The Baying Hound

The Accidental Platonist

2009-01-14T16:33:00.000-08:00

It could be said that I wouldn't be writing here at all were I not suffused with some sort of melancholia, but feeling robust enough that I could bother taking it public. But rather than plumb the details of this melancholia (the origins and nature of which are probably as elusive to me as they might be to you), I'm instead going to focus on something that's striking me just at this moment: that my dissatisfaction with myself implies that I do hold some idealized notion of what self is; that my dissatisfaction with the world, with art, with friends (or shortage thereof--not to discount those who remain loyal, supportive, and ever at my side), with religion likewise implies an ideal world, a perfect art, a perfect notion of [P/p]latonic friendship to which the real should conform (though it may never actually attain such heights).

What interests me, here, is that as a self-proclaimed nihilist--even a self-proclaimed ethical nihilist--I've essentially denied the existence of Platonic ideals (though not all small "p" platonic ideals; hence the grammatical chicanery above, wherein I allow both the existence of platonic friendship--that is, friendship without eros--and, grudgingly, of Platonic friendship, or perfect, ideal friendship). Good and beauty have no objective existence; they're constructs we impose on what is. And for good reason: What is will not likely organize itself into what's useful and edifying if we don't impose our "arbitrary" limitations on it. But once you assume that good and beauty exist independently of what we feel or agree is beautiful, or that love is something other than a collection of responses, agreements, and sacrifices, you assert, by default, that there is theos, or deity.

I'm not necessarily holding this out to any of my Christian readers (I do have 'em), though I'm not exactly withholding it from them either; it's safe to say that they would answer, "Well, YEAH!" Not that they'd admit to being Platonists (they tend to hate it when you suggest that Judeo-Christian conceptions of God tend to combine Greek pantheism with Greek anthropomorphic theist mythology), but they'd suggest my "accidental Platonism" is some whisper of the divine in my ear. Indeed, I may not be looking for an answer at all. Hell, I don't even know what the question is.

What I find interesting, I guess, is that for all my claims, I am still both driven forward and held back by the notion that there is a better me--gentler, kinder, more consistent, more potent, less selfish, less frantic, less insecure, a better artist, a better husband, a better son, a better mentor, a better student, a better friend, a better being--and that this better me will live a better life--more edifying, more focused, more altruistic, more moral (whatever we take that to mean). Driven forward because the desire to improve, to reach these ideal conditions, gives me reason to function (because function, when I'm down, is very, very difficult); held back because I have a blinkered view that keeps me from seeing alternate paths, alternate states or conditions that might be equal to, even preferable to, the notions to which I've chosen to devote myself.

I think even a radical individualist must be a Platonist, to some degree. Once you've defined the ideal condition of "individualism," you've already lost the battle. If, as an ethical nihilist, I believe that we must invent our own ideals (being presented with nothing but raw chaos, punctuated by random pockets of order, by the universe itself), then I'm suggesting that we must still, like Plato himself, hold that there are conditions transcendent to the real to which the real should aspire.

American Wulver

2008-10-09T13:19:00.000-07:00

Just thought I'd share a few shots from American Wulver, the solo show I've been working on over the last several months. I performed a 9-minute cut therefrom at Bumbershoot in September, which is where these pics were taken (by the wonderful Vince Vonada at Acappella Wedding and Family Photography).

Yes, I could probably afford to drop about 15 lbs. Duly noted. :(

If you missed Bumbershoot, it looks like I, along with others, will be performing at Balagan Theatre at 11:00pm on Friday, October 17th. The event will be free (though, being as it's a theater, donations will be more than appreciated).

Little Big Town

2008-09-11T14:50:00.000-07:00

This is brought on by the political tension in the air, but this isn't about politics. This is a rant on something that, I think, transcends (yet underlies) politics. What interests me right now is a certain current underneath the rhetorical tide, something that seems to speak more to the notion of "two Americas" than mere red & blue, liberal & conservative. Rural and urban is definitely part of it, and is probably where I'm gonna start, but I think it's something far more insidious than that, since that's just about where one lives, which grows, often as not, from the field in which one works and/or what one values.

This might be about the difference between those who deal in numbers and those who deal in letters, or those who handle objects and those who handle cultural commodities. I don't think it's about who works with hands and bodies vs. who works with the mind, because I find that division is the most facile of all (painters and sculptors work with their hands as surely as do farmers and mechanics, who use their intellects brains as surely as do professors and physicists; the physical, generative theatre I do demands that I read as astutely as a copy editor and maintain the physical condition of a professional athlete).

I suppose, in the end, the manufactured division I see is that between "the elite" and "hard-working Americans." As far as I know, most everyone here, if not everyone I could possibly think to ask, would claim to be the latter. So if we're all hardworking Americans . . . who the hell are the elite?

I've seen a lot of complaint in the last week or so from conservatives about liberals "talking down" to the rural voter, to "small town" values, and thus, presumably, to the "average voter." And while I've seen more conservative complaint than I've seen example of that about which they're complaining, it would be disingenuous to a degree beyond my capacity--I being an honest, if cheeky and evasive, sort--to suggest that I haven't seen a few people showing a lot and a lot of people showing a little of the kind of condescension being described.

Of course, we're talking about this now because we Sarah Palin--Alaskan, Christian, conservative, hockey mom--is on the national stage. How quickly these defensive, hard-working small town residents and their equally hard-working apologists forget the years (at least) of contempt leveled at urban, liberal "elites," and dismissal of their (okay, if I'm being honest--OUR) values as decadent, effete, out-of-touch with "hard-working" Americans . . . as though no one ever called us to ask about that rent check we held onto, waiting for a paycheck to clear; as though we never had to figure out how to make the same rice & beans we'd been digging into for a week look like a real meal, maybe even a marginally different meal than those rice & beans represented same time, day before; or had to take a second job to pay off the uncovered portion on our (okay, MY) wife's 4th throat surgery in the last decade while still slogging away at old student loans, medical bills, and business investments.

I use my personal story to illustrate because the notion of hard-working Americans and elites is a matter of personal narrative; and in everyone's narrative, he or she is the hard-working citizen, and the people who just don't get it are elite. When I sit in my one-bedroom apartment--the rent for which is over half my monthly income--with my wife, an "elite" is a jug-eared Texas millionaire with a vacation home; when I'm onstage or on the Fray, with my tailored diction and fondness for grammatical (de)construction, mocking the way that same millionaire says "nukular", well, apparently I'm elite.

Funny thing is, most of the people I know in my city (or my "Little Big Town," the Emerald City) came from small towns themselves; a lot of us learned our contempt for small towns--and many of us do, admittedly, have some--because we were beaten, bruised, mocked, ostracized, and, in some cases, raped, burned, and assaulted with arms in our little bergs. Some of us were clumsy and weak; some of us had no head for team sports; some of us just had aptitudes or interests in the directions of pretty words, soft fabrics, big ideas. We may have doubted in our churches, or recoiled at the idea of meat. Some of us may never have developed that pubescent interest in the opposite sex, instead gravitating towards our own, or maybe we did a little of both. Or maybe we just liked opera, which made it seem like we lacked "normal" heterosexual desire. Maybe we drew a sharp, astonished breath the first time we heard Sonic Youth, or My Bloody Valentine; maybe dissonance made us feel whole in ways that melody and harmony never could. Maybe we hit our growth spurts late, or early, or we were fat. Maybe we were just too fucking smart, or smart in the wrong ways.

Whatever it was, a lot of us found reasons to move away from those small towns, and for a lot of us--even those who suffered astonishing abuse at the hands of their peers and, mistakenly or not, blamed that abuse on rural small-mindedness, but particularly for those who didn't, or who did, to a degree, but also had beautiful memories of watching the sun set on a lake, or glimpsing a gigantic sturgeon a handful of feet below our canoe, or bowing to a cheering audience, or cupping a breast in the front seat of a '77 Volvo, the sun roof open, thinking even the football players don't have it THIS good--yes, for a lot of us, it was HARD to leave those small towns, where social norms were savagely enforced, but rents were low, competition in our disciplines was minimal, and somehow, no matter how lonely or ostracized we were, everyone who DIDN'T want to hurt us wanted to help us--they knew us, recognized us, knew we weren't right in the head, but, by God, he's Mike's kid, and I'll never forget that joke Mike told at the office Christmas party . . .

So it was hard in the cold hard city, and we had our struggles too. We DO have to hold down desks and counters, stack boxes in warehouses, prepare your food, drive your cabs, even if we spend our nights working a guitar or piano, treading the boards, or leafing through books. Maybe some of us'll get to quit our day jobs, to eek out a living on articles we're only half interested in writing, or slogging through ten Neil Simon plays in the hope that we'll get tossed some Shakespeare or Mamet now and again, or that we'll get to play our original songs instead of covering the fucking Eagles for another fucking wedding. Maybe some of us are programmers, and find good work at Microsoft, or we teach at universities, get tenured, and live comfortably. Or maybe we'll keep those day jobs, and do some art for big money, some for beer money, some for no money, in the hopes that someday, maybe even after we die, someone will look at the work we never, ever compromised and say, "There, there was a hound ahead of his time."

And maybe it's all bullshit, and maybe it's all a waste. And maybe the same goes for your life, your family, your God, your values. After all, we only have the stories we tell about ourselves, and the faith we put in their veracity. Maybe there's a heaven, a hell; maybe I'll come back as a banana slug or a wolverine or a Texas millionaire. Or maybe we're just fucking worm food, pre-soil; maybe the afterlife is the life our death makes possible.

If it sounds like we're making fun of you when we talk about your "guns and religion," well, remember that we sometimes seek our comfort and edification in our foreign cinema and kind bud, or our cheap wine and punk rock, or our transcendental meditation and macrobiotic diets. And you make fun of that, too (or so it looks from here).

If it sounds like I forgot to tell your story, well, remember that I don't know it. My own story--making it, telling it, finding some way to weave entertainment from it--has kept me busy. You worry about what those rap videos are doing to your kids; I'll worry about whether I'll ever be able to have any, or whether existence precedes essence, or whether there'll still be roles for me when I'm a little less young and a little less pretty.

Yes, this has been a ramble. Sorry for the disturbance. If you've made it this far, well, thanks for your indulgence.

If you need a moral, a thesis, it's this: We're ALL hard-working Americans (more or less; don't cloud the issue by nattering on about the drunk asking for change), and elitism doesn't come with a benefits package. I might have contempt for you, but that doesn't mean I don't see you as a brother; it means you have something I wish I had, or you don't have something I can't imagine living without, or I want you to understand me and like me (because I want everyone to understand me and like me), and you just plain don't, and that pisses me off. It's nothing personal . . .or rather, it's strictly personal, and it has nothing to do with what I think about where you live, what you do for a living, how you account for life and eternity, or even how you vote. I'd love for you to believe as I do, because I think it's true; I'd love for you to vote like I do, because then I'll have the leaders I want (or am, at least, willing to settle for); I'd love for you to buy tickets to my shows, especially if I'm getting a percentage of the door. Hell, if we liked the same kind of ice cream, I'm sure it would inspire someone to make more. But in the end, I'm just trying to do what I can with what I've got, wherever I can do it, and to make it all a little more bearable with whatever creature comforts, codes of honor, and spiritual directives appear to me to reflect truth and/or offer the greatest possible utility.

Rather like you, one imagines.

Heh, heh . . .

2008-05-22T16:02:00.001-07:00

You paid attention during 91% of high school!

85-100% You must be an autodidact, because American high schools don't get scores that high! Good show, old chap!

Do you deserve your high school diploma?
Create a Quiz

Um . . . That's what THEY think. The only thing I remember paying attention to in high school was a rather impressive cross-section of Helena, MT high school girls (and maybe a few college girls, and at least one teacher).

Confessions of a Churl

2008-05-22T10:09:00.000-07:00

The title for this post would be a reasonable title for the whole blog, truth be told. But then there'd be pressure to be a churl all the time, and deep down, I like being a nice guy.

Don't laugh. I'm serious.

Mind you, I'm aware I fail at being a nice guy more frequently than I care to admit. In person, I frequently monopolize conversations, nattering on about music or cinema or, worse, bloviating endlessly on matters of my personal philosophy or artistic ambitions. Worse yet, I can also fall into long, silent funks (sort of like the last, oh, six or seven months, for those of you who only ever see me or speak with me here), that should be a relief from my exhausting loquaciousness, only it too often leads to an uncomfortable air of stewing, of self absorption, or, worse yet, a sort of mute, animal stupidity brought on by too much weed, too much booze, or lingering brain damage wrought by the many, many tantrums over the years in which I beat myself on the face until my vision went fuzzy and my cheeks swelled like I was storing nuts in 'em. I am, frequently enough, sullen, cantankerous, and elitist.

The frustrating thing about falling short of what you desire to be--not what you desire to have (though I've fallen significantly short on that measure) or what you wish to (or think you should) do (another mark I'm not reaching), but what/who it is you would like to look back and say you have been, or look forward and say you will be, or settle into and say, "I AM . . . "--is that it seems like something that should be entirely within your control. Something that extends naturally from your value system, your worldview, your perception and understanding of reality and your place in it. Not being an asshole should be as simple as deciding that you're not going to be an asshole and sticking with it.

I'm not blind to the fact that this dilemma could emerge from my apparently contradictory interests: my disdain for populism in tandem with my radical egalitarianism; my talky and pedantic anti-intellectualism; my burning desire for authenticity coupled with my desperate need to be loved by everyone I happen to encounter (or at least everyone I encounter who, for whatever reason, inspires some loyalty, admiration, or other connection in me).

Thing is, none of this explains how I manage to take an argument from a place like this to a place like this, or how I manage to mangle friendships with fumbled words and misread intentions, or how I become a nearly impossible spouse every time we hid the financial skids (which happens so often that I should start thinking of it as the status quo, and the rare peeks above the surface as the anomalous events). It doesn't really explain why I am, or when I became, the sort of person who becomes so agitated when listening to phone messages that I snap my fingers and pound on my desk when listening to them, hoping against hope that they will speak faster and let me get on with my very, very important task of appearing to be busy while fostering my ever more tenuous social connections on the web, frantically trying to convince myself that I am loved, that I even can be loved, enough to fill this hungry nothing at the heart of my being.

Sometimes I think it's just my Gemini, Jekyll-Hyde thing that makes mere being so bloody complicated. Jekyll is accountable, but congenitally unhappy; Hyde is quite a bit more fun, but those around him must work harder to avoid getting bitten in the ass (sometimes quite literally). Trouble is, as I mature, Jekyll gets stronger, which makes Hyde angrier, which seems only to increase the level of conflict . . . except during those (rare) periods of time during which I am wholly one or wholly the other. Which is not how I wish to live; the uncollapsed paradox, composed of both entities, comprises the central tenet of my being, my raison d'etre.

I have no satisfying conclusion to which to bring this. This post is bourne less of a literary impulse, and more of a desire to post after such a long absence, and to make heard my cry in the dark without the obligation to give it form or beauty. I've been mired in all manner of generative projects for the last year or two, and frankly, I'm tired of form and beauty. Or tired of serving form and beauty; I imagine I'd still be more than happy to let them serve me . . . which makes me wonder if Hyde isn't rising, after all.

Clawing to Zero

2007-12-03T10:10:00.000-08:00

We're clawing our way to zero right now. I'm sure that we'll eventually claw our way past zero, perhaps even up into a comfort zone, but we need to find a way to stop running deficits. I'm working two jobs right now. In fact, I've been working two jobs for the better part of the last 4 months, my show with UMO having been a paid gig that gave us some significant extra income for the months of September and October.

What's frustrating for me is that I see myself as the kind of person who gives to or helps those less fortunate than myself. But I don't have much time to give to those less fortunate if I'm working two jobs, trying to write reviews (for my de facto third job), and trying to write a play and a possible libretto for the rock opera (for which I've found a potential collaborator). And I can't very well give anything material away when I'm trying to claw my way to zero from this pit of debt.

It's hard, faced with money troubles, to think about much of anything but money troubles. A lot of people are inclined to say, "Oh, it's the holidays; we all feel like that." But presents, at this point--whether for 'Stine's birthday or Christmas--are actually the last things on our minds. We're talking rent, here. Power. The phone and DSL. Our trip to visit 'Stine's folks is largely prepaid, which will be quite a blessing, and I don't think either of us have particularly high-falutin' notions regarding gifts this year. We'd just like to make it as smoothly as possible from this year to the next one and to see next year be a little brighter than this one as regards our financial prospects.

Lest this should reek of despair, however, let me not that, well, we ARE both working our asses off, the debt IS shrinking, and if our overdraft charges for the month look suspiciously close to our actual income, well, it only goes to show that we're just one good shot of real money away from stability, that if we could just catch up, maybe speed ahead enough that we could experience a week or two of being flush, our income and expense might actually match (just barely) for the six months or so it will take us to finish our consolidation. Meanwhile, I chant. And rather than chanting for money or wealth--though I do that--I chant to be better able to offer myself to others; to be a better provider; to have the capacity to make others' lives better; to make better, more enduring art. I chant, not to be a richer man, but to be the boddhisatva that a man of my particular aptitudes ought to be.

All right, that's enough of that.

What else to report?

Well, I've been reading the Harry Potter books. I know, I know, I'm a latecomer. I get immersed in my religious and philosophical texts, my art films, my heavy, dissonant music, and I forget how to read for entertainment. So I forced myself to make a go of this, and now I'm done with book 4, and I'm reasonably hooked. The only other reading I've really been doing, on a slow but occasional basis, has been on The Beast of Gevaudan, the definitive compilation of testimonials, letter, and reports on the true-life mystery-monster of the title. Dry but fascinating reading. I'm writing a play on the subject; it's the narrowing down of my scope that's giving me trouble. But no matter. I'll keep reading the book 'til I get the whole picture, then find the threads that fascinate me.

Thoughts are random and scattered, largely as a function of my merciless work schedule (even if the work itself is mercifully--though sometimes maddeningly--straightforward), so I can't grant you any great philosophical insights today. I'm in something of a worry spiral. So forgive the tepid prose and financial woes; I promise to have an honest-to-dog post sometime in the near future.

Think of this as me clearing my throat.

The Changeling

2007-10-03T14:43:00.000-07:00

I'm not here. There is no I. I am not the 'hound; I am of the 'hound. I am Jack's surrogate baying.

This is not a post.

This is the placeholder telling you that the 'hound will post, that he can post, that he's still capable of posting. This is the scarecrow; it holds the murder of crows at bay until the 'hound can again prowl the fields.

Or it's not. I wouldn't know, because I'm not so much here.

I am Jack's bleating ennui. I am Jack's overstuffed schedule. I am Jack's seething anomie.

Jack is tired and incoherent. He'll be back if he ever again decides that he has something worth sharing.

/wail.

Random Bits

2007-08-07T16:36:00.000-07:00

So it's been, like, a hundred years. I suppose a lot has happened, but it's all so hard to quantify, I couldn't give much more than a snapshot, and I'm ambivalent about journal-posting.

I've had a birthday (35 now). My parents have been in town. I started and finished Zen Tales, an UMO project in which I adapted several Zen, Buddhist, and Sufi fables for the stage, which we then performed using aerial trapeze, yogic acrobalance, physical clowning, minimal stage combat, and judicious use of silence. (interesting side note: I love silence onstage, but audiences are usually less than thrilled. Our test audiences this time out, though--which included a fair number of children--actually ENJOYED the use of silence in this show, and many said they could have used more. Only goes to show you never know, as they say.) I think I may have put on a little weight, but I also think I may have taken some, maybe even most, back off.

For those of you not yet buying or subscribing to ALARM Magazine, this summer's edition features three articles by yours truly: an interview with Dungen, one with Sharon Jones, and another with Antibalas. There are a handful of reviews in there as well, though many that I wrote didn't make it in; perhaps I was over-featured in the articles (suffice it to say, then, since my review isn't there, that you should give Rebuilding the Rights of Statues a listen. I didn't know they were listening to Joy Division, Bauhaus, and the B-52s in Beijing, but I'm glad they were).

In a week-and-a-half, I begin work on my next project with UMO, another in which I'm serving as writer and actor/athlete; the subject, chosen by UMO founding member and project head David, is time, specifically the question of whether it exists or whether it's a construct to which we willingly enslave ourselves. I'm excited, scared, impatient, and not at all ready. What else is new?

'Stine just got her tattoo yesterday. It's lovely. I can't wait to see how it fades, blends, becomes one with the skin (instead of being something imposed on it, which is how all tattoos start out). It's funny that something picked for such science-geeky, alternative-medicinal, hippy-ish reasons gives off such a heavy metal vibe, but that's part of the charm and paradox of my lovely wife.

Other than that, what's to say? Still fighting the fight. Chanting more than usual. No longer in a class, martial-arts wise, but continuing to integrate new stuff I've learned with old favorites, keeping on the trajectory of attribute development, pursuing answers--or at least better questions--regarding the ever-evolving mystery of the body in space. Keeping tabs on all the mysteries, really: spirit in flesh, individual in community, iconoclasm in the middle class. What would you expect?

This was sort of an obligatory post to keep me on the radar. Hopefully I'll have something more specific and/or coherent soon. If not . . . well, at least you know I'm around.

A Moment of Silence . . .

2007-04-12T10:49:00.000-07:00

. . . for the late, great Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Readers will quibble over whether he was a great writer or a merely good one (I'm sure some cad will insist he sucked, which is fine; I've never liked Hemingway, so I have to assume that there are no universally applicable, fully objective standards). Others will debate their favorite works (I'm partial to Slaughterhouse 5, which, IMO, beats the pants of of Heller's Catch-22 for surreal war satires; but in the end, my REAL favorite is God Bless You Mr. Rosewater [although Venus On the Half Shell, a book supposedly written by Vonnegut character Kilgore Trout, which I've never been able to verify as being written by ANYONE, but which sits on my bookshelf and has a vaguely Vonnegut flavor about it, is an apocryphal contender]).

Anyway, R.I.P., you cranky old bastard. 84 ain't a bad time for an artist to go, especially one who saw some of the shit you did.

ADDENDUM: Turns out that Venus on the Half Shell was written by Philip Jose Farmer with Vonnegut's permission; Vonnegut was apparently unamused. Nonetheless, it's a funny bit of satire, and I've interests in adapting it--in whole or in part--for . . . well, whatever medium seems to absorb it.

I still maintain that it has a Vonnegut flavor about it, and I think it's interesting that it actually predates The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which it does very much resemble (though it's infinitely more American).

Cultural Nudity: No Shirt, No Shoes, No Being

2007-04-04T15:23:00.000-07:00

I was having trouble getting started on a post today. I've had an idea brewing since about the time I made that first post after a long break, but I haven't been able to find the time amidst my personal and professional chaos to sit down and write it. I started something an hour ago, involving tortured references to Foundationalism and Coherentism (which only applied in the most slanted possible way to the matter at hand), in addition to an attempt to tie it to this post and rumors of someone's misunderstanding thereof, and . . . well, it was just too dang thinky for me to parse out the relevant bits and get to the story I wanted to tell. What sucks is that all those connections--even the skewed philosophical ones, and especially the one relating to the other post--were actually quite real, and quite important, in my mind, whereas the story itself lacks resonance on its face. Could I rely on most readers to make the proper inferences? Would this post be of any worth without them?

I'm not gonna get into the whole debate as to whether blogs are supposed to be good writing or not, except to say that I try to keep things at least nominally thoughtful and somewhat (anti-)intellectual to differentiate it from the multitudes of bloggers who seem to think that their journals are interesting to anyone (though I certainly think some of them are correct; indeed, my hope is that my concepts, and the ways in which I write about them, will interest the reader in the being who formulated them, thus finding them willing to engage with my autobiographical details and prosaic musings). No, what just occurred to me was a conversation I had with 'Stine sometime in the last day or two. I was coming home, exhausted from a day at work following a weekend of some serious writing. See, I had a big deadline for the summer issue of ALARM on Monday, so I had three features and eleven reviews to write (actually, I'd already written four of the reviews, and transcribed all the interview text for the articles, but STILL . . . ) over the weekend. And quite accidentally, I said something to 'Stine that was more true, more profound than anything I could actually have cooked up from my arsenal of noetic recipes.

"If there's one thing the deadlines and money help me with, it's getting over any worry about whether my writing is any good. My title is 'contributing writer,' after all, not 'good writer.'"

Okay, it doesn't look so profound now that I've put it down. But it's still true, and truth trumps profundity. See, it doesn't really matter if I get the best of my craft out there; that's between me and whoever prints, publishes, edits, or markets my work. That's what those people are for. Since this is a forum where I rarely rewrite, and where all middle-men/-women are removed from twixt my readers and myself, I'm actually even LESS obligated to produce good writing, and more obligate to WRITE, to tell the damn story I wanted to tell.

So as far as either my philosophical interest or the connection to the other post goes, we can either address that in the comments, or--should this fail to draw any comment--in a future post, where the dialectics can be unburdened by mere observation. Here's what I was interested in noting, and what it seemed to mean aside from its relation to either big philosophy or its relationship to my other ideas.

I was listening to one of the CDs I'd requested from the list for review. I don't get everything I ask for from every list--there are other writers to take into account--but I don't get anything I didn't ask for, unless my review editor thinks there's something I'd enjoy based on her (remarkably astute) understanding of my tastes. In order to avoid falling into a rut, and only reviewing one or two kinds of music, I do like to shake my own foundations up a little, and request something that resides outside my tastes, if not entirely outside my musical values. **
The process can be a little risky, but it's often quite rewarding.

So I'm listening to one such gamble--we'll leave the artist's name out of it for now--and I'm finding myself a little put out, at least for the first track. It might be because it's blues rock, and I'm just suffering from precisely the prejudice I was trying to address in picking the CD; post-punk theory (because post-punk is nothing if not theoretical) has traditionally demanded that the blue be bled from the blues, hollowing out the recognized emotion constructs in order to create music that is resolutely deconstructionist, situationist, etc. This was partially a function of European bands trying to de-Americanize the essential tools of rock & roll, but, considering that American bands like Devo, Mission of Burma, Talking Heads, and Pere Ubu also engaged in this, it's also fair to say that they were rebelling against the Rousseauist warmth of '60s ideology (it's no coincedence that Rousseau's number one rival, the Marquis de Sade, was such a profound influence in the industrial camp, one of post-punks most easily recognizable sub-genres).

Whatever the reason, my relationship with the blues is tenuous. I love the old, scratchy stuff; I enjoy some revivalists like Mark Lanegan or Hillstomp; I LOVE artists like P.J. Harvey or the Kills who have appropriated aspects of the blues to tell stories that have more personal resonance with me than the ones usually held out by the old masters. But this recording struck me, on first listen to the first track, as belonging more to the school of '70s classic rock (which, if you haven't gathered yet, ain't my bag), with a vaguely Bob Seger-ish tinge that had me sulking.

Now, the album got a LOT better over the rest of the tracks, and I should note that, although that sense that this was sorta my parents music more than mine didn't quite dissipate, I was almost won over by the music itself. I can thank Quentin Tarantino (among others, probably) for contextualizing classic rock in a way that I could appreciate, and the right flavor of Americana can remind me of dusty road trips back in my old college stomping grounds in the SW, and the notion that this music could go quite well with a smoldering joint, a cheap (3.2%) beer, and a desert sunset did warm me to the whole enterprise. But my impulse was still to write this off as something that was only worth having if I was dying for something I could share with my friends who have no interest in motorik, post-punk, drone, dub, techno, hip-hop, art-punk, prog-metal, freak-folk, or anything else that I might refer to as my bread-and-butter.

