clouds of evil

twitter!

2011-01-02T23:50:00.000-08:00

I started a twitter account so we could stay in touch

twitter.com/careymercer

I will try and make it more about the band and less about me and my checkered past

See how that works

It's already a total mess

supreme announcement

2010-07-09T14:39:00.000-07:00

I'll be playing a show of blackout beach material and reading some stories from this site (along with a few unpublished gems) on Friday, July 23rd, at the Orange Hall, in Victoria BC.

The One Ring Valentine's Post

2010-02-12T13:54:00.000-08:00

Radio Shack used to sell "The One Ring". You know, the one from the movies.

My mom bought "The One Ring" (originally 399.99 from Radio Shack) from a thrift store. Then she stopped a man from India on the street. She asked if he knew Arabic, and if he could translate the inscriptions on this Arabic ring for her. He was like, "No, I can't. I'm from India, but also, this is not Arabic. I think this is the One Ring." Then he kept walking.

Anyways, she gave it to me. I just wish that I wasn't married to Melanie so I could propose to her again with "the One Ring". I understand that women respond favourably to "The One Ring". I know my friend Jax's heart was forever broken when she opened up the ring-box and did not see a Radio Shack receipt. Happy Valentine's Day.

3 ideas for your Halloween costume

2009-10-29T09:44:00.000-07:00

Dune Sting

Tantric Sting

Medieval Lute Sting

Poet's Corner #2: Carson, Dickinson, Bars of Time, Against Milton

2009-08-17T16:54:00.000-07:00

(Emi Honda, Scott Evans, Jordan Mackenzie)

--------------

Here's Anne Carson on Emily Bronte:

Whacher is what she was.

She whached God and humans and moor wind and open night.

She whached eyes, stars, inside, outside, actual weather.

She whached the bars of time, which broke.

She whached the poor core of the world,

wide open.

Beautiful stuff. Especially "the bars of time, which broke."

-The barely perceived bars of time, stoically and heroically whached by Bronte.

-Actual weather.

-The poor core of the world.

What micro-vision perceives this near-invisible architectonic, these translucent specter-like bars of time, all waving and floating in the soul-cosmos?

Who states that the core of the world is "poor", and resists bedazzling the thing with mighty molten, and rebellious Satan, and vast chambers for plotting and war?

Dickinson?

Woolf?

Carson?

Akhmatova?

I am thinking too of Emi Honda's art?

------------------

Is the woman's gaze pre-determined to be micro and mystic?

No. It just seems that way.

But shit: Lord Nelson/Trafalgar/Middle-Earth be damned, that gaze is the good gaze...The micro gaze is the good gaze...

-------------------

I have always felt this sense, when reading Dickinson, for example, that the interior mechanisms of the world were being perpetually and minutely mapped out. Here:

She slept beneath a tree

Remembered but by me.

I touched her cradle mute [...]

This poem is not about "the lady of Shallot". It is not about any muse, not about a muse to inspire both feats of verse, and feats of grandeur and epic heroism. It is about a Tulip. It sleeps beneath a tree. Only the speaker records its sway, its undulations under the bows of whatever nameless tree it roots by. The speaker is mute, speechless, as she touches it.

Beautiful stuff.

Or here:

The sun just touched the morning;

The morning, happy thing,

Supposed that he had come to dwell,

And life would be all spring.

She felt herself supremer, --

A raised, ethereal thing.

You, speaker, are some raised and ethereal thing. Good guts to state it. For who else might see that sly finger of the sun slyly caress that hopeful twit, the morning? Only an elevated, spectral and ethereal thing might view that. The morning cuckolded; except, of course, that the morning is feminine and the sun is on a macho schedule, first for the dawn, second to the noon, and lastly to lie with his husky, booze-breathed darling, the dusk.

-------------------

And is this all "metaphysical"? I have never understood that phrase. It seems self-serving, like a rooster scratching his claws in a yard, his puffy red chest blooming in the sun. Rooster-y, if you know what I mean.

-------------------

And who, to now return to Carson, is seeing these broken bars of time? Carson? Bronte? Carson through Bronte?

Yes, that's it, Carson through Bronte. That's one objective shred of beauty in literature. What a beautiful thing it is to bend time. To bend a century or two and to fall back into Bronte's lap. Bend a few millenniums and walk around with that Alpha-poet who sang of ships and gore and dusty Hector's corpse! Though I would be self-silenced, jittery and nerve-stricken. Hopefully I have in my pocket a copy of Hamlet.

And the "whached". As if Carson is smiling at Bronte, a tacit recognition that she can smile through time at her. A recognition, within herself, that she can speak to the darkness. That she is a real poet. To steal a bite from Joseph Brodsky: like Tsvetavea writing to dead Rilke. She can speak in a myriad of tongues, and even speak the word of Bronte, that word being "Whached".

And it brings to mind Dylan's line: "Shakespeare, he's in the alley". But when Dylan places mere Shakespeare in the back-alley of his mind, it's a snide and self-assured sneer, and a poetic acknowledgment both of Shakespeare's greatness and Dylan (and his scene)'s greater greatness. As if to say, "I will put him wherever I want." Shakespeare, he's in the outhouse. Shakespeare, he's in the drunk tank. It's a one way edict, and Shakespeare's dust cannot mount a retort, much less set it to a catchy beat.

Carson has more of a dialogue going on. Dialogue is a gift, from Zeus.

------------------

It is not Shakespeare that makes us human, it is the reading of Shakespeare. The bending of time. Just as it is the reading of Achebe, for me, that bends space. Time=classics. Space=other. Time and Space. These are the two dimensions of literature.

I bend the paths of space, the many thousands of miles between me and Achebe, when I think of his words.

Carson seems to be more into time than space. I have never understood time, except in the sense that it both destroys and reveals, like snails on fresh unpaved pavement, reveling, not revealing, in the sunny second before the steamroller's shadow falls upon their spines.

And I only understand Time Revealer and Time Destroyer because I went to university for a while. They aren't natural ideas.* They are "Milton" ideas.

------------------

Anyways: Wonderful creatures: amongst the best: by that I mean they can eat lunch with Shakespeare in Heaven and interrupt his holding court, grill him on Titus (?), weep for Cordelia and sing a song for Ophelia.

Thus, I deign to wonder: What does Shakespeare think when he reads these following lines, again taken from Anne Carson's The Glass Essay?

I saw a high hill and on it a form shaped against hard air.

It could have been just a pole with some cloth attached,

But as I came closer

I saw it was a human body.

trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off

the bones.

And there was no pain.

The wind

was cleaning the bones.

They stood forth silver and necessary.

It was not my body, not a woman's body, it was the body of us all.

It walked out of the light.

The essay ends with this beautiful-seraphim/eschatological-angel on the horizon. It is the body of us all. Feminism is an "us". It is for us all. The micro-gaze flows within the intramission of that sight. We can see the micro in the Tulip. We can hear it revealed in the good Coltrane, or the subtle shifts in any good drone. A drone, to me, should always mimic the opening of a spring flower.

And what can we make of this "light"? Is it the light of the renaissance? Surely not! Surely not some empirical light, for that same light is the monster's candle: it illuminated the judge's drawing, just as it illuminated the horrors that, in Sebaldian terms, continue to suck us back into a black hole of unknowing, of Auschwitz and Ivory. Its gravitational pull is so immense it is invisible. It is, in fact, not light, but the antithesis of light.

Against reason.

Not Against Nature.

And when I think of this light, Carson's light, I feel as if swaddled in a birthing light.

-----------------------

This essay is, roughly, and jazzily, about woman poets, and a consistency of vision that I perceive in their works. There still, in 2009, aren't enough woman poets of renown (I do not have my ear to the ground) to make generalizing statements worthless--just as we might say something singular about 19th century Russian poetry. Argue that point if you have the energy--I know I can be made wrong, but it's important to the health and vitality of this essay that I ignore my ignorance, and just stick to this thread. I accept too, that in acknowledging a certain tradition, I enforce and ensure that this tradition exists. Thus, to be transgressive, I should be applauding those women who write like Milton. But, I say, Milton is a complete asshole, and the micro gaze is the good gaze.

And even if it is about a certain strand of women's writing, it is also about threads, and one of these threads seems to be a desire to delineate gender, to delete the conditions that create gender, that subordinate and hem in and, most importantly, that live to classify. I speak here of those impulses that salivate over terms, and limits, and barriers, and zones of the mind. Here's Dickinson's take on big hermeticism:

Arcturus is his other name,-

I'd rather call him star!

It's so unkind of science

To go and interfere!

I pull a flower from the woods, -

A monster with a glass

Computes the stamens in a breath

And has her in a class.

