it's xmas time in the city

I like to dance

do you?


My favorite place to dance is on the couch, because it's sort of soft and you have to use your knees a lot if you want it to look cool. I like to do Elvis moves, on the couch. Especially the move where you keep your toes on the ground but you get down low and make like you're running really fast and turn your head to the side sort of.

some things to listen to

Vashti Bunyan - Train Song ... off Some Things Just Stick In Your Head



Yma Sumac - Incacha ... Royal Anthem

netlfix, what what

I watched This Is England last night. It's my new favorite movie right now. It's not, like, my all time favorite or anything (I don't even know what my all time favorite movie is, anyway)... but it's what I'm going to be recommending for like the next month or so.

Being an 11 or 12 years old kid, is hard. Also, 1983 in some shit coastal town in England. There is cool hair and cool clothes.

On another level, the movie illustrates the gradual partial appropriation of English skinhead culture by nationalist and race driven political movements of early 80s. When Shuan first joins the local skinhead crew, they are basically apolitical. There's a great scene in the beginning, where Shaun is invited to go haunting with the rest of the kids (who are all older teenagers). They dress up in funny clothes and raid abandoned houses and break windows. But things change, and Shaun is pulled away from the loose egalitarian anarchism of the initial group, toward political activism and racist thuggery. Anyway, the movie has some heavy shit going on, too. I mean, it's warm and touching, and you sort of wish that these kids were your crew when you were young. Even Combo, who's sort of the antagonist of the movie (and he does some pretty fucked up, violent shit)... you want to like him too. He's just fucked, and trying to find something to cling to.

word.


oh, and the soundtrack is friggin awesome.

when movies meant something

hells yeah! get some!

what the frack? (let's get lost edition)

Netflix doesn't have the Bruce Weber directed Chet Baker doc "Let's Get Lost". It's an incredible documentary... Bruce Weber is the photographer behind all those A&F catalogs with the shirtless gay dudes, and Chet Baker is the seminal cool jazz trumpeter and singer. He has one of the most awesomely androgynous voices of all time... he makes Antony Hegerty sound like Martin Short impersonating Liza Minelli. Chet Baker's voice is like pulling a silk scarf out of a vat of honey.

Mmmmm.

Can't find anything from the doc... here's some other stuff...



Heroin fucked him up big time. I know right? A 50s-60s jazz musician using heroin? Way hard to believe! They say he got beat up trying to buy drugs in San Francisco and lost some of his teeth, and that sort of fucked up his embrochoure, and later clips of him singing are weird too. The drugs and the prison time did a number on him. Don't do drugs!

Here's a good clip of him singing:

elenette

ja!

kool music.

http://www.myspace.com/elenette

hope deferred

Pain cannot be avoided when something (someone) desired is lost. The conscious mind extracts muscle memories of the lost thing from each finger, hand, lip, and eyelid that grazed, held, and rested against the lost thing we miss (her). in Its immediacy, we are desperately aware of Absence, and anxiety & unrest increase when we cannot predict the end of absence. "Either fill the gap, or cease to be bothered by it!"

Ursula Bogner

Claudia sent this to me. It's so wonderful. Listen to the music this lady made with her fabulous synthesizers in the personal recording studio she had built at her home in Vilnius. I like the song called "Begleitung für Tuba" ... shit man, so many of these songs are great... just scroll down and listen for yourself.

http://www.faitiche.de/catalog1_en.html

I gotta learn more about this kooky-cool sexologist Wilhelm Reich (apparently he was somebody that Ursula was into) and his "rhythmicity of early life." He seems pretty awesome so far... Orgonomy! Ha ha, what is that?

Also, it's important that you know what Wilhelm Reich looked like:


Nice hair. No really, I mean it.

happiness is a warm pair of underpants

this is the famous final shot from michelangelo antonioni's 1975 film "professione: reporter" (known in the US as "the passenger").

Pay attention to the bars on the window.

this is one of my favorite movies. i really love it. if you want to get in my pants, know and love this movie.

it really is amazing, the little story told in this continuous shot. even if you know nothing about the movie, this shot will convey something to you. there is a man in a hotel room, lying on the bed. a woman leaves him, some other men show up, and something happens!

i also love the kid in the red shirt.

o-baaaaama!

