Thinking is a Health Food

Tender Discoveries in a Brutal Life

2011-10-22T16:20:00.000-07:00

For over 1,500 years, the above-pictured Roman-era skeletal couple have been holding hands--or to be more precise, bones, they've been holding bones, digits, carpals, joints--defying the unassailable wrath of time and decay in tiny but no less significant ways, through the only measure we small human animals can: through symbols, through metaphor, and through sheer obduracy. To read the full story of the archeology dig, check it out here. Of course the full story is not, is never, cannot even tap into the full story. The people who buried these two thought, at the time, that it was important, for whatever symbolic or metaphysical reason, to arrange them as such, to signify to others at the time that while death may have its way with everyone at some point, while it may obliterate and decimate everything substantial in this world as we conceive of it, the honoring and placement of these two is meant to signify that there was and still is, long after they've ceased to exist and disappear into sheer nothingness, long after submitting to the influence of time, something remarkable and brave about the way they lived and they way they died, i.e. together, in union, a force of two individuals pitted against the eroding shoreline of the world, staring oblivion directly in the face, hand-in-hand, shoulder-to-shoulder. The woman, wearing a bronze ring, is set with her eyes staring at her male companion while her partner, whose head was once turned in the direction of the woman, has since rolled and lolled over to the opposite direction. But originally, they were positioned so that they were staring at each other from behind dead eyes. In these times--times of disease, plague, antiquated times where health was a complete and utter crapshoot--it wasn't uncommon for couples or family members to die at proximal, similar, or even at the exact same time. This finding occurs five years after another couple, this time 5-6,000 years old, found in Mantua, the site on which the old bard's Romeo et Juliette is set, also locked in a similar if not even more loving and intense embrace. This burial, much, much older than the one with which this post began, was plenty more rare and intriguing, at least at the time, as double burials in the neolithic period were considered rare. The caveat here is one of those "as far as we know" sort of deals, where our knowledge on neolithic burials is based on an embarrassingly thin lot and, for all we know, double burials were as frequent as ever. Nevertheless, pace Voltaire, doubt is preferred to certainty (with which I agree) and those speciations of humans who existed 5,000 years ago couldn't possibly have known the cultivated, advanced, and sophisticated forms of love, ardor, intimacy, obsession, and romance in which we dabble now in our cosmopolitan epochs, and they couldn't have possibly with all their primal, tribal, prehistoric characteristics found any use with passionately developed relationships and sustained feeling, they couldn't have possibly felt like we feel about our loved ones and the need to symbolically concretize those feelings long after death, the emotions they felt couldn't have been as complicated and nuanced mine own (with which I virulently disagree). It's embarrassing, egocentric, and insensate to think others could not have loved as hard and as longingly as you, could not have been as afraid as you, and could not have needed the hand, the torso, the shoulder, or the body of another to pad the abrasive pain we must endure in our regular per-diem lives, even if those people happen to be from millennia ago. It is, in fact, that kind of arrogance, a denunciation of all that from which we come and a gross example of ingratitude at the wonderful examples of simple living done by those whom came before and paved such exemplary paths.

On the Incisiveness, Inflexibility, Seeming Permanence & Irrecoverable Hopelessness of Deep, Disemboweling Types of Hurt

2011-10-15T04:03:00.000-07:00

Wealth in Rain

2011-08-20T15:42:00.000-07:00

Insects, bugs, crawlers, and the like are still, to my mind, some of the most fascinating creatures on the planet, a plant full of, I admit, fascinating creatures. But it's the insects (not to mention a few reptiles, lizards, and animals, but only a few) which retain a kind of primordial look about them that makes them so richly present and reminds us, as people, how far the planet has come, from where it has came and arrived (not, however, to imply that we have arrived at anything permanent or fixed), from where we have come, and where, potentially, it (the planet) and we might be going (let us hope against the evidence that this direction is auspicious). Miroslaw Swietek recently captured a slew of macro images of rain-sprinkled insects, taking the photos early in the morning when the dew was still clinging to the insects in his native village in Poland, when the insects are still torporous and immune to the intrusion of the camera. The result is simply gorgeous and can be found at the link provided. A few images have been provided by moi for interest-piquing purposed only.

Notice how the water magnifies the numerous high-powered lenses of the dragonfly's eye, showing how honeycombed and clustered they are. More lens = more pixels = better and more blisteringly precise vision.

The dragonflies, thanks to their compoundness and complexity, are consistently awestriking. The subtle goat-tee of bubbled waterdrops is lovely.

The bejeweled beetle!

The World is Violently Unwell

2011-08-10T18:05:00.000-07:00

Take one quick look at global news, and you'll see pretty quickly that London isn't the only area in the world right now going through some genuinely turbulent and floor-shaking insurrection. Rebellions, protests, demonstrations, revolts, and any number of other nouns most news agencies will ignore in place of the pejorative and dismissive "riot" are occurring on nearly every continent, much of it coming from a exceptionally disenfranchised youth culture who is appropriately, understandably, and justly upset with what has become of the market-driven neoliberal policies which have resulted roundly in failure, widespread cuts to vital infrastructural measures, and dizzying poverty and wealth-gaps. At this very moment, the ground underneath all of our feet feels particularly brittle and unsteady, not because of the threat of some kind of foreign "terrorism", but because of the domestic policies that have been in place collecting dust and quietly bringing ruin to our countries, our cities, our lives, hopes, and every single dream. While Tottenham's frustrations spread through London, Chile right now is undergoing a massive student-led movement involving a number of varied demonstrations--"Mass suicide by education" protests in which students scream and clamor before lying down in the street, "dead"; "passion for education" clusters in which whole streets are clogged by students kissing and making out; hunger strikes and more--in protest of the country's floundering educational system. What they're specifically seeking a plebiscitary process to increase the funding and the level of quality of the public schools, and ultimately that for which they're asking is a overhauling to the framework of the whole education system, including increased state participation in secondary education and a moratorium placed on educational profiteering. An August 11th poll demonstrated the an almost overwhelming 72% of the Chilean population approved of the student movement, a level of endorsement I believe you'd be hard-pressed to find in American polls if our frustrated students went ahead and engaged in the same insurgent behavior, which they have every good and solid reason to do. The Atlantic just put out a tremendous and elucidatory--and emotional--series of photos taken from the protests. They make your heart hurt. I'll drop a couple below but check out the whole lot of them; they're intensely visual. I firmly believe that we're, as a world, as a whole global populace, approaching a breaking point, a fiscal breaking point, a societal breaking point, a human breaking point. We are seriously in need of some kind of transportive, transformative succor or medication or resolve--something analgesic. People are frustrated and in pain; they're afraid and alone. They feel abandoned and ignored by the policymakers and the governments who have toyed with them for years as if those underneath them were made of this kind of superplastic material who could bend and twist and be pulled apart without eruption, and guaranteeing them their best interests were in mind. This has all been slowly fomenting, I'd say, for thirty or forty years. The world will change or people will make it change by bringing it to its knees; the world will listen or the people will rip its ears out. These aren't the first rebellions and, unfortunately, it's likely they won't be the last. Think of Spain's 15-M or the Arab Spring going on. These aren't capricious uprisings, but rather they come from an incredibly disgruntled society sick of political jargoneering and mealymouthed status quo-keeping charlatans and orators who differ from religious orders only in their uniforms or lack thereof. To be clear, what I don't mean to imply is a kind of logical, philosophical, or ideological concinnity or a similarly realized underpinning for each and all of these outbursts. They are occurring for their own bevy of reasons worthy of study and rational, unbiased attempts at understanding. What is similar, though, is the frustration, the hopelessness, and the anger, which is there, and which has been there for who knows how long, and which is manifesting itself through similar but different modes of rancorous expression, expression and rabid activity we would be wise not to write off as unjustified or nihilistic or greedy. For the record, most of the students seen in the pictures are covering their faces not to protect their identity but to keep them safely blocked-off from the toxic tear gas. All photos are credit to the Atlantic and Alan Taylor. The spirit of this social energy is captured in these photos and should be seen by as many people as possible. In one of the photographs, the grafitti-tagged words "Chile Lucras Con Todo" can be seen, what looks like, stencil-printed onto a building wall. Translation: Chile, you do everything for profit. Sound familiar? It should for a depressing and uncountable number of countries where suffocating systemic implementations have laid waste to entire groups and subsets of "nonessential" people, who neither provide much revenue for the country nor are they large enough for politicians to spend time pandering to.

Juvenilia

2011-06-26T16:13:00.000-07:00

"I am the manager, said the manager, since he was the manager." Beckett, Mercier et Camier

This is, without a doubt, one of those things that most people would certainly never find funny (not even if they read it themselves in the context of the novelistic setting) but when I came across this brief vaudevillian line in one of Beckett's earlier novels about, what else, two vagabonds trying and failing to leave an oppressive and asphyxiating city, as he was still experimenting with and discovering his form and style (and also his first French-written novel), I laughed, out loud, by myself, for a good five minutes, repeating the sentence over and over in a joyous delirium I imagine Beckett would appreciate. Thinking of it now, still, I laugh, a good gut-pinching guffaw. 'Tis the little things that get us by, bit by fucking bit.

Thank You Oakland Heretics, Blasphemers, & Apostates!

2011-05-20T12:57:00.000-07:00

Thank goodness for some people with a little practicality remaining inside those cavernous, underutilized heads of theirs. Check this out right at the foot of the Oakland Bay Bridge before the world ends, and while you're at it keep heading towards the East Bay for what's supposed to be one of the largest Rapture Parties at Oakland's Masonic Center on Saturday and Sunday, which party/conference is expected to draw somewhere around 200 folks or so not afraid of spontaneous death, lakes of fire, asteroidal toppling, or five month torment at the hands of huge scorpions, unrolling carpets of earthquakes, which will feature (the conference, not the onset of doom) "keynote speeches from scholars, bloggers, student activists, former Christians, atheist feminists, and other crusaders." All the information you need is here.

Shallow, Febrile Celebrations of Meaninglessness

2011-05-02T01:26:00.000-07:00

So Osama bin Laden is dead (or might be dead), which the US is quite ready to claim without proffering the body, though they claim they had it, and even claim they buried him at sea to peaceably accord with the Muslim tradition of burying the dead within 24 hours postmortem, all of this within mere hours of the actual pronouncement of the deed; I'd be dishonest if I didn't say that all of this sounds mightily suspicious and dubious. For a high-profile person of historical importance like bin Laden, this kind of quick and convenient religiously sensitive disposal makes no sense whatsoever. And so Gadhafi’s kid and grandkids are dead (or might not be dead, might not even exist, according to US and NATO, at least not until they proffer the bodies). Legal and philosophical burden of proof stuff and matters vaguely similar to it, how it applies and to whom it applies and to whom it doesn’t and when it does and when it doesn’t—it’s all very confusing. But like on most issues, it seems as if America is making their own rules and sticking hard and fast to them irrespective of the rest of the world. If Osama is dead…then terrorism is over, right? No. The world is now safe from threats? No. "A mortal blow has been dealt to al Qaeda"? Sorry. Sounds nice, but not that either. A front waged against undefined "terrorism" is a measurable war with clear-cut outcomes and goals against America- and freedom-hating infidels orchestrated by on arch-villain madman under whom all inner- and outerworkings function? No. Not at all. What’s certain is this: The death (or rumored death) of Osama bin Laden means absolutely nothing. Closure is a word invented by pop psychology books, and chances are (much like what Edith Wharton said of happiness) if you're seeking closure, you're probably going to have a rough time finding it. A literal translation of Habeas corpus: show me the body. Prove to me that this is something besides a scapegoat for all of Americas' and our executive's frustrations. Everything I've read thus far is all anonymous this and undisclosed that and 99% this but can't confirm that. According to some bin Laden has been dead for a few years now. According to others the man as we've construed him has never even existed (like Jesus, probably) except on American television. Now these might very well be shaky-fingered conspiracy theories in which one would have to be a little bit screw-loosened to believe, but one would have to be equally screwless in the head to believe that the death of Osama bin Laden carries with it any nanoscopic amount of national or international import. Whose to say American forces didn't just now come across the emaciated body of a man who'd died in the desert from privation and heat and decided to say they executed him, to boost morale? Whose to believe any of this without the same burdens of proof the government asks of everybody else, especially other countries. Nevertheless, say this is true, say bin Laden had been, upon executive order, brought down in Pakistan after ten years of wearying searching, destroying, and dying on the behalf of American (but not only American) troops. This is what we call a pyrrhic victory, if it is even that at all—a minor “triumph” offset by an outlandish tonnage of losses, the balance of which is not even proximal to being evened. Is this the rate of success we can expect, then--ten years per one success--let alone one with which we're content? Will it take another ten, twelve years to bring down another figurehead on whom our government chooses to place their crosshairs? Is any of this even worth it? Besides giving a small population of people yet another martyr to shower with praise and adulation, what does this accomplish in the grand or even in the miniscule scheme of things. Forget the macro; what's the micro gain of this? Not much. Nobody honestly thinks this man's death does anything to compensate for 9/11 and the nearly 3,000 lives wrongfully taken from this planet thereon. That's not true, I guess, because the counterterrorism head seems to believe that al Qaeda is a thing of the past now and considers America a categorically safer place, and the fact that this is our counterterrorism chief is just a little bit upsetting to me; those sentiments are mere wishful thinking and American fear- and ego-stroking with "narrative agenda" written in blood all over them. We're talking about a guy, bin Laden, whose role over the past ten years has been so scarcely limited he might as well have not existed at all. And now, after what is and has always been an overblown and overhyped threat from al Qaeda to begin with after 9/11, after the death of that organization's feeble old symbolic face has finally died, America wants to act as if a major blow has been delivered and al Qaeda has been crippled; and while that's a nice and cleanly composed story book morality tale with a happy ending, it doesn't have much to do with the actual way reality has played out. I understand the potentially viewed insensitivity of what I'm saying to those who've lost loved ones in these acts, and I of course feel for you, I truly do, and I empathize with all your anguish, anger, and suffering, but I stress the point of an earlier sentence: this does nothing to mitigate any of that, at least nothing beyond temporary respite, the deferment of said anguish. Killing one man cannot make anything better; it cannot make up for ten years of mistakes and cluster-fucked ham-fisted clumsiness; and it cannot clean up the confusing messiness of the 9/11 acts in the first place. They happened and the death of their "orchestrator" cannot make them any more understandable or easier. It doesn’t vindicate the wars nor does it make up for all the lives lost therein. It inflicts not a lick of damage to the vast and interconnected system of al Qaeda and its diffuse and little understood affiliates; what it does put an end to is most Americans' symbolic understanding of that organization, and bin Laden is just that: a crudely drawn symbol and a practically irrelevant figure to them in recent years, a boogeyman for all of America's despair, fears, and anger. al Qaeda means "the base" in Arabic and that's exactly what their goal has been from the start: to be the base, which isn't the same thing as a central source of power, but a kind of loose gathering point of uncountable divisions and branches, subsidiaries and take-offs with marginally different ideological goals, all self-sustaining and all able to rely on others if need be, so many of them that it would impossible to track them all. What the jubilant and eerie celebration of this does is point to how futile and interminable these wars are and how desperate and yearning-for-anything of a nation we have become and how just plain old ignorant (or worse, in denial) to the state of things most of us are. Call it “justice” if you want; the dead aren’t coming back nor are they even watching. If there is such a thing as an afterlife and the dead are in fact capable of observing us, I hope to hell they've turned their back on our sad little dramas for something more interesting years ago; were I to be dead, I would much prefer to watch the gradual burning out of a distant star or the birth of a galaxy than the unforgivable cruelty and wastefulness of the human race. This is nothing more than a sadly trumpeted sensation to make up for what has been a decade of fruitless engagements, staggering losses of life, and rampant hopelessness in search of an end to a war (and a series of wars) without end, without directive, without, in general, a point. To combat terrorism is a vague and meaningless mission, in addition to which it is dangerous and reckless. For every Osama bin Laden you kill there are probably 300 more you don’t know about. The world (and America) is not even a scintilla safer than it was before, and to think that either of the two are demonstrates a fundamentally cracked and childish understanding of the world in which America is still a do-no-wrong spandex-clad superhero and purported “evil” can still be stamped off in one swift blow by felling a comic-book type of head-honcho evildoer. The lives that have been lost are lost and no amount of violence can rectify or make up for this. To celebrate this minor footnote on the grim, sanguine spreadsheet of these wars as a kind of comprehensive military triumph over evil, a symbol of American indomitability, and to pretend that because the American military managed (or may have managed) to kill one person who has been wandering around caves, luxuriating in compounds, and herding goats for the past ten years will in any way ensure a greater blanket of safety on the world is either shamelessly and pueriley naïve and simplistic or willfully ignorant and an example of seeing the world through perpetually red, white, and blue blinders, but it’s most likely all of the above, not to mention a pinch jingoistic. If anything, this is an example of America's singleminded compulsivity and perilously cathectic behavior disorder, in that we will pursue the first thought-best thought plan, no matter how terrible it is or how much damage (human and financial) it causes us, because that's what Americans do--get the goddamn job done at all costs; and it's there, that "at all costs" where you lose me and where you lose, as it turns out, lots of living, breathing lives, and where, in my opinion, the ends here are simply unjustified vis-a-vis the means, and not even close to being worthwhile. Watching the celebrations redolent of the kind of mind-numbing fist-pumping of fans after a superbowl victory, I'm actually a little stomach-sick at how myopic and callowly credulous we can be. The best and most composed way to celebrate or, let's try a better word, acknowledge the death (or rumored death) of Osama bin Laden would be to ignore it and ignore him, to go about your lives with your heads up and your eyes open, to continue being brave in a dangerous and violent world, to find some way to be kind to someone whom might need it, to dive in to the world and life you have right here and eke out as much significance as you can with the people you love because it all moves pretty rapidly and one doesn't have enough time to get caught up with pettiness and useless allocations of time, like the death of one insignificant Afghani guy with a beard who may or may not have been entirely responsible some massively and heinously atrocious acts, and to remember that there are still many thousands of men and women overextended, overtaxed, and being treated, in general, like armamentary apparatuses rather than human beings overseas pursuing an increasingly fragmented, dissolute, and disillusioned war against a nebulous conceptual enemy by which this country is being torn open and bankrupt and against which there is no genuine way of safeguarding and protecting ourselves, not in any meaningful way at least. Regardless of how you feel about bin Laden and 9/11 and the horrors thrust upon the country and the country's consciousness at that moment, there's something sick and depraved about excitedly and joyously celebrating the death of bin Laden, a ghastliness and a depravity that brings us right back around full circle to why we're here, because of a uniform celebration of death and destruction, mayhem and ruination, the same celebrated death and destruction that bin Laden and his janissaries felt when they toppled the towers and felt, for themselves, a sense of closure, an upper-hand, a comeuppance. Human life is human life is human life is human life is human life is human life; you want to be proud that he's gone, fine, go ahead. But to celebrate it, to want to see POV footage, as I've heard expressed, of the man being gunned down, the desire to see his shed blood, the extended desire to kill his family--i.e. to want to turn bid Laden's death into entertainment, which is what Americans want to do to everything--it's all a byproduct of the same sociopathic, inhumane, and detached viewpoint that brought us here in the first place--an unwillingness to approach even remotely understanding one another; an absolute self-assuredness and confidence in the purity, religiosity, nobility and almost saintliness of one's actions; a total dearth of doubt; and a kind of tumescent sense of pride in oneself and implosive self-centeredness--so to celebrate, to be mirthful and ecstatic at this death, is to be complicit in everything involved; be glad that a small chapter is finished and move on. Hate is a corrosive thing; energy is precious; and so you've got to be careful about to what or to where you devote it, and to hate bin Laden, to relish in his death (of which, in the end, I'm still a little unconvinced), not to mention to try and seek some kind of resolution from it, is nothing but a waste of time and personal resources and won't last you in the long run. I repeat: this means nothing other than a forced and false meaning affixed onto a linkage of wars devoid of any such thing. But it's fine. We'll buy signs and banners congratulating ourselves on bin Laden's death, we allow ourselves to be commercialized by the whole event, we'll join facebook groups commemorating and celebrating the death of bin Laden, we'll make jokes, we'll advocate for holidays in which we get a day off because of the rumored and as-yet unproven death of bin Laden, we will, in essence, trivialize not just the death of bin Laden, the deaths of those in 9/11, and the deaths of all those who have died until now and who will continue to die along the circuitous courseways of this pathetically empty-hearted and -headed war, but death itself, and when you trivialize death itself you also, as a result, trivialize and cheapen life, you make life all that much more meaningless than it already is right out the tabula rasa-gates. But it's fine. It's America. I get it. We're sad and desperate and incultured. Flags will wave briefly, car horns will honk wildly in feigned joyousness, and people will drink themselves into a stupor they will tell themselves is about American pride and not their own problems with their own dissatisfying lives, but in the days that follow the originally scheduled programming will return to America like the vomitous pall that it is with all the self-satisfying reliability of prime time television, and those sterilized, overly saccharine pop star voices auditioning to be big hits and national anthem-crooning baseball park stars and starlets will continue telling you the same fallacious nationalistic bromides you've been told for too many years for there to be any hope of reversibility: you are special; you are righteous; you are so fucking great.

