Nightmare of Past Futures

I'm on the playground and it’s the early nineties. I’m shrunken, sweating, the scent of vinegary boy-smell in a turquoise Looney Tunes tee-shirt, the one where Bugs Bunny and Tweety Bird look like straight-up thugs, the first dumbing down of hip-hop on a commercial scale for a white audience, children included. The Vanilla Ice Syndrome. Billy, Ted Hernandez and I are standing on the platform next to the tallest slide, giggling at a small plastic bucket that the janitor forgot about when he was cleaning the inside of a tire swing at the far end of the playground. We’re giggling because we’ve spent the last five minutes on the platform at the top of the slide, pissing and spitting in the bucket until we’ve succeeded in concocting just about the most vile substance we’d ever seen or smelled. I think I know what’s going to happen next and I shudder. I ask Billy to stop, do we have to go through with it again but there’s two pieces of skin-colored Velcro covering his mouth, identical to what’s strapped across the top of my sneakers. He leers at me, wags his finger. I turn to Ted, to plead with him, no we can’t do this but his mouth is a zipper. When I reach up to un-Velcro Billy, he slaps my hand away, smiles, mumbles something that only Ted understands. The sky turns the same shade of turquoise as my shirt while Ted unzips his lips and yells something to this kid Arnold Weinstein, who’s minding his own business on a swing about ten yards from where we’re standing. Arnold ended up going to Fairport Prep with me, then Penn, then law school at Drexel, but that’s not in this dream. Right now he’s an 8-year-old dork, plain and simple: chubby, quiet, with freckles and a curly orange mess for hair. How much shit everyone gives him. We make fun of him for his orthopedic shoes, for always losing at foursquare, for the fact that he doesn’t know where his father lives. I’m feeling it all again, his snotty tears, my own Velcroed foot smashing into his fat gut the time he wouldn’t give me his last Double-Stuff Oreo at lunch. Ted tells me to stop thinking and waves at Arnold to come to the top of the slide. Arnold creeps towards us, real slow and timid because why would we ever ask him to hang out with us at recess where everyone can see, except that this time it’s only us on the playground because there’s no school. The sky turns indigo. Billy gets excited, rips the Velcro off and shouts out - spitting skin chunks - loud enough for Arnold to hear, the description of this horrific insect that we’ve just captured and put in the bucket. It oozes poisonous green pus out of its mouth, crawls around on at least a thousand hairy legs, has pincers the size of Swiss Army knives. If we move the bucket it might escape, so Arnold, if you want to see it, if you really want to see it, you’re going to have to climb the steps to the platform. I know what’s coming next but I can’t control my arms, and Billy’s cackling, trying to hold it together, and Ted’s already zipped his mouth back up so he won’t blow the surprise. He doesn’t have to worry. Arnold’s almost halfway up the steps when I slide bucket over the edge and his fat little smiling face gets blasted with our juice. But not just his face. His tee shirt, jeans, and sneakers are all completely soaked through. I’m too busy staring at the almost-empty bucket on the ground, trying to figure out how my arms managed to move so fast even when I didn’t want them to, so I never see Arnold run head-down all the way to the nurses’ office. Later in the afternoon, on a bus that’s empty besides Billy and me, Billy un-Velcroes and explains that Arnold’s mother had to come to take him home after lunch. We laugh our asses off the entire bus ride until it’s my stop and I’m alone. The sky is a deep orange, burning. Instead of my mother waiting for me, there’s only Andrew, his skin piss-colored, his eyes shining, holding Billy's severed head in one hand and a dripping bicycle chain in the other. I don’t want to get off the bus. Not now, not ever. An invisible pair of hands shove me forward towards the door, and I’m screaming, clawing at the green fake-leather seats, and Andrew’s skin is melting, congealing into a flesh puddle on the floor and what’s underneath is an elderly half-skeleton version of my mother, smiling a toothless smile and pointing at me with one of her bone-fingers, still clutching Tweety Bird’s head in her other hand. ‘You’ve got some explaining to do, Mister,’ she gargles as the bus disappears and the sky explodes like the scene in Terminator 2 where the robots finally succeed and everything is fire.

(picture by Jimmy Cauty via www.boingboing.net)

Can The Flaming Lips Save the Next Decade? Probably Not, But Their New Album Is Pretty Freakin' Sweet!!!! (And Lady Gaga Sucks)

It was all Biggie and Miley’s fault. Blame them.

