2007 in Music

I've been reading a lot of indie music 2007 top-ten lists the last couple weeks, spending most of the time being frustrated at the truly average choices that wound up filling virtually every chart. Honestly "In Rainbows", while certainly an enjoyable album by a great band, was not the most inspiring or worthwhile music to listen to of the year. In fact, after listening to literally hundreds of albums this year - this was, after all, my first and last year as a proud member of the inimitable bittorrent server OiNK - I've only come up with 3 albums that merit making a top-ten list.

#3 was Burial's album, released in I think the beginning of November. It was a brilliant and very logical progression from the dark, nuanced sound he had mastered about a year previously with his self-titled debut. This year, the beats were pretty much the same, if a little denser and melodic, with the big change being the inclusion of haunting, ephemeral vocals on most of the tracks. Although many have dubbed this album, as I have, a progression from the first album, and therefore superior, I found it to be a little less focused. It was still a fantastic album, but perhaps in its ambition it lost some of the godlike perfection. Definitely nothing to be ashamed of.

#2 was Justice, easily the best electronic dance music I've ever heard in my life. Justice may be proteges of Daft Punk, but their sound has eclipsed anything that existed in the era that they reference so frequently. Not only that, but since they released their breakthrough hit "Never Be Alone", they have proven to be inimitable by their contemporaries as well. I would say Justice was the album released this year that I listened to more than any other album. As dance music, it suits a startlingly wide variety of moods. The reason I call it my most frequently played album released this year is because my overall most frequently played album of the year was still last year's Burial album. This has been a beautiful year in electronic music. However...

My number #1 album of the year had very little to do with electronic music, although I believe there were a few cymbal sounds played backwards on the first track. And that wasn't even a highlight of this stunning mosaic of music present, past, and future. I'm talking about 'Rise Above' by the Dirty Projectors. A freely interpreted "remake" of an old Black Flag album called Damaged, this record throws some of the most otherworldy, twisted melodies around like they were totally natural. The vocal harmonies are very consistent and interesting throughout, the guitar playing is completely original, clearly based on a mastery of classical guitar styling, and the song arrangements forge new paths for pop songwriting in virtually direction imaginable while maintaining a certain orthodox elegance that makes them unforgettable even after a couple of listens.

OK, so there's my top three albums of 2007. Overall, it was a great year for music. If anything, there was too much new music. So please everyone, stop making music. Most of you don't know what you're doing.

Here's my honorable mentions (5 of them): I really loved all of these albums, and they probably each deserve volumes and volumes of praise and analysis, but for now, we'll just settle for artist and title:

Ava Luna - Lemming
Blonde Redhead - 23
Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity
Menomena - Friend and Foe
These Are Powers - Terrific Seasons

R.I.P.

If I finally eliminate all of you, can I then rest in peace? My life amounts to nothing more than an enervating series of evasions and repulsions, and, failing that, rejections of all those that enter into it. By being alone, with no one even caring, I get the fleeting sensation of immortality. As I exist out of mind, I exist out of time. But, in the end, this is the most devious mirage of all. Because, looking back, when I wonder what has happened to my youth, my untroubled years -- then it will be manifest that I have always been the one who has not existed.

Picasso - a poem by Carlos from his "sweet nothings" period

you ain't no picasso
More cowbell
the Modern age
the oh so quiet show
sixeyes
stereogum
the music slut
musicisart
yeti don't dance
skatterbrain
said the gramophone

Burial, Bobby McFerrin

In Bobby McFerrin's un-heralded tapestry of human voices called Circlesongs, he approaches African chants and oral (and thus vocal) tradition through the multi-faceted lenses of minimalist repititions and jazz improvisations, calls and responses, dense circular patterns. In doing so, he crafts an intricate lullabye for the ages. I listened to this album every night for three years, from 1996 through 1999. In about 1999, I began to develop and nurture a deeper respect and appreciation for contemporary music, as more than just a lullabye, or a vehicle upon which to drape my own personal uses.

The eight year interim might be called a search. In the process of searching, it goes without saying that I all but forgot the concept of music as a lullabye; music that is so perfect, so complex in its rhythms, so intricate in its repititions, and so dense in its sonic tapestries, that it can be listened-to on a level above normal everyday senses; music that sinks so deeply into the depths of your innards that it can do little but lull you into a deep slumber, night after night.

The question is, what music is capable of this?

The answer includes, but is not limited to, Bobby McFerrin's Circlesongs, and Burial's two efforts thus far, "Burial," and "Untrue."