On Endings:

2011-04-24T04:57:00.000-07:00

"The ending of a novel isn't usually very important. In fact,people never seem to remember the endings of novels (most especially crime novels--that's what makes them so re-readable) and movies (especially, once again, thrillers and whodunits). Conclusions and final explanations are often the most irrelevant--and disappointing--parts of a novel. What counts the most--and what we remember the most--is the atmosphere, the style, the path, the journey, and the world in which we have immersed ourselves for a few hours or a few days while reading a novel or watching a movie. What matters, then, is the journey along the horizon--in other words, the journey that never ends." Javier Marías, Spanish novelist and short-story writer.

First things first, Javier Marías is an excellent novelist of whom you need to be reading more. He's breathtakingly amazing. Secondly, This quote of his, which comes from a series of questions at the end of his short novel Voyage Along the Horizon, echoes my every sentiment regarding endings perfectly. Endings are, always, the part of novels I hate to read to the most, and I hate them even more when I can sense that the writer is trying, trying ever so hard, to smoothly end the novel in a conclusive and audaciously artificial way that just doesn't happen anywhere else in the world other than fiction, and I can catch the scent of an incoming "suddenly" epiphany from a mile away. Let the story linger, let the threads extend allusively, let the pieces fall where they fall, and then step away. Tie nothing up. Life goes on. My favorite books are the ones whose covers I close and wonder, with joy and awe, what comes next for these characters, where do their lives go from here? I'll never know, and that's the tragic beauty of it. My favorite books are the ones whose endings seem to end everything I've just read and yet, somehow, end nothing at all. My favorite books are the ones whose endings explore, explode, and dive into the absolute mystery and confusion present in this life, not attempt to wrestle it into a controlled, understandable, and safe submission.

The Stupid and Cruel Is Alive & Well in America

2011-03-12T17:29:00.000-08:00

Not that, you know, there's ever any convincing reason to believe the stupid and cruel isn't alive and well in America, but sometimes it's important to call attention to those egregiously self-identifying, red flag-waving examples of such mind warpage. All of this is, of course, in response to the terribly tragic 8.9 earthquake in Japan. I'm willing to bet every one of these posters are good old god-fearing, bible-thumping, gospel-quoting christians in whom hypocrisy is more or less the 11th commandment: thou shall hypocricise frequently, readily, blindly, repulsively.

Skewered

2011-03-09T22:19:00.000-08:00

I always prefer it when authors personalize their little "the following portrayals are based in fiction" disclaimers in the first few pages of a book. What exactly it adds for me, I have no idea, but I think it's that it's entertaining, in a wink wink, nod nod sort of way, to see the author, outside of the work of art in question, discussing the work of art qua a work of art qua its basis in reality or lack thereof and how, at once, in holds dominion in both reality and unreality. How delighted I was then when I found this on one of the opening pages of Fernando del Paso's epic and masterful Palinuro of Mexico:

"This is a work of fiction.
If certain characters resemble certain people in real life, it is because certain people in real life resemble characters from a novel.
Nobody, therefore, is entitled to feel included in this book.
Nobody, by the same token, to feel excluded."

"All Art Constantly Aspires to the Condition of Music"

2011-02-19T03:25:00.000-08:00

Two dope albums worth checking out that came out over the past week and this weekend with videos/songs dropped below: Abstract & ambient noise expressionist Tim Hecker's Ravedeath, 1972 and Radiohead's long-awaited latest The King of Limbs, both of which are just excruciatingly good; one is a blissful dive into warped sonic wreckage and pipe-organ-smeared-by-synths-and-haze airiness, and the other is a surprisingly funky Brazilian dub kind of thing but not surprisingly amazing in the most peerless way (because it's Radiohead and I more or less expect amazing peerlessness from them). Both, however, are deeply transportive records but for very different reasons. The above quote is from Walter Pater, an English art critic, essayist, and fiction writer, and I agree with its assertion without reservation.

Quick note on Radiohead in general: I don't think there's been a single group of musical artists more deft at and willing to change, explore, and evolve without seeming to ever worry one bit about how this alteration will be received, and for that I'm incredibly thankful and excited. This record, for example, is one of the funkiest of their outputs, a word that I don't imagine had been used often in discussing Radiohead.

And to bookend the titular Pater quotation, I'll end with a Thomas Mann from The Magic Mountain, which if you haven't read then shame on you: "Can one tell – that is to say, narrate – time, time itself, as such, for its own sake? That would surely be an absurd undertaking..." He goes on to align storytelling (and I would argue art overall) with the tempo of experience, rather than the representation of some kind of linear, Newtonian time, which is false and misleading. But tempo, musicologically speaking, concerned with the mood and the speed and the pace and the feel and the psychological and physical space of a given piece, seems more appropriate to talk about when talking about the way in which we, as humans, experience time. Storytelling is eventually compared directly to music making, both similarly described in their ability to "only present themselves as flowing, as a succession in time, as one thing after the other."

Attacking Fluff

2011-02-13T14:30:00.000-08:00

I'm not shy about saying I think a large proportion of what Malcolm Gladwell puts into his books is unfounded, specious, sophistic bullshit, all of which sometimes might sound nice and inspiring but upon further critical thinking and a kind of rigorous examination sort of falls in on itself due to a lack of solid and solidly researched foundation and a gross tendency to confuse and/or conflate correlation with causation. That out of the way, this website, The Malcom Gladwell Book Generator, is probingly spot on and precise--not to mention funny.

Or...

History, Civilization, & Time Are Our Subjects, Like It or Not

2011-02-12T03:53:00.000-08:00

Obvious statement: Carlos Fuentes is masterful and spellbinding. That out of the way, I'm lost and immersed in his humongous Terra Nostra, which he described as his attempt to write and account for a new history of Spain and South America, and a couple passages (a lot of passages) have struck out at me with some pretty aggressive immediacy, which passages I will gladly drop below.

"'You continue to believe that the world culminates in you, do not deny it; you continue to believe that you, you yourself, poor señor caballero, are the privilege and the sum of all creation. That is the first thing I want to advise you: abandon that pretense.'"

"'You look at me with scorn; you believe I am mad. You know how to measure time. I do not. Originally because I felt I was the same; later because I felt I was different. But between before and after, time was forever lost to me. Those only measure time who can remember nothing and who know how to imagine nothing. I say before and after, but I am speaking of that unique instant which is always before and after because it is forever, a forever in perfect union, amorous union.'"

"'One lifetime is not sufficient to reconcile two bodies born of antagonistic mothers; one must force reality, subject it to his imagination, extend it beyond its ridiculous limits.'"

Belated Postholiday Roundup

2011-02-05T19:45:00.000-08:00

The holidays speed by, for which I'm more grateful than nostalgic. It's good, I think, that they terminate almost as soon as (sometimes sooner) than they begin. That the bulk of my holidays included either reading, writing, and/or listening to new music was a tremendously refreshing experience, all through which I swept over to New Mexico, D.C., and back. I simmered and gestated and birthed for about two weeks, mentally and psychologically speaking. What follows will be a list of striking quotations from books and stories devoured, pictures taken for a roughhewn pictographic travelogue sort of thing, as well as some of the key tracks that came out in what amounted to holiday gift-giving from a number of my favorite artists (jj, yeasayer, the klaxons, MIA, & others I'm forgetting) all of whom released free or name-your-price eps, live albums, mix-tapes, &c over the holidays, thus providing all a person truly needs for happiness besides the whole food & shelter deal: books and music. Also, because I cannot get enough, I'll drop in a few of the yearend's best space shots. All in all a beautiful and short winter holiday (and not to mention year) spent with the people (and the person) I love, doing the things which constitute who and what I am. If I were the type of person to aggregate the best of the best of the best of the best of the best literature, music, film, art, and whatever into a spartan and digestible Best Of 2010 list, I would, but I find that type of crass selection and privatizing so abominable I avoid it altogether. Peace in the new year, fuck the world.

Baltimore to Brooklyn to Worldwide: Yeasayer, live album at Alcienne Belgique in Belgium. I couldn't find any decent pure audio versions of this, so some less-than-sonically-pellucid videos will have to suffice. You can cop the album for a cost of your choice (free, .99, 2.99, 4.99 &c), thanks to the wonderful Yeasayer guys, of whom everyone should be familiar. If you haven't seen them live or have and want something a little more lively permanent for your collection, grab this now.

JJ released their Kills mixtape on Christmas Eve. Like a lot of their work, it's loaded with pop and hip hop samples far and wide, recondite and popular, surprising and expected, all breathily and hypnotically spirited over with Elin's amazing, vapor-thick, and constantly yearning vocals, the combinatory effect of which is just stunning and bracing, and even a little bit disorientingly transcendent in a weird way. Grab it here at Sincerely Yours gratis. In the span of about two years, the Swedish duo has an output already on par with some groups and artists who've been around for a decade, not one fraction of which isn't worth sitting down and sinking into. Elin's ethyrean voice finds that weakest spot in your cortical center, that weakest vertebrae, and soothes the living shit out of it. For me, despite or in spite of the autotune found occasionally here, her voice opens up to miraculous spaces on this mixtape, places to which she hasn't quite gotten before, and she sounds a little bit more confident than before, and the songs benefit from it.

"All of Ionesco's theatre contains two strands side by side--complete freedom in the exercise of his imagination and a strong element of the polemical. His very first play, The Bold Soprano, was an anti-play, and as such a criticism of the existing theatre as well as a type of dead society. The same, strongly pugnacious spirit manifests itself in Ionesco's entire oeuvre, and it is therefore quite wrong to regard him as a mere clown and prankster. Ionesco's plays are a complex mixture of poetry, fantasy, nightmare--and cultural and social criticism. In spit of the fact that Ionesco rejects and detests any openly didactic theatre ('I do not teach, I give testimony. I don't explain, I try to explain.' he is convinced that any genuinely new and experimental writing is bound to contain a polemical element. 'The man of the avant-garde is in opposition to an existing system...An artistic creation is by its very novelty aggressive, spontaneously aggressive; it is directed against the public, against the bulk of the public; it causes indignation by its unusualness, which is itself a form of indignation.'"Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, "Eugene Ionesco: Theatre and Anti-Theatre"

The name Bradford Cox is really all that I need to mention. Holiday song:

"The rebellion hoarded up day by day against the fate which they had generously offered by means of a silly ejaculation was searching for its explanation at that time and its roots in the hated family tree. It was not possible, you said to yourself, that such a vivid and intense feeling, such a deep and bribe-free anomaly could rise up out of nothingness and thrive entirely in the air like an unrooted orchid. An anonymous member of your lineage had experimented before you perhaps, had transmitted them them intact to you at the cost of darks years of compromise and dissimilation. What was maturing in you and giving forth no fruit could feel it germinating inside of itself, terrified, like a cancer that grows and strengthens itself in the midst of the blindness and the ignorance of others. That impulse, obscure and luminous at the same time, had hidden in it something like a grace perhaps, perhaps like a shame, sacrificing, in any case, its true imperative to the stupid and inconsistent approval of the clan. You, his heir, had managed to cut the bonds in time without managing to free yourself completely because of it. Family, social class, community, land: your life could not be anything else (you subsequently found out) except a slow and difficult road of breaking and dispossession." Juan Goytisolo, Marks of Identity

Geotic, Los Angeles' Will Weisenfeld of Baths ambient side project, put out a free record a few days after the new year, Mend, which is purely magical. I think the first time I played it through I dematerialized or something for the duration of the record, some kind of psychic departure and intensive form of concentration. While you're at it, you should also check out his Baths project--a totally different and equally as engrossing experience. So glad to have a dude like this making so much music.

"The only thing that makes me write is the need, the overmastering need, at this moment more urgent ever it was in the past, to create a channel between my thoughts and my unsubstantial self, my shadow, that sinister shadow which at this moment is stretched across the wall in the light of the oil-lamp in the attitude of one studying attentively and devouring each word I write. This shadow surely understands better than I do. It is only to him that I can properly talk. Only he is capable of knowing me. He surely understands...It is my wish, when I have poured the juice--rather, the bitter wine--of my life down the parched throat of my shadow, to say to him, 'This is my life.'"Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl

M.I.A capped of 2010 with a mix-tape composed one long 36-minute track of industrialized chaos, sample cross-sectioning, and heavy head-nod beat-making, smashing about 20 songs into the tumultuous runtime of the mix-tape, each minute of which is dizzying and manically joyous. While criticizing her LP this year may have been a hobby of a lot of the music critics out there, this mix-tape is on-point and dazzling and, if you're on of those whom felt she veered off track on her latest record, shows she never really went anywhere.

Oh, and lastly: I can't even remember when Eric put this out, whether it was before the holidays, during, or after, but Eric Berglund, one half the Tough Alliance, and the brains and voice behind CEO did a rather awesone interpretation of Beyonce's "Halo" complete with Spanish guitars, blasting and rolling synths, strings, and horns. This is over-the-top in the best way possible.

Now for a aggregation of sorts of my personal heart-swoons with regards to images taken in, of, or from space throughout 2010, which I'll try to ensure aren't any of the ones I've previously included.

A sunspot image taken of the sun, showing the great ball of light more or less staring right back at us in a very creepy and somewhat absorbing manner.

12th time I've seen this and it still blows my mind, its almost cartoonish fantasia-like accents. What it actually is: The Carina Nebula, a stellar nursey 75000 light years away, and what's going on in the image is a whole lot of chaotic activity at the top of a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust being chomped and eaten away by the brilliant light of nearby stars.

Long exposure image of a magisterial face of a spiral galaxy deep within the Coma Cluster of galaxies 320 million light years thataway.

"In order to explain my life to my stooping shadow, I am obliged to tell a story. Ugh! How many stories about love, copulation, marriage, and death already exist, not one of which tells the truth! How sick I am of well-constructed plots and brilliant writing." Hedeyat, The Blind Owl.

Astronaut Nicholas toiling away on the International Space Station's seven-windowed observation deck, which apparently provides the most marvelous view of earth from this particular outpost.

Check out all 32 images here

Last but most certainly not even close to least, Baths, as mentioned above, will be touring the US this spring with Braids, and they'll be stopping at San Francisco's Rickshaw Stop in Hayes Valley on Friday, March 4th. Were I not already committed for something that day, I'd be there. Braids, who finally put out their LP--Native Speaker--is a spellbindingly and startlingly good band out of Canada too eclectically intricate and stylistically woven to even begin to describe with any precision. The only true reason I mention this show to which I won't even be able to go is so I can reccommend Braids. Highly textural, deeply hypnotic, long serpentine and fluid songs capable of going on forever with elusive percussion, surging rhythms, sudden movements form hushedness to exuberance, and the gorgeous and at times wild vocals pushing it all forward--they're remarkable, an alien and otherworldly kind of good, and just beginning.

Reductio Ad Absurdum

2010-11-28T19:39:00.000-08:00

"Once again, I'm aware that it's clumsy to put it all this way, but the point is that all of this and more was flashing through my head just in the interval of the small, dramatic pause Dr. Gustafson allowed himself before delivering his big reductio ad absurdum argument that I couldn't be a total fraud if I had just come out and admitted my fraudulence to him just now. I know that you know as well as I do how fast thoughts and associations can fly through your head. You can be in the middle of a creative meeting at your job or something, and enough material can rush through your head just in the little silences when people are looking over their notes and waiting for the next presentation that it would take exponentially longer than the whole meeting just to try to put a few seconds' silence's flood of thought into words. This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person's life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn't even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second's flash of thoughts and connections, etc.--and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language out native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we're thinking and to find out what they're thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows that it's a charade and they're just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one little tiny part of it at any given instant." DFW, Good Old Neon

My favorite picture of Dave, because of his
smile, the unfettered warmth of it.

Bradford Cox is Unleashing

2010-11-26T01:28:00.000-08:00

Few contemporary musicians utilize their internet presence the way Bradford Cox does. Lynchpin and brainchild behind both Deerhunter and Atlas Sound, one being his full band project and the other being his solo venture, respectively, Bradford is renowned for uploading onto his blog countless gift tracks, demos, b side cuts, tracks that didn't and/or won't make albums, holiday songs ( e.g. Christmas Synths!). So I've always known the dude is not only absolutely musically brilliant but also pretty formidable. I knew he produced a lot of music, and I knew a lot of it was superb; it wasn't until over the past few days when I realized Bradford is unrivaled and sui genaris in terms of his prolificacy: over four days, he's released a Bedroom Databank collection in four volumes, all of which are beyond par and a hell of a lot more enjoyable than quite a lot of music out there right now. The fact that these are the dude's outtakes is obscenely admirable and should inject not a small amount of envy in a lot of musicians. The music just pours out of him, it seems. Below, I'll link to the blog and the four individual posts for each volume.

Bedroom Databank Volume 1
Bedroom Databank Volume 2
Bedroom Databank Volume 3
Bedroom Databank Volume 4

Per usual, these are all gratis. And uncontrollably gorgeous.

Never Forget We Are Are Round

2010-11-25T03:49:00.000-08:00

& dense & packed & bent & spinning & full & enormous & nanoscopic & held together by dust & lovely.

Sicily and the rest of Italy's boot as seen from space all aglitter and lit up.

88 Keys & More

2010-11-20T01:13:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of John Cage, Germany's Volker Bertelmann, who records under the moniker Hauschka, paints haunting regional landscapes through the inventive and playful finger-workings of his prepared piano thanks to a bevy of acoustic sonic distortion. A prepared piano, for anyone unfamiliar, is piano with objects placed atop or in between the strings or on the hammers themselves, or in some cases having some strings deliberately detuned, so that the piano produces an unusual and idiosyncratic effect. Volker takes this idea to the extreme and practically unloads a thrift store worth of bric-a-brac and gewgaws on his pianos, flourishing his music with a lush and hypnotic layering of sounds, touches and often mysterious wintry textures, so much so that listening to his records gives one the sensation that you're listening to a full company playing, complete with percussion and everything. He stepped into NPR's studios last week and gave a small performance, showing the process going into the preparation and then the ensuing result, which result Volker says he enjoys because, as I've always admired, it puts something in motion and creates something going on that is, as the composer and the pianist, beyond his control.

Ping pong balls, tic tac containers, paperclips, leather, necklaces, foil, shish kebab skewers, anything and everything is on the table and on or in the piano for Volker's performances. The result is a sort of celebration of aleatoric brio.

In addition to performing two more or less improvised pieces, for which his prepared piano methodologies seems naturally destined, Hauschka also played a piece from his most recent LP, Foreign Landscapes, entitled "Mount Hood." Beyond his latest output, I recommend: everything he's ever recorded. The dude is magical.

On the Construct of Time:

2010-11-18T04:08:00.000-08:00

I think, perhaps, that I'm a weird reader, at least in this current generational crop, in that I feel immeasurably comfortable and at home in books with devastatingly long and dense paragraphs; minimalism does nothing for me; simplicity does even less; and brevity is, in general, not the soul of wit. Brain-straining fiction is what I crave. Mentally, emotionally, psychically, physically exhausting fiction. I enjoy that sensation of being lost inside a particular fictive world, a world that is as layered, fractured, complicated, disastrous, miraculous, beautiful, mystifying, horrific, and frustrating as our own; and I don't mind one bit when time is completely obliterated. As I see it, if one is enjoying a particular book, why on earth would you want to leave that book? Why would you need room to breath somewhere in the pages? When I'm reading, when I'm deeply, emotionally, and intellectually invested in a work, the pages are the oxygen. I don't need anything else. The best books, for me, are the ones I don't want to end, the ones in which I could remain entrenched and submerged forever. In point of fact, I wholly understand that sensation, of time being nonexistent and being encased in a form of gripping, strangulating nowness in which everything that has ever happened and will happen is happening right now, to me, distilled and acute, like that tiny fly golden-hued and amber-stuck inside a chunk of sap on the trunk of an ancient tree. Attribute this to a background in continental philosophy and world theology as well as just heaps upon heaps of anxiety and insecurity. That said, it's no wonder that I love W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz, who--Sebald, that is--has cited Robert Walser, of whom I am devoted admirer, as a major influence. I will say right now: I do not believe in time.