Indeed: that same (but not same) "monster" with a glass...this monster also walks the eschatological wastes of the Blood Meridian: that same judge, the judge who classifies a thing and then destroys it; a thing, a bird, a creature, its freedom serving to insult that vaunted, and macro, sense of the domineering human. It is a thing's freedom that rankles. Remember this.

"Definitions blur", to quote Carson, in her introduction to Euripides' Alkestis. If "Life and Death" can blur, (as it does in the play), then why not every other phenomenon real and imagined? It is the blurring that rankles.

-------------------------

I will end by resurrecting Carson's image of that body that walks out of the light. This body, Carson's body, her body and yet not her body, that walks out of the light: it is not a woman's body. It is certainly not a man's body. It resists classification. Lines are blurred. WIthin this blurring exists a kind of rankling freedom.

A tulip is a tulip, is a small thing, is a connected thing, is a thing that a small tree shadows. And what shadows that tree, but a summer cloud in some stratosphere? And on and on into the celestial gardens.

Rankling freedom and its infinite connections; nothing can really be hermetically sealed. Nothing is a binary. In the world of ones and zeroes there really is just ones, not one one, but a trillion small ones.

Hear Woolf:

It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. [...] And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilized. [..] There must be freedom and there must be peace. Not a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer.

I think I understand, if anything, this line about freedom and peace. One must not construct in anger, though the world provides for construction an endless array of fuels for outrage. Rather, one must construct using the last dying embers of righteous indignation withering in the soul of one's conscience, and one must also construct with an eye to the pink dawn. Soft anger, wild new hope, stillness of dawn, rankling freedom. Blurring definitions, with a gaze that is against Nation, against Milton, against systems and didactic talk, and forever and ever against the desecration of the Mysteries.

Poet's Corner #1

2009-08-17T11:52:00.000-07:00

Here's a poem that has lodged itself into my mind. Maybe it's 2666, maybe it's just, you know, time. But this poem has come across my vision at a time when this shit just seems un-ignorable.

SOMEONE IS BEATING A WOMAN, by Andrei Voznesensky

Someone is beating a woman.

In the car that is dark and hot

Only the whites of her eyes shine.

Her legs thrash against the roof

Like berserk searchlight beams.

Someone is beating a woman.

This is the way slaves are beaten.

Frantic, she wrenches open the door.

And plunges out--onto the road.

Brakes scream.

Someone runs up to her,

Strikes her and drags her, face down,

In the grass lashing with nettles.

Scum, how meticulously he beats her,

Stilgaya, bastard, big hero,

His smart flatiron-pointed shoe

Stabbing into her ribs.

Such are the pleasures of enemy soldiers

And the brute refinements of peasants.

Trampling underfoot the moonlit grass,

Someone is beating a woman.

Century on century, no end to this.

It's the young that are beaten. Somberly

Our wedding bells start up the alarum.

Someone is beating a woman.

What about the flaming weals

In the braziers of their cheeks?

That's life, you say. Are you telling me?

Someone is beating a woman.

But her light is unfaltering.

World-without-ending.

There are no religions,

no revelations,

There are women.

Lying there pale as water

Her eyes tear-closed and still,

She doesn't belong to him

Any more than a meadow deep in a wood.

And the stars? Rattling in the sky

Like raindrops against black glass,

Plunging down,

they cool

Her grief-fevered forehead.

Translated by Jean Garrigue

Old Xerxes and the Sea

2009-06-05T13:04:00.000-07:00

Recently my phone rang.

-Hello?

-Do you want to be in our music video?

I threw the phone down in disgust. Why would I want to do that? I have pride--a certain sense of principles.

-No fucking way. As if I'd be in your music video. I am an artist, not a fancy dazzler. Fuck you.

-Oh, sorry; I forgot to mention we'll pay you one thousand dollars.

I threw the phone down in shock. I trembled. I crawled over to the shrine of Zeus, a supplicant at his stony knees. I emailed Delphi and asked how I might best handle this.

-Ummm, hello. Yeah: just looking at my calendar. Hmmm; actually, as it happens, I do have a fewwww days off.

-Oh, really? That's awesome!

-What kind of a video is it? Not that it matters. And who is the star? Not that it matters.

-You are the star. And it's a surf video, to be filmed in the West Coast town of Tofino.

I winked at the glowing, encouraging eyes of Zeus--time to push this into overdrive.

-I demand to be paid in cash, in American currency, and I demand to be flown in and out of location by float plane.

-That sounds reasonable.

-Goodbye.

And I laughed, and put it out of my mind, and thanked blessed Zeus, and for the next two months I did not think about it once, until the night before I was to board my float-plane.

I realized, rather late, that I had not received a ticket. Do float planes run on reservations? Am I on a list?

I made the appropriate queries.

-Oh, ummm. Yeah. The float plane. It will be two thousand dollars--

-And? Yes? I am sure you have access to that kind of money.

-Ummm? Are you serious? I can't tell if you are serious.

-Why would I not be serious? How would I benefit from un-seriousness?

-Hey: listen. We are sending by two old friends to pick you up. Haydn and Mike Rak.

Zeus' eyes were glowing red at this insult and blasphemy. I hung up.

We drove up to Tofino. The whole time I sat in the back and spread strife and discordance.

-Yes, hmmm, I wonder what I will spend my ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS on. Yes, it is nice to be a star. Hmmm, I wonder what the rest of the crew is being paid. Oh, it is none on my business, really. I should just be happy to be paid one thousand dollars, and be happy, I suppose.

I could see a few crumpled and dirty 5 dollar bills hanging out of their pockets. Their cheeks were hollow. I bit into my artisan hoagie. I tasted caramelized onions and fine salami. I instructed Mike Rak to drive more in the center of the road, so as to not get any gravel dust in my beautiful, luscious hair.

When we got to the film shoot, Mike Rak and Haydn marched over to the director. There was some kind of angry exchange. I yawned and fanned myself.

At the beach there was a commotion. The director had rented the same camera that had captured, in stunning slo-mo, the sharks in Planet Earth. It cost close to one million dollars, but only thousands of dollars to rent. It gleamed in the sunny haze.

The "locals" walked by. Their wet-suits hung from their sinewy bodies. Their stringy hair spoke to days in the rip-tube, in the swell-curl. They saw a million-dollar camera, on a ten-thousand dollar tripod, and many kinds of professional lights strung around the camera.

They began to assess the facts. Grizzled men in wet-suits, huddled around a million-dollar camera. Surely this was some kind of professional filming event, and these were professional surfers, for if not, then why the expensive camera?

Mike Rak pointed to me.

-Yeah, this guy is the star. He's a bit of a Malibu legend. You've probably heard of him: His name is--

--Zane. Zane McDermott.

I heard a telephone wire of Zanes rocket around the beach. Zane McDermott; a legend. A surf hero, so true to the wave that they had not even heard of Zane. Amazing, awesome, incommensurable, that Zane should be dipping his toes into the rip-swirl.

I looked into the sun. I looked into the quilt of clouds. I gazed as Zane might gaze.

After about an hour of dry-shots, the tension was unfathomable. People were crowded around the shoot, chanting Zane's name in time to the crashing of the waves.

No one stopped to think, 'Why does this chubby little beaver not look like a professional surfer? Doesn't his belly get in the way? What is his secret?'

I gazed some more. Pure 100 percent Zane McDermott.

It was finally time. I twirled my board up over my head with just my little finger. I trotted with assured confidence into the foam. I was Zane. I became Zane as my ankles disappeared beneath the foam. But I fell down. I tripped. I spat water. I blubbered. I sat in the foam for twenty minutes and tried to velcro my leash on. When I looked up, in faint hope, I saw that my career as a professional surfer had ended. Even the crew had disbanded, for a short time perhaps believing their own lies.

I looked to my right and saw the sea hurl Mike Rak onto the rocks. It was like an Egyptian myth-painting. I laughed. Hubris.

That night there was another commotion. They hadn't brought enough wood to make a brilliant fire. We needed a camp-fire, for a very important shot where my character, aka the star of the video, falls asleep by the campfire. And then sea creatures come out of the sea and rip my guts out.

So Todd had an idea. Since he is a pyrotechnics wizard, he suggested that I lie on one side of the fire, and he would go on the other side, just out of the vision of the kino-eye, and then dump gasoline on the fire, just as the sea-creatures came into vision.

I objected to the plan. I have a wife who loves me as I am. But I do not want to test the bounds of that love by coming home with gas burns all over my face.

There ensued a righteous chorus of tut-tut-tutting, and assurances. Todd even filled up a trash-can of water so I might quickly douse myself, should the unthinkable occur. I ignored my suspicion that gas burns hotter than the cooling properties of water, and consented. It was 4 in the morning.