I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to be like every other self-described internet journalist (aka blogger hack that no one gives a crap about) and most of my favorite cable networks, spending the last month or three trying to find some unique, compelling way to analyze the last decade – the Two-Thousands, the Ohs, the Zeros, the Oughts, the Naughts, the Oh-Ohs – whatever you want to call it. There are already the ubiquitous Top-10 lists (Top-10 iPhone Apps, Top-10 Celebrities’ Assholes Falling Out of Their Skirts), I Love The 2000s marathons, an ever expanding collection of Skillz’ year-end raps. It seems like every Twitter-head and Facebook stalker is trying to carve out his or her own nostalgia niche. It’s not that I’m being a curmudgeon or that I don’t want to remember the past ten years. They were the best of my short life, although that’s mainly due to the fact that the 2000s corresponded with many of the events (high school, college, grad school) that are supposed to be the proverbial “BEST time of your life”. Clearly, any decade in which one receives his first hand job and hazes his first batch of screaming, blindfolded fraternity pledges in the backseat of the same beat-up ’97 Izusu Trooper has to be epic on a personal scale. However, other than my generation’s collective debauchery, a lot of shit sucked. There were a staggering number of reasons (9/11-Afghanistan-Iraq-Katrina-The Tsunami-George Bush-Bird Flu-Darfur-The Great Recession-H1N1-Jon & Kate Plus 8) why well-respected voices, from Time Magazine to Gore Vidal, decided to brand this decade as among the worst in American history.

Figuring out just how awesome or lame it was will take years, more decades, hundreds of magazine articles, blog posts and PhD theses. Our overall understanding of the 2000s will change again and again. Being the passive-aggressive slacker fiction writer that I was, I saw no problem in letting the super-nerds tackle this one as I lay back in my allegorical cave creating worlds of my own.

That is, until I heard Miley Cyrus and the Notorious B.I.G.’s vocals on the same track. Granted, it was just an unofficial remix/mash-up of Cyrus’ “hit” song “Party in the U.S.A.” where the verses have been changed to Biggie’s, from his old-school classic “Party and Bullshit”, mixed by some herb in his parents’ basement. And it was actually pretty catchy, too (until I heard it at every bar I went to for a week). Apparently a lot of people agree because the song has more than 1.4 million hits on YouTube, and has been a fixture on party playlist sites like fratmusic.com for a while. Maybe I’m getting older and can’t simply enjoy this song the way it’s meant to be enjoyed – twelve beers deep dancing on top of a pong table and throwing drinks at scantily clad ladies who look like J-WOWW and Snookers – or maybe I’m just thinking too much, as usual. But to me the song represents everything wrong with the current music industry, and maybe more so with the people (Generation Y) who have been listening to the music made during the last ten years.

One of the easiest ways to start to define a decade is to look at its music. Politics, fashion, culture and current events should all be reflected in what the kids are listening to. It is impossible to think about the tumultuous, radical sixties without picturing the Beatles looking all hippied-out or Jimi Hendrix jamming his soul to thousands of Woodstockers. Same with the nineties. No one who grew up then will ever forget all the disaffected, flannel-wearing grunge rockers and their rejection of ’80s excess, or the racial chaos that fueled the passionate monologues of West Coast gangster rappers.

But what about the 2000s? The introduction of file sharing and beat-making programs like FruityLoops has cheapened everything about music, has made it accessible to the point of meaninglessness. It has been commoditized like never before. Any knucklehead with a computer can make “quality” sounding tunes in his basement without any real talent besides being able to figure out which samples from REAL songs go best together. Indeed, much of what passes for music today is really just lyrics and riffs from other, better songs that have been digitally combined to form nothing more than a reusable, throw-away product. Yes, much of art and literature borrows from past works. One could argue that nothing new has been created since the ancient Greeks. But this music is not art. This is Wal-M(art). Don’t believe me? Compare rappers from the nineties to those of the 2000s. Tupac and Biggie were the mouthpiece of a generation. Auto-Tune-infested morons like T-Pain and Kanye sound like robots taking a shit. Pop Bottles! Fuck Bitches! Buy rims! We have no soul! Even popular music used to be at least occasionally multi-layered. Recently some gay friends of mine tried to explain to me that Lady Gaga is not only the Madonna of “our” generation, but is possibly more influential to today’s youth than the Material Girl ever was. If this is even remotely true, someone find me a shotgun because I’m about to pull a Hemingway. Is this what we’ve come to? Is it true, as one of the characters in my forthcoming novel puts it, that the 2000s are “a nameless amorphous creature, a vacuum, a sterile computer-chip refuse pile that’s allergic to any specific attitude, to any real passion”?

You may be wondering where The Flaming Lips come in to all of this. Weren’t they in the title? I’m so glad you asked, friend, because The Lips’ newest album, Embryonic, is one of the few musical things I’ve heard recently that has given me hope for a brighter tomorrow.

Although thematically similar to previous releases (Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, The Soft Bulletin), Embryonic is a stark departure musically for Wayne Coyne and Company. The sound is harder, more raw, yet pulsing with unparalleled grandeur and cybernetic beauty. Imagine if members of the Beatles, Joy Division, latter-day Smashing Pumpkins, the Clash, the RZA and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs all got together in the 23rd century and smoked some serious Magical Martian Red Skunk – this is what would come out. If T-Pain sounds like a robot taking a shit, Embryonic sounds like that same robot making love to Miles Davis’ granddaughter in a psychedelic field of android poppies while electric-faced cherubs wail the existential blues.