"Time, said Austerlitz in the observation room in Greenwhich, was by far the most artificial of all out inventions, and in being bound to the planet turning on its own axis was no less arbitrary than would be, say, a calculation based on the growth of trees or the duration required for a piece of limestone to disintegrate, quite apart from the fact that the solar day which we take as our guideline does not provide any precise measurement, so that in order to reckon time we have to devise an imaginary, average sun which has an invariable speed of movement and does not incline towards the equator in its orbit. If Newton thought, said Austerlitz, pointed through the window and down to the curve of the water around the Isle of Dogs glistening in the last of the daylight, if Newton really thought that time was a river like the Thames, the where is its source and into what sea does it finally flow? Every river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so where, seen in those terms, where are the banks of time? What would be this river's qualities, qualities perhaps corresponding to those of water, which is fluid, rather heavy, and translucent? In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it? Why do we show the hours of light and darkness in the same circle? Why does time stand eternally still and motionless in one place, and rush headlong by in another? Could we not claim, said Austerlitz, that time itself has been nonconcurrent over the centuries and the millennia? It is not so long ago, after all, tht it began spreading out over everything. And is not human life in many parts of the earth governed by the weather, and thus by an unquantifiable dimension which disregards linear regularity, does not progress constantly forward but moves in eddies, is marked by episodes of congestion and irruption, recurs in ever-changing form, and evolved in no one knows what direction? Even in a metropolis ruled by time like London, said Austerlitz, it is still possible to be outside time, a state of affairs which until recently was almost as common in backward and forgotten areas of our own country as it used to be in the undiscovered continent overseas. The dead are outside time, the dying and all the sick at home or in hospitals, and they are not the only ones, for a certain degree of personal misfortune is enough to cut us off from the past and the future. In fact, said Austerlitz, I have never owned a clock of any kind, a bedside alarm or a pocket watch, let alone a wristwatch. A clock had always struck me as something ridiculous, a thoroughly mendacious object, perhaps because I have always resisted the power of time out of some internal compulsion which I myself have never understood, keeping myself apart from so-called current events in the hope, as I now think, said Austerlitz, that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was, or more precisely I shall find that all moments of time have coexisted simultaneously, in which case none of what history tells us would be true, past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them, although that, of course, opens up the bleak prospect of everlasting misery and neverending anguish."

That sounds like a mission statement.

This Novel Slanders Mao Zedong

2010-10-31T00:16:00.000-07:00

Practically all I have the time for these days are blog posts featuring quotes from books I'm reading. While the page count for the writing projects pile up into miniature towers of novelistic architecture of brutalist design, any idea of free time goes way out the window into the San Francisco Bay. So here's another, from Chinese novelist Yan Lianke's hysterical and gut-punchingly serious-indeed Serve the People!

"As things stood, matters had now swung from the deadly serious to the unimaginably ridiculous--to a level of absurdity beyond Wu Dawang's own comprehension, but still artistically consistent with the fantastical parameters of our story. Neither character, in fact, had grasped the full ludicrousness of the scene they were acting out, or of their roles within it. Perhaps, in very particular circumstances, emotional truth can shine only through the curtain of farce, while earnest restraint will always fail to ring true. Maybe absurdity is the state that all affairs of the heart are, finally, destined for: the ultimate and only test of worth." Lianke, Serve the People!

Truer words, never spoken. I long for more of Lianke's translations. His most recent novel, Dream of Ding Village, concerns an AIDS outbreak in China and was, once again, banned by the government for, and I quote, "dark descriptions, to exaggerate the harm and fear of AIDS." Apparently, there's a bright side to AIDS of which I've been unaware? It's been referred to as the Chinese answer to Camus' The Plague, and even were I unfamiliar with Lianke's work up to this point, that comparison alone would interest me, as the The Plague was, I always thought, Camus' best work.

Yes!

2010-10-06T12:33:00.000-07:00

Aside from speaking acerbically and at length with a fair amount of frankness about Sonic Youth and their 90s shift out of the independent scene to a more mainstream, major label venture, Steve Albini was volleying off bits and pieces of his far-reaching, multitopical opinion left and right. An excised quote from indie musician, notable producer, and notorious jeans-and-t-shirt-kind-of-guy on fashion given to, with a straight face one would imagine--and this is what makes it great--GQ magazine:

"I think fashion is repulsive. The whole idea that someone else can make clothing that is supposed to be in style and make other people look good is ridiculous. It sickens me to think that there is an industry that plays to the low self-esteem of the general public. I would like the fashion industry to collapse. I think it plays to the most superficial, most insecure parts of human nature. I hope GQ as a magazine fails. I hope that all of these people who make a living by looking pretty are eventually made destitute or forced to do something of substance. At least pornography has a function."

Arcade Fire Comes In & Soothes

2010-10-04T02:27:00.001-07:00

Not even with their music this time, either. In a recent interview with Pitchfork, brothers Win and Will Butler said a number of wise things which not only resonated with me in a big way but also apply in a sort of general way to the literary scene of the day and the ways in which major publishing houses, like major record labels, are floundering, and why I tend to find a lot of the current crop of literature written contemporaneously quite dull, unimaginative, self-involved, and artificial (and yes, there are more than a few exceptions to that last bit). A couple of the gemlike standouts below, but check out the whole interview at The Fork and not to mention their latest long player, which is a phenom of a record, a sonic event.

Pitchfork: A recent New Yorker piece used your success as an argument against major labels, what's your take on that?

Will Butler: Major labels just lost their way. It's like the housing bubble. They lost a sense of the fundamentals. They were just flailing about and throwing money around. They weren't thinking about putting out good music or embracing new things.

Win: When we were getting courted in the early days of Funeral, we would get taken to these dinners, and it was just like, "We'll take the dinner, but who's paying for this?" I guess Led Zeppelin is. But, at the end of the day, we were just like, "Would we be paying for other peoples' dinners?" It's such a weird thing.

It seems like the record industry made so much crazy money in the 1960s that everyone wanted to get in on it. Now it's just become very corporate. So all of these people who despise music end up being in charge.

And more, commenting on a kind of myopia amongst young people making art these days:

Will: We are ambitious, and I think that the general mode of almost all art these days is pretty small-focused. In literature and in film, the culture is all about these Miranda July-esque small moments observed in a lovely manner. Nothing against Miranda July, but I think that's the prevailing aesthetic.

I remember reading a book where the author was making fun of people who liked [Melville's] Bartleby, the Scrivener instead of Moby Dick-- like favoring a well-crafted short story instead of his flawed, epic thing. But I think we're definitely much more of a Moby Dick kind of band, and a lot of bands just aren't. And there are some beautiful small songs out there, and it would be nice if we could theoretically do a small album. Maybe we will. But the music we really reacted to growing up was stuff that was a little bigger and more major label.

Pitchfork: Like what?

Will: The original stuff that got me excited about music was Björk and Radiohead and the weirder spectrum of the bands that were popular and on MTV. Radiohead weren't small in their focus. It definitely seemed like they were talking about the world at large. I think the first indie music I heard was Neutral Milk Hotel and the Music Tapes, who were both Elephant 6 bands on Merge.

Still more, hinting at autonomy and the absolute silliness of art school, academia, and some of the absurd rules and theories occasionally found therein:

Pitchfork: On "Ready to Start", you sing about an emperor who "wears no clothes" that the kids "bow down to... anyway." Do you ever worry about reaching that kind of level of hero worship yourself?

Win: America's a big country. There're still way more people who've never heard of us. For me, the feeling of "Ready to Start" came from going to art school and meeting a lot of people who had really defined political ideas and rules about art. But I just wanted to make something in the world and worry about the rest of it later and not get too caught up in rules.

Literary City

2010-09-28T00:56:00.000-07:00

While I won't be the first person to extol the untainted virtue of the United States as a democratic entity, I will be one of the first to stand up in defense of San Francisco. Like all cities, we've got our fair share of flaws and kinks to work out, but if there's any place to be frustrated about bureacratical flaws and democratic kinks (and not the fun kind of kinks) and general carelessness from time to time I'd rather be in San Francisco than anywhere else. I love no city in the United States like I love San Francisco. In fact, I don't love any cities in the United States other than San Francisco. San Francisco, in a matter of speaking, is my United States, as I think might the case with a lot of San Franciscian émigrés for whom San Francisco has been a kind of refuge city to which they can relocate in order to set up a life free of personal and ethical compromise and free of a kind of close-minded denigration, effrontery, and at times outright oppression. San Francisco is, for the most part, a warm, friendly, open place, hospitable to any kind of person you can imagine. We encourage and welcome all; and that's this city's draw. It's human constitution is about as freakishly eclectic as possible. We are one giant carbon-based portmanteau of living bodies and it's really quite breathtaking. When I first moved to California, after after a few months spent getting comfortable and learning my way around San Diego, I wrote a poem, the contents of which I'll spare you, called "California is a Country." The theme of that poem is patent to the title; I still believe that, too. California feels at times like an autonomous nation cleanly divorced from the rest of the nation, for better or worse. And San Francisco, while not the capitol of the state, has all the trappings and sensations of being the de facto capitol of this imagined nation-state of California. All of this is not to say California isn't, at the state, governmental, and occasional personal level, debilitatingly inept; but so is just about anywhere you go in the country. I'm not romanticizing things here. Part of loving something or someplace or someone involves acknowledging faults, weaknesses, pockmarks; and it's funny how, over time, those become the features you remember most and of which you're fondest.

But my reverence for San Francisco specifically is core-of-the-earth deep. There are myriad reasons for this. The one specific one about which this post is concerned is the literary lustre both past and present. Local artist Ian Huebert has given birth to a truly beautiful map composed up of literary quotes from the past written in and/or about San Francisco. SF locals will be able to pick them up as hard copies on 8th and Minna at Electric Works in SoMa for a modest 15 bones. Until then, just enjoy.

Click the picture for a larger, more detailed view; and also check out Ian's website for more of his excellent work. At Ritual Roasters his work will be hanging from the walls all through the month of October, so that makes for a doubly excellent experience--Ritual coffee is rather inarguably superb.

This Particular J.C. We Know Existed; He Sang, Played Jazz, & Left a Paper Trail

2010-09-26T00:37:00.000-07:00

"'Eat your flan,' ordered Clara, still looking at Andrés out of the corner of her eye. His eyes he'd closed. He seemed to be awaiting either an electric shock or a miracle." Julio Cortázar, Final Exam.

The sentence has such power. We all, today, seem to be either impatiently awaiting either an electrokinetic jolt or a miracle or a universe-delivered sign storming in on a cloud of good tidings from one of the few thousand gods, none of which show any signs of coming or ever existing in the first place.

In other related news, Cortázar, who's one of those deeply-missed authors whom I will recommend almost always, also evidently presaged the whole globular-insectile-frame-sunglasses craze we know see going on crazily today:
He, however, does it with a handsome flair and wise éclat that's hard to find these days amongst the notable notables, even just mugging for the photogs. Methinks it's the beard and that thick, wild hair. All that said, read Hopscotch. Go to the library and get something, anything by Cortázar and drink that elixir down.

And but so

2010-09-13T15:56:00.000-07:00

"Do you know where all the really sad stories I'm getting are coming from? They're coming, it turns out, from kids. Kids in college. I'm starting to think something is just deeply wrong with the youth of America. First of all, a truly disturbing number of them are interested in writing fiction. Truly disturbing. And more than interested, actually. You don't get the sorts of things I've been getting from people who are merely...interested. And sad, sad stories. Whatever happened to happy stories, Lenore? Or at least morals? I'd fall ravenously on one of the sort of didactic Salingerian solace-found-in-the-unlikeliest-places pieces I was getting by the gross at Hung and Peck. I'm concerned about today's kids. These kids should be out drinking beer and seeing films and having panty raids and losing virginities and writhing to suggestive music, not making up long, sad, convoluted stories. And they are as an invariable rule simply atrocious typists. They should be out having fun and learning to type. I'm a little worried. Really." David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System

I won't sit here and belabor the point: yes, David Foster Wallace is and was incommensurably amazing and you should read everything he wrote, like, five times and then five more times. But on a side note: I sincerely miss the pre-nineties Vintage Contemporary softbacks with the cheesy art-deco meets pop-art for these pseudosurreal covers which pointed at something suggestively deep, emotional, painful, or harrowing possibly to be found in the text. I seriously miss those. Like this: Cormac McCarthy's early novel,and one of his best, far better than his smash hit The Road, Suttree.

2010-08-27T01:00:00.000-07:00

"Think you're escaping and run into yourself.
Longest way round is the shortest way home."
James Joyce, Ulysses.

Trieste, Italy, where Joyce first began penning the epic and moving novel about everything powerfully all at once, without reprieve.

As I toil away at my Fulbright application for a potential writing grant in Italy (with a fantasized permanent relocation afterwards), Joyce's own personal triumphs, travails and emigrations move along similar pathways with my mind, the words echo, his own rails pitted against his native land and his reasons for leaving synch with mine, and this image above, along with rereading Joyce for the umpteenth time and sort of swallowing up that fierce and tirelessly humane esprit, gives me both joy and hope.

Brief tangental PSA: Ulysses is a book whose gorgeousness, insight, and pure jouissance exceeds so much of the fiction out there I often genuinely feel bad that so many people are cheated out of the pleasure of reading it courtesy of far too many trumped-up charges citing its purposeful difficulty, its modernist posturing, its inaccessibility, and so on; none of that's true. Yes, it's playful; yes, it's demanding. But it's also, and most importantly, a wonderful read and in its celebration of the human body and the human being a vital one; that it requires patience and concentration, as all good books should, is no reason to ignore it.

Stuttering & Linguistic Development or Stuttering to Linguistic Development or Stuttering Words or Words Are Stuttering or Stuttering, Just Stuttering

2010-08-23T12:24:00.001-07:00

David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, Ghostwritten) is one of those keystone contemporary writers for me, one to whom I often look for inspiration and reminders that there are still modern writers being published whose work is both challenging and satisfying, intellectual and human, entertaining and philosophically concerned. In short, he's one of those writers who I'd prefer reading one of their lesser works than most other writers' best, because even a faltering David Mitchell is superior and more worthwhile a read than a lot of what's out there these days in the big glut of literary acclaim.

To mark the publication of his most recent novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which I have in queue and am working towards dilligently, he gave an interview with Alec Michod for the splendid gift to literary levelheadedness, San Francisco-based Rumpus; in it, he shed a little personal insight on something about which I've thought for a long time: stuttering, speech impediments in general, and how that affects and/or develops a person's linguistic understanding and, to use a writerly phrase, their inner voice, the vocabulary and the speech going on inside our heads and not the one with which we speak. I've always had a sneaking suspicion that growing up with a pretty nasty stutter instilled in me from a wildly young age a deeper appreciation and thoughtfulness about language, how it works and functions as a mechanism for expression, and how important words and communication are, if simply because I had to pay closer attention to words when reading aloud in class or speaking to people, friends, family, strangers. When I knew certain words or parts of words or whole phrases would be difficult for me to get out, I'd have to find ways to navigate around that, by substituting other words, by altering my pronunciation or rhythm to avoid a total, ten-feet-tall obstructing stammer which would not only render me unintelligible but make me look like an idiot. For a young mind, there's something startling and unjustly unfair in realizing that the words in your head cannot match the words springing from your tongue no matter how hard you will them to do so. The words, in a sense, become much more important to a mind tweaked that way. Communication and lack-of-communication (where our words fail) are much more intimately experienced to a mind and a body tuned that way, in a person who deals with those very things per diem. And if the words cannot come out through our lips the way we want them to, well then we have to resolve to find another mode of communicating. When approached by certain words I'm incapable of pronouncing without embarrassment, the easiest thing to do as a kid was expand my vocabulary--find new ways of saying the same thing. It's no surprise a person like this might find solace in the literary arts, the silent and absorbed processing and conveyance of words during which silence is elemental. All of this might even help to explain why, when I'm writing or when I'm reading (i.e. engaged in a nonverbal sort of communique with the author), I'm so excited and alive in a totality that's much more elusive elsewhere. It's the clearest way for for me to communicate, to express myself, and where, at last, the thoughts I'm expressing accord with the thoughts in my head (for the most part). And assuming how we ourselves communicate with others, an exchange of thoughts and ideas, is one of the many processes by which we understand ourself, this can present a problem; if we have an onerous time effectively expressing ourselves or making our desires and sentiments clear to others, a certain crisis of self can result. We are, after all, social animals, part of whose happiness is derived from our interactions with other social animals caught in the same struggle--escaping loneliness, fleeing a permanently confined existence bunkered within our own heads, in which safety is substituted over genuine connection. This, gladly, can be done through verbal or literary dialogues, but my guess says a combination of both is the most satisfying. Reading Dante or Oscar Wilde and speaking with a friend or a stranger about an important topic are two different beasts, both of which are equally important and both of which can, I believe, help inform a person's sense of belonging and community. There's something equal, although different in nature, in feeling a connectedness (which is a form of interfacing in a way) with a thinker from long before you were alive and engaging a living contemporary person in conversation. And if you're talking to a stranger about Dante and Wilde and how they, the historical writers, may have viewed or written about the contemporary world, well now you're just vibrating that big old string of the cello belonging to collective history and playing a wonderful, soaring tune.

The interview takes it in a couple different directions, (much as I've unexpectedly done here with my small bout of self-cross-examination) but it's all highly fascinating stuff--very intriguing to think about.

Mitchell: There’s always the problem of getting what you’re thinking out into the world, isn’t there? I think possibly genes and certainly environment makes us a walking bundle of archetypes, and as a human and as a writer one of my major preoccupations is incommunication. Isn’t it true how everything contains its opposite? How can you have a knowledge of beauty without knowing what ugliness is? Or, or—do you know what I mean? A phenomenon contains its opposite. To have a knowledge of phenomenon is, by default, to know about the opposite. This leads, among other things, to a fascination with words. We aspire to be master communicators, right? But that must also mean we are deeply versed in non-communication, in fluffing it, in getting it wrong, in duff sentences, in not saying quite what you mean and the consequences of that. Stammering makes me an expert in that. I’ve obviously thought about this link a lot, because one of the questions people ask me a lot is “If you hadn’t stammered, would you be a writer?” I think I would have been, but I would have been a different writer. I wouldn’t have had this theme of incommunication. I can identify at least three ways in which they are related. One is—

Rumpus: Stuttering and writing?

Mitchell: You scan the sentences ahead and you see the danger words, the words you won’t be able to say, and then you re-engineer the sentence to be able to go around it. That’s a practical crash course in sentence construction. That, in turn, leads to a practical crash course in register. If you realize you can’t get out the second syllable “less” in the word “useless,” you substitute “futile.” That might fix the vocal problem, but it creates another problem. If you’re amongst a bunch of thirteen-year-old boys, you can’t say a word like “futile.” Everyone will think you’re mad. But again, it’s bloody useful stuff for a writer. You learn your registers. I mean, there they are, all these fancy words, some of them on high registers and others on less educated registers. If you’re a writer and you use a word like “autodidacticism” to describe a character, it completely saves you from having to mention that that character went to college. As a consequence, you develop a higher vocabulary, because you need substitutes.

Rumpus: You need four different words if you can’t say one, for example.

Mitchell: Precisely. I think—I can’t prove it, but I suspect our interior voices are far richer than our spoken voice. If you are one of those people who speak in perfectly mellifluous, complex sentences, I would humbly suggest you think them instead of saying them. It is, of course, impossible to be able to compare a writer’s inner voice and his spoken voice in the quality of the diction and the grammar, but I like to think that stammerers’ inner voices are going to be far more articulate and sharper than someone who isn’t affected by a speech impediment.

Rumpus: Stammering, then, clearly seems to have contributed to your fluency with different voices. Is that why you’re such an apt literary ventriloquist?