Justice

Quick note on the Justice concert: do not go to a Justice concert in the summertime, because you'll probably die. It'll be way too hot, and you just might have to cash in your chips, so to speak, if you try to endure it. Of course, then you'll be playing right into the postmodern concept piece that is each and every Justice concert.

We all know that there's a dark theme running through Justice's apocalyptic dance music. On the album, you can hear it best on the track "The Party", which itemizes in great detail one woman's routine for getting ready to go out and have a good time against the most somber, reflective music on the album. In concert, the concept becomes much clearer, although I personally still wasn't able to piece together exactly what Justice is trying to say. Maybe it's the ringing in my ears.

Carlos, who was wearing earplugs, was able to capture the basic idea of it succinctly: here you have a DJ booth, set up on a giant heavy metal stage (symbolized by the stacks of Marshall speakers on either side), and a giant cross in the center, providing the most tangible imagery associeated with the group. They are asking the question, "How will the world end?", and the answer is "More or less just as this concert is playing out right now."

That's the genius of Justice - by doing what you are expected to when you go out to something like a dance concert, you are part of their exhibition. You get dressed up, you do the drugs that will give you the experience you seek, you rub bodies, kiss, spread germs, listen to music that's so loud that it permanently damages your hearing systems, and throw yourself about in ways that reveal how deficient your ability to preserve yourself really is. You're all facing the stage, like an altar, with the big cross in the middle, but the ubiquitous symbol in this context feels empty and soulless. In this rapturous scenario, self-destruction seems to be a new form of salvation.

Justice is truly a product of the 21st century. Music has always been visceral, ephemeral, and as a result, a perfect medium for posing those important existential questions that have always been with us: namely, how do we handle the fleeting nature of our existence and make the most of our lives given this truth? Justice is among the first music acts I've heard that are not necessarily interested in the brevity of a human life, but in the inevitable passing of the human race. If you view the behavior of the few humans gathered on the dance floor and extrapolate it to the tendencies of humanity as a whole, you have painted one of the most vivid and engaging apocalyptic scenarios that has yet been explored.

Dirty Projectors

I've heard a lot of good new music lately, which makes me feel like life in general might be tolerable for the duration. But enough about me. The absolutely best song I've heard in a long, long time is "Spray Paint (The Walls)" by Dirty Projectors. It's hard to say exactly what moves me so deeply when I listen to this song, but I think it manages to capture so poignantly the spirit of an entire generation, in a way that can only be accomplished using words from a previous generation. It might "feel good to say what (you) want", but you can probably learn more about yourself by listening, and the Dirty Projectors illustrate this theory with their own brilliant creation.

I would recommend the album "Rise Above" to anyone, not only for the lofty and well-formulated concept, but also for the visceral thrill of the music itself.

Instructions

1. Wake up at 7:00 AM SHARP
2. Preheat a sweet potato to 350 degrees
3. Take a shower
4. Take the dog for a walk
5. Put the sweet potato into the oven
6. Take another shower
7. Bake a pie for breakfast

What kind of pie?
A SWEET POTATO PIE

VICTORAY SAWA No. 3

A haze fills her mind and then she wanders off. She wanders into the back room. In the back room is a boy spinning postcards on a small table, taking a sip of whiskey on ice and then spinning a postcard again. He looks up from this mundane activity and catches her eye.

"You know," he says to her, a stranger who seems to recognize her as nobody else in the place does. (Because she came alone.) "You know, way back when...

(He is referring to a simpler time, when he first met her. She does not remember this. He was young, nine years old, and she eleven. He sat on an overturned paint bucket, his knees sticking way up and pointing at the sky, and she walked past with her mother. He, out of loneliness, threw a crumpled up paper at her. It was a note that he had written, not for her, but for a pretty girl who walked by. The note read "I like you, will you be mine?" She never read the note. The paper bounced off her head and landed on the ground, and the girl's mother gave the boy a nasty look, grabbed the girl's hand, and walked off. The boy blew a bubble, from the gum he rolled around underneath his tongue, and spat a rapid spray towards the sky.)

back when we were younger, you were the prettiest girl I ever saw."

"What do you mean?" she responds, her eyes becoming more and more clouded from drink.

Just Behind Your Eyelids

Imagine, for a moment, a vile worm, one that could invade a... human!

did nathan just saay "darkness overcomes me"?!