Since it always behooves me to research an artist's past projects, I looked this guy up on allmusic.com. Turns out his music is most often classified as indie-rock, and is usually compared to post-hardcore acts like the Jesus Lizard. What the hell? Thing is though, as I'm reading his history, the bands that he's toured with, and the way previous reviewers had described his sound, I'm starting to wonder: Did I give the album a fair hearing? Was I tricked into thinking this music was something it wasn't because the blues element was up front, rather than subverted? Did my prejudices against a certain kind of sound make me miss something hiding in plain sight?

So I listened to the album again with new knowledge . . . and it was better. Oh, it still sounded the same, and it's not gonna be something I play all the time. But when I know who I'm listening to, where he comes from, what his widely-perceived intent is in appropriating the sounds he's appropriating, I hear the music differently.

All of this had me questioning . . . well, everything. Had my theory unduly prejudiced me against the music? Had that same theory converted me back? Did knowing this gentleman's history open my mind to his music, or had it blinded me to its flaws? Do we apprehend art with the raw senses or with the whole mind? Does how we absorb a message depend on who delivers that message? Is it shallow to prefer the music when I know it's been delivered by a tattooed (in theory; I don't know that he has any tats) punk rather than some red-state fogey?

Can we approach anything--art, family, politics, religion--culturally naked, without the noetic baggage accumulated over a lifetime? I tend to think not. Maybe when we were younger, more literally naked. But we DO come to define ourselves by the roles we play, because without those roles, we're more and more like everyone else. C.S. Lewis once noted the irony of people insisting that they were "more themselves" when nude, because the opposite is, in fact, true: any one man is more like every man without his trousers, and any one woman more like every woman. Individuation is a result of serial affectation, calcification, rejection, appropriation, socialization. These labels, identities, archetypes do bind us to other people, but we still find space in the contradictions to free ourselves from those binds, and even that would be impossible if we truly shed everything--language, culture, preference, ethics, philosophy. A human without theory--whether or not he or she calls it that--is an organism, a collection of biological needs with few, if any, strategies for fulfilling them.

Truth be told, my review of this record wasn't that far from my original impression (though another CD on which the same artist played with a trio was a slam-dunk, a fulfillment of the furious promise hiding under the surface of the solo work, so I like to think everything came up [bloody] roses in the end); I just softened the criticisms and looked a bit more closely at the silver linings. But I like to think I listened more completely in knowing what the music's context was. Maybe we should be able to consume art without this knowledge. But do we? Ever? It seems to me that by the time we even started to develop musical preferences, we already had language, already had friends who recommended music to us, templates and paradigms by which we judged good from bad. Maybe we've never arrived on art's doorstep without the requisite shirt and shoes (and trousers, of course, though that was always omitted form the convenience store signs).

** - I differentiate between values and tastes because tastes usually speak to matters of genre, where values can transcend genre. I hate to say I don't like x kind of music, but like y kind of music. More correct would be to say that x kind of music tends to operate from a value system different from my own, but when it does address my musical values, I CAN like it (say, Neko Case helping me like country); y kind of music reflects my values as a matter of its construct (say, dub music already being an intrinsically postmodern form), and therefore it doesn't necessarily have to work as hard to meet my criteria. But even that ties me to genre more than I prefer, because there's a lot of suck-ass dub out there, and one really oughtn't criticize country music for BEING country music.

I bring this up because I find that everyone's preferences look snobbish to someone who doesn't share them, and I'm always taken aback when I--who like more individual bands and more individual kinds of music than pretty much anyone I know--am accused of elitism by people who surely dislike at least as many forms as I do (I remember being accused of elitism because I didn't like Neil Simon by someone who didn't like Theatre of the Absurd; I wondered why one set of preferences was perceived as affectation and the other as enlightened populism).

Sample Platter

2007-03-26T14:29:00.000-07:00

For those of you who haven't seen any of my work in ALARM yet, here are some previews of my work in the spring issue:

Here . . .

. . . here . . .

. . . and here.

The 250 word format is challenging; there's only so much you can say in that time. I know 500 would be easier, but I imagine that 100 would also be easier, because it would take away the illusion of in-depth content and leave me to make more impressionistic (or expressionistic) statements about my experience of the music.

On the other hand, I wrote these guys back in January, and I think my new batch is better. So there's something to be said for the practice of doing the short takes.

Anyway, enjoy!

Be, and I'll Just Watch You

2007-03-22T15:04:00.000-07:00

(Props to the criminally under-recognized Julian Cope for the lyric referenced in this post's title, from the song "Soul Desert," on the album Jehovahkill; the lyric quoted is followed, rather devastatingly, with the addendum, " . . . 'cause being is just too hard for me.")

I'm sorry I haven't called. Really. I didn't mean to leave you hanging. I've been busy, but that's not much of an excuse; I found time to play with my other friends over on the Fray, and I don't even like them all that much (I've actually got a lot more over there--click on the "More By This User" key to see what I've been up to--but this review is the only thing that got any honorable mention, so I chose to emphasize it). Well, maybe a few of them. Mostly I go over there to get into debates; it's like a bar I'd never take my wife to because I only go to start brawls.

I had a performance with UMO Ensemble on Sunday, for the Moisture Festival, a great idea (a week+ festival for burlesque, cabaret, clowning, magic, vaudeville, and other arguably archaic forms that, at one point, formed the basis for modern musicals and the Theatre of the Absurd, and a good basic ground for re-enervating, and hopefully innovating, the form) with a terribly and wholly inexplicable name. We were performing as buffoons (I don't actually appear in the picture, but I wore the costume/makeup for the tall one with the horns, and more or less looked exactly like that; the costume defines the buffoon at least as much as the wearer), a staple of the UMO roster with which I, being something of a newbie (I've been a member since 2003, but we've been on hiatus most of that time), had not yet engaged.

A buffoon is the ultimate outsider: deformed (indeed, in the case of Aztooth, not human at all), rejected, interdependent on other buffoons, living in holes in the earth near the landfills and sewers outside medieval towns . . . and liberated to tell nothing but the truth, to exist free of all social grace or obligation, oblivious to stigma, allowed to live in a state of perpetual toddlerdom.

Anyway, we were emceeing the event in question, so it involved a lot of flying by the seat of the pants. I'm a little creaky when it comes to verbal improv--words are a very carefully considered thing to me, though I can react quickly and organically enough on a physical basis--but, luckily, Aztooth is the least verbal of the crew, so I just had to live in the skin. Much hilarity seemed to ensue.

Of course, how could it not? One has a clearer--and giddier--view of truth and being when we use artifice to strip away pretense, costumed that we may run, socially naked and brutally honest, through the world without accountability. Clowns and fools always have a certain advantage when it comes to telling the truth, and fiends & monstrosities have a certain advantage when it comes to seeing it. The rest of us are so tied to the roles we feel obligated to play that we often don't see when the role is doing the talking for us. The role of buffoon speaks for its wearer, of course, but the role itself is obliged only to exist outside obligation; there is no fear of repercussion, no mercy, no sense of consequence, no concern for the consequence when it arrives. The buffoon laughs at being beaten, its anger just a more violent facet of its perpetual amusement.

This article in last week's Seattle Weekly, written by Mike Seely, got me thinking about roles & obligations, about labels and context (which continually both illuminate and obscure truth). The passage that really took me for a ride was this one, in which the narrator--a prank-playing indie rocker--is confronted by someone who chastises him with a label I have often used derisively:

'John, you're such a...a...frat boy!'

"The insult was the equivalent of slapping my face with a white calfskin glove," Roderick goes on. "The term 'frat boy,' as he intended it, had all the connotations of beer-swilling, date-raping, jock, macho crap. I laughed, because to me, a fraternity boy was someone who sneered insults at people with sarcastic WASPy smugness. His knotted-sweater, white-collar disapproval was everything I associated with the Greeks.

"So here we stood, two indie rockers, faced off across a gaping cavern of American culture as defined by the term 'frat boy.' He dismissed my car-wreckin', prank-pullin', fire-startin', gun-shootin', whoop-it-up, call-the-cops American party-makin' with one word: frat. And I saw his sniffing, eye-rolling, weak-assed, big-vocabulary-but-not-quite-used-correctly tsk-tsking as more or less the same thing: fraternity boy. But in fact, we were both limp-wristed, lit-major indie rockers."

The operative words in Roderick's diatribe: "gaping cavern." The stigma associated with frat boys is not a one-size-fits-all-proposition, but has rather been expanded over time to signify anything that anyone might find remotely annoying about white heterosexual males.

Seely goes on to note that no one should get too worked up about the "poor white boy" thing, and I won't get into it here (much; it's probably unavoidable). But it's interesting for me to see not only how two-sided the label can be (or many-sided, if we buy the author's assertion that ANY annoying traits of the white, heterosexual male can be targeted), but on how many sides I've actually been when using the word (only once, that I know of, did anyone ever use the word to describe me; as I was in a bedroom with two naked women when it came out, I decided offense would've been a little out of line). Really, I've been both the merry prankster dismissing the uptight preppy and the trimmed metrosexual chastising the feral party animal; I've been the fashionista and the regular Joe straining at the boundaries of couture. Interestingly enough, while I champion independent music, I've often been dismissive of (some) indie rock (some of my favorite and least favorite bands are tagged with the label), as such, precisely because they seem like a fraternity, a collective with rigid standards of fashion and conduct wherein learning to sing or play instruments is dismissed as selling out (probably because some of them, if they shed the affectation of sloppiness, would be mere rock bands, about as indie as Bob Seger), with an off-putting sexlessness that seems counter to all that I consider revolutionary in art. But I do also see that as a reaction to what I've always perceived as the adolescent sexual culture of the more jockish franternities, where I always imagined that men got laid, but women never had orgasms. Of course, that view may be my envy and not getting laid nearly as much as I hoped I would in college, knowing full well that I could provide the orgasms I was sure the women weren't getting . . .

What was I talking about? Oh, yeah . . .

So anyway, that little exchange noted in the article--in which we see that both sides of the "gaping chasm" see frat boys on the other side--reminded me of this post from back in August. See, I realized as I read the article on the indie rocker/frat boy divide that the term "frat boy," while once indicative of membership in an organization, has become a term rather like "bourgeois," a way of commenting on class, aesthetics, and value systems. And like "bourgeois," it's a term generally only applied by those to whom it might BE applied. Whatever you mean by "frat boy," chances are, if you use it as an insult, that you're white, male, reasonably privileged, somewhat educated, pop-culture savvy (even if you pretend not to be), and either a self-styled bohemian or a meticulously constructed "average Joe." And if you're not at least, say, three of those things, you're not more than a degree separated from someone who's all of the above. I'd also bet money that if you're a male applying that term, you (like me) choke just a little on the envy in the term, probably still a little steamed at the girl who left you alone that night for her frat god, certain to spend her orgasm-less night (unless, you know, she came by such things--pun intended--easily) in the arms of cretin. If you're a female applying the term, I suspect that you either spent too much time around people like me, or you're one of those unfortunate girls who could've been having orgasms with the 'hound, but instead were duped, to your eternal regret, into sleeping with the devil in the alligator shirt.

Shit, what was I on about? Oh, okay . . . See, I don't really think we can possibly underestimate the role that envy plays in this whole tendency to disparage the frat boy; I can only take TREMENDOUS comfort in the fact that my wonderful wife, 'Stine (y'all know her, right?), chose me over a creature that, truth be told, is probably more like me than I care to admit. It seems to me that stratifying the people you see and know over such mundane details as whether you were into Joy Division or Def Leppard as adolescents, the Decemberists or Jack Johnson now; whether you're into arts or into sports; whether sex came easily to you or only infrequently and with tremendous personal, emotional investment . . . Well, it's all very bourgeois, isn't it? It's like the whole geeks/jocks/art fags thing really just followed us into adulthood. Everybody's adolescent angst has become the meat of our arts journalism, apparently.

But this problem isn't just about frat boys and indie bands. No, this is something else. Look at this article about how New Age culture cheapens yoga. I happen to agree with some of what the article is getting at. New Age-ism claims to have roots in Hermetism, Gnosticism, and Rosicrucianism, but it seems to get the doctrines wrong, and the hippie-turned-yuppie concerns of baby boomer self-actualization have done much to confuse my own understanding of spirituality and self-care. As a Western practicing Buddhist, I struggle not only with those who will criticize, en masse, all Westerners who practice Buddhism, but with the fact that they at least partially have a point: There ARE those who use Eastern thought as a way of avoiding the rigors of Christianity, who adapt it to their least noble instincts and create a consumer culture of fabricated needs disingenuously called "tools." The comfort I take--aside from the physical benefits of doing yoga and martial arts, of chanting, of studying the Lotus Sutra and the Nag Hammadi Library--is in knowing that this disdain is itself a function of the same occidental privilege. Atheists who chastise Western Buddhists as insincere are ultimately betraying their oneness of mind with American Christians, assuming that honest Westerners must surely be either Christians or Atheists, that all religions should be approached only in their orthodox forms.

But then, the Vedic cultures from which yoga arose were often anti-materialistic only in rhetoric; some yogis have been ascetics, but certainly not all. Similarly, the debate as to whether the tenets of Buddhism demand austerity was raging in the East long before it was cool in the West to meditate, chant, or read the Sutras. Western boxing neglects the feet, knees, and elbows as weapons, and anything outside the torso as target; indeed, ALL Western exercise before pilates fails to address the body from a holistic perspective. Moreover, if we LIVE in a material culture, in practicing arts or spiritual disciplines from elsewhere, we need to either adapt those arts to what we NEED TO DO to survive here, or we need to leave.

And I suppose you could make similar arguments for fraternities. People who belong to them develop social connections that help them in the free market; artists may even be able to network in ways that can help future career prospects, or to create a new audience. Hell, a fraternity produced one of my plays back in college, with no help from the theatre department itself, because one of them happened to like what he saw at one of my other pieces. Did I sell out? Did I accept help from a lesser being? Does the fact that I wanted to be Kafka suffer because he may possibly have been listening to Stone Temple Pilots back at the frat-house?

These prejudices, and the misunderstandings that surround them, are almost necessary for the color in our language and culture; abandoning "frat boy" as an insult isn't likely to happen soon, and I wouldn't want it to. Insults are prejudicial by nature, and a culture without insult is a culture without flavor. Disdain, discord, and elitism are the satirist's bread and butter; subcultures exist to oppose each other, and the greater good of the culture relies on the proliferation of subcultures, where innovation takes place to enrich the whole. I don't object, either, to our turning either our parts in these conflicts or the "objective" analysis of the conflicts themselves into fodder for critique. But I think we need to recognize, also, that there's something inherently frivolous, and a little hypocritical, about taking these things too seriously. We could be talking about the health benefits of yoga and the dangers/benefits of materialism. We could be talking about the effects of white privilege, about the harmful wages of social competition through sex, about different levels of entitlement, about aesthetic theories and the role of theory vs. technical proficiency in the creation of art. If we spend all our time talking about whether it's acceptable to meditate or chant for more money, trying to decide who is and who isn't more of a stereotypical frat boy, or scolding people for driving several hundred dollars worth of yoga equipment to a class in an SUV, it seems to me that we're missing the point.

Long Time, No See . . .

2007-01-25T13:42:00.000-08:00

. . . you're not gonna get much here. There just isn't enough time.

However, I thought y'all might like to see a sampling of some of the (very positive) reviews we've been getting for Titus Andronicus. Luckily, you can link to ALL reviews here (just type "Titus Andronicus" into the search engine; apparently I can't link you directly to the show's page), saving me the trouble of finding them individually (the PI review is part of a run of capsule reviews; we're the 3rd or 4th show down).

Hopefully I'll have time to post some new writing once the show closes.

Oh, and shout out to Amanda: We are SO looking forward to seeing you this weekend. And I'm excited to have you see the show (when was the last time you saw me perform?).

Finally . . .

2006-12-21T16:55:00.000-08:00

. . . my musings on music are available to the masses. Issue #25 of ALARM magazine is out. I've only found it on one newsstand in Seattle (Broadway News), but I'll have an update for you Seattleites as to where else you may find it; those of you who are elsewhere can check at any of the chains listed at the website, or email to ask where it may be sold in your area (though, being a quarterly magazine, a 2-year subscription is only $20, so if you really love me . . . ).

I just sent a couple reviews for the winter issue; I have a few more due early in January, and we're trying to set up an interview with a local(ish) blues band, so we'll be looking at another update in 3 months or so.

My kids came through like gangbusters for the final performance of my teaching project, and even had some striking things to say about using martial arts as a template for performance and cooperation. The project was troubled with unforseen losses, inclement weather, and what appeared, at the time, to be wavering support and institutional browbeating. But we all pulled through, and damn if it didn't bring some tears up at the end.

Rehearsals for Titus Andronicus are going full bore. I'm excited, but I'm also inclined to keep details close to the vest for now. More on that later.

You may have heard over here that 'Stine and I got a new car. So . . . uh, yeah, 'Stine and I got a new car. It's not that I'm not excited; I just have nothing to add (plus driving is more work than play for me, unless I have absolute control over what goes in the CD player).

Sometime in 2007, I promise a post with actual writing in it. Until then, owing to my being so insanely busy (and inclined to lethargy on the rare occasions when I have actual leisure time), you're stuck with my "Dear Diary" entries. Sorry 'bout that. :^)

So Rises A General . . .

2006-11-27T12:50:00.000-08:00

While granting a disclaimer stating that I believe myself to have agency within my circumstances, it nonetheless seems that those circumstances conspire sometimes to leave me without blogging time. So this will have to be quick.

All of the projects named and described in previous posts continue; I'll get to those towards the end. The big NEW news is that I will be playing the role of Titus in Titus Andronicus, which is being produced by Balagan Theatre at CHAC. We start rehearsing on December 5th; we'll have a generous holiday break, followed by a big push in January. The show opens January 18th. If you live in Seattle, or have any chance of getting to Seattle during the three weekends of the run, I'd really like to see you there. I'm terrified, of course--Shakespearean tragic leads are a new thing for me, and I haven't had to play a character some 20 years my senior since I was in school--but very excited. Titus is one of my favorite of Shakespeare's plays in performance, even if its primitive, end-stopped pentameter makes it one of the shakiest on paper.

I was actually given an opportunity to understudy for a show at one of the big houses, with a paid contract and the works. Unfortunately, it would have interfered with both my vacation plans for Thanksgiving (wherein 'Stine and I visited The Krause House) and, potentially, with the classes I'm teaching. The sacrifices were too great, the rewards too intangible (the understudy gig would have represented a good professional leg-up, but as you should all know by now, my exuberance for the ART of acting is more than matched by my profound ambivalence regarding the current state of theatre and the acting PROFESSION). And it seems to me to be a not inconsiderable karmic/cosmic coincedence that I declined the understudy position on the very day of the callback for Titus. Serendipity plays a strange game.

Other than that . . . my kids are doing great work. I got back from vacation to see that a couple of my most devoted students have really taken some initiative, and shown some leadership, in concocting some remarkably well-formed vignettes around the idea of wordless, symbolic combat-dancing; they've even found some creative ways of applying combat principles in completely non-combative context. If I ever create an adult class out of this, I may invite some of my older students from this leg to be my assistants, because they're doing fine, fine work. I'm tearing up a little just thinking about it. Frankly, they're so good that I have to assume it's really nothing to do with me; I was simply the vessel by which they discovered the principles they needed to unlock their own potential.

Still waiting on publication of my articles (the issue comes out in a couple of weeks), but the review editor emailed me the new list for the March issue, so I guess they were willing to have me back. And there are some sweeeeeeeeeeeet offerings in this batch; I can't wait to start my new stroll through the dubby, proggy, trippy, dark, and atmospheric. A celebration of my first publication, meanwhile, should be fortcoming, pending the arrival of December's issue on newstands. Locals, stay tuned.

Let's see . . . the new James Bond movie is awesome; Daniel Craig is both the strongest actor and sexiest presence ever to play 007. Vacation in Albuquerque was lovely; Amanda's kids are darling, and of lovely disposition, and I love playing the crazy, funny uncle from Seattle.

OK, that's it, news, frivolities, and all. Be well.

Slapdash & Slipshod

2006-11-02T14:21:00.000-08:00

They have said--and they will continue to say--that accomplishment is a function of preparation. And they have been--and they will continue to be--wrong. Preparation is what we do to keep our own sanity. Accomplishment is the accident for which you must prepare, not the fruit of that preparation.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Someone who, unbeknownst to me, keeps up with my goings and doings almost exclusively through my blog pointed out today that it had been a while since I'd posted. I have to admit that I didn't realize just how long it had, in fact, been. So I'll try to catch y'all up a little, and I'll do so as quickly as possible.

I'm about 2 1/2 weeks into my teaching project . . . and loving it. I don't know if I'm any good at it, but I'm . . . well, I'm tremendously proud of my kids. To be fair, it's only been KIDS for one class; it was KID for most of our time.

Our class is growing slowly. But then, what I'm teaching, while hardly new or radical, is a little esoteric. Offering to isolate the philosophical and responsive principles of martial arts for the sake of creating physical, improvisational, generative theatre exercises is confusing enough for the average layperson, or even for theatre practitioners unaccustomed to generative work, let alone to young people of limited-to-nonexistent theatrical experience who have strugged within the public school system.

But for all of that, the kids who HAVE come to study have been enthusiastic, receptive, occasionally enraptured. The girl we've been teaching at the beginning has not only been studying at home, but has been teaching her roommate the exercises, and finally dragged the roommate to the class on Sunday (she'll now be joining us every Sunday, being unavailable for our Tuesday and Thursday classes). Even the parts of the training that may seem more hokey to some--like the recitation of the Dojo Kun (an absolute article of faith for me)--are going over like gangbusters.

Now, I don't have any illusions that my teaching is what's making this click; I'm just happy that it's clicking for my first formal teaching project. I wonder whether there isn't an unsavory, paternalistic character to the satisfaction I derive from this project, but I can only hope that my doubt and fear that this might be the case means I'm checking in on my intentions adequately, and making offerings in good faith.

Anyway, if all goes well, I should be able to head up a second, more advanced class in this sometime in the next year, and then maybe a version for paying adults sometime in the next 3-5 years. Or not. Right now, I'm just focused on teaching the class as is.

In other news, the magazine for which I did some writing in September and October has been contacting me about creating a subheader, a blurb for the cover, and a synopsis for the table of contents, as well as a photograph and a bio for the "Contributors' Page". So it looks like the article is getting published. No word on the reviews, but they're better than the articles, if only because I have more experience writing reviews, so it all bodes well. I intend to throw myself a little party when the issue comes out.

I had an audition today, and I have another one on Sunday. Today's didn't go all that well, I think, but I've had worse. The people for whom I was auditioning were roundly pleasant, though, so it's not a total loss.

Okay, that's it. Sorry I couldn't come up with something more well-written, but I'm afraid this entry is what I could squeeze out between my many other obligations.

Heh, Heh . . . Amusing

2006-10-05T16:59:00.000-07:00

You Are Incredibly Logical

Move over Spock - you're the new master of logic
You think rationally, clearly, and quickly.
A seasoned problem solver, your mind is like a computer!

How Logical Are You?

Lotta good it does me, huh?

Come What May

2006-10-05T09:42:00.000-07:00

As of yesterday, I've turned in all my materials to the music magazine: my 7 CD reviews and my interview/feature about the hip-hop band. It's out of my hands now. I fear I made some rookie mistakes--my one and only pan may have been a little hasty and narrow-minded; my feature's a little wonkish, politically speaking, and seemed to require a level of journalistic experience I don't possess; and my tone is . . . well, what it is, and it may well be found off-putting. But the point is, I guess (I hope), that I took the assignment seriously--though not without a spirit of fun--and completed it (just barely) ahead of schedule. So while I can, and probably will, torture myself just a little with wondering whether any of it will be printed, whether they'll ask for the CDs back and tell me never to write again, or whatever, the truth is that I'm done unless they ask me to revise something (which would be a good sign, right?).

Between that and the successful completion of my first levels test, I can now turn my attention to worrying about my teaching project on a full time basis. Actually, I'm trying to absorb these last two landmarks, because I think they'll have a positive effect on my teaching, if they let them. My martial art studies have really gotten me thinking about what it means to be an artist who functions from a physical place, while writing about music has me thinking both about being an artist who addresses things by way of language and about being a critic, an artist whose art is to analyze art, critique it, try to generate (or discourage) the interest of a would-be audience. I'd like to think there are some lessons on perseverance and multi-tasking in there, as well.

All of this now has me hankering to perform again. That's neither good nor bad in and of itself. I don't have much control over whether anyone in town happens to produce anything that piques my interest; if I'm to write it myself--whatever it is, be it a solo show, music, mutant sketch comedy--it'll be months, at best, before anything is presentable. But I've got the itch, and it actually feels sort of good. It may be that I'm comforted that I still possess that urge to any degree, or it may be that I recognize in the things that I'm doing the seeds of my growth as a performer, and I'm just getting excited to start planting.

There's nothing that inspires me to perform like a truly inspiring performance, which brings me to last night. Well, other than a really BAD performance, in which case I want to perform just so I can fix the damn thing; but really, there's nothing that so cements my investment, my belief, in the vivid, sensual, violent, compassionate power of art than a performance that wields that power confidently, rapturously, and unapologetically.

So I thank my stars that I was able to witness the glory of TV on the Radio at the Showbox last night.

I'm a latecomer to TV on the Radio fandom; they just never showed up on my radar until this last year, when I heard them playing in the ticket office at the theatre where I'm employed. I was struck by a resemblance to . . . well, I thought at the time it was Genesis as led by Peter Gabriel, and I stick by that to a certain extent; my only revision is that they might more aptly be compared to Peter Gabriel at about the time when he recorded "Biko", after he'd worked with Fripp and Eno, when world music was his new tool and not the whole toolbox, and his gift with an anthemic melody was at its peak.

Anyway, I would hear them now and again over the last year, and think, "Damn, I should get me some o' that." But for some reason, I never did. There's just too much music out there, you know, and I only periodically scrape together enough money to purchase CDs (which points to one of the top 5 reasons I'm trying to turn myself into a published music writer: free music). Then, earlier this summer, when I decided to treat myself to some music, I simultaneously made the decision to specifically seek something new, so I could write about it and send the piece to the magazine with which I'd been in contact. As luck would have it, TVOTR had a brand new release: Return to Cookie Mountain. If you're interested, you can check out my review here. In any case, I've never looked back. The album truly grows richer and more complex with each listen. But what really emerges is something that you usually expect to see up front: an anthemic heat that speaks to some common passion buried deep in the cells. TVOTR is that rare collection of studio wonks that takes clear aim at a universal pop vocabulary, experimental populists who can navigate the perfect hook or a rogue harmonic theory with equal aplomb.

Did I say studio wonks? Guitarist/vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Dave Sitek can't really escape that charge. Comparing him to Lee "Scratch" Perry and Brian Eno has become so pointedly the norm that it's no longer subject to charges of hyperbole, and the dense layers of noise that make up TVOTR's recorded output are clearly the product of someone--or several someones--playing with toys in their home studio (dammit, I want a home studio!!!). Given that, these boys have every right and reason to suck live.

Good thing they don't.

