So, even though the movie I Am Number Four was a(n unsurprising) disappointment, and even though the soundtrack was the typical run of “cool” songs thrown together only loosely coupled to the events on screen, it did reveal an awesome gem that has more than paid the price of admission*. Check out a version here: [...] Read more – ‘Letters From The Sky’.
I will fill in the background details soon, but I figured ‘release early, release often’. This is a set of reflections on my run-in with Bell’s Palsy. Things I have learned: Don’t make the mistake of thinking that because one side of your mouth is at least semi-functional, that side can perform successfully the actions [...] Read more – ‘The Palsy’.
Tillandsia ionantha is a bromeliad native to Central America that is classified as vulnerable by the World Conservation Union. This epiphyte is well adapted to its rather unique ecological niche, growing attached to the high branches of trees where it receives exposure to the sunlight that the canopy of trees shades from the forest floor [...] Read more – ‘Terrarium’.
I had truly forgotten the immensity of the ocean. We had not been to the beach in a very very long time. Oh, there were reasons, even beyond our constant cries of “busy”-ness, but they all seems to dissolve into foolish caricatures today when we stood on the shore and watched the white-maned waves come crashing [...] Read more – ‘Oceanic’.
Deep into a stumbleweed night, cold autumn air sluicing through the canyons, and even the coyotes are calm tonight. Iryshka and I are drinking Red Stripes and doing a suicide pact of pushing one more hour of creative enterprise out, but I am not entirely sure it’s working. I know why we choose to do [...] Read more – ‘Push at the Edge, Then Push Again’.
And here it goes again, more than you could ever hope for, or expect. Hallowe’en comes but once a year, but this year — no candy apples. Almost didn’t make it to any pagan parades, but did manage — with Iryshka’s insistence — to drop into a sweet neighborhood that brought back some serious childhood [...] Read more – ‘Against The Grain’.
A gentle oasis of peace yesterday morning, as the Baby and I decided to take full advantage of the gorgeous rainfall. We bundled up in our raingear and galoshes (what a great word, so appropriate to the sounds of walking in rain and mud) and trundled off to the park to chase utkey (ducks) and [...] Read more – ‘Rain, Rain, Don’t Go Away’.
This is a short instruction to myself to put a few things up on the shelf, now, and stop fretting about them. Everything will come in time. Promise. Read more – ‘Put It On The Shelf’.
My child has taken to repeating, mantra-like, “No No No No!” when his intentions are thwarted by a safety-conscious parent, such as myself. I had read that this behavior is quite common, but it’s quite interesting despite its prosaic nature. It’s part of the whole slew of concepts I keep labeling “maps”, not only because [...] Read more – ‘What Else Can We Say But Yes?’.
Summation of stun. That is the night. Broken into shards, unable to collect them together, but still able to get a glimpse of the whole form, an implication of what it was, what it could be. We’re zombies after 8pm. We can push, push, push, and get something out, but it is only recycled detritus [...] Read more – ‘We’re Zombies After 8pm’.
Yet this alchemy was so powerful that once he massaged that elastic between his little thumb and forefinger, all was forever lost. Read more – ‘Quotes Out Of Context’.
Things don’t always go the way you plan. In fact, sometimes planning is the least significant component in your life. Surely if you were some god-like creature designing frogs over the millenia, you’d work in leaping and landing as a sort of coupled unit — figuring that the conclusion is at least as necessary as [...] Read more – ‘An Evolutionary Flop: To Leap Is Not To Land’.
An interesting set of thoughts, coming up at exactly the right time as I start to chide myself about not following through with all my vast plans for music, for life … Before I get into it, here’s the article: The Willpower Paradox from Scientific American, July 2010 I might expand this later, but the operative ideas [...] Read more – ‘Paradox of Will’.
I just have to post my latest horoscope from Free Will Astrology Here’s the really good news: CIA director Leon Panetta says there are fewer than 100 Al-Qaeda combatants in Afghanistan. Here’s the utterly confusing news: The U.S has over 94,000 highly trained human beings in Afghanistan whose express purpose is to destroy Al-Qaeda. I [...] Read more – ‘A Lavish Reserve of Fighting Spirit’.
I am liking today. Despite being tired, there’s a dark, powerful push that lingers behind the curtains. That’s the best way to describe it, the best I can think of: imagine, if you will, a slowly brewing storm-cloud, a thunderhead-to-be, full of force, slowly becoming something terrible, inexorable, natural. The ‘portentous storm’ feeling is helped, [...] Read more – ‘A Storm’.
…[R]ather than creating immutable, unchanging spaces that define a particular experience, they suggest inhabitant and structure can—and should—mutually influence each other. -Ethan Marcotte Read more – ‘Responsive’.
So, a fine repast of words to break the fast of a colder night, following on the heels of the dark coffee of morning. Echoes of some of the ecstatic verbiage I myself have employed back in the visionary days of music and art. It’s a nice partner to the wellspring of motivation I feel [...] Read more – ‘To Solemnly Affirm’.
Stepping into a world of typography and organization, these have been the nodes of interest lately: http://data.worldbank.org/ http://www.thenewhumanism.org/ http://www.npr.org/ Read more – ‘Sites That Get Me Crazy Lately’.