Perhaps it’s the addition of new drummer Kliph Spurlock, but raucous power jams like “Convinced of the Hex,” “Silver Trembling Hands,” and “Watching the Planets” rock harder and louder than anything since The Lips’ mid-nineties guitar-driven line-ups. But the beats are also funkier, more jam-dance friendly, as any Disco Biscuits fan or Phish phreak will attest. But they also perfectly blend in their softer side with Sigur Ròs-esque space ballads like “The Impulse” and “Gemini Syringes”.

As always, Wayne’s unique songwriting ranges from the startlingly introspective and the philosophical to the obscure and downright silly. There is maybe a bit more darkness and desperation present in tracks like “The Ego’s Last Stand”, where Wayne sings, “The only way out / Is destroying all traces / Oh, destroying yourself /There’s no way back / It’s complete devastation / Oh, there’s no way out” or in (arguably the album’s masterpiece) “See the Leaves” where he laments, “She cannot pretend / To believe that life / Really has no end”. But, in this collection of yins and yangs, there is also an undeniable streak of positive energy and hope, such as in the smile-inducing “Watching The Planets,” where we believe Wayne when he proclaims “See, the sun’s gonna rise / And take your fears away / Like the soft tit of the motherbrain” and the culturally appropriate “If” where we agree and hope in our hearts that “People are evil, it’s true / But on the other side / They can be gentle too / If they decide.”

Other highlights include the bombastic synth-fest “Worm Mountain" featuring MGMT and the happily bizarre “I Can Be A Frog” in which Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (and the Where The Wild Things Are soundtrack) helps out by making animal noises through a telephone.

There is a general consensus by hardcore fans that 1999’s groundbreaking The Soft Bulletin was the band’s musical and artistic apex. I would argue that Embryonic not only approaches this gem but outshines it. And I’m not alone. Paste Magazine described the album as "a wonderfully weird parade of sonic delights: an arresting consummation of the Lips' two-and-a-half decade career,” and The Record Review lauded The Lips as "one of the few acts left that stills dares to be original, inspired and off-center in such a mainstream musical climate." Couldn’t have said it better myself.

So take that, Miley, Gaga, Kanye and the rest of you boring, self-obsessed , ear-bleed-inducing leaches! Biggie, please do not roll over in your grave just yet. There is hope.

(However, Miley, when you turn 18, please call or Twitter me @ChrisVola)

Finally, looking ahead: 2010 promises to be another spacey, brain-bending neo-psychedelic balloon ride for The Lips as the band has just released a song-for-song cover of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, featuring the likes of Stardeath and White Dwarves and Henry Rollins. So get your glow-sticks and confetti guns, kids, and prepare your faces to MELT! As for me, my biggest New Year’s resolution is to stay POSITIVE and HAPPY, something made a lot easier by the fact that the Decade from Hell is over and bands like The Flaming Lips have not only survived its aftermath, but continue to thrive. Stay up, God Bless, and please say a prayer for Haiti and everyone hurting right now. Peace.

"We Killed God! Yay! Let's Become Evil Robots!" - Thoughts on Transhumanism, iThings, and Why You Don't Care About Anything I Write

Picture this – It’s the year 2099 and you’re still alive. No, not as a 114-year-old wrinkled crone hooked up to dozens of life-support tubes, dependent on nursing home aides and your great-great grandchildren for liquid feeding, sponge baths, and as an audience to your frequent diatribes about how they don’t make jackasses like Kanye West anymore. Not even close. You feel healthier than you’ve ever been. You are ready to “do anything, or be anything, you want or need.” How is this possible and how are you going to accomplish this? Simple. First, you shed all biological matter, not just the wrinkles but everything, in order to upload your brain into a dynamic, conscious sub-entity within a larger, singular entity, all within a machine. In short, you are fusing with the artificial intelligence of the Terminator. You are taking over a robotic body, but the distinction between you and the robot, and all other robots, is minimal, negligent even. This is because all other modified humans and robots communicate in a virtual world, taking robotic forms whenever they wish. Actually having two people meet in the physical world is rare. The term “self-identity” has no meaning. Since knowledge and skills can be instantly downloaded and comprehended by most intelligent beings, the process of learning is compressed into an instantaneous affair instead of the years-long struggle “normal” humans experience. Speaking of “normal” humans, or those who choose to remain organic and unmodified – they exist on a different plane of consciousness and cannot fully communicate with uploaded humans and their robot pals. Money and death have become irrelevant. There is no such thing as gender.

Sound scary? Enticing? Insane? According to futurist Ray Kurzweil in his book "The Age of Spiritual Machines", none of what I have described is science fiction. They are accurate predictions he’s made based on current developments in medicine (human genome project, stem cell research) and science (nanotechnology, artificial intelligence). Many of his predictions stem from the fact that technological evolution is occurring at a highly exponential rate (consider that for 99 percent of our species’ existence we were hopping around caves and flinging poo at each other), a rate so fast that by 2045 we will have reached a technological singularity, an intelligence explosion that would render the human mind obsolete.