Wow, that was a fun night! It will be interesting to see how swiftly Obama moves to name his cabinet, and who the appointees are going to be. Is he going to "reach across the aisle" to people like Chuck Hagel and Dick Luger (not to mention others), is he going to look to Clinton Admin. stalwarts, or is he going to go with noobs? Probably a little of each, yeah?

Politico.com has an interesting article on this subject. I'm going to look into one area in particular... potential SCOTUS nominations.

I'll probably post something later about some of the characters Politico suggests might be in the running for a seat on the fanciest, most highest bench in the nation.

Here's a cool picture from yesterday:

Ya betta vote, my ninja!

I voted in Cali! Absentee style, what what! If you haven't voted yet and you're registered in California, then read Kate Slate, and know how to mark up that ballot and not be a douche by voting the wrong way.

http://kateatyrownrisk.blogspot.com

Also, two weekends ago I went to see the Moondoggies at Laurelthirst. Yes, they vry vry good. Matt bought a CD, and then lost it, so I am still without tracks.

This most recent I weekend I went to Ben & Sara's wedding in Stockton, CA. It was awesome! I will post pictures when I get them. There were like 5 or 6 costume changes! Because it was a traditional Cambodian wedding, that's why.

cool website!

this one is rad. I was looking for my own blarg online, and I found this instead!

http://library.thinkquest.org/J0110014/NewFiles/art.html

drawing ghosts looks fun!

the headless ghost of ann boleyn! yikes! looks like a bad date.

this is a ghost called a kelpie. no thanks! too scary!

my 4 new girlfriends

Ipso Facto.

L to R: Samantha Valentine, Rosalie Cunningham, Cherish Kaya, Victoria Smith.




My favorite is Victoria. Who is yours!

songs with clatter bones

down in the bardo

Throw away your Excesses, slough off your Detritus, pare down to Basics. In the new century, the Myth of the sole rational Actor has been debunked, but the many tentacled, hyper empathetic social Networker will not replace him. No thing shall replace our dying Ethos. The Pendulum swings in all directions at once, and without its metronomic creak keeping time, the Praxis falls flat... a jumble of words where once was an Arc. Two by two, the Words disembark, leaving a dead Husk of a Narrative, like an old battered ship at dry dock.

Take yourself down to the landfill, let them pick out and resell that which others can make use of and throw out the wretched remains. Out with the old; the new starts as a clean pair of feet on the first steps of a long road back home.

transformation!

"the Death card is not a card of death - it is a card of transformation.

In the Tarot, as in reality, Death is nothing more than a transition to the next level of life. Whether you believe that a soul goes to heaven or back to Earth to be reincarnated, the fact remains that the soul lives on. The candle is extinguished, but only because the day has come. The river shown on many versions of the Death card is a symbol, showing that life will go on, no matter what disastrous things happen. The river water will reach the sea, rise into the clouds, then rain onto the land to flow into the river again. Nothing is destroyed, because nothing can be destroyed - there can be only transformation.

The only real reason the transformation shown by Death is so catastrophic is because it is being held back, fought against by those too afraid to realize that change is beneficial. Every change happens for a reason, and Death is a force like Justice in that it is absolutely fair. It does not discriminate against one group and spare another - everyone is equal in the eyes of Death. So if big changes are happening in your life it is certainly plausible that you are the reason for them. There's no point fighting death, it only makes things worse."

- http://www.ata-tarot.com/resource/cards/

Baseball makes you gay

I tried to think of something funnier than this, but I couldn't do it. Hello, it least I tried, you lazy butt!

the waiting game x5000

"you know what really grinds my gears? time & waiting. waiting for something you want that isn't coming as fast as you'd like it to but you really can't control." said me, to myself.

"but you gotta have patience, man." said the doorknob.

"what? you can talk?" I said.

"yeah, sounds like it, huh?" replied the inanimate object.

"oh my god i'm losing my fucking mind." I said because that's what I was thinking, and sometimes, when the chips are down, I can be direct like that.

"yes you are, but its going to take a while. so maybe do something else while you are waiting, and the waiting will go by faster." said D. Knobber.

