Monday, January 31, 2005
winter is in the air, mom
Emotion, n. A prostrating disease caused by a determination of the heart to the head. It is sometimes accompanied by a copious discharge of hydrated chloride of sodium from the eyes.
Justice, n. A commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.
Noise, n. A stench in the ear. Undomesticated music. The chief product and authenticating sign of civilization.
Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.
-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Advocate, 1906
no place like home no place like
"mom, where's my birthday money?"
"just wait until your dad gets home, sweetie"
"fine. but, there is no piñata outside. and I dont see a pony. this is supposed to be a gangster party.
Sunday, January 30, 2005
anti-silence$$$$$$$$$$
She roamed the city at will, and Robert said nothing. She came to know the city so well that had she been blindfolded and taken to practically any place in Washington, even as far away as Anacostia or Georgetown, she could have taken off the blindfold and walked home without a moment's trouble. Her favorite place became the library park on Mount Vernon Square, the same park where Miss Jenny had first seen Robert and Clara together, across the street from the Peoples where Betsy Ann had been caught stealing. And there on some warm days Robert would find her, sitting on a bench, or lying on the grass, eyes to the sky.
-Edward P. Jones, Lost in the City
Friday, January 28, 2005
(palabras negras)
I got a call yesterday morning but it went unanswered because it was a strange number. So, pensive and out-there, I called the unrecognizable number back. ring. ring. the dialtone was cut by a warm voice:
Austin Chronicle?
and my ittie-bittie heart started breaking beats like Autechre. off-kilter and austere. but, inquisitively I told her that someone had called my phone from this number and she eventually plugged me through to a nice gentleman who uttered the following words: Martin? Hello. I was just calling to congratulate you on making the top 10 of our short story contest. then, my ittie bittie heart swelled up and I remembered the story I submitted a month ago to this. To be honest, I was a bit bummed because I hadn't heard anything back and all sorts of not-good thoughts fluttered in my mind (maybe I should just stick to music journalism, fuck these folks, whats the problem? why can't I be you!).
it's strange, really, how one phone call can change your day.
then, the nice gentleman told me that I had made the cut out of 400 participants who entered their short stories. cuatrocientos. and he also told me I have to sweat it out for another two weeks when the judges select the first prize, second prize, etc. at a ceremony here.
its like Andre 3000 said at some old Source awards: I'm tired of folks not listening--it's like...this all I got to say: the South got somethin' to say. by South, I mean South America.
(quiet hum of breaths/televisions buzzing)
Thursday, January 27, 2005
shadowboxing
Nevertheless, everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, Biz Markie*, bands and gangs, Ghostface's rhymebook*, successive lateral offshoots in an immediate connection with an outside.
-Deleuze and Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus
*possibly added after I added them
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
imaginary pencils
let me get this one started on the right foot by sharing a little wisdom my grandpa once told me: ....(he usually, takes a while)...........(by this time, he's just staring at you).....(here, it comes)....we all have dreams, son.
and the red button for originality goes off real loud. like THIS THIS THIS THIS!
but, thats not the point. because being original doesn't always mean you are interesting. and as we all know, interesting people tend to wear nice clothes. and those nice clothes result in shoes with the idea of interesting pasted on them.
and then that gets you places. high places. because you walk in them.
follow me, here.
back to dreams. we all have them, blah blah blah--okay, my grandpa didnt really say that. but he did tell me this nifty story once about coming over here as an immigrant in the 50's from Mexico and learning how to play the accordion from some rude Germans. now, thats a story. and thats how babies are made.
The origins of the modern newspaper lie in the Dutch gazettes of the late seventeenth century: but the newspaper only became a general category of printed matter after 1700.
-Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
^^^^^^^^^^^
Dicen que por las noches
no más se le iba en puro llorar;
dicen que no comía,
no más se le iba en puro tomar.
Juran que el mismo cielo
se estremecía al oír su llanto,
cómo sufria por ella,
que hasta en su muerte la fue llamando:
Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay cantaba,
ay, ay, ay, ay, ay gemía,
Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay cantaba,
de pasión mortal moría.
Que una paloma triste
muy de mañana le va a cantar
a la casita sola
con sus puertitas de par en par;
juran que esa paloma
no es otra cosa más que su alma,
que todavía la espera
a que regrese la desdichada.
Cucurrucucú paloma, cucurrucucú no llores.
Las piedras jamás, paloma,
¿qué van a saber de amores?