Mitchell: I hear what you’re saying, and here’s a new thought for me: perhaps it’s a craftily manifested wish fulfillment on my part. The times I’ve thought I wish I could speak like that guy, or I wish I could chat somebody up unstutteringly. I wish, I wish, I wish—I wonder if that “I wish” is fuel or a kind of power.

I had a close friend growing up who lived next-door. He too had a speech impediment, not a stutter per se but something else a little more sloppily complicated, a fractioned manner of speaking; he spoke fast, as I did then and tend to still do now, and logjammed. We spent whole chunks of time together, baked to leather under the sun, in trees or half submerged in creek water, chomping through a bag of peaches, our chins sticky and sweet, neither one of us concerned about screwing up our words around each other; and while at times I may not have understood what he was saying nor do I believe he always understood what I was saying (at least without asking for him or myself to repeat something) I think we grasped each other on a much more intuitive level. We understood frustrations and confusions and how to deal with them, and we understood patience and maybe leaving room for and being okay with the messiness of language, which is to say we were beginning to understand what it means to be alive.

Check out the interview in full at The Rumpus' website.

Tempus Fugit

2010-08-07T02:58:00.000-07:00

"I wonder if it’s possible to have a second chance at life? I don’t think so. I’m not afraid of death — I’ll just be one of the million, billion grains of sand in the desert…"
Klara Behrens, 83

In 2008, German photographer Walter Schels and his partner Beate Lakotta put together this accumlatory project, Life Before Death, twin sets of portraits of terminally ill indviduals before and after they die. In addition to the portraiture, Schels and Lakotta recorded interviews and conversations with the dying men and women over their final days, uncloaking much about both the bitter reality of death and the strangely wonderful (and oft bittersweet) process of being alive. It's a quite chilling and movingly gripping collection. This is, I realized halfway through writing, a collection two years past its prime, but that takes nothing away from the immediacy present therein, no matter what the date is. In fact, my being two years past this collection's prime seems somewhat appropriate given the fatal thematics of the collection. The only thing ever-lasting is death, mortality being the most permanently relevant topic out there. Not the most uplifting set of images but neither are they ignorable or unimportant. These images provide reminders of the brevity and the fragility of the lives we lead, and I'm grateful for the bravery and kindness of the individuals represented here in allowing their most frightening, vulnerable moments to be shown, albeit long after they can see it.

Accretions So Large You Could Climb Them

2010-07-14T01:08:00.000-07:00

I still owe money
to the money
to the money I owe;
The floors are falling
out from
everybody I know.
The National. "Bloodbuzz Ohio"¹, High Violet²

1. ∴
2. On a developmental note, this entire new LP of theirs (The National) is overflowing with moody, foreboding, dread-inspired, nail-bitingly ominous, social-phobically sorrowful, and somehow triumphant songs, not to mention some beautiful raw music. If you haven't checked it out, you absolutely must. Ditch your Lady Gaga; or your freshest singer-songwriter with a guitar, a pretty face, and a swiped-clean, overproduced voice singing that same trite song that's been sung three hundred times before; or the latest American Idol ideation of "popular music", and listen to something with a little pluck and emotion.

Wholesome Imagistic Goodness

2010-07-11T17:37:00.000-07:00

The sad truth is you can't rely on televised news to usher forth anything remotely interesting or educational or anything to remind one that not everything is completely falling apart from the ground up these days. And maybe they can't, maybe they don't have the time. You'd think in the cushiony, consequence-free ether of existence in which 24-hours news syndications thrive they could somehow manage to fit in something that wasn't entirely doom-and-gloom-related, but I suppose not. Instead they toss (more like sneak) these stories onto the Science or Space or Technology sections on their websites, as if anyone who wasn't already interested in those topics was going to take a peek. In any event, this weekend was the first Total Solar Eclipse of the new year. And while those of us in the States couldn't see it, that didn't stop others from chasing after it and snapping some incredible photography in the South Pacific on which the eclipse set its gleaming, electric stage. While the total Solar Eclipse was exclusive in visibility to Easter Island, Cook Island, and surrounding areas of Southern Chile and Argentina, other parts of the Eclipse, like the crescent phase pictured below, could be seen from a large portion of Western South America.

Valparaiso, Chile

Moving from the sunkissed beaches of the Pacific Isles to the cold chambering frontier of the cosmos, where the European Space Agency's Rosetta probe has since February of 2004 been commissioned deep into the universe to ultimately rendezvous and study the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, while in the meantime grabbing as much photographic data on its passings and mishaps as possible. On Saturday, Rosetta flew by the asteroid Lutetia and managed to capture what might be some of the most detailed images of an asteroid to date.

The crater-pulverized, pockmarked irregular shaped rock is likely leftover from the birth of the solar system. "Tonight we have seen a remnant of the solar system's creation," Holger Sierks of the Planck Institute said.

The Rosetta probe passed by the eccentric and rotating rock at the dizzying speed of 9 miles per second and inched within 1,965 miles of Lutetia in the asteroids orbital path around Mars. 6 years and 4 months into its mission thus far, the hope with Rosetta is that it will help unlock the secrets of how our solar system looked before planets formed, 4600 million years ago when nothing other than teems of comets and asteroids surrounded the sun. If things work out as predicted, the Rosetta probe will meet with the Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, upon which it will place a lander and the two will then journey together piggybacked, harpooned to each other; they'll speed through space for several months as they approach Jupiter's orbit and then head for the sun, on which Rosetta will finally touch down after many years of intergalactic voyaging to take samples of our solar system's governing star, by far its chief component and its centerpiece, one of our main sources of light as well as many of our problems--the same sun without which we would not even exist.

Just as I was writing all that I received an update with another picture. An even more beautiful one, in my opinion, thanks to its scope and distance and frigid emptiness. The European Space Agency website has the rest of the images and a remarkable video to boot.

Lutetia--soaring, peeling layers through space--with Saturn way off the in the background, just hanging out, keeping it real.

Fool's Gold & Vincent Moon All Up in Your Audiometric Headspace

2010-07-07T22:01:00.000-07:00

I mentioned not too long ago the increasing number of exciting and excellent happenings in and around Los Angeles' rumbling independent music scene, the diversity, the quality, the fun atmosphere brought to the stage by many if not all of these artists, among other plauditory characteristics. Fool's Gold was one I had mentioned. They're a big, tropically toe-tapping collective who draw some major influence from multiple different forms of African music (soukous, East African, Touareg desert blues, etcetera), blending their shared love for those more warmer sounds (think lots of syncopated rhythms; shimmering, prickly guitar work) with 80s dance-influenced pop, all that with the Israel-born Luke Top on vocals singing melismatically more often in Hebrew than in English. This isn't mildly-Afropop-influenced indie music, which there is, I stress, nothing wrong with on its own merits and is quite good; but this is something all on its own, American pop music filtered through global pop music and stewed around a little more, handed back and forth in rhythmic and sonic exchange, the after effect of which gives us Fool's Gold's savory, compelling sound, fit for both headphones and large parties alike. This is inspirational singalong dance music in every sense of the word, and it's done wisely and intricately. So it was only a matter of time before Vincent Moon et al hooked up with these guys. Moon (whom I am perfectly aware I unabashedly admire) caught up with them for his Soirée de Poches series in Paris during a show they had done with Kouyaté & Neerman. Twenty-four lush minutes here. Their debut came out in '09 and has been spinning for me since then on a fairly recurring basis. Pop this video on, pick up a book, and enjoy. Or if so incline, dance. (And buy their record.) Los Angeles should be championing, celebrating, and talking about Fool's Gold constantly, wildly invigorating music that should be keeping people sweaty and dancing well into sunrise.

This Month in Space: June

2010-07-03T20:09:00.000-07:00

I've no qualms admitting that when one month ends and another begins I get downright childishly giddy with feverishness and anticipatory glee, knowing full well that another batch of sinewy and insanely-precise gorgeousness from space will be put together by a handful of websites, MSNBC's Science and Technology's oftentimes one of best and most comprehensive.

Clouds skitter above Papua New Guinea's Manam Volcano while thin white vaporous volcanic discharge issue forth from the mouth itself

Hot young stars--and not in a celebratory way. Here's a fecund star-forming region whose subzero, frosty glow is reflected and re-directed by the surrounding gas and clouds.

An aural pyrotechnic show put on display overtop the South Pole. Ethereal and tender.

And maybe I'm just a major sucker for chiaroscuro, but I adore this one, the light and dark composition. Fucking haunting and bare and solemnly moving.

Saturn's ice-composed, crater-hammered, and wisp- and dust-covered moon (and 15th largest moon in the entire Solar System) Dione shown in stark, almost unreal precision against the lazy, blurry backdrop of Titan, one of Saturn's other moons. And the void of space around it, that freezing void, in the center of which Dione is suspended like a levitating yogi.

There's plenty more where these came from, all of which are worth taking in on their own right. Check them out here.

My, How Far We've Come

2010-07-01T20:26:00.000-07:00

An actual page taken from an actual textbook published by the Christianity-First,-Education-Second Bob Jones University in 2004, updated in 2008. Two-thousand-and-fucking-eight? Stick your finger in an electrical socket; tell me what you feel.

The book's synopsis? "Explain God's ordered world to your student through the study of the moon, light, electricity, area and volume, simple machines, digestion, animal defenses, trees, erosion, and simple classification of insects." And here I thought Zeus was responsible for electricity! Electricity's just a theory, ya'll. Place ye faith in the Lord to wield it forth.

Alcohol & Art

2010-06-26T04:15:00.000-07:00

Just in time for the weekend, right here. And no, this has nothing to do with the stupid mythopoeia regarding mostly-in-the-minority self-destructive artists and addiction. Florida State University chemistry labs has been whipping up some gorgeous work for a company called Bevshots, whom quite literally ferment art out of your favorite alcohol and/or cocktail. Below, for instance, is what a little bit of Chablis would look like hung up on one of your walls. Pretty, huh? Right. And tasty. So now you can sip on some Chablis whilst admiring your hung mural of Chablis, discussing with friends both how good this Chablis is in your hand and also how you managed to procure an artistic expression of Chablis, getting all meta in the 21st century and subsequently blowing the rickety minds of everyone within thirty feet of you.

How they do it: taken at 1000x magnification on old school 35 mm. cameras, this is a labor of love, folks, one in which patience goes beyond virtue into simply a part of the process. In order to get the perfect shot, this can take up to three months and upwards of 300 camera clicks.

Your standard red table wine, looking like fluorescent stems of some kind of beautiful faunal growth.
What we're seeing here are basically crystallized carbohydrates. Now that they've crystallized, they've become full-on sugars and glucose. After squeezing from a pipette a droplet of liquor or cocktail or lager onto a slide, the liquid is then allowed to dry on this airtight container, the drying of which can take up to four weeks alone; once dry, it's then placed for examination under a high-powered microscope with an old school 35 mm. attached. Depending on the number of impurities (pure vodka, for instance, has very few impurities, as compared to a pina colada, which is naturally chockfull of them), the dried constituent parts may fall apart or not dehydrate properly, which accounts for some samples requiring so many attempts.

The Piña Colada, due to its inherent complex sugars and citric acids, behaves like a doll and dries out well, thus it looks spectral when glimpsed through a microscope--winding up here resembling a very alien, very twisted, and very trippy butterfly pattern. Check out how there's almost an origin of left-to-right movement here, the dark brown spot in the top left-hand corner from which the rest of the image sprawls out.

The intense, florid, breezy, wild shapes and kaleidoscopic colors come from the chemists shining light on top and through the bottom of the slide, both of which seem to ignite these potent samples into a whole other realm of colorization, a sinewy world of molecularly psychotropic pigments capable of pleasing both your Fink Floyd-fan friend of your abstract art-fan friend.
A tasty and refreshing White Russian, languid-streaked and bleary; a devastatingly disoriented image of a planet and its outer atmosphere.

The Irish pale lager is traumatizing in a way, alien and raining apocalyptical brecciated coal.

Check out the rest of them, and there are plenty more fascinating ones, here at Art. Distilled. Oh, and I hope wherever you are you were able to catch the lunar eclipse tonight. I was hoping for the fog to keep away for one night but no such luck. It's a dense topo of ghosts out there right now, murky and pale, foghorns and all. Major solar eclipse coming up in about a month, though, so let's keep our eyes on the skies.

A Supper with Which I Can Get Down

2010-06-24T19:38:00.000-07:00

No magic, worship, or crushing religious guilt involved.

Eat, drink, be merry, fall dementedly in love with the world, and take the reigns. We are alone.Deal with it.

Thank You, Jennifer Egan

2010-06-23T03:51:00.000-07:00

In a discussion with the contributing Rumpus writer Alec Michod, he and the protean fiction writer Jennifer Egan predictably found themselves talking about genre, whether she thinks about genre, what her opinions on genre are if she considers genre at all in her process. After admitting she doesn't gift genre much consideration--as a limiting device--and considers it your standard consumerist selling tool, which she is one hundred percent right in saying, she had this wonderful addition; and if I could shake her hand and say thank you all the way from her native San Francisco I would:

"How about Cervantes? How crazy is Don Quixote? Even nineteenth-century novels, which are supposed to be so staid, they’re actually not. I reread Middlemarch recently. It’s narrated by a really flexible, intrusive, at times quite strange, overbearing, but also very funny and arch narrator, and it’s not even a first-person narrator. Although at times the narrator addresses the reader in the first person. I think if you did that now you’d be perceived as being a little out there. I mean, I do think we’ve gotten really quiet about pushing any limits, all limits, as fiction writers. I would love to see more craziness out there. The novel began as this completely weird outpouring of strangeness. It was there from the beginning. It’s inherent in the form. At least the possibilities are there, but I feel like we’re not exploiting the possibilities as much as we could be. I just want to feel some playfulness happening on the page, and if genre has started to hold people back, then it’s time for genre to disappear. Or change."

Please, please, please, por favor, let there be more craziness out in there in our novelists; let us push the limits a little bit more; let us be brave and write with a little more abandon; let us be a little bit more honest with the very world about which we write: a complex, wild, confusing, messy, terrifying, beautiful, exciting and anything but simplified maelstrom.

Read the whole interview here. Egan's latest novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, is out now and demands reading. Put down your beach read and get on a different level.

Los Angeles' Strides

2010-06-19T03:42:00.000-07:00

L.A., at least according to certain pop cultural dictums held up and reinforced by decades of musico-imperial gasconading artists and heavyweights, is always in some weird, extant-non-extant insurrection against New York City for who has the better music scene, and it's an odd little bataille, now fought with subzero pretensions, deeper-by-the-month v-necks, and testicle-obliterating jeans. In reality, it's probably not really there, but at least the illusion of it is. San Francisco, for its part, doesn't seem to care much either way where it fits into the whole scheme. Recently, though, L.A. has seen quite an escalation in not just good local music but fantastic local music which is getting a lot of the attention it rightly deserves (Local Natives [on freaking NPR], Flying Lotus, Active Child, HEALTH, Ariel Pink and his freak show of awesomeness, Fool's Good, to name a few, not even to mention No Age or Liars, whom I would argue, Liars that is, doesn't count for any one particular city and instead resides on a bizarre and vital portal of existence all their own). And unlike a lot of the stuff coming out of New York (read: Brooklyn) L.A.'s music tends, at least to me, to arrive in your ear buds with a little more sonic and tonal and, cutting-down-to-the-bones of matters, stylistic variance. This might have something to do with the demographical and architectural designs of these two cities--New York being denser than a slab of lead and Los Angeles sprawling for miles; so you've got one as this tightly-wound incubator where not rubbing shoulders is a spatial impossibility and the other where vanishing off into your own little world is easily done. Baths is the at-this-time one man project of Will Wiesenfeld, who was in San Francisco about two months ago and dropped into the Lower Haight's Robotspeak to give this in-store performance of "Apologetic Shoulder Blades" and "Plea". First thing you notice is the guy's wicked metacarpal sorcery. Then you notice that the songs are pretty great, and Will's voice, which I personally love, for its almost unbridled childlike strain. Wild, dazzling stuff. An analogous behavior to the music: slow motion diving into a warm, bottomless lake in which you don't need gills to breathe. He's got a record, Cerulean, coming out later this month on Anticon, which you should definitely pick up.

On Pain:

2010-06-12T00:08:00.000-07:00

"You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain."

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest.

Every Four Years, This Consumes the World

2010-06-09T16:00:00.000-07:00

This is the first year in a long time where I've found myself being pretty woefully negligent with following club level football in Europe. A couple solid reasons (excuses) can account for this. I no longer have television, so I couldn't watch the matches if I wanted. I've tried the whole getting up ungodly early on Saturdays and Sundays and heading to the few bars and burrito joints that feature about five or six televisions showing matches from all across the world, but for some reason the last place I'm in the mood to be at that hour on the weekends is in either of those places when I could instead read in bed with a cup of warm tea. Liverpool, the English club I normally follow, has suffered through a pretty ungainly year, failing to even make the UEFA Cup for next year. Additionally, finding Spain's La Liga matches on television is plain arduous work, as in scour the Spanish and Italian speaking enclaves (and the enclaves within enclaves, like honeycombs inside of honeycombs) and trying to find which one in particular shows Barcelona's matches and then struggle and squeeze my way into a seat, not a chair, but a spot on the floor to sit, as in this is San Francisco and that's a hell of a lot of work to watch a game, and given that I had my trust placed firmly on the shoulders of Leo Messi to carry Barcelona all the way to the end, which he did, I wasn't extremely desperate to watch. I haven't been totally absent, as in I've been keeping up with scores and developments, but I haven't been as ardent as in years past. In a lot of ways this has good thing. My early morning weekend focus was thus unchained and allowed to shift elsewhere. Nobody ever really needs to follow sports as closely as they allow themselves.

Now, however, with the kickoff for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa a diminishing and anticipatory one (one!) day away, it's time to get back in gear. If there's any time undeniably appropriate for football fanaticism, it's the World Cup, a time in which the entire revolving, three-quarks-away-from-losing-its-collective-mind globe in some cases literally shuts down to watch its darling. Maybe the Euros could rival the World Cup, whose occurrence comes in the halfway point between each World Cup serves as but an appetizer, but the fervency is a tad watered-down. Despite all Americentric delusions, this is, as far as the rest of the world is concerned (and that's a boatload of intelligent people), the time when the world's rightfully most popular and important and all-embodying sport takes center stage for a month and is just fucking supreme. A month of athletic jazz. A month of elegance and class, and no, not that the players involved are rigid symbols of either of those two things, but the game itself: watching football is watching an elegant and classy performance. Even America experiences a tiny little peak in its y-axis of football spectatorship during this period, and why not? No other sport has as much nationalistic pride caught up and ensnared in its spikes, trampling up and down a wide open pitch. Check out the stands, the banners and the gonfalons threading trembling quilts across the mezzanines. Listen to the songs' roar before match play. It's an arrantly bewildering experience. For one month, what is globally recognized as the greatest sport on earth assumes its merited place. And football is just that, in every possible way, a game of physics, geometry, and philosophy: when to push, where to push, who to push, when to pull back, attacks and defense, the game an amoebic mucilaginous creature that changes with every decision a team, even a player makes. This is a tactician's dream, chess with living, moving, dynamic people. I will state without reproach: if a person does not enjoy football that is a deficiency on their part, not football's. There is something lacking inside of you, not the sport, something fundamentally absent.

Spain's Fernando Torres and David Villa doing what will, I hope, be a common occurrence: celebrating sensational goals.

As always, my allegiance goes to Spain, who will kick things off against Switzerland on the 16th. Rebounding from a few injuries some of their key figures suffered during club play, it should be interesting to see what they can pull off. The good news is Torres, Iniesta, and Fabregas are all three (putatively) healthy and fit. For a month my Europhilia is vindicated. With that: ¡Viva la Furia Roja!¹

The charge remains: it's all still children's games. Just damned good ones.

1. There was what may or may not border on an unhealthy and quite realistically offensive amount of hyperbole present in the previous paragraphs. My own personal, un-vulcan exuberance got the best of me. I don't apologize.

The Art of Science (And How Oil Kills)

2010-06-04T22:31:00.000-07:00

Nick Bax's optical trap, a wound up laser beam able to hold microscopic particles stable in three dimensions.

