Sunday, February 27, 2005
trees are machines
um.
the story is now up for the two of you who actually want to read it.
1) it requires Adobe Reader (its free--hello Google, good to see you again.)
2) the story should pop up when you hit the link on the left side of this page.
3) if not, click 'pickup' on the link page (my information should already be there) and then subsequently 'view pdf' when it pops up.
keep in mind it had a 2000 wd. limit and that its a beginning.
comments can be left by clicking the pound sign next to my name below.
reach for your scissors...starting......now.
Saturday, February 26, 2005
vector love
typewriter noise: sometimes, in the middle of the day, surrounded by fluttering pieces of wind and the chattering homeless on thick, gray streets all I want to do is be a mechanism--a machine of memory--for history. (when people go outside and watch the world like: stop making characters that are not like the ones we will ever dream of. nas as a modern-day langston hughes. (at a bookstore today, I realized that this guy was a better writer than I thought). also, if autores had hair like this guy, we'd have our own VH1: DIY Authors do the Damn Thing.
(I walked into a record store here in Austin two days ago and found myself bumping into people, watching my Britpop-looking friend snag free beers while I looked around and wondered. Minutes later, I wandered to the part of the store where there was tens of scruffy-haired kids sitting in front of an empty stage and I thought: what a wonderful metaphor for modern music. this band Autolux played some hair-moving rock that involved wahwahwah and gggggggggrrraaaaaaaaowowowowowowowow-kinda stuff. dreampop from LA that sounded like Blur on heroin: accidental fun is the best.)
it hurts to be hip: what a thesis. according to dj rupture, its worth a page turn or two.
thirteenandgod is worth an aural page turn as well. weirdos.
Friday, February 25, 2005
thats not a star, dad
& the clouds became billboards.
more contestants for best band name from a band I've never heard of at SXSW:
Million Dollar Marxists (Ottowa, ON)
Hawthorne Heights (Dayton, OH)
Say Hi to Your Mom (Brooklyn, NY)
Thursday, February 24, 2005
anti-realness
Just waking up in the morning gotta thank God
I don't know but today seems kinda odd
No barking from the dogs, no smog
And momma cooked a breakfast with no hog
I got my grub on, but didn't pig out
Finally got a call from a girl wanna dig out
Hooked it up on later as I hit the do'
Thinking will i live, another twenty-fo'
I gotta go cause I got me a drop top
And if I hit the switch, I can make the ass drop
Had to stop at a red light
Looking in my mirror not a jacker in sight
And everything is alright
-Ice Cube, "It Was a Good Day", 1992
on a side note, I always found it humorous when Cube said on an old NWA cut, that he "wasn't meant for the pop charts"....I wonder if he was thinking that when he was in Barbershop.
ah, when capitalism makes punks go soft.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
muted echo
new wave sweaters
minimalista
working on a story about spaces and gender that one has never subjectively experienced is equally intriguing and involves the weight of the imagination. dealing with issues of transcultural identity--what it is to be both a woman in muted nations, a spaceless member of a countercultural community and how much the past has actually changed you.
Albert Camus once said that Americans are the only writers who think they dont have to be philosophers.
p.s. a warm thankyou to those of you who have shown support in this weird time of fertile production, albeit one that brings bouts of self-doubt.
preppie/masked/bearded/
Casio beats/poor people with computers/ amour
beds on fire
accordionique
germans germans germans germans everywhere
When I was a boy of 14 my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned in 7 years.
--Mark Twain
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
before before
literary sampling in the hip-hop world is the new rockism. how much is homage and how much is mere stealing? Jay can obviously hold his own, and this isnt a real threat to his creative machismo (didn't Skillz write a rhyme for him back in the day?), but still. you have to wonder. could Jay-Z be the Barry Bonds of rap? did he take verbal steroids?
follow me on this one.
now, stop following me.
on another note, who knew that Gustav Klimt was Sage Francis' father?
Monday, February 21, 2005
post-urban/actualized
from Nas'* new single:
"There's daggers in men's smiles/False face must hide what the false heart doth know/There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face"
*featuring Shakespeare on verbals
soy o estoy
from the shadows of cinema, Mexico has rarely contributed to much of the international dialogue of cutting-edge imagery and substantive screenplays. in 2003, three films drizzled their way into the thoughtspace of millions worldwide based upon their disjuncture from traditionalism and their artcore expression of a visceral realism (two things that American cinema is trying to desperately find, I think). Last year, Hold on to Young Ideas (thats me, dude) wrote about how it was amazing that at the time the top glitzy films being shown in this country (Hellboy and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) were directed by two Mexicans. magical realism + Amerikkkan hyper-realism. nutso.
this guy is the black-shirted Aphex Twin (only in ambition and social awkwardness) of Mexican cinema. on the other hand (thanks to my better half for the link), this guy looks friendly and unassuming.
viva la television, señores.