The Heat, the Darkness, the Heat

I have lain in my bed for fourteen days. With pneumonia. I swear to myself that the sloshing around inside my chest cavity that I am convinced that I feel is purely psychosomatic. I look to E., who is sitting on the black leather chair in the corner.

"I know I'm dying," I say. Her gaze does not move from straight ahead, and her eyelids don't flutter from their position, halfway covering her eyes. Between strands of damp hair, I can see her forehead gleaming red.

Later, in the night time, I look out the window and, above the expanse of bricks and windowsills, I catch a glimpse of the sky. From this angle, on my bed, I can just barely make out the dense hazy fog that drenches everything with blackness, and behind it, a faint glow where I imagine the moon is shining strongly. I close my eyes and then I open them again, and then I close them again and keep them sealed shut. I try to imagine that I live somewhere between the top of this great cloud and the bottom, somewhere in which black fog extends around me in every direction, and where no matter how hard I flail and claw at the air, I can never get anywhere.

Early in the next afternoon, E. walks in to the room, the top half of her white skirt sticking in the heat to her thighs. As she hands me a tray, made neatly with small plates, she scratches the back of her neck with her other hand. I pick up a bit of cool rice with two chopsticks from the plate on the lower left, and I try to ignore the pain in my chest as E. crosses her arms and watches me chew it.

The Darkness, the Heat, the Darkness

Darkness overcomes me, and the heat settles softly in thin layers like disembodied kitten paws. When did this happen, this transformation from light to dark? Was I sleeping?

No. That doesn't make sense, the light of dreams is a dull, artificial luminescence, the cold flicker of underpowered fluorescent bulbs along a dingy white hallway. This tranformation from light-- this light was no light of dreams! What I've just left was the penetrating radiance of the... sun? Or maybe it was a tanning bed. EIther way, I should have been wearing a blindfold.

But it doesn't matter now. My eyes are no longer worth protecting, because I'm lying in the kind of darkness where I'm quite sure, on a rational level, that I'll never see anything again.

And with the darkness, that stifling, inescapable heat! Now pressing down like a column of kitten paws, stacked forty meters high in a silo. It occurs to me that this is my first time in a silo, although I hadn't hitherto noticed the absence of this experience in my life, however illuminating. I decide to relax for a while out here on the blazing prairie, resting my eyes without bothering to close them.

The Heat of the City

I lie on the black and white tiles of the kitchen floor on my side so that my right cheek is halfway between a black tile and a white tile. My right eye is forced closed by the pressure from the floor on that side of my face, but my left eye looks outwards, towards the refrigerator. It is open slightly, and the scant modest cool air is wafting from the open vegetable drawer right onto my head. Once in a while a bead of sweat drips from my hair onto my nose or into my eye or onto the floor, and my left eye darts upwards, landing and focusing on the half-empty pint of heavy cream that sits in solidarity on the top shelf of the refrigerator.

E. walks up behind me. I can tell it's her because she and I are the only ones home. Her footsteps stop inches from my head, and I watch above me as her torso bends over towards the refrigerator.

"We're out of food," she says, looking straight down at my head. Then she yawns, leans back up, and walks away.

The Heat of the City

Sometimes I think that I can stay up all night and outlast the heat. I check the 5-day forecast over and over, hoping that if I check it enough times, tomorrow's temperature is suddenly going to drop by 10 degrees or something. I'm looking for a mistake, human error on the part of the weatherman, that will make tomorrow more tolerable.

But staying up all night is the wrong approach. It only makes me hotter, lonelier, meaner. There's no escape; the heat's going to be here, relentless as a wolf on caribou, for the next month at least. The only way one can survive, it turns out, is by being a good citizen - trustworthy, dependable.

Music Review No. 4

Cymande - The Message
I love any song whose lead vocals are, first off, sung in octaves, and second off, totally awesome. I listened to this song growing up, and every time I hear it I want to dance in a way that makes my head stay perfectly still while my body gyrates around and around.

The Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Choir - Kalimankou Denkou
This traditional piece, as performed by this world famous ensemble, was all the rage in the international world music scenes in the latter half of the 20th century. I had never heard it until the other day, when Karina showed it to me. I was sitting on my black swiveling chair, and over the course of the piece I found myself sinking lower and lower down, until I had slid off the chair completely. I lay on my floor until the piece was over, and when it was done I looked up at Karina, who was sitting on the bed a few feet away, and I said "now I can pretty much die." Then I mentioned that I had heard a thing by Yoko Kanno, the esteemed Anime composer, which had very blatantly ripped off Bulgarian choral music, but that it had never occured to me until right then that this was her source. Anyway, later that day we went out for bagels and while we were standing in line I did my best to sing all of the 24 parts at once, much to the chagrin of everybody in the line, but I didn't really care because right then I knew about something truly beautiful.