"that sounds true. thanks." I said, and then I left the house, because you can't just sit around waiting for stuff to happen or you really will go crazy.

unrelated picture (or maybe this is what the doorknob really looked like. I don't know):

Reading Everything is for Winners

If you're wondering, that's the Loch Ness monster carrying a scuba diver in its mouth. And if the back of the book is to be believed, there is probably a story in there about that thing being in love with a person, or vice versa. Or maybe they're both in luv with each other at the same time! Perfect! Unrequited love is crap.

I don't know about the other stories in this book, but the first one, Black Charlie, made me cry, almost. It was really, really, really good, and also very, very good, and beautiful too. When a short story about a giant alien otter from another planet that carves statuettes out of rocks with his teeth and tries to sell them to an art collector using a reformed fur-trapper as an intermediary manages to convey something about love and art and the struggle to find meaning in existence, you have to take notice and then shut the fuck up about all the other books that are out there talking about Iranians flying kites, or about how its SO important and super grayt that brown skinned people in hot countries read some Flaubert or whatever. Shit, pretty much every other book out there can go get burned. Just kidding.

The author is Gordon R. Dickson, and the net doesn't have a lot to say about him, but I'd guess that he probably has some sort of cult following. He died in 2001, at the age of 77. Also, he was an asthmatic, proving that nerds and asthma are married to each other.



Here is a little piece of Black Charlie, which I took some of my own incredibly valuable time to copy down:

But there was one more thing to tell. For a long time, after I returned home from Elman's World, I did not look at the crude statuette. I did not want to, for I knew that seeing it would only confirm what I had known from the start, that all the longing and desires in the world cannot create art where there is no talent, no true visualization. But at the end of one year I was cleaning up all the little details of my office. And, because I believe in system and order- and also because I was ashamed of myself for putting it off so long- I took the statuette from a bottom drawer of my desk, unwrapped it and set on the desk's polished surface.

I was alone in my office at the time, at the end of a day, when the afternoon sun, striking red through the tall window beside my desk touched everything between the walls with a clear, amber light. I ran my fingers over the grainy sandstone and held it up to look at it.

And then- for the first time- I saw it, saw through the stone to the image beyond, saw what Black Charlie had seen, with Black Charlie's eyes, when he looked at Longan. I saw men as Black Charlie's kind saw men- and I saw what the worlds of men meant to Black Charlie. And above all, overriding all, I saw art as Black Charlie saw it, through his bright alien eyes- saw the beauty he had sought at the price of his life, and had half-found.

And, lastly, how super is THIS cover?


Gordon R. Dickson is my dead science fiction homie, and that's the truth of it!

CLH

My great grandfather, Chester Losie Hancock, had a trick he could do. He could roller skate around on his hands. My grandmother says he was too tall to be a gymnast, a few inches under six feet, but he practiced on the pommel horse every other day at the gym. There is a picture of him in 1923, when he was 31 years old, doing a handstand on the beach. In the picture, it’s easy to see his athleticism. Big quadriceps, narrow waist, calves flexed with toes pointed toward the sky, and a casual expression, lank hair falling down, away from his face and toward the sand. He’s just standing there on his hands, looking like you or I would have if we posed for a picture on the beach, right-ways up. The picture comes along with an obituary clipped from a newspaper in 1938.

Great grandpa Chuck was born in Brooklyn in 1892. He met great grandmother Lulu in California, but I don’t know when or where, maybe down south, near Pismo Beach. He signed up for the army in 1917, and was chief gunner’s mate on the USS St. Louis during the Great War. Sometime after he came home he found a job as a sales representative for the Santa Maria Gas Company, and then my grandma was born in 1921. He died at 46 of some sort of heart problem. My grandma says that it grew too big from fighting off an infection. In the next year or two following Chuck’s death, my grandma met my grandpa, a freshman at UC Berkeley, when he started boarding at the house that Lulu ran.