It worked!

The last scene was to have me dragged into the actual sea; the moon was to illuminate the gentle, celestial-lit foam. But it was raining. The tide was out. The tide was so far out, that after being dragged for two hundred feet through the murk and mud and seaweed, we were no closer to the lip of the sea.

-Cursed ocean! Where are you! Show thyself!

The electrical cord had reached its limit. They had only brought two hundred feet of cable. I had been dragged through two hundred feet of muck.

Someone pointed to a creek, a tiny tributary.

-Drag the star through that. It might look okay.

So they did. They dragged me over a small ledge into a creek, and dragged my flailing body for another one hundred yards.

I ran away.

In the morning the director drove me to the bus. He had got some good shots. He paid me that which I demand and deserve. We hugged.

I burned one twenty-dollar bill and the thigh of a bull for sweet Zeus when I got home.

ENEMY MINE: Bad Computer, Community Judgment, Astral Rush, Spaghetti Blob.

2009-02-08T10:10:00.000-08:00

Swan Lake is a musical project that I am a part of. It’s not quite a “band”—we have no drummer, no bass player, no help. There are only songwriters. There are three songwriters: me and my good friends Spencer Krug and Dan Bejar.

Dan dubbed the project Swan Lake, further cementing his position in the skate-punk Mecca that is EAST VAN/STRATHCONA as a lunatic, a pompous member of the bourgeoisie, a man too obsessed with the immutable worth of his own cantos to even crack a WILDCAT ©or a DUDE ©. Before he christened our association, I jokingly and self-effacingly called the project MODERN SONGWRITERS, a name so cringe-inducing that I thought “surely no one will think we actually would call ourselves MODERN SONGWRITERS”. I was wrong, sarcasm sucks.

One day we were in the studio, and we were sitting in what studios call “the lobby”, which is a front-window-secretary-space with couches and a coffee maker and usually a Nintendo machine. We were sitting on these leather couches when the most tortured, un-listenable sounds started floating out of the mixing room. This was the sound of our first record: I think Dan or Spencer said “it sounds like a boar dying in a tar pit.”

I am an excellent synthesizer: I have very little creativity, very little spark, and I only possess a knack at fusing things together and making causal connections. Immediately the image of a wild and frenzied boar in a tar-pit passed through my mind: it was gasping, bleating, gnashing, and death-moaning in the tar-pit, the ugliest sound on earth and in earth. I said “Let’s call our record Beast Moans”. We were laughing a lot—it was nice. I miss those guys even now.

Beast Moans was recorded through a DIGI 001, a piece of shit that looks like a dolphin. I remember a week before we started our project, waking up in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, thinking ‘Oh my God all we have is a DIGI 001 and it looks like a fucking dolphin.’ I was really scared.

We had a bit of money and I thought about buying an APOGEE ENSEMBLE, until I turned one on. Every light starts blinking at once, and all the lights are barney-coloured and cotton-candy coloured, and any hope of conjuring up some “Morrison-like plunge into the darkness with me baby mojo fest” is eliminated by this gaudy and pukey light show.

I am speaking about analog to digital converters here: The microphone captures the sound, the pre-amp gives the sound its shape and its tone, but this sound or signal is still in an analog format. After the pre-amp, the sound can go to either an additional shaping device, like EQ or Compression, or straight to the recorder. If the recorder is digital, like a computer, the analog signal needs to be transmogrified into a digital code, represented as “zeroes and ones”. Some boxes do this really well. Other boxes are shitty—the DIGI 001 is famously shitty.

So the record ended up sounding pretty shitty!

There are some pretty interesting ideas on Beast Moans though, and at least shitty is a sound.

I've had an idea, a concept, for my music for some time. This idea is best represented as a gigantic bowl of vibrant, pulsating, intersecting wet spaghetti noodles that wrap themselves around two or three monolithic meatballs. So in a song like “City Calls”, the umpteen snaking vocal lines and mimetic organ and guitar lines wrap around the only slightly-saucy meatball of a floor tom, or a meatball of a Dan Bejar singing “and the ill-milk in your bones…”, and this song might be thought of as flying towards you in space, and as it grows closer you realize that it gets bigger and fills more of your vision, that is to say that the negative space is being continually blocked out, continually being eaten up by this spherical mass. At the same time you realize that the plate is getting bigger, you also realize that your vision does not become more acute, you do not notice any new detail about the surface of the meatballs or about the make-up or consistency of the vibrant noodles—the image eats up more space, but you don’t ever get any more information about what is eating up more space. So in the end you feel angry and like puking, but you also can’t really look away. I hope.

Except that I do not feel that I have ever represented this idea in my music successfully.

We laid down our bare-bones parts in a small barn on top of a mountain range. We used RCA 77dx mics, and great river pre-amps, and a blackface 1176 compressor, thanks for asking. The bare-bones tracks sounded pretty cool. We should have just left it at that, but I wanted spaghetti and meatballs. So I fucked it all up or whatever. It’s no big deal: I fuck a lot of things up.

I can’t remember if this essay had a point. I started it a month ago and remembered to try and finish it today.

One of the funny things about Enemy Mine was that, for all this talk about collaboration, there wasn’t too many times that we were all in front of a microphone or a monitor together.

Allow me to digress, and through digression I will come to a point.

Melanie and I: we live a soft, domestic life. We go to the same video store everyday. We have a relationship with the woman at the beer store. We know the cashiers at the grocery store.

The recording of Enemy Mine, due to everyone’s schedules, was kind of weird and intense and I did not get to see Melanie as much as I usually like, which is of course every waking second. In fact, I hardly saw her at all.

And I never saw Spencer for the first two weeks because he was tangled up in his life in Montreal.

So for the first stretch of Enemy Mine recording in February 2008, I spent every waking second with someone whose soul I am slightly less mystically connected to: Dan Bejar.

The clerks and cashiers who, for years, have seen Melanie and I cuddling in line to buy our carrots or arguing over Terms of Endearment (my choice) or Krull (her choice) or canoodling while we wait for our Africanos, now saw me with a new constant companion: Daniel, with his trimmed beard, and his scarf, and his tan jacket, and his city-guy loafers, and his eccentric hair and his distant, superior, European sensibility.

Every day at the video store, and the beer store (buying Strongbows no less), we would giggle over something, and he would buy his Spanish wine and me my Strongbows.

Important: all of the “Recording” money was in Dan’s account, so he was always paying for everything. This act occurred many times, and the act procured more than a six-pack: he bought Toilet-paper and coffee. The kind I always get. And a toothbrush.

I think these are things couples buy.

I started to sense this palpable anguish from the younger members of our cashier-community. This anguish was not strictly homophobic, but more a question of TRUE LOVE: where was Mel? We seemed so in love!

And who is this bearded guy who is buying everything? What are you two giggling about? What are you doing, man! You’re throwing your life away! This guy: what’s his story! And shouldn’t I have waited a respectable month before I introduced this new companion to my community?

Lines were drawn, and though Melanie and I did not know it, the community sided with Mel. It’s funny to think: she was just working away at her nursing job, totally oblivious to the immense community outpouring of sympathy that was being psychically channeled against me (and this decrepit urban usurper), and in favor of her.

We had no idea.

This went on for two weeks: by the end of our time together, I fully expected some life counseling: a cashier intervention.

And then one day Spencer showed up, and the very next day Dan left. And the whole sordid, or seemingly sordid, ritual of video-renting and Strongbow-purchasing and toothpaste/toiletries buying started up again, but now with my new friend. This ritualistic living began anew, but now with my new young-looking handsome cherubic friend. And still: no sign of Melanie.

As if I had ditched Melanie, burned through Dan, and had now settled on this latest untarnished prize.

Succubus with a blonde beard.

So now they were like “Well, we were just starting to get used to that old dude, that guy with the beard, and now you’re bringing this new little guy in? With his soft voice and his canvas shoes and his gentle mannerisms? What’s next? Who the fuck is next? Where’s Melanie? Where’s old guy? Who’s this young guy?” and so on and so on, a vicious and dizzying cycle of serial mono-ga-tude and homophobia-lite chorusing out of their judgmental gaze.

And then, as if the torrid clouds of my new “experimental lifestyle” had passed over our island and headed out to the open ocean, Melanie returned to my side.

The first part of the tracking of Enemy Mine was done!

We had our gentle life back. I made all kinds of triumphant appearances at our local haunts, my arm wrapped proudly around Mel: Even the nihilistic stock-boy who doesn’t believe in love and who makes puking sounds when we smooch by the canned peas, even he was openly sobbing tears of relief. The universe had righted itself. Old poet and young page/squire were phantoms of mist. Melanie and I laughed and joked in the aisles.

