Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Loose meats!


This is Stab Pyramid's postal brethren
Upon opening the package that contained my copy of Sean Kilpatrick’s fuckscapes (Blue Square Press, 2011), I discovered a much smaller nugget of unbridled poetical prose in a handbound black Moleskine-like cover, numbered _ of 42. Stab Pyramid by Sean Kilpatrick & Blake Butler is a treat, if you like treats that taste like “chocolate swastika-kissed anvils, seats grafted fat with toddler head all pushed from me” or “the paling below raked clit.” Grizzled domesticity championed by a father figure who delights in goring baby-skin and “sucking the pulp out of a picture of the glitched.” The mother only implores us to “stop acting like my pussy is an ambulance for the world.” And, yeah. This little fleshy gulp of sin and topical-brilliance-in-Tourettic-OCD-language-expulsions-slash-murders makes for an excellent prelude and tremor-smeared companion to the similarly themed fuckspaces, perhaps one of the fuckiest. As disjointed as they are freaky, these impure exaggerations ream me the burnt cornea treatment I’ll be unable to shake, even if I wanted to: “I slept in a newspaper wide enough to crown my wave and considered a microphone shitting sons from the knotted tunnel of a senator’s hysterectomy.” Thanks fellas.  

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

but I don't want brain damage


The Flaming Lips have always been a band that eschews conventionality and categorization. From the group’s quirky, acid-punk indie releases in the 80s to its transition from guitar-heavy alternafunk to sonically ambitious trippy studio syphonika in the 90s and 2000s, the vibe has remained as consistently unpredictable as it has stayed awesome. That the Lips are still, after three decades, putting out a steady stream of innovative work and touring relentlessly is not as noteworthy as the fact that they’ve put out more music in the last 12 months than anybody. That’s right, in terms of sheer hours of music (probably more than 35) they are the most prolific. This kind of output is ridiculous, but the way its been released is innovative on an insane level, even for a band that features duct-taped spaceships, human balloons, 20-foot-tall digital vaginas-slash-doors and three-feet-long synthetic hands as part of its standard stage act.

A vague January2011 promise of one song per month exploded into a constantly churning neo-psychedelic machine, as, starting in March, the Lips released, in monthly succession: the EP “Flaming Lips 2011: The Flaming Lips with Neon Indian”; the "Gummy Song Skull" EP, a seven pound skull made of gummy bear material with a gummy brain-slash-flashdrive; the EP "The Flaming Lips with Prefuse 73”; a live-in-studio recording of the band's 1999 album "The Soft Bulletin" on a flashdrive embedded in a marijuana-flavored brain inside a strawberry flavored gummy skull (as well as a best-of compilation entitled "Everyone You Know Someday Will Die" put together by drummer Kliph Scurlock); the "Gummy Song Fetus" EP, which consists of three songs on a flashdrive embedded in a bubblegum-flavored fetus made of gummy bear material; "The Flaming Lips with Lightning Bolt", a collaborative EP with experimental rock group Lightning Bolt; a six hour-long song entitled "6 Hour Song (Found a Star on the Ground” packaged with two other songs and released with a set of spinning discs with animations on them; a 24-hour song entitled "7 Skies H3" made available for purchase as a hard drive encased in an actual human skull; and a 12" EP collaboration with Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band.


Yes, they recorded a 24-hour song.  And novelty is great. Novelty is as American as Oklahoma. Gummy skulls and spinning discs are super rad. They are. But for those of us who would rather surf YouTube for free shit than purchase a $5,000 skull-slash-USB cable, we’re going to be more concerned with how the actual music sounds than how it’s packaged. And how does it sound? Is it even possible to succinctly and coherently analyze, in a single review, hour s of music made with several (vastly aesthetically different) collaborators over dozens of recording sessions in a variety of lengths and formats (live vs studio)? Yes it is, in four words: Mindfuckingly brutish yet sextacular. 


Actually it’s impossible, mostly because I’m lazy. But also because I don’t have time to imbibe all the shrooms necessary to listen to a 24, or even a 6-hour song in its entirety. I will say, though, for the casual listener who thinks “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” is cute or who finds “She Don’t Use Jelly” catchy, this is a post-Embryonic Flaming Lips that is darker, much more experimental, mostly devoid of intelligible lyrics, and only completely accessible to those with a proclivity for consuming multiple narcotics within a short time frame, or simultaneously. This is music for those who would rather tackle Pynchon than James Patterson. A slightly less snobby way of saying that this is conceptual art. And seriously, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Lips’ music has sort of mimicked the trajectory of the world at large for the last dozen or so years. From the pre-dot-com triumphant fanfare of The Soft Bulletin, to At War With the Mystics’ cable-friendly garbage spewed at a time (2006) of cheaply made foreign goods and a deceptively surging economy, to Embryonic’s crunchingly dark experimental dirge in 2009, to the seizure-inducing, haunting, eardrum-molesting maelstrom that is 2011. As if to say, “Shit is getting crazy, kids, we know, we’ll be there to hold your hand and guide you through the sins of your past and the mango-colored bliss that your future can be, if you’ll only trust us.” Abstract art was born from social and political turmoil. We need a break from straight-lines and convention, the Drudge Report blinking on the Subway-ride Kindle. An escape to the rapidly deteriorating fuzzy zones in our headspace. We must defeat the robots (hint: they hate gummy skulls).

Below are links to some of the 2011 tunes that may not require hallucinogens to be enjoyed by the average young professional, and a couple for which you might want to light up:


A constant stream of the 24-hour song is here.

Monday, January 2, 2012

welcome to the end times


Had a couple reviews come out last month -- J.A. Tyler's "A Shiny, Unused Heart" in The Brooklyn Rail and George Williams' "Gardens of Earthly Delights" in Prick of the Spindle. Both of these guys are in my top 8 books of 2011, so check 'em out, now. Actually, now that I mention it, I should just share my top 8 books of 2011. Why keep you anxiously salivating? And why 8? It was my number in baseball and water polo and I'm too lazy to think of 10. Boom. 

1. Look! Look! Feathers by Mike Young (Word Riot)
2. A Shiny, Unused Heart by J.A. Tyler (Black Coffee Press)
3. The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories by Don DeLillo (Scribner)
4. Gardens of Earthly Delight: Stories by George Williams (Raw Dog Screaming Press)
5. The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals by Rae Bryant (Patasola Press)
6. Us by Michael Kimball (Tyrant Books)
7. The Blue Tower: Poems by Tomaz Salamun (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
8. Animals by Janey Smith (plain wrap press)

Also, I was going to announce to the five people that read this sporadic attempt at bloggery that I would be taking a more or less complete hiatus from posting for the next several months because of my involvement in two top-secret projects. However, one of them, a movie-related thing, has fallen through as those things tend to do. So my list of covert projects has been reduced to one, a kind of online literary monstrosity, a collaboration with novelist John Reed that is so totally sweet that the coolest hipsters are already checking it out before it exists. So needless to say, I will still be posting, probably with alarming frequency. I'm sorry. 2012 is the time to step one's proverbial game up (and to get pumped for Ridley Scott's ancient aliens-influenced Prometheus). Let's do it.