While some haters have described Kurzweil as a pseudo-scientist quack, a surprising number of the world’s brightest minds not only agree with him, but are working hard to make his dreams a reality. These are the transhumanists, men and women who regard certain aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death as unnecessary and undesirable. They strive towards transforming themselves into what they call posthumans, similar to Nietzsche’s “Ubermensch”, self-actualized beings of extraordinary skills and abilities. Demi-gods, if you will. According to many members of the scientific community, the transhumanists will achieve many of their goals sooner rather than later. The vast majority of Kurzweil’s predictions for the 21st century have become a reality so far, meaning that some time in the next 50 years (barring a nuclear war or a super badass mutant swine flu outbreak), those of us who are still alive will have to make a choice. Do we continue to live as we have for countless thousands of years? Or do we deny our own biology, hook up to the machine and become post-human immortals?

You may be saying to yourself (if you’re one of those creeps who talks to yourself), “What’s wrong with living forever? Becoming a robot doesn’t sound so bad. Actually it sounds pretty freakin’ sweet!” After all, humans have been trying to transcend their natural state for as long as we’ve been around. It’s no accident that we live three times as long as people 10,000 years ago despite little or no change to our biological chemistry. Countless advances in medicine, science, technology, and nutrition have been made to ensure that we live longer, live healthier, and are able to exercise near-complete control over our environment and the natural world in general.

Conservatives and Christian fundamentalists would be quick to point out that the quest for immortality represents the ultimate hubris, that to attempt to become “God” is the ultimate transgression. I would argue that modern science (see: Evolution) has already done a quite thorough job in dismantling the classic Western conception of a monarchical white-bearded deity shooting lightning bolts down from the heavens. We have effectively killed Him. There is also a big difference between playing God (i.e. bombing the shit out of innocent people because their beliefs don’t conform to what you perceive is the ultimate ‘good’ morality) and realizing that we are all gods, albeit the "bankrupt gods" of Jean-Paul Sartre, condemned to be free in a world in which we are only able to exercise a finite (yet growing) amount of control. Most intelligent people understand that there is no Guiding Hand. Reality is us and we are reality. All we have is now.

OK, so archaic and foolish belief systems are not a good excuse to halt our quest for immortality. In fact, many transhumanists look at their ideals as a kind of New Age spirituality, the ultimate salvation. But what about Science? Isn’t it also a form of fundamentalism, just as susceptible to mindlessness as religion? The scientist who is unable to look beyond the absolute sacredness of his numbers, facts and theories is like a quarterback who doesn’t understand that the plays which have called for him by his coach are not set in stone. His blindness to what’s happening outside the pocket is what leads to interceptions, fumbles, failure and loss (Not like my boy Eli!!!). The intangible and creative aspects of humanity (love, joy, community, art, music) are quickly dismissed as secondary to the cold, hard “truth” preached by modern scientists.

Religion and Science aside, my biggest problem with the whole idea is not so much the idea itself, but the people I see around me on the streets of Manhattan every day (see above photo), the people who make up my own generation. I would venture to say that as a whole, people in their twenties are more individualistic than any group in the history of civilization, even more so than our parents, those ex-free-lovers and unforgiving yuppies who spawned the "Me" generation. Our technology starkly reflects our individualism. Cell phones, computers, iPods, DVRs, and those ubiquitous social networks that have made many of us virtually useless in genuine face-to-face conversation. The simplest act of communication, like asking for driving directions, is almost unheard-of. We have been allowed to withdraw completely into a digital fantasyland, causing our reality to suffer horrendously. It’s no surprise to me that relationships and marriages are failing at an unprecedented rate, that there are four times as many prescriptions for depression and ADD issued than ten years ago. Technology’s promise of “Harder, better, faster, stronger” has destroyed our attention spans, and along with them, any desire to continue in the moment, to find any lasting satisfaction in who we are NOW, who we’re with NOW. Fantasyland kills “the [real] moment” every time. I find it hilarious when someone gets pissed, no, genuinely furious when I take more than an hour to respond to a trivial text message that they could have called me about and gotten over with in less than fifteen seconds. I'm sorry, but if you're that insecure and starved for attention, don't bother texting me anymore. When we allow technology to seep into the fabric of who we are, when we allow the digital comfort blanket to dictate our relationships, our ability to feel pleasure and sadness, and our very identity, we are reduced to little more than Andy Hargreaves' "people with mobile-phone headset attachments...talking aloud and alone, like paranoid schizophrenics, oblivious to their immediate surroundings. Introspection [for them] is a disappearing act." Even on crowded streets brimming with humanity they "scan their mobile phone messages for shreds of evidence that someone, somewhere, may need or want them."

Just as life implies death, death (i.e. emptiness) implies the meaningfulness our lives are capable of achieving. When one of the female vampires in the HBO series True Blood is asked why she prefers her human companion to members of her own (immortal) species, she replies that (I’m paraphrasing here) because their existence is so short, they feel things so much stronger, more passionately, and with a much greater sense of urgency. Only in their mortality are they able to find true purpose. And conversely, in the words of Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun – “Immortality is always nihilistic.” Why live forever if you’re just going to be a lonely robot with no purpose, endlessly searching the stars for shreds of evidence that someone, somewhere may need or want you?

