Ey, check it. The digitization of the inner worlds of one man's mind begins today; phase 1, a new vinyl rip e'eryday till the collection is readily available for all interested parties. (Blood on the Tracks, all zipped up for yer pleasure.
Act 1, part 1; Blood on the Tracks.
You may or may not have ever fornicated with BOTT as yer soundtrack; whether inadvertent or explicit, this is one of the oddest albums to fuck someone to. As far as 'divorce' themed works go, few tracks howl quite like "Idiot Wind", just as few can offer a kind of vertiginous nostalgia that comes from unwrapping "Tangled up in Blue". It's best to form your own opinion on such things though, so happy hunting, and stay posted for future postings.
Frank, we have a problem on this street. This used to be a good neighborhood, you see. Something has changed, I don't feel safe anymore. I thought people valued things like family and hard work, but I look around, and all I see are fucking babies everywhere, and nobody taking the fuck care of 'em. Not a one! Not a fucking one! We start crying out about this and that and this and that. The worst part, is that I see myself amongst them, more and more; the wide-eyed, easily scared type, like deer in the fucking headlights Frank! So, I give every one of 'em dopplegangers a greek nickname, or epithet, call it what you will. One time comes running this one girl "Dara, the Innocuous", I swear she was misshapen in a way that made her look like a faucet.
There is a light drizzle that persists, punishingly so this December 26th, outside my parent's house in the outskirts of Princeton Boro. Every good blogger has got to write from mom and pop's place. The whizzing current of emotion and inertia that is running through my brain as each moment ticks by could be termed, "unbearable", by those who don't enjoy things like the tea cups at whatever local amusement park you choose to advertise by saying thurr name out loud. Days like this bring me back to a beautiful book that was found at a local second-hand book shop on the outskirts of Nassau St., "Azul" by Ruben Darío. The opening of this text, itself a series of short stories and poems, is an open letter from Victor Hugo in which he declares (I'm paraphrasing/poorly translating) "all art is blues". Extrapolate how you will, fine reader, but Darío has no problem confirming such grandiose claims within the confines of his text. The first story begins with weather not unlike the conditions I currently face today, but, the author tells us, far, far away in a distant land there is a great kingdom full of riches, all the greatest material wealth concentrated in the hands of a single ruler. He meets a poor poet who scoffs at such a thing, thus perplexing the ruler whose entire life has been predicated on this pursuit of devouring all that came within his grasp. It is slowly, beautifully made clear to this man of material goods that the poet's riches cannot be seen, for they lie inside his mind.
Blues is a word that has been run through the meat grinder of American genrefication, thus making it a kind of fiction. Lazy art fans will mention Pablo Picasso's "Blue Period" as a time of great melancholy, when the painter was struggling to reconcile his passion, his talent with the world he found himself in. Wolf Parade's Dan Boeckner quipped, "I'm not in love with the modern world," touché; it is this feeling of lovelessness, My Bloody Valentine may have gotten it too, that is at the core of a single often-highlighted aspect of the derivative motif we call Blues. By trying to distill the essence of blues in a series of archetypes, not unlike what the folks over at Pandora internet radio are trying to accomplish with their musical genome project, we are left with nothing more than well intentioned pastiche. Is this the great sadness, then? The music that came from a place of such radically accepted oppression by those who gained from it (I'll call it racial slavery), slowly, but surely became embraced by the progeny of its detractors. This is why gawker folks can write their vitriolic posts about movies like Avatar and the Last Samurai, that still place an emphasis on white superiority. Whatever the fuck blues was, we'll never really know. Some of the all-time greats were blind, this does not surprise me. In the sense that the more you read about it, the more you codify it, the less real it becomes.
Quit cognitive checklist: -Pathetically broke as fuck? yeah. -Masturbating excessively in the form of a blog? MMhm. -Writing songs? Not quite like this one.
