting from his guitar.
Then I woke up. I'm told I was drooling on myself.
Other than that, it's been black iron prison, black iron prison, black iron prison.
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[Mar. 31st, 2009|03:26 pm] |
MY SNAKESKIN JACKET! THANKS, BABY!
Life indeed is very strange. |
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[Mar. 30th, 2009|04:04 pm] |
WOOD GRAIN BRAIN
I refer to myself on occasion as a kind of a snob about certain things (music, literature, art, film, pretty much anything that one can be snobby about). This title may be a little bit generous; others might refer to me rather as a humorless obnoxious old bastard who is completely self-assured of his own subjective aesthetic judgement calls. I don't have much of a soft spot for the simple or nostalgic pleasures that many folks my age seek to have; I don't want to have any road trip sing-a-longs to alternative rock songs from the 1990's, I don't want to watch Empire Records or The Breakfast Club or Ace Ventura with you, and if you are really into something that I'm not into, I'll probably talk shit about it until we get into an argument and our friendship is damaged. In general, I claim that my tastes are essentially a finely honed deadly samurai katana of aesthetics unfettered by any guilty pleasures whatsoever.
This is not exactly true. From time to time I encounter songs show merit can be in no way justified, but fuck man, I just can't help feeling it. I'm not talking here about shit you heard back in high school that maybe reminds you of a time and you have a soft spot for it still, I'm talking about grandly stupid shit that is also grandly appealing. Here are a couple off my list.
The song, the video, the whole affair, like, what the fuck?
To me, this is basically like the black version of the last song.
What about you? |
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[Mar. 26th, 2009|12:26 am] |
ATTACK THE STORY LIKE A RADIANT SUICIDE
Franz Kafka, from "Paradise":
Since the Fall we have been essentially equal in our capacity to recognize good and evil; nonetheless it is just here that we seek to show our individual superiority. But the real differences begin beyond that knowledge. The opposite illusion may be explained thus: nobody can remain content with the mere knowledge of good and evil in itself, but must endeavor as well to act in accordance with it. The strength to do so, however, is not likewise given him, consequently he must destroy himself trying to do so, at the risk of not achieving the necessary strength even then; yet there remains nothing for him but this final attempt. (That is moreover the meaning of the threat of death attached to eating of the Tree of Knowledge; perhaps too it was the original meaning of natural death.) Now, faced with this attempt, man is filled with fear; he prefers to annul his knowledge of good and evil (the term "the fall of man" may be traced back to that fear); yet the accomplished cannot be annulled, but only confused. It was for this purpose that our rationalizations were created. The whole world is full of them, indeed the whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment. An attempt to falsify the actuality of knowledge, to regard knowledge as a goal still to be reached.
William Burroughs, from Nova Express:
What scared you all into time? Into body? Into shit? I will tell you: "the word." Alien Word "the." "The" word of Alien enemy imprisons "thee" in Time. In Body. In Shit. Prisoner, come out. The great skies are open. I Hassan i Sabbah rub out the word forever.
...
Listen: Their Garden Of Delights is a terminal sewer-- I have been at some pains to map this area of terminal sewage in the so called pornographic sections of Naked Lunch and Soft Machine-- Their Immortality Cosmic Consciousness and Love is second-run grade-B shit-- Their drugs are poison designed to beam in Orgasm Death and Nova Ovens-- Stay out of the Garden Of Delights-- It is a man eating trap that ends in green goo-- Throw back their ersatz Immortality-- It will fall apart before you can get out of The Big Store-- Flush their drugs down the drain-- They are poisoning and monopolizing the hallucinogen drugs-- learn to make it without any chemical corn-- All that they offer is a screen to cover retreat from the colony they have so disgracefully mismanaged. To cover travel arrangement so they will never have to pay the constituents they have betrayed and sold out. Once these arrangements are complete they will blow the place up behind them.
Antonin Artaud, from "To Have Done With The Judgment of God":
they were words
invented to define things
that existed
or did not exist
in the face of
the pressing urgency
of a need:
the need to abolish the idea,
the idea and its myth,
and to enthrone in its place
the thundering manifestation
of this explosive necessity:
to dilate the body of my internal night,
the internal nothingness
of my self
which is night,
nothingness,
thoughtlessness,
but which is explosive affirmation
that there is
something
to make room for:
my body.