I’ve never seen a picture of great grandpa Chuck before this one. There is a disconnect between us. I do not grasp what my inheritance is from him. There is something of him in me, of course there must be, but it’s not his physicality. I’m athletic, but a gymnast has a special sort of ability. Looking at it him on the beach there, I can imagine the taught grace with which he did things, the muscular intelligence he must have possessed. I imagine the fluid, shifting balance with which he moved, angling his center of gravity and his posture to maintain poise. Carrying a big plate of food to the dinner table, loading heavy baggage into the trunk of a car, closing a door with his heal, even, or doing whatever it is that a chief gunner’s mate does when his ship is under attack.

If you take the picture and turn it upside down, he looks like a diminutive, airborne Atlas in an old-timey bathing suit, propelling the Earth through space, driving us onward through each day. He’s settled and focused in his work, sure of where we are headed. In 1923, on the beach in Pismo maybe, when his heart was beating strong, and his two-year-old daughter played in the sand nearby, he must have thought, “I have survived a War. I have a job with the gas company. I have produced offspring. And now I’ll do a handstand.”

Brother!

Sometimes I get SO PUMPED UP I just need to KICK SOMEBODY'S ASS, like maybe the Macho Man Randy Savage if he started shit. Like maybe if he had an interview and he talked about how my belt should be his and that he was gonna take me down in the squared ring.

Slow dance

I look at Grandpa, sitting in his stressless chair, blankly watching an awful, jarring commercial for a wrestling video game, and I can’t gather my feelings correctly. I can’t make sense of this growing frustration, this ugly contempt that I feel welling up inside me. I know how bad that sounds, but there it is. There’s no use in pretending his giving up isn’t affecting us all.

He won’t get up in the mornings anymore. And if he does, he eats his breakfast, takes his pills, and gets back in bed, to Grandma’s distress. And these days, even her nagging, tinny insistence that he put on clean clothes and at least try to sit at the table with her while she reads the newspaper fails to persuade him. He’s exhausted, or woozy, he usually says. And it’s hard to tell whether he’s telling the truth, or lying, or whether that thin difference matters at all at this point.

I try to convince him to move around a little, using humor to hide my discomfort. I say that he can get her off his back by getting up and getting the little bit of exercise that the doctors say he needs. Let’s walk to the mailbox. Let’s go sit outside. But I can see that he doesn’t want to, and I capitulate, because I don’t have the heart to tell my Grandpa what to do. I’m embarrassed for him. I know that, at the very least, he must have given up on pride, and at the very worst, he’s willing death to come and swallow him up during the commercial break between segments of post-Monday night football analysis. I feel terrible, earlier in the day, standing in his bedroom, smelling his medicines, looking at the oxygen mask he sometimes puts on when he goes to sleep, knowing that he is preparing himself for another long, meaningless afternoon in the twilight of his life.

I don’t know what I expect him to do, this old man with a fat white, war-scarred globe of a belly, and reed thin, uncooperative legs. He’s not taking up tai chi or zen gardening. He’d rather keep his tangled up thorn bush of regret and fear in his dreams than lay it all out in memoirs. He’s read so many books that there’s no new revelation to be had, no new story to be heard. Even the news reports about hurricane damage in Galveston, or the op-ed pieces on the financial crisis are historical retreads for him. He knows what human tragedy is and what mortality truly means. And I know he’s disgusted with himself, more so than I am. So I stand there, watching him watch the television, and I day dream that I and my future wife die instantly, in a sudden, white-hot air balloon explosion 200 feet over the most beautiful valley in the world, on my 78th birthday, our will drawn up cleanly and agreeably, so that neither of us, nor our progeny, has to endure what my grandparents are enduring: the slow, shitty crawl into the grave.

A tossed, rotten plum moves with fatalistic certitude along a trajectory. A wet & messy collapse waits at the end of this terminal arc, and in its final, self-obviating act it becomes a moldering pile of fertilizer for its scavenging cannibal children.