Cucurrucucú, cucurrucucú,
cucurrucucú, cucurrucucú,
cucurrucucú, paloma, ya no le llores
bling theory
Genes, like diamonds, are forever, but not quite in the same way as diamonds. It is an individual diamond crystal that lasts, as an unaltered pattern of atoms. DNA molecules don't have that kind of permanence.
-Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
electric glue society
Airborn Audio makes me feel warm inside--fuzzy, hyper-minded and complicated. The beats are walking machines, all shiny and bulbous. M. Sayyid makes me remember why I wanted to marry lyrics and High Priest throws tongues together like the French. Which brings me to our erudite post-Zen counselor, Greg Tate: for all the Hegelian umph and broad theorizing, hip-hop is still kicking. Perhaps what we're talking about here is purely semantic--time to come up with a new name. Critics--my peoples--let's get hot and heavy with the alphabet and name this post-rap Blob something meaningful and anti-marketable. Something we can all agree will die in the near futurepastpresent. Scratching my chin, I realize that jazz has put up with all kinds of freaks and it never changed much semantically (except for bebop, the word "free" in front and something we all would like to forget--fusion). F*ck it, let's just wear MF Doom masks and run around the playground.
Sunday, January 23, 2005
(heartbeats)
jewish moms& loud thoughts.
(were always there, really).
I began to walk south and found no one had ever taken this street. a chalky gray like the eyes of grandfathers too old to remember their first dream. red boxes, like art galleries, lined the street--but, I knew to look up. cut the air like knives of soft words and watched me watch it: a question mark made of question marks. but this wasn't your normal postmoderrrrn French (or Freedom if your in the Midwest) philosopher churning out shapes in the sky to baffle me: this was real. like going over to a friend's house when you were a kid and never telling your mom. they worry, you know. or going to a baseball game with your dad and listening to him yell at the Japanese pitcher on the mound (Hideo Nomo, for the scholars). then, it disappeared.
Friday, January 21, 2005
way its gonna be
when you wake up in the morning, fuck mainstream NYC radio.
when you take a walk at 4 AM, fuck mainstream NYC radio.
when you eat crackerjacks, fuck mainstream NYC radio.
when you play along to KMD with an accordion, (see above)
I didnt really know where I was going with that.
on a more sunshine note, these people are going to let me write about weirdo rock, non-right hiphop and mexican art bands on a monthly basis. there has always been something intriguing about XLR8R--they balance design with pretty good articles. and they never put the bassist of mediocre bands on the cover because there is no because. I just wish they handed out complimentary MF Doom masks.
one can dream.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
dad, I don't think people like you
it's just me against the world.
[rejection makes you feel. due to someone's mistake, my name was invisible on a guest list for the aesop rock/mr. lif verbal giveaway tonight and I was sorta heated because I dont make much loot writing for music rags so I get my kicks by getting in free to shows. what a bunch of absentminded folk these musicians are. but, to make a short story longer I turned my blueness into purpleness by coming home and throwing some Lightning Hopkins on the turntable. and while I tapped along with my big toe I realized that I didnt really want to go see Mr. Lif tell me to get louder when I've seen KRS do it a gazillion times better or hear a verbose rapper do the bunnyhop onstage while a tickytack DJ does two-steps with his fingers. hiphop shows nowadays are like going to little league games with a cardboard box on your head. they're just not fun anymore.]
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
, and that was the last time.
Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop:decline the mare.
Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta!
I will see if I can see.
See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.
-James Joyce, Ulysses
sometimes you feel like you're living in the 31st century.
sometimes you feel like you're stuck in the 14th century.
what a strange world.
(between beauty and the black blood of time)
we dream on a budget
graduate students in brown coats, slinky-haired ladies with blood-red accordions, storage employees with gold teeth and mexican children walking around photographing thoughts--what a dull world we live in. hiphop robotics and the dead pulse of passion that once breakdanced on skating rink floors: in the next few months im either going to start writing a dissertation on the history of nonlinear narrativity and American literature or I'm going to sit in a park with a portable turntable and listen to Liquid Liquid. who knows.
what I do know is that few things make sense in Spanish films nowadays and Pedro Almodovar masters such sentiments in his new film, Bad Education. Fishing out images months ago on the Net made me anxious to see this film and after reading lukewarm reviews in various snooty papers, I doubted myself. Like grape jelly, iPods, canned food in 19th Century France and building a city out of paperclips: this film is excellent. Charmer Gael Garcia Bernal knocks out the thick-tongued Spanish accent and throws down for some great roles (bearded, transvestite, student) that pencils him in for greatness (or at least post-Brando goodness?). Unlike most folks I've spoken too, the film isnt that hard to follow but its non-linear narrativity makes for a Faulkneresque structural space. As if designed by crosseyed lovers the narrative stops and thinks about its place in the world then stutters some more--all in hopes of displaying small pleasures. Almodovar's sorta-genius comes through in the nuances: compositional shots, 80's fashion, punks in Spain and quiet moments between tiny intensities.
we need more independent scientists/experimental rappers/Brazilian writers.