Return to Cookie Mountain is such an impressive feat of technology and songwriting that I'd like to think I could be forgiven to hearing the prog-rock and missing the sexy, sweaty soul music that actually sits at its core. If I still didn't recognize the soul after seeing them live, you'd have to conclude that I wasn't paying attention. Lead singer Tunde Adebimpe oozes charisma both sexual and spiritual, and sings with a fierce conviction rarely seen today in either the theory-drenched world of post-punk and indie rock or the prefab monotony of big studio pop. Kyp Malone adds a suitably weird presence to the proceeding, augmenting and harmonizing with Adebimpe's fervent yowl and blending the angular precision of funk guitar with the steady wash of noise championed by classic shoegazer bands like the Jesus and Mary Chain. Sitek is a more elusive presence visually, but he still makes that presence felt, both sonically and in the theatrical sense.

Collectively, TV on the Radio exude all the athletic grace and rhythmic rapture of a Gospel service, even a Pentacostal revival. When, on their first encore, a girl from the audience leapt onstage and began dancing with Malone and Adebimpe, they didn't miss a beat. When they invited Grizzly Bear--the opening band, a psychedelic folk outfit in the same vein as Animal Collective--onstage to tinker with percussion instruments for the final song of the evening, the idea of musical performance as ritual, as community gathering, as celebration was realized in a way that I haven't seen since my last Sky Cries Mary show (and TVOTR's songwriting is stronger). Even now, almost 12 hours after the fact, my feet still aren't quite touching the ground. Even at its earthiest, this experience was not of this earth.

Good Things and Unintended Consequences

2006-09-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

This is gonna be a quick one. Basically, I wanted to say that I passed my martial arts level test; I'm now a phase one, level 2 student. There are three phases, and three levels in each phase. This really just expands the number of classes I have the option of taking, accelerates the pace a bit, and increases the number of weapons I may get to handle in any given class. It hardly puts me in any elite upper tier, but it moves me closer to where I can lobby to become a core team member (level 3 or above), and, eventually, start training to teach others.

I don't want to jinx anything, so I won't name names or count on publication . . . but I was finally contacted by a nationally distributed music magazine. They were interested in my writing, and I've been reviewing the CDs they sent me over the last two weeks (I've sent them 4 reviews; I've three more to cook up), and I had my first interview with a band yesterday for a 1500 word feature due . . . well, any day now. The transcription of the relevant points from the interview already well exceeds my necessary word count, so I'm not worried about coming up with the verbiage. Some judicious editing, a good intro/conclusion . . . we'll see. No guarantees at this point, but I've heard some great music, learned a lot about my own writing (when your reviews are supposed to be 250 words, you learn a lot about distillation), and had the opportunity to meet and speak with two of the nicest, most intelligent members of the Seattle arts community and of, I'm given to presume, the hip-hop community nationally.

If it turns out that any of what I've written gets printed, I'll be sure to let y'all know. And if you're a visitor to this site and DON'T buy my published work, I will find a way to punish you. No, really.

So once I write my remaining reviews (no sweat--of the 3 CDs left, two are actually among my favorites of the batch) and my feature (terrifying prospect, but at least I've got all the content I could possibly use--like I said, these cats were smart), my next major priority, aside from just plugging away at my training, will be the teaching project. Which still terrifies me, of course, but I feel like I've got a little more credibility simply through tackling these other obstacles.

It's funny how succeeding on your own terms can create as much angst as it does pleasure. I'm as stressed, anxious, and plagued with insecurity as ever: probably more so. I don't know if I'm good enough to do any of these things, that I'll be exposed as a fraud any minute now. But I'm getting better at simply acting on the demands placed upon me; my insecurities don't keep me from doing the things I feel unqualified to do.

Anyway, that's it for now. Hope the weekend finds you all well.

More On Yesterday's Post . . .

2006-09-13T11:06:00.000-07:00

If you haven't read this, you might want to before reading this extra bit of navel-gazing.

See . . . There's more to this desire for "greatness", this need to prove my capacity for transcendence, than a mere ego-boost. And while I already made it pretty clear (I think) that the issue extends well beyond the martial-arts, theatre, and education projects facing me this fall, there's actually a piece that I've been hesitant to address given the number of parents in our little flock. Because part of what I feel incapable of is parenthood.

Now I've always been ambivalent about parenthood. Not in the sloppy, American sense of the word, which tends to treat it as synonymous with apathy (oh, the crimes of Americans against the English language). No, I mean REAL ambivalence, wherein multiple strong emotions create a noisy stasis. Some of it's the usual stuff: Can we afford it? Am I ready for the impact on my career (such as it is)? Is this world a fit place for a new life? Am I unlikely to raise a serial killer? On the other hand, I'm stuck with other, less obvious questions: How can I provide economic stability while making it clear to my child that I'm suspicious of my culture's economic values? Can I impart an operative definition of integrity? Can I instill a love and valuation of aesthetics? How can I ensure that I bring a life into the world that improves it, when so much of what calls itself life seems to debase and degrade the world in which we live?

This isn't my sole preoccupation--everything I've said about wanting to make "important" art, teaching warrior ethic, altering the culture, what-have-you is still true, still a prominent desire in my life. Sometimes I think that, insofar as I want to have children at all, that need extends from the other, that I sometimes think the family is the most effective vessel for passing on revolutionary concepts and ethics.

Since 'Stine and I can't have children naturally, I'm faced with the prospect of needing to appear, while we're still young enough to have children out of the house before retirement, to be a reasonable candidate for adoption. Parents who can be parents naturally don't have to prove themselves "worthy", but prospective adoptive parents do. So one of areas where I feel the sting failure is in looking at myself as a candidate for parenthood financially. I see an actor/writer/musician/martial artist who offers his talents for free, who does desk-monkey work for a pittance that is less than the combined total of the monthly household credit card bills, and who doesn't seem to be headed for any kind of career. This approach might suffice if there's never anyone but us for whom to care; indeed, it might even suffice for a child, were it possible for us to have one without anyone evaluating our worth for such. But when held under a magnifying glass . . .

'Stine's got a lot going on. She's found something morally and spiritually satisfying in which to specialize, at which she excels, and for which she is paid. She's not the obstacle. There are many reasons why I would like to become less shiftless and vague in my approach to life, even before introducing the idea of children; but making that transition with an eye towards both my values and my aptitudes could take more time than it seems like we have.

Where do greatness and transcendence fit into this? Well . . . again, it's largely a matter of being able to hold my head up even without the trappings of financial success or professional appreciation. Maybe successfully teaching at-risk youth about theatre, or passing a level-test, or writing potent works of performance text for myself have nothing to do with being a good parent (indeed, I'm fairly CERTAIN they bear no relation), but they DO speak to my ability to put my values and abilities into action. I'm never going to be the guy with the corner office, and I wouldn't want to be. I've no gift for sales, little respect for current educational hierarchies, and no idea what, besides sales or teaching, someone of my particular skills could do within the market. Working with my body, with ideas, with patterns and cycles in art and media, is what I'm built for, whether I'm doing it for free or for pay, whether I'm doing it well or poorly. And for all that, if asked to account for my lack of success, I'd want to be able to say, "Yes, I'm broke; but I'm broke because I've stayed true to my values, an approach to life I'd hope to pass on to any progeny. I work hard and I get by. I sacrificed a lucrative career to study those disciplines I found compelling and important; I sacrificed a career in those disciplines to maintain what I see as the integrity of the forms."

As it is, despite the work I've done and continued to do, despite my efforts at self-improvement through art, religion, philosophy, and combat sport, I'm still all but overcome with shame when I look at myself. I still worry that it's laziness or--worse yet--utter lack of talent that's kept me where I am, not some vague notion of integrity. I fear asking someone to let me raise a child because I fear, on some level, that I really don't deserve one, that I'm really not qualified. As worried as I am that I will be rejected by any adoption agency for being too poor, too old, too colorful, I'm scared of something even worse: that the reason for which I am these things isn't because I was too dedicated to my vision quest, but because I'm too potently self-absorbed to be any other way, and that to give children to so hopeless a scoundrel would be a cruel condemnation.

Anyway . . . sorry that the above is both technically sloppy, writing-wise, and wildly self-indulgent. I guess that true, bone-deep self-doubt is usually both.

Some Prosaic Greatness

2006-09-12T11:46:00.000-07:00

Apologizing for navel-gazing on a blog is like apologizing for farting at a chili cookoff: it's probably the right thing to do, etiquette-wise, but the guests knew what they were in for when they showed up. But since we're all into worrying about how we come off, I'm going to apologize for the navel-gazing. The fact is, for all my attempts at altruism and self-improvement; for all exercise of my listening skills, kinesthetic response, and empathy; for all attempts at a truer, more generous state of being, I remain among the more singularly self-absorbed people I know. There are pluses and minuses to such a character, and I'll probably be forever working on that balance. But for now, I'm somewhat entrenched in a period of self-regard and self-analysis. So here we are.

I have two major events coming up in the next month (or so) that have me absolutely petrified. The first is a "phase test" in my martial arts class. See, at our school, since we're studying multiple disciplines (Kali, JKD/Jun Fan, Panantukan, CSW, BJJ, Savate, and Muay Thai), there aren't "belts" in the traditional sense; rather, they've devised a system of phases. There are three phases with three levels each, and students test once every 2-4 months. This would be my first test, and, if I pass, I'd move to phase 1, level 2. Which would just mean that I'd have a couple more options as to which classes I'm allowed to take, and would hopefully mean I'd get to play with weapons (!!!) a little more.

Thing is, I haven't been quite as consistent in my attendance as I'd like. I've been shooting for going to class 3-4 times a week, but it's really been more like 2-3, and some weeks have been a little less. Not exactly a shameful track record, but enough that, given how new all of these arts are to me (and how little they resemble the Goju-Ryu Karate, Aikido and Capoeira Angola I've already studied) and the length of time it's been since I last studied martial arts, I definitely feel . . . not so much unprepared as unready.

The second petrifying event is the beginning of my education project in mid-October. For those who missed the last few descriptions of this project, a close friend of mine and I will be co-teaching a series of classes on physical theatre, improvisation, and acro-balance. The emphasis will be on how one may apply martial-arts principles thereto, with a secondary emphasis on how one may use the performing arts as a platform for understanding the warrior ethic, insofar as one takes that to mean the ethic by which the "warrior" takes responsibility for her community, and to offer humility and healing by way of her art.

In this case, my fear stems from some of the same concerns, specifically the concern that I'm simply not a good enough martial artist to teach these principles (though the literal martial character of the art is essentially stripped away--we're only dealing with technique in the abstract). I'm worried that, never having taught before, my attempts will be awkward, amateurish. More prominently, though, I fear that these kids will see through my cirriculum and ideas to the lily-white face of my privelige, my paternalistic liberal desire to "give to the community". I find myself second-guessing my own motivations, wondering if my very intent with this project is so stone self-serving that my credibility will be shot before I open my mouth to say my first words.

As I approach these challenges, I hear the steady drone of the same old insecurities: that I'm a mediocre talent, that I haven't managed to do much of anything with myself, that I've a lazy intellect, that it's too late to establish any meaningful direction in my life. Basically, that I've squandered my modest gifts and given the shaft to any chance I might have had at greatness.

Greatness, you say? Yeah, that most prosaic of all goals, greatness, the longing for which is almost ironclad proof of mediocrity, even when the quest for it leads to a quiet (or not so quiet) contempt for all that is perceived as mediocre.

Greatness is a difficult thing to quantify for a dedicated abstractionist like myself. Though I've always hoped for comfort, I never sought wealth; though I crave recognition, I've never chased fame. Of course, I'm pretty sure I always secretly craved both wealth and fame, and had, at one time, that secret, youthful, vaguely megalomaniacal self-regard that whispered in my all-too-eager ear that I was gifted, dammit, that I was special, and that riches both literal and figurative would emerge as my birthright if I pursued truth, love, vision, and autonomy at the expense of all else (that those four directives might prove incompatible never occurred to me). But I've failed to create any legacy as an actor, a writer, a cultural critic, a martial artist, a musician, or a philosopher; attempts at fusing these disciplines into a single line of pursuit has been futile. I keep hearing the snide voice of this guy I heard, once, on NPR, talking about how, with few exceptions, people don't achieve greatness at pursuits picked up later in life, and I worry that the years wherein I could have made this work are past me, that sinking in anonymous routine is the only option left.

Obviously, studying new martial arts in my thirties and teaching eight weeks of an after-school theatre program to at-risk youth could hardly be called bids for greatness. I certainly don't seek fame or fortune in teaching or combat sport. But as these projects certainly pertain to my quest for truth, so, too, do they relate to my longtime musing on the abstract matter of greatness. My insecurities on all matters seem to rise from the same place, that dark little center where I wonder, at every moment, whether I'm an irretrievable failure. Of course I'm chanting on matters micro (the test, the classes) and macro (the quest for truth, the yearning to succeed at something), and it's kept me from getting stuck in too ugly a spiral. But this week in particular, I feel mired in doubt. And while my more immediate doubt is that I'm not enough of a martial artist to pass this relatively simple test, my greater doubt is that I'm not enough of anything to offer these kids any guidance, that I've already squandered my future, that all I have to share is a mish-mash of half-formed ideas that have already demonstrated their own poverty.

I suppose, all said, that all I can do is persevere, envision myself succeeding at these challenges while preparing NOT to chastise myself if I should fail, and hope that either truth or success peaks over some horizon.

In other discussions . . .

2006-08-25T12:21:00.000-07:00

What makes the perfect song? That's the subject of this discussion. Laying out theories? Making lists? Justifying choices? Oh. My. God. This forum may have made my week.

I, Bourgeois

2006-08-23T13:59:00.000-07:00

So the other night, I was unable to bring myself to attend my martial arts class. I do so try to be a dedicated student, but I was tired, grouchy, overwhelmed; I felt overscheduled, underslept, potently dissatisfied with self, life, work, and recreation.

My solution? Retail therapy.

Now, I rarely engage in retail therapy, mostly because our economic circumstances are such that even acquiring what we need is sometimes a bit of an ordeal. But I was feeling a particular dissatisfaction with my khakis: they're the sort of light tan, generic-looking Old Navy khakis that are the uniform of fashion-indifferent, business-casual office drones everywhere. So I find myself a lovely pair of herringbone-style khakis, made of cotton, but with the weave and texture of herringbone tweed. They're brownish, but neutral enough that they could as easily be worn with cool colors as warm, with a shirt and tie, a jersey, a T-shirt and sport jacket, you name it.

Where did I find these wonder trousers? Well . . . Old Navy. Exactly where I got the bland khakis for which I'd come to feel such contempt, which, in turn, I'd bought because khakis just make it easier not to think about what I'm wearing. And I bought BOTH pairs of pants on my Old Navy card, increasing our debt while maintaining the illusion that I still have that money in my real account. Between the use of credit (hell, the possession of credit) at Old Navy, the matter of sweatshops and regressive labor laws, matters of conformity and mass-production, and the decidedly male, in the ugliest traditional sense, approach to wardrobe, I'm at risk of revocation of license for my three most prized practices: bohemiamism, liberalism, metrosexuality. My God, I'm just a GUY. I had to go by a used corduroy shirt jacket at Value Village for $6.99 just to clean that feeling off (and can I say, my corduroy jacket looks great with the new herringbone khakis, and pretty good with my mechanic-fit jeans . . . also from Old Navy).

Yes, folks, the rejectionist himself is really just an average Joe with a tattoo (hey, I'll get another one soon) and some long-neglected piercings.

Like many artistic sorts, I've long sneered at any values I called "bourgeois", having a certain disdain for the notion that respectability or property were of any real use. I've rejected, on well-documented and fiercely argued grounds, the notion that music should please the ear, that cinema should make us laugh or feel good about ourselves, that law exists to protect people instead of wealth, etc. But it's all something of a sham: I DO want to be respected, and even my most dissonant, dystopian and dysphoric aesthetic indulgences are enjoyed because, for whatever reason, they DO please my ear, make me laugh, and, in some roundabout way, make me feel good about myself. I'd like for my aptitudes and talents to earn me admiration, and I'd like to weave a career therefrom, thus securing my access to what I see as my necessary--or at least highly desirable--material comforts. I want my clothing to be inexpensive and reasonably interchangeable, in the sense of everything sort of matching with everything else, without having to always go the all-black, all-the-time route OR stay aware of which color is "in" this season.

Fact is, most people who use the word "bourgeois" are, in fact, precisely that; the rich have no disdain for materialism, the poor don't spend a lot of time weighing social paradigms and value systems. Inasmuch as "bourgeois" means "middle-class", it's we who are moderately educated, working for just-enough-yet-strangely-too-little, who both know what it means and feel guilty enough about it to criticize it. Sure, there are those among us like myself, who have used our modest means to explore outsider aesthetics and maverick philosophies, sought divergence from mainstream religion and are suspicious of mainstream media. But scratch the surface of these "rebellions", and you'll find that most of their theorists, critics and practitioners are of that same bent. They're what Herman Hesse dubbed "steppenwolves", lone lupine luminaries frustrated with, but inescapably held by, a world where order and civility are the norm. Look at any of history's great rogue philophers--de Sade, Lautreaumont, Sartre--and you'll see a gallery of malcontents fiercely (and knowingly) biting the hand that fed them all, carving out a comfortable niche from which to rail against comfortable niches.

I could equivocate on the matter for days (and you can stop giggling there in the back row). Gustave Flaubert once said that an artist should try to live the quiet, ordered life of the bourgeois individual, that he may be violent and original in his art; I'd proudly bear the banner of that idea were I actually creating any art at the moment. And really, I'm only looking for bargains so I can reinvest my income into my other pursuits; but if I'm being honest, the big problem with my pursuits is that I'm at loathe to sell out on the one hand, while finding it too tiring to study, take classes, work full-time and make art, particularly since I find it wholly necessary for my marriage (that most bourgeois of institutions, in which I've been happily and successfully engaged for a decade now) to spend some portion of every week cuddling on the couch to a DVD (whether it's one of my violent independent horror flicks, an obscure proto-surrealist European oddity from the '20s, or the first season of Scrubs).

In The Steppenwolf, after noting that the disaffected bohemian is, generally, a middle-class phenomenon itself, Hesse goes on to suggest that the bourgeoisie survives solely because of the steppenwolves, that the innovations of the middle-class's most disaffected members allow the system against which they ostensibly rebel to thrive. It does seem to me that a system allergic to the uncivilized appetite for deviance and chaos would need an occasional injection of both to avoid death-by-stasis, that the old mammalian impulses to destroy and dominate help give civilization a needed kick in the ass now and again. But I also think it works both ways: without some definition of civility, we'd never need to invent a clever subversion of such base impulses into aesthetics, theory, kink and/or technology. Without the education our (modest) affluence has bought us, we'd never have become too smart for our own good (or anyone else's), never have so exhausted the mainstream canon as to become disenchanted with it, never have experienced privelige to enough of a degree to become mistrustful of it.

That doesn't mean there aren't still conflicts to deal with. While I think that the far left has been facile in its understanding of sweatshop economics--these jobs are often the only alternative some third world workers have to trying to grow crops in fucking sand--I'd certainly love to know that the dapper herringbone khakis I'm wearing were made by people with health insurance, and that my punk-meets-preppy-with-a-dash-of-hippie aesthetic relied more on creative use of homemade and second-hand items than on any prefab, mass-produced fashion mandate. I'll always want more, and always wish I could do with less. I wish civilization hadn't made cars, phones, and computers necessities instead of luxuries. I'm always shaken by the paradox that I could probably simplify my life if I only had more money right now to pay of my debts, invest in a home infrastructure that allowed me to do more with less--by a sewing machine, a giant spice-rack, a handful of strong, well-made, universally applicable clothing items to replace my vast patchwork of half-formed, invariably "settled-for" approximations of what I need, a vehicle or two. I'm always amused that the people exhorting us to shop with the worker in mind, abandoning price as our primary consideration, are usually a little higher on the economic food chain than the rest of us, and that "voluntary simplicity" so often seems to be by-product of affluence. And I may never fully reconcile myself with the frustrations of the art world, the ways that the mainstream seems to stifle innovation, the way that the underground allows deceptive bursts of success that all other underground artists will attempt in vain to replicate.

But in the end, while I'm not likely to stop using "bourgeois" as a shorthand for everything prosaic and yawnworthy, I should remember that I'm also implicating myself with that word . . . and that maybe that's not such a bad thing.

And So It Comes To Pass . . .

2006-08-15T12:35:00.000-07:00

Ten years. A decade.

The first wedding anniversary seemd like a landmark because, well, it was the FIRST. The second was a good indication that this wasn't a fluke, the third was cool because the number 3 has tremendous symbolic significance, the fourth corresponded with all sorts of other time cycles (high school, leap year, the Olympics, most musical meter), and the fifth was a big deal because 5, like 10, was always one of those happy, easy numbers back when we were learning the multiplication tables. But what made 5 so significant was its relationship to 10, so even the fifth anniversary was mere foreshadowing for this one.

Ten years.

Getting away to Port Townsend for the day proper was a stroke of genius on our part. We've neglected the pretty parts of our own state, because the hassle of renting a car and travelling usually inspires us to travel, which, for better AND for worse, has always involved visiting folks, usually family. In fact, this little excursion was the first "vacation" (I mean, I only took 3 days off from work; hence the quotes) we've had that didn't involve anyone else. My, it was refreshing. We took lovely walks, ate a fantastic dinner (she went nuts on some king crab legs, while I snarfed down a lovely halibut filet with wilted greens), engaged in frivolous shopping, watched copious amounts of cable, ate, drank, had loud sex with the windows open . . .

Of course, any marriage is largely about community, so we DID have ourselves a lovely gathering at home on Sunday. In theory, it was to start at noon; in practice, it was nearly 3:30 by the time anyone showed up. The first few hours were spent languishing by the pool, with intermittent swimming and sunning, and then moved inside, where music was played and there was much imbibing.

All in all, it was pretty dang near perfect.

Other than that . . . I'm still plugging away at the martial arts, and am now starting work on granting for a theatre/martial arts project for at-risk youth which I'll be co-teaching in the fall. I have an itch to do theatre, but there's no theatre I'm itching to do, so I'm relishing the opportunity to take some theories, simplify them to where I can pass them along to the young and impressionable in a fairly short period of time (8 weeks, 3 hours a week), make some money (!!!), and . . . well, see what floats and what doesn't. I try to quiet my blind terror at the whole prospect of teaching anything with the idea that I could even learn a good bit from failure.

Since we've clearly hit some sort of expiration date on the matter, I can say that my initial sending of music writing to magazines ended in a positive response that lead to precisely nothing, so I'm both encouraged and discouraged. But I've got some new work to shop around, so I may send some of it along. I need to find some more publications that specialize in both the music and dialogue with which I'm trying to engage, but that's the kind of trawling that'll have to wait until I've finished the grant-writing and lesson-planning for the upcoming teaching job.

We've developed one disposable camera's worth of shots from the vacation, but I'll have to wait 'til we see the second before posting anything; at the risk of inspiring certain fellow bloggers to "punch me where I fuck", I look woefully out of shape in many of the shots, and would like to keep them from the public eye. Hopefully the second roll will yield all the pictures in which I look ripped and attractive. :^) Still, between that and a couple-year-old (we can't fix on an exact date) roll of film we found and took in with this one, there are some good candidates for a replacement profile picture. Nothing wrong with the old one, of course, but we all need an image makeover now and again.

The Good Fight

2006-07-25T13:59:00.000-07:00

In theory, I should go to grappling class tonight, since I haven't in few weeks. But I've become somewhat addicted to Savate (see links here and here--the first has more pictures, but the second has an interesting entry on the history of the art, even connecting it to common ancestry with Capoeira, which was what I studied last before coming to MKG). So I'm going to follow my intuition. After all, the whole notion of mixed-arts is based on the intuitive understanding that different bodies function differently, that technique and form are ultimately subservient to use.

In fact, to tie this in a little with my other post today (on Ichinen Sanzen) . . . Bruce Lee was always a believer in martial-artistry as a true form of artistry, a vessel for the expression of self, of truth. To engage with another body in combat is to engage with the science of interrelation, all actions committed an effective channelling of emotional content. Lee often spoke of the illusory boundary between opponents, and asserted that the most effective athlete/warrior was one who came to an ability to KNOW an opponent's movement through a realization that we are already one with the opponent, that each of us contains the whole of the other. A microcosm of mutual possession, perhaps? Who knows . . .

In any case, I like the skittery footwork of Savate, the delicate savagery of its kicks (lithe and balletic, yet almost invariably aimed at soft, vulnerable targets), the element of taunting (certainly French in character, but also attributable to the possible African origins of the art). Bruce Lee himself integrated a fair amount of Savate footwork and kickery (I don't know if it's a word, but I like it) into his own Jeet Kune Do (also the subject of several MKG classes); and who am I to question the judgement of the Dragon?

A Manifold Manifesto

2006-07-25T11:26:00.001-07:00

One of the concepts that sits at the heart of Nichiren Daishonin's Buddhism is Ichinen Sanzen, the observation of 3000 realms in a single moment of life. To me, this is at its heart a doctrine of infinite possibility, as well as part of a broader metaphysical assertion of universal inclusivity, what modern theosophers often call pantheism; Renaissance Gnostic, hermetic philosopher, and heretic monk Giordano Bruno expressed a concept not unlike Buddhism's idea of "mutual possession" when he said, "Anything we tak in the universe, because it has in itself that which is All in All, includes in its own way the entire soul of the world, which is entirely in any part of it."

Or, to paraphrase Heinlein's shaggy-dog barb near the end of Stranger in a Strange Land (I don't think this constitutes a SPOILER, but I'll give y'all a qualified heads up anyway), "Thou art God; but then, who isn't?"

For those, like yours truly, who are better able to grasp an abstraction if it's tied to some sort of rational construct, there is a useful symbolic equation for this concept. The 3000 realms in question are actually the product of the ten basic "life states" or "worlds"; the mutual possession of the ten worlds (simply put, the accepted fact that each life state, or world, possesses the other nine); the ten factors of life, which are the ten ways in which an organism affects--and is affected by--the world and other sentient beings; and the three realms, or spheres of worldly being. Given our ten worlds, and our mutual possession, we begin with 100 possible worlds in any given moment; multiply that by ten factors--the ways in which these worlds, through the individual, affect the literal, observable world at large--and you have 1000 possible "effects"; and finally, multiply those possible effects by the three realms which may ultimately be affected. And so we've reached our number.

Confused yet? Good. I'm going to revisit this equation later, so just let it sit and simmer on the proverbial back burner.

First off, let's take a look at those ten initial "worlds". Where Western morality often focuses on easy duality (good/evil; right/wrong; flesh/spirit), and Western psychology on an ever-expanding litany of emotions and neuroses (and let me say here that there are times where either duality or irreducible complexity are still useful models), Nichiren's Buddhism postulates that our "life states" can be understood by way of ten "worlds". To my still-embryonic understanding, the advantage of equating life-states with worlds, as opposed to emotions, neuroses, or pre-judged moral conditions, is that treating each life state as a "world", with its own rules, its own obstacles, its own character, accurately reflects both the ostensible pervasiveness of any of these states when you feel "stuck" in one and the fact that one may still experience a broad spectrum of emotions while inside.

The ten worlds are best described as follows:

1) HELL - The world or state of Hell is said to be characterized by rage. Because this is our first state, it's important to note that the rage, in this case, isn't directed at other beings or events, but rather at being itself; it's not unlike the existential rage William Blake describes in "Infant Sorrow":

My mother groaned, my father wept,
Into the dangerous world I leapt;
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my father's hands,
Striving against my swaddling bands,
Bound and weary, I thought best
To sulk upon my mother's breast.

This condition could even be seen as a parallel to Sartre's nausea at his recognition of being.

2) HUNGER - Greed is the primary characteristic of the world of Hunger, which can mean both literal hunger and, more generally, the tendency of all organisms to seek acquisition.