Such to the dead might appear the world of living — charged with information, with meaning, yet somehow always just, terribly, beyond that fateful limen where any lamp of comprehension might beam forth –Thomas Pynchon, Against The Day Read more – ‘Threshold’.
This is a rough/simple version of where we are — sitting a few long blocks down from the Forbidden City and Tianamen, and right at the crossroads of some heavy shopping areas. Earlier research suggests — though I cannot be sure — that the highly rated Da Dong Roast Duck restaurant is very very close. [...] Read more – ‘Simplified Beijing’.
Bad sleep the night before (what’s new?). Long long day of packing, cooking baby food, sorting clothes. Baba helping with Lushkin. Katya “why can’t we ever do anything on time?”. Finally out the door, almost 7pm. Night drive to LA. “Munis” in the back — Monsters Inc. — red bulls in the center column. In [...] Read more – ‘Telegraph From Beijing Part 1’.
Getting ready– small, agile laptop. Online backups we hope we can access. Installing server on laptop to run dev sites. Drinking water. Read more – ‘Prepping for China’.
Off to a soaring start, though sleep is still a corrugated surface. Packing it up, packing it in, trying to streamline yet still be comprehensive. Thinking that expectations are like putting a soft blanket on the future, but the future is like the cold vein of air that inevitably creeps in. Also thinking: A mode [...] Read more – ‘It Might Just Be A Great Day’.
I keep forgetting to mention (to the noosphere in general) the “bloom”: here in the palm-and-desert aerie, we have the blessing of an early bloom. This is always a beautiful shock to my inner-climate-sense, since I grew up in {was forged in the Iroquois fires of} Upstate New York {and also subsequently in the Mohican Valley [...] Read more – ‘In Bloom’.
Sometimes I think that these days are the compressed moments seen quickly, from the corner of the eye, in the half-light of the past… a moment of falling asleep, or of seeing the black window and thinking that it could be anywhere outside. Tonight, outside, it’s a rascal vein of cold air, slipping up through [...] Read more – ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’.
We’re all survivors, but who transcends survival? –joan baez. History is all about polishing the edges and flattering the ego, so don’t worry about that part of it while you’re doing the work. –todf Read more – ‘Jumbalaya’.
Sitting in the semi-dark of Lucian’s room, playing with a wordpress app for my new “smartphone” (a title no object deserves when it requires so much instruction and direction), reviewing family, christmas, music, and food in my head (in that order). Seeing the armature of xmas in a vision and it’s dark, silver and purple [...] Read more – ‘Skeleton of Christmas’.
Tired. My ears are buzzing like they’re filled with boar bristles. Electric boar bristles. It’s been a long day. My throat is a continuous lost sigh. I am going to bed. Read more – ‘The Grain of the Voice’.
Managed to uncover some novelty tonight, pushed Crucifixion Doll in another direction entirely but one that made me much happier. This is the song I have found entirely unyielding to manipulation lately … I have spent the last 4 sessions, several hours each, really trying to wrench this out of the sonic hole it was [...] Read more – ‘Aural Fatigue’.
Trying to pull off the cobwebs of sleep, leftover from the long and spine-scraping weekend. When Iryna is sick, the whole world is off-kilter. Sleep was the first sacrifice. Yesterday, a nice “day off”, was confounded by an overtaxed nervous system and a rogue stubbornness daemon that encouraged me, through delicious whispered promises, to bang [...] Read more – ‘Floating…’.
I had heard it said that the older people get the crazier they get. I am not so sure this is true– it feels rather more like, the older one gets the less one values the social filters that dominated one’s younger life. It takes a lot of energy to keep oneself socially acceptable on [...] Read more – ‘Lift the Censure’.
There are three forces shaping the world, an Arab reporter I met in the Gaza Strip once told me: money, women, and journalism. The Most Hated Name in News Read more – ‘Three Forces’.
SO I have fallen behind with my Gravity’s Rainbow reading. I don’t know exactly why, but it’s not ‘catching’ me like Infinite Jest did. Not yet anyway. There have been beautiful passages thus far: the opening (“a screaming comes across the sky” stuff) passage, and then the longer extended Slothrop development, with family history and [...] Read more – ‘Housewarming’.
Waiting on another upload, still sleepy, daydreaming about coffee, wondering what the limit is, but more really feeling bitter and betrayed by the fact that, today, drinking coffee seems to have no stimulant-esque effect yet I am hitting that queasy-overdose-feeling. Read more – ‘Bitter Coffee Morning’.
.…research has gone well, in retrospect. There were some frustrations, and I wasn’t ultimately happy with the two major “creative” attempts today (one attempt at grainy, scream-esque vocals that just fell painfully short but left me with a ragged throat, and one attempt to insert a motif-expanding break into a driving song– the result was [...] Read more – ‘Ongoing Sound Research’.
Going along with the idea that “if you build it, the ideas will come”, I have created homes for my recent audio work. Guitar/Synth/Band format stuff I believe will become Engine Ares {working band name, based off an old song from my former band and one that hit me with the force of epiphany this [...] Read more – ‘The Invisible Noise Experience’.