Sunday, February 20, 2005
gonzo satori
He was more than a man. He was more than a character.
who knows what the hell he was--either way, RIP.
on an offnote, can you imagine how many hits of LSD it would take to make a pindrop of sense out of a conversation between Hunter S. Thompson and Ol' Dirty Bastard? just thinking about it makes me fuzzy.
(walking turntables & Chinese punk)
Saturday, February 19, 2005
niño bomba
sugartongue
Friday, February 18, 2005
this has nothing to do with tapes
the realness +
(before we go any further...)
a friend of mine who works for the gubment here in Texas told me about a protest they had on the lawn of the state Capitol here the other day.
"what'd the politicans there say, man?" I mumbled.
"they looked on a schedule and said which one is this one?"
my eyebrows crinkled.
I had forgotten the absurdity of democratic politics. the theater of it all.
the protesters have to get permission from the very people they are protesting against to protest.
(and we continue with our regularly scheduled program....)
blankspace.
geometry rock
listening to a bootleg tom ze and tortoise recording makes me wish moments could be downloaded--gestures, thoughts, the soft twitching of eyelids, etc.
I noticed that Javier Marias still writes with a beat-up typewriter and makes all corrections by hand. then, I thought about (and this is the last time I'll bring it up, really) how weird it was for someone to reject my work because it was too bulbous and wasn't stream-of-conscious enough, when a hundred years ago (roughly...) everyone from THE MODERNISTS were cranking this stuff out and getting heat for it. how much has happened in the last century that we dont think something should have changed in writing? (what was Brion Gysin's quip to William Burroughs in the 60's: writing is 50 years behind painting. I guess its now 100 years behind animation, graphic art, web art and the wealth of electronic music that writers act like doesn't exist).
beepbeep.
autumn breaths&satellites in the sky.
Thursday, February 17, 2005
hemingway on crack
(neuro)logical
they said it was too pretentious.
they said it was too elusive.
they said it was too complex.
then, I smiled.
I didn't win. instead, I stood and listened to the winners read their works and the editor politely mumble as to why the five judges weren't feeling my work. but, he told me to keep writing. and he's going to try to get me a job at The Austin Chronicle.
this entire contest, as far as the judges go, is why literature is in a weird state relative to the other arts (music, painting, film, etc). people shy away from anything that is remotely complex (unlike the editor, which was the reason he chose my shit as a final contestant). regardless, I just wish I lived in France.
everyone wants to be Dave Eggers, Charles Bukowski or Jonathan Lethem 'round these parts. no one aspires to be Carlos Fuentes, James Joyce, Ishmael Reed, William Gibson or Zora Neale Hurston. the winners, in my humble opinion, collectively committed the worst trangression a writer can ever make: they were dull. and in retrospect, they were all older folks (there were entries from as far as Columbia and England) who had been churning out stories for years. I'm a scruffy-headed twenty-three year old who hasn't written that much prose, yet. eh.
(small post-racial notes: there were no hispanic of black folk on the jury, none of the finalists were of color and there was only one black dude and me at the actual event).
eh.
anyway, without further ado, here is the first place story. which I havent thoroughly read yet, but sounded achingly dull when I heard it last night.
for some stupid reason the comments section is hidden on here (the pound sign by my name is how you access it). feel free to dig in. I can't possibly here anything worse than I already have about my story or anyone elses. and when I figure out how to do it properly, I'm going to post my story up here.
p.s. a big fuck you to the five judges who were too scared to show up after they had the audacity to select the stories they did.
(new fiction being written/televisions humming)
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
blood invisible
no time for headaches.
& remember what they do to us who ( ) too much.
wind-sharpened trees made of white shadows and
(espacio vacio)
"thirty centuries of sleeping"
synthesizer literature/hispanic people as inherently hybrid/scissor nationalism
...they looked up and saw that the sun's lidless eyes were really atoms.
driftspace
Listening is the most dangerous thing of all, listening means knowing, finding out about something and knowing what's going on, our ears don't have lids that can instinctively close against the words uttered, they can't hide from what they sense they're about to hear, it's always too late.
-Javier Marias, A Heart So White
Monday, February 14, 2005
the sea inside
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders, the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. "It feels like going down into one's tomb,"- he would mutter to himself- "for an old captain like me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to go to my grave-dug berth."