In short, if we are to transcend the limits of our biological mortality, we must transcend our current societal system. The coldhearted, digitized and capitalistic waste-land that we know now, a flimsy diaspora of haves and have-nots, cannot be prolonged forever in its current state. The future has become something which we fear, not cherish. Before we can fully embrace transhumanism, we (i.e. Generation Y) must become humanists. Because a dystopia composed of a selfish, self-absorbed class of nihilistic immortals, and an equally selfish, and therefore jealous, class of "normal" humans without the money or resources to make the necessary adaptations is a recipe for an unhappy and bloody extinction, a fate worse than the slow, natural death we know today. Only a fully integrated community with the same desires for knowledge, happiness, and self-betterment would make an eternity meaningful. If you can picture that, let me know, because the way things are going right now, I can’t.

The Question of Form in Peter Markus' "The Singing Fish"

The Singing Fish, Peter Markus’ 88-page collection of evocatively strange, beautiful and brutal flash fictions involving two brothers living by the banks of a muddy, magical river, quickly discards conventional form and narrative structure, creates a mythical landscape built by mud and hammers, and employs a language that is superficially sparse and recurrent yet melodiously deep.

The repetition of phrases, events, and even plotlines in Markus’ book endows the stories with a relentless rhythm, a musicality usually found in a verse or prose poem format. The short and often sharply punctuated sentences drive the reader on a staccato march towards the same muddy river, the same brothers, the same Girl, and the same brutal domestic revelations at the end of many of the stories. The child-like simplicity and recurrent nature of the prose create many instances that are at once sonically pleasing and melodically infectious. In “Guts,” for example, the simple act of fishing becomes an almost painfully deliberate ritual performed in a minor key that is at once primordial and catchy:

“We take turns reeling in.
We take turns baiting the hook.
We take turns setting the hook.
One by one, the fish come in.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.”

This obsessive and oftentimes neurotic style is exactly what draws the reader into the text. The words flow like incantations, like pop songs whose choruses and verses blur together to form a mesmerizing hum with no defined beginning or end. In “The Fish That Walked on Water,” the language is almost onomatopoeic, as the reader is presented with the gritty sights and smells of a filthy river: “We were both of us brothers ripping off hunks from the moon with the muddy-clawed hammers that were our fists.”

The timeless and cyclical nature of the stories recalls the oral tradition of storytelling prevalent throughout much of human history, in which the storyteller would create an experience, in a lyrical and repetitive manner, with the audience, in turn, grasping the message and creating personal mental images from the words heard and the gestures seen. The sounds pounded the ears of listeners until, their psyches penetrated, they became, in effect, co-framers of the melodic spoken art. This effect may not be as salient in Markus’ book, but the prose still beckons the reader towards the mud, to become baptized in the river, to become privy to some small part of the ulterior knowledge that the brothers seem to possess. Although the stories are presumably told by one of the brothers in the first person, the abundant use of the words and phrases “we” and “us brothers” and the fact that the narrator virtually never refers to himself in the singular, seems to allude to the idea of a collective conscience, not an interior monologue, evoking the notion that all the major characters, especially the two brothers, are necessary, not just to each story’s plot, but also to its telling.

The Singing Fish not only opens the debate for which facets of a collection (the narrative, the characters, the style of prose) make its stories well-written, enjoyable, and intellectually engaging, but it also opens the debate for what exactly constitutes a work of fiction. Markus’ stories have been widely published in recent years, and sections of his two larger collections (The Singing Fish; Good, Brother) have appeared in a wide array of electronic and print publications, some devoted exclusively to short fiction and others devoted exclusively to prose poetics.

The inside cover of the book refers to these tales as “fictions,” yet the rhythmic writing style creates a stream of consciousness that seems more in line with many contemporary prose poems. All but three of the sixteen stories appear in block format, without paragraph breaks or breaks for dialogue; this structure also contributes to the rapid, sensory-oriented imagery scattered throughout the text, another common characteristic of prose poems. At first glance, the paragraph divisions in “Guts” and “Boy: Revisited” even look and read like poetic line breaks.

However, in order to classify a work of literature, to determine whether that work succeeds in the context of its form, it seems important to look beyond mere aesthetics. In his theory of narratology, or the study of narrative structure in fiction, the Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov states that, in addition to other literary elements, a short story or novel must contain a set of coherent actions that work towards achieving some artistic or emotional effect, an effect, for Todorov, not as important in the context of a poem or film. Each individual story in The Singing Fish follows a clear narrative path, with the same juvenile narrator relating events that follow a logical progression (allowing for some suspension of disbelief) from beginning to end, with few dissociative leaps in syntax. Little, if any, plot development occurs from story to story, though, and each story’s order in the text is interchangable. The actions of the brothers may differ slightly in each vignette, but the images of the river, fish, mud, Girl, and a sinister father figure are constant and make reading the collection in its entirety a bit tedious at times.