Every year Princeton University holds its Art of Science awards, and MSNBC's Science and Technology department has posted some of the award-winning images, most if not all of which are pretty damn wondrous. The above image, Bax's laser beam, is in actuality a failure of what he was trying to do. He was attempting to get the beam to appear as round and cylindrical as possible, but what he wound up with was this gunmetal gray embossed, ripple-effected cardiod surrounded by molecular-life-looking silica beads. Failure has never looked so beautiful, so hopeful.

A spherical object submerged in viscous silicon oil and the striated flow patterns caused by this; Princeton's Shelley Chan, Josue Sznitman and Alexander Smits.
This might be one of the more splendidly disturbing--and timely, given what's going on in the southeast--images. Silicon oil is 5,000 times more viscid than water, and though that may result in some stunning patternistic imagery here (think of extremely tiny interlayers of chromospheric gas) but one can't help but be reminded and think immediately of the oil spill off the Gulf. You can visually see here, in a kind of clarity and depth not often seen, just how thick this stuff is by looking at the flow pattern and the miniscule layers formed after something as small and tiny as a sphere puts a tincture in, not even it's middle, but just the oil's surface. Imagine, for instance, a brown pelican submerged in this; or rather, imagine your own head plunged beneath this surface (which might be an arguably just comeuppance for a few of these promulgators of oil). Stepping down now from the moral soapbox, aesthetically, I love the gradation moving from yellow to red to blue, three of my favorite colors especially when thrown together.

For my favorite out of the sixteen award winners, though, it's a toss amongst the two pictures above and this last dazzling muralesque color-emulsion right below, which almost manages to look like some recently-unearthed drippy Fauvist piece or maybe even an early print of Picasso's. There's even small shades of a certain Dutchman's Starry Night in there, or just his skies in general. A total, sheer pleasure, this one right here.

Magnetic reconnection converts magnetic energy into particle energy, with the magnetic field being confined to the small red islands and the high energy particles as yellow sperm-like squiggles swimming around the blobs. It's astrophysics stuff, but it looks almost identical to biological structures and the same bursts of energy found there. Princeton's Lorenzo Sironi and Anatoly Spitkovsky.

Check out the rest of the images here; they're all pretty arresting.

Camille!

2010-06-02T22:51:00.000-07:00

Not a stranger in the least to weirdly surreal and bizarre dreams, most of which have no direct ties to anyone I remotely know, my most recent was tamer than usual but exciting no less. The extent of the dream: Camille Pissarro sent me a text message. Idiot that I am, I didn't open the message for a long time, choosing instead to ride the powerful wave of self-importance in being the fortunate recipient of a text message from the illustrious French impressionist. By the time I finally decided to open the message I woke up, tangled in sheets, furious, to whooshing eyefuls of inflexible historico-reality: Pisarro is long since dead and cannot send text messages. What I wouldn't give to read that goddamn message, though. Not that I believe in any hidden codices in dreams or that it's the subconscious' way of directly addressing the conscious or any of that unfounded dream interpretation sophistry, but I think it'd be interesting to see what I'd imagined a text from Pissarro would say.

Before my girlfriend left for Rome a few days ago, we were on the topic of dreams. She told me about a juicy little dream she had in which she was stuck in Louise Bourgeois' boudoir, the renowned, idiosyncratic recently deceased sculptor of whom my girlfriend is a massive admirer, and how the closet assumed this otherworldly, Narniaesque closet-of-infinite-proportions aspect, and how at the tail end of the dream Bourgeois kindly reached into her jungle of a closet and handed over a delicately bewitching orange blouse which belonged to her, and the tender, sweet moment of irreality that this was but also how damnably necessary it and other sleep-enshrined moments like this are, where our irresistibly tireless and unremitting imaginations conjure up these lucid, bleary moments where possibilities and impossibilities shatter against each other. Even her voice, as she was retelling me these details of the dream, rose to a heightened, honeyed, lost-in-joyousness quality which was so haltingly inspiring and gorgeous.

Bourgeois' Arch of Hysteria 1993, Polished Bronze, Tate Modern

I say necessary because I sincerely believe dreams are necessary, vital aspects of human beings. Whether we remember them or not, I think we need them, as a form of gray matter Olympics, cerebral exercise, a refreshing dive into a deep sea of murky relations after which we might be just a little bit better off in acting out our day to day, perhaps boringly real lives. Enjambed to this, also interesting to me are the ways in which not only art but the artists themselves, their countenances, infiltrate our lives and run amok over our dreams and provide a strange betrothal between those two things, so often in ways of which we can't even be entirely aware; and then there's the inverse of this relationship, where and how art and artists are influenced and fueled by their dreams, both daydreams and nocturnal ones; how art (the best of it, at least) resides in this liminal category between dream and reality: something simultaneously strange and alien and familiar, just the way it has to be, perfectly normal. There's a whole dialogue going on there with, I think, the cumulative effect being the creative state, a limbic somewhere between abeyant dream and loosely controlled consciousness; the creative process we wind up with is this war-torn intercourse, and the work produced between these two things is this abandoned, six-limbed freak of a child that just seems to somehow make sense, which nobody wants for themselves but about which everybody wants to know more, and so we read, we view, we listen, we offer ourselves to whatever medium the art takes and, through it, seek to understand more of ourselves.

I don't want to imagine a life without dreams. If we need water during the day to survive, then it's dreams we require at night to keep us alive. From them we wake up believing in the philosophy of More, which states: we are capable of so much more; we have yet to explore so very much; in our world we may still yet find new methods of thinking about and approaching our lives; there are more solutions that we haven't found than there are problems; we must never stop thinking, must never stop inventing the illogical; we are not finished, not even close.

The Future Belongs to Crowds

2010-05-25T20:10:00.000-07:00

I appreciate sentences that never get old, sentences founded and constructed upon an undeniable and inelastic, almost chondritic truth. Of these, DeLillo is a master. That's one of those sentences that never change. Say it three thousand times and the fact still remains: DeLillo is a master. That's that. He's another one of those writers whose every single sentence electrifies everything about the entire reading experience and gives me over to another desire to go write. Similar to Bolaño, DeLillo is one of those writers who seems to have such a stringent, keen grasp on the world, like he has access to some photo negative of this world the rest of us can't quite see, as he subverts it and then reformulates it back to us like some mirror fun-house image of the same very world in which we live so that what we end up with is something truer than what we might actually find when we leave our homes in the morning. This is one particular passage from his novel Mao II which depicts all that I've mentioned. Whichever political direction you swing, your interpretation of this could arguably be appropriate. You could say this sums of some of the left's pre-election fervor with Obama and his Arthurian protectorship; or you could rightfully drop this right on Tea Partiers and most of the right and the way they lift up their leaders in the same manner; or those rallying behind populist voice's like Beck's or whichever seething pundit you prefer to get your grayscale opinions from. Whatever the case, DeLillo seems to have been right in pointing out, is there is at this current moment a sad desperation out there. So many tired people, so many broken people, so many people without much belief left in anything, are taking every last ounce of lifeblood they have and offering it to someone from whom they expect everything in return.

"When the Old God leaves the world what happens to all the unexpended faith? He looks at each sweet face, round face, long, wrong, darkish, plain. They are a nation, he supposes, founded on the principle of easy belief. A unit fueled by credulousness. They speak a half language, a set of ready-made terms and empty repetitions. All things, the sum of the knowable, everything true, it all comes down to a few simple formulas copied and memorized and passed on. And here is the drama of the mechanical routine played out with live figures. It knocks him back in awe, the loss of scale and intimacy, the way love and sex are multiplied out, the numbers and shaped crowd. This really scares him, a mass of people turned into a sculptured object. It is like a toy with thirteen thousand parts, just tootling along, an innocent and menacing thing. He keeps the glasses trained, feeling a slight desperation now, a need to find her and remind himself who she is. Healthy, intelligent, twenty-one, serious-sided, possessed of a selfness, a teeming soul, nuance and shadow, grids of pinpoint singularities they will never drill out of her. Or so he hopes and prays, wondering about the power of their own massed prayer. When the Old God goes, they pray to flies and bottletops. The terrible thing is they follow the man because he gives them what they need. He answers their yearning, unburdens them of free will and independent thought."

DeLillo, Mao II

Insights From the Dead

2010-05-24T17:17:00.000-07:00

In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Hal Incandenza is a reluctant teenage tennis wunderkind at the very academy built by his father, whom killed himself by sticking his head in a microwave after realizing the limits of potential. In an order dictated by the fervid sweep of my ballpoint pen, these are some of Hal's and his brother's rules for survival, written, filmed, and recorded aloud in the mentally, muscularly, and osseously assaultive youth-camp training facility which can alternately pass for a grueling playground on which civic morale is generated and where good Americans are either broken into shards or made whole; they are snippets of insider advice that can pass for ways to succeed or stay alive in the self-sabotaging realms of, but not limited to: tennis, writing, or life in general for anyone for whom pressure and expectations (or in particular, living up to those social weights) have played a significant role, which is just about everyone. Pull from them what you will. Infinite Jest is about 1,000 plus pages of essential, fire-cracking wisdom, one phoneme after the other.

"Here is how you handle being a feral prodigy. Here is how you handle being seeded at tournaments, signifying that seeding committees composed of old big-armed men publicly expect you to reach a certain round. Reaching at least the round you're supposed to is known at tournaments as 'justifying your seed.'

Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.

Here is how to weep in bed trying to remember when your torn blue ankle didn't hurt every minute.

Here is how to sweat.

What is unfair can be a stern but invaluable teacher.

Expect some rough dreams. They come with the territory. Try to accept them. Let them teach you.

Keep a flashlight by your bed. It helps with the dreams.

If you are an adolescent, here is the trick to being neither quite a nerd nor quite a jock: be no one.
It is easier than you think.

This is also how not to fear sleep or dreams. Never tell anyone where you are. Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.
This is tricky.

Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail.

How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away. Nets and fences can be mirrors. And between the nets and fences, opponents are also mirrors. This is why the whole thing is scary. This is why all opponents are scary and weaker opponents are especially scary.

See yourself in your opponents. They will bring you to understand the Game. To accept the fact that the Game is about managed fear. That its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return.

This is your body. They want you to know. You will have it with you always."

Take Me to the Place Where Time Goes to Die

2010-05-20T02:41:00.000-07:00

San Francisco Bay as seen from Buena Vista Park, the oldest official park in San Francisco. Looks much different now. And it kind of doesn't. All at the same time. Go ahead and develop some of that green land the two bewhiskered men are appraising, and build an International Orange cable-suspension bridge connecting the two peninsulas, and it might not look so different. I can actually see where I live, north of there, once, you know, the whole industrial complex thing kicked in. Now the park, one of SF's most notorious hikes and hills, allows for some spectacular views of downtown San Francisco, the Golden Gate, and the surrounding bodies of water. And nowadays it also tends not to feature monochromatic renderings. It's funny to think: when black and white photography was all there was, I wonder if anyone ever thought that if and when color photography had been around for a while people would actively attempt to chalk up their photos into something like this. What a travesty that we can't access the thoughts of people in photographs from eras of yore; what a shame we can't listen to them think as they beheld the inchoate world; what a terrible affair that the only person we can ever come close to fully knowing and understanding--and barely even then--is ourselves, the body and the mind within which we're entombed.

Attendant to the mood, naybe a little Former Ghosts? "Hold On" from their 2009 debut, which they'll be following up on soon.

Paradise, I Adore You

2010-05-18T00:05:00.000-07:00

This is miles and miles beyond even the skinniest trail of a doubt one of the best stripped down, acoustic live performances I've seen in a good while. One guy, a guitar, a harmonica, and his loop pedals in a spooky, depopulated church (when aren't churches spooky?). That this "one guy" just so happens to be Bradford Cox of Deerhunter and, as seen here, Atlas Sound might be an unfair advantage to that aforementioned title simply due to the guy's overall consistent musicianship and flair. Pitchfork just dropped another Atlas Sound track from this "Live at the Cemetary Gates" series, the soft and moving "Sheila." As with most things Bradford Cox puts together, it's highly powerful and worth checking out. What makes Cox and company doubly more interesting, at least to me, is he's said before that they were influenced by Dennis Cooper, which may in and of itself be somewhat trivial to the casual listener but hearing how musicians have dug up influences through literary works is a major fascination of mine, maybe because of the way it mirrors the ways in which I find influences for my writing in music and visual art. There's no doubt in my mind that this is one of the preeminent artists of our time and to watch him work is pure, privileged joy.

Update

2010-05-15T16:45:00.000-07:00

Checked Arcade Fire's website, saw this, got excited, contemplated the temporal-evaporative qualities of Saturday vs. other days of the week, felt human and inefficient, and became (for the moment) grounded.

In the meantime (what period of our lives isn't in the meantime?) let's enjoy one of their older songs, on which I've been sating myself for all these years since their last release. Live, there's few bands that compare to Arcade Fire's presence on stage, which is simply monstrous, a borderline out-of-body Blakean experience, sweat stinging the corneas, voice going scratchy, a fly-paper texture to the back of the throat, clothes damp, elated.

Best New Artist Most Likely To Blow Your Speakers

2010-05-11T22:22:00.000-07:00

Sleighbells is an electrocore (how many genres can we apply "-core" to? Plenty) dance-pop duo out of New York comprised of Allison Krauss on vocals, formerly of legit teen poppers RubyBlue; and guitarist Derek Miller, who used to specialize in egging on the monster dance circles playing in front of Florida hardcore stalwarts Poison the Well, for whom he also held down guitars and more or less orchestrated those ever-so-brutal breakdowns. I, in fact, remember when Poison the Well first began back in '97 out of the whole post-hardcore/hardcore revival going on all up and down the East Coast, so it's interesting to see what some of those guys, like Miller, are doing now. On paper the joint venture between these two sounds odd, but the combinatory effects of this union are sonically stunning and almost overpowering. Despite all the strong pop sensibilities found here, this is an aggressive, in-your-face record, one to which you can either dance frenetically or rage out and break something, which is exciting, to see and hear that there are still independent musicians who aren't afraid of abandoning delicacy in favor of getting outrageously, ear-bleeding boisterous. It all feels urgent. Here, in Sleigh Bells, Miller controls most of the assaultive rhythmic crunch and frequency-defying beats while Krauss smoothes it all over with her sweet honey-and-whiskey soaked voice. Maybe not all the unexpectedly, there's a raw sexiness about all of this. With so much energy packed into these songs they can't help but be sexy.

Treats, their debut LP, came out yesterday but only on digital. If you want it on wax or--ick--CD, you're going to have to wait until June. Before that all they'd had was a few teaser songs. You can stream the entire album for exactly one week thanks to the good people over at NPR. And for goodness' sake, turn this up loud. I'll throw the first single "Tell 'Em" down below along with one of their earlier tracks, "Crown on the Ground.'

There's been a glut of releases over the past few days which have just been so incredibly good it's hard to decide what to talk about. Of them: The National's new one, Broken Social Scene's new one, Zola Jesus, The Radio Department, Flying Lotus, GOBBLE GOBBLE, too many. This suffices for now.

"Tell 'Em", the first single.

"Crown on the Ground", one of their older demos, a little rougher around the edges but still a banger.

Epitaphs

2010-05-09T15:08:00.000-07:00

If you're not a David Foster Wallace fan--which, of course, you should be--you most likely won't enjoy this book, although you might find some insights into the creation of his works and his goals, which may or may not alter the hitherto-formed opinion of him: Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is the entire transcript of a five day interview with then Rolling Stone reporter now novelist David Lipsky who was commissioned by Rolling Stone to interview the thirty-four year old writer on the last few days of his Infinite Jest book tour. The interview, while completed, was eventually axed and never included in the pages of Rolling Stone. This is a good thing, especially considering the fate of David. This is not an interview and these are not words and passages that should be lost inside the monthly pages of a culture magazine; they belong in a book. These are seminal words by a seminal author from a exquisitely grand, humane mind and heart.

Already two-hundred and sixty pages in and nearly finished, I was hooked instantaneously. The result here is that we are afforded an extremely intimate and well-handled portrait of David Foster Wallace at his height and can see him at a moment of such hype and infamy, when he himself was beyond a little rattled by all the furor, for who he really was and will be remembered as, and hear him discuss his work, what he wanted for it, and why he made the authorial decisions that he did; beyond that, we get a human rendering of David, who in all the critical commentary and endorsement surrounding him can, I feel, become lost; and it's the human side of David Foster Wallace that is the most important because, as far as avant-garde writing goes, it's the human side of things that he never lost sight of. I can't encapsulate everything they have discussed thus far nor can I summarize what they will go on discuss; they discuss everything, leave it at that. The result here is that we are afforded a passing glimpse into the humanity of a man we are all a little bit lesser-off in not having around anymore. The dynamics of this relationship are wonderful and touching, in being able to watch these two, both young budding novelists at the time, evolve from the stilted roles of interviewer and subject that can at times seem like a tactician match between two tense people thrown together, each trying to gain an upper hand, into an honest to goodness friendship full of warmth and kindness. Knowing the way in which this story ends, not this novel, but this life; knowing the way in which David's life ended, makes this read one of the saddest and most moving things I've read in years.

"If you can think of times in your life that you've treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it's probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we're here for is to learn how to do that. I know that sounds a little pious."

There are multitudes of moments like the one above, where Dave manages to put together a passage in which he just nails certain contemporary issues that face us as a generation of people, of thinkers, of artists, of writers, or just simply a generation of human beings. He can seemingly wax extemperaneously as well on pop culture and cinema as he can on high art, the power of fiction, and what it feels like, what it means, to be alive in the world right now, to use one of Dave's often repeated expressions, what it feels like on our nerve endings, on our nervous system, to be alive in this world at this moment, a moment in which we are incessantly bombarded by five hundred thousand bits of sensory feedback overload and information-laden bursts from all directions. This is required fucking reading. As is everything DFW ever wrote.

Addendum:

Book finished. Book swirlingly heavy-hitting and superb. Migratory boatloads of quotes to copy down here. Too many. Too much general goodness. Goodness, quotes on what? Quotes on art. Quotes on love. Quotes on fame. On anxiety. On fear. On pain. On joy. On music. On Alanis Morisette. On Bush and "Glycerine" and how it's a complete rip-off (I knew it!) of a Brian Eno song but still a fairly okay song. On work ethics. On fiction. On the power of fiction. On the things that fiction can do that no other art form can do.

String Theory is a proposed hypothesis that attempts to be a quantified theory of everything, the world condensed to a unified, understandable equation. Thus far, there's no evidence of this, nor any way to observe it even if there was. Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, however, is as close as you can come to a literary String Theory, a conversational theory of everything.

This is Often

2010-05-07T11:36:00.000-07:00

For as long as I can remember, my life has been a constant chess match with a depression of varying levels of hunger--depression being the frozen-faced Russian champion, me the jaded hopeful only trying to score a good move or two and secure a few days of clear-sky-headed freedom here or there.

An understatement: I'm not very good at chess.

Vonnegut, perhaps in literary and gloomy commiseration, has always helped me along:

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

As has Beckett:

"Perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."

There's a reason I get upset when someone makes the insensitive claim that books and art have never helped or changed anyone or anything--because it's soundly false.

Born Free

2010-04-27T03:57:00.001-07:00

M.I.A does it again. Long known for incorporating sociological and political themes and well-written, introspection-heavy lyrics into her otherwise buoyantly surging, driving, and melodic pop music, the first single and video pulled from the UK genre-smasher takes all that to new levels. The video below is, without a doubt, not safe for work unless you're into that field. Otherwise, the song itself is spotlessly clean.

Obviously the video provokes more questions than it answers, as all good art should. Without going into a whole bunch of biographical information on M.I.A (whose real name is Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam and whose family's native country is the politically-fractured Sri Lanka, in which she spent some of her youth), the song and the video alone place its crosshairs on what seems to be an all-too-human tendency to erect barricades between fellow homo sapiens, to not only purposefully but cruelly delineate lines of normalcy and otherness between ourselves as an entire race of people. To say "we are right" and "that is wrong." The use of redheads as the symbol for this otherness is wry as well as terrifying. Of course all sorts of examples come to mind when watching the video: the Shoa, American slavery, genocides in South America, in early North America, Columbus' entire life, the Tamil struggle in M.I.A's own native Sri Lanka, present day Darfur. Even the Japanese-American internment here in the US. Few countries have been immune to this. The list of genocides and similarly-based oppression is, sadly, as long as time itself. Even Ireland, amongst Catholics and Protestants, the need to demarcate between acceptable and unacceptable--whatever that may end up being--seems integral. And yes, you can be sure that there are direct parallels to the recent immigration law passed in Arizona in which failure to carry identification is now a crime and those "suspected" of being in the country illegally are fair game to be arrested, detained. I'm not sure what kind of criteria is going to be used to constitute the basis of this round-up policy but it sure as shit doesn't sound empirical. How does an official decide someone "looks" like an illegal immigrant?