3) ANIMALITY - This is where hierarchical struggle begins; the dominant characteristic is foolishness. In a condition of animality, one dominates those which one recognizes as weak, and grovels before those recognized as strong.

4) ANGER - This anger is quite different from the more metaphysically rich rage of the Hell condition. Also called ASURAS, a name for a class of angry spirits left over from Hindu cosmology, the state of ANGER is characterized by perversity and arrogance, and refers broadly to a condition wherein one experiences jealousy, envy, competitiveness, duplicity, and deceit.

5) HUMANITY - This is the state of civilization, the mutual agreements we make with other organisms to effect peace. The tranquility characterizing this state isn't really comparable with the peace that comes with enlightenment, but it's obviously a necessary component of civic life.

6) HEAVEN - HEAVEN--like HELL--represents something far more ephemeral in Buddhist cosmology than in Western theologies. The primary characteristic of HEAVEN is the happiness that comes from material gains and worldly pleasures; unlike true happiness, this "happiness" leads to yet more desire.

7) LEARNING - Also referred to as the realm of VOICE-HEARERS, this state represents the beginning of the quest for enlightenment, the point at which one glimpses truth (which, for one studying this Buddhism, is the moment at which one is introduced to the Lotus Sutra, as summed up and expressed in the law, or Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo).

8) REALIZATION - The realm of CAUSE-AWAKENED ONES, wherein one begins to seek self-improvement through observation or effort; having heard the ring of truth, the "voice-hearer" of the last state now pursues study, engages in meditation through chanting, etc. These last two states are important steps on the road to enlightenment, but are also intrinsically self-centered; these worlds are characterized by an ernest desire for truth couples with a high level of introspection and a certain level of indifference to other sentient beings.

9) BODDHISATVA - When the voice-hearer and/or the cause-awakened one feels compassion rising within him, and he wishes to share what he knows of the truth, to bring others to enlightenment, he has enterered the world of the BODDHISATVA. The self-centered nature of practice then opens itself up into a new mission to help one's fellow beings. While this refers primarily to sharing Buddhism with others, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to imagine that anyone engaging in spreading true compassion, through charitible work or other selfless acts, is experiencing this world.

10) BUDDHAHOOD - If the world of the BODDHISATVA is characterized by compassion, BUDDHAHOOD is characterized by limitless compassion and reflexive wisdom, an ability to see all potential at all times in all beings.

Now here's where things get really interesting. We started with these 10 worlds. Our next step is to recognize mutual possession. To make sense of this concept, we need to understand that we ALL possess these conditions, these worlds. Moreover, these worlds all possess each other. What this means is that even if, say, I'm currently functioning in the world of Hell, I still possess the other nine worlds, including the Four Noble Worlds (Learning, Realization, Boddhisatva, Buddhahood); conversely, someone functioning in the world of Buddhahood still possesses the first Six Paths, as well as the three remaining Noble Worlds. In other words, each world possesses all worlds in itself.

This is a recipe for some beautiful--if unrepentantly heady--stuff. If, through practice, I come to function at the level of Buddhahood, recognizing conditions like Hell and Animality in myself creates ground for empathy when faced with someone functioning at those levels; recognition, also, that those functioning on such levels possess Buddhahood allows for greater compassion. But wait; it gets better! Someone whose primary life condition is that of Buddhahood is not always well-served by functioning in that world; for instance, active opposition of injustice may require a Buddha to function in the world of anger. But if one can function in the various worlds with an awareness of the seed of enlightenment at the heart of her being, one may function in the world of Anger (for instance) in a different way than one unaware of--or unconcerned with--mutual possession, for said individual may engage with anger with the goal of sharing boundless compassion.

Remember our equation? Take your Ten Worlds, and assume that each of the ten possesses all ten within itself. That's our first 100.

Our next order of business is to analyze the ways in which each world (or, more importantly, how each organism possessing all ten) becomes manifest in life, space, and time. These are called the Ten Factors of Life, and are as follows:

1) APPEARANCE - Also called FORM or BODY. Refers to the physical properties of being.

2) NATURE - Spiritual properties of MIND.

3) ENTITY - Also called SELF; refers to the confluence of body and mind that establish BEING, or the physical and spiritual aspect of all things).

4) POWER - Also called INHERENT ENERGY: the energy of a person's life allowing a person to act a specific way in each of the ten worlds.

5) INFLUENCE - Volitional activity--the words, thoughts or actions that emerge from an individual based on in which he/she currently resides.

6) INHERENT CAUSE - Karma, basically. Not easily defined, but for these purposes, we can call it the seed of the experience(s) a person will have when all conditions manifest.

7) EXTERNAL CAUSE - Influence from the environment or from other sentient beings.

8) LATENT EFFECT - Internal reaction to any and all phenomena, not yet manifest outwardly.

9) MANIFESTED EFFECT - Observable outcome of the past causes outlined above.

10) CONSISTENCY FROM BEGINNING TO END - The constant interrelation between the first nine factors, representing the cyclical nature of these factors.

So we have our life-states and their mutual possession; we can multiply that total by the Ten Factors, because these are the channels by which our life-states affect the world at large. 100 becomes 1000.

But . . . what of that world at large? Well, according to the doctrine of Ichinen Sanzen, the world itself operates at three different spheres, each of which can be influenced by the life condition of any given individual.

These spheres are:

1) SELF/INDIVIDUAL - Entity composed of the 5 components of life: form, perception, conception, volition, and consciousness.

2) SOCIETY/OTHER SENTIENT BEINGS - Other people, community.

3) ENVIRONMENT/LAND - Can refer both to the Earth, in the strictly environmental sense, or to the nation-state, the confederation between communities.

And so we reach 3000.

The mathematical equation is of more symbolic than literal significance; we could quibble over internal variations in any one of the categories, or the possibility of states between the states, but for the purposes of allegory, what we have is more than functional.

More important than any attempt to empiricize the doctrine is to analyze its metaphysical function. I've already noted that mutual possession gives us ground for empathy and compassion; but of more interest, to me, is that the doctrine in its totality creates a holistic template for unlimited possibility. Ichinen Sanzen is about the pregnancy of any given moment in time, wherein the entirety of any world, any sphere of being, is available; the myriad channels by which one can use one's life-state to interact with and extend compassion to other organisms; and the spheres upon which one can commit such action. As in existentialism, choice becomes the defining characteristic of being . . . and the number of available choices is manifold. Through this realization, we have stumbled upon fertile ground for the discovery of Buddha nature, for enlightenment, for the realization of goals personal and global. Viewed through this lens, we see each moment as an opportunity to effect change in ourselves, and through that, on our communities and on the world at large. My God, it's so exciting, I'm shaking a little just writing about it (of course, I DID have two cups of coffee).

Hope this held the interest . . .

Values Profile (Interesting)

2006-07-19T14:44:00.000-07:00

Your Values Profile

Loyalty:

You value loyalty a fair amount.
You're loyal to your friends... to a point.
But if they cross you, you will reconsider your loyalties.
Staying true to others is important to you, but you also stay true to yourself.

Honesty:

You value honesty a fair amount.
You're honest when you can be, but you aren't a stickler for it.
If a little white lie will make a situation more comfortable, you'll go for it.
In the end, you mostly care about "situational integrity."

Generosity:

You value generosity a fair amount.
You are all about giving, as long as there's some give and take.
Supportive and kind, you don't mind helping out a friend in need.
But you know when you've given too much. You have no problem saying "no"!

Humility:

You value humility a fair amount.
You tend to be an easy going, humble person.
But occasionally your ego takes over.
You have a slight competitive streak - and the need to be the best.

Tolerance:

You value tolerance highly.
Not only do you enjoy the company of those very different from you...
You do all that you can to seek it out interesting and unique friends.
You think there are many truths in life, and you're open to many of them.

The Five Factor Values Test

As might be expected, I'm maddeningly moderate (something I always find I am, despite being drawn to extremity in expression and performance).

Head Spaces

2006-07-12T14:00:00.000-07:00

First and foremost, I'd like to offer a tender, giggling R.I.P. to the late Syd Barrett, who died some undetermined number of days ago of yet undisclosed causes. Roger Waters may have led the Pink Floyd we best know, as we were more likely to have started with The Wall, or Dark Side of the Moon, than with Piper at the Gates of Dawn; their later epic psychedelia was more immediately canon-ready--at least on the terms dictated by "classic rock" radio--than Barrett's bent, whimsical, noisy drug-rock. But when punk and post-punk musicians were turning their backs on the would-be neo-classical noodling of '70s art-rockers, many still embraced those early, Barrett-led recordings, and the results can be heard throughout the post-punk scene (and its descendents and revivalists); spin any track by Robyn Hitchcock, Julian Cope (and his early band, the Teardrop Explodes), XTC, Animal Collective, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Residents, and on and on; post-punkers who sought psychedelic transcendence within punk's revolution against the virtuosic and masturbatory, Barrett's sparse, silly constructions allowed them to be minimalistic and primitive, but with a heady expansiveness and sense of play that provided a delicious antidote to the political stridency, wonkish theory and relentless anomie of compatriots like Gang of Four or the dour and ultimately self-immolating paranoia of Joy Division. Bolder (and funnier) than the Beatles, more sonically adventurous than the Stones, and less recklessly dystopian than the Velvet Underground, Syd's Pink Floyd remains rock's ultimate surrealist confection. Sorry to see you go, Syd; we hardly knew ye.

OK, so, if word hasn't gotten around, I've taken the plunge: I'm now, officially and for the record, a practitioner of Nichiren Buddhism. My resistance was largely dialectical, but funny enough, it's through my own meanderings through various points of rhetoric that led me to a bright flash of revelation: binary thinking and facile dualities permeate our understanding of even the most relativistic and inclusive of our philosophies. I was struck, on the very evening on which I signed the card, by an assertion at one of the meetings. A passage by Nichiren suggested that "darkness" was an illusion, the tarnish on the mirror of our lives. I say we can go one step further than that, and accept that the illusion is that darkness is different from light; since darkness is the absence of light, and we are never without light, the notion that one cannot dwell in darkness and serve light is itself absurd. By that same token, chaos isn't different from order (indeed, any attempt to create order, even if successful, only proves that there's chaos that requires the imposition of order; the success of the various forms of hierarchy, in turn, prove that chaos is responsive to order, and therefore subject, in some measure, to acts of will). So the propositions that we all have the seeds of enlightenment, that our destiny goes (essentially) where we goad it, that our "Buddha natures" exist at multiple levels at any given moment, and that our compassion guides us to seek peace and happiness for all living things don't contradict the important premises (important for me, anyway) of nihilism, existentialism, pantheism, or the writings of Giordano Bruno, William Blake or the Marquis de Sade (I'm actually using passages from Bruno and Blake as part of my current study project, the text of which I may post once I've given my presentation). The one thing I'm having to turn my head around on a little is the "existence precedes essence" question, since my observation still leads me to believe that directive; the notion of an innate Buddha nature carries with it the implication that essence precedes existence. But this almost seems like a semantic quibble: if one imagines the Buddha nature to exist at a subatomic level, it would seem to suppose that existence IS essence, transmitted along in time through multiple organisms--again, a clear refutation of binary thinking.

In any case, I'm finding my study is focusing a lot of things with regards to my writing, my martial arts study, my way of BEING. My practice had already produced some benefit; now that my practice is an official reality, I hope to find more profound and interesting ways of sharing it, studying it, expressing it. Stay tuned . . .

Right To The Point . . . If I Had One . . .

2006-06-21T21:00:00.000-07:00

Some brief updates:

I've sent some of my writing on music to some people. Nothing has come of it, but at least I took a step; the trick now is not to feel discouraged that I don't know what the next step is.

I've been in training at a mixed-martial-arts school for just over two weeks now, and I'm loving it. I'm taking quite well to the Muay Thai and Panantukan. I'm a little more uncertain dealing with weapons (I've had almost no weapons training), and I SUCK at grappling. Aside from some pointed differences in technique, most striking arts have at least some core principles in common, so travel between them is relatively . . . not easy, per se, but less complicated. I'd equate it to travelling between romance languages: it's simpler to jaunt between French, Italian and Spanish than it would be to jump from any of those languages to, say, Mandarin Chinese. Grappling, then, is my Mandarin Chinese.

Last night, in class--my second grappling class, mind you--we finished off the last ten minutes by "sparring", sort of a tough sell when you don't know any techniques. Now, while "tapping out" is fairly common practice in any sort of grappling or wrestling classes, we never really discussed tapping out before these rounds, and I found myself, within minutes, flailing like a fish in a choke hold, my neck wrapped tightly in the arms of some ROTC kid who'd wrestled all through high school. Because I simply panicked and flailed--tapping out simply didn't even occur to me--it took some student noting that I seemed to be panicking and flailing to get air flowing in again (the instructor was working with another pair at the moment). I STILL have a headache and a sore throat. Kinda humiliating, but sort of invigorating.

I think I've got some things going for me in grappling: I'm extremely flexible, reasonably strong, more than a little slippery and effectively aware of my overall body mechanic. I just need to learn what the hell I'm doing.

Anyways, I'm LOVING being back in training. I was kind of hoping to see a little more trimming around the waistline by now, but 'Stine assures me I'm looking more ripped (though she is prone to flattering me).

I've been writing some lyrics lately, largely (though not exclusively) based on some H.P. Lovecraft short stories I'm adapting, and they all suck. But that never stopped Tim Rice, so I'm gonna go ahead and try to make some songs. I'm also feeling inspired because I finally heard some music by Idiot Flesh recently; they're the band made up of the core team of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum before they were Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and one of the tracks I heard was a punk/metal/industrial/cabaret take on a brass marching band sound. I'm used to the instruments I play--saxophone, flute--being employed in either square forms like popular jazz or arch, academic forms like . . . well, like experimental jazz, which I like, but is a little technically advanced for where I am and not quite as dirty and primitive as what I'm hoping to put onstage. Hearing horns used in such a visceral, elemental, HEAVY context was downright inspiring. So who cares if my rhymes suck? It may be time to just bite the bullet and risk looking stupid.

Actually, I still have a bookstore gift certificate that I received for my birthday; I should probably get a rhyming dictionary, just to get those wheels turning (though I could probably also afford to learn how to write song lyrics without relying on rhyme--it's worked for Michael Stipe, Nick Cave and Nils Frykdahl).

Notes from an Old Man

2006-05-31T09:59:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I'm now in my mid-thirties; I'm 34 as of 9:15 (or so) yesterday morning. I left work at 1:00pm yesterday, had lunch, went to look at some furniture and caught a matinee (X-Men: The Last Stand, which wasn't bad, wasn't great, was sorta disappointing--look for a review sometime in the next day or two on 5 C Reviews, reachable via the "Our Reviews" link to our right). Before that, on Sunday, we ordered a lot of Italian food and had friends over for celebrity guessing games, Cranium, and the imbibing of mass quantities of . . . well, all sorts of things. I can't remember what all the food goodness was, but there was a lovely pasta with white sauce, cheese and prosciutto; prosciutto also figured prominently on a pizza with red peppers; one of the pizzas had goat cheese. Two people brought two boxes each of fudgcicles, and we're still munching on those.

I was given a dark chocolate bar with chilies and cocoa nibs, Aztec style. I ate it on Monday. Mmmmmmmmm.

Oh, and I got an I-POD!! Madness, I tell you. I listened to Sleepytime Gorilla Museum on a trip to the store, Modest Mouse (not my favorite band, but I can't resist "Gravity Rides on Everything") on the bus yesterday and These Arms Are Snakes on the way to work this morning (note: pre-emptive hardcore DOES make the morning go more smoothly). I need to upload some more of my CDs.

Anyway, I went CD shopping with a gift certificate given to me by one of my friends. I bought Hidden City of Taurmond by Wizardzz (again, look for a review in 5 C Reviews). Holy fuck.

Looks like I'm in for a free introductory class at a local, mixed-martial-arts program this next Monday (6/5). I'm pretty excited. We'll have to see what the $$ looks like & such, but at least steps are being taken. The program offers a mixed class, a program specifically dedicated to sparring, and then the option for regular classes focusing on the individual elements of the mixed discipline (grappling, kickboxing, Muay Thai).

I've also started some preliminary work adapting some old short stories, in a horror vein, with an eye on creating songs therefore, just as an early exercise in marrying music & text. I figure if I start with "micromusicals", or "microperas", I can start to work the muscles that allow me to mix metal, cabaret and jazz with narrative and gonzo physicality to create . . . something. Or nothing. We'll see.

Anyway, that's all. I just wanted to keep y'all up to date. Keep an eye on the other site--I've got at least 2, possibly 3 reviews in the hopper (depends on whether I want to review Trouble Every Day, a seriously fucked up French flick we watched last Friday).

A Eulogy For Certainty: An Evening with Miss America

2006-05-15T10:44:00.000-07:00

If you're someone who's reflexively suspicious of a man who reviews his friends' art, you may wish to have the proverbial grain of salt--or a whole shaker of the stuff--handy; since art criticism is already about the attempt to quantify and codify subjective reactions, I feel relatively little urge to affect journalistic objectivity in apology for the fact that that the author of the play I intend to discuss spends an hour or two nearly every Saturday morning helping me pick the world apart and analyze it over coffee.

And if the dialogue his play seeks to establish with its audience is much like the dialogue between us, well, that's probably because ours is the dialogue we've always intended to carry on, with each other, with the audience, with humanity; it's the dialogue we've felt our culture needed to have, however differently each of us may have processed it.

So there it is: the disclaimer.

Moving on . . .

Miss America: A Fugue Born in 1969
A Review

David Mamet? It seems like half the reviews I've seen for this work compare Josh Beerman's eliptical phrasing to Mamet's celebrated sentence-cleaving. Now, while I'm certain that Mr. Beerman would claim Mamet as an influence, reading his style as "merely" Mamet-esque mistakes form for intent. Yes, both employ sentences that die--or perhaps dissipate, or keel over exhaustion--before their time; both are filled with ellipses and interruptions; both offer these slices of semantic confection through the lips of potently flawed organisms.

But a past review, for Beerman's A Eulogy for Citizen, suggested a more apt peer: Hal Hartley. As in Hal Hartley's films, the characters in a Josh Beerman play seem to be fumbling around for the compassion and vulnerability they KNOW is in there somewhere, under the layers of half-cooked dialectical epiphanies, pop-culture saturation, reptilian desires and failed attempts at developing inner peace. While both Mamet and Hartley clearly write from male standpoints, only Mamet's shortened sentences seem to be a function of a precisely masculine stance. Where his abbreviations seem to emerge from either impatience or constant interruption, Hartley--and, by extension, Beerman--seem to emerge from, more than anything, a failure (or highly mitigated progress) in the attempt of the modern, liberal, intellectual male to adopt the free-flowing communication and ongoing emotional narrative traditionally associated with women. It's a form of impatience, perhaps, but an earnest and empathetic one: the focused-yet-incomprehensible rambling of someone who's gathered all the ingredients of a cognitive or spiritual breakthrough, but can't seem to elucidate the excitement, the dread, the ardour to another human being.

Whether it was the influence of our friendship or the force of my narcissism (perhaps a little of both), I was all too quick to see myself in the author's clearest surrogate, struggling writer Charlie (played with impeccably wiry aplomb by Jason Marr). Charlie isn't the smartest, most level-headed, hardest-working or even most neurotic character in the play. What he is is the perfect stand-in for the show, for he's as lost between all the stories as we are (which is to say, less than we believe we are); he's smart enough, level-headed enough, compassionate enough and neurotic enough to contain some piece of each story within him. He's less the protagonist than the observer; less the observer than a hapless participant a la Candide; and, as Captain Ahab said, "Another lower level": he embodies the convergence of all tensions.

The tension Charlie embodies is the collective burden of communication. To count the miscommunications in the play would be a futile gesture; when communication succeeds, it's almost a fluke, and often leads to yet more fertile ground for communication failure.

To lay out the varying conflicts would be to reduce the crowded-yet-perfectly-integrated story (read: stories) to a series of situation dramedies. Since nothing could be further from what you'll see onstage, it'll have to suffice for me to say that we'll witness multiple crises of faith, only one of which is the usual one (as relates to belief in God); a recently blind woman and a lifelong deaf woman struggle within their separate relationships, as well in in their relationship to one another, though it seems by the end that they see and hear no less than any of the other myopic residents of this (barely) fictional Seattle; a man who sells IP addresses is approaching implosion under the weight of both his workaholism and emerging concerns about some of the clients using his wares. Voices of reason emerge (or try to) and recede (or are forced into the background). Dialectical strains erupt and fizzle. People justify themselves with varying degrees of success. Everyone knows each other, but no two people know each other enough, not even those in the most intimate of relationships.

It's almost criminal to mention stand-out performances in a cast as uniformly strong as this one (see bottom for a full cast list, and let it be clear that every last one of those people is spectacular in his or her capacity), but Jane May's performance as Molly, the aforementioned blind woman, haunted me well into the night; Philip Clarke balanced gravity and levity as Alvin, a pastor struggling with faith; Ray Tagavilla is admirably contorted by the twin demons of conscience and ambition as Thomas; and Brandon Whitehead conveys, effectively, both calm reason and ineffectuality.

Jennessa Richert, as America, "born in the '60s", is a welcome presence, but her character is an enigma, one all the more frustrating in that one wonders whether the solution to her mystery lies in realizing she's just as mundane as the rest of us. She arrives too late and gives us too little. This has nothing to do with Richert, who invests her few scenes with a lot of dimension. And to be perfectly fair, it may not even be the fault of the writer or director; indeed, given her loaded name, that my primary reaction to "America" was one of confused apathy--when apathy is the last thing the rest of the play could be said to inspire (though it does explore the inaction that results of having too much insight--or attempted insight--for one's own good)--might well be entirely fitting. In a play of ellipses and uncertainty, she speaks in whole sentences (except when interrupted), and seems eerily certain of things. This sense of clarity is, not unexpectedly, something of an aphrodisiac for Charlie, but after this festival of reason, folly, nuance and neurosis--and compassion, our tenderest and most useful neurosis--certainty and simplicity seemed, for Charlie (if not for Beerman), like a little bit of a copout.

That said, I wanted to believe that there was a free spirit who could help poor Charlie anchor himself, and Miss America might well have been the best woman for the job. Given that it's a minor quibble (and that I can always ask the playwright what he was getting at with her), I'm willing to concede that I might be experiencing a reflex (reflux?) based on my own less-than-spectacular experiences with so-called "free spirits".

Production elements were strong. The synth-heavy sound design confirms any Hartley comparisons I'm inclined to make (I was particularly reminded of the maudlin-yet-icy tones of his score for No Such Thing), the lighting conveyed both a heady delirium and a sense that events were unfolding in something close to the real world, the set was gloriously minimalistic and functional. Rob West's direction was solid throughout, with bursts of inspiration in the yoga class scenes (you're just gonna have to see, 'cause I couldn't possibly do justice to explain them) and several group scenes in a coffee shop. He also handles the many scene changes with flair (I've seen MANY a solid production nearly sunk by the dead air that occurs when furniture's being moved).

I've suffered more than my share of disillusionment with "plays" of late. People talking to each other about prosaic affairs is well-served by film, with its closeups, its negative space, its specificity of locale and arsenal of formal tricks inherited from the French New Wave. That Beerman's play seems to reinvigorate the form is a testament to his wordplay and knack for construction, but there's something more potent at work here; his writing is an ongoing, unfinished (unfinishable?) dialogue with the actors and the audience, one that genuinely engages the audience without offering resolution. It revives the too-long dismissed idea of art as discourse, a meeting place where we pick ourselves apart, mock foibles we wouldn't ordinarily think to notice and make a collective commitment to get just a little better at being. Here's hoping that, on his road to finding some peace, the jittery Charlie remains a bit jittery, that he continues to indulge gloriously confused (and intermittently profound) reasoning, and that he doesn't go finishing those sentences 'til he's damn sure where they end.

Miss America: A Fugue Born in 1969 runs one more weekend at Theatre Schmeater, to close on May 20. For those readers in Seattle, I really can't recommend it enough.

Cast:

Patrick Allcorn
Paul Bergman
Philip Clarke
Chad Evans
Erica Evans
Lindsay Evans
Rob Jones III
Erin Knight
Matthew Lyman
Jason Marr
Jane May
Jennessa Richert
Ray Tagavilla
Brandon Whitehead

Artistic Company:

Josh Beerman - Writer
Rob West - Director
Anne Hitt - Stage Manager
Michael Perrone - Set Designer
Tim Wratten - Lighting Designer
Wrick Wolf - Sound Designer
Carla Moar - Costume Designer

From the Fray . . .

2006-05-10T12:33:00.000-07:00

Two articles appeared on Slate yesterday, both relating to music. The first involves a dispute between (the brilliant) Stephen Merritt and a critic/musician who finds him to be a racist. The second is more nonsense on the "rockist" label vs. "poptimism"; basically, it's an amusing but empty critique of how we reach musical preferences.

My response was more to the first article than the second, but it used the terms of the second to dissect the first. In any case, the first is the one you really need to read to make any sense of this post; the second is interesting fodder to geeks like me who give a damn.

In any case, my post:

Of Music & Identity

These last two articles on pop music--regarding the Stephen Merritt snafu and the drawbacks of the "rockism" label--both seem to speak to the matter of music as a signifier/source of identity.

It seems to me that if you take the tendency to identify music by its racial characteristics, and the impulse to judge not only the music, but the people who like or dislike said music, in terms race, it's all too easy to continue digging and find further matters of cultural impropriety. To whit: might we reasonably ask whether the desire to see Merritt as a racist is itself indicative of homophobia? From the article:

Merritt is diminutive, gay, and painfully intellectual. His music is witty and tender. He plays the ukulele. He named his Chihuahua after Irving Berlin.

The Irving Berlin reference is telling. Let's look at Berlin himself: a Jewish immigrant known for writing an enduring Christmas classic ("White Christmas"); an admirer of blues and ragtime often accused of racism, and even more often accused of co-opting and diluting black music for white audiences; a man of cryptic sexuality writing love songs in the model that--along with the works of Cole Porter, another wordy ponce with a gift for multiple entendre and half-serious sentimentality--has come to define the "love song" as we've known it ever since. It seems, from where I'm sitting, that we're talking about the "Tin Pan Alley" tradition discussed in the other article. Indeed, even a perfunctory spin of any one of the three discs of 69 Love Songs, Merritt's own immodest masterpiece of irony juxtaposed with sincerity to the cause of creating an epic opera of cruel obsession and botched breakups, reveals a clear debt to that tradition.

This tradition is, of course, fraught with cultural complications, the most obvious being race. Musical theatre, such as we now know it, emerged as Tin Pan Alley pop, vaudeville and operetta collided over the course of the 20th century. But both Tin Pan Alley pop and vaudeville owe clear debts to the minstrel show and medicine show, two popular--and racist--forms that emerged from the previous century. It's hard to deny that the minstrel show had a profound effect on both the aesthetics and marketing of black music--it borrowed black rhythmic traditions in order to mock them; the music that resulted therefrom (ragtime) would be reappropriated by blacks and reimagined to produce the blues and jazz that sprouted up later--but it also began a tradition of white, American popular music that clearly borrowed those principles and turned them into something else.

That this trajectory of music's evolution brought us musical theatre, however, complicates the issue even further. Because as I'm sure we all know, musical theatre has never been embraced by any single group so thoroughly as it has been by the gay community (a generalization, I know . . . but as a theatre practitioner, I can assure you that it is one that is generally bourne out by observation). This already puts "gay" music culture in a bit of a spot, allying itself with a cultural movement that, if its surface is scratched, has such troubling "racist" roots.