Nearly half of the stories end with one of the brothers or their father hammering a nail into one of the brothers’ hands, then some form of the phrase, “I lined up that rusted nail.” The overall plot does not develop beyond this recurring event (the first and last story in the collection end with the same aforementioned line), and, in my opinion, the cyclical nature of the book does not allow for any profound emotional effect at the conclusion.

What sets Markus’ work apart from that of contemporary writers is not its repetitive nature or its genre-bending tendencies, but how its bizarre yet gratifying language sucks the reader into his riverine world to showcase an unconventional landscape that at first feels strange, but quickly feels appropriate in the context of the fables: “This fish was the biggest of the big-lipped fishes that us brothers ever fished from out of this fishy river that runs through this fishy river town.” Ultimately, each story’s success lies in the sounds emanating from Markus’ unique verbal instrument.

Unconsciously Smiling at the Virtual (un)Reality Blues: A Novel 26-word Treatise on the Rapidly Expanding Field of Internet Autopsy

She signs off.
The hollow moan of a digitized door slamming shut.
“I just wanted you,” he says to the empty white box on the screen.

1923-2008

"I'd like to thank the Good Lord for making me a Yankee." - Joseph Paul DiMaggio

Dark Days Documentary (first 10 minutes)

Where all the bums near my apt go at night

Suicide - Martin Rev Interview

"You want a ride with a chauffeur? You make your music like a big Cadillac."

Radio [Junk]ies

artist asserts alienation between barreling basslines
and billowing bombast
bongos babble cymbals collide collectively conspiring to compress
cackling crackles of disk-jockey dilemma

dive down dashboard derivatives until every enveloping echo
of ethereal engendered entertainment evaporates into eyesores of facetious fixation

funk un-godly glam gremlins and their golden hip-hop hiatus
hardly inspiring an instantaneous iota of introspection
just jamming the juice of jungle-boogey jiggle
killed by klick-klacks of kiwi-colored kick-drums and knocks of a knob
leaving listeners to lamely lament late-afternoon lush-hour
as lemmings leave monotone museums of macroeconomics and malpractice
musing for more music
to make microcosms manageable
never negating the necessity of novel neuroses

the open-mouthed pathetic pale-face percussive pattering
plucks primal propaganda with pop-star ploys
quietly relents to rocking redundancies and reverberating revolutions

relegated to re-run status some schmuck sings succulently
strumming sensations of scatological sermons smearing sense and talent
and ticketmaster tendencies to topple top-ten tyranny
turning unfilled urges into ugly undone unctions
of unutterable venom

veins vilify victims and vicars of verve violently veering toward
weird waves washed-up wenches and worthless waggles
wining wanderlusting waifs with XM xenophobia
x-ing out yesterday’s younger yardstick yearning
yolking youth for yuppie yen
yielding yucky yackkity-yak for zombies and zealous zephyrs
zig-zagging to zero

Weezer and Speed Levitch - KILLER combo

Walk through the sweater apocalypse and find your own warmth!

Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo

Release date: January 11, 2008 (Geffen Records)

All I can say is that this collection has been LONG overdue. A selection of raw, emotional four-track recordings from Weezer's neurotic and introverted front-man, Rivers Cuomo. Some of these songs ("Blast Off!", "Lover in the Snow", "Chess") were available for free download in the early 2000s. These dark, intense, grainy musings on loneliness, longing, lost love, death, and outer space quickly became my favorite tunes in the entire Weezer catalogue and got me through a good deal of self-inflicted (and now vaguely comical) high school angst, proms and pimples.

Cuomo recorded most of the tracks on "Alone" in his L.A. basement from 1992-2007, playing all of the instruments and singing all of the vocals in most cases. Highlights include the sad, soft piano and clarinet ballad "Longtime Sunshine," a track Cuomo resisted putting online for nearly a decade due to its profoundly personal (and borderline suicidal) lyrics. "Blast Off!" is a classic, hard-rockin' Weez demo about a hedonistic, alcoholic starship crew on a desperate mission to save the planet Normis. On the mostly acoustic "Chess," Cuomo compares a difficult relationship to the board game.

My favorite track is "Lover in the Snow," an electric guitar and tamborine masterpiece about - what else? - a former lover of Cuomo's entangled in a shady, allegorical snowy glen with another man. In moments of joy and heartbreak in my own life, the song has always resonated and haunted me with the simple, yet soul-wrenching power of its lyrics and minor chords.

This album is a must-have for any die-hard Weezer fan and a soothing cure for anyone suffering a lonely fracture of the spirit.

http://www.amazon.com/Alone-Home-Recordings-Rivers-Cuomo/dp/B000Y30ODQ

What the inside of my head looked like last night

DAFT PUNK!!!