The old guy at the video store who loves his rye and cokes looked me in the eye again.

We did a second round of singing and plinking in Vancouver, at JC/DC studio, in April 2008.

I felt comfortable there. I had one great experience at JC/DC.

Let me write it down if I can.

Dan was off reading Paul Reiser’s Fatherhood, or grabbing a pizza, and Spencer was in the singing room. JC and DC were out of town. So, on this day, I was without qualification the master of the control room.

I was rolling around the floor, rolling in freedom, rolling because the control chair has wheels. I had my feet up on the computer like Spider-man’s boss. I was in charge.

We were working on one of Dan’s songs—I think it’s called “Ballad of a Swan Lake”. The last two minutes of the song is chiefly Spencer and I wailing “I sat down / and took a number / at the table where / death resides”

What a beautiful line. It’s courageous, and noir, and of course very funny. I walked around for months softly singing this song, this one line: it puts a lilt in my step. I felt lucky.

As I’ve said, for the last half of this song, there’s one track of me wailing this line, over and over again. And then Spencer said “let me try wailing!”

And of course he did his wailing. And then he said, into the microphone, “Let me try doing another track of wailing!”

And I was like “Fucking A”!

So I panned his first wail to his left headphone. This means you only hear it in your left headphone or speaker. This is the difference between “Stereo” and “Mono”: the ability to assign or weight specific tracks to one speaker. It supposedly creates more space.

I kept my wail “in the middle”, meaning it went to both headphones equally in volume. And I put his soon to be recorded second wail on the right side.

Think: Three horsemen galloping down a narrow and short stone canyon, two of them identical twins, all three riders screeching a litany about death. Each horse has an identical human face, a classic mix of Spaniard and Sephardic Jew. The face of the horse bears a well-manicured beard.

I had a kind of platonic vision of music when he was recording his second wail. I saw beams and streams of yellow light emanating from the tweeters, and I saw condensed tendrils of purple oozing from the woofers. I spun around and around on my control chair. I lost my mind in the righteousness of it all. I flew into the birth milk of the cosmos and I smelt a star, I fell onto the top of Mt. Olympus and I picked a yellow flower out of Zeus’ sandal. I did, I did: all of this, I swear. But this is personal, and I am not sure if anyone else will have a similar reaction if anyone else ever comes to hear the song.

And then Spencer asked “How was that?”

And I pushed the speak button and said “Pretty good, bud.”

And that is all I have to say about Enemy Mine.

Inklings should have spotted this hole on the first reading

2009-01-31T13:23:00.001-08:00

It's one of those holes: as soon as you step into it, you never get out. It sucks, but once mired in the muck, one cannot seem to break clean. I've been thinking about it all day--I woke up with a fever about it last night.

Why didn't the eagles just fly Frodo into Mordor?

Think of the ultimate flying Eagle-Diamond: Gandalf at the point of this eagle-spear, full of white light/white heat and Enya song. Legolas is to his right, quivering bow in hand, ready to pierce Nazgul-throat. Aragorn is to his left, re-forged sword in hand, ready to strike! and Frodo and Sam huddle on the King of The Eagles' back in the middle of this deadliest strike force. And Gimli and maybe Radagast the Brown in the back, just rounding things out, whizzing on Cirith Ungol from the heavens.

It just seems easier to me than all that climbing and soot and orc-breath.

read more at your own peril:

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/eagles.html

Chelsea Will Go Anywhere # 1: magic themed coffee shop

2009-01-29T17:03:00.000-08:00

This is the first post in a recurring series where I assign a
photography mission to my good friend and excellent
photographer Chelsea Lowe.

By "photography mission" I mean this:

I send Chelsea into a place of business that distresses or interests me, and I get her to take pictures. I then re-create the menu or merchandise based on my impressions of her photos.

The first place Chelsea has agreed to go is a magic-themed coffee shop in Langford, BC.

The coffee shop is called "Illusions Cafe: the Magic of a Fresh Cup".

I haven't been this perplexed since I first heard about Long Island's "Yogourt 'N Such".

ILLUSIONS CAFE MENU

1. ABRACADABRA wraps: a sorcerous mélange of fantastical feta, magnetic mayonnaise, telekinetic tomato, and perplexing pepper, all swaddled up in a wizard-wrap 12.95$

2. PRESTO-PESTO BAR: Occult-oats. Presto-Pesto. Tastier than you’d think. Not starving? Ask us to "saw it in half!" 8.95$ "sawed in half": 8.25$ (plus .70 cent "sawing" surtax)

3. HOUDINI-CANO: Our magical twist on the Americano—the Houdini-cano will help YOU escape from the boredom box…with Pizazz! 3.25$

4. MAGIC-CINNOS: Take one “regular” Cappuccino. Now grate some “Illusions Café: the magic of a Fresh Cup” special spices onto the foam. Enjoy! 3.25$ (2.00 grating surtax) 5.25$

5. WHITE RABBITS: an illusionist’s classic! (just steamed milk) 2.95 $

6. DAVID POT-OF-COFFEE-FIELD: Copperfield's preferred dark roast, brewed up fresh in your own pot for you and your disciples 6.95$

Do you have an idea of where Chelsea should go next? Send it to: chelsea_will_go_anywhere_even_the_harshest_death_pits@hotmail.com

Source Material

2009-01-22T20:23:00.000-08:00

Coming soon: an essay on Star Trek: The Next Generation

Bildungsroman II

2009-01-18T09:44:00.000-08:00

1. I like the lights of Christmas. I remember being ten years old. We lived in a log house in the real north. We cut our own tree like real bushwhackers. Our log-house had a really high ceiling, so the tree that we chose was probably twenty-feet high. We lived in a sea of timber, so it didn't feel so wrong then to grab and kill a tree just so your presents can have a sylvan reflection. In fact, across from our house was a mass of rotting logs. I think my dad fell in it once, and scraped up his sides from the many broken and sharp limbs that protruded from the logs. So wood was neither holy nor precious.

We spent days stringing popcorn and lights around the tree. These days of stringing and tree-decorating were really nice times, time spent with my parents and my brothers.

Why were they so nice? Because we lived in the country and my only friend was a Neo-Nazi. I never told my parents this at the time, because I didn't know what it all really meant, but looking back, my only friend definitely was a Neo-Nazi. At least his parents were. They were Germans. They had Swastikas.

I was old enough to know that this was a really bad symbol, but not so old that I was ready to cut ties with my only friend. And I was only at their house once. They fed me butter fried hot-dogs, and I puked. I still can't eat fried hot-dogs, because they remind me of fried hot-dogs. And they remind me of Nazis.

He showed me his brother's room. His brother had guns in his room. Hand-guns. And racks and racks of cassette tapes with toxic names like "stormtrooperz 4 death" and "Blitzkreig 2: the gathering" and other names that now in retrospect sound like Highlander movies. And when he came home from whatever he filled his days with he gave me a look that was like a robotic scan for racial purity. He had a shaved head, he was lean, and he was full of toxic anger. My skin shrieked and shrank under this gaze.

Years later I learned that a real skinhead group was discovered on the edge of our Northern town. They were operating some kind of race war bullshit training ground, with automatic weapons, in this town that we lived in. I thought of my friend with real fucking sadness. What a piece-of-shit way to start your life, in a mobile trailer on the edge of an ugly Northern town in a Nazi house, surrounded by Nazi parents and a robotic shit-kicker of a brother. My friend was an amazing artist, even then, and it sometimes occurs to me that art for him, even though it was expressed in highly detailed drawings of m-16s and bazookas, was as valid an escape as anything I've ever put together in my adult life. I remember later, after our friendship had organically dissolved, seeing the swastika on a t.v. show and telling my parents that his parents hung that shit all over their house. My parents were really really upset.

Anyways: a twenty-foot high tree is fun to string. And if you are young, and the house lights are out, you can sit under it and let the coloured lights cascade into your sub-consciousness, and rock yourself into a feeling that is not dissimilar to tremolo. As if your body is one big metal sheet, slowly flapping and bending. This was my first and best psychedelic experience.

2. One year for Christmas my parents bought me Harvard Moccasins. I think that's what they were called. They were shoes made from suede, and to keep them from spoiling in the winter slush, I'd tie plastic bags around my feet. And then I'd be terrorized by the bangers when I slushed through the smoke pit. I was at a weird stage, where I hadn't yet realized that a certain tact and grace was required in order to make it through the world un-charlie-horsed or whatever. My parents were really poor, and even though everyone made fun of my slush-proof get-up (and by "made fun" I do mean punching me and throwing lit cigarettes at my plastic bag shoes), I was proud of my shoes, and I was proud of the fact that my parents would go out of their way to help me look like a prep. So my love for my parents got displaced into a love for my moccasins.