If this weren't already tricky enough, we have the consistent antagonism between gay culture and hip-hop culture, the latter of which has been overwhelmingly hostile to the former, for reasons too numerous and complex to get into now (unless someone's just itching for that discussion). This is, in turn, either a sign, symptom or cause of the broader unease between the respective political movements of each minority group, the ongoing (and tiresome) dialectical battle of nurture/nature, etc. Again, the politics and sociology are complicated in ways that have nothing to do with aesthetics.

Back to the music, or at least to the driving theories of music criticism. "Rockism", such as it is, holds "authenticity" to be the paramount musical virtue. But such elitism isn't endemic to rock; hip-hop, at all levels--underground, mainstream, backpack-rap, gangstas, trip-hop--is absolutely obsessed with notions of credibility. There is a semi-prevalent school of thought that suggests that the authenticity of any popular music is measured by its proximity to its black roots. One of the Presidents of the United States of America kvetched on an interview on NPR that the "problem" (he was careful to word his assertion more benignly) with Radiohead was their excessive distance from the blues tradition.

So is Frere Jones's essential critique of Merritt's musical tastes a mutant form of rock-ism (funkism, maybe)? Do those who simply dismiss Merritt's taste as "bad" for liking sentimental love songs fall into the trap of demeaning a good hook in favor of perceived "grit"? Or, if we want to keep riding the identity boat, is Frere Jones a homophobe? Are his musical tastes too straight, too black? Do people who diss Merritt's preferences failing to recognize the rich legacy of an ongoing musical tradition that grows from racism and co-opted aesthetics, but has since blossomed into a fecund and creative aesthetic soil of its own sort?

Quick thoughts: Hip-hop is too varied a form to settle on it as something one either likes or doesn't, though I know people who hate all hip-hop and people who reflexively like most hip-hop. There's nothing wrong with appreciating all kinds of music; nor is there any shame in being a genre fiend. All discernment is snobbery, even if not all snobbery is defensible as being mere discernment. Stephen Merritt probably isn't a racist, but I don't know the man. His music is brilliant, IMO, and I'm no more inclined to stop listening to his music because he MIGHT be a racist than I am to stop listening to Eminem--whom I also quite admire--because he's demonstrably a homophobe.

A personal lament: since musical theatre and rock & roll emerged from the same traditions, why has one evolved/mutated so much more quickly than the other? When does musical theatre get its Sonic Youth, its Mogwai, its Mr. Bungle?

Because I've Got Too Much/Too Little On My Mind . . .

2006-05-06T13:14:00.000-07:00

I'll just give you a taste of the what's been rattling around in my head with regards to new music.

'Stine and I have been talking, with more and more seriousness, about trying to make music together. I think these guys would give us a great window for exploring some good, hard keyboard noise (she really liked the track, and my goal is to find something that's pretty and transcendent, but as hard, dark and monolithic as a mountain of onyx).

I'm debating as to whether or not I'd like to pursue at least a little musical instruction within the next few months. It'd be nice to get some refresher on technique as regards the alto sax and flute, but it's not like I can't play. I might get more mileage out of simply playing at whatever level I can, and allowing techique
to grow from practice. As a student of post-punk, I'm always intrigued by the idea of "incorrect" technique creating a whole new set of rules for relating to the instrument. I'll have to give this a little more thought . . .

While I'm thinking of it, does anyone in the Seattle area know if there are classes in Butoh around? I'm having no luck on Google . . .

Anyway, that's all I've got today. A few crumbs . . .

Excrutiating Ephemera . . .

2006-05-01T11:05:00.000-07:00

. . . is the way of all things theatrical, I suppose. And so it was with The Swan, which closed Saturday night. We were a small, tight, congenial cast; but we weren't a partying cast, which unfortunately meant that all things ended in a fast strike, quick departures and something like an unceremonious shrug. The most satisfying role I've ever had, robbed of his wings, is waddling off into the distance, sqawking plaintively because he's not sure why I've abandoned him.

In any case, I thank my stars that this show happened to me after such a long break, that so many people who came to see the show said so many nice things, and that I didn't sustain any major injuries from either the piece or from trying to haul the antique refrigerator that served as the swan's perch up and down the narrow staircase at the Northwest Actor's Studio. I'm thankful that I was able to work with artists with whom I'd never yet been on stage, and that I was able to re-connect with Atlas Theatre in the wake of trying times with mutual acquaintances. I'm thankful to come out of a show that I loved, my head abuzz with hope and beauty, rather than ennui and misanthropy. As usual, I'm a little sad and lost, a little uncertain about what's next. But now that unease is well tempered with an unfamiliar ember of compassion.

In other news: Today I'm wearing khakis and a blue shirt, the absolute uniform of NW business casual. Yes, I too am bourgeois (like there was ever any doubt).

Listened online to new works by Om (transcendent stoner metal) and Wizardzz (freaky, prog-ish, synth-heavy, movie-soundtrack instru-metal). Whoa. Good stuff. I need to get my hands on that Wizardzz album stat, so's I can write a proper review.

OK, that's it. Just a quick check-in today. As the nature of my "hopeful melancholy" begins to reveal itself, or I find new morsels to review, or if I manage to get good and pissed-off about something, I'll be checking back in.

A Fool's Request

2006-04-15T16:25:00.000-07:00

JJisaFool requested that this post--originally placed as a response to Jose's lovely review of The Swan--be posted on my own blog, as he found it a worthy topic in and of itself. I brushed it up a little, but left it as is for the most part.

Question for artists, arts administrators and, perhaps most importantly, arts consumers who visit this neck of the woods . . .

To what degree does one pay attention to reviews?

In light of this and this (4th show down) (neither of which, by the way, I find particularly discouraging, because this show is decidedly odd, the choices at our fintertips equally so, and the whole effect could be off-putting, or at least an acquired taste; and even more, the fact that, despite not liking my vocal choices, the Times reviewer actually referred to me in print as "sexy", tickles me to no end), I find myself asking the usual questions about critics and reviews: Do fringe companies rely on reviews as the one form of financially equalizing marketing? Do critics and their opinions accurately or adequately represent the thoughts and interests of the audience at large?

Obviously, adjusting the show for critics (or anyone else) once open is as close to a sin as a good relativist like me is likely to acknowledge, regardless of the validity of the criticism. And I'm not inclined to take any of these reviews to heart (indeed, the criticisms in each review point fingers at different aspects of the play--one critic liked me and not the other guy, the other reviewer liked the other guy but took exception to my "dialect" [which, funny enough, is largely, though not entirely, dictated by the text], which indicates to me that they were troubled, and couldn't quite put their fingers on why . . . which sounds like success to me). I mean, as we've seen, the music and cinema I've appreciated over the years is often subject to misunderstanding by critics and audiences alike.

On the other hand, ignoring the critics is stock in trade for movies and CDs. Theatre . . . well, I don't know. I tend to find that theatre people fancy themselves more educated, more "academic", than fans of more "populist" art forms. As such, they may be more susceptible to "corruption" by a perceived critical consensus (not that these reviews represent much of a consensus). Or maybe not.

I wonder, too, if dismissing critics is tantamount to dismissing the audience, which brings us back around to the "fuck you" from the audience that a certain fool threw out there a number of weeks back.

I'm half questioning, half musing on the matter. Thoughts?

Spring Drizzle

2006-04-12T10:14:00.000-07:00

The winter rain was getting me down. But I'm telling you, spring rain is different. You don't feel it chilling you to the bone and making you sick; rather, you smell it opening the doors to the green in the surrounding leaves, washing the film from the streets and sidewalks.

I think, sometimes, that my love of rain in the warm seasons stems from some warm lunch/tea/coffee sessions in my adolescence with Platonic female friends, some plucked wildflowers, John Cusack standing with a radio blaring Peter Gabriel in Say Anything, the sweeping romance of it, the way it makes colors leap out from the gray, the teasing, "let's-get-you-out-of-those-wet-clothes" crypto-eroticism. And then when the sun peaks out, and the emerging warmth mingles with the scattered wet . . . aaaah, I remember why I love this city.

Opening weekend for The Swan went well, but Beige has a more credible report on that than do I.

We're reviewed, if you scroll down to the fourth show, on this page; the review is tepid, and the writing is . . . well, I'll let you judge that for yourself. But it isn't a pan, it's marginally complimentary towards my efforts and it may pique some curiosity amongst those who read it.

As a liberal, I'm neither reflexively against taxes nor particularly trusting of the idea of a "simplified" (read: regressive) tax code, but for FUCK'S SAKE, does this have to be so complicated? WE DON'T HAVE ANY MONEY!!!!!!!!!!!! Save your fucking audit flags for people who have a car and buy their clothes new, people! Jesus-monkey-fucking-Christ . . .

Oh, and I finally saw last week's LOST. Very fun, though I hope this doesn't portend a shaggy-dog ending to the whole thing.

Napping in the Eye of the Hurricane

2006-03-30T14:19:00.000-08:00

My apologies for any perceived neglect on my part. Really, I had no intention of blogslacking. But you see, between the primary job (where there's been a lot of work to do, which inhibits blogging), the second job (where I'm on my feet behind a computer-less counter, or weaving through a crowd with a bag of trifles, hence unavailable for blogging) or rehearsal (where I'm leaping about naked--sometimes, anyway--squawking, hissing and padding around the room in imitation of the cygnus buccinator, and as such am hell-and-gone from any blog-friendly environment), I just haven't been where I need to be when I need to be there to reach out to you, my friends, my other community.

So The Swan seems to be going well . . . I think. Actually, I'm pretty sure. I think. No, I'm definitely pretty sure . . . about everyone else's work. This is, of course, what every show looks like to me a week-and-a-day before opening, and I can't have sucked in ALL of those plays, or no one would cast me anymore. Right? Right?

In any case, what I fear ranges from the ludicrous (feeling too fat to pass credibly as a symbol of unbound eroticism) to the intangible (fearing that my stage listening, which felt so on a couple of days ago, but hopelessly off now; wondering if I'm finding the most useful balance between avian and human qualities) to the downright--for actors, anyway--mundane (Is this script going to be as interesting to the audience as it is to us? Am I good enough? Do I suck? Are there decent actors not doing a show right now because this bald, fat mediocrity snatched this role?).

All in all, though, the show as a whole is looking pretty good. We'll see come next Friday . . . I sorta wish this press release didn't make for such a set up. Referring to my "remarkable physical" performance is gonna make for some serious sting if or when my performance turns out to be less than remarkable. That said, the press release is lovely and should generate interest.

I've been chanting a good deal recently. There are many reasons I'm still hesitant to fully adopt Buddhism--true ambinalence about the appropriation of eastern ideas for western purposes, profound misgivings about any assertion that essence precedes existence, a fairly nihilistic position of the character of essential nature--but the mindfulness I see emerging in myself is undeniable. I think I'll need to study further to reconcile these matters, which means that I'll probably just have to keep chanting without fully accepting until such time as study of anything--martial arts, philosophy, etc.--is actually possible. More details on that as time permits.

In the meantime, forward on all matters . . .

Funny Thing, That . . .

2006-03-09T14:54:00.000-08:00

I've started rehearsals for The Swan. Boy, oh, boy, this is gonna be an interesting one. This may be one of those scripts that's more interesting to actors than to audience, but then again . . . Well, all I can say is, it fuses pathos, violence, humor, eroticism and surreal fantasy more pointedly and unabashedly into beauty and poetry than anything in which I've performed recently. So I'm pretty damn excited.

Other than that, all I've got are some little observations:

When you try to cut down on the number of weekdays on which you drink coffee, the weekdays on which you do drink coffee find you experiencing more pointedly the drug-like effects of the beverage.

Losing weight because I wanted to appear helpless (as in Edmond) seemed to happen a lot more easily than losing weight because I'm going to be naked onstage and don't want love handles (as with The Swan). You'd think the powers that be could throw my vain-insecurity/insecure-vanity a little bone. Geez.

My ankles hurt for how "on-our-toes" our finances, a patchwork of my many hours of low pay and 'Stine's many hours of indefinitely delayed pay applied to mountains of debt so outstanding I frequently forget who all needs to get paid, keep us.

Talking to Mormon visiting teachers after drinking a pitcher of stout with a friend at Six Arms is pretty amusing. Trying to execute a handstand as they're walking out the door, then attempting to fall gracefully into a backbend without properly gauging the proximity of the coffee table and smashing up your shin on the descent may be equally amusing to an observer, but considerably less so to the participant.

Having a heart to heart talk with a friend who has a different perspective--or at least a receptive ear--on a painful rift with another friend who left for another city without telling you he was moving away can do wonders for a still-troubled soul.

Having a surprising and compelling heart to heart with someone you barely know via email, and having hard-won but nebulously defined insights vindicated in the process, works similar wonders.

LOST seems to dole new episodes out at a rate of one every, like, 3 weeks, and it's starting to piss me off. Someone needs to write those cats and say, "Look, dudes, your show's cool; but you've got to look at 24 if you wanna see how a season should be run."

OK, that's all. I just mocked some people last week for blogslacking, and didn't want to be a hypocrite. I'm sure I'll have something more interesting to say once the show opens. Oh, and that's April 7th, for those in the area and/or those who want to get to the area. Stine's show opens a couple weeks after that, so a late month visit could equal a weekend of much theatrical goings on (and any and all attendant misbehaviour!!).

Rough Girls

2006-02-23T10:36:00.000-08:00

So part of my job is to cut articles related to theatre from our local paper for scrapbooking purposes. The irony that someone is paying me to read the arts section is amusing enough in itself. But then, lo and behold, as I open the arts section today, this is what greets me (I recommend enlarging the pictures and scrolling through to get the full effect). And it warmed my ever-lovin' heart. Why, you ask? 'Cause I looooooove roller derby girls. Or, to put it more broadly, I love, with every cell, rough women.

Women in combat boots. Women with piercings and tattoos. Girls who like pain, girls who like to inflict pain. Girls who play rugby, or roller derby (where girls on roller skates with tattoos wear skull makeup and skate very fast, tackling and jostling each other as they try to knock opponents on their asses), girls who leave soccer fields with scraped, bloody knees and mud all over their jerseys. Women who box, who wrestle, who lift weights, who do pushups.

The other night, while channel surfing, I caught the final matchup in Oympic women's hockey. "Holy living fuck!" I thought. "There's been women's hockey all this time, and I never knew about it?" I mean, it doesn't have the skin factor that boxing, wrestling, soccer, rugby (I've only ever seen women's rugby in my dreams, but I refuse to believe there isn't such a thing) or roller derby (sigh) has, but it's hockey, for God's sake. Ever seen an ice skater's thighs? Plus I imagine the orthodontic distress of hockey, and . . . well, that's too dark and sick a place to go right now, but use your imagination.

Anyway, if you check out that link, you'll notice that most of the rollergirls are 30-ish, with such arcane day-job titles as "artifical-intelligence consultant", or such mundane ones as "paralegal". Certainly not what you'd expect, except that I can imagine that if your work is all about brain, your life needs a little brawn, a little blood and sweat, some cathartic aggression and commemorative bruising. Certainly working at a desk inspires me to make my evenings a little more viscerally rich.

I think that's what I do with my art in a way, which is why it seems somehow inaccurate to call myself a writer, an actor or a martial artist. What I really seek is the path by which I can take the contents of my mind, heart and soul, all my compassion, rage, love, violence, fear, guilt, intelligence and rhetorical fortitude and inscribe in on the world at large in flesh, blood and spit. Writing's just words, after all; and acting, aside from being most bourne of thoughts and desires other than my own, has all kinds of safety imperatives built into it. Well and good: I'm not an inconsiderate sort. But still . . .

Back in 1998, when 'Stine and I were in our early years at the local theatre company of which we were members for 8 years . . . well, I don't remember how it started exactly, but a minor tradition was established whereby the development director of the company at the time--a semi-burly football player type--would wrestle with My Amazon herself. There stood the love of my life, who-knows-how-many drinks into a Seattle summer's evening, wrestling dirty, grunting, straining, embedding deep grass stains and dirt streaks on her clothing in the development director's backyard, inspiring neighbors' calls and police visits. There she was, all six feet of her, a warrior's musculature already well established even before massage school pumped her up further. The morning(s) after, miss purple world would have purple bruises on her arms, her thighs, her ass. I'd kiss them and "make them better", which usually lead to a wrestling match of our own.

I'm glad I married a healer, an empath and an artist. But I'm even more glad I married a rough girl. Now if we can just get her some roller skates . . .

Because I'm That Sorta Guy

2006-02-16T15:05:00.000-08:00

Well, I've been tagged twice now, so I'll do it.

Four jobs I've had:
1. Tourist information coordinator for Downtown Improvement District (Helena, MT)
2. Construction worker/home repair
3. Clairol hair color customer service hotline
4. Docket coordinator for the legal department at the chapter 13 trustee's office

Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. Pulp Fiction
2. Donnie Darko
3. Triplets of Belleville
4. Murderball

Four places I've lived:
1. Kenoga Park, CA
2. Helena, MT
3. New York, NY
4. Jackson, WY

Four TV shows I love:
1. The Sopranos
2. LOST
3. Deadwood
4. Firefly

Four places I've vacationed:
1. Fern Lake (somewhere in upstate NY)
2. New York, NY
3. St. Petersburg, FL
4. Mystic, CT

Four of my favorite dishes:
1. Thai drunken noodles
2. Garlic/Spinach/Mushroom/Monerey Jack Omelette
3. Sauteed greens (kale, preferably, or collards) with lemon juice, black pepper and garlic
4. Tuna melts

Four sites I visit daily:
1. IMDB
2. Slate/The Fray
3. allmusic.com
4. abebooks.com

Four places I would rather be right now:
1. Kicking back pints with Paul
2. Rehearsing for "The Swan"
3. Sitting in a natural hot spring, surrounded by snow
4. Tying 'Stine up and doing terrible things to her . . .

Sorry, I'm not gonna tag anyone. Anyone I'd tag has already done it or been tagged by someone else.

In Between Days

2006-02-13T11:45:00.000-08:00

So yesterday--February 12th, 2006--marked the 12th anniversary of 'Stine's and my "couplehood". We've been having sex for a few months longer than that, and have been friends for a little over a year longer than that, but February 12th, 1994 was when we started "dating". Come August, we will have been married for ten years.

Whoa, huh?

Sitting wedged between this anniversary and Valentine's day, I thought I'd be forgiven for using this in-between-day as an occasion to remind everyone what a glorious spot I'm in, and for paying an homage to the woman who's given me most of what I have worth keeping.

When I first met Christine--late September, 1992--I hit on her. Not all that consciously, really; at 20, I hit on attractive women without really trying or being particularly aware of it. With her impressive stature and cartoon-character eyes, she won me over as . . . what, exactly? I was at a socially isolated place in my life, trapped in an ugly undertow with an ex who kept pulling me back out to sea for the sort of "misery sex" that college exes sometimes have when they can't find anyone else willing to have sex with them. 'Stine was everything the not-to-be-named party wasn't: giddy, generous, romantic, naive despite harrowing experience, open-minded despite clear moral conviction and pointed aesthetic preference.

I imagine, in hindsight, that we were doomed to frustrate each other endlessly; her devotion to new agey principles like relativism, positivism and unconditional love clashed with my love of dissonance, my belief in chaos and my inability (to this day) to accept the notion of being loved on any other basis than for my own merit (hence conditional--and hence my difficulty in appreciating either parental or divine love). What was funny was that our opposition felt fun, whereas my rivalries with . . . the other girl were usually characterized by acrimony, deliberate cruelty, mockery and disdain.

Our early friendship stumbled through at least one complete miss of an attempted sexual encounter (attempted by me, which is, of course, why it failed), and was interrupted before it really got started by my suicide attempt in December of 1992. A piece of trivia that wouldn't come to my attention until later: As I realized through the heavy limbs and psychic stupor of the 80-or-so sleeping pills I'd taken about an hour before that I didn't want to die, I called the aforementioned ex, out of the aforementioned perception that no one else gave a fuck. Unbeknownst to me, Christine was AT the girl's apartment at the time. Small world and all that . . .

As the remainder of that school year played out, with my hiding my suicide attempts and its attendant bills from my parents, seeing a therapist on campus to avoid forced hospitalization or medication, scrambling to regain my academic composure after spending fall-quarter finals getting my stomach pumped, I found myself reaching out less blindly, but with greater transparency, to the people who were in my life but not fully integrated as friends or confidants. Christine had a way of listening to me compassionately while deflating my reflexive seriousness with warm, giggly humor, the occasional cutting insight and a consistent context of "I think this chick might be crazy, but DAMN she's entertaining." Her support and friendship to me during this time was a huge boon to my recovering from . . . well, from where I'd been before (the story of my suicide and how I got there could be the subject of its own post).

After an awkward-but-fun near-sexual encounter in March of 1993 (on the day I got my nose pierced, natch), and a far more successful (finally!) sexual liaison exactly 6 days before Thanksgiving '93, we moved from friends to friends-with-benefits for a few months before finally deciding on February 12,1994 that it was time, as I'd put it, to stop making a molehill out of a mountain and doing this for real. I was vulnerable that day, coming down off of LSD from the night before, sluffing my volunteer duties as a judge for a high-school debate meeting and trying to keep Christine from ditching me to have sex with a good friend who'd driven down to Cedar City from Logan for a booty call (we were frequent but NOT exclusive lovers). In hindsight, I probably would have had a good case for a temporary insanity plea (the statute of limitations is SO over by now). Sidelined that spring by a temporary breakup, we finished that spring in an essentially positive spot, increasing our levels of transparency, intimacy and vulnerability, and creating a strange community of misfits that included our own Missuz J and amandak.

That next fall, we found ourselves sharing an apartment during the turbulent Cedar Crest Year. At the end of that school year, June 1995, when 'Stine graduated and it became apparent that I never would, we moved to Salt Lake City to live with her delightful, insane mother for the summer and into the fall, all the while saving up funding to move to Seattle to . . . well, that was less than clear. I had vague notions of being a playwright, though I hadn't written anything in the year + that had passed since an ill-fated production of a play that will likely never again see the light of day, and an old high school friend (or rather, a friend from when I was in high school--she was in college at the time) who was on the staff of an Open Circle Theatre had been reading my scripts and giving me great encouragement. Christine still had interests in pursuing acting opportunities. Really, though, we wanted to live in a city with liquor and theatres and art films and public transportation, so we packed up and moved to the nearest city of any cultural distinction where we happened to know anyone. Seattle it was to be.

We married in August of 1996 under a weeping willow in a back yard on Beacon Hill. Our self-written vows were punctuated by blasts from the Blue Angels, exhibition pilots flying blue F-15s and annoying anyone not given to public bursts of militaristic, patriotic bravado. Our wedding mix had a Nine Inch Nails song on it, and I wore motorcycle boots. Our photographer was a street troll from the Pike Place Market named Bobby, who had a beard down to his groin and wore flamboyant tie die at the ceremony, chewing a toothpick and scaring the hell out of 'Stine's family. We got too drunk too fast, and as a result didn't "consummate" until the next day; but it was really just an afterthought, really, 'cause we already knew we had great sex.

We've stumbled back into theatre since then, I rediscovered my lost passion for martial arts and she's made good on her natural talent for bodywork. Our marriage, like all marriages, has had its ups and downs, its drunken revelry, its sexual deviances, its encounters with cops and its visits to correctional facilities. And it's always had its great sex, its open dialogue. In short, it's been human, and it's been spectacular.

What can I say about Christine? I can say that no one shares the way she shares. No one embodies true generosity so thoroughly, so ceaselessly, so unconditionally. She will always speak the truth, which can drive me to distraction as often as not. She likes to be naked.

She's taught me that the meritocratic understanding of love and a belief in true, unconditional love aren't mutually exclusive. She's softened my misanthropy, and correctly pointed out all of the ways in which clearly even I don't believe my own hype on the matter. From her, I've learned what a powerful weapon warmth and humor can be; from her, I've learned that beating up on myself is counter to my self improvement. We've gotten a lot of good practice at forgiveness from each other, and the importance of that gift, on either side, cannot be properly valued.

I love to hear her sing, to watch her perform. I love the way she cries at tawdry "human interest" stories on news magazine shows, or at any given episode of Miracle Pets. I love the way she has to build a pillow sculpture, put in earplugs, wrap her head in a turban to keep the light out and flop around like a dying carp for half-an-hour before she can get to sleep. I love that she puts so much syrup on her waffles that there's a veritale wading pool on her plate by the time she gets done, a sheet of gravy following her (divine) fried chicken, greens and mashed potatoes. I love that she shaves the lower half of her leg and her bikini line while opting out of shaving her thighs (??--I mean, as we know, I don't care; but it's the reasoning that fascinates). I love that she'll put ranch or blue cheese dressing on anything. I love that she can't eat ice cream without pouring milk on it. I love that pouty face she makes when she wants to spend money or do anything she thinks I won't want to do. I love that she's into sex toys, that she's an experimenter. I love that she wants sex as much as she does. I love that she grew up Mormon while I grew up Catholic, that she's a buddhist to my quasi-nihilistic, crypto-Taoist gnosticism. I love that she's enough of a fag hag to marry this slapdash slob of a metrosexual. I love that we can drink beer and do housework together, and she squeals with delight when I put on the cutoff T-shirt that says "Pussy Boy" when I scrub the bathroom. I love that half her wardrobe is purple (as are many of our sex toys).

If I didn't love all those things, 12 years would have been a very long time.

So happy anniversary, doll, and happy Valentine's day. Here's to 10 or 12 more.

Flesh to Feather

2006-02-08T15:05:00.000-08:00

So now that the cast list is officially posted and what not, I can tell you that I've been cast in The Swan by Elizabeth Egloff. I'm more excited for this project than I have been for any in a while, and as such, I fear failure with every cell. Of course I should embrace failure, to be consistent in my values, but I'm still working on that. Hypocrisy, like passive-aggression, is really just a function of having aspiration, since some failure is an inevitable side effect of persistent, repeated effort.

Anyway, the play is a fascinating little fantasy in which I get to break out some zoomorphic physical work. I'll appear nude in this one, as well (whether you consider that a warning or you consider that an enticement, you're right), so thelyamhound will be busting his canine ass to drop about 10 lbs. over the next two months. Wish me luck on that.

Auditioning was interesting in the context of my ongoing struggle with identity and its relationship to art. I will never be able to fully give up acting, any more than I can fully embrace the acting industry. In light of my work schedule and financial needs, I decided some time ago that I would only audition for shows that sound genuinely exciting, and stop doing shows as favors to friends or, far worse, as perceived stepping stones to some perception of legitimacy (a concept I despise, unless of course I happen to want it at the moment). When I got an email asking me to audition for this one, I was skeptical. But then I looked at the synopsis, and the sides . . . and something about this one just . . . I don't know, just seemed to call to me. It just seemed so right. So right that I was able to embrace the notion that it wouldn't work out, paradoxically. I auditioned knowing both that this was the right role for me, that I was right for the role, and that I might very well fail. That great cosmic buzz of caring-but-not-caring . . . oh, I tell ya . . . Why can't I feel that way all the time?

Anyway, it paid off. I got cast, I'm working with some cool folks, and I think it's gonna be awesome. I mean, if we can pull it off. If I can pull it off.

Also, the role I'm playing was played by Peter Stormare, opposite Frances MacDormand, in 1993. And that's cool.

I was laid out with a back spasm last Monday (probably the result of some misguided attempts to shock those 10 lbs. off in one fell swoop on Sunday morning). It's feeling better now. I wish I had something more interesting to add to that, but there you are.