Music Review No. 3

Hang On The Box: Heroin And Cocaine
Utterly surreal and utterly catchy. Almost as addictive as the drugs about which they sing.

OOIOO: UMA
This one packs a wallop.

Menomena: The Pelican
Basically the best song written by humans with a piano and other noise machines.

LCD Soundsystem: Someone Great
Good background music while shopping for sun dresses.

Deerhoof: Scream Team
Fan tastic.

Conlon Nancarrow: Study No. 6 for Player Piano
Carousel music for the depraved, or just depraved music for people riding a carousel. I feel dizzy just listening to it.

Hanne Hukkelberg: Cheater's Armoury
I just spilled coffee on my favorite shirt but I didn't care because I was listening to this song.

Music Review No. 2

Hang On The Box: What Is Now
Sweet song from China. It's like you want to dance but you're too lazy and you just eat chips instead.

Change: The Glow Of Love
A disco standard. It's pretty good for the ladies, but not so for a Sunday afternoon.

Jimmy Castor Bunch: It's Just Begun
A four star funk jam dance classic. Listen to it and play it for your sweetheart.

Psapp: Hi
I was drinking root beer when I heard this song, and I thought the two stimuli went together perfectly.

Battles: Ddiamondd
Nathan plays this song from his room sometimes and I always think about how cool it sounds, then I wonder who it is, then I realize it's Battles, then I think to myself, "I should listen to Battles."

Krzysztof Penderecki: Threnody For the Victims of Hiroshima
So beautiful that you wouldn't know it's serialist. Like the aftermath of nuclear wars.

The Futureheads: Fallout
A mellow one from these British people. Their first album is better anyway.

Music Review No. 1

The Thermals: I Might Need You To Kill
Pretty sweet and the guitar is pretty sweet.

Giacomo Scelsi: Ygghur for Violincello Solo
Its originality makes me roll on the floor.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe: My Journey To The Sky
Only the best song ever written.

James Brown: People Get Up and Drive Your Funky Soul
The tops. It makes me wave my arms like a crazy person.

Feist: The Park
Pretty sweet.

György Ligeti: Lux Aeterna
Even better outside the conext of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Apparently simpler to perform than it sounds. Basically the best choral piece ever in the world.

Merzbow: Woodpecker No. 2
It's like, "turn this noise down," but without the value judgment. The recording is just at a very high volume and I was fairly to moderately startled when the track came on in the shuffle.

Esther Phillips: Do Right Woman, Do Right Man
I wept for hours and hours.

White Rabbits: The Plot
Only the best song ever.

Drawing Machines and World Domination

"Soon, I'll have the whole world watching my drawing machines while eating out of the palm of my hand!"
-Artist, racontuer, and self-described astronomer Tristan Perich

robot wife! Now with 'guff knob'!

into the domestic

I stood over the sink, cigarette resting deceptively easy in my left hand after I had just taken a long drag. I let the soothing smoke fill my lungs. The air was heavy with smoke throughout the kitchen and into the adjacent living room.

The dirty dishes were piled high; there was a problem with the plumbing to the dishwasher, and I hadn’t had time to wash the dishes from the previous night and morning since arriving home from work.

I knew that Jacob and Michael needed dinner before I took them to soccer practice, but we were out of the microwavable dinners that I usually save for busy nights like tonight, and Dan wouldn’t be back from work until much later, so it would be impossible for him to pick some up…

Leslie was screaming in pain; she had been chasing Joann with a hammer that Dan had left in the living room after fixing the coffee table leg, and she had hit her chin against the wooden television cabinet. She had tripped on a corner of the brown-orange carpet that had come apart from the floorboards. The television itself was blaring – absolutely blaring. It was a commercial for Beast Wars Transformers action figures. Tears of frustration welled up; my parents never bought me action figures, beg and plead though I did.

VICTORAY SAWA No. 2

The Viper is just outside the room, just around the corner, I know, but I cannot face him, becuase he took my parents. This hotel room, with red velveted carpets, is where we stay, is where the mantels are adorned with photos of my parents and me, smiling, surrounded by falling orange leaves, by black umbrellas in grey city rain. But my parents, of course, are gone. They were gone when I came back from my walk. The Viper, Victoray Sawa took them.