-Anyways, that X-mas day we all went out for breakfast. It was the first Christmas where my brother and I asked for clothes instead of Electronic Battleship or cross-country skies, so I think we just wanted to strut our duds out in a public situation. So we drove into town. All the restaurants were closed, except Bino's. Bino's, for those who don't know, was like Denny's. But, because of our society's latent anti-immigration bias, a chain called Bino's fell by the wayside in the grease-rush to capture that quintessential familiarity that seems to be so important in choosing a breakfast restaurant. I don't actually know if it was the quiet racism that killed Bino's, or if there were other factors.

Actually, Melanie just pointed out the aural connection between Bino's and Bean-o, an anti-fart pill.

-The actual meal was kind of depressing. We were the only family there. The gravy brown booths were occupied by solitary drunks and travelers. We were rubbing it in. And, in our new aqua-velva cable-knits and suede boat-shoes, we were brutally over-dressed. I used the pay-phone to call my friend Reg and tell him about my shoes.

He asked, "where the fuck are you?" I said, "Oh. At Bino's." He was probably stretched out in front of his fire-place, his golden retriever lapping cracked chestnut jewels out of his palm, a steaming eggnog on the rug and a plate of homemade blueberry griddlecakes coming his way. Stretched out in front of a crackler in a new cashmere house-coat. I was at Bino's.

So every year my dad asks us if we remember Bino's, as a way of honouring Zeus, who mixes our lives from the jars of happiness and sadness that sits at his feet.

The Horse, The Bear, The Kat, The Bob

2009-01-01T16:09:00.000-08:00

In 1990, when I was fifteen, my family moved into the Gordon Head Townhouses. A man named Bob lived there. He was not quite our neighbour, but he was close enough to suck my dad into his world. This story is about Bob, and my dad, and a horse.

The townhouses were laid out in a square, and all of the back patios of the housing units surrounded this malformed, lumpy square of grass. On a summer day every patio wafted out cigarette smoke and grass smoke into the courtyard. The harshest sounds emanated from Bob’s patio: sadistic cackles, homophobic curses, a river of profanity, “fucking cocksucker” every thirty seconds, roadhouse modern blues. Bob was elevated amongst the rough-and-tumbles for sending a revealing picture of his girlfriend to an outlaw motorcycle magazine. It was published.

I never went to his patio, but my dad did. He is much friendlier and less judgmental than I am. I have a sensitive nature. My brother, who was thirteen, was summoned to the patio. He had to run to the store for packs of cigarettes and pornographic magazines and mojo-fries. This exposure, brief as it was, ruined his education. He is only now, fifteen years later, recovering from the corruption.

My dad began spending every minute with Bob. My dad was, at this time, the maintenance man for the townhouses. The maintenance of the units was thrown into abeyance.

In the winter they moved their days indoors and Bob bought a Sega Genesis. They played Sega golf and kept a diary of their wins and losses, an artifact that represents every victory and every indignity that they shoveled onto each other. The record-keeping was immaculate. A page might look like this:

May 17, 2001:

Bob wins. Fuck You Randy. Fucking Cocksucker. No fuck you Bob, I won. No You didn’t Randy go fuck yourself. Get a fucking grip Bob you lost. Eat shit randy I won

This goes on and on. When my brother and I found this diary, immaculately preserved and kept in my dad’s safe, we were flabbergasted. Why? To what end do these two men keep these scores? Will there be an eventual winner? How can a winner ever be decided upon when each and every proclamation is vehemently contested by each participant? And the language: Bob was unable to write one sentence without repeated threats to my dad. A kind of mantra emerges after a close and repeated reading of the text: “I’ll slit your throat and throw you in the drink.”

I think “the drink” is a lake where Bob throws his victims.

2007: Bob no longer dates outlaw motorcycle women. He doesn’t live in the townhouses. He lives in a motel. His neighbour is not my dad. His neighbour is a man named “Bearkat”. One night Bearkat lit his own leg on fire with gasoline.

Bearkat didn’t want to go to the hospital. He just wanted to keep partying around the motel campfire, while his leg smoked and blistered and reeked of charred flesh. He was furious when the ambulance came.

Bob somehow met a young woman named Celeste. She was oddly not repulsed by his neighbor Bearkat, and she was not repulsed by Bob’s years of hard-partying, or his cackle or his homophobia, or the decades between them. She moved in with him.

Celeste was wanted by Crime-stoppers.

Bob was so in love! No more outlaw motorcycle magazines for him!

He wanted to shower her with gifts—but what gifts?

-Steak every night, even a steak occasionally for Bearkat, because the universe is good and celestial.

-Boxes and boxes of Budweiser, even the occasional box of Wildcat© beers for Bearkat, because the universe is good and celestial.

-A horse for Celeste, a beautiful steed…

Bob needed some cash.

He went to the bank. They held their nose, because Bearkat came with him and his leg still reeked of charred flesh. They said “But you live in a motel with Bearkat as your neighbor.”

So he asked my dad.

My dad said “Well, Bob, I’d love to lend you two thousand dollars to shower gifts and steaks and horses on Celeste, but actually I’m not even allowed to talk to you until Celeste is out of the picture, by edict of my wife Cheryl. Wait Bob: I’ve got a great fucking idea man! Turn Celeste into Crime-Stoppers and then you’ll have the two thousand dollars. Then me, you, and Bearkat can just…you know…spend that money on stuff…”

Bob threw Bearkat’s cell-phone out of the motel window. Bearkat spent the night with his wildcats taped to his belt scurrying around the bushes, like a beetle, looking for his cell-phone.

Bob went to Trans-Canada credit. He needed the money. Trans-Canada Credit gave Bob the money, but every week the loan went up 25 percent. Bob didn’t give a shit.

Bob bought some steaks and beers and they had a wonderful week of indulgence. He waited a week to buy the horse because he didn’t know how to buy a horse, and, more importantly, he wanted to stretch out this time of gift-giving. Just when Celeste’s mind was truly scrambled from a week of steaks and beers, he’d call Big Mikey, who has a car, and they could drive out to a farm or a stable or something that holds a horse, and he’ll show her the horse, and then he’ll propose to Celeste and then she’ll be his, and she can change her last name and then maybe Crime-Stoppers can fuck off.

So Bob called Big Mikey:

“Yeah sure, Bob! We can do that. In fact, Bob, I think you can buy a horse on the internet. They have local classifieds where people sell their horses.”

Bob had heard of “classifieds” but not the internet.

Mikey explained the internet to Bob, and Bob said it sounded like a bunch of “fucking cocksuckers”. Mikey protested: he is not a “fucking cocksucker”, and he goes on the internet sometimes.

Bob said that, in fact, he was a “fucking cocksucker”, and that the fact that Mikey was on this internet was proof positive that this internet is only for fucking cocksuckers.

Then he cackled.

There was a line of poor people behind Bob, outside of the Gorge corner store pay-phone. Bob couldn’t care less. Bob is pretty wiry and he is probably psycho in a fight. The people behind him waited in the rain for the payphone, and they listened to Bob laugh and argue with Mikey about how he is indeed a fucking cocksucker for a long stretch of time. There were mothers in line who needed to call their young sons and remind them to cook up some Mr. Noodles© because they had to work a double shift. There was a boyfriend who needed to apologize to his girlfriend. The rain intensified.

Bob settled down and stopped calling Mikey what he was calling him and he let Mikey boot up the internet. Mikey had a portable phone—not a cell-phone—and he could easily talk to Bob and scroll through the classifieds for used horses.

“Here’s a good one—it says ‘good horse, good spirit. Lots of fire in his belly.’ Kind of like Celeste eh?”

Big Mikey was smiling. He didn’t really like Celeste but he did like that Bob seemed a bit happier recently.

“I’d be happy to come pick you up and drive you out there Bob.”

Bob agreed that Big Mikey should do exactly that.

They bought the horse. They reeked of ancient beer. They borrowed a trailer and everyone coaxed the horse into the trailer. The horse looked upset—Mikey got the impression that the horse didn’t like Bob. Like it was depressed that Bob was its owner. Every time Bob called Mikey a fucking Cocksucker or threatened to slit Mikey’s throat and throw him into the drink, the horse seemed to shudder: like it was really depressed that Bob was its new owner.

They drove through the country: two friends. Even Bob admitted that the greens and the setting sun and the fields of grass and eggs and chickens were quite beautiful. Bob looked into his rear-view mirror. He looked at the trailer. He marveled at what he had done: borrowed a trailer: bought a horse: used the internet. It was awesome. He looked at the brown trailer in his rear-view mirror and he felt an enormous pride in his own capability, and a brotherly Platonic love for Mikey, who had been far more useful in the procurement of the horse than Bearkat could ever have been.

