Monday, May 16, 2011

Maybe You Spend a Weekend Faking a French Accent, Maybe You Buy an Even More Expensive Stereo and Build a Separate and Self-Sufficient World Inside the Garage

I thoroughly enjoyed not anguishing the clusterfuck over the weekend. I enjoyed pre-game pints with a digital friend who is now analog. I enjoyed STANDING! w/mine and screaming at Dax. I enjoyed Planet's last piano recital ever (it's a good thing; more later, or not). I enjoyed listening to Talking Heads and Eno. I didn't enjoy driving readers away - and a Byrne post, an Eno post, a United post drives readers away, oh yes they do - but I enjoyed giving less of a damn than once I would have enough to bump Robert Fripp's birthday to the top of this post.

Robert Fripp is sixty-five today. I liked early King Crimson enough to listen contently if you it put on, I loved King Crimson (Version Four) enough to buy and play vinyl, but I didn't follow Fripp after unless it was played for me, which I listen to contently (WFMU plays him often) - I'm told it's proof that I'm not a guitar player that I noticed Belew's gimmicks over Fripp's genius, and who am I to argue. For instance:




My Fripp story : Fripp had a touring workshop called Guitar Craft and a performing ensemble, The League of Crafty Guitarists. A bunch of us (Elric, you were there, yes?) got in Phavid Dillips lime-green VW van and drove to an old yellow mansion in West Virginia, not far, past Harpers Ferry, up near Shepardstown. Phavid, who we thought an excellent guitarist - or at least the best guitarist we smoked dope with regularly - had been invited to sit in a circle of other guitarists with Robert Fripp leading the workshop. Incredibly cool actually. Guests were invited to sit in the circle; guess who refused. Afterward, going out for a smoke, I ran into him on a porch and apologized. He asked me why I didn't sit in the circle. I said I didn't want to. He said, then you've nothing to apologize for, and shook my hand.

Requests solicited! (and sorry, I know the below cuts out early, but still.....)




  • Zizek: Un-Shock Doctrine: The Left today faces the difficult task of emphasizing that we are dealing with political economy—that there is nothing “natural” in the present crisis, that the existing global economic system relies on a series of political decisions—while simultaneously acknowledging that, insofar as we remain within the capitalist system, violating its rules will indeed cause economic breakdown, since the system obeys a pseudo-natural logic of its own. So, although we are clearly entering a new phase of enhanced exploitation, facilitated by global market conditions (outsourcing, etc.), we should also bear in mind that this is not the result of an evil plot by capitalists, but an urgency imposed by the functioning of the system itself, always on the brink of financial collapse. For this reason, what is now required is not a moralizing critique of capitalism, but the full re-affirmation of the Idea of communism.
  • How can the Left win?
  • Once. Twice. Three times.
  • The welfare state.
  • Krugman's bankruptcy.
  • Obama's Midas touch.
  • Freedom's just another word for blowing shit up.
  • Junk justice.
  • Being poor is a crime.
  • Offered for you to make your own comment.
  • How Fox works
  • Internet Kill Switch and.....
  • Huckabee sensibly chooses Fox's money.
  • Your Fucking Washington Post.





That's Callie, beloved and missed by this guy, as is Little One below. Send me you cats, alive on earth or alive in mind.









THE WORLD AS SEEN THROUGH A GLASS OF ICE WATER


Dobby Gibson

There are a billion reasons to look down
into a casket, but just one way to lie in it dead,
which proves there isn't anything 
you can think of that isn't here for the living,
who are each alive for a short time
in a very different way. 
After she moves out, one tears up grass blades
to watch which way the wind blows.
Just over there, another buried his favorite dog
and now look at that tree! 
Would you like to model for me?
says the lousy painter 
to every woman who walks within earshot.
Feeling a little dead?
Maybe you spend a weekend 
faking a French accent,
maybe you buy an even more expensive stereo
and build a separate and self-sufficient world
inside the garage. 
Something happens something happens something happens.
Repetition repetition repetition. 
The saddest painting I ever saw 
was on the carpet in my friend's hallway
where he tripped one night
carrying a gallon of red.
This was just before the divorce.
Just after he told me he was trapped 
inside some idea of himself,
one he swore bore no relation
to what the rest of us had been seeing.
"Nice shirt" has always meant too many things.


11 comments:

  1. There is more to the motivation of any truly satisfying literary character than “because I can”, “because I want to” “because I like it” and “because it gets me more power and money”.

    Damn real people. They're just not very interesting.
    ~

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  2. For starters:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuf9nwSrtDA

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REkbY-eEuus

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  3. When I was in high school, I had a massive Muriel Spark phase and read pretty much all of her nine thousand novels. I remember the outlines of them but not what I liked or why, particularly. I keep thinking I should try again and see if they hold up for me, still have a stack of them from then.

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  4. one day at a thrift store, i stumbled across an eno/fripp tape called no pussyfooting, or rather, (no pussyfooting). looks like jim h already posted links. anyway, the tape player i was using somehow both ate the tape and played the tape in reverse at high speed. it was amazing.

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  5. That's fucking awesome. Had you asked me, I would not have remembered that there was television in the days of Discipline/Indiscipline. And you're right, as entertaining as Belew was in his various incarnations, he was a kind of a showboating assclown compared to Fripp. Not that this invalidates his worth or anything. Or that past tense means I think he's as dead as Billy Zoom apparently isn't.

    Hanx for teh kittez. For the most of you who didn't know them:

    Little One: "Fuck off. Where's my dinner?"
    Callie: "Love me, love me, love me, just a baby kitty, love me, closer, closer..." *slash*. "Hah. Sucker."

    For all that, it was Little One who, at the ripe age of 23, beat the hell out of a raccoon that entered my former house through the chimney, scaring the hell out of my then-nearly former wife, but not nearly as much as she scared the raccoon, which promptly beshat my then-nearly former wife's living room and study. She spent the last year of her life (yes, 24, both of them) prowling the house, looking for raccoons.

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  6. "She spent the last year of her life (yes, 24, both of them) prowling the house, looking for raccoons."

    Q: Your then-nearly former wife?

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  7. Whoa, No Pussyfooting backwards at double speed is an interesting idea. Might do that later.

    Robert Fripp by himself tires me, as does prog on the level of King Crimson (it's a personal problem), but Fripp and Eno, all the albums including the recent ones, is the best thing ever.

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  8. Maybe Green posing for all those photos with his back to the camera is suddenly cool because telling the audience to eff off in a tweedy and passive-aggressive way is emblematic of the age of Obama.

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  9. Jim: re: 24 years old

    He meant both CATS. His then-wife *wishes* she were 24 years old at the time.

    Yes, I will have my saucer of milk now.

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  10. That would be a rare encounter you had. He probably appreciated your seeming indifference.

    A soundscapes concert I saw in the late nineties was beyond any possible expectations I could have had. Crimson in 2008 was pretty damn good as well.

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