The Only Thing(s) to Fear

There's a review of Monkeytown in The Brooklyn Rail this month. Thanks to Stephen Cicerelli for his kind words. Also, thanks to the Rail.

for a joke to continue to be a real joke it requires an audience that at least sort of gets the punch line

Last Girlfriend, is up at Vol. 1 Brooklyn as part of their Sunday Stories series.

PTSD Is So 2005

Oprah agreed on a fair way to decide initiation, which involves two closed fists and pretending your grandmother’s in the room. The compromise proved to be a big ratings boost in most major markets (except, of course, in Kandahar) and was rated as favorable by almost every viable demographic besides panty-sniffing Japanese stock brokers vacationing in Haiti and bomb-sniffing dogs out on recon.

Honestly, I think it made most people feel a little better about the future: vapid suit-herders could still meditate under clouds of dharma-jizz in obese central-air pumping boxes, highways would still shimmer in the hot afternoons and block complete glimpses of fields, bizarre tension vibes and unprovoked assaults would still be the two most sought-after traits of every washed-up child actor.

My brother came home in August with half a femur and a pull-one-over-on-you Midwestern drawl he got from watching too many John Hughes movies in the hospital. Maybe that’s why nobody argued when he stopped taking his Ambiens and started stashing them away for what we assumed would be one heck of an Alive Day party the following year.

“The least coolest person on TV is more interesting than anyone I know,” he told me while I sponged him down for the last time, his Budweisers raised above the tub like night goggles.

El Jefe: The Journey to Freedom, or, A Severely Misplaced Cause for Rat Empathy?

As I watched El Jefe shiver sadly before scurrying out from his perch under the beer pong table and into the cold rain, I panged at realizing that I’d misjudged the rat. For months he’d been the nutria-sized antagonist to our basement apartment, terrorizing the back patio with his sheer girth and gull-sounding battle cries. A full eight to 10 inches longer than the biggest members of his numerous brethren who call the garbage area in front of our building home, his first appearance conspicuously coincided with the death of Mr. Jigglesworth, the one-eared, half-tailed cat who had called the patio home for years and who had shown no signs of relinquishing his domain. My roommates found his mangled corpse under the makeshift metal table  in January, and immediately an inquiry was raised. Had Jiggles been the victim of an improbable rat-on-feline hate crime? Or had we simply not noticed him until long after the normal decay had set in?

One thing was certain: El Jefe’s reign had begun. Scouring every inch of the 40-by-15-foot space, perched on the wicker chairs and neglected garden boxes, scaling the chain-link fence separating our building from the adjacent ones, brazenly peeking in our back door, the rat’s presence was constant, though not yet terrifying. Then the casualties started piling up. A succession of smaller rodent remains, both mice and lesser rats, appearing daily, their necks bitten clean through, their tiny palms raised skyward in last desperate acts of supplication. El Jefe enforced his doctrine of isolationism with an iron paw.

Our collective unease culminated during a recent beer pong tourney slash barbecue honoring the equinox in which the rat came out of nowhere and ran across the crowded patio in a Full Metal Jacket maneuver that ended in the trampling of the flip-flopped feet of my roommate’s significant other or maybe some rando. Regardless, war was declared. The superintendent was alerted, industrial traps were set, mice corpses kept piling up and El Jefe remained fearless.

Then came that plaintive shiver that changed everything. Are any of us – the super, me, the giant rat – really that dissimilar? We’ve all made journeys, sacrificed much. I’ve forsaken sunlight and hours of human interaction to work as a copy editor and sometime writer in a drab basement apartment in a decent neighborhood. The super left his family and his as-yet-to-be-determined Spanish-speaking island to pursue his dream of cleaning toilets and turning on the hot water every morning so Amelia in 1B can soak her calloused bunions. And El Jefe made his undoubtedly Quixotic pilgrimage through a maze of basement traps (and the doors connecting the boiler room to the super’s office to the back of the building that the super and his cronies invariably leave ajar) in search of, what, solitude, a patio of one’s own, escape from a mating gone awry, shame from defeat at the claws of another alpha rat? Does it really matter?

We are all searchers, cut from the same ilk. And even President Monroe, recent history’s most famous proponent of isolation (minus Kim Jong and Fidel), once admitted, “Our country may be likened to a new house. We lack many things, but we possess the most precious of all – liberty!” There are always small prices to pay for this liberty. I must suffer the daily rude awakenings by roommates who work 8-to-6, ugh, jobs so that I can afford an apartment where my afternoons are undisturbed. The super must live with the shame of continually forgetting to fix the broken door in my room and the rust emanating from various points in our ceiling. And Amelia must deal with the nappiest feet this side of sub-Saharan Africa. To deny El Jefe his freedom, a freedom for which he has killed, would be a cruel hypocrisy. So scurry on, badass rat, fight the good fight, do not go gentle into that crevice behind the garbage chute!

That is not to say we can be friends; I’m keeping a respectful distance, not really trying to get hemorrhagic fever, plague, or renal syndrome. Not to mention the rat’s brief two-year lifespan (in which El Jefe will have been more productive than the super could ever hope to be in his wildest cerveza-induced dreams), much too brief to form any deep bond. That is, unless he develops more than a passing interest in the never-ending supply of Weight Watchers string cheese and Lucky Charms that I bestow upon the apartment, or he’s actually La Jefa and the killer instinct is really a maternal one – there will be rodent blood. Until then, do your thing my wayward, disease-ridden brother.

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:

1. "Gummy Skull #1: Drug Chart"

2. "Is David Bowie Dying??"

3. "What Is The Light? / The Observer"

4. "Heavy Star Moving"

5. "I'm Working at NASA on Acid" *cool video

6. "Evil Minds"

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

Last night I had a horrible dream