Just then the horse stuck its head out the window. It too wanted a taste of this new country air. It looked at the fields and it seemed happy. Bob was happy for it.

Then it saw Bob. It stared into the rear-view mirror. Its eyes narrowed.

It puked a bunch of carrots out into the ditch. It bared its teeth at Bob. Carrot hunks were wedged into its chompers. It shook its head viciously at Bob, letting its puke-covered tongue whip about in the wind. It was apocalyptic. Bob rolled up the window and looked straight ahead. He tried to think about Celeste. When he looked back again the horse was in its trailer.

The next day dawned, and Bob and Celeste had steak and eggs for breakfast, and they each drank three Budweisers waiting for Big Mikey to come and pick them up and drive them to the stables. They sat in lawn chairs outside, on the grassy strip where Bob and Rand and Mikey and Bearkat had their fires. Bearkat came out and joined them—he ate cereal and drank a Wildcat. Bearkat was really excited: he snorted like a horse and giggled, and Bob gave him a look like “you are one step away from going in the drink with your throat fucking slit Bearkat”, and Bearkat stopped his snorting.

Mikey pulled up. Celeste ran to the car and yelled “shotgun!”

Bearkat took that pronouncement literally and pulled a nail from underneath his lawn-chair and shot-gunned a beer.

Bob got in the back. Bearkat got in the other door. Bob was pissed but he couldn’t not invite Bearkat. The smell of Bearkat’s leg invaded the car immediately.

They screeched out of there—Mikey was trying to get some air moving through the windows. Celeste clapped her hands and yelled “Drive fast—speed turns me on!”

Bob had no idea what she was singing.

Bearkat’s phone rang. Bob grabbed the phone—it was always for him. It was probably my dad, wondering how it was going.

“Hey Randy you fucking cocksucker.”

“Oh, pardon? Um…Is this someone named Bob? Umm…did you just call me—“

“This is Bob. I thought you were something fucking else—I mean someone fucking else. Who the fuck is this?”

“Oh—sorry—it’s…”

There was a huge pause.

“I’m….from the stables. The stables where your horse is--was—the stables—oh, I am from the stables and there’s—something’s happened.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? We’re coming to the fucking stab—”Bob caught himself before he said stables.

“What the fuck is going on?”

Bob’s horse had…Bob’s horse had…I can barely even type it…

Bob’s horse had gone mad in the middle of the night and jumped its stall. It had jumped into another horse’s stall and chomped another horse to death with its murderous teeth. The other horse was murdered by Bob’s horse. This was a Macbeth-style-Universe-is-inverted kind of tragedy. Murder: By a horse: To a horse. This had never happened before. This was a first for the stables.

The stable was demanding that Bob pay for the other horse. He also had to pay for the damaged stable. He still hadn't really paid for the first horse. The murdering horse.

He chucked the cell-phone into a ditch, the same ditch on the same stretch of road where Bob’s murdering horse had puked its last meal. The cell-phone exploded. Celeste was still singing her rap song. Big Mikey was silent; he’d had a feeling that something really fucking weird and dark was going to occur.

Bearkat was silent. He had his eyes closed. He had made up his mind to go to the doctor finally. He’d finally smelt himself.

Frog Eyes in Moscow 1

2008-12-16T21:56:00.000-08:00

1. After our show in Moscow, we racked up an 800 euro vodka bill. So we felt pretty nice, you might say. After our show we drank and drank and reveled and we racked up this monumental tab. Delicious ice-cold vodka was brought to our table: whole crystal vases of precious sloshing vodka, sloshed into our joyous mouths, and plates of whole baked Rus fish with onions, and rinds of lemon, and the silver skin of the fish drizzled with olive oil, and perogies with dill.

In Russia the word Vodka is a slight diminutive of Voda, or water, and the drinking all felt very pure--as if the vodka had melted from a glacier and into some purified crystal decanter. I thought of water, and what water means to people, and I thought of water’s little brother, and what that means to people.

I wanted to go to a Georgian restaurant after this racking-up of Euros and drink yellow weirdness and eat li'l lamb off an ancient skewer. Our cosmopolitan Muscovite hosts disagreed. They surely did not want to go to a Georgian hole-in-the-wall and drink yellow liquid that slows your limbs and makes you fly around in a psychic-amber-dawn golden light. They turned their handsome Muscovite noses up at such a proposition--Muscovites, as a general over-simplification (meaning: cultural observation), have a kind of "U.S.S.R.-is-still-in-effect" snobbery towards the old satellites, and I think they possess a particular fear of the representatives of those post-glasnost countries that bolt for the West. I do have two incidences that corroborate this small claim, and I will get to them in due time.

Our hosts wanted to go to a western-style nightclub and drink tequila. I could see this desire expressed in their aura.

We bought dried fish in little yellow bags, and wine and beer and vodka, and we went back to our hotel rooms. We convinced our German booking agent to have a party in his room, but actually we convinced his girlfriend to host the party. He looked pretty sad about the whole affair. Astrid, his girlfriend, is a Bavarian and a Russian translator. She lives in Berlin but she used to live in Moscow.

Astrid is the only Bavarian I know, but I have been told that Bavarians often have this Manichean love of seriousness, made Manichean by a Bakhtin-Carnival style love of guzzing. Or guzzling. She was dressed in black, and smoked every second, and she blew the smoke out of her mouth like the smoke was an impudent child that she loved and owned. She also loved Kharms' Incidences and the lesser Bulgakov works and Bely's Petersburg, and knew lots of places in Moscow and she pissed off the brides of Mayakovsky but she didn’t care (I was of course mortified, but still so giddy to meet a bride of Mayakovsky).

Our hotel was large. It was opulent, and we were breathless virgins to that word and world of opulence. Each floor of the hotel had its own massive central gathering space, protected by sound-proof glass, with beautiful carpets and fireplaces and marble and red and gold and Hockney shit all over. I have no reference or analogy, so I can only think of these spaces like lobbies, but without a portal to the outside world. I thought: ‘We will just have a party in there’.

I love being in an elevator because it’s the only time I get to mosh. I have a personal pledge, to myself, to skank the shit out of all elevators, mostly because of this idea: the cables break from the moshing, and the post-tragedy examiners soberly pop in the security tape, and they expect to see a bunch of chicken-shit business men panicking, flailing in fear at the camera, but the footage only shows some stone-cold moshers skanking the shit out of that elevator. That security tape is, to me, the very logos of punk.

The elevator doors opened, and I stopped moshing into everyone, and I stopped singing "Holiday in Cambodia", and we looked into our pre-ordained party space. We saw that another party was already occurring. We saw a muscular man wearing jet black leather pants, smiling and singing dramatically and drinking juice out of a carton. When he drank, we saw his torso muscles ripple. He only had bald-dreads, every other hair was burned off his body. His dreads streamed in coils down his back, cascading dreadlocks that fell from the crest of his head. He wore a ketchup and mustard hot dog cable-knit undershirt, and it hung loosely off of his raw, rare bulging muscles. This shirt, coupled with the tight leather pants, produced an effect that was not unlike an exploding hydro plant falling into a panic-void. He looked like Conan on the catwalk. These were clearly theater people. We are still children, and these kinds of signifiers scare us off.

2. So we skipped the party place and moved to the room, kind of sad because everyone has partied in hotel rooms before and it usually ends poorly.

But luckily, on our way to Astrid's room, happy just to smoke cigs on the bed, and clog the sink with prawns, and chicken bones, and puke, we saw a beautiful sight--Latvian Helen Mirren, weaving towards us, slamming into the walls, swearing, laughing at her own comedies. Latvian Helen Mirren, drunk off her own beauty, her essence, drunk off her performance that night as Star Opera Singer at Moscow’s Biggest Opera House, drunk and weaving and laughing and singing Opera in the hallway, and with every swagger she was utterly bewitching us.

Mike Rak, our Bass player, dropped his beer and ran up to her, and he immediately and wisely adopted her sway and swagger. He was like "Allll Righhhhhtttt! Where are you going? That's right, I know where you are at! Come party with us, 'cuz that's where the party is really at!"

I thought, 'Wow, what a brazen move!'

Later, after touring with another Bass Player, I will recognize that all bass players are secretly sex-crazed, as a result of playing the bass. And when they have their liquor, this brazen-ness burns a forge of fire in their bellies and takes control of their actions, and they are able to speak sexily, they are able to verbalize the sexy language of the bass.

She might have slapped Mike, or scratched his eyes out, because she was shockingly beautiful. Her hair was like this field of wheat that a noble soldier sees after two months of traveling on a train, a field of wheat that he had once tilled when he was a boy, and now the sight of the wheat drains him of all of the horrors of the trench, a field of wheat swaying under a spring’s breath, a field of wheat that has grown even more handsome since his departure.