My favorite Republican

Who I really want to vote for in the primaries....numero uno

Can you believe how much I am in heaven?

the pump

Interracial porn leads to god, leads to art, leads to [*]

I watch a trashy blonde woman in her early twenties kneeling next to a beige fake-leather couch -- bleached hair, oily pores, dribbling eye-liner, small breasts, protruding nipples, apple-shaped thighs, thin growing spirals of cellulite spreading from under her fleshy ass. Her face is getting fucked by a massive black cock, a penis more suitable for certain breeds of domestic cattle. Pumping her mouth with the sheer racial force of 300 years of caged aggression. Flinging gobs of frothy saliva onto her artificially tanned neck, her hair, and the couch.

It’s near the end of a long scene. One that involved a good amount of oral (on both actors), some missionary, doggy, reverse cow-girl, ass-to-mouth, and a conspicuous little toy called the Road Warrior that looks like an mp3 player with furry insect legs. As I sit here, hunched over my laptop in the near-dark of my parents’ guest bedroom, watching the African fire hose finally drench his visibly shaken partner in a milky rain of self-loathing, I realize that the streaming images and near-muted sound in front of me represent the closest I’ve come in a long time to having a genuine religious experience.

Religious Experience (Encyclopedia Britannica definition): A moment of wonder at the infinity of the cosmos, the sense of awe and mystery in the presence of the holy, feelings of dependence on a divine power or an unseen order, the sense of guilt and anxiety accompanying belief in a divine judgment, and the feeling of peace that follows faith in divine forgiveness.

OK, maybe what I’m feeling isn’t really a religious experience. And anyway, the Western concept of RELIGION has been a difficult one for me since early adolescence. I can specifically trace my feelings of doubt regarding Judeo-Christian tradition to a snowy, chemically ambiguous night in March 2001, a few weeks after receiving the sacrament of Confirmation and a few days after a brief, awkward, bumbling, yet ultimately gratifying physical episode with a younger female classmate. Over the years – for many reasons – the doubts multiplied, became shards of glass, bullets, wrecking balls, and finally the pound of TNT that vaporized any remnants of my grandparents’ Eurocentric faith somewhere toward the end of my last semester at college. Jesus was a cool guy, don’t get me wrong. I love most of thy neighbors, even the crackheads that sit in my hallway and spark their white flashes and demons. Basically what it came down to was that there was no way I could justify sitting for an hour every week listening to an old man who probably beats off to the Toys R Us catalog tell me that it’s a sin for me to fixate on how the right breast of the girl in the pew in front of me resembles a pomegranate, or that the five dollars my father throws in the collection basket every week is going to go to starving Hispanic children in the North End of Hartford and not toward gas money for the priest’s Lexus that’s parked behind the rectory. Then there’s that whole Inquisition thing…

In the aftermath of my dogmatic holocaust (May – June 2007), I still had this urgent need to feel something, anything, amidst an absence of meaning in the synthetic, desensitized realm of post-modern pseudo-existence. So I focused my spiritual curiosity Eastward – to the beautiful precepts of Lao Tzi, to the awakened nirvana of the Buddha, and to the sacred cookbook of Baba Ram Dass. At first, this triad of philosophies – Taoism, Buddhism, and Americanized Hinduism – seemed to offer so much comfort and sensible insight. Each renounces the worship of an arbitrary, white-bearded, human-shaped ‘god’ and instead implores each of its followers to look within himself. I can do this by myself? My own brain is the church? Far out, brahh. Woo! But after further reading, and after many failed attempts at finding my own enlightentment, I formed this general definition of Eastern philosophy:

Look! A nontheistic spirit is already inherent in each of us, an untapped resource for personal enlightenment. All we have to do meditate, meditate, MEDITATE, go vegan, stop drinking, meditate, focus on the present, be compassionate but forget EMOTIONS!!!, forget anger, forget joy, forget MONEY, forget the past, forget the girl who sleeps at your apartment but won’t tell you she’s been fucking one of your friends for the past week, forget fucking, forget the future, meditate, fast, deny good, deny evil, deny, deny, DENY your reality, meditate and then you will find enlightenment in NOTHINGNESS, in the absence of your life…

Granted, that may be a little extreme. There are a lot of great things about these philosophies that are worth looking into. But the ultimate problem with Eastern philosophy – like Christianity – is that the goal of the believer is not to embrace his humanity completely, but to deny certain integral parts of it, to find the ultimate experience elsewhere, and not in the physical realm of the world around us. Yes, we are taught that happiness is found in the present, but it is a present I’d rather spend eating a Hardee’s Monster Thickburger with four strips of bacon, three slices of cheese and mayonnaise on a buttered sesame-seed bun than sitting in the lotus position for ten hours contemplating how wet the rain is. Also, being a true Taoist or Buddhist would be impractical and impossible in our America-Fuck-Yeah! culture. I need money to buy food and beer. I need a job to get that money. I need to exploit natural resources in order to survive in the good old USA. I also highly enjoy television, central air-conditioning, and my new pair of baby-blue and cream-colored custom Nikes. I continue eating cheap, processed ham, regardless of how many infant pig testicles were ripped off for me to enjoy its sliced deliciousness. Call me coldhearted, but I think I’m a pretty average Westerner in most respects.