You can't fight the powers of the mainstream; and hell, who in their right mind would, except for the idiot who wants to hold the reins on that power game. The monkeys who assume the three positions of pious action (see NO evil, hear NO evil, speak NO evil) are decidedly more on point in their negation of such things than I had ever considered until RIGHT NOW. Update your idols, and you can make it all the way to pitchfork. Kill your idols? Sit and wait for the angry mob to come storm the castle of yer mind. Who wants to piss in the wind? Who wants to sit on the breezy hillside and get someone else's urine in your mouth as you go in to kiss the one you've known you've always loved? Who doesn't love Robert Kelly?
So, there's just no need to keep crying myself to sleep, no matter what I wake up bleary eyed.
Between David Brooks and Karl Rove, what's an independent to do in this decaying political landscape of ours here in the Ol' United States of America? If you spend all day watching cable news networks, the push-pull policy dichotomy has never seemed so strong between Asses and Elephants. Disillusioned youngsters are content to get their news on comedy programs, because, frankly, what news isn't second or even third hand these days? Maybe, then, it's high time to get far away from these current boondoggling cum-farts and contemplate the dilemma of another time, another place, another day...Consider the West End of Chicago in developing times; a major selling point of the city was that watching the prairie grass was like seeing an ocean of greenish hues as the wind swept over it all. A similar notion was alive in the southern neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where the vertiginous rush of the San Telmo marketplace gave way to the Pampas, the grassy plain that was the life giving source for the bustling masses huddled in to such close quarters. In Buenos Aires, every year finds 'La Rural', a national 4H fair, popping off in all its splendor. 5 convention center buildings filled to the brim with booths of every possible facet of agriculture. Ingrained in the products and services offered are relevant tales of the places they come from. Swirling all around are the proud textiles of the Andes, the luxuriant warmth of Patagonian fur, 'Swiss' chocolate from Bariloche, enough Mendozan wine to make Caligula blush...
All the pomp and circumstance of the fair overlooks the harsh reality of rural life in Argentina. On a trip out to the Massalines Particulares factory, just outside the city limits, the end of the urban highway was punctuated (!) by the squalor of the completely rural outlying region; anorexic horses and a beleaguered looking group of individuals who didn't seem much better fed then their equestrian friend. Upon arriving at the factory (where they produce every possible Phillip Morris brand cigarette), my host, Guillermina, escorted me to a room where more than a dozen employees were comfortably seated, snacking on sandwiches and coffee. I asked them, "why do you want to improve your English language skills?" Most believed that it would enable them to rise higher in the company ladder, one assembly-line worker made it clear that he simply wanted to enjoy future vacations more. Fast forward to a cab ride through the microcentro, business district, where I ask a cab driver what he thought of then current-president Kirchner; "aunque está enomarado por mucha gente, si preguntes los del campo iban a decirte el contrario"(yes he is beloved, but those outside of the city have a different tale to tell.) At that moment it became clearer to me that the disconnect between the population who consumed and the population who produced had grown wider amongst these people. 'La Rural' served as a mechanism for the rich to trumpet the glory of their financial superiority; tickets were not cheap. The real workers were busy striking and shutting down highways in Córdoba over an executive decision to halt the exportation of beef. That same disconnect is ever so real here in the US of A. I had a chat with a bilingual worker for the Baltimore Health Department who noted that her Italian family's conservative worldview could be tolerated in the sense that, 'just lived differently from us, they had to make their own food...' upon which point I had to cut her off, invoking Dionysus, to wonder just how she had come to that conclusion.(what does MF DOOM have to say about this?). I questioned her belief that we don't have to work for our food like our grandparents did, as we chewed on three day old baby carrots, chopped and chilling in a plastic container. She smiled, seeing my blatant hypocrisy in action, and shrugged it off, moving on to tell me that it really sucked to not be able to smoke weed with the fear of failing a mandatory drug screening before she could begin working.
If you do the math there were 2,460 games played in the NBA last season by all 30 teams. I bore witness to nay a single live broadcast of any of them. If all life is suffering, for all life is craving, then it seems that I was truly living in the interim period where a lack of broadband internet in the home and no TV led to the situation of reading box scores like a horoscope. The highlight of my basketball viewership while in buttfuck, Andalucía was watching former NBA rotation/Stanford Cardinal Curtis Borchardt flush a few wide open dunks with authority, before leaving with a sprained right wrist. This led to a lot of speculative imagination as to the boyish reverie of watching a game with other fans, as well as trying to figure out the keystone to each team's bench players. Sitting and watching the Cavs shut down Dwight Howard was not particularly riveting, with dinosaurs roaming the Amway Arena lanes, there was not a single highlight play, yet I find myself smiling like a child.