I looked into her sloshed eyes and I mouthed "Star". She truly was a star. She was 55 years old, and her laugh, if you can permit this metaphor, was a Bosendorfer twinkle. She held a beer in her noble hand, and she appraised Mike.

She “considered” Mike, though with her beauty she might have smote him a blow with her clarion voice, she might have smote him with only her eyes and struck him down as insignificant.

Her beauty was such that she could have drawn into her bed-chamber any one of Moscow's many chestnut-haired or coal-haired princes with only a glance or a lilt. There might be moats of anonymous Audis circling her hotel room, a whirling dervish of Putins crying out her name, crying for her love.

She laughed and shook her head and mouthed “no” with happy eyes, and she deaked around Mike, like Ariel on her way to a spirit party, and the sorcery of the sea poured into the hallway and we felt like we should have put wax in our ears but someone had their eyes closed or something and managed to drag us fireman style into the hotel room and away from the option of following the star immediately to her party.

The hotel room was pretty wild. Ryan was drinking lots of stuff, like beers from cans and raw warm vodka from a bottle with Prince Myshkin on the label. People were just guzzling wildly and talking about the brides of Mayakovsky and having other conversations. No one noticed Mike disappear. We noticed him come back though. He’d gone to the party. He’d followed the star.

Astrid was pissed—it could have been dangerous! But Mike swore that they were theater people, but were singing, or, in other words: “opera people.” Astrid was a bit protective, and our other host Inna, a true Muscovite, was begging us not to go to the party. She feared something nameless. But we had seen the star.

3. When we walked into the party space the excited chatter of the Latvian National Opera troupe hung up, and all eyes went right to the star. After a minute of squinting, she remembered Mike from the hallway--that is, she remembered meeting him twenty minutes prior to this show down, and she greeted us and hugged Mike and squeezed him. We sat down on some leather couches, all huddled together of course, but Mike was led into the Star’s inner circle. This circle of power was quite discernable—and those on the outside of the circle snarled and stink-eyed us, and this group of emigrants and exiles from the circle were definitely led by the 2^nd Star, a young woman who was dressed like Snoop Doggy Dogg.

She really was dressed exactly like how I see Snoop whenever I close my eyes and think of Snoop: those long, skinny cornrows, a big loose blue jersey, some tear-away pants and brilliant white sneakers, cool cat slouched shoulders and the knowing of one’s own infinite coolness. She sullenly smoked and eyed us with utter contempt. Utter contempt.

Her troops assembled around her—I thought of just after World War 2, when the Russians and the Americans were viewing each other with a suspicious hatred, and then some hapless British officer shows up with a gin gimlet thinking that it’s time the allies just get along. Hapless fools, we were, and we had stepped into the darkness outside of the circle, where the 2^nd star’s burning hatred for the 1^st star choked the air. She just smoked, and scowled, but in her eyes smoked all of the fury of a 2^nd star.

Inside the circle, everything was light and happiness: I saw the Star, holding court and laughing and drinking fine champagne, I saw the man with the leather pants and the cable-knit sweater, and a rosy-cheeked stage manager who smelled like Mel’s mom, and by that I mean she smelled nice, and there was, in this circle, another half-dozen hangers on and bit players.

Our host Inna was the most disturbed—the Latvians sensed immediately that one of the hated Muscovites had crashed their party, and though they had just played three wildly acclaimed sold-out shows at the Moscow Opera-house, the old rivalries and hatreds of Moscow were such that not even an infinite string of adored performances in their Rome could have softened this hatred. They were all burning a wicked hatred towards her.

4. I hate strife, unless I am trying to create that strife. I hate other people’s strife, and I always want to mitigate this strife. If I have to, I will create a situation that unites all of the warring parties for a short time, by acting in such a way to unite these parties.

So I stood up, and I explained to both circles of the Latvian National Opera that we too are musicians, and that it is a kind of holy coincidence that in all of Moscow two visiting troupes should happen upon each other, and what greatness lies in this coincidence, and so on and so forth. And then I planned to give a tribute. But I had forgotten, while I was planning this diversion, to decide who to tribute: Turgenev and Farley Mowat? Should I make a toast to Glenn Gould and Rachmaninoff? I just couldn’t think of anyone who we would all know and respect.

I was saying things like “It’s truly a blessing that two artistic troupes [I actually used that word] are here, unified by that most invisible art”, every fucking terrible word damning me more in their eyes, uniting them in outright disdain for this overweight, red-faced Scottish British guy with shark eyes holding his vodka glass in the air, as if he was delivering his acceptance speech for the Scotiabank poetry award (this is how crappy Canada is—it lets Scotiabank give out awards for poetry), as if I was speaking to a crowd of friendly but bored Torontonians and not hostile Opera singers who hated me and hated Inna and hated Moscow and hated each other.

I sensed that my plan was working! Star was looking at me like I was a pile of puke, and so was corn-rowed 2^nd star! I became emboldened to sow these two disparate forces together:

“I’d like to make a toast, a tribute to the great musicians of our traditions! So here’s to Metallica and Shostakovich!” and to seal the deal of unified hatred, I guzzed my entire drink like a frat-house pig, great rivers of Vodka pouring down my ruddy dimples and down my neck. No one toasted with me, but I think one of the stage-hands started air-guitaring “Master of Puppets.”

After that the world started growing dim and fractured and contentious. Star looked up at Mike and asked what nationality he was. He proudly proclaimed that he was 100 percent Ukrainian, and for the xenophobic Star his hands, hands that were brazenly rubbing her shoulders and slowly moving down her chest, morphed into rotten fishes. She looked positively disgusted that this Ukrainian was giving her a sensual massage in front of her whole company. She seemed on the verge of slapping him, but then Mike really poured his magic into his bass fingers, and she floated back into the whirlpool of goodness and she started singing. This was nice, very nice, incredibly nice, shockingly beautiful, she was singing about The Volga, that steaming, boiling, rolling Volga that Paustovsky wrote about, that white frothing Volga of my dreams, she was singing and I was dancing and she was up on the table singing to her Ukrainian liege and I was spilling my new drink and dancing and then the last thing I remember was being back in the hotel room, and Astrid was talking about Faust, and I was trying to remember one thing about Faust, the book, and the one thing I could remember at the time was a cottage’s light and the word “peace”.

Then our booking agent said something about Faust, and Astrid turned to him and snarled the following words at him:

“Christian, you have only read the first six hundred pages of Faust. Until you finish Faust, I not only order you not only to never ever speak again about Faust, but you are not even allowed to ever speak again about other books, and furthermore, you are not allowed to speak again for the rest of the night, so pull the covers over your head, and go to fucking sleep!”

Then I crawled down the hallway and into bed. Mel was moaning, poisoned from Vodka, and she was muttering in her haze “She smelled like my mom…”

When I closed my eyes I saw the peace of a cottage’s light.

5 reasons to persevere.

2008-12-13T19:21:00.000-08:00

It's not Snakes on a Plane 2, because Val Kilmer is not into Jar-Jar Binks and Tarantino--he's into Oliver Stone, which is a way of saying that Val's involvement precludes the possibility of The Steam Experiment becoming another exercise in Irony.

Val's passion and commitment to Art and Politics destroys Irony.

My good friend Tony took a History class at University--he didn't know why he didn't like the professor, until he went to his office, and he saw a lovingly placed photo of Margaret Thatcher framed and hung over the professor's typewriter. Under the photograph read a caption, a quote from Margaret.

It read: "I will destroy Socialism."

Val's caption might read "I will destroy Irony--even if I destroy myself in the process."

By the way: December 2008 is Val Kilmer month:

1. He's running for Governor in New Mexico (thanks to Bejar for this tip)
2. He's starring in a remake of Bad Lieutenant, directed by Herzog, who has never seen the original.
3. The Steam Experiment
4. Val starred in a film entitled The Doors, directed by Oliver Stone. The Doors is Kilmer's seminal performance. Wall Street is Stone's seminal film. Stone is making a sequel to Wall Street, entitled Money Never Sleeps.
5. I basically look like him.

The Steam Experiment, 2009

2008-12-13T11:12:00.000-08:00

"Val Kilmer stars as a former professor who concocts a brutal experiment in order to get the word out on the effects of global warming. By trapping six people in an urban Turkish bathhouse, he vows to overheat his hostages unless his global-warming hypothesis is published on the front page of his local paper."

2008-11-28T20:15:00.001-08:00

Two years has passed since I submitted this article at the request of a popular cyber-magazine, and I am coming to recognize that the article has fallen through the cyber-cracks.
I am sorry about the lack of mp3, but I don't know how to do that yet.