@bmakesithappen happy to make you happy. i sent it to everyone except aaron. in reply to bmakesithappen # @bmakesithappen this is for you: http://bit.ly/p7VsK # super-stimulants don’t so eradicate hunger, so much as make it an abstraction # just communed with an owl on my backporch overlooking the canyon # Oh yeah this will someday [...] Read more – ‘transmissions 2009-09-15’.
Creativity and Mental Illness: Is There a Link?. There is limited scientific evidence to associate creativity with mental illness. Despite this, many authors promoted a connection. Explanations for this contradiction are explored, and social and research implications are discussed. Also, the venerable Aldous Huxley: Aldous Huxley interviewed for The Paris Review (1960). Read more – ‘Creativity and Mental Illness’.
Yeah, haven’t actually written too much lately, instead letting the Twitter module take over & capture the fragmented thoughts of any given day. Night time has been spent experimenting with recording, incrementally carving, remapping, knob-twisting, and the like, moving slowly– but ever– onward. Lingering favorite from last week has to be the Tuba samples, thrown [...] Read more – ‘The Tuba of Blasphemous Distortion’.
Now that I am wrapping up My Infinite Summer, mulling over Pemulis’ footnote-expulsion and wading through Gately’s ‘post-default-setting-violent-encounter’ recovery, I turn my mind to the next book. And just to re-iterate that the universe takes care of its own, another group is starting, though this time with Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I took this book [...] Read more – ‘Gravity’s Rainbow for the Fall’.
…have to admit they’re getting better and better: more time, more adventures, more recording, more reading; Lucian talking-without-talking, walking-without-walking, all those secret hybridities that come from a mind stretched between a baby and a child. Towards the end of today’s recording session, hit with the tired feeling, sort of like I am out of ideas. [...] Read more – ‘Another Saturday’.
So interesting thing sort of just happened… I was too tired to tackle the “music” music tonight (though I got a few ideas off a deep-listening to the scratch tracks), so i decided I should play with some of Logic’s software instruments and make some cool and non-specific textures. OK, wait, back up, important point [...] Read more – ‘Symbiosis’.
Oh, yeah, come all ye faithful reproducers of sonic phenomena. Just glanced through this article, The Death of High Fidelity while I was researching the foibles of mixing specifically for the mp3 format. I had just bounced down a few recent changes in my current roster of songs, and was giving them a listen on [...] Read more – ‘Adeste Fideles’.
Something that I have — through experience — thought myself: Multitasking is bad for you {from CNN, from Hivelogic}: “Compared with those who rarely used more than one type of media at a time, heavy multitaskers had slower response times, most often because they were more easily distracted by irrelevant information, and because they retained [...] Read more – ‘Multitasking, revisited’.
On the eve of my dear wife’s Citizenship Ceremony I have a few moments to untangle the skeins and make sense of august, the most august of months: playground of the leo; birth day of my daughter; string of sleepless nights; fractured arrhythmia of unfocused days; the late night slosh-and-hum of the dishwasher; the bramble [...] Read more – ‘august imbroglio’.
So, those in the know know that today was Iryska’s Citizenship Ceremony … we were both running on a wave of coffee and adrenaline over a deep and wide sleep-deficit (like, Mariana Trench style), but coasted through in fine form and now my loveliest love of all time is a full-fledged U.S. Citizen, with all [...] Read more – ‘Stray Thoughts from the Edge of Citizenship’.
A quick post I should have finished a while ago… while hiking through our wonderful mini-desert, almost in our backyard, with Mr. Lushkin strapped firmly to the chest, we had the occasion to see some of the cooler, wilder wildlife of Southern California. I won’t go into much detail, but the crowning moment was of [...] Read more – ‘Bestiary’.
It is late, it is early, it is difficult to decide. I am hungry, I am wasted, I am aching, I am wired. It is dawn somewhere in the world, right now, this moment. I have a pulsing vein in my temple, I have a an excess of ions in my blood, I have burdock [...] Read more – ‘12:23 am’.
Sitting in bed, in the silver-blue glow of my laptop, watching my son sleep, soothing him first with sound when he wakes. Interestingly, more than half the time he wakes with a violent start, and starts crying immediately — before even opening his eyes. So I have to ask — is he having nightmares? Or [...] Read more – ‘Do Infants Dream of Electric Milk Bottles?’.
So maybe this isn’t the best topic for this moment– re-inaugurating the ‘blog so to speak– but I had this dream the other night about which I keep thinking: it’s simple, and it’s also perhaps indicative of my computer-addled brain, but I dreamt I was using this computer-drawing program that was some weird intuitive merger [...] Read more – ‘In Three Dimensions’.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of [...] Read more – ‘Another Mandela Quote’.
I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear. ~Nelson Mandela Read more – ‘There You Have It’.
There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not [...] Read more – ‘Keeping the channel open’.
I remember an argument– a nice one– that I had with my brother Matt once about a poem, a Mark Strand poem, called “Keeping Things Whole”. I do not remember it in its entirety, but I do remember Matt’s reaction to the theme, which was, I think, about personal meaning in life… the narrator talks [...] Read more – ‘keeping things whole’.
I can’t really think how to begin all this again, and we’re all in one of those times of infinite compression: like a superterrestrially dense onion… a Plutonian onion, perhaps? How do you begin to pull back the skin, sorting through the layers? My eyes are pretty heavy; there are early wake-ups these days, but [...] Read more – ‘Where have you been?’.