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
bullets and booty
Monday, January 17, 2005
jazzbomb
masked and unkempt, jazz musicians in basements make their mouths move as drums walk around looking for the new Vietnam. The Arcade Fire are actually good--who would have known? but, this is about jazz--atemporal, sweaty and comfortable thumps that groan in thick taps. looking out of windows.
hip-hop was never meant to die.
(branford marsalis is the devil)
Sunday, January 16, 2005
subterraneo
(small cities are meant to be left)
hello, Austin, Texas.
me and you have some two-stepping to do.
thanks to everyone who came out last night to my going away soiree: warm beats and crowded kitchens make for evenings where you feel all awake and stuff. black-rimmed glasses and Lone Star beer are logos i can live with. seriously.
sometimes, I dont realize how strange it is to live in this country in these times: and more importantly, to live in this state.
I'm sure 89% of people here will never read a novel for joy.
and that's just downright criminal minded.
I'm taping turntables to the red clouds above me as we speak.
(buildings of eyes)
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
bookprostitute
Two novels that I finished recently: William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and Henry James' Daisy Miller. Writers are weirdos (trust me on that one), but both Bill Gibson and Henry "My Brother is a Psychology Nerd" James display their eccentricities through disparate prose styles and vastly different methods of narrating stories. One is like reading a novel by Autechre: cold, mechanical and jumpy but with underlying structures that are oddly human. The other one is like listening to the German minimal-tech producer, Lawrence: a thick style that questions, picks at and probes the feelings of people in abstract ways.
Pattern Recognition is about multiple things all of them pretty new to American lit. Chat room obsessive people who drool over a fragment of film footage that they dont know the source of. From there, Cayce Pollard (the protagonist), a "cool hunter"--the real people who get paid by marketers to hunt cool shit--travels to strange depths to find the meaning behind this footage. Though real, real slow, the novel shows Gibson at his illest since Neuromancer as the story is achingly unique and the last 100 pages are worth inching through his robot prose and lack of poetics that I dig. Then again, if Sonic Youth can dedicate a song to you (check the first song on their latest record) then you're okay with me.
Daisy Miller on the other hand is a whole different world as James examines America as an idea in Italy and Switzerland through Winterbourne's (the main character) lusting over proto-punk character Daisy Miller. She's punk in that she refuses to acquiesce to Italian social norms. But, as The Clash and stores such as Hot Topic prove: the youthful swagger of punk rarely is enmeshed in reason. So, she juggles Winterbourne's company with some snazzy Italian who wants her. The plot may sound thin, but James makes up for it through a well-constructed, concise prose that keeps it low.
go outside, already.
Monday, January 10, 2005
.45 Caliber Grammar
It was spring, the part of spring where the bursting is done, the held-in pressures of dessicated sap-veins and gum-sealed buds are gone, and all the world's in a rush to be beautiful. The air was heavy and sweet; it lay upon the lips until they parted, pressed them until they smiled, entered boldly to beat in the throat like a second heart. It was air with a puzzle to it, for it was still and full of the colors of dreams, all motionless; yet it had a hurry to it. The stillness and the hurry were alive and laced together and how could that be? That was the puzzle.
-Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human
Sunday, January 09, 2005
Invisible Colonialism
Randy Moss is the hardest thing to come out of the NFL: dude is gangsta in a way that messes with the ubiquity of the term "class" and disabuses joy on the football field. After scoring on the breathless Packers, he decided to do a fake "mooning" to the folks at Lambeau field: and the (gasp!) Fox announcers went off on homeboy like it said Ron Artest, Jr. on his license. I thought it was hilarious. then, I felt all weirded out when Howie Long, Terry Bradshaw called him "classless" and kept reiterating that Moss didnt "get it". and then I became confused: what is there to get? from whom are you getting it? how did Moss fit that mountain of hair under that helmet? will Paul McCartney flash his boobs to the Super Bowl audience in the name of tradition?