Thinking thusly, I prepared to lob myself northward, hoping against hope for a softer landing than that which awaits flying pieces of overripe fruit. After consultation, my inner oracle's prognostications on my immediate future were framed with loose & unreliable words, open to broad interpretation and, at places where I hoped for some clarity, approaching pure gibberish. It was intimated to me in uncertain terms (words that seemed to be culled from rejected portions of the original manuscript of Finnegans Wake) that although no aspect of my future is fixed or predetermined, in truth I can only expect to choose from a narrow range of possible scenarios, none of which allow for any dramatic flights of fancy. IE, it was suggested that I could expect to NOT become an ex-bandito-turned-populist-mayor of a small, impoverished & lawless Brazilian mining town any time in the next ten years. Additionally, a record-setting career in professional sports was out of the question at this point, especially any movie-ish plot involving a nobody (played by me) arising out of the obscure margins of down-home-mid-sized-city-nowhere to lead an otherwise snake-bitten franchise on a riotous chase for the pennant against the big, bad, English-mustachioed other guys. [No... don't expect anything that doesn't look anything like the life you lead now, it said. But, it continued, try to enjoy yourself... or at least try to LOOK like you're trying to enjoy yourself, for the sake of everyone else who is occupied with making sense of their own mess right now.]

There is, sitting in the corner of the room, a hulking, elephantine reason as to why I've picked out the splatter-target that I have, and its trying unsuccessfully to keep quiet and out of the light, but it has a chronic sniffle and shifts uncomfortably on a squeaky, too-small chair. I'll not address it by name just now, as that would embarrass both myself and my pachydermal houseguest. For now, I'll casually set a pitcher of water and a glass, along with a plate of crackers and cheese, on the coffee table in the room where my problem sits, and wander away whistling, like there was nobody there at all. I want the issue resolved, but I don't want it to leave just because I wasn't a courteous host.

Can

makes my ears feel good.

europa europa!

The sun came out in France! So we played petanque.

There are some things you can't hold on to

like youth and exes. Also, for me, money.

Proj Run, Season 5, Episode 1

I went to back to Portland. The drive was awful. Hiked to a secret spot on the Sandy River. Sat with Lindsey, Matty, and Fabi on a front porch on Ash Street and expounded on the evils of cigarettes, comfortable beds, climbing trees, and too much masturbation. They're all related... each road leads to the City of Solitary Vice, populated by you, your lecherous hand, and your quivering meat pile. Thankfully, some old people with tight lipped, disapproving frowns wrote a book about how young boys should be manacled to the headboard every night. Saved from themselves!

like, 1996, or something

I have this one song stuck in my head... turnip farm, by Dinosaur Jr., and it's taking me back to, like, 1995, or something like that. I wore flannel shirts then, as I do now, and tried to have kurt cobain's hairdo, and I had a metal screw pipe you could buy at the Health & Harmony Festival, that I used maybe twice. If I could go back in time and talk to the 15 year old me, I would tell him "Hey little man... it's going to be ok. Keep riding your bike, and don't stress out so much. Puberty won't last forever." I would also tell him that rap is not a fad, and that turtle necks never came back in a big way, like I thought was going to happen, so I should just give up on that now and focus on my homework a little more. If I remember correctly, my grades weren't so awesome. Then again, if I got better grades, that would alter the future, so the me from now might not exist, or be doing something else entirely, and not have come back to the past in the first place. This all goes to show that time travel is a complicated matter, best left to professionals.

hater ass bitch

Monte Rio Tigers, never lose & represent!


Later, we accidentally sneaked through the artist's entrance into the Russian River Blues Festival, generously brought to us by Southwest Airlines and Budweiser. Past beer-fed security guards to where the yellow wristbanded and barbwire tattooed hoi polloi slept and burned under the sun to the sounds of Johnny "Kevin Bacon with Soul" Lang and his AM gold commercial tween blues pop band.

Over on the other side of the river, a menagerie of characters from the alleys and underbridges of Suttree's Knoxville. Weird saw-toothed, patch-haired old men and haggard looking ladies (like the one in gold lamé pants and a dirty black tank top), the smell of weed joints and pee, and crumpled cans of bud light like loose cobblestones littering the path to free dirt seats at the river's edge.

Metamorphosis

This morning, I went for a jog around the Nevers Field track, and I saw that they had made a hall out of Eugene DeSoto. This is the first time I have personally known someone who has died and become a building.

I tried to look him up on the internet, but he didn't exist there anymore, if he was ever there in the first place.

I hope they keep DeSoto Hall clean, and I hope it's air conditioned, and I hope they play Sinatra and Dean-O over the intercom.