There is much to tell you, gentle reader– much more than I have time for this mild subtropical morning in San Diego. But I shed the warm blankets of blogging-laziness to announce one thing: Thursday, June 22nd, saw the unanticipatedly-kind CIS official smilingly stamping Iryna’s passport– and Katya’s by physical association– with the “Green Card” [...] Read more – ‘wonderful days, these’.
The fog rolled in sometime late last night, obscuring my restless dreams and turning the night world into a ghost story. Perhaps fitting, the dark spirits trying one last time for a pall (should darkness govern in a thing so small); this is the final day, the long-awaited conclusion to months of practical purgatory. The [...] Read more – ‘purgatory doors begin to open…’.
and I quote: While the assembled students were peppering Paik with questions about how his incomprehensible invention worked, he changed the subject radically. With a waggish smile, he said he would tell us a secret. He had discovered the most powerful artist’s tool in the history of mankind, the Manhattan Yellow Pages. He said that the [...] Read more – ‘Manhattan Yellow Pages’.
on the East Coast, this is already fact; on the West Coast, there is still about forty minutes… so I sit on the cusp of my two month anniversary, happily wedded [though too often separated] to Iryna Clark, born Kotlyarova, and formerly Zinchenko. It is with pleasure that I overlay my name on these former [...] Read more – ‘and speaking of beauty’.
Again, for test purposes: “For a start, I think, we must stop treating beauty as a thing or a quality, and see it instead as a kind of communication: Beauty is an unstable property because it is not a property at all. It is the name of a particular interaction between two beings, a self [...] Read more – ‘quoting beauty’.
this is the guy I remember from Massart, and this is some good info on brain-nutrition (see, I’m worried about the functioning of my grey matter lately, so I am taking preventitive steps) Read more – ‘brainergy’.
Saccharine : comic/new media frosting Tyranny of icing: chaos and nomadology merely cosmetic drapery for another art template… a meditation: laptops with glowing simple phallus logo (titanium mac) What was the sentence that floated through my mind before? Read more – ‘To make things right again’.
Awaiting scholarly intervention. On the road momentary thought post. In the major tectonic plate-shift of life, it’s (unfortunately) mostly preparation of website structure and little in the way of use. Still, will it work? Mobile blog? – Mobile Email from a Cingular Wireless Customer http://www.cingular.com Read more – ‘mobile signal’.
A few thoughts on a new-ish theme for an old, worked-over hero: origin mythos partially intact: Frank Miller’s Bruce Wayne as a boy falls down the well; something dark and sinister there imprints certain psycho-spiritual template, brings about changes in character and the eventual downfall of the system of securities around him–> leading to the [...] Read more – ‘Batman as Psychotic’.
…bullet stopped dead, I suppose. Was that really my last post? I will spare you the details of that flight, a sleepless zombie-walk overnight in Baltimore, lost baggage… I will spare you. So, it’s been a while. I might not have even tried this (this=Blogger), but I am a little Microsoft-Accessed-OUT at the moment, and left [...] Read more – ‘so not a bullet, or…’.
Reading poetry out loud, to myself, while sitting on the toilet. I can hear, above me, the flows, then trickles, of water from the upstairs bathroom, toilets and sinks and the long, snakey silver sounds of the draining water, a musical weave through the pipes right behind my head. I am struck a bit by [...] Read more – ‘waste +’.
How the bugs fly in synchronized circles, spirals Falling shadows of a hot day Heat seems to be green, and milk white, and sometimes a pale-yolky color Something inside the head that expands bigger than the cranium. Pressure The way something I was just thinking about slips away, forever, for all I know Seeing a future fight, [...] Read more – ‘thirteen’.
Mornings, lately, have been measured by mucus content. An internal barometer, sinus pressure and milliliters of slippery, green-and-grey fluid that my body somehow produces mystically, in quantities I find hard to believe. All because of some invisible spores. All because of trees having their promiscuous cloudy sex. I am a gate-crasher at this vernal orgy, [...] Read more – ‘tree pollen dervishes’.
lately it’s phrase-ology, it seems. of this I am aware. But after the heading must come the content. Mild overhaul in progress. I would laugh at the multi-strata resonance of that comment, but it has been too long, too many times, and I know that a shuffle of design on a website is part of [...] Read more – ‘to make better use of space…’.
I am getting some new stuff together, squeezing in some edits inbetween bouts of work on the database. It isn’t going well, so I am ‘throwing up’ a stock-template for the moment. My apologies. But all of this is the dizzy preamble to my intended return to posting more-than-infrequently. Wish me luck! Read more – ‘not for lack of trying…’.
This is Nathaniel. I apologize for not having written lately but such is only one among my many human faults, and easily forgotten, which is just about the same as easily forgiven. I was at the zoo the other day and was enjoying myself thoroughly until one of the zookeepers happened upon me and mistook [...] Read more – ‘not meant to shame myself…’.
An odd day, no doubt. An odd week. Hell, an odd month. Some character from some book I cannot quite remember saying “The signs align!”, the writing is on the wall but it might be a code. Aye, there’s the rub » To decode is the first step to the consequent action, and in this [...] Read more – ‘suede pajamas and the droning fall of night’.
a quick and heartfelt thanks to GURU Labs for compiling several RPMs, making otherwise ornery installs an order of magnitude easier. But special thanks for the xmms-mp3 plugin, missing from the Fedora upgrades… else I wouldn’t be hearing soma.fm and “Happy Hour All The Time”! Read more – ‘happy hour all the time’.