I leave the room and turn the corner, and The Viper Victoray Sawa stands before me. He is two heads taller than I am. His right arm, right leg, and the whole right half of his body are the palest paper white. His left arm, his left leg, and the whole left half of his body are the darkest colorless black. He stands, in the shape of a sumotori, legs bent at the knee and hands on his thighs. His face, half white and half black, looks at me with closed eyes, his mouth locked in a snarling frown as on a dark samurai mask. In this way he stands, his cold malevolent stare painful to my eyes.

The Viper Victoray Sawa opens his mouth and a dark liquid spews forth in bursts, burning my flesh. I cannot scream, and I cannot move. I am afraid yet I feel no fear, for Victoray Sawa has taken me too, and I can never go home.

VICTORAY SAWA No. 1

A dark figure flickered across B. Harrington's field of view as he lay awake in bed. He began to shift and stir in place, with a silent resignation more than an acute fear. Young B. knew exactly what would happen, now that the lights were out. The dark figure would creep in through the crack underneath the door, the crack that let in traces of light and faint echoes of adult conversation. The light, and the sounds, came alive beneath his door. On the wall next to his bed, there was a chip in the offwhite paint, about the size of his young palm, that hovered silently near his head as he lay. In the daytime the chipped paint would gaze across the room silently and coldly, and watch B. as he drew comics and built block castles. At night, though, the dark figure would glide across his floor, and up the wall, and into the chipped paint, and in that instant, the palm-sized spot would begin to smile a dark smile at young B. He would know he can't move and he would know he can't show his fear. He would know he can't sleep. Victoray Sawa watches young B. and he knows that if he falls asleep then Victoray Sawa will get him.

Part Deux

13.

There was so much filler I could barely stand it. It was all filler, and no substance, so I wiped off my nose on my sleeve. My sleeve, even though it was wet with tears, reeked of something else, something far more vile. Yet despite this distraction, I continued to stare, to ponder. One comes to frightening conclusions when one ponders for too long, and in this particular instance I came to the frightening conclusion that I had no choice but to die. I would take pills, I'd take lots of pills, and I would lie on the floor and wait for somebody to find me. I guessed in terms of percentages. There was a twenty-four percent chance that somebody would find me before I was dead. There was a fifty-one percent chance that someone would find me within one or two days of my death. There was a twenty-five percent chance that somebody would find me in the next week or month, and a zero percent chance that I would never be found. I say zero because the term "never" of course implies a necessary infinity, and in infinity nothing is impossible. I could sense black forests and unearthly worms with sharp teeth. I could sense alien invasions, sparkling gunships floating through the air like flies in the summer, almost serene from a distance. But most of all I could sense only filler, only filler, only filler. In a Kissa in Nagasaki there are listeners, passionate listeners with great loves. In the Omo valley there is a young boy running on the backs of bulls, who themselves grunt and charge around, who want nothing but one moment of rest and a lap of water and a break from the bleeting sun. In kitchens, mothers clutch their children close, fearful of the sounds of sparkling gunships, wanting nothing more than to be the protector, dying for their own, noses at the future and musical gestures coursing through their blood. A mother's feet, which are sore from running forever, which crack their skin on painted pots, and a mother's hands, roasting coffee beans. In these moments I dream of eating pills, of losing myself in hallucinogens. Of drugging the humanity out of this, this imperfect brain. In these moments I bask in the beauty of the organism, the ticking scattered mess of people who will never know each other and who are all the same. Why do we study? Why do we study each other?

December 2006

December 2006
One of the most difficult things about making Logic was allowing ourselves to finish the album. Tracking had been completely at the end of May but we had since reached an impasse where as soon as one thing was satisfactory, something else was wrong. Vocals were done and redone. Mixes were made furiously late at night, only to be scrapped the next day. I processed every track through various plugins, ultimately deciding that everything sounded better without most of the effects. The album became our baby, our obsession, and while I didn't make it obvious to Spencer that I was thinking about it alot, I was, and I know he was too. Since we were so involved in the making of this album, it was almost impossible to send it to Northeastern Digital to get mastered.

It was also a huge step. I'd never recorded a full length album before and I'd never had anything mastered. When you send something to the mastering house, you're putting the final product in someone else's hands and you're saying "I've done the best I can do with the tracking and mixing of these songs, you make it sound like a unified whole."