Funny thing about that: I checked a website yesterday for some dietary information--not for weight loss, strictly speaking (I'm trying to improve my overall health, which is fine but could always be better), although I did note that I was interested in dropping a few pounds by April--and they had me put in things like height and weight. According to the BMI, I'm overweight. Now those of you who know me (in real life) know how neurotic I am about every pinch of fat I can scrape together; and while I feel that, to look (for acting purposes) and feel (for human purposes) my absolute best, I could afford to lose 5-10 lbs., I do NOT, in any way, shape or form, see myself as overweight. Has anyone ever found the BMI chart to be . . . just, I don't know, weird? Maybe there are questions of frame or musculature that need to be addressed. Maybe I'm delusional. Maybe I'm just American. Whatever it is, it struck me as odd.

I'm still sitting on a lot of writing--it's harder to get any sort of writing program started than it is to start acting again, especially when my primary interest seems to be writing screenplays & rock operas (neither of which I know how to do) and write for myself (my motives for which I'm always second guessing). And while all writers will have varying thoughts on this matter, it's my finding that the writing I force myself to do when I have no inspiration pretty much invariably ends up in the recycle bin. It's neither here nor there, since I still have two jobs to work, lines to memorize and a weighty book of biblical-era text to finish; but I need to assure myself that I haven't stopped trying to find a place in the chaos, or abandoned my intent to re-explore my writing. I've just abandoned myself a little more to whims of chance and intuition.

It also occurred to me that being a physical actor--and I think it's fair to say that I am one--bears a useful relation to being a writer, because the physical actor has a level of freedom in creating a "text" of sorts that's bound to, yet independent (ultimately) of, the written text at hand.

My other theatre group, UMO, is having its retreat in June. A longtime colleague, also a relatively recent inductee into the company, has proposed our creating a "routine" that can be used for onsite gigs (corporate or artistic events where we perform clown routines, sketches or ongoing improv in a crowd situation--onsite gigs = good money for not too much work). It may be an interesting opportunity, both for making money in the industry without interfering with my day job or wasting time on unpalatably middlebrow projects and also for learning a bit about creating text for physical acting.

Ultimately, I can only go forward, with whatever caution or circumspection I care to apply. My greatest fear? That I'm a dilletante, looking for a place in the art world because what I crave is the artistic lifestyle. My greatest dream? I don't know. So I guess I'd best find one.

Cleanse

2006-01-28T11:21:00.000-08:00

For a combination of reasons--addiction management, health improvement, the advice of my acupuncturist--I'm cutting down on coffee and, for the next few days (to clear up a nebulous but uncomfortable health matter), drinking green tea, eating cucumbers and pears and avoiding peanuts, alcohol, shrimp and spicy food (I'm also supposed to be eating mung beans, but I wouldn't even know where to look--I've eaten mung bean noodles . . . I wonder if those would be any help?).

Anyway, I find it interesting how subtle shifts in perception begin to assert themselves in light of even minor dietary adjustments.

I was tinkering with my profile. Not a lot, but enough to include some new discoveries like Animal Collective (think a folkier take on XTC style melodies and Flaming Lips style sonic experimentation only, like, WAY freakier) and Ennio Morricone (not a new discovery per se, but I just acquired a double-disc set called Crime & Dissonance--best title in the world--that collects some of his obscure gems that were influence by musique concrete and dissonant minimalist free-jazz) and eliminate some old ones (love him as I do, I haven't listened to Charlie Parker in years). I traded some old horror favorites in for some new ones on my movie list; I left the book one alone because, between multiple jobs and the occasional acting gig, it seems like so long since I've actually finished a book; and while I've enjoyed some of the non-fiction I've read, I rarely think of academic lit as something I'd include with favorites, as I'm usually going in for information.

What I noticed, though, is how the essential character of my lists remains the same, but the personality of the list changes, which speaks not only to notions of personal canon formation (my favorite hobby), but to the personality/character conundrum I brought up in the last post. Interesting (to me, anyway).

Speaking of "the occasional acting gig" . . . I've just been cast in a show! A very fascinating show, in which I'll play a very challenging role. I'm probably more excited for this piece than I've been for anything in a while . . . which of course leaves me terrified that I'm not up to the task. Oh, the double-edged sword of getting what you want.

Things I'm Not Writing About

2006-01-25T13:26:00.000-08:00

Nothing's happening in my life, really. Well there's one thing, but I don't want to talk about it, 'cause I'll jinx myself. You know how some people catch every cold that comes through? Well, I catch every jinx. So you won't hear about it 'til after the fact. Deal.

Oh, there are things. 'Stine's doing well (although I'm sure she could tell you that herself). We just saw The Matador the other day, which is VERY funny, though arguably unexceptional . . . in every sense but one: Pierce Brosnan delivers, in this film, the best comedic performance committed to celluloid in years.

I'm having some mild success cutting down on coffee. But it's leading to an increase in appetite, which is either gonna have to lead to my ignoring my "hunger" pangs or exercising more, 'cause I gain ONE pound, I'm back on coffee. That's just the way of things.

I'm about 1/4 of the way into the Nag Hammadi Library. I'd be further along if I was just reading it, but I'm taking better notes than I ever took on anything back when I was feeling burdened with the strictures of formal education. Fascinating stuff. The Apocryphon of John actually deals in a strangely eastern sense of the notion of reincarnation, and a fairly loose definition of asceticism. I think the reconciliations I'm having trouble making with the gnostic worldview have already been addressed by the authors and philosophers through which I discovered gnosticism to begin with--Jung, Melville, Hesse, Blake--and through some philosophers whose work I've yet to tackle--Bruno, Jonas, Bloom. Besides, I've yet to encounter ANY philosophy that didn't contain some unacceptable premises; and being that most of these texts are contemporaneous with biblical scripture, one can assume that most of its problems are already endemic to Christianity. All in all, it's nice to have my talk of gnositicism taking on the hallmarks of (semi-)serious sholarly pursuit.

I've cut down on work, but I'm still putting in about a 50 hour work week. That means little to no time to really write on any topics that require discussion, at least not without an argument to spur me on point by point. To hold forth on a topic independent(ly?) of such a spur, I need to be able to construct a thesis, define my terms & the problem and elucidate the body of my internal conflict. Then I need to support it, and . . . well, it's just a nightmare. I understand that there are people who don't go around with their minds spinning spools of information this way. Lucky devils.

So here's a list of all the things I'm NOT posting about because work, time and the mechanisms of my psyche won't allow me too, despite their being on my mind. I've decided to list them under the titles of posts I started but never finished:

*Character vs. Personality - If character refers both to "essential nature" and "integrity or fortitude" (Houghton Mifflin), and personality to "the totality of distinctive traits of an individual", how does one differentiate between the two for the purposes of personal reform? In the first definition of character (essential nature), it would seem that personality is more changeable, more malleable than character. But given the second definition (integrity) would seem to put "character" in the position of that which needs change, in the sense that traits in an individual that speak to his integrity are the ones that need reform, whereas those that constitute "personality", looked at in this light, may only refer to superficialities like, oh, chewing with one's mouth open. So is the cause of self-improvement concerned more with character or personality? How does one identify traits worthy of reform vs. traits which may cause superficial problems , but have little bearing on personal integrity, trustworthiness and moral alignment? In the wake of a troubled, possibly demolished friendship where the end had as much to do with long-term character/personality issues as with any instigating events, how do we discern the important traits from the unimportant ones when evaluating the history of our personality/character conflicts?

*Sleepytime Gorilla Museum: A Tale of Two Concerts - The story of my attendance at two shows that introduced me to the only band that's really mattered to me for the last year or so, and the only musical theatre that's mattered to me in the entirety of my adulthood, is dying to be told. I missed them this last time they were in town, and am eagerly scanning their website to see when they're playing again.

*The New Dualism - The beauty of gnostic dualism--aside from its clear parallels in classic and Zen Buddhism and in Taoism--is its clear divergence from Christian moralism. But it also requires, at its heart, a certain disdain for this world. Most religions do, and those that don't circumnavigate that disdain with a nebulously defined optimism, not to say utopianism. Can one recognize dualism in the world without, of necessity, placing judgement on one side or the other? Can reality be divided into the pneumatic and the hylic without one being intrinsically superior, or without one being inextricably linked with right or wrong action? Is there room in Blake and Bruno's mysticism for Sade's deification of the violent lawlessness of the flesh?

*My Maverick Monkey - I don't care WHO thinks it's about race: Peter Jackson's fiercely entertaining King Kong is the most tear-jerking, pulse-pounding spectacle of 2005, a big movie the way they don't really do big movies anymore. More than that, it's the most poignant evocation of Rousseauian (not to say Rousseauist) rage in the face of impending civilization I can think of.

*Too True to Be a Biopic - Capote does what most artist biopics fail to do: It tells the uncomfortable truth about the chasm between art and humanity, and the price of mistaking that filter for real experience. Plus, Philip Seymour Hoffman is probably the best actor in the world.

*Let It Rain (But Let Me Sleep) - I hate summer clothes, and the sun gives us Celts cancer. Cloudy skies make me think of Tim Burton movie sets and Sisters of Mercy songs. Fact is, I like inclement weather . . . or at least that's how I always thought of myself. But this stuff is getting me down. Making peace with moods, seasons and aesthetics.

*Lost in LOST- Where is it going? And will Matthew Fox's beard ever grow into anything substantial?

OK, that's enough silliness for now. There's more, probably, too vague to even title: The nature of the artistic personality; the difference between the expressive and interpretive artist and whether it's possible to be both; porn, and the fact that everything beautiful and natural seems to have become a fetish item, leaving the casual porn-trawler with scrawny, shaved, airbrushed, made-up, implanted, subjugated women as the "mainstream" ideal . . . but maybe you'll get better capsules on these ideas as they evolve. Maybe my next post will be on one of the topics mentioned above (in the titles without dissertation section), and the subjects in this paragraph will have graduated to having a title and thesis. Who knows?

Surgery and Resolve

2005-12-30T13:03:00.000-08:00

First things first, just to get the truly important stuff out of the way: 'Stine's surgery seems to have gone smoothly. News after the surgery was that she'd been breathing on her own, which was a good indication that the nerve to the vocal cord was still active. It turned out things were even better than that, for when I entered her room on Friday evening, she actually greeted me with her own voice! Oh, what a relief it is.

Her temperature's been bobbing around a bit, and there seem to have been some side effects that I'll leave for her to elucidate once she's feeling better; but on balance, things are going well.

Other than that, I've just been preparing for a new year.

New Year's day was always sort of a throwaway holiday as a kid. I mean, there were no presents, there was no religious significance (as an awestruck Catholic youth, religious significance at least lent Christmas and the far less tantalizing Easter a certain grandeur), and, worst of all, the day itself seemed to be built around an endless string of televised football games (or "gridiron" as they call it in the rest of the civilized world, saving the moniker "football" for the far superior sport of soccer), the true scourge of our culture.

I can't quite remember when New Year's Eve first became important. I remember at least one New Year's Eve spent in the care of a hot babysitter (sorry, Wendy, but you were). I remember at least one on which I was the babysitter, looking for movies we weren't supposed to be watching on the satellite dish. And I remember our later family tradition of going out to dinner at a decent restaurant, seeing a movie and then coming home and waiting for the countdown. Well and good, but no magic, please, this isn't one of those holidays.

Later on, of course, it became about profligate indulgences, drunkenness, debauchery . . . all good things, sure, but how do I distinguish that from any other Saturday?

Then there were the resolutions, as often as not suggested to me by my parents, and subsequently including things like resolving to be more obedient, get better grades, stop cowering in the face of bullies and stand up for myself, complain less while doing chores, be more consistent about brushing my teeth, eating everything I was fed whether I liked it or not, working harder at being confirmed and so on. Basically, resolutions used to have a feeling of chastisement about them, as though they existed primarily as functions of my past failures and promises not to be such a fucking weakling/crybaby/general twit in the future. Attempts to change them in my adolescence and in college failed because what I really wanted to resolve to do involved either the participation of other people (resolving to get laid more offered zero boost to my collegiate sex life) or grandiose schemes simply outside my youthful reach (that Pulitzer Prize I was supposed to win in 1993 is still in the mail, I'm sure).

So this year, to my pleasant surprise, New Year's Eve was a pleasant affair, spent imbibing in a gorgeous cottage on a lake. We had fireworks, music, a fireplace, a couple of invigorating power outages . . . All in all, it was a nice reminder that I actually DO appreciate the pleasures of life outside the city. New Year's Day was spent seeing Walk the Line (flawed, but well-acted and quite entertaining), and doing very little else.

As for resolutions . . . I have to say that I've come to appreciate the concept, although it's nigh to impossible to gather all of my resolutions together by New Year's Eve, and I'm likely to keep coming up with more over the course fo the year. One needn't wait for a holiday, I suppose, to bolster resolve, to court the better part of ourselves and recognize what in our natures or behaviours stands in the way of success, accomplishment or--to make room for a goal less intrinsically objectivist--a more profound and peaceful state of being.

I'd apologize for the intrinsic self-indulgence of posting one's resolutions, but that seems pointless in a forum where the subject is, by definition, the contents of one's internal monologue or the narrative of one's personal obsession (both of which, in my case, happen to be the same thing).

So here are a few thoughts on the upcoming year, and what I'd like to do with it:

--Bitch less (but embrace my bitchiness more, leading to the next one . . . )

--Be kinder to myself, more forgiving of my own foibles.
This one's always tough to reconcile with an ethic more influenced than I'd like to believe by '80s "tough love" rhetoric; if there's one thing that I share with social conservatives, it's a pointed skepticism regarding the undue philosophical and educational emphasis on "self-esteem". But I think it's safe to say that my enlightened self-criticism becomes vindictive self-loathing more often than not, and my perceived failures are less a product of sloth or moral failing than of unrealistic expectation and a failure to except either the world or myself as it exists.

--Be more sexually inventive, and make more room for sexual play in my life.
Not that anyone's complaining, but "play" is really the key word here. The fun in my life has ceased being fun. Some of the things that have lost their fun--booze, weed, partying, theatre--may best be addressed by distance and reflection, sex would, I think, best be reo-booted by patient exploration and new approaches.

--Drink and smoke less, to save money, be healthier and keep myself better suited for that last resolution.
Fairly self-explanatory.

--Get back on my "neurotic" oral hygeine regimen, which has actually served my dental health well and will also support resolution #3.
I can't even think of how many times I've refused a kiss because my mouth felt foul. It's my own thing--it's always me, and not 'Stine, who finds my mouth unattractively dirty. But I'd like to keep my clean dental record running; and I figure that if you find something dirty, you'd best clean it.

--Learn to cook meat and vegetables in more--and more creative--ways.
Not that there's anything wrong with my cooking or our diet (except with my planning--if I cook more than 2 things at once, one of my pieces will inevitably burn, a problem I imagine my mother would have had if she hadn't cajoled her children into being kitchen assistants at a very young age). We could just use more variety, and, perhaps most importantly, some simple-but-tasty combos that don't take a long time, are healthy, filling-but-light (so I don't have to rely on knee-and-hip punishing exercise to keep my waistline from becoming too . . . American). Part of it is a matter of moving beyond the Asian cooking framework, which is delicious and has done great things for my cooking habits, but routinely leads me to ingredient-heavy dishes that require a LOT of prep time.

--Dress better.
This is not because there's anything wrong with how I dress, but I still "save" my favorite outfits for special occasions; and I've come to realize that I don't find any occasions special anymore. Which is too bad, because all of my occasions should be a little more special.

--Rediscover humor.
Laugh at myself, my anger, my foibles, the foibles of others.

--Accept, KNOW, that I may never be famous, and that's OK; but also recognize that it's OK that being known by everyone on earth has been my only goal in life, OK that I have to start from scratch because I never wanted anything but to be liked by everyone.
Accept, KNOW that, just maybe, I never have to "accomplish" anything the way I've understood that term. Accept that ALL of my artistic endeavors, even martial arts, may have more to do with my character than they ever will with my career, that they may be hobbies rather than professions, that there's nothing shameful about having my "work" simply be that which pays my bills. Accept that I may be a decent man, even an exceptional one, without any "career" at all.

--Read more (which goes with watching TV less).
I've got a good start on that one, having begun the project of reading the totality of the ancient gnostic gospels in the Nag Hammadi Library.

--Play my saxophone and flute now and again.
I forget, sometimes, that before I acted, before I sang, before I wrote plays, critiqued film, had sex, cooked Thai food . . . before I was anything else, I was a musician, a good one; and while I may never capture any past glory, I may find myself less creatively dry if I started playing the instruments I know how to play and have at my disposal. No, I don't remember everything I learned; and no, there's no protocol for flute or saxophone in art-metal, post-punk or industrial music. But I can be better than I am on those instruments, having been so much better before; and if anyone's gonna find a protocol for those instruments in music that I actually find compelling, it's gonna be me. Plus I may actually discover a creative pleasure in my life that I haven't either temporarily or permanently exhausted, which can only be to the good.

--Re-cultivate some love of nature.
It's tough without a car, but it's a worthy endeavor. One of my obstacles with nature--which I seem to recall I once appreciated--is that as my philosophical outlook has evolved, the methods by which humanity (or Americans, at any rate) "appreciates" nature strike me as unpalatable: the naive Rousseauism of the average hippie backpacker, the bourgeois playground-ism of the urban and suburban tourist. But like it or not, we have some primitive tie to nature, and our cultural aspirations will always look to the reptilian brain for a place to begin understanding the world. If all I understand is the world we've created, and not the world that spawned it, part of the equation for understanding the primordial, chaotic Tao is missing.

--Re-cultivate an appreciation of--and create some time for--solitude.
If I'm dissatisfied with my social engagements, bored with the paltry pleasures of drugs and alcohol, annoyed by the prosaic aesthetic pulses of my acquaintances and colleagues and hungry for greater peace and understanding of self, it seems like a no-brainer that what I need is some time for genuine reflection, time to appreciate those things that the people around me don't enjoy (and maybe get out and find out who IS enjoying these things, so I can say that I know someone who does). And, contrary to some (partially correct) assertions that I should get "out of my head", some real time to get into my head, instead of trying to squeeze my meditations into a frenzy of activities in which I've long since ceased to believe. Maybe the reason my periods away from my activities never seem to refresh is that I replace my activities with more activities, more TV, more booze, more parties, more desperate bids for company and attention. Maybe I don't actually know what I think anymore. Maybe I should find out.

--Exercise to feel better, not to look better with my shirt off.
My trick knee, sore back and throbbing hips will thank me for it. Besides, I'm not a movie star and am unlikely to become one anytime soon. And even if I did get some big break, decided I wanted onstage or found a way on camera, let's face it: I'm in my 30s, I'm bald, and I have hair on my shoulders. No matter what kind of shape I'm in, no matter how cool the tattoos I KNOW I'm gonna get, NO ONE is gonna ask me to take my shirt off. No one.

--Notice when I'm eating for comfort, boredom, sadness.
I might not have to jump rope 'til my ankles feel like they've been sledgehammered if I didn't go through a half pound of medium cheddar and three bags of microwave popcorn every time I watched an episode of Lost.

OK, I think that's good for now.

In any case, Happy New Year (belated), and keep throwing positive thoughts in 'Stine's direction.

Hit & Run

2005-12-29T10:31:00.000-08:00

Some quick observations: The holidays are o'erladen with dairy products.

For some reason, I can't get to my blog through any path but the beige one's link. What's up with that? Computers are confounding. I thought maybe I'd gotten myself banned or something, just for being a cantankerous motherfucker; but I'm still able to post, so that seems unlikely. Maybe I'm being reserved for the most dedicated seekers.

I just bought 'Stine and I a book on Celtic design that shows how to compose and construct Celtic knots, specifically those that morph into animal designs. There's a whole chapter on Celtic hound symbology. Someday, when time and money work out, there's a veritable treasure trove of tattoos in there.

I need to cut down on coffee consumption. Maybe I'll make that one of my New Year's resolutions (I'll even bump it into the top 100-or-so).

I'm so behind on movie reviews that I might just have to do a holiday roundup this weekend. Music, too, although little of what little music I purchased this last year was actually recorded or released during that time. I'll actually have two full days off, Sunday and Monday, so I'll have to make a project of that. Maybe an "Arts Year in Review", something like that. A quick summation, though, would yield that the best blockbuster I saw all year was King Kong, the most well-directed feature was The Constant Gardener, and the most satisfying overall feature was Murderball. While there were many albums released in 2005 I would love to have owned, I bought few if any of them; my purchases tended to involve catching up with bands I saw live late in 2004, early in 2005 and/or outfits I'd read about over the previous year. The most deeply satisfying purchase of the year has to be Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's Of Natural History, even if I almost always listen to it alone.

The best reason I can think of to become a professional music critic is that the newest releases would just show up at my desk whether I wanted them or not. Of course, if I didn't hand pick the publication in question, I'd get stuck listening to a lot of crap. Oh, who am I kidding? Even independent post-punk, industrial and art-metal rags probably receive their share of CDs by no-talent posers, perhaps even more than other magazines might (better These Arms Are Snakes than Beyonce, but post-punk-industrial and art-metal are as vulnerable to fashion victims and studio creations as any other genre).

I got a charcoal grey peacoat for Christmas, and that's more than fine by me. If there's anything that doesn't go with, I don't wanna know about it.

Okay, gotta fly. If time and chemical imbalance allow, I will post something more interesting than a rushed overview or a self-depracating rant sometime soon.

Still Around

2005-12-19T14:54:00.000-08:00

This is going to have to be brief, 'cause I have a lot of work to do at work, and I'm never not at work.

Brief update: I'm still working my ass off, but, paradoxically, I /we still have no money. Since I often find mere breathing to be something of an off-putting chore, current workload had me a little overwhelmed last Friday at the futility of it all. I'm marginally better now; that is to say, there's still no light at the end of the tunnel (assuming the desired result is material comfort), but I feel less weighed down with hatred, resentment and fury (the anomie, futility and ennui are still, for better or worse, fully intact). I am, however, left perplexed that I still can't make enough to cover basic expenses even when working at a rate that I can't possibly maintain.

This is nothing new, of course. I've been broke since pretty much the moment I graduated high school, to one degree or another. What I've lost in the interim is that sense of confidence that I was answering to a higher calling, that there was something beyond material comfort for which I was working. Having lost faith in pretty much all higher callings--art, enlightenment, social change--I essentially abandoned all other pursuits, at least temporarily, to bombard my debts with the fruits of perpetual labor. Now I see that perpetual labor provides no fruit (unless you count a four-cup-a-day coffee habit as a "fruit"). So I'm kinda back to square one.

Other than that, I guess I'm fine. My health has been better, but it's been worse. I've shaved the goatee. I could afford to lose a few pounds--this schedule has been hell on my exercise regimen--but I've been in worse shape (and the size 34 jeans I bought this fall still fit, so I can't be expanding all that much). We celebrated 'Stine's birthday last weekend, which was a roaring success; but she already told you that story. My only disappointment was that I expected some sort of spiritual uplift from it, a sense that, as ineffectual and impotent as I may be in financial and artistic forums, as empty and disconnected as I may be in matters of spirit, that I could still prove capable of a generous and giving act. Yet somehow I still felt like I'd failed, like the real effort and investment had come from other people. That said, her tattoo looks good (although we'll probably need some color touch up on some of the details), the movie was solid and the party was a true surprise. Success!

I'm pretty excited to have two mornings of sleeping-in in a row next week (I get an administrative holiday the day after Christmas, what with the holiday falling on a Sunday), and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that after we cover our hundreds of dollars in overdrafts & overdraft charges this week, there'll be some money for me to do some last minute Christmas shopping (the funding needed to do it before now has simply never materialized); I'm not overly worried, since I went all out on the birthday, but I'd still like to find some nice knick-knacks to make the next year a little more fun.

I've had some possible CD reviews brewing, but those take the sort of time my schedule just doesn't allow for now--maybe after the 1st of the year (I've already got a new 2nd job lined up, but it'll be both fewer hours and lower pressure than the current supplemental income machine). Until then, a happy holiday to all.

Just a Meme . . .

2005-12-13T11:54:00.000-08:00

Androgynous
You scored 56 masculinity and 60 femininity!

You scored high on both masculinity and femininity. You have a strong personality exhibiting characteristics of both traditional sex roles.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 35% on masculinity
You scored higher than 51% on femininity

Link: The Bem Sex Role Inventory Test written by weirdscience on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Hounded

2005-11-23T15:24:00.000-08:00

OK, the title was a bit of playful melodrama. I suppose I'm rather glad that my "presence" (such as it is) is missed in bloggerville. But what good's a moor-dwelling bloodhound if his appearances aren't infrequent enough to cause doubt as to his existence?

General update: I work too much, but am still not seeing quite the financial payoff I'd been hoping for. I anticipate that next month will look marginally better, but I may need to find another second job after the holidays (when the current second job ends) to start seeing significant amounts of "disposable" (read: movie-going, CD-buying, skin-inking, martial-arts-class-taking) income.

On my way to work today, an enormous possum ran across my path, hustling its way out of the rain, worry and aggravation in its beady little eyes. I love seeing possums and raccoons in the city; it gives me reason to believe that all this human intrusion we've allowed ourselves to believe will destroy the earth will cause only a minor inconvenience to the broader continuum, that when we destroy ourselves, adaptable animals will make use of our environment and ultimately open its gates to less adaptable, more easily cowed species.

'Stine cooked an amaretto brined turkey yesterday, and it was delicious. I screwed up the gravy--I got overzealous with the cleanup, forgot what I was doing (I was, erm, memory-impaired) and threw out the drippings before my clouded mind could fully grasp what I was doing. It was an easy enough rescue, though, and the meal was a delight. I'm having leftovers for lunch and I can hardly wait. I've never been one to complain about holiday leftovers. I'm the sort who can eat more or less the same thing every day.

There seems to be a parade outside my window. Didn't they just have one yesterday?

Anyway, the beige one was over and we watched The Aviator. I'd give you a review, but it would really all boil down to, "Eh . . . Not bad." DiCaprio was better than he's been in years, Blanchett is sexy as Katherine Hepburn (of course, Kate Blanchett would be sexy as J. Edgar Hoover), Kate Beckinsdale is a little bland, and Gwen Stefani's appearance is mercifully brief. John C. Reilly is brilliant and underused, as always. Still, the movie was, on the whole, technically impressive, admirably coherent, consistently engaging and, really, kinda forgettable. As I'd feared, it seemed like Martin Scorcese had made a Steven Spielberg film. Which isn't a bad thing, necessarily; but it's not what I'd hope for from the man who gave me Raging Bull and Taxi Driver.

On matters I can't discuss too openly:

This sense of corporate superiority is not always Olympian; that is, tranquil and tolerant. It may be Titanic; restive, militant and embittered.
-----C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

In this passage, Lewis refers to the tendency between friends to create a vacuum around themselves, to create an ipso facto aristocracy, the "corporate superiority" to which he refers. What I wonder is, if the nature of a friendship is indeed "Titanic", might one imagine that obstacles within the friendship, or even the temporary or permanent dissolution thereof, would be similarly acrimonious? The trouble, I imagine, with a friendship based on a mutual sense of opposition to "the world" is that, inevitably, any two people are likely to find that they don't necessarily oppose the same things about the world, that maybe they don't believe in the same prescription for "saving" it. What happens when the antipathy that they both shared for "outsiders" is turned inward, toward one another? If both the degree and nature of their respective, ostensibly shared animosities reveal themselves to be wildly divergent, do these differences provide fertile soil for the perception of betrayal, or even the undertaking of pre-emptive betrayal?