-Herman Melville, Moby Dick
this i dig of you
giggling at symphonies with pretty ladies & eating barbecue tofu with Spanish wine is what valentine's day, created by the British 1,000 years ago, is all about. you don't believe me, do you. unbelievers will be struck down by this man and trust me, it won't feel good. but, unlike dentist offices and the homegirl at Thundercloud Subs, it will sound good.
fzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt.
Multiculturalism is boring sometimes--despite flashes of wisdom from anonymous bearded-types on message boards and nerds at Brown university. having a brown-skin brotha do the dirty work for all his non-brown skin chums in the name of I Don't Know What is not worth getting all nationalist and big-chested about. but this is. and so are words that do backflips.
cuentos:
(blood invisible/soundless/ofelia/the absent)
Sunday, February 13, 2005
death from above
I recently finished Gabriel Garcia Marquez's new novel, Memorias de mis putas tristes that I bought in a bookshop in Monterrey this past December (and I remember when buying it, I mispronounced his name by emphasizing the latter portion of his last name by accident and the clerk corrected me like I was a schoolboy: Márquez). It's not his best novel, but certainly a tiny masterpiece for different reasons. The fact that he, in my humble opinion, takes a Romantic notion like a 90 year old man whose never made love to a woman without paying her and has him fall in love at the end of his life to a prostitute is not only fascinating but dirty dirty. The first-person narrative and subtle details of his life as a journalist (and music critic, no less) hits home like Barry Bonds hitting a steroid-induced homer in the ninth. The novel also is less of a sweeping story than a swift and lucid conversation: a small open window, cracked yet achingly transparent. The protagonist is a dirty old man but a sweet one who is smart and merely longs for the simplest pleasures in life. And he lets you see what 90-year olds probably think about: sex and death. It sounds somewhat simple-minded, but Márquez has a way with words (you know that, dont you) that feels like you're listening to your grandpa tell you about life over cafe con leche and an Erik Satie record. Gone is the magic (and that's welcomed, personally) but present is the everyday reality of a man nearing his death, but finding the nascent love--both as a concept and an actuality--that he always longed for. What's more magical than that?
Unicorns. Flying Shoes. a Black Senator. anti-gravity. New York City. Peter Pan.
but, seriously. read it in between episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force and that downloaded copy of Bad Education.
(You know Gabo represents like the Geto Boys on a hot and hazy Houston winter day.)
(dormido)
wednesday is when five people, in essence, will think my work is worth shit or relegate it to a netherspace of forgetting. five people I have never met and probably will not think very highly of (though, as always, things could be different than I assume) will make real a space I imagined and constructed. the 13th annual Austin Chronicle Short Story contest will be happening with a nifty ceremony at a renowned local bookstore where five folks will get recognized for their work out of four hundred original participants. I am, potentially, one of them.
but hey, Americans don't read any more, right?
words as video games as digitized philosophy as Mexican pyschology as anti-magical realism as cosmopolitan/urban as a windowless room.
If no one ever obliged anyone to do anything, the world would grind to a halt, we'd all just float around in a state of global vacillation and carry on like that indefinitely. All people really want to do is to sleep, the thought of future regrets would paralyse us, imagining the consequences of acts we haven't even committed is always dreadful, that's why we politicians are so necessary, we're here in order to take the decisions that others would never take, immobilized as they are by their doubts and their lack of will. We listen to their fear. 'The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures,' Shakespeare said and I sometimes think that that's all people are, paintings, asleep today and dead tomorrow.
-Javier Marias, A Heart So White
Friday, February 11, 2005
nina simone studies
Manu Chao and breakfast cereal: what else is there to live for?
but, seriously folks. enough talk--harmless, big-sweatered and cozy. we need more communes. turntables in every room. tv's in the yard watching themselves. big signs on the roof that say: NO MORE FUNERALS. little kids with long hair protesting gangsta rap, yet recognizing that some beats are worth going to war for. cigarette smoke drizzling upwards and noisy thoughts dangling. like learning economics. the amount of cells in the human brain. the life of Lew Alcindor. remembering the difference between "affect" and "effect". Herman Melville novels. West African Yoruban aesthetics. a Max Roach solo bbbbrrrrummmmbbbbbissscatacatcatcatbang! a Richard P. Feynman lecture and Wu-Tang Literary Studies courses. Nina Simone drawings.
we should really talk about this.
water the plants
(picture of Venice, people reading, bearded men looking at you)
Venice, the ancient centre of the fifteenth-century European world economy, was still, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, a cosmopolitan city where easterners could feel at home.
-Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World, 1979
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
absent eyes
so, I went to an opera tonight. or better said, I arrived late, stayed for the duration of the first act and left because all those snooty people and my bad eyes were getting to me. but, the music was extraordinary as were the voices (the timbres, textures, control and range was phenomenal) and I absorbed the absurd hybridity of it all (a story taking place in common era Greece, written by a German and taking place in Italian for an American audience). the old man next to me fell asleep and I think someone fell out of their chair--two reasons to go back.
...this is a great reason to buy a lock, go down to your local cinema and sit down, using the doo-hickey to not be able to leave so you are forced to watch the film over and over and understand things that are beyond science and long division. and because Javier Bardem is a better actor than me and you could ever comprehend with calculators.
caution: it will make you want to move to Barcelona. this is a good thing.
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
(television silence)
for the two of you who care, here's some thoughtspace on a story I'm working on (one of two):
it's about a girl, born in Mexico City, named Olivia--she reads too much, draws on the walls at her church and listens to tapes that she steals from a record store that sells American pop. when she was seventeen she left for Spain in the early 80's against her father's will. there, she found la "Movida Madrileña"--a loose post-Franco movement amongst the youngfolk of Madrid that involved postpunk, rebeliousness, art, hope and a recalcitrant idealism centered around street culture. motherless, yet imbued with the sentiment that the traditional culture of her native Mexico was malignant, she never returned. years later, now thirtysomething, and after earning her education while in Spain, she goes to the US to teach Spanish and explore Amerikkka. after teaching class one afternoon, a fellow teacher hands her a package that was put in his box accidentally. all that it contains is a web address and an old Polaroid of her from Madrid in the 80's.
then, she remembers...
(Franco's dictatorship as a metaphor for latin-american patriarchal structures/painting with the same gun you wanted to put to your father's heart/ a mother's absence/postpunk and eyedealogy/how hard it is to be a thinking woman in Mexican culture/)
then...
Monday, February 07, 2005
~~~~~~~~
Tu sabes cuanta libertad habia en mi cuarto? No, no lo sabes. Nadie lo supo. Y si tu lo supieras empezarias a odiarme. Una no aprende a ser puta en los bares, ni en las fiestas, ni en la calle. La puteria se aprende en soledad.
-Xavier Velasco, Diablo Guardian
nounbeats
cartoons without clothes are as arbitrary as this country's overt distance from any concept of an open society.
...the new Prefuse 73 album is a historical object: the blurring of the idea of "underground" with "overground" can be found in the fidgety beats. Ghost and EL-P swapping syllables, old-timers GZA and Masta Killa playing chess with nouns and the the lead singer of Blonde Redhead--all within numbers of each other on the tracklisting. and its real. not like the fictional tracklistings I dream of every night where Johnny Cash and the Os Mutantes are sharing a cup of coffee with Dizzee Rascal, either. real, people. real.
(the Shell logo on fire)
Sunday, February 06, 2005
bloodthirsty robots in smiling mouths
drum machines and African rap are reasons to get up in the morning, my mom would always say. she used to make tortillas from scratch, watch novelas on bad Mexican tv channels and take me swimming in black holes--all in the span of a schoolday. growing up, my dad would cover his ears with both of his index fingers (I would glance at him from the corner of half-closed eyes). at dinner two nights ago, he confessed that he always wanted to be a musician (he is, but he isnt, its strange), make a record and play shows. I told him CALM IS THE WAY and to pass the chips. tv's outside are not real. and humility is the only cash flow I can slang cause the man with wrinkly eyes and half-grown sideburns who in some earlier life should have been a Mexican national icon left it all to wake up at five in the morning--a mediocre, rural education in tow--to watch me grow like leaves with red t-shirts and mohawks.
and thats all I can do, I guess. (two piano notes twinkle)
and thats not all I can do, I guess.
...I walked out of the black hole, shrugged off flimsy impulses to watch the sun set across the table and took a cab through downtown...but, the roads were wobbly like German beats and this made me rethink my ideas about sound as being post-urban (truly, this is something I thought about four years ago in the bathroom of a Tokyo hotel)...so, I waved one down (a cab, that is) and slabs of sunlight cut through my closed eyes like water falling into empty buckets...and there wasnt anyone around, you see...but this wasnt a French film, so I didnt want to wait around for the mise-en-scene with the girl and the waiter and....you see where this is going, dont you...questionmark
a scanner lightly
po mo is so last century. here, in my room, we're future. future.
"I'm like Michael Moore, except I'm skinny, my jeans are washed and God loves me"
-Ned Flanders, The Simpsons, two minutes ago
all we used to know
within within within within within within within within. the watching of pale sounds drift upwards. purple clouds drizzling on the tongues of walls. kids drinking motor oil in Houston ghettos. and us, with typewriters--walking tape recorders.
we should walk around more.