Toby Moutnain, who mastered Logic, is a real mastering engineer. He's done a whole bunch of digital remasters for Bowie, Frank Zappa, and I believe he generally makes a living now doing classical mastering. I felt stupid sending him off our crappy little mixes, made for damn-near free in my TV room at home. It felt like cheating the system to be able to take something out of my house and have it play through Toby Mountain's expensive monitor set-up but that's exaclty what happened. I half expected to get a call from Northeastern Digital with the news that they simply couldn't work with our material but of course they wanted the 600 dollars...

I'm not sure the mastering was worth it. People like to champion the importance of mastering and I've seen it with my own eyes, but I think that money could have been better spent. We could've made better recordings if I had a little bit more freedom with my mic choices. Maybe if we'd bought some soundproofing materials or something, we could've cleaned things up a little.

As it stands, I'm more happy that we managed to finish than I am with the finished product itself. The music itself is almost inconsequential at this point. What's important is that Logic is a slice of a certain time of my life. I recorded that album to get over a girl...I was sad and I did what I was best at all day. I threw myself into something for the first time. I tried to make a statement. I'm hardly trying to minimize Spencer in all this but I can't tell you why he made the album. I guess he had to get the music out of him.

rainstorm

I kicked some water into the air, the rain kept pouring down.
There was a puddle, growing and morphing to match the contour and crevices that marked the pavement below my feet, testifying to the natural erosion and wear of countless past rainstorms like this one. I dug my toe into the puddle, my foot already having reached the point of saturation where I was no longer worried about where the water was in relation to my foot. I gave the water a good kick, sending it back into the air, only to disappear among the unremitting torrent.
I kicked and splashed, hoping my friends would see, my parents. I hoped my former elementary school teachers, police officers, and accountant would come and see me splashing in the street even as housewives slammed their windows to protect their furniture from this onslaught of vindicating liquid. I asked God for a clergyman, a servant of His word, to walk by just at the moment I tumbled into the road, rolling, splashing, and kicking in the inch-deep puddle, so as to catch a glimpse of my enjoyment of my modest but undeniably private beach.
The only thing I wanted more than death at that moment was to be witnessed, a voyeuristic perversion of desire. As my eyes rolled back into my head, I imagined a crowd of spectators, watching from buildings, nay, from a stadium, and I was the lone gladiator still standing, evoking the awe and pity of thousands.
My desire was fearsome, even to my own dark soul, but in practice I was spared moral consideration of any kind; no one was around, anywhere in sight. I assume they must have been shuttered in their homes, with their pets and children, clustered around the hearth.

kick it

I got seven daughters, and one has a lisp,
So I put them on a spit
And burnt 'em all to a crisp.

I got a baby in the oven and a wife on crack,
I got a dog eating a muffin
All dressed in black.

Kick it.

liner notes: study #1

i'd just like to take this opportunity to thank my father, grandfather, great-grandfather, great- great-grandfather, great- great- great-grandfather, great- great- great- great-grandfather, great- great- great- great- great- grandfather, great- great- great- great- great- great-grandfather, great- great- great- great- great- great- great-grandfather, great- great- great- great- great- great- great-grandfather, great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great-grandfather, and last but certainly not least, my great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great-grandfather's father (sorry, i'm not sure what that's called), because without you, none of this would have been possible.

1b.

Sit.:
Miguel H. sat towards the back of the car of an old wooden roller coaster. It was empty but for a young couple in the front. As the car ascended, with a long series of metallic clanks, and in preparation for the great drop, Miguel sensed a certain unease eminating from the young couple in front of him. He could not hear what they were saying, but the young man was looking away, off into the distance, while his companion's head was rocking back and forth as if she had lost control of it, or as if she were in an extreme amount of duress.

Q. 1:
Was it Miguel's responsibility, or that of the jaded boyfriend, who was feeling and increasing, and decidedly sharp, amount of disgust and loathing for his companion, to care for the afraid girl?

Q. 2:
Given the fact that the boyfriend's disgust for his companion was rooted in his perception of her as a sheltered little child, whose psyche had never and could never fully develop as a result of her problematic childhood, and given that her illogical and unbased fear on the rollercoaster represented, to him, a symbolic culmination of all of the ways that she could never live up to his expectations of a companion, and that based on this realization he intended to end their relationship in the near future, was it then within acceptable behavior for him to look away?

Q. 3:
Given the fact that during the course of their ride the roller coaster experienced a mechanical malfunction, and that the car was derailed from the track and fell to the ground, and that the young woman was fatally wounded but that Miguel and the young man went home the same day with only minor injuries, who, between Miguel and the young man, was left with a more profound sense of self-loathing and guilt?