.: as the most cherished lips on the planet say, “Whatever…”, rolling it out of the soft cavern and off the tongue like a wet marble, but tonight its meaning orbits nearer to “whichever”: which ever direction, paths upon paths, bifurcation through the mountains and snowy woods. it has been a great day, taking me by [...] Read more – ‘odysseus+delicious=odalisque’.
“So you see– so you see– so you see– a certain L-O-quence can arise– dig?- drumming on the meanest state– and here I mean voc-ab-u-lary- of existence. “qua-quo-quell-cope, honest abe, honest abe. “It’s an enthusiastic endeavor. Like– you know– you know– youknow– En-theos… god within, yeah? “I mean, here we have hipocrisy, your run-of-the-mill spiral [...] Read more – ‘prophet in exile’.
.: so it comes down to moments: small capsules of decision, little microcosms of life, all miniaturized, all bearing the profound depths of revelation. When these moments, like dense space-time bubbles, float around you in chaotic inversions of gravity, you’ve got to be careful! You are entering a potential feedback loop, and the effects of [...] Read more – ‘avoiding the exponential return of becoming-potato’.
.: So we all know that I have lost more than a single day, withered as they have become in the shadows of the vast and unsightly MMW. I have been busier since so-called “graduation” than I was ever before, and I profess I do not fully understand it. However, with the exception of a [...] Read more – ‘Amici, diem perdidi’.
.: So, it’s the “day off”, but as I have grown to realize (and have said before), all that means is that I don’t have to leave the house to do the work I have to do… It’s been a productive day already, perhaps just the dynamic recuperative upswing after a bout of food-poisoning (or [...] Read more – ‘’twas business’.
Morning rises, to the rhythm of the roofing hammers, carnal coffee, a teasing and tingling daybreak revisitation of the floating worlds of the night before… this time lit by the venetian shadows and gold-white light of Saturday; a day colored unlike any other in the week, a brilliant and playful hue that hovers on the [...] Read more – ‘’twas brillig’.
.: So, it is a brumal night: my fingers have felt like cold, dead iron, scattered across my desk like abandoned railroad ties in winter. It has made me think of snow, of my lost horizon of the old world I passed though this last yule-tide. Which puts me in strange friction, for as I [...] Read more – ‘a dust of snow from a hemlock tree’.
A clump of lichen rises, and stretches, and bristles, sending an annoying chitter into the air towards me– they wish to tell me that the toadstool is right in words, but wrong in spirit: for that which wanders might of course lose or find; and in finding, one does not always find the way back, [...] Read more – ‘some madness?’.
well, here it is again: sick. But I figured out something this morning, sitting on the new canyon-view porch, watching the bees go about their business in the tree-tops: this illness has been exacerbated by the onset of my seasonal allergies. A lightning-bolt revelation, I assure you. But as I now sit in my bed, [...] Read more – ‘On Illness and Vikings’.
Well, it has been a significant bit of time, hasn’t it? And not that I have designs to truly correct that this morning; that is to say, balance will not be restored, even though the sun is that particularly beautiful shade of slanting gold that excites and calms at the same time. Which is to [...] Read more – ‘morning bees, leather books, and running in the dark’.
.: This has been my vacation: a time of deep, burnished gold, of deep laughters, of distended but joyful bellies protruding outward and daring the world to challenge it. I can feel the solid core of my stomache, it is like a hard, smooth biogeometric phenomenon, sort of like a bowling ball but alive, sometimes [...] Read more – ‘In the Belly of Buddha’.
.: …a flight of uncarpeted stairs. Something about the sight, and the phrase, has caught me the past number of days, ever since wandering through the hollows of the old Westfield house for a single day. The halo of light streaming through the window– a bright whitish-blue & snow-refracted light– stopped me and made me [...] Read more – ‘“I came up stairs into the world…”’.
It is snowing again. I cannot believe– nor describe– what the falling snow does to me. It quiets everything about me– reduces it to less than a small quiver, to a stillness that my geminin and manic soul never knows in waking life. Read more – ‘Favete linguis’.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .: The wonderful, comic friction of this event comes mostly from my family’s previous discussions: all morning, Matthew and my parents had been defending the war in Iraq and the over-all spread of American democracy and “interests”, all in the name of an [...] Read more – ‘Turkey Fight!’.
.: the fire dies down, the tree is unplugged, the quietude of the woods settles in. I can still hear a faint metallic chiming, a soft fading ring of ghostly bells and icicles. Another Christmas tapers off to a fine point, fading and receding and minimizing into a single glowing dot, a single-pixel afterimage; in [...] Read more – ‘Merry Christmas, Outro’.
.: and for the animals to speak… and if it doesn’t happen this midnight, then it is back to the Pagan carousing for me! I wish you all a beautiful evening, with mystery, surprise, and joy. Merry Christmas Eve. Read more – ‘Waiting for the magi’.