So now that I’ve basically thrown out the teachings of every major formal religious school of the last 10,000 years, what else is there? What do I believe in? Is it possible that I believe in – GASP – nothing???? BUT, watching the interracial porn, I know I feel something. Something that cannot be explained in strict scientific terms; an innate connection established through purely spiritual channels, one that goes beyond the images. But wait:

Religious Experience (Wikipedia definition): In a religious experience, or sacred experience, an individual comes in contact with transcendental reality.

Transcendental reality!!! Now that makes sense. The feeling I get from watching the porn is something that transcends the digitized pixels of the screen, the circuitry of my laptop, and the process of light filtering through my eyes to put that picture in my brain. Sort of the way recorded music transcends the physical aspects of its nature (i.e. CDs, amplifiers, soundwaves). The porn and music both stimulate my body and my mind at the same time in two completely different ways. This definition of religious experience looks suspiciously similar to another Wikipedia definition:

Art: is a product of human activity, made with the intention of stimulating the human senses as well as the human mind; by transmitting emotions and/or ideas… "a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science".

So there it is. Faith in the human mind, faith in its ability to create, in its ability to transcend our own reality, to inform us of our own reality, to embrace with sweaty palms every aspect of this reality, to fuck this reality into submission! I believe in this art, and not just in the definitive mediums – music, literature, sculpture, film, painting, and printmaking. Everyone loves a good book and a pretty picture. I’m talking about real art, human art. I believe in the Guatemalan crackhead who sits outside my building, and who I sometimes give old newspapers that he uses to insulate his garbage-bag parka. I believe in the black girls from Brooklyn going to school, carrying nine books. I believe in the character of my handshake. I believe the sticky sex angels of a Thursday drunk. I believe in my friends' success. I believe that the self-disgust and self-inflicted purgatory of this past semester served an ultimately beautiful purpose. I believe in the terrifying authority of my imagined rages and ecstasies. I believe in memories of crumpled yellow promises. I believe in my own future and the passion I have for my work. I believe in Manhattan. I believe in flights to Europe – to anywhere – and in the thoughtfulness of Iberia Airlines employees. I believe in the ancient burnt stench of camels and Moroccan taxi drivers. I believe in screaming, vomiting, dicks, and pussies. I believe that love is slippery. I believe in words that sound like scarecrows. I believe in road trips to Vermont and other Northern New England locales. I believe in chemicals. I believe in the angry Harlem PCP-fiends, howling up the stairs in my hallway for another golden fix. I believe that I may never completely come to grips with my four years of college. I believe in the sexual streetlights of 47th and Lexington. I believe in the curve of a girl’s naked lower back as she bends over to pick up her thong in the misty darkness of a gray morning-after. I believe in Santa. I believe in the elements of my life that are beautiful and sinister, creative and destructive, and I am in love with all of them. I believe that the setting sun is just an illusion caused by the world spinning around its axis. And I believe in YOU.

Happy holidays!

Elephants, Hot Girls Spinning Around, Bunnies, Existentialism, Flaming Lips

Do You Realize??

Waiting for my moment, I was destined to shine

surviving the times

Fight the Anti-Cruise

psychotic and riveting

I Wanted To Go There

If X is the sum of two or more differentiating equations, and if I didn’t write the answer in my graphing calculator, and if graphing calculators served a purpose, and if one of those purposes was paying my bills, and if I sold my graphing calculator on eBay, and if I got enough money to pay my bills, and if I spent everything on a fifth and three dimebags, and if I got drunk, and if I got stoned, and if I got stoned, and if Mr. Jones shut off the water, and if Mr. Jones shut off the electricity, and if Mr. Jones shut off the gas, and if I got stoned, and if my parents lived in Connecticut, and if I took a Greyhound, and if we saw a homeless black man passed out in the road, and if the kid next to me had an Incredible Hulk blanket, and if we stopped in Fredricksburg, and if we stopped in Baltimore, and if we stopped in New York, and if my parents were gone for the weekend, and if I slept on the couch in the TV room, and if I got drunk, and if I broke Dad’s collection of 19th century whiskey glasses, and if my parents came home while I was looking through their closets, and if I walked a half mile to Grandma’s condo, and if we’re one happy family (well sure we are), and if Grandma asked me why the trees look so big this year, and if the trees really did look so big this year, and if leaves synthesize carbon dioxide from light energy, and if the Moon doesn’t have any carbon dioxide, and if they build a colony on the Moon in 2024, and if I wanted to go there, and if a space shuttle’s ticket price was comparable to flying from Newark to West Palm Beach, and if the density of atmosphere gradually decreases as the altitude increases, and if I got sick from space travel, and if I vomited on an astronaut, and if he hit the wrong button while cleaning his boots, and if we got sucked into a vacuum, and if the word VACUUM didn’t feel so slippery, and if there wasn’t any afterlife in space, and if that idea didn’t sound too bad, and if most ideas don’t sound too bad, and if ideas are combinations of words, and if words are more fun than calculus, then X equals 7.