So the question I've heard is what are we, then, to make of M.I.A.'s deliberately graphic video? What answers does the video provide? None. It's exposing. This is the prime difference between politics and art. Politics attempts to profess sagacity on topics whether it has this or not, a hardheaded surety which can often lead to violent acts such as this; art, on the other hand, asks questions, investigates, takes a camera with which it peers into the dark and murky unknown and attempts not to solve the confusion but show it, let those haunting questions and the accompanying images linger--because if they are done right they do all the work. There's a certain absurdity here, horrifying no less, but an absurdity that dominates, which makes the actions of these soldiers all the more terrifying. And still, it's an absurdity that doesn't seem so far. A ridiculousness that we seemed predisposed to laugh at in theory but somehow know we are every bit capable of such monstrosity unless we get on our feet and keep it from happening.

We Are Made of Stars

2010-04-24T13:10:00.000-07:00

20 years seems to be an ongoing theme these days; in a world of fleeting trends and fads and impermanence, 20 years is indeed a benchmark of sorts. This was a confusing and capricious time for beginnings, '89 and '90, as we prepared to enter not just simply another decade but the terminal decade of the century, after which nobody was quite sure what would happen. The Cold War dragged on to its exhausting (and exhausted) end; the Gulf War rose its ugly head; Ireland was awash with sectarian violence; and the first McDonalds in Russia turned on its Golden Arches. Happy 20th Russo-Micky D's! Also celebrating 20 years in orbit: The Hubble, which since its ascension into space has captured and divinely sent back to us hundreds of thousands of images, many if not all of which have led to innumerable papers and research topics (age of the universe, how to detect planets out of our solar system, etcetera), topics that would have been nearly impossible to tackle without the aid and interstellar reach of Hubble's panoptic line of vision. Hubble's journey hasn't been all smooth sailing, though, and were it not for its (and NASA's) resiliency in escaping a few near-death experiences and other unceremonious moments, we'd be on the short end.

This image below is one smaller excised image of an assortment of stars belonging to the much larger globular cluster Omega Centauri. In this sample alone there are over 100,000 stars. The entire Omega Centauri contains nearly 10 million stars. This is just one cluster of stars in one small fraction of space 16,000 light-years away from us. Between 10 billion and 12 billion years old, these stars have witnessed plenty. Think of them like our great, great, great, great, great (multiplied exponentially) grandparents, under whose placid eyes we are allowed to dance and stare up in awe.

Here: the full star cluster to which the above sample belongs, with the sampled portion outlined in blue.

In honor of its 20th year, a new batch of images has been released from which the above two are samples, along with some other beauties. These are arguably some of Hubble's most probing, precise, and dismaying images, as the satellite has just begun to hit its stride in strength. One image in particular is quite possibly the most wondrous and exciting yet, the world in which it depicts a seemingly unreal vista taken right out of the pages of science ficiton. Also, a list of Hubble's most classically iconic and important images has been compiled, all for our viewing pleasure. Take these fuckers in.

Of the top images over the past two decades, this is easily one of my keepers: the stately and pristine Sombrero Galaxy, whose center is a brilliant and luminous orb, shown like never before.

There's nothing magical about the planet in which we live. But its sheer gorgeousness is pretty fucking stupefying and jaw-dropping nonetheless.

Celebrating 20 Years!

2010-04-23T17:19:00.000-07:00

Merge Records, whose list of greats is long and unfair (Arcade Fire, Xiu Xiu, Dinosaur Jr., Wye Oak, Dan Bejar and Destroyer, Spoon, and so on), rings the bell for its 20th year in producing groundbreakingly excellent independent music. To mark the occasion, they're releasing SCORE! 20 Years of Merge Records: THE REMIXES!, a collection of Merge artists from the past and present remixed and remastered by some heady names. You can stream the entire record right now for a limited time only on Merge's website, from which you can also purchase the masterful compilation. If you do anything, please check out breakcore producer Jason Forrest's remix of Arcade Fire's "No Cars Go." Anthemic, moving, heartrending, and ultimately inspiring as an original, Forrest's interpretation is an echo chamber of all those things times ten, letting the harsh, driving rhythms and the split, drawn out words bounce around long after the six minutes is over.

When Writers Behave Like Children

2010-04-21T02:42:00.001-07:00

Great website here running a caustically biting little docudrama on the history of literary invectives. Here's 1-25 and here's 26-50 of what the very wise and very witty Michelle Kerns has dubbed "The 50 Best Author vs. Author Putdowns of All Time."

A couple gems:

Nabokov's description of Hemingway: "As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it."

Harold Bloom (with whom I often disagree but not here) on J.K. Rowling: "How to read 'Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone'? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do."

Faulkner on Twain: "A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.

Charlotte Bronte takes on the celebrated Jane Austen: "Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would rather have written 'Pride and Prejudice'...than any of the Waverly novels? I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses."

Tom Wolfe (whom I don't care for) on Hemingway (whom I more often than not love but can see his point): "Take Hemingway. People always think that the reason he's easy to read is that he is concise. He isn't. I hate conciseness -- it's too difficult. The reason Hemingway is easy to read is that he repeats himself all the time, using 'and' for padding.

Mary McCarthy explains her position on Salinger: "I don't like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn't a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don't like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality and it's so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated. Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egotism. I simply can't stand it."

Finally, and brutally, James Jones according to Papa Hemingway: "To me he is an enormously skillful f#*&-up and his book will do great damage to our country. Probably I should re-read it again to give you a truer answer. But I do not have to eat an entire bowl of scabs to know they are scabs...I hope he kills himself...."

Ouch.

Perspective

2010-04-20T02:20:00.000-07:00

Pointing at Idiots

2010-04-18T02:16:00.000-07:00

Euclid's Illusion

2010-04-17T02:57:00.000-07:00

I'm reading a fantastic book on art theory, scientific theory, and the strange, often untold union between these two called Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light . Overloaded with corollaries, probing insights, and thought-provoking speculation, the book is a wonderful tug at the imagination. For a master in neither physics or art, the author demonstrates a firm neophyte's understanding. The idea presented here in this book is that art and physics are more interrelated than the two know, something I've always thought myself. Both are ostensibly concerned with the nature of being, with our existence, and with trying to assist in the understanding of our existence. Their methodologies may differ, but their goals are the same.

In an early passage, the author is discussing Aristotle and Euclid and how through them so much of what we now know of in terms of space and logic is stable, how we've managed to craft a linear understanding of our world and time; yet, the author writes, we mustn't overlook where they erred. "Everyone learns this system," he writes, "of thinking so early and it works so well that is is very difficult to see its deficiencies. But, if truth is the correspondence between appearance and reality, then there are some glaring inconsistencies in this system. Straight lines are strikingly absent in nature. If you take a walk in the woods, it is apparent that there is virtually nothing that is ruler-straight. Instead, all naturally ocurring forms are curved and arabesque...Only tree trunks and the perpendicular alignment of the human form standing upright upon the earth offer a commonly seen vertical that approximates a plumb line. Despite this direct evidence of our senses, we continue to connect everything with straight lines." And here's my favorite line: "The nineteenth-century Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix once speculated, 'It would be worthy to investigate whether straight lines exist only in our brains.'"

And

continues...

"The Western adherence to the illusion that the link between objects space and events in time is a straight line is similar to belief in a religious dogma. Just as all the major religions of the world begin with the assumption that beneath the flux of our sensations there lies a unifying principle, so science had discovered in Euclid's rectilinear system its corollary..." He then goes on to clarify a little bit: "To say, however, that nature does not contain any perfect obvious straight lines is not entirely correct. To most peoples' vision, there is one: the uncluttered meeting of sea and sky--the horizon as seen upon the water. The horizon is the central orienting line in our experience. Pilots and sailors who are lost in a fog and cannot see the horizon frequently report a strange disorientation regarding up, down, front, back, right, and left. This naturally occurring straight line is so important that I speculate its ready visibility had a powerful effect on seacoast civilizations. Perhaps the reason that linear alphabets, linear logic, and linear space have championed principally by the seafaring empires of classical Greece, Imperial Rome, Renaissance Venice, and Elizabethan England is that their inhabitants continually had nature's straightest line in plain sight. This sharp crease was missing from everyday experience in the land-based civilizations of ancient Egypt, Asia Minor, and China. Perhaps its absence is the reason these empires failed to develop a widely used alphabet, or to organize space and time in a linear fashion."

Okay. The point is: as an artist and a writer, time is a spectral interest to me, thus why I felt it apropos to cite such lengthy and verbose passages. But I find them excessively interesting. We consider time linear, but it simply is not. Not here and especially not outside of this planet. Leave Earth and time all of a sudden gets warped and twisted and beat the fuck down. Yet we demand our novels to be linear, chronological; we demand the time demonstrated within, if not linear, to make sense, whatever that means (when did time or anything about our lives "make sense"?). Do we want our works to "make sense" in pedestrian terms or do we want to demonstrate our characters' truth, per whatever is necessary to the story? If a story demands fragmentation and jump-cuts through time and it can be done with aplomb, well then why the hell not? If time is essentially not linear, what's the pressing urge to represent it as such, other than stubbornness and tradition and pandering? Our brains don't even work that way. If you think you think linearly, consider more deeply. Our brains, small time-machines on their own, transport us almost constantly from the past to the present to the future. We exist, if not in body then at least in brain, in all three of these realms. There is no singular space from which we sit for all of our adult lives.

And I suppose this always comes down to what we want or what I want fiction to be? Is it a mindless escape rife with predictable melodrama that can be read while cooking dinner or is it an elegant, engrossing, and maybe sometimes complicated art that demands attention? These things need not be mutually exclusive; we've made them so. I don't know why they can't be the same thing, why things that are complicated, difficult, and perhaps even educational can't be considered a good time. Aren't our actual lives mindless and escapist enough? Cannot our art be simultaneously challenging and entertaining?

Quick Brain Pummeling

2010-04-09T04:40:00.000-07:00

UK producer Gold Panda puts together seemingly dismembered beats with chopped, captivating vocals that originate from multiple directions, all of which manages to lead you astray, strap you into a keelboat, and then quickly (without asking you for permission, that perilous, international motherfucker) sends you abroad somewhere along the waterways, never to return. Wherever this journey takes you, you love or will grow to love. And this is a picture of Big Sur, which also makes you think of vessels; shipping off to distal lands, places, and worlds to which you might never venture let alone worlds that might not even exist; and beauty. One mustn't forget beauty.

10,000 Feet Under the Sea

2010-04-09T03:23:00.000-07:00

Two kinds of stories I'm an irresistible sucker for: those that deal with prehistoric life and those that deal with the ocean, especially the bottommost regions. This explains why the recent discovery of animals living healthfully, consistently, and quite happily without oxygen way, way, way below the Mediterranean Sea has grabbed my attention with the kind of intense clench that it has.

This is the first time a life form like this has ever been found. Ever. It's truly remarkable. Yes, an array of single-cellular organism who've been able to subsist without oxygen have been found but never before has a multi-cellular, complex organism of the same kind been rounded up. Until now.

More fascinating, the findings were not simply evidence of former anaerobic life, but life that is brilliantly alive now, this instant, going on living without oxygen, deep below, while we prattle about above, doing this whole inhale/exhale thing (so pedestrian). Some even contain eggs. The investigators were only expecting to find viruses and bacteria; imagine their excitement at finding actual life! Less than about 1mm. in length, these things resemble the tiniest of jellyfish, which makes them extraordinarily creepy.

What's wonderful about a discovery like this is that it sheds--more like pours--light upon what life might have been like on this crazy planet of ours when oxygen levels were much, much lower, a time when--quite brazenly--animals only like this could have survived, animals to which we respectfully owe our very existence. Without life so formidable in the face of a planet so inhospitable to aerobic-based life at the time, how wonderful that these little grotesque guys worked for us? And what about the possibility, then, of other Metazoan life forms living or having lived at some point in history in other anoxic or low-oxygen settings on other planets? The questions this finding opens up are too great to detail.

Let's Get Cold Together

2010-04-08T03:25:00.000-07:00

Memoryhouse is a gleaming hypnagogic pop group hailing out of wonderful Ontario, Canada. Their debut EP The Years, a four song, thirteen minute glacial dream-trek through their bleary landscape of blurred time and warped-fidelity, honey-dripping melodies, is so silencing it makes you want to fall in love with something, anything, and as quickly as possible--the nearest wall. And then maybe break up with it. "Bonfire", a video for a new song from their limited to 500-copy "To The Lighthouse" single, is unmitigatedly (and for some reason heart-chokingly) joyous. You need to love them. With a full length coming out soon--May, if I recall?--be sure to check them out now. Visit their Myspace or go directly to the label, Arcade Sound, to download their EP, which, like Communist rebels, they've made available for free. There are times when I don't know how I would remain sane without music like this (not the free part, but the shockingly talented part). Oh, and when those tambourines kick in? Feel free to feel wonderfully weightless.

Modern World, I'm Not Pleased to Meet You

2010-04-03T06:05:00.000-07:00

Let it be no secret that I'm obsessed or at least curious with all things Dan Boeckner, Spencer Krug, and Dante DeCaro, who consistently take music in new and untapped directions. Among them in all their side-projects and amalgamations are the bands: Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, Handsome Furs, Swan Lake, Frog Eyes, Johnny and the Moon, and Fifths of Seven, all of which--mind you--are each and every one of them fantastic and fresh and inventive and imperative. It's almost inundating. And yet, the music amongst all of their various projects--while it's impossible for there not to be certain similar quirks--is all different and startling and poignant.

Beyond that, it's just straight up good fucking music. To know that their are musicians out there today who are more interested in the music as art, the musical process, and the expansion of their musical forays than the commercial success of that music is refreshing. Upsetting as it is that many, many people will never hear these bands, it's wonderful to know they're out there and to be able to catch them live while they're touring the globe. Here's a clip from one of their earlier records:

Oh! And news: New Wolf Parade record coming out soon! Entitled Expo 86.

Oh, Neil

2010-04-02T02:37:00.000-07:00

"I know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomena in the cosmos. That makes me want to grab people in the street and say, "Have you heard this?" Neil deGrasse Tyson, oft-known planetary murderer of Pluto and brilliantly charming and wise astrophysicist.

I could listen to Neil wax scientifically for hours and, in fact, have done just that on numerous occasions. He coined the word Manhattanhenge. He's a notable speaker on The Universe series and is now the host and brainchild behind PBS' NOVA scienceNOW. The work he's doing, not just for actual scientific development and research, but for making science exciting (which it always has been) and approachable to laymen is extraordinary. The sheer beauty and ingenuity of someone like deGrasse Tyson is that he seems equally at home on the Colbert Report trading jocular barbs with Colbert as he does on The Science Channel, discussing the unfathomable intricacies of string theory; it is this duality of his that makes him such a consummate scientist. He breaks barriers. Also, you listen to this guy talk about his work and it's just infectious; this is a man who truly loves this world, this life, this planet, this everything, and if we can obtain even a small fraction of his enthusiasm and hope for this world and our species, we're all better off.

To simply keep up with the prolific dude, who seems to work just about as constantly as the same universe to which he devotes himself: Tyson Explains Life & the Universe

Vincent Moon Makes More Magic

2010-03-29T23:10:00.000-07:00

Once again, Vincent Moon and La Blogotheque prove themselves indomitable. Hot off the trails of Beach House's stellar LP Teen Dreams, Moon's side project Les Soirée de Poche gave the Baltimore artists twenty or so minutes in front of a small coffee house crowd to do little else than dazzle them with their seductive, meditative pop; lead singer Legrand's scratched-and-smoothed, haunting voice of yearning; and some pretty damn fine French as well.

In a pragmatic view of the world (where there is often a wealth of despair and where hope isn't much more than a philosophy), one of the greatest experiences is finding exuberant, live music that is on par with or even better than the recorded version. It's a simple thing to ask of life and yet for some reason so elusive to find. Below, however, is just that.

That Time of the Month

2010-03-27T17:11:00.001-07:00

The Witness in the Noosphere

2010-03-24T03:00:00.000-07:00

Sometimes disappointment is informed by a wealth of pure pleasure. For instance, I was all set to copy down a few of the more meaningful and illuminating quotes and passages from Camus' last written full novel The Fall, which is nothing but a 148 page monologue between the narrator and the nameless listener or witness to whom he's delivering said monologue, when I took a look at my book and realized I wasn't going to be able to: there's no quotes to find because nearly the entire book I've underlined! Every page is a mess of black or blue ink. Almost every sentence in this seminal book on the conscience of modern man in the face of unspeakable evils is worthy of a quote, and I can't bring myself to reduce this (already pithy) novel to a few lines. So the only quote I can put down is this, my own crude words:

"Read the fucking book."

Better yet, read Camus' entire oeuvre. Read his letters. Read his essays. Read Camus. Read Camus. And when you've finished reading Camus, read him again.

Speaking of Voices I Miss

2010-03-20T13:36:00.001-07:00

Remember the days when Dave Chappelle was easy to find? When his half-hour comedy show or a replaying of one of his sidesplitting standup performances was more or less a guarantee somewhere? Splendid times, no? He still does standup now, quite a lot if I recall correctly, but the days of finding constantly new incarnations of Dave at any given instant are behind us; for that, I think we're gravely underfed of the kind of biting comedy we need. Below he gives a great bit ripping into new-agey manifesto The Secret and the tomfoolery and downright dangerous ignorance of this whole "positive thinking" spiritual self-help movement.

On Marriage:

2010-03-19T21:15:00.001-07:00

Oh, Ambrose Bierce: your wit, your snark (and truth) is missed:

"Wedding: A ceremony at which two persons undertake to become one, one undertakes to become nothing, and nothing undertakes to become supportable."

It's Friday night in the city: windows are open, voices are loud, music is blaring, and the city smells and tastes of springtime and momentary bouts of joy. Cheers. And by "cheers" I mean I'm doing work, listening to all of the aforementioned.

Washed Out

2010-03-15T12:10:00.000-07:00

If I were to compile a list of all the great reasons to live in California or why living in California is--at least for me--the greatest locale in the contiguous 48, it would run on and on and on. But it's true: living here is a dream piled on top of a fantasy. This is true for all three of California's major cities (okay, maybe not Los Angeles, which feels somehow inverted and hollow, but roll with me here) but I don't think you fully experience the broad range of all California has to offer in the southernmost two. One of my particularly favorite aspects of living in San Francisco is that while you are indeed deeply embedded in a dense, locomotive city and one of the major urban centers through the world, you're only a half hour away from some of the most serene and peaceful and majestic sights of wilderness and oceanic dreamscapes, where at the drop of a dime (or in this case a flip of the wind) a gritty, steely city is the farthest thing from your mind.

Some friends and I took a trip out to Stinson Beach, which is just a little north of the city, across the Golden Gate, and northwest of Sauselito. Snuck in at the westernmost edge of Muir Woods and Mount Tamalpais State park, Stinson Beach is riddled with curving hills and mountains, snake-like roads that finally burst you out into the open cliff-side coastline. Stinson Beach reminded me very much of the small beach towns you find on the east coast, somewhere along Maine or New Hampshire, except, of course, the food and the culture here is still heavily influenced by all that California is known for.

On Tuesday, we're heading south to camp out for a couple nights at Big Sur; given the predicted weather and what I've already seen of Big Sur in the past, my expectations are towering. Driving down California Highway 1 is one of the most striking experiences ever; the sheer natural beauty is almost overwhelming. What I love the most, though, is the truly undisturbed feeling of the Old West: the wood-paneled shanties, the slowed down movement, the dirt paths, all contribute to removing you from whatever ridiculous sense of hurry, self-importance, and life-is-so-fucking-serious dreariness you left behind. If I'm never heard from again after this, it's safe to assume I was at the center of one of those grisly campground tragedies where a wandering psychopath stumbles upon a group of campers and throttles their lives short; in that case, may this blog live on! One more picture of Stinson, assuming it may also be my last:

A Poetic King of Literary Jazz

2010-03-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

In Dave Eggers' extraordinary introduction to Barthelme's Forty Stories he writes down a pretty brilliant insight, one I've often found cropping up in myself when going through Don B's electrifying canon. He writes: "I had a tough time reading this book this time around, because it's one of the few collections that inspires me to the degree that every sentence I read makes me want to stop and write something of my own. He fires all my synapses and connects them in new ways. He sends a herd of wildebeest through my mind. It's a whole jungle full of animals, really, every color and shape, and he sends them all over my brain, screaming, defecating, fornicating."