All right, that's all I have to say on that subject. Such is the price of confronting semi-private matters in a public forum: nothing is ever quite clear enough (except, of course, to those who know exactly what I'm talking about).

Observation: The key, I've found, to a reasonably attractive goatee is vigilant trimming. My approach has been to zap it weekly with the 3/8" attachment on my shaver, and chase renegade hairs with scissors every other day. Shaving would be easier, of course, but I'm determined to make this beard work for at least a few more weeks (I can't remember what my record is on goatee longevity, but I'm pretty sure I haven't yet broken it). We'll see how it goes, with occasional updates.

OK, so . . . The Devil's Rejects. How does one review a film that seems patently review proof? How does one address its built-in controversey without coming off like an apologist? In a sense, the "exploitation" genre, even when it subversively accomplishes aesthetic goals beyond mere exploitation, would seem to defy apology; as such, an "apologist" is likely to appear either defensive or unduly academic (in the worst sense of the word).

Let's do the easy job of synopsizing: The Devil's Rejects begins an unspecified period of time after House of 1000 Corpses (long enough for the previously merely scruffy Otis Firefly to grow a rather impressive rat's nest of a beard, apparently). An armed-to-the-teeth posse descends upon their den of iniquity and redneckery, led by William Forsythe, brother to one of the lawmen killed in a raid on the compound in ...Corpses (Forsythe, always a reliable character actor, has never been more chillingly ambiguous). After a shootout worthy of Sam Peckinpah, Ma Firefly is captured alive, while Baby and Otis hit the road, arranging a rendez-vous with Captain Spaulding, a bearish bald man in clown face and their father.

Yep, it's the old irredeemably amoral sociopaths on the lam through the desert motif, and the phrase "irredeemablty amoral" gets a genuine workout here. When Oliver Stone tackled this genre, squeezing the fun out of a Quentin Tarantino script in order to make his political point, he justified the cold-blooded fury of his leads by making them "products" of a media gone haywire. Far better predecessors like Bonnie & Clyde, Badlands (Terence Malick's first film, with a very young Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek--run to the video store NOW if you haven't seen it) and Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid circumnavigated the issue of cruelty by letting their characters, even at their most vicious, be existentially hapless more than wantonly cruel. One of the better recent takes on the genre, Stander, a true story about a South African cop turned fugitive, is so suffused with matters of class, race and moral accountability that while there's much to get the heart racing, there's little to chill the blood. Even Tarantino's ne0-grindouse splatterfests are so suffused with irony, so filled with winking, that his most brutal monsters still seem like they'd rather be drinking a good bourbon and posing in new clothes to old Dick Dale recordings than torturing innocent passers by.

Not so the Fireflies. Sure, there's irony and humor: Everyone in the "family" (it's never clear exactly how related they all are, though the mangled giant Tiny Firefly--Matthew McGrory, who played a far gentler giant in Tim Burton's dandy Big Fish--seems to show signs of more than a little inbreeding) is named after a character from a Marx Brothers movie . . .or non-Marx Brothers movies featuring Groucho, as explained by a film-critic hired by Forsythe to help track down the family members' many aliases in a hilarious sequence wherein the film critic blames Elvis' death for stealing the thunder of Groucho's (which apparently occurred just days later). Aside from being a clown, Spaulding is a giant, brown-toothed party animal, Otis is a classic "you think you're better'n me?" hillbilly shaman and Baby . . . well, Baby's the sort of vicious vixen that anyone who went to public school knew somewhere along the line, Zombie's nightmarishly extreme distillation of the character Kim Kelly on Freaks & Geeks.

But the humor and irony never bleed over into camp, and never offer us the easy art-school winks of the Tarantino/Rodriguez school. When the violence gets a laugh, it's the shock of the atrocity drawing the laugh. All giggles are concentrated fight-or-flight yelps. When Otis Firefly tells a man he's brutally slashed, before killing him, "I am the devil . . . and I do the devil's work," it's not the action-flick call to arms we've come to expect. This is horror-movie-as-action-movie-as-horror-movie: This is designed to horrify, with no apology.

As cinema, this film quite exceeds its predecessor: Zombie and his cinematographer capture the dusty expanse of the road as well as anyone--indeed, they've only been bettered, in my opinion, by Wim Wenders and Robbie Muller in Paris, TX (and to be fair, I'd eat my hat if anyone ever outdid Muller's work on that film). Violence and gore have moved from pure schlock to true shock: No neon red blood, no fake-looking severed limbs. Blood is barely this side of black, and as in Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the world is perpetually gritty. The heat, the road, the distance from urban centers leaves us all a little dirty, and a little sweaty, and every time anyone in the film got so much as a paper cut, I worried that it would get infected. When Zombie lingers, almost lovingly, on a slain girl in the opening shot, the film is simultaneously bleached of and saturated with color, the skin a sallow gray, the blood a dark crimson.

This vivid naturalism, reminiscent of the psychedelic realism in Lars Von Triers early work Element of Crime, makes distance from the violence impossible. So when the tables turn, and it becomes difficult to discern the good guys from the bad guys, the sadism the film seemed to be celebrating turns sour, in a manner not unlike Wes Craven's seminal debut Last House on the Left. While many films have played on the notion of moral ambiguity, most are still fairly clear in leading your sympathies where they're best used. Here, there's nowhere to put your sympathy, though each character is given at least one moment of uneasy, occasionally grudging respect.

Should you see this movie? Well, I can pretty much assure you that if it doesn't sound like your cup of tea, it probably isn't. Intellectual and aesthetic value are fun to discuss for people who enjoy discussing such things, but I've found that you can't really make people like what they simply don't like (although one can develop appreciation incrementally). There are genre films for people who don't like the genre in question, and they're great for educating the outsider in the finer points of works they may otherwise find alienating. And then there are genre films for which you need to be in the target audience to appreciate. This is truly one of the latter. If you're one of those people who can do this sort of thing, it doesn't get much better than this.

Oh, and the film makes the best cinematic use of Free Bird ever.

Let's see . . . I've been getting into bitterly acrimonious religious arguments with people on The Fray over at Slate magazine, mostly over the objective, literal truth of the Christian gospels, the ethics of homo-/bisexuality, the ins-and-outs of prophecy fulfillment, etc. I'd link you to it, but there are too many different threads, and I have to confess to saying some things, in anger, of which I'm not particularly proud (albeit to peckerwoods so insufferable that licking my asshole would be a privelige beyond their worth).

I'm anxious to begin training again, assuming I can find the funds, the time and a class that suits. I've been pretty good about keeping some sort of an exercise regimen in my life (although I can definitely see some winter bulk parking itself), but it's nice to have instruction, some sense that I'm working for something, as opposed to making sure I look good naked (which, well . . . I look all right).

The wife and I have just signed up for Netflix. I think this'll be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

So I'll try not to let it be so long next time, OK?

Oh, All Right . . .

2005-11-03T15:02:00.000-08:00

Some periods of time, in any (every?) life, are either so lackluster that there's nothing to say about them or so turbulent that there's no way to condense all the information. It's rare, but not unheard of, that one's life should harbor periods of time for which both descriptions seem to fit. My last two weeks have been just such a time.

This is my way of explaining both why I haven't posted in a while and why this post is itself likely to be choppy and incoherent (though I must admit, being that I spend so much time apologizing for precisely that, it may be time to admit that, well, that's just the way I write/speak/think).

The boring-but-happy news: I've got a second job (seasonal, part-time) working for a company that specializes in Celtic art and memorabilia and sells through a seasonal catalog. So far, it's been all work and no pay, so I can't report on the benefits of such employment saturation, only on the fatigue borne of working seven full days and two short nights every week. Still, the work's fine, the people are nice, the products are--for the most part--pretty cool, and come next week, the 'hound and the purple lady are gonna have a little extra bank for the season.

This next bit is more 'Stine's news than mine, but here goes anyway: Memory of Water just opened this last week, and I'm thrilled to report that my wife is brilliant. We knew that, of course, but it's lovely to see it out there where those who don't already know and love her can see it. I wish the show nothing but the best. She posted the URL for the review in which she was singled out for praise, so there's not much need to place it here (in the unlikely event that there's anyone who reads me who doesn't already read her, click on the "My Amazon" link to the right . . . 'cause she's, like, my amazon).

Those of you who see me regularly know that there are some things I won't be talking about in this forum, to protect the innocent or . . . less so. Which leads me to some general observations about nothing in particular:

I'm growing a goatee, and I have to say that I'm liking this incarnation of the "unit" (goatee + 'stache grown as single piece, as opposed to the 'stacheless goatee--an old favorite of mine--or the pirate/Chris Cornell/Errol Flynn combination of narrow chin tuft and carefully tailored upper lip) better than past versions. That said, when I saw myself in the mirror the other day, I looked so old. It might have been the beard, it might have been the work schedule . . . or it might just be that I'm older than I'm yet willing to admit I am.

I've never thought of myself as someone who feared aging--I'm anti-plastic-surgery, anti-gray-coverage, anti-hair-replacement, etc. I've always longed for the wisdom and temperance of age. On the other hand, my models for aging have always been somewhat fanciful: ancient sages from kung-fu movies who can rip a spine out without breaking a sweat; tattooed misanthropes perpetually digging themselves out of holes or being flogged by harpies in heavy-metal videos; rogue philosophy professors or astronomers spending their last breath(s) solving some abstract (eternal) mystery. It's that cranky guy who doesn't get the music that those damn kids are listening to that I really don't ever want to become.

Anyway, I seemed to look better (younger?) by later that afternoon, so it was probably just that "fresh outta bed" thing.

This post had no point, other that keeping myself on the grid; it's fitting, then, that it should have no real conclusion, n'est-ce pas?

As I Might Have Guessed . . .

2005-10-20T12:24:00.000-07:00

You fit in with:
Spiritualism

Your ideals are mostly spiritual, but in an individualistic way. While spirituality is very important in your life, organized religion itself may not be for you. It is best for you to seek these things on your own terms.

80% spiritual.
80% reason-oriented.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

OK, I'll bite . . .

2005-10-19T21:11:00.000-07:00

10 years ago: Having spent several months in Salt Lake City after failing to complete college, I was giving notice at my job at Matrixx Marketing, where I was working the incoming customer service line for Clairol hair coloring products. 'Stine and I were pooling our resources, and would be moving, in two weeks, to the great northwest, to Seattle.

5 years ago: Having just moved out of the studio where we'd lived for the better part of five years to our current one-bedroom apartment, I was waiting--quite apprehensively--for the opening of my zombie-farce Sunken, being directed by the beige one himself. I was also growing hair and a beard for Gorey Stories by this time, and was already over it and wanted to shave.

1 year ago: It was around this time I first saw Sleepytime Gorilla Museum in concert, before having actually heard any of their music, and was dumbstruck at the sheer spectacle and transcendental brilliance of it all. That I went at all was an exercise in feeling comfortable going out and doing things I enjoyed, very necessary in the wake of a turbulent summer and absolute collapse of a fall. I was trying to deal with my depression and rage on my terms, which are sometimes a little . . . well, stringent and unorthodox (if those words aren't too intrinsically contradictory).

5 snacks: Quesadillas, celery, kale stalks, peanut butter & jelly on apple cinnamon rice cakes, Gellato Classico green tea ice cream

5 songs I know all the words to: If I discount musicals I've been in (and I have to, or I'd never limit it to five) . . .Morphine, I'm Free; Peter Murphy, Marlene Dietrich's Favorite Poem; Sky Cries Mary, Elephant Song; The Flaming Lips, She Don't Use Jelly; and Nine Inch Nails, Terrible Lie

5 things I could do with $100 million: Pay off my debts, buy a bass guitar and several months worth of classes, take martial arts classes every night (Aikido twice a week, Muay Thai once a week, Krav Maga twice a week, intensive yoga on Saturday and T'ai Chi on Sunday . . . probably), get a car (or a scooter), get a philosophy degree

5 things I would never wear: I'm assuming I can count things I'd never wear again . . . Polo shirts, short shorts, a mullet, tight leather pants, a leisure suit

5 favorite tv shows: Lost, Firefly, The Tick, Freaks & Geeks, The Sopranos

5 biggest joys: The heady buzz after a good workout, seeing an audience member with tears in his/her eyes, 'Stine sobbing while I cradle & rock her, herbal tea late at night, having every last pair of underwear clean and in my drawer

5 favorite toys: Defined broadly . . . my jump-rope, our strap on, my juggling balls, my hackey sack, the Super Scrabble tiles

That was fun. Are the beige one and rob listening? I know 'Stine already shouted out . . . I don't imagine JJisaFool would be likely to play, but I'd be curious to see what he had to say.

Are You Not My Tribe?

2005-10-18T14:31:00.001-07:00

I remember reading this a few years back in The Stranger, our local free "alternative" weekly. I don't know why it occurred to me today, but it ties into something I've been confronting as I try to write about music and film, particularly music or film that falls under the catchall headings of "independent" or "alternative".

First off, let me explain something about my ostensible preference for the independent, underground or alternative: My concern is less about who makes music or releases it, whether my neighbor likes it or not, or whether it has any sort of dubiously defined "credibility". My sole reason for skewing towards the independent is not that it's inherently better, but that reduced commercial expectations seem, on balance, to lead to a greater receptivity on the independent circuit for the original; whereas larger studios and distributors are more risk averse, overall, because they have to protect not only their direct investments in the product, but the massive infrastructures of their bureaucracies. So I'll be the first to acknowledge that independent record labels and film producers can churn out pablum; and I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that perennial iconoclast Bjork has been on a major label for years, while former indie darling Chris Nolan's major studio blockbuster Batman Begins (a franchise entry, no less!) provided the second most potent shot of adrenaline this most reason movie season (the first was Murderball). It's just a matter of recognizing which lever most often gives me a food pellet and which one most often gives me an electric shock.

I'd also like to cite Northwest writer Sherman Alexie, who, when addressing the matter of his writing almost exclusively about matters tribal (he's American Indian--he rejects the term "Native American" as a white-guilt thing), suggested that focusing on the tribal is the only way to address the universal. He points out that tripe like Pearl Harbor is made possible by a bland desire to appeal to everyone. Might we not, he suggested, achieve the universal by aiming for the highly subjective?

Alexie, of course, was referring to the "tribe" in terms of ethnic identity. Well, that's not really something that resonates with me; my "Irish" ethnicity might still carry some currency if I were, say, a practicing Catholic on the east coast, but our racial identity thing is a little more passive out here. No, I've based my notion of tribe on a number of things: where we fell in the adolescent caste system; class; aesthetic preferences; political leanings and temperament; attitudes towards sex, sex toys and kink; feelings towards the churches in which we grew up. Eventually, the ways of delineating tribes become so abstract that my tribe becomes whatever circle will at least feign an interest in what interests me, whoever will at least try the strange and foreign flavors I'm trying to feed them.

In some ways, this is true in the broader culture, as well. Tattoos were first the mark of sailors, whalers, military men and unintegrated natives of faraway, "primitive" cultures. Later they would be the province of fetishists, bikers, punks and cops. Then gangsta rappers. Then sensitive art students, and the first generation of emo kids. Now there are tattoo shops at the mall...

Really, this is all terribly exciting . . . and disconcerting. It reminds me of 1992, when all the music I'd been listening to in high school--R.E.M., The Pixies, New Order, Joy Division, Modern English, They Might Be Giants, The Cocteau Twins, Depeche Mode--were suddenly not so very alternative anymore, because alternative was the genre du jour. What had been featured only on "120 Minutes" the year before was now WHAT WAS ON on MTV, with Siouxsie Sioux sharing air time with the likes of Metallica and En Vogue. It was rapture, briefly. The democratization of the underground, the breaking through, was, to my mind, a show that the mainstream had finally caught up, that the last innovation had become new guard. I was set to become suddenly, impossibly cool, the guy who was on the scene before anyone knew what the scene was . . . only to watch every jock frat boy who used to beat up my friends back in the hometown trying to play the sensitive guy who was listening to The Replacements before they were cool (yeah, I saw you back then, asshole: you thought "that punk shit" was gay, and had Motley Crue's Dr. Feelgood blasting from your Dodge pickup). After that, enough copycat bands even ruined the music (for a while). It was enough to make anyone long for that sense of authenticity, and it's hard, faced with said longing, to avoid wondering if it wasn't better when it truly belonged to us.

The article to which I've linked, however, seems to represent the sad culmination of this line of thinking, a socio-aesthetic dead-end wherein it can be assumed that there's a wrong kind of hip-hop audience. I've also seen this in the punk crowd: an assumption that those who are inadequately "in-the-know" can be excluded from the party, that those unfamiliar with Botch and Kill Sadie can't be real fans of These Arms Are Snakes.

When did we start thinking this way? When I seem to be focusing in on a specific audience, it's usually an economic decision, a business move, an attempt to ascertain who is most likely to pay for and appreciate the art that I value and intend to make. When I appear to reject certain audiences, it isn't because I don't want them there, but because I have no intention of catering to their desires and doing art that has no meaning for me.

I understand the impulse to run from those you may come to perceive as hostile to your aesthetic interests. God knows there are people for whom I've stopped even trying to play music, people who are no longer invited to the shows of which I'm most proud. And I'm sure that people like Kareem Panni are only trying to protect the integrity of their vision from the facile expectations of an audience with little invested in that vision.

But is the measure of that investment apparent in an individual's hair color, skin color, fashion since, absence/presence of piercings or tattoos? Or is it, rather, in the abstract reaches of the mind and heart, where we process the things we see and hear, transforming them, word-by-word, note-by-note, into spirit? Do you have to tolerate the dilletantes and posers to get the work out? And can you tell the authentic listener from the poser by any external cues?

My hope, my dream, is to make the art I want to make and share it with everyone. This is a delusional line of reasoning of course, this notion that I can make art on my terms and expect a large and diverse audience to be interested in making sense of it all. But far be it from me to tell anyone who "gets" the work I do that they don't belong there. If you've found a brother in me through my offerings, you are my tribe, are you not?

The Tyranny of Beauty

2005-10-17T14:37:00.000-07:00

It was early last week that, walking down the street, I noticed him. I heard him first: That unmistakable tone and timbre of man yelling at the unseen (to us) presence lurking at his side, over his shoulder, perpetually in front of him, that desperate, frantic howl of a man plagued by voices. Such things aren't unusual in any city, and they're downright commonplace in Seattle, where pretty nearly the whole lot of us suffer from some sort of mood disorder and/or a tendency to talk to ourselves. I didn't look because it's unusual, but because . . . well, because I always do. Maybe it gives me comfort to imagine that there are people out there crazier than I am; maybe I think such people speak a deeper wisdom, their minds damaged by divine revelations crammed too quickly into their capacity-challenged crania.

The "why" isn't important. What's important is that I looked, and was surprised by what I saw. Instead of the usual grizzled malcontent or unsanitary transient, I saw someone who could, more or less, have been me . . . only much, much better looking.

And all I could think was, "I didn't know they could go crazy."

They being the beautiful people, of course.

Of all the perceived advantages for which I have envied beautiful people, impunity is the one that haunts me, this notion I've had in my head my whole life that they can get away with more, they win more favor with a greater number of people, they don't need a well-formed, overriding philosophy, they get laid more, they don't lose their minds and start talking to people who aren't there (again, so far as the rest of us can see). My guess is that some of these beliefs are backed by honest statistics while others are not; either way, I think that, for rhetorical purposes, we can assume that these assumptions are bullshit. What interests me is why I have them to begin with.

It's obvious that our culture obsesses over beauty. Sure, all culture obsesses with beauty: the philosophy of values class I took in college was called "Truth, Good and Beauty"; art is often spoken of in terms of defining, re-defining or decontstructing beauty; music is often asked, by those of classical persuasion and/or those who expect music to engender primarily "positive" response, to either be "beautiful" or to explain itself for failing to do so. Beauty is perceived as a universal good.

But in the West, and the U.S. in particular, the notion of individual, physical beauty is not only a commodity on par with money, security, enlightenment and accomplishment, but an end that supercedes all of these . . . or, perhaps more correctly, is seen to contain all of these in itself. Our cult of celebrity is often seen, perhaps correctly, as a cult of youth and beauty (more on youth later): the beautiful individual as millionaire, tastemaker, icon.

Thing is, when I see money, power, influence, public adoration, what I really see, what I truly desire, is impunity: the ability to function without accountability, to choose projects based on how much they appealed to me, to live outside the dictates of traditional morality, to stop for a cheeseburger without worrying how much it's going to cost. Oh, and to avoid tedious niceties like eating, sleeping, shitting, blowing my nose and writing out bills (for surely the beautiful needn't do such things).

Interestingly enough, studies have shown contradictory data on whether the physically attractive actually receive these kinds of social benefits. Physically attractive people do seem to get hired more readily than do less attractive people; but they also do worse than others in terms of getting help from concierges, or cutting in lines, perhaps because of people like me who think, "Yeah, right, like I'm gonna help you Mr./Ms. Supermodel."

Except, of course, when I'm thinking, "I'll gladly help him/her out if he/she could at least pretend to be flirting with me."

All of which gives me pause with regards to my association of beauty with impunity. Does physical attractiveness create a different set of obligations in exchange for the ones it seems to take away?

I think the association of beauty with youth also speaks to the desire to postpone accountability. There's tremendous comfort in feeling like there's still time to do those things that we'll have to be too responsible to even think about in a few years. Is that why, in the interest of maintaining that which we understand to be beauty and youth, so many actors resort to plastic surgery?

On Saturday night, 'Stine, the beige one and myself all took in Broken Flowers, a movie so insinuating I can't even write a lucid review of it (just yet). One of the things we all noticed, however, was that Jessica Lange appears to have had some "work" done. I wonder, not without some sense of irony, whether the fact that we even noticed or speculated is as much a symptom of our society's obsession as the fact that she may have been concerned enough with beauty and the appearance of youth to have felt pressured to do it in the first place. I'm ashamed that I'm talking about her face, instead of pointing out that, in her brief appearance in the film, she gave one of the most nuanced performances of her career.

What strikes me most of all about it is that someone as beautiful as Lange (on whom I had a huge schoolboy crush back in junior high) would feel this pressure at all. Thinking about it in this light, I suddenly feel fortunate to be sort of plain and bald, with love handles and hairy shoulders. The idea of getting a facelift or an eye job seems so foreign to me, because . . . well, I'm just not possessed of enough ethereal beauty to feel like I have to preserve anything (plus I'm, like, poor).

And when I start hearing the voices, at least I know it wasn't because I failed to be good looking enough to dodge them.

Of Course, Under Alternative Careers . . .

2005-10-17T10:40:00.000-07:00

Your Pimp Name Is...

His Majesty Slick

What's Your Pimp Name?

Surprise, surprise . . .

2005-10-17T10:29:00.000-07:00

This test was hard, because I'm sometimes too cerebral to function as a practicing artist, yet too intellectually lazy to operate successfully as a philosopher or a scholar. So erring on one side of the intrinsic debate within the questions on this test . . .

You Should Get a PhD in Liberal Arts (like political science, literature, or philosophy)

You're a great thinker and a true philosopher.
You'd make a talented professor or writer.

What Advanced Degree Should You Get?

Of course, the Gemini in me had to take the test twice (in classes, I was known to both put a new spin on ideas AND argue with the professor; I'd like to express myself AND spend more time thinking than working; I like to challenge myself with new ideas AND express those I already hold), so here's the second version:

You Should Get a MFA (Masters of Fine Arts)

You're a blooming artistic talent, even if you aren't quite convinced.
You'd make an incredible artist, photographer, or film maker.

What Advanced Degree Should You Get?

It seems there must be some way to practice somewhere in between, to be both a practitioner and a theoretician. Of course, it may seem that way because I'd like it to be so.

Pretty in Beige . . .

2005-10-11T14:15:00.000-07:00

Wanted to take a moment to wish the beige one a bon anniversaire...

Notes on the Last Post

2005-10-03T14:44:00.000-07:00

I generally despise the kind of navel-gazing in which I've just engaged, but it was clear that my posting bottleneck wasn't going to clear without some good ol' fashioned purging. Those of you who read it before reading this, I'm sorry that I didn't warn you. The rest of you are hereby warned.

Dynamic Stasis: Chaos=Completion, or You Want Some Hate With That?

2005-10-03T11:50:00.000-07:00

Michel Foucault rejected Sartre because Sartre held choice to be the highest human ideal. This never really jibed with Foucault's postmodernism, wherein the "individual" was little more than a whirling confluence of social and economic forces, human relationships a tangled web of power dynamics. Individuality is subservient to the "identity group" in postmodernism, which leaves choice a somewhat illusory commodity that can only be won collectively; whereas Sartre tended to be suspicious of the notion that groups existed as anything other than arbitrary arrangements of individuals, each of whom is as lost as another in the face of life's absurdity . . . and yet, perhaps paradoxically, each is equally in control of his or her destiny.

Granting that, despite a postmodernist's affinity for deconstruction and appropriation (thank you, Derrida) I've always been more Sartrean than Foucaultian (although I tend to prefer Camus, who saw a sense of purpose in life's arbitraria; and who, not coincedentally, chastised Sartre for his inexplicable support of Stalinism), I've often been confused by Foucault's failure to see a contradiction between his rejection of Sartre and his embrace of Samuel Beckett. On the surface, Beckett's characters seem swept up in the tides of circumstance as Foucault seems to have imagined; and yet there's no getting around the fact that the theatre of the absurd, while postmodern in the character of its worldview, grows from the soil rent fertile by the work of the existentialists. More importantly, Beckett's characters--helpless as they may seem in the face of fatal inevitability--continue, like the anti-hero of Sartre's Nausea or Camus's The Stranger, to assert some (perhaps feeble) force of individual integrity, to choose courses of action and succumb to their consequences.

Scholars on this matter are probably slapping their forheads at my facile distillations; and those of you who don't care one way or the other are, of course, already bored. Faced with despair, however, I will take refuge in whatever philosophical conundra seem to apply.

See, 'Stine and I work. Not an insane amount, but enough: Full-time, diligently and with an eye for detail. We're both more than willing to work more than we do: She's lobbying, as always, for more clients, and has succeeded recently in finding a fairly brilliant part-time gig (Go Team!!!!). I've been applying, on a large scale, for part-time evening-and/or-weekend work to supplement my current full-time income, hoping to take advantage of my current disillusionment and, let's face it, utter boredom and dissatisfaction with the theatrical form by paying down some debts and ensuring my financial security. So far, no good . . . or rather, only limited good: I've got a little money coming in from a 6-hour per weekend gig selling merchandise for a long-running, wildly popular local production at the theatre where I work during the week.

None of this is going to help us this month. If we include the money I'll get Thursday, the money my mother's graciously loaning us and the paychecks coming in, we might just make rent. The other bills will be covered through the generosity of our overdraft protection, which will mean that our account will be about $400-$500 in the hole come the next round of bills. What's worse, I don't see much in the way of potential for improvement, at least on my end: I lack the skills that tend to lead to lucrative employment. And while 'Stine is in a growth industry, I sometimes fear that, realistically speaking, health issues may impose limits on how much more I can reasonably expect her massage to bring in . . .