Sitting naked in bed, the wind howling outside; I am swaddled in sheets and comforters and I am propping the laptop precariously on my knees, having decided– after several long minutes of silent debate– to actually write something here. First, of course, is the weather. The reader will have no doubt come to the conclusion [...] Read more – ‘water-damage on the ceiling’.
.: Well, there you have it: last night ended with a string of haiku and a perfect little spilled mess; tonight, an icy slush and a few haphazard Nietzsche quotes, like frayed electrical wires buzzing and writhing… serpentine, but fading. The days have been too gray, I think. I had forgotten that the snow sculptures [...] Read more – ‘Neither poetic, nor profound…’.
.: It is approaching year 0, or at least our celebration thereof; and I can feel ol’ D&G’s �faciality� emerging in profile. Here, as the temperature drops below 0, I find myself bemused at our conventions of the cold: we wrap ourselves in such insulations, our torso and legs and hands all bundled, but we [...] Read more – ‘Christmas: year 0 rekindled, you can see it on the face’.
.: A long walk along another frozen stream, through frozen cattails, a Hawthorn grove, and bundles of sumac and burdock and other strange thistley-flowered things… makes me realize how inept I am with this little digital camera– so much looks good on that LCD screen, but when I import them onto the laptop… well, it [...] Read more – ‘a hazel, thorn, holly and burdock crown’.
.: tail end of the day, and it tastes like sugar maple and cream sherry; the wind is ouside, where it should be, and I am inside– but I can’t decide if I am as rightfully situated as the Austru, gusting down the mountain. But truth be told, my head aches a little and my [...] Read more – ‘a shift in view…’.
.: “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started… and know the place for the first time.“ –T.S. Eliot Read more – ‘at the end of our exploration…’.
.: So the cold, an entity unto itself, has moved in tonight, but softly: I have stamped its ice and crystals off my shoes after running through the crisp field of snow and the dark sentinel army of the skeletal trees that form an ancient palisade around this house. But the soft echo of a [...] Read more – ‘pagan frenzied elf in frosted leather’.
.: culled from an interesting, real-time view of a West-Coast working environment, my focus sharpens on the emerging profile of a coffee cup, to-go style, of a chain coffee shop that all of us know but we refuse to mention. It is odd the things one might find in one’s inbox, aside from viruses that [...] Read more – ‘nice coffee!!’.
.: a quick note before reading another snatch of Utopia- it did make the final cut– and falling asleep amidst the wooden beams and dovetail joints of this Upstate NY homestead. There lies on the ground outside such a velvet and white coverlet of cold, crystalline snow, muffling the nightime sounds even while crunching beneath [...] Read more – ‘please have snow…’.
.: … and driving back from Tucker’s, I found myself meditating on colors. Not a difficult thing to do, considering the quaintness and yule-ishness of these backroad, South Park neighborhoods: ’tis the season for the splendid carnival-blaze of lights, hanging icicle-lights, moving reindeer lights, and palm trees wrapped in diamond-white lights. Oh, I am sucker [...] Read more – ‘“colors are more than mere visual reference to the world”’.
So here we are: the second full day of grading. Not that any day of grading, for me, is full. I have just enough of a dislike for it, and just enough of a scattered, inquisitive soul, to make the enterprise lumpy, irregular, spotty. So, whilst grading the rushed and repetitive products of California’s finest [...] Read more – ‘Zoroaster Defends His Slot’.
my eyes bleed, my head ready to explode. I am going to put the papers away and turn the linux box off. Soon. It is hard to think. But a quick story: walked by my neighbor today, a woman named Izelle. She was dazed, perhaps surprised to see me– we have never met. I said [...] Read more – ‘losing momentum…’.
.: awakening this morning, loose-barked branches scratching my eyes, the cold density of snow on my tongue: it is strange what lands I must traverse while sleeping. I cannot remember most of my night’s journeys, ever; I wake only with fleeting impressions and emotional echoes. It must have been a long pilgrimage last night, back [...] Read more – ‘Leszi’.
.: here is the post I tried last night, but blogger wasn’t cooperating: How many miles is it to Babylon?- Threescore miles and ten. Can I get there by candlelight?- Yes, and back again. If your heels are nimble and light, You may get there by candlelight. -The Real Mother Goose Read more – ‘to Babylon’.
.: mmmmmnhhmnmhmmhm.… 9:01 am; first lights of morning, first cup of coffee. The day looms large, though my skin still feels the taut pull of my yule-ish expectation of snow. In the mad scattering of all the elements of life lately, I can stop and marvel at the gentle pirouette each thing undertakes; a graceful [...] Read more – ‘mmmmnnnnhnmh…’.
.:. As life so often does, it will come down to a dilemma: do the responisble thing, clear the path, make life more accessible? Or– and this is where my heart has always lain– do I throw my ecstatic body into the snow and make the frivolous and seraphic indentation? To celebrate the core metaphor [...] Read more – ‘shovel or snow angels…’.
Well, dear reader(s)… I am sure you’ve noticed the paucity of posts lately; and perhaps you’ve gotten so far as to examine, with that critical eye we both know so well, the the actual content of said posts, and found them abstract, lacking, or simply uninformative. I cannot argue; I even would agree. What excuses [...] Read more – ‘posting deficit; apologies and excuses’.