Barthelme's fiction brims with possibilities, overflows with them. It is rebellious, defiant, inviting, hysterical, absurd, sad, life-affirming, and always moving. In every story--every sentence, every word--he demonstrates with aplomb what can be done within the framework of fiction, how much room there is for exploration of the form, how limitless and how kinetic it is, taking the question "What is a story?" and--rather than blowing it out of the water--he decides to drown it there instead, bloodlessly getting rid of such an outrageous question. "What is a story?" What is a human being? We shouldn't accept cookie-cutter answers to these complex questions, which demand multiple formulations and variations.

Sadly, Eggers also hits on another precision of thought, this one more disheartening, regarding the current state of the publishing industry. He begins the introduction asking a question: What would become of Donald Barthelme if he were to happen today, "if he were to burst onto the scene in 2004 or 2005 or thereabouts...what kind of reception would he receive?"

His short answer is clownish yet bitingly true: "People would be curious. Then they would probably be more or less dismissive. They might even club him in the street, using clubs meant for seals." His elaborative answer is less frolicsome, even more true: "We live in serious times, and though this is not Donald Barthelme's fault, he would pay dearly for it. The fact is that work like Don B's--which is playful, subtle, beautiful, and more like poetry (in its perfect ambivalence toward narrative) than almost any prose we have--would be seen today as frivolous, as unserious. There is in most quarters of mainstream fiction a newspapering process going on, wherein stylistic deviations are disallowed, where innovations in style are seen as a sign of disengagement. When reading contemporary work with distinctive styles, some readers become impatient and most critics become enraged. Tell us the story, they say. Just tell it to us, get it across, and get it over with. Spare us the frills."

Remember that Don B was, in his time, published in the some of the biggest of the big literary magazines. Today, the likelihood of that happening is suspect. Barthelme might have indeed found a publisher today, but would it be as robustly mainstream as it was then? Unlikely. Once again, Eggers, who was just on fire in this intro: "Things are different in this century, thus far. There is not much time for things that don't announce themselves and make fairly clear linear sense. And how often did Barthelme make clear linear sense? How often did his stories have a beginning, middle, and end? How often did he tell a story in a goddamn simple and easy way? Maybe once or twice, when he forgot himself."

Reading Barthelme is fraught with difficulties--but not the difficulties one would expect after reading all this--because, quite like Eggers, sometimes I just want to read Barthelme and not constantly feel the need to do writing of my own. Bathelme makes me want to write and write. Every sentence of his, the elasticity, the quantum leap of them, makes me want to write three or four or ten thousand of my own. But as far as distractions go, that's got to be one of the most welcome. Barthelme is the kind of reading experience that reminds one why we read--and why we write--in the first place: not simply to replicate or recapture experience, but to redefine it, to irradiate it.

You Don't Move Me Anymore & And I'm Glad That You Don't

2010-03-11T17:22:00.000-08:00

A couple months back, the enlivening-as-ever psychedelic Brooklynites Yeasayer released their sophomore followup Odd Blood, whose highs soar above and beyond their earlier work (All Hour Cymbals) and whose lows (drawn mostly from a heightened sense of ambition and interests) still aren't all that bad. "O.N.E.", their second single, explores the dual vocal direction they're taking at its very best. The video, as aptly described by Pitchfork, is "characteristically batshit" but no less ridiculously engaging. Oh. And the song is a funky 80s pulsating anthem all on its own merits.

Tourné à Montreal

2010-03-08T17:17:00.000-08:00

After waiting what has literally been years, I'm ecstatic to be able to say that Vincent Moon and Tegan and Sara finally got together in Montreal for a three song film session, featuring one song from their latest LP Sainthood, another from Tiesto's latest batch of dance house recordings (that included T&S among many notable others, Bloc Party, Jonsi, etc.), and one more, the song "Nineteen", from the twins' previous album The Con.

Catch all three of these amazing, pared-back versions of three already amazing songs right here. And as always, support the shit out of Vincent Moon.

Thinking Tangentially

2010-03-06T17:02:00.000-08:00

On parsing the similitudes between Klee and Walser, both being Swiss, I went ahead and dug through some of the Kardinsky-influenced, Bauhaus and surrealist master's quotations on art, life, and the convergence thereof. This, I adore:

"Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn."

Among many other fantastic characteristics (his musicality, his childlike sense of humor), Klee's use of and theories on color are most satisfying:

The Paul Klee of Prose

2010-03-04T22:27:00.001-08:00

At the excited suggestion of one of my mentors, I've been reading the dismally little-known but incredibly talented, "bewitched genius" (Newsweek) Robert Walser, the Swiss-German writer whose uncanny way of looking at the world and metaphysical modernism was a precursor and an inspiration to historical and modern writers alike, all the way from Kafka and Christian Morgenstern to Max Goldt and W.G. Sebald. Regarding Walser, the lauded Herman Hesse put it simply: "If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place."

What's refreshing about Walser (and there's a lot that's refreshing about Walser) is he seems to be equally at home and adept at writing three page flash fiction fables or anecdotes as he does writing longer stories and novels, which makes reading him at times a triple-layered experience, as each form presents a different style and a different way of storytelling and as a result a different emotional response from the reader. It's quite chameleonic and markedly different from many contemporary writers, who seem grounded in one form, one style--hell, even one story--and wary of veering away from that.

This short piece is the entirety of a story entitled "Nervous", a one paragraph block of interiority and slightly altered repetitive thoughts, a determined and flawed declaration of self, a tender, honest, and fragile introspection of aging:

"I am a little worn out, raddled, squashed, downtrodden, shot full of holes. Mortars have mortared me to bits. I am a little crumbly, decaying, yes, yes.I am sinking and drying up a little. I am a bit scalded and scorched, yes, yes. That's what it does to you. That's life. I am not old, not in the least, certainly I am not eighty, by no means, but I am not sixteen anymore either. Quite definitely I am a bit old and used up. That's what it does to you. I am decaying a little, and I am crumbling, peeling a little. That's life. Am I a little bit over the hill? Hmm! Maybe. But that doesn't make me eighty, not by a long way. I am very tough, I can vouch for that. I am no longer young, but I am not old yet, definitely not. I am aging, fading a little, but that doesn't matter; I am not yet altogether old, though I am probably a little nervous and over the hill. It's natural that one should crumble a bit with the passage of time, but that doesn't matter. I am not very nervous, to be sure, I just have a few grouches. Sometimes I am a bit weird and grouchy, but that doesn't mean I am altogether lost, I hope. I don't propose to hope that I am lost, for I repeat, I am uncommonly hard and tough. I am holding out and holding on. I am fairly fearless. But nervous I am, a little, undoubtedly I am, very probably I am, possibly I am a little nervous. I hope that I am a little nervous. No, I don't hope so, one doesn't hope for such things, but i am afraid so, yes, afraid so. Fear is more appropriate here than hope, no doubt about it. But I certainly am not fear-stricken, that I might be nervous, quite definitely not. I have grouches, but I am not afraid of the grouches. They inspire me with no fear at all. 'You are nervous,' someone might tell me, and I would reply cold-bloodedly, 'My dear sir, I know that quite well, I know that I am little worn out and nervous.' And I would smile, very nobly and coolly, while saying this, which would perhaps annoy this other person a little. A person who refrains from getting annoyed is not yet lost. If I do not get annoyed about my nerves, then undoubtedly I still have good nerves, it's clear as daylight, and illuminating. It dawns on me that I have grouches, that I am a little nervous, but it dawns on me in equal measure that I am cold-blooded, which makes me uncommonly glad, and that I am blithe in spirit, although I am aging a little, crumbling and fading, which is quite natural and something I therefore understand very well. "You are nervous," someone might come up to me and say. 'Yes, I am uncommonly nervous,' would be my reply, and secretly I would laugh at the big lie. "We are all a little nervous," I would perhaps say and laugh at the big truth. If a person can still laugh, he is not yet entirely nervous, if a person can keep calm when he hears some distress he is not yet entirely nervous. Or if someone came up to me and said: 'Oh, you are totally nervous ,' then quite simply I would reply in nice polite terms: 'Oh, I am totally nervous, I know I am.' And the matter would be closed. Grouches, grouches, one must have them, and one must have the courage to live with them. That's the nicest way to live. Nobody should be afraid of his little bit of weirdness. Fear is altogether foolish. "You are very nervous!"

'Yes, come by all means and calmly tell me so! Thank you!'

That, or something like it, is what I'd say, having my gentle and courteous bit of fun. Let man be courteous, warm, and kind, and if someone tells him he's totally nervous, still there's no need at all for him to believe it."

(The above story was taken from New York Review Books Classics' Selected Stories: Robert Walser, March 2002, NYC)

Also, incidentally, as I wrote that story out to instrumentalist artists Balmorhea's record All is Wild, All is Silent, the seven minute heart-swell song "Truth" came on, and the combined effect of those two tasks was fucking exhilarating.

Proclamatory!

2010-02-28T01:30:00.000-08:00

I've decided to make the unofficial, non-meteorological declaration that winter in San Francisco is officially (get it?) over! Plausibly, a valid argument could have been made any of the past couple weeks, but in my estimation there was a pinch too much rain and too many sudden, temperamental dips in the weather, who was behaving kind of like a spoilt child. Now, on the other hand, after a glorious and sunshiny day as today, I doubt there's much supportable opposition. If there's one thing that NorCal (SF in particular) has over SoCal (and there are many) it's the blooming season. Such gorgeous colors everywhere! Actual verdure! Actual flora! Spring has arrived, folks. That's as much a mindset as it is a literal moment in time.

The sun was a masterful force; the clouds were either paper-thin or pillow-fluffy and scattered like designs on a soft powder-blue wallpaper; the streets were thronged with assortments of people, some whose heads were buried in maps, others who knew their destinations all along; the air strewn with traces of delicious outdoor food being cooked away by vendors; and there was a noticeable lilted quality to the entire mood of the day. Factor in that it was the Chinese New Year Parade and the day was more or less an inflating balloon of anticipation until the big event, which is regarded as one of the top 10 parades in the world. You could sense it, though: there was a palpable buoyancy out there today, as if all at once everyone had concomitantly come to the agreement that, "Yes, right now, this instant, is spring. We are a people in need of spring. Let's get sprung and enjoy ourselves." Rooftops were packed, music carried from all over, and when it all ended, when the sun sunk below our horizons (aren't they cruel?), a great big moon rose up in the crystalline eastern sky, as though in earnest approval. Even now, early Sunday morning, firecrackers are still popping off.

I could never--and especially cannot now, after living in the West--fathom how people can voluntarily submit themselves to winters on the East. If I'm going to endure brutally chilled winters and onslaughts of snowstorms, I'm going to be living in Stockholm or somewhere similarly magical and with European quality of life, like healthcare. The only way it's worth putting up with self-abuse like that is because you're living somewhere not only desirable, but a place that strokes you back apologetically during these harsh winters, not some hyperbolic shell of a city that stares back at you with two black eyes and wired jaw. Prague, I'll take snow in Prague. Or Vilnius or Berlin or Vienna. Snow in America is a terrible punishment for a crime as benign as birth.

Many thoughts go out to Okinawa and Santiago in these tough, quake-ravaged times. If you can afford to donate a bit, please do. This is a planet that does not care about us, so we must take notice and care about each other.

Screaming Without Screaming

2010-02-25T21:30:00.000-08:00

Berkeley historically has a great film series; this year has been no different. Beginning on January 27, they've been currently running an African Film Series that went until last night, February 24, showing a different film each week (this is only one aspect to their film series; they've got plenty more going on). The two films I recently saw there were astoundingly rich and moving and, of course, visually stunning. The first was Movement (R)evolution and the second one Nora; both were focused on the contemporary dance movement borne out of the young generation of Africans hailing from all different parts of the continent, wrestling with how to move modern African Dance forward. It was so wonderful to hear them speak not just about dance as an art form and a means of storytelling but of the unavoidable way these dances are tied into their countries, their continent, their politics, their traditions,their entire formulation of identity, and most importantly their future.

The second film, Nora (winner of all sorts of awards), features one of the main dancers from the first film in a 35 minute dance-poem quatrain infused with brightness and energy that focuses on her youth, her life, and the events that eventually brought her to New York City. The cinematography and the imagery and the colors in this - not to mention the choreography - were quite literally amazing. Nora's a magnificent artist and a dancer; she plays herself, her mother, and her father, and the performance is consummate. Both of these films are incredibly necessary to watch. It was haunting and touching to watch and listen to these dancers discuss the history (national and continental) they were trying to tackle with some of these films -- genocide, slavery, wars of liberation, violence and injustice, all things the US knows all too well -- and to hear them wrestle with these notions of identity formed through country or nation or by rejecting these ideas; it's what gives this film such verve -- the raw emotion and the brave way these young artists are going about their passions. The central question at the heart of these film is: who is going to speak for Africa? It seems that so often when we hear about Africa we're hearing about it from an outsider, a face in the news. The answer that these films are shouting is "Africa must speak" and these silent, fluid, soft, punishing, excited, loving, angry, brutal, and delicate movements are their words.

One of the dancers from the first film had such a brilliant quote I just had to put it down here. They were talking about dance as art and the body as a tool for expression, how the body is a direct source of identity and how it speaks for you even if you never utter a word, and how ultimately to be tied to a country or a national identity is a potentially flimsy, corrosive, insubstantial, and dangerous way of being:

"Perhaps my only true country is my body."

Social Networking is Making Me Ill

2010-02-20T00:32:00.000-08:00

Not even in a figurative sense. I'm physically and physiologically growing weary and sick from all of this. First and foremost, I must state: I am complicit; I am part of the problem (a small cog, though) that I'd like to deracinate. Social networking is, in a manner of speaking, an organism -- a technological organism, but an organism no less. Like any organism, it can acquire bugs, viruses, diseases, antagonistic tendencies, and the likes; then, they can pass these viruses on to us hosts, those of us whom allow this organism, which can at times be an invasive one, to take residence in our lives. I feel as if I've gotten the equivalent to some kind of violent strain of influenza from all this social networking, and the major catalyst for this is Google Buzz -- the latest mouthful in the gluttonous feast of self-absorbed social networking. The last little nudge to the sensitive volcano, Buzz has topped everything off for me. I truly can't take much more of this. How socially, psychologically, and technologically thin do we want to spread ourselves? Are we actively trying to replace reality? Is that the goal? As much as I enjoy the professional and networking features of something as potentially useful as Facebook, there's a part of me that loathes the tedium that seems to take predominance. Too much talking about and around trivialities and too much solipsistic disclosure of perfectly inane information is, as the phrase suggests, too much. I've given serious consideration to a long-term project of crafting a novel or a long story entirely out of found Facebook status updates, but the project would be far too soul-crushing. Recently I heard an interesting quote from a scientist who weighed in on the subject of technological sprawl: (paraphrasing here) it's so terribly unfortunate that with all the "connectedness" out there, all the outreach, and all the information, the myriad ways in which we can use this to further educate ourselves, what do we use it for? Reality television, mindless droning, avatars and internet personalities. I almost hope that the skeptics and the cynics are right: that in five, ten years time social networking, facebook, buzz, twitter -- all of it -- will be a distant and embarrassing memory, like slap bracelets or beanie babies. I long to one day struggle to admit, embarrassingly, that "yes, yes I was a part of that blight."

A few cafés around the Bay Area have gone ahead and done "no technology days" to encourage more social interaction and intercommunal behavior between folks, where if you want to have coffee or a bite to eat or a glass of wine at their place of commerce and communication on this particular day, no computers, cell phones, or iAnythings are allowed; I think it's a wonderful idea and I encourage more businesses to do just this once in a while. There's nothing more depressing and vacuous than walking by or walking into a café and seeing twenty faces buried into the blue-hued screens of their respective computers. Historically -- and even today in many places outside of America --- cafés (and coffee culture as a whole) have always been places for people (friends and strangers alike) to gather and/or meet to discuss their lives, politics, art, philosophy, topics with a touch of import; they were places to make new friendships, strengthen old ones, maybe even learn a little bit, all while enjoying good food and drink. I'm not in any way, shape, or form anti-technology. I'm no luddite; I certainly don't, however, think technology is even a serviceable surrogate for the world in which we inhabit. As a proud, self-avowed introvert I find new social interactions alarmingly uncomfortable, probably more so than most people; but they're profoundly worthwhile and illimitably integral to creating a better world. Last I checked, there's a still a world out there that has yet to be destroyed and people who've yet to be reduced to barbarism. Let's take notice.

Brand New Views of a Universe That Gets Prettier With Age

2010-02-17T19:59:00.000-08:00

Two months ago, NASA launched their Wide-field Infared Survey Explorer (WISE for short) 325 miles up from earth, where by design this probing telescope scans the sky for objects and matter that is typically hard to see: asteroids, comets, galaxies, as well as objects that might potentially pose a threat to our dear (if somewhat mismanaged) planet. Since then, it's sent back somewhere in the likes of 200,000 plus images, some of which NASA has recently been so kind as to publish for our astonishment. The images give us a new and comprehensively stunning perspective on the immensity of the Andromeda Galaxy, the burnt infared path of a comet hurling through space, as well as a bird's eye view of stellar chaos. We're so lucky (and arguably unworthy) to live in such an amazingly beautiful world that if you let it will ignite your curiosity and imagination all your life.

I could stare at this one for days; the detail is absolutely mind-boggling. You can actually see the dusty arms of the spiraling galaxy! The blue denotes new mature stars while red and yellow represent dust from large, newborn ones. Lovely. So lovely.

This one too. Well, all of them to be honest, but this one foremost. Quick story about this comet found first in 2007: after spending billions of years spinning around in one of the more cold spherical clouds within our solar system, it was suddenly knocked out of its orbit and sent loose in a new direction closer to the sun.

Vingt-quatre minutes magnifiques.

2010-02-13T00:01:00.000-08:00

Upon the release of their sophomore record (which is fantastic), Vampire Weekend gave a performance for Vincent Moon's Les Soirées de poche series of one-take recordings, which is sort of a tangential direction of some of his other one-take films. I'm not shy about saying that I regard what Vincent is doing as brilliant, in an almost obvious, "why didn't anyone else think of this? " kind of way; and this further demonstrates his beyond-secure position as a beacon, a stalwart, and a watermark of fantastic taste in the independent music world. As music videos themselves witness their slow demise into obscurity, Vincent Moon is stealing their last breaths and giving us something more, something infinitely improved, and something that digs at that moist spot of our hearts where we love to be dug. This is one of those Parisian loft concerts that makes you (or me, at least) want move to Europe immediately. So very amazing. Viewing this should a requirement for breathing.

Please, please, please visit and support Vincent Moon's projects. They're so fucking necessary in our world, which seems to do everything in its power to enforce a sterile, joyless, connectionless existence on us.
La Blogotheque
Les Concerts À Emporter
Les Nuits de Fiume
Les Soirées de Poche

Everlasting Desire

2010-02-11T04:18:00.000-08:00

Normally I wouldn’t tack up any of my own personal writing here, but I recently did an exercise with a group of writers that was interesting and thought-provoking enough for me to mention, and I figured what the hell: it was a simple exercise, not an attempt at brilliance. Short and weak enough that I don’t really care, I’ll throw her on up here. The exercise is worth considering

What was the first thing you can remember asking for as a child? Write about that, either through fiction, poetry, or fuck it - paint a picture. Art's pliant; whatever your medium, work it. What did you want? Why did you want it? What did it look like, taste like, sound like, feel like, etcetera. And did you get it? If so, was it worth it? And if not, then what? We’re social animals. As animals, we're marked by our desires. Pretty much all religion attempts to put a muzzle on desire, but they're part of who we are, earthly and humane and carnal desires. These may or may not be more substantial and impressive than the desires of, say, your standard housedog. Nevertheless, we, as people, don’t ever stop yearning, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing depending on where the crosshairs of our desires tend to gravitate. If there's an American author who wrote about desires in just the precise way, it's Kerouac, who said both "“My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them” and “all human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together," encompassing both the necessity for and the pitfalls of desire. I don’t need much in the way of confirmation that I’m a little bit (quite so) bizarre, but this certainly did the job. For the life of me I couldn’t actually remember any things, as in objects or items or other trinkets typically procured through a pecuniary exchange that I asked for; I did, however, remember asking for other things, slightly more impalpable and therefore impossible requests. Quite clearly I remembered the first thing I desperately wanted. To this day, I still think this is an important question.