(p.s. philly by a touchdown)
on a more Zen note, I went to an art show in Houston yesterday and the art was asleep. snoozing, looking confused at itself. second-string Rothkos, squiggly, post-Minimalist drivel on grumpy white pieces of paper. but there was free chinese food and Miller High Life. so, we stayed for a while. but, more to the point--I realized, again (as I always do when I go to these things) that there doesn't exist good enough criticism in contemporary art. in particular, street art. theres no snobby NY-by-way-of-Austin-by-way-of-Sydney critics that know what makes a piece good, bad or something in between. and I also realized that 98% of stuff is post-rational: theres no narrative, it doesnt require thought and it leaves only one blanket reaction--"that's cool."
then, they ran out of High Life and we left.
Friday, February 04, 2005
pink silencio
grab on tight to those black Converse, overpriced faded t-shirts and tight-ass blue jeans, kids: its that time of year again. for one week this city becomes a big room without walls. and I get butterflys in my brain because where else can one see M.I.A., Robert Plant, Bloc Party, Diplo, weird bands from Mexico, Vanilla Ice (act like you know), Ulrich Schnauss, Germans walking around in funny clothes and Saul Williams.
a hallucination, I tell you.
nominee for best band name by a band I dont know: The English Department
honorable mention: What Made Milwaukee Famous
LOOK TO BRAZIL, PEOPLE. LOOK TO BRAZIL.
[don't forget]
One of his most rational projects was to connect a musical operation with the machinery of his watches, so that all the harsh dissonances of life might be rendered tuneful, and each flitting moment fall into the abyss of the past in golden drops of harmony.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Artist of the Beautiful", 1844
Thursday, February 03, 2005
hot hot hot
you give me fever.
fever all through the night.
(singer throws down microphone)
"I'm f(insertbeepingsoundhere)ing serious, dude"
drums thump. trumpets start yelling.
"Hey, idiot. Stop Playing"
bass wiggles. snare taps look at themselves funny.
"Seriously, you jackasses. I have a fever. It sucks."
Singer #1: 'Like yeah, totally. I thought we were into a groove, you know--
"Ralph. My head is the size of two apples. It hurts. I can't feel my baby toe."
Singer #1: "--Cause um, I was like doing this thing where I like put spaces in the song, right? and then---"
'F(insertbeepingsoundagain)ck it, Ralph. Your face looks like a swollen banana with a thousand unicorns all playing xylophones in between the spaces of your irises. I need some Tylenol."
the above is really happening to me
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
pops, your body is a drum machine
when I get old and white-haired, I will tell drawings of my grandchildren this about my childhood: drums stopped being real.
and I'm chipper about that. Canadian, chipper.
and that it doesn't matter what language you can read: they all sound the same when his shadowy face is behind it.
yee-haw.
(a story about punks in Madrid in the 80's)
make me wanna kiss myself
B. The chief intellectual virtues.
Science--demonstrative knowledge of the necessary and eternal.
Art--knowledge of how to make things.
Practical wisdom--knowledge of how to secure the ends of human life.
Intuitive reason--knowledge of the principles from which science proceeds.
Philosophic wisdom--the union of intuitive reason and science.
James Brown reason*--kiss your dreams as if they were made of chocolate.
Relations between practical wisdom and political science.
-Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, a long time ago
*possibly not real, but who are we to delineate between the ontological texture of text and the outside-the-mind physical actuality of something? do the Mashed Potato.
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
amour robotic
In an old interview, five years after his seminal collection of short fiction Drown was published, Junot Diaz got all deep and said this: "way too often, writers of color are, basically, nothing more than performers of their 'otherness'." Coincidentally, that was my first thought after I read Diaz's book (example: this dude went pop fiction because basically white folk like to read about wacky brown people and their experiences. in English, too!) because his minimalist prose style doesn't always hit me where it hurts so good. But, its more complicated than that--and he certainly has a point about writers of "color". Ishmael Reed has spilled more words on this than putting an Eric B. and Rakim record on repeat for 8,000 years: writing is fighting. But, again, its more complicated than that. Javier Marias put it well: 'literature is the space for complexity'. Textures, symbolism, structural construction--all this is imperative in disrupting the mundane continuity of merely writing about your experience as a a nonwhite person and because you are a nonwhite person writing about your experiences then you expect people to love you. run-on sentences are fun.
I've been thinking heavily about all this as I work on two new stories. One with a strong, independent female character and one with an eccentric latin-american male character that deals with memory, stealing paintings out of art museums, tape recorders and graffiti. I realized, in the end, it doesn't matter.
One just writes.