Daddy's Hands-

http://popsheep.com/2006/11/daddys-hands.html (read the words and listen to at least one of the songs from each period)
http://www.myspace.com/daddy39shands

Dave Wenger was the voice and brain of this band. He was hit by a car in
November of 2006. He was hyper-intelligent and in his various bands he made amazing
music. Daddy's Hands was his best band. He was at times maybe misanthropic, and at times maybe a beast, but his lover and band-mate Emily told me once that "misanthropes are like that" because they are "actually idealistic and the world repeatedly betrays them."

She was talking about Bill Murray.

When Emily died, the band dissolved for a time, or at least stopped being a cohesive
unit, and though I was nowhere near Dave, I think it is fair to say that things went really bad for him.

The band recovered and made a new record.

I didn't like their new record at first, but maybe I had been used to living in a world where Wenger was a ghost, and a memory, or some such vain shit. Now I think that the record declared some great ummm "return to form". By this I mean that I always feared the shadow.

When I think of Dave I sometimes think of this archetypal and doomed
officer from a World War II novel. A sensitive alcoholic, a "lost soul":
Fitzgerald in an elegant gin trench. Of Time and the River covered in cigarette butts. Larry Darrell, Maugham's protagonist in The Razor's Edge. A role that Bill Murray starred in. Dave could be funny, even Stripes or Ghostbusters funny, but mostly he had this focused and searching melancholy that cannot in our age be dispelled by a trip to India. That door is sealed shut.

I am being romantic. The saddest part about Hamlet is not that everyone
dies. It's that everyone dies and Horatio keeps sailing on.
Great drums. Great great great towering songs. I love them.

Elyse Weinberg- Houses/If Death Don't Overtake Me

It is that immutably and ever-pressing point of "sailing on" that warms me to
Elyse's record. I hear her tromping around in a mytho-poetic lotus-hazed
Los Angeles. Her band sounds warm, and nice, but also "laced" or "dosed"
by an undefined peril--this peril is of course acid. And there is humour in her rasp, an almost Falstaffian guffaw at the mutability of things.

She lives in Ashland, Oregon. I think they have a big Shakespeare festival there. I wonder what she thinks when Ophelia walks on the stage.

The universe would be too tipped in my favour to imagine her playing Ophelia in that tender and yet tough shit-kicked rasp.

Fela Kuti and Ginger Baker-Let's Start

Intermission from the bummer times, and hear the "Riders on the
Storm" Rhodes break. Zeus is always mixing those jars.
I think this was recorded live. The precision and dexterity of the playing demands a military-like ranking system for the term "Musician": (Karen Dalton: Admiral. Fela Kuti: General. Mercer: Soup Cook).

Exuma- Dambala

I have tried for hours to write about this song. I have tried to write
about Dante and the architectonics of our spiritual universe. I have
tried the Caliban angle and what Shakespeare might have thought if he
heard this. And the jingles and the coral-shanties of Ariel. And crazy
Prospero. And slavers and slaves. And even his friend Ritchie Havens.
I have tried to write about a historical character named Plato the
Wizard, a Jamaican practitioner of Obeah (hear also "Obeah Woman", and remember
that Nina Simone covered both of these tunes).

I have tried to write about the impossibility of putting things into paragraphs.
Even that cop-out of mine crumpled and withered. It is a beautiful song.
One true story though, as read on the internet: When Plato the Wizard was
caught and executed (due to his one weakness: Rum), a horrendous
Hurricane and Earthquake ravaged the West Indies in a fashion that reminds me of
Tolkien's destruction of the island state of Numenor. The sea, from all
accounts, literally swallowed up the town where Plato was executed...

Bill Fay- I Hear You Calling

Bill Fay sings about Jesus. A person thinks, upon looking at the cover
of Time of the Last Persecution, that Bill himself has a full-blown case of something that psychologists and non-psychologists call a "Jesus complex".

I think he has a "Hamlet-if-Hamlet-had-lived" complex, which is to say
that you cannot pretend to be crazy or broken, and not end up at least
partially crazy or broken at the end of the act. Which is to suggest
that, in these songs, I hear an actor acting out the true and unfolding tragedy
of his own life.

kandelakiv.com

2008-11-26T14:32:00.000-08:00

-For those who love paint: kandelakiv.com
-This portal represents the visual art of Vladimir Kandelaki, the great Georgian painter. His painting enriches the cover of Skin of Evil.
-He collects ancient swords. I know his daughter. Her name is Marika.
-I think people might confuse the woman in this image with the woman at the centre of the songs on Skin of Evil. I think this is wrong, as the woman in the painting is actually a portrait of Marika's mother, and she is a real person who has nothing to do with anything that I have ever sung about.
- I tend to be friends with the children of artists: Marika is rare as a child of an artist, because she does not hate art. In fact, she is a great painter herself.
-Artists are like fucking Kronos with their children.

-I think my albums always get mis-represented. Skin of Evil is not so much about 'Donna', as it is about my own attempt to just stick to something, and not veer off into the nebulous domains of 'fractured social commentary.' I think that in this sense Skin of Evil is a moderate success.

-I used to love paintings. I loved painting, the verb, and I loved to look at paintings. Or, at least, I loved acting in a play where a man loves to see paintings. I loved to think that I was spending some time enriching myself. Working on myself. Making my spirit better.
-Then I willed myself to stop loving it. I asked: what's so deep about a bunch of lines and colors? That stuff doesn't even move.
-I fell out of love with painting. It was easy. I just tried to convince myself that painting is boring. Tried that on, as one tries on a weird pair of pants.

-I met a few people with ferocious and sympathetic minds. During a small synchronetic* period they all admitted it:
-'I've never ever been moved by a painting!'
-What courage, to admit such a thing!
-These confessions made me wonder if I was really moved by a bunch of paint, by moving a bunch of paint, or if I was just playing at being moved. And, I asked, what is so central about being moved?
-Is it a virtue? Does it allow me to see the hues of the world more clearly? Sleep sounder?
-Dispense Justice?
-'Not empirically answerable,' I responded. Empiricism is the enemy you hate until it departs this Earth. And that which killed it?
You hate that thing one thousand times more...

-And some of these artists: Snakes! Vipers! They'd smother a baby for a handjob!

-And: the act of pondering other people's confessions has been stupidly problematic since I think Elsinore, 1324.
-So just as a test, I willed this love of paint out of myself. Flushed that shit for good.
-oooohhhhhhh, it worked, fuck...

-I can't recall ever being moved while actually painting. I can only recall a wonderful absence, a silence, a hollowing out.

-I said, 'I know what's clever. And what is important in that world of Art. And what people like to talk about. But a ziggy cartoon is 'clever' (?) (?) (?) (I actually remember thinking this)'
-It's a bit scary, and a bit liberating, this experience. If I can will myself to pull down the blinds against one form, then why not all forms? Can I will myself into stone?
-Could I shave my eyebrows and drop out of this world?

-Then can I also let that love of the WORD, and the words, drip out of me?
-Yes! Of course!
-It's always falling out of me, and I am always blindly crawling around, stumbling in its shards and rolling in its crumbs, re-devouring what comes back into my mouth.

-I'm practiced at sucking that shit back up into me...
-Noo-noo, that sucking thing...
-Precious flickering flame to be cupped and held in the most interior zone of hand...

-And if the line, and the smudge, and the fucking WORD can drain out of me, then why not music?
-What is so holy and pure about music? Stupid sputters and rattles. The sound of a dirty laundry cart with a whobbly wheel squeaking on a waxed hospital floor. Pissy cocks. Soft minds. Forks in cellos, shiny scarfs, hockey card-collectors, and boredom. So pathetic: so far from serious and so begging to be taken serious!
-Begging! And so in love with money!
-We mustn't judge though: Bolano says even poets are always dazzled by money.

-Who judges the meek?

-Lastly: The inverse of this act is liberating. Because if I can will myself into the discarding of one thing, then I can will myself into embracing one thing, and the fact that it can be lost, can so easily be lost, makes me cling. Or nurture. Hold tight to it, brother Self!

-I think I should love painting again. I am virtually ignorant of the thing. This is one benefit of being so 'short term' about everything; every few years your shit becomes tabula rasa.

-I should love painting again as I love music--for its frivolity, its play, its funniness, and its sorcerous power!

-I thank Vladimir for his paintings, though I have never met him, and I very much doubt he will ever read this, as he is off painting one thousand tiny Lenins into lightbulbs, or collecting ancient swords, and not slobbering over his own google alerts.
-I thank him, because the paintings move me, even though I don't know if I am playing at being moved or actually being moved. So please, if you love painting, go to the website.