.: falling into that sleepy realm, that aquatic dreamscape of warm, eddying, tropical currents. A feverish bath of pungent and living brine, most of my blood is saltwater. The days of recent week have tossed me from exultation, to exhaustion, and back again; tonight, the odd glyphs of m.m.w. are chiselled with sharp, electric crayons [...] Read more – ‘indecent reverie; yearnings not answered’.
.: a bit too tired to actually write a post, but I figured, before another day was lost (as Titus, “diem perdidi!”), I would make the gesture. Much driving lately, many late nights; seeing the world from the glassy theater-screen of my dear battleship-grey truck, realizing at odd moments just how liquid, and beautiful, the [...] Read more – ‘Dum spiro, spero’.
:.: There is a dream, a swimming in the deep kelp beds and the air is all cloudy with the decomposing silt of all the life around; but this is not repugnant, rather, deeply sexual, implicit potential. It is rot as rejuvenescence, deterioration as rebirth, drinking in deep lungfuls of protein, hiding in the watery [...] Read more – ‘a kelp dream’.
..: So in the midst of the MMW-struggle today, mapping out the various elements of Alex Haley’s Roots, we began to conjecture about a so-called atrocity index, some statistical mean of brutality you might use to assess each era of humanity… that is, what periods of time might represent the greatest peaks of human suffering? [...] Read more – ‘Darfour’.
.: ahhhhhhhhhhh yes. burning bright, as William would say, in this cold forest of the night. To tell you the truth (as if I did anything different), I keep the windows open in my new nutshell-kingdom (something was rotten in the old Viking state last night, you’ll recall) to chill my bones like a winter [...] Read more – ‘tyger, tyger’.
This author first wishes to acknowledge the stupendous, albeit coerced, efforts of his students. .: Today, as each young podling handed me their Midterm, I jokingly shook their hand (sometimes, hands) and said, “I want to thank you for being here. Your presence means a lot. Thank you”. I will admit, without being pressured, that [...] Read more – ‘An organism is a theory of its environment’.
.: Can’t say much more than that… to the woman who has borne me, birthed me, taught me, terrorized me :), inspired me, encouraged me, I give all my thanks. May you have a day of peace, of contentment and satisfaction; and may some moment occur where you reflect on all that you have brought [...] Read more – ‘Happy Birthday, Mother’.
Well, perhaps the coolest thing I’ve heard in ages: a new strain of human evolution discovered… Homo floresiensis. Several different partial skeletons found in Australia; incredibly recent in the grand scale (12,000 years before the present); a dwarf-like creature that may put a new twist on the various ‘little-people’ myths. I am totally astounded; flabbergasted; [...] Read more – ‘One More Branch, and: A Pilgrim’s Progress’.
..: An interesting morning that followed an uninteresting evening. I had to bow out of PW’s offer for another fire, flesh, and frankincense primal evening, the pressure of work too much for frivolity. Continued the Inquisition Rack-like punishment of the MMW Database, trying to put on what I call the “finishing touches” but really that [...] Read more – ‘Some coffee, a Rondo, and room with a view…’.
There’s been a slight scatological edge to the last day or so: Martin Luther’s Toilet found, the consecrated site of Luther’s infamous constipation and, hence, contemplation; reading-intersection with “…the gluttonous, shitting, fucking grotesques of the Renaissance carnival”; seeing Georges Bataille (ye ol’ use-value of Marquis de Sade) cited in an old text on Chinese Foot-Binding; [...] Read more – ‘scat-singing, scat-slinging’.
Just needed to stand up again, to eclipse the light of sister moon and try to thread the needle; but it is easier for a sleeping man to get to heaven than it is for the restless, or the hungry. And I cannot rest. And I am hungry, oh by all the forces of creation, [...] Read more – ‘Intending rest, yet not able…’.
.: So the madness escalates; thankfully I took some time to go shopping so I have some food. Drinking a few chilled shots of vodka, trying to taste a foreign land in every sip. The major news is fire: built a raging, purifying, Abraxas-evoking blaze that turned all my junk mail, old papers, student idiocies, [...] Read more – ‘I had a cool title in mind, but I forgot…’.
It is interesting to drape yourself in the silence and darkness: home alone, a taste of the future… in order to experience it– to taste it and feel it– I turn off all the radios and computers and lights and sit for a few moments, watching for perhaps the first time the pale night-shadows of [...] Read more – ‘“…not curse your darkness”’.
.: So the rain accompanied my to and my fro today; ushering a vast, beautiful frozen motion on the 805, as clouds of dense moisture rose from the drops’ millionfold explosions on the pavement, up and around and engulfing the SUVs, the trucks, the little Minis; lights were fractured from cubist lenses– it was a [...] Read more – ‘rain, old men, and a hit head’.
.: ahhhhh… a day of grading the rushed and feverishly mediocre proposals of this year’s crop of podlings. Their refusal to access their own wondrous minds is disturbing. They sleep a nautiloid sleep, comforted by the wash of television and playstation images that, by their sheer quantity, nullify their own meaning. But all is not [...] Read more – ‘…bitter perfume, breathes a sigh…’.