I'm simply wondering like black scholars Kwame Anthony Appiah, Paul Gilroy and some lady who wrote a column on Wes Anderson for some journal I cant think of right now: are we living in postracial times?
short answer: non.
long answer: oui.
regardless, heres some wordthought to munch on. Classical Rap Philosopher Greg Tate crumbles hip-hop's history in the broader context of hyper-moneywanting, diamond-studded toasters and the absence of real talk about race in American politics. Beef with Tate is minimal, though I wonder why does he never address the contemporary reality of hiphop as a multiplicity of races as progress. Its like saying I wish rock would have never gotten in the hand of white folk: both Minor Threat and Bad Brains are delicious. Regardless, hiphop is now more than black culture (even Chuck D realizes this), but in ways that complicate the argument. Where is Beans in all this? Dizzee? Anticon? Tate at one point in time recognizes his sorta-anachronistic theorizing by saying he is an old-school Pan Africanist and even if Tribe gets their MPC's together in the next week its not going to matter: change is the only currency relevant to hiphop. Alas, I agree with everything else: hiphop (the way we all knew it) is dead.
bring on the yellow afros!
but, hold your breath Cornel West because race still matters.
I just keep seeing purple.
(we need more of you)
Saturday, January 08, 2005
(mouse spacesuit)
everyday in the later Roman Empire makes one feel like this.
robots are people too.
and who knew the Japanese were ahead of us when it came to bumping uglies as well?
courtesy of someone: history has mouse ears.
Friday, January 07, 2005
VERBWAVES
we are the only country in the world with rich rappers, athletes, CEO's, and yet have the poorest President. I guess Halliburton is paying him in cupcakes and back issues of Texas hunting magazines. but, alas, it's best not to fight. because the French are always watching.
Spain doesn't love us anymore
"Él dijo que quería leer dos libros que no encontraba, así que los escribió. Y una vez acabados, consecuentemente, no tenía por qué seguir."
-Javier Marias on Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo (the cat who jumpstarted Magical Realism--word to Gabo).
two things:
The Life Aquatic makes watching movies in public feel good again.
Street's Disciple doesn't sound that bad: but I wonder.
and a few more things:
De La Soul, Saul Williams, Subtitle, Kanye, Madvillian, dalek and DJ Dangermouse are the only people who kept me wondering where hiphop is going. It's taking a u-turn, I think.
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
math lab
(dinner for two, please)
slow and rainy, the days drift. but, not without the small joys that make you want to make windows out of everything. what is in a space? moving out is much harder than one thinks. like, Sugar Ray Leonard, Houston Rap and math exams on a monday.
and while im not on the subject, are we living in a post-literary society? being in Mexico reminded me of literature as technology: folks don't quite get up on the Pixar reality of your average American. walking into a bookshop, I felt modern, forwardthinking and somewhat out of normal society. (palabras/pistolas). it's hyper-real there, but its a clash of modernity and tradition that gave me a headache by week's end. a clash that has been erased in this country.
I was talking about math.
A cloud began to cover the sun wholly slowly wholly. Grey.
Far.
-James Joyce, Ulysses
Monday, January 03, 2005
wrong way, lady
In fact, without the gravitational force, the sun itself would explode.
-Michio Kaku, Hyperspace
all purple hazed and stuff.
(new fiction being written/televisions buzzing)
Sunday, January 02, 2005
manchester rock
in the last year:
British soccer, the word "ineffable", William Gibson novels, breakfast at restaurants in Mexico named "Al", driving through desolate Texas roads listening to Willie Nelson on a Sunday, chatting with dj /rupture about Nathaniel Hawthorne, actresses from LA, watching my Dad sing his heart out, Zen Palate, the muted hope of global democracy, finding a bagful of spanish fiction in a bookshop in Monterrey, this, my niece asking me "do you know who made god and the universe?" over the dinner table, talking to this guy about Frank Miller in Denton, jamiejamiejamie, rain walking across the pavement in Fort Greene Brooklyn, watching my mothers eyes as I walked across that stage, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, almost dying&handsshaking, watching the Red Sox be dreams/watching the Astros almost do the same, amor es amor es amor, old philosophy professors and honest talk, how am i not myself, baseball, philly folk, dave chapelle in nyc and orange soda, Eat Shrimp People, the chance to do it again.
(lean back)
god bless the dead:
Ray Charles
Jacques Derrida
Dimebag Darrell
Marlon Brando
Ken Caminiti
John Peel
Susan Sontag
Ms Miriam (the elderly lady who lived across the street from me)
and the thousands unnamed
questionmark
You are needed.
no more heartache & bad thinking.
a week in Mexico will make you see the world with unopened eyes.
this one is mine.
words can still change things.
( more after these messages)