Hello, Papa

A Papa Doble (according to AE Hotchner) consists of:

two jiggers of white rum

juice of two small limes

juice of half a grapefruit

six drops of maraschino

put it in a blender one quarter full of shaved ice and blend on high until the contents are cloudy and whipped to foam.

Party faces

The old greek guy at the thrift store said to make sure you enjoy your lifetime. He also said that he was America's number 1 gold miner. I don't know what to believe, but I think I can get behind the first statement.

157,000 people can't be wrong?

Gay LeBaron on Santa Rosa (I can't find a link, but it was in the Press Democrat last year):

"There is a disconnect between the average Santa Rosan's perception of the town and reality. ... What we have are a lot of people, some old-timers, some fairly new residents, who never, ever intended to live in the fifth-largest city in any area. And, frightened by new crimes, stalled in old traffic, watching tall buildings rise, they're mad as hell! When you stop to think about it, this revelation explains a lot. We have spent decades wondering why we couldn't save the Carrillo Adobe or the Hoag House, why we can't have a plaza like Healdsburg's or Sonoma's, why we've never achieved a proper historical museum like all the other towns around, why it takes so long (20 years for ANYthing) to reach the simplest civic goal, why we have to hire an image consultant to tell us what we represent. It's because we have outgrown the hometown, small-town advantage. We've become a real city while we were busy complaining about our farm town."

I can't be from somewhere else

Eucalyptus & the oak live here too, although the former was brought to California one hundred fifty years ago, by the Aussies with fever in their eyes. The native, the predecessor, gnarled and stooping like an old man, waited all these years for the new stewards of the land to strike back against the tall, stern invader.

I come home to an uneasy household. Oak is the older inhabitant of these hills, but Eucalyptus was brought here by the will of others. Brought by the will of others, unless you consider the will to be the blind drive to grow and propagate wherever given ground to do so. Countervailing claims of adaptive superiority and precedence. I blame neither party for the conflict, and I don't envision any reconciliation. Sometimes the fight is what holds the fighters up.

Women prefer driving on LSD

Ironically, the many signs and signals that are meant to guide her to safety dodge and weave, like threatening street toughs at the mouth of an alleyway in a foreign bazaar, flashing knife blades and hungry grins at fat sheep tourists. She sweats while negotiating a lane change, and panics at the sight of glaring red brake lights. But at the airport he smiles assuringly, unaware of her trials, so trusting in the hearty industry of Goodyear and frank words of other big men like Leitz and close-cropped Bates. He slides into the driver's seat where he belongs. Look. See how grateful she is? She asks how Denver was. There's a casserole waiting in the oven. Let's please go home. And watch out for that stop sign, I think it wants to rob us.

diving rock rock

the Sandy River in August and the place where you can swim to the blackberry bushes and there's a diving rock.

chop chop chop goes the sword through the knot

Yesterday, after working on my paper for 4 hours and not making a lot of progress, I went over to the undergrad campus and sat in the sauna for 15 minutes. I guess maybe that helped to loosen tangles in my brain, but I wasn't really able to accomplish anything else for the rest of the day.

I tell myself that the tasks (the paper, moving, finals) I have set up in front of myself are Gordian, and I imagine a cathartic, tragic release of failure, like Alexander's sword slicing through the knot. But Alexander slicing through the knot symbolized a solution to intractability. I guess that means that I see some sort of success in accepting defeat as a scholar, as an academic.

But I drift further than that. I imagine myself down and out, beyond recognition to my friends, beyond the reach of my family. I'm gristly and grizzly, with thick, cold-hardened hands, cracked skin, and clothes that fit me like the the skin of the rhinoceros at the end of Kipling's oh-best-beloved fable. I wander the streets, muttering to myself through a bushy, nicotine stained beard, endlessly sorting out problems that have lingered for years, arguing with a faceless buddy who has stood in my way at every corner.

A breakthrough? This faceless other, the misfit doppelganger who opposes me: is he just the disinterested, undiscriminating universe, patently unaware that I want the world to adjust itself for my comfort? I bet that's it.

If that's the case, then back to work. I have to do things that need to get done.