Contents of Package

one bar of Arriba Chocolate: Premium Varietal Chocolate from Ecuador
one bar of Milk Chocolate with almonds
one car shaped cookie (cute!)
eight ounces of Premium Gourmet Chocolate Fudge

thanks mom.

i have nothing.

12b.

Pablo loved admiring the black chickens as they ran around his feet in the evenings. They blended in with the black asphalt of the city streets, and the moon made their plumage glimmer like a night time lake. He felt as if he were walking on water, a steady sea of feathers extending in every direction, the occasional sharp claw pattering across his bare feet, the occasional beak caught in the skin of his calves.

He thought of rats. He thought of cockroaches skittering across sub-tropical alleyways, a clacky-clack sound like clocks, like machinery. He thought of the worst kinds of vermin, caked black and gleaming of filth, always emerging in the high-contrast portrait of night-time to break the darkness with their shine. Seas of cucarachas, seas of lao-shu.

He thought of black marbles, spilt, rolling across the carpet, of Maria's voice seeping through the walls, of the fear he felt when he knew that Maria would see the mess he had made. Of black dress shoes scraping around on the floor of a dance hall, and a young Pablo sitting cross-legged amidst the feet, too utterly afraid to stand, and too utterly trapped in the jungle of legs to be alone.

1, 2, 3,

, and with all of his strength, kicked his own leg forward, and heard one loud squawk of pain from one particularly large chicken, and his joy at seeing the trembling bird scurry about, bruised, bumping and pecking his comrades.

1, 2, 3,

, and a fine dinner he and his mother would soon enjoy.

longing to escape...

I want to be beautiful, but my mind...!

My mind and my ego, should they be the same? They couldn't be more disparate, and this is a cry for help. The masses, the sheep, where do their minds lead them? They are not led by their minds, their own ambitions or dreams; they are led by the shepherds.

And the good shepherds... where do their minds lead them? Are they not, like I am, but a slave to the all-powerful coersion of the mind's directive? The will stands such little chance.

I want to be everything, for you, but in the final analysis I am nothing, and whatever I might have wished is of little consequence.

the forgotten sense

The street light above flickered a little, but it hardly made a difference with the full moon shining with enough intensity to illuminate even the farthest recesses of this famously dark alley. I was leaning against a wall smoking a cigarette, one foot flush against the brick with my knee jutting out in front of me.

A tall man with a very sharply fitting-trenchcoat and a broad jawline suddenly came through the door just to my left. My back arched slightly, and a slight jet of adrenaline pumped through my body. Naturally, I didn't want to be seen in this place, and at this hour...! When he appeared he was facing away from me, and I thought for a moment with a sigh of relief that he wouldn't take notice of me at all. However, just as he took his first couple steps down the street leading away from me and into more welcoming quarters, he spun around quickly, as though he had been planning to do so at that moment, and looked directly at me. He spoke while he was still approaching, rearing up glaring down at me about a foot from my face.

"What are you?"

I wasn't sure what to make of this question: "I'm sorry?"

"You have to know what you are not. You will not experience any sense of joy, accomplishment, or connection with other people as long as you fail to realize this."

I ignored him, shaking my head. I just wanted to be left alone. That seems to be an impossible feat in this city, even in those narrow streets and back alleys that would seem specifically made for lonely people to wallow in their remorse and cathartic self-pity.

He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me vigorously. I could feel pain shoot through the back of my neck and my eyes watered a little. I guessed I was here at this moment for a reason, so I didn't make any action whatsoever to fight back or even to defend myself.

"What do you want?" he asked.

Images of everything, images of nothing flashed through my mind. People I've met. Material things. Dreams, journeys, and real emotions, all things that I once knew. There were a lot of things that I wanted, I realized. However, when I tried to answer his question, no single thing, not even a random selection from the infinite list of desired things that I had formed in my mind almost as a reflex, could be uttered. Indeed, all of my powerful desires were stirred into a concoction of filthy grey soup, like the puddle in front of us along the curb left over by the rain of earlier this evening. Mostly I wanted to be left alone.

"Leave me alone. Who the fuck are you, anyway?"

Just then, I realized that I lacked a desire to hear the answer to that question. What was I doing here with this man? Did I, or did I not want to learn his identity? I could feel the weight of my desires descend upon me, as though the Earth had suddenly swelled in mass and the gravity coefficient had increased proportionately.