.:. ..: it with sand in my exhausted eyes but a much-lightened heart I bring you the news of the MFA: received at approximately 11:35 this very morning. When I have more energy, I will give you, gentle reader, all the details. But for now– I must format my “thesis” and turn it in tomorrow. [...] Read more – ‘.…m.….f.….….…a’.
just found this ambling through a strange noise-art site, but I am always on the lookout for free books or electronic texts: http://www.knowledgerush.com/Books.htm. Like the Gutenberg Project! Read more – ‘knowledge rush’.
God-damn! They’ve even devoted an entire site to it: http://www.mysterybulge.com/. But the truth goes to Kerry camapign spokesman Joe Lockart: “If he had someone talking in his ear, he should have gotten someone better to talk in his ear.” Ahhhh! I never realized politics were this fun! Read more – ‘MysteryBulge.com’.
.: Hilarious! Bush wired, that’s why they keep saying he did so much better in the debate! Someone feeding him his lines, stats; everything that he can’t remember! Ahhhh… Mr. David Poulin was right when he said Bush would provide far more entertainment in office than his last opponent, Al Gore. Not that that has [...] Read more – ‘wired!’.
.: Just watched the end of Tombstone, a modern version of the old Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Not that it’s a great movie, but Val Kilmer’s portrayal of Doc Holliday cracked me up for hours. I would recommend it just for that… Made me wonder what it would be like to teach my class [...] Read more – ‘doc holliday’.
breathe a sigh; but it will be full of clouds. Fog has clouded me lately– not just its beauty but its cooling thought, it obfuscation. All turns translucent with clouds in your eyes. Been away from this little corner of the art– and ‘blog– world. That’s ok, because much has happened, been done and gotten [...] Read more – ‘fog & breath — coffee and violins — Uzbek?’.
.: patrick deegan | patrick deegan | patrick deegan | patrick deegan | patrick deegan | patrick deegan | patrick deegan | patrick deegan | patrick deegan Read more – ‘anything for a friend…’.
..: well, early in the evening and just about to launch into the some image-editing, whilst a fine, fine cool breeze touches me in soft greeting through the old XLab window… a breeze that carries with it the subtle smells of the canyon, and as you all know that is the Possum Kingdom. That is [...] Read more – ‘devil in your eye’.
… finally starting to feel better, though Amy is feeling worse. Shifting territories, difficult time. Clouds and sun, quite fitting. Spent the AM at the coffee shop, sketching out new plans for the comics. Will post somethings soon; the way I am planning it feels like a movie. Sweeping scenes, zooms and pans. Micro-realities. Helped [...] Read more – ‘afternoon cup…’.
..: concretions, from the Latin con- “together”- and cresco- “to grow”. Thinking about visiting them today– out in Anza-Borrego. Read more – ‘pumpkin patch’.
check her out here. paints like pollock and kandinsky they say, and she’s only four. sigh. time to find a new career. …::.: tired tired. less sick. moved PW again. ate sushi, drank sake, chatted with robroomate. beautiful moon. sad clouds.student emails. mfa committee, image resolving; october 14th. rat in the classroom– i shit you [...] Read more – ‘child art prodigy’.
..: sitting in a rocking chair, atop the foreign and floral geometries of my carpet, sipping a smoky black tea and staring at the colors painting the sky. Quite an unbelievable configuration– as one of my learned authors might say, history is in the placement of bodies, an arcane mathematics of destiny taking shape in [...] Read more – ‘magic carpet’.
.: another amazing sunset, noticed even while quite sick, raw, and febrile. I find it most interesting that, in my weakened condition today, a movie might yield 2 hours of dynamic, if oft-times vulgar, entertainment; a sunset, over an hour of subtle, quiet, but spectacularly differentiated and enliveningly joyful entertainment, with absolutely no price of [...] Read more – ‘sunset’.
..: I had thought it but a momentary ill, a dryness and numbness after eating 2-day old chicken from the MMW buffet, but it looks like this a full-fledged medical happening. Must be from shaking all my old students’ hands today; one of those filthy gutter-rats wiping their besotted mucous-membrane on their hands and not [...] Read more – ‘sore throat…’.
Sometimes the diode burns brightly; other times, it burns out. Not so profound a sentiment, I imagine, unless you ascribe to the idea that it is the poet’s job to state that which is so obvious as to have seemed prosaic, until mentioned; and to merely remind you of what was already profound in its [...] Read more – ‘109607203989579198’.
Shannon and Weaver’s classic formulation of communication, noise orthogonal to communication; mold on maps, makes new continents where oceans once slept, mountains in the desert, clot the savannah’s with fetid jungle; nomenclature of noise, the measurement between intention and action, or between what is spoken and what is heard, or even between expectation and reality; [...] Read more – ‘merry mold of windstorm’.
: Well well well, I put together a submission to the High Deserts, sent it off as a stream of noisey digital packets itself in the dark of the night, Monday. I also submitted said sound-piece to the lastest issue of scale, which may explain (if you care to piece together puzzles as I do) [...] Read more – ‘tetchy, aggressive, nurturing, miraculous…’.
Anyway, away from the posting lately. Had many ideas, but too much inertia to overcome– that is, the ball was rolling far too quickly and my brain a bit of a worn-out break. But before I talk about Windows Hacks, iMac Surgeries, or The Secret Life of Canyons, i bring you words from Tucker: ubu.com. Read more – ‘I should become a Literature major…’.