It would be too easy to say that I want nothing to do with all the assclowns who populated those high school halls, whose memories are fading faster with each and every breath, but come ON, I WAS one of those assclowns.
So, for one thing, John McCarthy makes the movies.
For those who didn't watch the US Open at Flushing Meadows in 2000, Marat Safin might not be the most recognizable name. The tall, sinewy Russian has a power game few can match, and a proclivity for meltdowns on par with the most hilarious Darko Milicic tantrums.
I couldn't help but wonder today if I wasn't the luckiest lazybones in the greater Wicomico county area. Farmwork was rewarded with a gift; An EMU Vintage Keys 61.
Also, some delicious food got made:
Green deliciousness
Steamed Kale, Hon Tsai Tai, Toasted Almonds, Pine Nuts, and balsamic vinegar
Orange deliciousness
Roasted turnips, mashed sweet potatoes, curried cauliflower, sauteed onions with melted 3 cheese blend baked to golden brown
In his treatise, "On Nature and Man", Henry David Thoreau spells out in clean, radiant language the wonderful opportunity each and every one of us has to get right. Suicide is sad cop out for any sentient being. That said, it is something I recommend for Glenn Beck. Check out this shit; NYT book section
“He’s our Oprah,” said Brad Thor, a writer of political thrillers who has appeared on Mr. Beck’s radio and television programs several times. “God love him, we’re very fortunate.”
It's entirely unsurprising that all the great expectations of getting a good job on the basis of going to a good school have been tempered by the reality that mediocrity begets more of the same frustration. Lately, the only way to get anything done has been to be busy, and to think how to stay that way. It seems, I could be wrong, that being a bum is forgivable if one is industrious in his/her hobo lifestyle; if you need money to eat, and you're a bum, work on a farm.
According to a girl I would very much like to sleep with, getting a rabies shot is not fun. After touching her pet dog which had come in contact with a rabid raccoon, the latest and greatest masturbatory fodder of my life was coerced in to multiple doctor's visits. The kicker is that it was the local municipality that came to that conclusion, not herself, nor her family. Now, we have the so fucking stupid it's cute moment where Emanuel "Rahm" Ginobli swats a living being in to oblivion in an NBA arena; looks like he needs them shots too.
The fact that he was a despot and dictator cannot be denied. It was his cruelty and sadistic treatment of Muslims that makes him stand out as one of the worst enemies of Allah. The above was only what was reported and recorded by mostly Western observers. The extent of what actually went on in the new Turkey by the direct policy of Kamal, was heinous to say the least. He was an enemy of Allah (swt) to the core.
No godly man, Dictator Kemal considers that there is no reason why Turks should not call Allah by his Turkish name Tanri. There is no reason except centuries of tradition, no reason except that Turkish imams (priests) all know the Koran by heart in Arabic while few if any have memorized it in Turkish. Strict to the point of cruelty last week was Dictator Kemal's decree that muezzins, calling the faithful to prayer from the top of Turkey's minarets, must shout not the hallowed "Allah Akbar!" (Arabic for "God is Great!") but the unfamiliar words "Tanri Uludur!" which mean the same thing in Turkish.
Here is a quotation from Joachim Prinz's "The Secret Jews", page 122:
" ... The revolt of the Young Turks in 1908 against the authoritarian regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid began among the intellectuals of Salonika. It was from there that the demand for a constitutional regime originated. Among the leaders of the revolution which resulted in a more modern government in Turkey were Djavid Bey and Mustafa Kemal. Both were ardent "doenmehs". Djavid Bey became minister of finance; Mustafa Kemal became the leader of the new regime and he adopted the name of "Ataturk". His opponents tried to use his "doenmeh" background to unseat him, but without success. Too many of the Young Turks in the newly formed revolutionary Cabinet prayed to Allah, but had as their real prophet Shabtai Zvi, the Messiah of Smyrna."