Before another moment had passed, I turned away from the man and ran down the street without looking back. I sprinted until my mind was clear. I sprinted until I felt my heart would explode. I sprinted until I saw the sky fading from black to the grey of a crisp pre-dawn, and sensed the indiscriminate warming blanket of the sun fluttering down on all things, living and non-living, anything with a surface. I tumbled into the dewy chill of a small patch of grass between the north- and southbound lanes of a major boulevard.

I realized at that moment that I, too, had a surface, and all at once I was freed from desire.

2.

The sun came up early, but I continued to sleep.
I sat up, and the sun was already up. The sun came up over the horizon, which of course was an illusion, since the sun actually stays in one place while the Earth perpetually spins with a certain ROTATION and ORBIT that causes it to reveal all of itself to the sun every 24 hours or so.

Why is the hour defined as 1/24 of a DAY? We know that 1 MONTH must be an approximation of one lunar cycle, e.g. the moon mak in g one full ORBIT (and in the case of our friend the MOON, the ROTATION is exactly the same length as the ORBIT (How can this be, you ask? How can the ROTATION and ORBIT, out of all of the different possibilities, be exactly the same? There must be a force, you're saying to yourself. A powerful guiding hand that keeps the moon ROTATING at that speed, exactly the same as the ORBIT time. (Were you thinking this to yourself? I'm sorry if I'm coming across as presumptuous...) The truth is, the great forces of the TIDES on Earth make the Earth so interesting to the man in the moon that he cannot turn away. He's holding the moon back from turning faster so he can look at the Earth continually for the rest of the approximately 5 billion years the sun has left to give off enough light to illuminate the Earth to be looked at. It's the TIDAL FORCES on Earth that cause the moon to have the same ROTATION and ORBIT time.)), but what about a WEEK? What about an HOUR?

I don't know what an HOUR is, but I'd like to figure it out, so I can learn how to exploit them better, while I still have them. On average, in America, a human life has only about 666,000 of them. Spend them safely and wisely. Use one when the devil comes a-knockin'.

Trixell's Last Dance

Trixell glanced through the window.
Trixell gazed through the win>wd-xwkjl
Trixell looked through the glass wiX)WWwwlklqn;_

The people laughed.
The people danced.
The people gesticulated wildly.
The people conformed to the parlance of their times.

Although Trixell wasn't sure what they would say next, he decided that their speech patterns were predictable.

It was like a recurring dream about a Hormel product, o

my god that's not the way

Dark Entry

12.

Pablo was sitting in the corner facing the wall. His mother, Maria, sat at their dining room table eating a sandwich, and muttering, as she chewed, short quips along the lines of "you little bastard," and "I should never have had you," and "you little rotten bastard." In between the quips, she would take long, loud inhaled breaths that mixed with the tunafish she was chewing on, the type of sound that is a result of taking bites that are too large, coupled with being unable to breathe through one's nose. Her nose became stuffed whenever she was upset, and on this particular day, she was. "You sick little fuck," she said, again, and before she had swallowed what she was chewing at the moment, tore off another bite of her sandwich.

Pablo sat cross-legged, with his back to his mother, and slowly but audibly banged his head repeatedly against the point in the corner at which the two walls intersected. Aside from the sound of his banging head, and the sound of his mother's chewing and breathing, the room was strangely peaceful. He counted to himself as he banged his head. "Sixty four," he silently thought, and a few seconds later, "sixty seven."

On the seventy-second, the last lit bulb in the simple fixture that hung above their kitchen table sizzled out with the sound of a sighing old man. The chewing abruptly stopped, but the banging continued. Maria looked up at the dead light fixture, a sleek arrangement of black metal rods with bulbs pointed in all sorts of directions in a very modern fashion, and she swallowed her tuna sandwich, and began to weep. She rested her elbows on the table, on either side of her plate (which, incidentally, was covered in crumbs), and rested her face in her hands, and wept in a quiet, but distinct fashion. Pablo continued banging his head against the wall in the darkness for another few minutes, until he reached one hundred and then, with a complacent look on his face, sat upright, his back as straight as could be, waited for just a moment, and then stood up. He turned to face his sobbing mother, quietly walked over to where she was sitting, and picked up the messy plate from between her elbows. Her crying did not show signs of slowing down, and in fact Pablo noticed the darkened outline of his mother visibly shuddering as he placed the plate in the sink.

Knitting Factory 1/26

poster

secret show

if you have a reason you should tell it to the ghosts if i'm not mistaken there is still a place where nobody goes
if you must disturb me won't you please find me the truth cause we've all been waiting and i'm tired of fools