“Space. Is there a way you can lower it down, like a big dark flag, the kind we have outside school?” I roved my eyes over them both: mom's face smaller than ever, round, stripped of makeup, and severe; my father's vice-like, narrow, an unkempt dusting of gray covering the skin of his chin that had softened with the onset of his fiftieth year. “Can you, can anyone, please bring me space." To drive home that I was serious, I had to keep looking around, back and forth between them. "Up there," I pointed, "haul it down here?” At six years old, I wanted space—as in an outer inner world, as in cosmological infinitude, as in room to breathe, as in dead and broken banana-colored stars hanging from the detritus coat hangers of a distant galaxy, as in my own room. They wanted me to clarify, always be clearer. A family (meaning the men) maxim: A man must be direct, like a gritty brick to the skull; he knows what he wants, but moreover, how to articulate it. “How would you measure it?” my father asked. Space? I hardly knew what he meant. “How many teaspoons will it take?” my mother wondered, already reaching into one of her many silverware-clinking drawers glinting from the sun storming through the open windowsill. The sun, from space. “I don't think I have enough,” she admitted, her voice worn by pity to an entropic murmur. “We can't go to the store,” my father reminded us, glancing from the want ads to where I sat knees-to-chest on the kitchen floor digging my fingernails into cracks set deep in the wooden planks wounded by dropped knives and plates and other bluntly shaped objects that my father swore would set us back thousands, maybe millions, “not until next month.” Space. I pined for space. How could I adequately explain this, at that age, without sounding insane? Even now, how can I? Between matter and nothing, between walls and openness, between rutted pastures and solitary confinement, between a vacuum of darkness and a vortex of scarce-but-enough luminescence, I wanted space. I said, “Can you bring down space? I want to sleep next to it to him to her—to space.”

The End of Something Abominable

2010-02-07T17:51:00.000-08:00

I'm talking about football. Or what the Americans roguishly call football. For twenty some odd weeks those us for whom football is at the very least a bore and at the very most an injurious affront must endure what manifests into a monster-show of hysteria driven by violence and latent sexual appetite satisfied through this violence, a-few-strips-of-fabric-shy-of-being-nude cheerleaders to further wet that appetite, overpriced (and awful) beer, and slow, lurching entertainment mixed with mass consumer marketing trying to pass as athletics. The question, "did you see the game?" becomes so ubiquitous that the words are spoken almost as a nervous tic instead of genuine interest. Cashiers at corner stores linger when ringing you up, their eyes fastened to the upper corner of the ceiling, where a television hangs like something dead and alive the same time. People, normally once active, hole themselves inside for paralyzing blocks of hours at a time to watch a sixty minute game that somehow winds up taking nearly three hours. And then after one final orgiastic hurrah -- it ends. How did Eliot put it? Not with a bang but a whimper? He could have said just as much about the American football season and been equally as spot-on.

I've got around the next six or seven months to recuperate in the blissful silence returned to me while footballs spends its half-year hibernation hungover and tending to its chronic bruises. Baseball, while I harbor just as much disinterest in the sport, doesn't clatter and roar with the same kind of fervor as football. Because it's spread out. Football is acute and winnowed down to only a few months of drunken, body-painting, jersey-wearing, inclusive-we-speaking intensity. Hell resurfaces in October when the end of baseball and the beginning of football converge to bear a freakish spawn of unsettling American boredom and misdirected focus. Until then, I'll be enjoying myself quite wholesomely.

Subtle Dream Pop

2010-02-02T23:57:00.000-08:00

Baltimore's whimsical duo Beach House recently came out with their third record, Teen Dream. To my ears, it's their best, lushest, and dreamiest stuff to date, which is exhaustively impressing considering the merits of their previous releases.

Get Thee To a Sink & Slake!

2010-01-31T16:39:00.000-08:00

Monthly Explorations. January 2010

2010-01-28T17:44:00.000-08:00

Every month MSNBC Technology & Science puts together a slideshow collection of the month's most stupefyingly beautiful photographs taken of space. This one might be my favorite: Saturn and its immensity dwarfing Rhea, one if its uncanny sixty-one moons. The shadow of another moon is visible to the bottom left of Saturn's ring at the edge of the planet's disk, a small dark dot.

This too: a painfully detailed and intense image of the Tarantula Nebula, the largest stellar nursery considered to be part of our "local neighborhood" of galaxies. The Tarantula Nebula has such magnitude and ferocious luminosity that if it were any closer to us--as close as, say, the Orion Nebula--the nebula would indeed cast canvassing shadows down on Earth. Contained within this nebula (those blue sparkles) is a star cluster, the most massive of which have already long since exploded. Taken here is arguably the most detailed image ever of Tarantula.

And for a quick rundown of recent news: Obama's budget dastardly crosses off any hopes for near-future trips to the moon, giving Russia and India the go-ahead as we direct our focus elsewhere despite the sizable chunks of money already spent in Bush's ill-conceived 2020 return to the moon plan; dinosaurs (yet again boosting dino to bird linkage) had slight red plumage; nuclear fusion is looking more and more possible; and I for one don't give a damn about an iPad or any further extraneous developments in too much technology. Go for a walk, people. And to quote the Jack Forkheimer, "keep looking up."

On Life:

2010-01-18T21:07:00.000-08:00

Few producers and directors, living or deceased, have quite as laureled and enshrined of a cinematic catalogue as Stanley Kubrick. From this writer's perspective, not one of his films is a throwaway and even his worst is metric tons better and more resonant than many modern filmmakers' productions. One peek at the indexes of utter tripe sold and mass-marketed into multi-million dollar grossing spectacles and it's almost disheartening to know that at one time serious movies had a serious place in the realm of Hollywood; now, their niche is more difficult to maintain and even harder to find - especially if you don't live in a large city where movies expecting to gain far too little for their effort are shown in smaller, historically-reputable theaters. Just for an example, Soderbegh's 2008 biopic Che starring Benecio Del Toro, which received its fair share of glowing reviews and awards, saw close to zero advertising and even less time spent in the few theaters gracious and venturesome enough to house it; on the other hand, James Cameron's Pocahontas and Midworld ripoff Avatar gets pumped with marketing and is still enjoying its insanely popular run in theaters. I realize in America a movie about Ernesto Guevara and by extension the historical facts surrounding the communism of the time might not have a wide appeal, but the point remains: what's contemporarily regarded as important and salient in this country, quite frankly, simply is not important or salient. Philosophically, Kubrick was also one of the most brutally honest and direct; he throws no punches, refuses to shy away from certain ignoble human truths, doesn't cater to any standardized Hollywood escapism tropes, and is uncompromising with regards to these characteristics. An interesting facet to his work as a whole: all but his first two films were adapted from novels and he was known to write his screenplays in collabo with other writers, usually novelists. To be sure, Kubrick's work is not entertainment for entertainment's sake. But is that all we want? Is the only thing we want, to quote another bad movie, "to be entertained?" or do we seek more from such a golden medium? The above quote is as representative of Kubrick and his work as I can think of and in my opinion is one of the bravest, most responsible, admirable, and electrifying perspectives on life one can string together.

Kubrick's career began with a photography job at Look magazine seized while he was still in his late teens, where the cinematographic skills he would learn there would greatly inform his future filmmaking and visual aesthetic. His poor grades in high school precluded all hope for him to seek higher education of any kind; he didn't need it.

L'heure est grave

2010-01-15T12:22:00.000-08:00

Arcade Fire, whose husband and wife founders have strong familial connections with Haiti, has been active in helping the country for years. On their website they recently posted a charity outlet through which you can also help that has a guaranteed pipeline into Haiti. Partners in Health is a non-profit health care organization that has been working on projects in Haiti since the late eighties. Donate. Every five dollars helps. This is not the time for sympathy, thoughts, and prayers; this is the time for action. Donate. A little bit.

http://www.arcadefire.com/

http://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti

They wrote the song "Haïti" for their debut record back in 2004. I doubt they'll ever play nor will anyone ever hear it quite the same.

Drawn-Out Intervals of Engrossing Boredom

2010-01-10T00:47:00.000-08:00

New Scientist recently wrote an excellent piece on the truth behind the excitement commonly associated and expected in scientific exploration. The inside scoop revealed? It's boring. Astonishing discoveries aside, "Science is not a whirlwind dance of excitement, illuminated by the brilliant strobe light of insight. It is a long, plodding journey through a dim maze of dead ends. It is painstaking data collection followed by repetitious calculation. It is revision, confusion, frustration, bureaucracy and bad coffee. In a word, science can be boring."

What immediately struck me in these opening paragraphs and caused me to reread them and by extension the rest of the article in a different mode of thought, was how analogous this was to art, to writing, fiction in particular (but only in particular because that's where my preoccupations are aimed by default and obsession). Books, like the scientific discovery (aren't books discoveries?), like the new knowledge or insight into humanity gained (can't and don't books provide both of these?), are the embodiment of stimulation, intellectual hunger and sated curiosity, filling those fortunate enough to read with a sense of the thrilling exploration of self, society, and world. Behind the pages and behind the covers and behind the sentences, for the artist, things aren't quite the same.

Sure, there is excitement in the process; there has to be, there must be. If there isn't exhilaration somewhere in the process, the praxis of writing daily, then you're doing it wrong. A colleague of mine recently put it this way: "process must be fun." One must find a way to adore and take from that boredom and frustration a kind of hunter's patient anticipation, hungry for the find, constantly searching. Without a doubt, though, the process can be a painstaking one filled with, as the article pointed out, dead ends, revision, confusion, bad coffee, long and plodding journeys marked with precipitous highs and hollow, lonely lows; on the other hand, when things are rolling, the adrenaline soars, pulls down clouds, a world-birthing joy. But it is, to use a well-worn cliche, a labor of love. Like science, all good art is an exploration, an experiment with the unknown that may or may not prove successful. Before an author can even begin to worry if his or her book will be critically successful or commercially successful, or even published, the author must worry whether or not everything will come together, whether the variables will add up and work, whether the experiment (because what is a book or a poem if not an artistic experiment?) will come to fruition, at least to the artist's designs. Characters come into the story that never spark to life the way they were envisioned and are axed; the point of view isn't working so it gets changed, a solitary sentence receives a day's worth of assiduous care just to make it sounds right and (one can only hope) carries the intended meaning. Hemingway wrote some of his endings thirty to forty times.

Somehow, the idealism behind this idea of a finished product and unleashing a glossy-covered book upon the world needs to meet with the blue-collar reality that it requires tireless work and effort; and it's not always going to be constant flood of intellectual breakthroughs, philosophical and human revelations, and worldly candlelight.That only comes by way of going through this "boredom", which isn't quite the same kind of boredom as, say, watching celebrities dance on television; that's an existential, purpose-questioning boredom. Much different. Boredom isn't even quite the right word. It's more of a murkiness that grabs hold of its victim, containing both moments of unharnessed wonder and seemingly impassable hardships.

A few description in the article regarding astronomers as being most familiar with this kind of drudgery resonated with me. Astronomers, famous for "the long stare", pry patiently into the cosmos, waiting, waiting, waiting all with the hopes of snagging a glimpse of something spectacular, a supernova, looking through the lens of telescope to spot an exploding star, the wispy tail of a meteor burning across the sky, anything, without ever knowing if they will in fact ever be so fortunate.Metaphorically, this sounds similar to the job of an artist - except the artist doesn't have to wait. They can succeed where the astronomer is helpless; they can create their own supernova, their own galaxies, their own cosmic vibrations and electromagnetic spectra of whatever it is they want to shed light upon.

None of this is to imply that science and art are complete equals; obviously, science serves to us certain things that art can never hope to do. Art won't cure any epidemics. The two do, however, stem from a similar root: an unquenchable thirst for knowledge; an endless series of questions about the world and our place in it and all that is entailed with us, our emotions, our aspirations, our fears, our morals, our decisions, our politics, our endeavors, everything; and a tenacious curiosity. In short, to push the envelope ever further so that we may better understand us, this heart-stopping perplexity we find ourselves thrown into, life. Together, they are a twin-chambered lantern with which we rifle through the folds, layers, and dark corners of the universe, our planet, and its people. The article, and Marie Curie, sum things up nicely:

"But here's the surprise. The Curies actually enjoyed their work. 'We were very happy," Marie wrote. "We lived in a preoccupation as complete as that of a dream."

Noise

2010-01-09T20:16:00.000-08:00

Londonian novelist Hari Kunzru was not many years ago deemed by Granta to be one of the twenty best fiction writers under forty. I am, to say the least, an enormous fan. A week or two ago I put to rest Transmission, the followup to his sensational debut The Impressionist. By all available indicators, Granta couldn't have been more accurate in their assessment, though that's nothing new. Written in 2004 at the heigh of the real version the events are based on, the story follows, among other critical characters, a young Indian man as he moves from his native country to Silicon Valley to work in the dot-com industry right as the bubbling market is about to explode and bust like the failed venture we should have seen it as. Reading it now, so many years after that tide-turning global moment, when we're still understanding and feeling many of the aftereffects of that bursted, fluttering bubble and the ensuing deflations of this supercapitalistic there-can-always-be-more theory of shut-eyed economic thickheadedness, the novel takes on an even more essential tone as it aims its lens at interrelated contemporary topics like the pursuit of dreams, success, globalization, terrorism, economic theory, celebrity idolization, and the ugly union of all the above - not to mention how love manages to figure into all this.

A particular passage near the end of the book struck me as so devastatingly apropos and timely, given the recent hysteria caused by the attempted bombing of the plane in Detroit and the subsequent shocked, outraged, flabbergasted response calling for all sorts of theatre: more information; bigger, better, more comprehensive terrorist lists; extended watch lists; extended no fly lists; pat downs, piss tests, and strip searches; microscopes slid up your anal cavity; ball-fondling to see what falls loose; more state of the art technology that they can't even assure will be any more effective; more, more, more, all to create the illusion of safety; to, as Kunzru puts it, "abolish the unknown."

"'We want to abolish the unknown,' writes one Leela researcher. It is a common enough desire. As humans, we want to know what is lurking outside our perimeter, beyond our flickering circle of firelight. We have built lenses and geiger counters and mass spectrometers and solar probes and listening stations on remote Antarctic islands. We have drenched the world in information in the hope that the unknown will finally and definitively go away. But information is not the same as knowledge. To extract one from the other you must, as the word suggests, inform. You must transmit. Perfect information is sometimes defined as a signal transmitted from a sender to a receiver without loss, without the introduction of the smallest uncertainty or confusion.

In the real world, however, there is always noise.

Since 1965, the Russian Academy of Sciences has published Problems of Information Transmission. It is, insofar as it possible for a scientific publication (even a Russian one) to convey an emotional tone, a melancholy read. Threaded through recondite papers on Markov Chains and Hamming Spaces and binary Goppa codes and multivariate Poisson flow is a vocabulary of imperfection, of error correction and density estimation, of signals with unknown appearance and disappearance times, of indefinite knowledge and losses due to entropy. Sparse vectors are glimpsed through a haze of Gaussian white noise. Certainty backslides into probability. Information transmission, it emerges, is about doing the best you can."

Don't Read in Airports

2010-01-03T06:03:00.000-08:00

Allow me to expound and clarify: Don't read in airports at six in the morning before moving across the country or even during the ensuing flight while being chained down into painful lethargy by a nasty hangover with cephalalgic tendencies. Or if you must read in those conditions, pick up something light, something easy, a book that's tantamount to a soothing breeze blowing through your hair, a book about two people falling in and out and in and out of love by a beach and at the end someone expectedly dies - in short, a book so transparent and immaterial you'll forget you ever read it.

Don't, on the other hand, try to read a potentially wondrous, indescribably beautiful and heart-rending book by an author who proves just how flexible fiction can be and how much can be accomplished with ingenuity and gusto between the covers of a book while at the same doing something completely different with the novel form. The book? The People of Paper. The author? Salvador Plascencia, of Greater Los Angeles. For whatever reason, when I first opened this book almost two years ago, despite the feeling that I should be loving this book, that I should be obsessed with this book, I read through it on that flight in a blur and upon finishing, my reaction was a nonplussed one. Reading it once again now, under much better circumstances conducive, I was indeed consumed with the book and offered it wavelets upon wavelets of apologies.A truly wonderful read, a joy, and an exciting moment for contemporary literature.

I'm loath to get into the book because I think it's something that you just have to read and experience on your own but I will provide two things: In the most recent issue of Poets & Writers they listed Plascencia as one of the top 50 most inspiring writers living today (joining the ranks of Haruki Murakami, Cormac McCarthy, Dave Eggers, Anne Carson, John Ashberry, Toni Morrison,Joan didion, Thomas Pychon, CD Wright, among many laudable others which I'll post later in full) At 28, take that for what you will; and a quote from Salvador himself grabbed from an interview he gave to BOMB magazine with Max Benavidez on the structure of his book, the somewhat comical state of publishing, and the necessity for the artist to do whatever is required for the story he or she is trying to tell:

"As far as the physical appearance of the book goes: “design” is often taken to mean something that happens after the writing. And, without a doubt, the people at McSweeney’s are great designers in that sense, but the graphic and layout elements within the narrative are not just decorative. The columns, the blackouts, serve an integral narrative function. You can’t lay outThe People of Paper in a standard format. It doesn’t work. Harcourt, who is doing the paperback, had to use a larger trim size to make the book work. That was really exciting, that the physical object of the book had to stretch to accommodate the story.

What I find extremely interesting is the apprehension toward typography and design by many critics. You hear people say, sarcastically, Call me old-fashioned but I like my novels with words. The irony is, if you’re familiar with print culture and history, a book consisting of pure prose on a single column is a fairly recent development that has more to do with the standardization of printing presses and lazy publishers than literary tradition. There are limits to what prose can do, and sometimes it’s not a metaphor or lyricism that you need. Sometimes what the page needs is a darkened square. Lawrence Sterne taught us this in the mid-1700s."

Rereading History

2010-01-01T19:29:00.000-08:00

Whenever I'm home I try to take advantage of being girded with such odd bits and pieces of my and my family's history - books I hungrily tore through when younger, much younger, books my mother or grandmother had feasted on growing up and handed down, pictures belonging to my father or someone else, his Vietnam days, his hippy days, my brother and I, my grandmother and her second husband, immigrant relatives, letters and journals from everyone, pictures and drawings, stories written, the list goes on endlessly. If there's one truth to life it's that at any given age we have enough history, a bubbling never-ending supply, to drown in if ever we should choose to.

Amid flipping through travel photologs of my grandmother's fearless odysseys around the world and finding books that occupied my thoughts and anxieties as a wee lad in elementary school - complete with the weird scholastic version's hardback texture yet paperback size - and getting a kick out of the sentences I'd underlined or notes I'd written in the margin or the interstices between words, sometimes interesting, often revealing, sometimes vulgar, I found a copy of Fahrenheit 451. I forget which grade I was in or how old I was when I first opened and sped through this awesome book-affirming book, but I love, determinedly love, even to this day, the line I'd highlighted and circled more than once in typical shaky, sloppy scrawl.

"I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane."

Such sage advice, no? Finding something from so far back and attempting to recall or, more likely, imagine what exactly that line meant to me at that time, what kind of weighty significance it held, enough to induce me to underline it as if I'd struck gold with my eyes, is a fascinating act of remembrance. I can only delight in wondering at how vindicating reading that sentence must have been to any maladjusted teenager who reads it, nods their head, and whispers "yes" so no on else can hear. The past is ultimately a mystery to us, and try as we might to understand or make sense of it, we never can; the forward progress of our daily lives is wrapped, wound, and tied into an ugly knot around this constant slightly pathetic even if endearing triangulating act of reaching backwards in an attempt to conclude with even an imprint of finality on our histories, perhaps so that we can better understand the present and maybe even predict or control the future.