...
but there is a thing
which is something,
only one thing
which is something,
and which I feel
because it wants
TO GET OUT:
the presence
of my bodily
suffering,
...
Man is sick because he is badly constructed.
We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally.
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[Mar. 21st, 2009|12:30 am] |
AY YI YI
Jill and I are watching the final episode of Battlestar Galactica. This is the dumbest shit I have ever seen. What the fuck?
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[Mar. 11th, 2009|01:38 am] |
ONE TWO THREE
I didn't like the Watchmen movie. I do like other things. Here are three things that I've been digging on lately.
1. The photography of John Deakin
I know little about John Deakin expect that he hung out in Francis Bacon's circle (from which he drew most of his subjects) and that he was a terrible alcoholic. I stumbled across his work while doing some research for another project, and was instantly in love. Deakin's pictures are utterly haunted. To me, these photos seem to capture incursions of growth and ruin; these are forces that are strange and otherworldly and they get to work on familiar things and defamiliarize them and create textures and moods that are glimpses into dimensions unknown and they open up mysteries in your mind. I'm dying to pick up the collection of his work A Maverick Eye, but I only have $29 in my wallet and maybe another $15 or $20 in my bank account. Maybe when payday rolls around.
2. Miles Davis - Sketches of Spain.
I really only know two Miles Davis records very well-- Kind of Blue, of course, and On the Corner, which was playing constantly for a week or two back when I lived at the Me Kong Delta. I got Sketches of Spain from the public library. This is a totally sublime album, guys. I listened to it like three times already today and I'm already looking forward to listening to it some more tomorrow. It's got a lot of the epic sweep and high drama flair that Ennio Morricone's spaghetti western stuff has going on, but there's also this weird Miles Davis birth of the cool thing happening too. Serve with Mingus' The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, stirred not shaken.
3. Fishing With John
This is a totally excellent discovery but it's pretty hard to describe. Fishing With John was a short lived television show whose premise was basically that each episode John Lurie would go out to an exotic locale with one of his friends and they would basically go fishing and hang out, and then add these strange surreal narrative track over it. I know that sounds pretty lame, but this is totally great.
The friends in question are Tom Waits, Jim Jarmusch, Dennis Hopper, Willem Dafoe, and Matt Dillon, and its really a pleasure to watch them hang around with the ever likable John Lurie. The personalities really come out; there are a lot of strange stories and jokes exchanged, as well as a fair amount of the players needling on another. It's all set in these beautiful locales and a lot of time is taken just to observe the atmosphere and capture the sense of place. The whole series is on YouTube. I haven't watched it all yet, but I'm really savoring it. It's quiet and it's smart and it's humble and gives a good treatment to a subject which almost always comes out trite or condescending when its taken on in art, which is just how terrific it is to be alive.
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[Mar. 10th, 2009|10:48 am] |
STRANGE DREAMS AND SHOUT OUTS
1. I had a really fun, funny dream the night before last. I was standing in a nook of a larger room and the lights were dim and the space seemed filled with the bronze glow from the hard wood floor. I was standing in a circle with a bunch of other people, one of whom was Shira Pilarski, and we were passing around a bottle of whiskey-- I think it was Jack Daniels even though I never ever drink Jack Daniels-- and also doing blow, except instead of a powder, it was a liquid and you would use a medicine dropper to squeeze a few droplets onto your fingertips and bump those. I remember the vivid sensation of that total delirious party bliss when you can't believe how much fun you are having. At one point, Shira pressed her forehead up against mine, which was sort of a visual aid to a really funny joke she told. I remembered the joke when I woke up, and I believe it was pretty legitimately funny, but by now its faded. Anyway, good work, Shira.
2. SAN FRANCISCO PEOPLE! I know there are a couple of you on here. This weekend is the Bay Area Anarchist book fair and my roomie/homedawg/mortal enemy Mr. Matt Ray will be there selling his awesome postcards, which he vends under the production guise of Born To Fight Dinosaurs. The postcards are homemade and really great, and I believe some of them use some of the New Orleans pictures I shot. Here's a picture of the handsome devil!
 (I believe this is his Baywatch look)
Perhaps the lovely Ms. Carin will be in attendance with him? I don't know. Anyway, you should go and buy his postcards and also buy him a drink.
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