All of this might have been moot (well, not moot so much as secondary in importance) if the original reason for our poverty and my near-unemployability--my/our love of and ambition in the arts--still applied in any measure for me. As it happens, I feel such antipathy for the theatrical form and my (perceived) place therein that I'm not even certain I want to act again, especially considering that the biggest hit in which I've participated have been among my least satisfying artistic experiences, while my most potent artistic experiences seem to have been carried out for audiences consisting largely of crickets (or, even worse, of people who seem to have given all credit for my work in said pieces to my director--those of you who know me know which show and which director I'm talking about). My hope, in distancing myself from acting, was to turn my attention towards other aspects of my interest/aptitude: Exploring my writing and my love for the rogue strains of popular music by writing music reviews; using that same love of music to turn my recent forays into gnostic philosophy into an industrial opera; immersing myself in martial arts study with the hope of either qualifying myself for instruction, learning enough to create my own form and/or finding a way integrate my martial study with my philosophical and artistic pursuits, maybe even reinvigorate my love of theatre. The original purpose of the extra part-time work I've been receiving was to fund these activities, to earn the money to buy new music and see performances for review, pay for martial arts classes, buy the seminal touchstones of gnostic literature (or at least pay to photocopy them from library books), take some writing classes . . . something, anything to make this life appear as more than a ludicrous, empty, futile scramble to try--and fail--to turn arbitrary work into necessary, but maddeningly unsatisfying, resources (which exist, it seems, primarily to perpetuate the same absurd cycle).

I am further spurred to wondering whether all of these aspirations are pipe dreams, whether any talent I've lead myself to believe I have is a sham, whether I'm indeed such a mediocre intellect and self-absorbed spirit that to imagine I could accomplish the sort of tasks that actually contribute to culture and community is a fantasy spoon-fed me by the occasional over-indulgent family member, teacher, lover or fan. I sit at my desk and wonder whether I fail because, at a cellular level, I am a failure, that I'm not only inadequately qualified to fashion an art that suits me, but that I am, in fact, inadequately qualified to create even those arts I find overly pedestrian.

I feel unfinished, the confluence of several strains of mediocrity that have spent the last 33 years conspiring to convince me I was of any worth whatsoever. And it fills me with such ennui, such anomie, such antipathy, such HATE that I live as a viper whose venom-producing glands have burst from overuse, flopping about as I die slowly from my own poison, the contempt that has fuelled my greatest perceived triumphs turning my very blood corrosive. It all came to a head on Friday, when a screaming match erupted twixt 'Stine and I over the sub-pitiful state of our financial affairs, and I bombarded her, viciously and unfairly, with the full weight and fury of my nihilism, my desire to pull the world in and crush it underfoot, scrape it from my shoe, swallow it whole and vomit it into the unforgiving cosmos . . .

Then I had my acupuncture appointment Friday afternoon. My five-element acupuncturist, so we're clear, is who I see instead of a therapist, as she engages me in a significant amount of discussion and cognitive resolution; and the acupuncture, with its emphasis on constitutional balance and energetic redirection, is what I use to fulfill the purposes of medication (though I do take St. John's Wort). I won't go too far into my skepticism regarding therapy and medication--I could take up a whole post with that, for one thing; and, as with religion, I hate to appear to disparage those for whom such ideologies and solutions work--except to say that my experience with therapists has been that they're often unwilling to treat existential dilemmas as such, and that both therapeutic models tend to be pointing me in the direction of making peace with a world and a culture against which I really wish to wage a more effective war (or at least establish a diplomacy without an insufferable level of compromise). Being of a metaphysical bent, and close enough to my age as to avoid an unbridgeable generation gap, my acupuncturist is better able to serve my needs than anyone else I've encountered.

But more importantly, she did what any therapist does: She listened. She listened to my tirade, an outpouring of content unlike any I've offered anyone (until I decided to write this post, of course). She listened, and she sympathized. She didn't have any advice, and that was fine. It was nice to have someone acknowledged that it all just sucked, that it looked like I was doing all I could be expected to do. Who knew that mere validation could feel so cleansing (I hear you snickering, 'Stine, and you can stop it right now).

After that, of course, she poked me with needles in all the appropriate spots; and more than at any other appointment, I felt calmed, cleansed, renewed. My hate had diffused, leaving a warm despair. Everything was hopeless, still; but I felt that I could embrace that hopelessness, wrap it around me and be warmed by it.

She also loaned me a book, called Nourishing Destiny, a traditional Chinese medicine text that delves into the abstractions at the heart of Chinese mythology and philosophy, and the parallels between these metaphysical guideposts and the actual mechanics of technique that guide the practitioner. Aside from reminding me of the parallels between Taoism and Gnosticism--thus renewing my fervor for exploration of both--the book also offered me a concept that, in the face of my current dilemma, I find immeasurably bracing: The idea that the Tao (or Dao) is "chaotic yet complete", that hun (chaos) and cheng (completion) are the ultimate principles of life.

Like Foucault's "confluences", I am a being out of control. Of course, if the original principle from which we are separate, which we call Tao (hence separating ourselves further by giving it a name, but can allow ourselves to discuss and explore by so doing), is chaos, all control was illusory. But like Sisyphus, the Greek mythological model for both Sartre and Camus's understandings of the existential dilemma, I can find purpose in opposition, in pushing the boulder up the hill. Of course, Taoism suggests that I should flow with nature rather than opposing it, which makes the analogy harder; but then, I'd have to suggest, faced with that conundrum, that what I oppose isn't nature, but that which opposes nature . . . or more importantly, that which opposes my nature, my own little piece of the void.

So here I am, as broke as before and as broken as ever, finding little solace in the mechanics of my daily life. I'm as uncertain of the future as ever, as frustrated by my incapacity as before. I don't know that I have the capability to transcend my economic circumstances or to re-engage with creative endeavour. I may be doomed for the mediocrity I despise. And I'm not okay with it.

But I'm here. My suffering is colored with some sort of perspective. My hate has the potential to become something else. Maybe not anything useful, maybe not anything that will pull me from the vicious--and still detested--cycle of meaningless work for pointless commodity. But I can feel my venom slowly clearing from my body, making room for . . . perhaps nothing.

It's not much of a happy ending. It just happens to be where, as of so far, it ends.

Elementally Yours

2005-09-21T10:02:00.000-07:00

Your Element is Fire

Your power color: red

Your energy: hot

Your season: spring

Like a fire, you are full of power and light.
A born leader, you easily draw people toward you.
You are full of courage and usually up for anything dangerous.
You have a huge ego and love to be the center of attention.

What Element Are You?

A born leader? Who'd be fool enough to follow me? Anyway, I'm not surprised: I've been seeing a five element acupuncturist for about a year, and we tend to deal with fire issues for the most part (with frequent wood and occasional water issues for . . . well, a lot of smoke).

As usual, I was torn on the questions; but the brevity and specificity of the questions seemed to speak to the notion of where you are right now, so I'm gonna leave it (especially since it coincides with what my acupuncturist tells me).

(Full disclosure: I went back and took the test again, changing the answers on any questions that had me wavering, after I just said I wasn't gonna do that . . . and I'm still fire. How about them apples?)

Incedentally, my element as a Gemini is air; having been born in the year of the rat, my element is water. In addition, different years have different elements on the Chinese zodiac aside from the sign attached to said year; but the year of my birth, 1972, was a water year in itself. So I'm a double water on the Chinese zodiac. Hmmm . . .

Political Tests (And Such)

2005-09-19T15:42:00.000-07:00

You are a
Social Liberal
(73% permissive)

and an...
Economic Liberal
(26% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Democrat

Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid

These are always interesting . . . but are they informative? I don't know. I think I thought of myself as being a little more libertarian than this . . . but then, we live in politically confusing times. "Liberal" doesn't really mean what it used to, does it? Anyway, here we are.

My greatest exception to this test is the lack of "undecided" or neutral stances on matters. Economically speaking, I both benefit from and am stifled by large corporations and mass production; so mightn't I answer question relating to such things with an air of determined neutrality? Instead, I have to qualify my moderation by declaring opinions on matters on which I have no opinion. There were also questions asked which didn't affect my score that probably should have, survey questions like whether or not I support the drug war (I hope it's obvious that I don't).

Of course, if I designed the test myself, it would most likely fail to provide a useful and objective view of my own political preoccupations. Perhaps my frustration with the test is precisely why it worked, and the way I mitigated my answers says more than I like about my political leanings.

I'm probably just bitter because I hoped I'd be something less . . . vanilla than a Democrat. Oh, well.

An Unholy Terror

2005-09-16T10:23:00.000-07:00

You are the Devil card. The Devil is based on the
figure Pan, Lord of the Dance. The earthy
physicality of the devil breeds lust. The
devil's call to return to primal instincts
often creates conflict in a society in which
many of these instincts must be kept under
control. Challenges posed by our physical
bodies can be overcome by strength in the
mental, emotional, and spiritual realms. Pan is
also a symbol of enjoyment and rules our
material creativity. The devil knows physical
pleasure and how to manipulate the physical
world. Material creativity finds its output in
such things as dance, pottery, gardening, and
sex. The self-actualized person is able to
accept the sensuality and usefulness of the
devil's gifts while remaining in control of any
darker urges. Image from The Stone Tarot deck.
http://hometown.aol.com/newtarotdeck/

Which Tarot Card Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Apparently, I'm The Devil. Granting that I had a hard time answering some of the questions, I took it again, clicking the alternative answers I rejected on the basis of essentially flipping a coin. Given a second reading, my tarot card came up as "The Moon" . . . which, funny enough, is my wife's card. But I suppose that's not in the spirit of the enterprise. The random choices we make in the moment are part part of the Tarot mystique.

On the other hand, since we're playing with pop metaphysics, maybe there is something to my indecisiveness and sense of duality. I am, after all, a Gemini, a bundle of oppositional forces. So while I'll let The Devil take my top spot, I think anyone who's inclined to look at these as ways of peering into personality should look at the other as well. So here's that:

You are the Moon card. Entering the Moon we enter
the intuitive and psychic realms. This is the
stuff dreams are made on. And like dreams the
imagery we find here may inspire us or torment
us. Understanding the moon requires looking
within. Our own bodily rhythms are echoed in
this luminary that circles the earth every
month and reflects the sun in its progress.
Listening to those rhythms may produce visions
and lead you towards insight. The Moon is a
force that has legends attached to it. It
carries with it both romance and insanity.
Moonlight reveals itself as an illusion and it
is only those willing to work with the force of
dreams that are able to withstand this
reflective light. Image from: Stevee Postman.
http://www.stevee.com/

Which Tarot Card Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Funny how both of these cards appeal to the intuitive and spontaneous. Camille Paglia, in her opus Sexual Personae, divides human endeavour and personality into two spheres: The cthonian, associated with Dionysus, god of wine and revelry (but also of violence and animalism) driven by nature and lust, and representing the earth-cult of pagan conciousness; and the apollonian, associated with Apollo, god of music, science and discipline, driven by a desire to supercede nature, and representing the sky-cult that would later form the basis of later western religions, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Most philosophy, of course, falls somewhere on a continuum between the two. I'm thinking of the Marquis de Sade, whose violent acts of sexual perversion and will-to-annihalation had all the formality of the most rigidly apollonian rituals; or Nietzsche, whose belief that greatness is inborn and measured by fullness of appetite and intensity of animal vigour pointed, almost paradoxically, to the foundation of vividly hierarchical social constructs.

I often try to pass myself off as an intellectual, and try to fuel my credibility with copious reading, analysis and cross-referencing. At the end of the day, though, my passions, my rage, my ennui, my desire, my need, my hurt and my love tend to rule my decisions. I'm ill-equipped for the spontaneous because I've had to strive all my life to stifle my spontaneity in order to make going to school, working with others and maintaining relationships possible. Yet I'm equally ill-equipped for the intellectual, so driven am I by a need for visceral experience, affection and intensity; and so deeply in awe am I of the mystical, the intagible.

My recent foray into gnosticism is, more than anything, an attempt to reconcile these ideas. The neo-/proto-Platonic thought of Hermes Trismegistus postulated that the divine and eternal were reflected in the grossly material. Giordano Bruno believed that reality and the flesh were simply the equations by which God can be seen and understood, and that we are both mathematical and emotional functions of the divine. William Blake believed that the poetic imagination was the point of reconciliation between the physical and the spiritual, and that daemonic energy was, in itself, a physical manifestation of a divine will. So perhaps this dichotomy is a necessary part of my current journey.

Anyway, fun little exercise. Anyone wanna give it a try? Just click on the link.

Yes, There IS Other News . . .

2005-09-07T15:53:00.000-07:00

For the record, I'm as torn up about the Katrina and New Orleans as anyone . . . I think. And I'm not thrilled by either the federal response or the state/local failure to prepare. Obviously, a lot of people royally screwed up on many levels. If I had any money, I'd contribute to the relief effort; when I do, I probably will. That, I fear, is all I have to say on the matter.

Meanwhile, other things continue to happen in the world.

I'm a little surprised that this [www.latimes.com] isn't bigger news than it seems to be. I'm actually surprised that I couldn't google more articles (or better ones) on the matter.

A common conservative complaint regarding issues of gay rights is that all recent advances have been made at the judicial level. Here we have a democratically elected body--the California legislature--taking a historic step.

Now the matter will go Governor Schwarzenegger's desk. Funny thing is, Schwarzenegger supports gay marriage (he IS an actor . . . of sorts); but has said he may veto the bill because he believes the matter should be decided by the citizens or by state courts.

Here's my question: How does Schwarzenegger's suggestion that this issue belongs in the courts jive with his party's hostility to judicial activism and insistence that this issue be solved democratically? And if allowing the elected legislators to decide this issue isn't democratic enough, should all civil law--not just marriage, gay or otherwise; but speed limits, land use, business regulation--be subject to referendum or initiative? What interests me is the question of what channel is appropriate for creating law on the matter if a republican defers the matter to a body--the courts--where the rest of his party doesn't want to see it solved, i.e., what does it mean to effect change democratically?

So What Does That Make Me?

2005-09-03T17:49:00.000-07:00

I recalled reading something in "Savage Love"--a sex advice column by Seattle-based media personality Dan Savage--regarding a study on bisexual men. I haven't found a link to the study, but you can read Savage's article here.

What do you make of this? I've self-identified as bisexual for the better part of the last decade; but I have found that my attraction to men is limited with regards to what sort of man attracts man, how often I'm likely to meet such men, the percentage of such men who who are gay, bisexual or bi-curious. Indeed, the type of man I find attractive is, generally speaking, straight; and the mechanisms of my attraction, and the way I manifest it, more closely resemble the cryptically homoerotic overtones of rugby and Fight Club than the proto-metrosexual aesthetic sold to and by the gay mainstream.

While there's much that the study would seem to fail to take into account--I mean, presumably there's more to erotic attraction than a simple measure of what gets your dick hard--I find it interesting.

And while we're on the question . . . What does it mean to be bisexual, anyway? Someone whose identity I won't reveal without permission has discussed this with me at length. She is attracted to women far more than I am to men, if taken in sheer numbers and variety (curiously, she tends to like girlie-girls; I'm the one who can't resist the riot grrrl types); but where I can actually imagine myself being in a long-term romantic relationship with a man--were I not already married to so fine an amazon goddess as my incredible spouse--she can't imagine herself in such a relationship with a woman. Of course, we have to temper this speculation with the understanding that I really have no idea whether I could carry on such a long-term commitment: We're operating purely on theory here. So, given all that, which of us is the real bisexual?

Some Sprouts Have Deep Roots

2005-09-03T16:20:00.000-07:00

It wasn't very long ago, it seems, that 'Stine and I saw "City of God". In a nutshell, "City of God" follows the rise of gang warlord Lil' Ze, a brutal thug living in a squalid, unpaved slum of Rio De Janeiro in Brazil. With a kinetic style, peppered with post-music-video aesthetic flourishes, the young director Fernando Meirelles had announced the arrival of a new talent. His low-budget marvel shared certain similarities in both story and style to Martin Scorcese's Mean Streets, while his use of mixed film stock, saturated color, flashy editing and copious zooming and titling called to mind both a less polemical--though no less political--Oliver Stone and a more hard-nosed, less campy Baz Luhrman. But to be fair, his style was as much a part of the new wave in South/Central American and Mexican cinema as it was an nod to his stateside aesthetic forbears. Like fellow Brazilian director Karim Ainouz--who's Madam Sata is a masterpiece of gay, biographical, martial-arts and crime cinema all at once (featuring an astounding tour de force of a performance by Lazaro Ramos in the title role of real-life thief/bandit/drag-queen/capoeirista Joao Francisco dos Santos)--Meirelles had told a story that was very much of his country and his background. Like Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the director of the potent Mexican drama Amores Perros, it was also a journal of urban decay, a paradoxically sensual, yet relentlessly dystopian, portrait of an inner city that strives, vampirically, to suck its denizens dry of all hope.

And, inevitably, like Inarritu--who would go on to direct the flawed but powerful drama 21 Grams with Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro--Meirelles was given the reigns to a domestic release. On Wednesday, The Constant Gardener, an adaptation of a John Le Carre thriller of the same name starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, opened to great acclaim. The acclaim is more than deserved. In what amounts to both the best romantic drama and the most exciting spy thriller of the year, Meirelles and his flawless cast have given us a tremendous gift: A film that is visceral, smart, poignant, colorful and alive. And while I usually hate it when reviewers say this, I can think of no other film that not only earns this compliment, but truly renders it complimentary: It is resolutely and unapologetically a film for adults.

In broad strokes, the story: Justin Quayle, a humble, nebbishy diplomat, played to perfection by Ralph Fiennes in what may be his career-best performance, is called to identify the body of his wife, Tessa (Rachel Weisz, who has never been stronger, sexier or more nuanced), found brutally murdered by a rural road in a remote region of Kenya. Combining flashbacks, flashforwards and present-time narrative to tell two stories--that of the events that transpire from the couple's initial meeting to the murder, and that of the investigation by Justin into the truth behind her death--The Constant Gardener immerses us in a world of international corporate malfeisance, corruption, espionage and genocide.

This world is Le Carre's, of course. But by applying to this story the same disjointed time frame that he used in City of God, Meirelles, along with screenwriter Jeffrey Caine, deserves credit for injecting the formula with new life. And where Le Carre's novels famously take place in parlours, restaurants and studies, Meirelles sets his in the vibrant hubbub of his truly foreign locations. Like Steven Soderbergh in Traffic, Meirelles color-codes his locations: England is gray and grainy, while Africa burns brightly with fierce red sands and explosive local plumage. Much of the camera work is hand held; but Meirelles cinematographer, Cesar Charlone, doesn't push for the jittery theatrics usually associated therewith (except, of course, when it's called for). The film is both exquisitely flashy yet coolly restrained, a skillful paradox which may soon make the young auteur a household name.

With strong supporting performances by Danny Huston, Bill Nighy and Hubert Kounde (a new face to me, Kounde plays the native doctor in Nairobi who guides the strident activist Tessa through the local intrigue that will draw her deeper into peril), The Constant Gardener satisfies on so many levels that it's impossible to elucidate all of the levels on which it clicks. And critics who have previously dismissed Meirelles as an all-flash-no-substance upstart should be surprised, if not outright shamed, by the emotional through line that sits at the warm, beating heart of what could easily have been a slick exercise in a genre not known for its human drama (full disclosure: tears were shed by both the 'hound and 'Stine at this one). One could go on ad nauseam about the craft at work in this picture; and this young hotshot in Brazil, along with his artistic team and screenwriter, deserve any kudos we can cook up for their competent treatment of the source material. But it's the soul of this very soulful piece that makes it art . . . and art it most assuredly is.

A Bouquet of Hammers

2005-08-31T10:47:00.000-07:00

There's little in the world of cinema as rare or as exciting as a truly original thriller. Oh, Hollywood still puts out plenty of thrillers, thrill conveniently, perplexingly, perhaps conveniently removed. Part of the problem is that we--and by we, I mean I--have seen far too many thrillers. We've learned the arcs, we recognized the archetypes; and as such, we're no longer absorbed, surprised . . . thrilled. Some independent fare, as well as similar-seeming imported product from Japan and Korea, manages to shock with incoherent plotting, graphic violence, unsympathetic characters, torture, masochism and/or other deviances, from the petty to the truly perverse. This approach can have its merits. Shock is, after all, a powerful emotion; and handled well--think Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction, Takashi Miike's Audition--shock can actually transcend itself, morphing into a sense of genuine dread or existential ennui. But without a context, social or aesthetic, to ground the shock in the moorings of our innate fears or current zeitgeist, it becomes another trick to overuse, like the glut of CGI in the average Hollywood blockbuster. Besides, all young directors who think they can create a shock-opera crime thriller that will have a real impact on the market should see Takashi Miike's Ichi the Killer. Whatever they think they can shock us with has been done. Ichi is the last word in Asian shock cinema the way Dead Alive is the last word in zombie flicks.

Every so often, though, someone manages to re-define the boundaries of the template, and come up with a piece that challenges the intellect, rouses the emotions, dazzles the senses. Sometimes a young turk in the industry can surprise you the way audiences must have been surprised when they first saw John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate back in the '60s. A Christopher Nolan, perhaps, with Memento (you haven't seen it yet? GET THEE TO A VIDEO STORE, CRETIN!!). Takashi Miike with Audition, which unsettles you with its eerie quiet before knocking you between the eyes with its nauseating torture sequence. Dirty Pretty Things, a return to form of sorts for Stephen Frears (plus it has Audrey Tatou, which never hurt any movie).

Add to that list: Oldboy, a troubling, shocking, sexy, funny, brutal, surreal and bizarrely redemptive fever dream from South Korea, directed and co-written by Chan-wook Park.

Min-sik Choi, in one of the best performances I've watched all year, is Dae-su Oh, a fairly ordinary man who, like many ordinary men, drinks too much. We meet him in a stupor, where general drunken goofiness and gently amusing references to his young daughter--he puts on a pair of white, feathery angel wings ostensibly meant to be a costume for a performance and frolics for the camera--progress to violent and tantrumic outbursts. He's carried out by a friend . . . and next seen in a cramped, seedy "motel" room with a prison-style door. He spends his time with no human contact but a television (no cable, even), fed only fried dumplings and periodically put to sleep with gas so his (unseen, unknown) captors can clean him, cut his hair & nails and change his clothes.

Fifteen years later, Dae-su is released to a grassy rooftop with a new suit. He soon after acquires a cell phone, on which he receives calls from his captor and is given clues to find out who imprisoned him and why. After enlisting the aid of a sympathetic waitress (thank God for those), Mi-do, he gradually sniffs and fights his way to the answers.

It's both fortunate and unfortunate that I can't say much more about the plot. Truth be told, the story, as complex and intelligently wrought as it is, is less a matter of plot than of puzzle. For all it's violence--and there's plenty--Oldboy is a meditation. Like Kill Bill Volume II, vengeance is no mere pretense for lots of violence (as it seemed to be in Kill Bill Volume I--and I'll have you know I was perfectly fine with that): It's a human impulse that is explored, studied and well-chewed-on. In a rare turn for a revenge pic, forgiveness is actually mentioned. More than mentioned, it is sought, discarded and revisited. Memory, too, gets a thorough exploration, on a continuum that calls to mind Memento's questioning of the human mind, and whether its contents and recollections are to be trusted.

It's only fair to warn that this movie isn't for the weak of stomach. While not as bloody as Kill Bill or flagrantly amoral as Ichi the Killer, Chan-wook Park is more than willing to push an envelope or two: A man devours a live octopus for the camera; a claw hammer is used as a dental instrument before becoming a formidable weapon in a long and brutal fight; various acts of torture and self-immolation accompany our "hero's" quest. As purplestine said after the film, "I loved it, except for the parts I couldn't watch."

A word or two on the fighting in the film: While not as balletic as anything in a Jet Li movie, as mind-bendingly precise as Jackie Chan's choreography or as focused and vicious as any of the moves immortalized by Bruce Lee, the efficient, brutal choreography--basic street-level pugilism (without the rules), leavened with a subtle dash of Muay Thai's circularity and force--seems more real than anything I've ever seen onscreen. When Dae-su takes on a veritable battalion of thugs in a long, dark corridor, armed with the aforementioned claw hammer, what should be an implausible maiming spree makes perfect, naturalistic sense, so skillfully does the choreography and direction convey the sense of a man so driven by his fury that he can't be put out of commission.

I won't give anything away about the end . . . except to say that those critics and viewers who found it hollow, nihilistic or self-defeating weren't paying attention. Indeed, the resolution of the story grows naturally from its thematic wistfulness, the anxious, inconstant faith that even in the midst of chaos, vengeance, violence and deception, love and redemption are possible . . . and necessary.

A side note on Korean cinema: I've had a reasonable bit of experience with Chinese and Japanese cinema. While I've always enjoyed both, they actually share a magnified version of a flaw endemic to American cinema: Lots of violence in a very, very sexless atmosphere. Korean cinema, or what little I've seen of it, has no such reservations. Both films by Ki-Duk Kim that I've seen--The Isle, which is quite good, and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring, which is outstanding (more on those in a future post, I'm sure)--were extremely sexual; and Oldboy is also not fearful with regards to sex. Granted, sex is dangerous in all of these movies; but even a pro-sex sort like me has to admit that, good, bad, comforting or nihilistic, all of my sexual experiences were at least a little dangerous.

The Sheltering Grey

2005-08-30T09:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, in the morning, I stepped out--tired, foggy, hungover, my stomach burning, eyes perpetually coated with my body's reluctance to awaken--into the Seattle I sought when I moved here.

Fall has begun its slow creep into the Northwest. Enveloping billows of distressed slate loom overhead, cooling the proceedings while, paradoxically, trapping the warmth of the city's inhabitants close to the ground. This is what I imagined when I imagined Seattle: A city like a movie set, like the city-scape in schlock classic "Streets of Fire"--though less grimly industrial (that fantasy city was, after all, supposed to represent Detroit)--which had been granted its strange, ashen light when director Walter Hill insisted that all exterior scenes be shot with a gray tarp over the set, so that even the ostensible "daylight" would reflect a half-dead colorlessness. Or like Burton's Gotham City.

Funny enough, though, while all my aesthetic comparisons are resolutely dystopian, I've never found anything ominous or sad about rain or overcast skies; and Seattle's enclosed, vaguely claustrophobic fall is, for me, largely a blessing. Maybe it's because I'm a water sign on the Chinese zodiac: When I see clouds, I see water, that which flows, changes state, moves things, makes everything happen. Or maybe, being an actor, film-buff and fan of post-punk music, my interests invariably play out indoors, and are therfore best suited to a cloudy city. But I suspect, more importantly, that the impending precipitation of my city on Elliott Bay, like the terrifying cold fronts I experienced in Helena, MT (the worst was a freak arctic front that shut the state down for four days--temperatures got as low as 75 degrees below zero before windchill factor) and the snowstorms that characterized the Montana winters (and, to a lesser extent, the Cedar City winters), serves to trap us in places where we're forced to acknowledge one another, listen to the things our companions (or would-be companions) have to unload. The cold outside calls upon our own warmth, forces our hands as we become mutually entrenched. Inclement weather as social and spiritual unifier.

Who would guess, then, that my next favorite terrain, next to the misty forests of the Northwest, is the desert. Specifically, the high, mountainous desert of Southern Utah. To live in Cedar City again, I'd either need to hook myself up with a lot of online resources for independent music and art films, and would probably need to make regular Vegas trips to see bands and movies that mightn't make the rounds. But more than the city, I find myself missing the place, the controlled delirium of open spaces surrounded by rising monoliths of crimson rock, the tiny mesquite forests springing from coarse sand. In some ways, the desert possesses the most iconic views of Americana--westerns, road movies and various psychedelic ruminations on our nation seem to take root eagerly in the seemingly inhospitable soil of our driest regions. There's a reason that both pantheism and hallucinogenic drug use thrive in such an environment: It's heat, it's expansiveness, it's dryness--and the shocking volatility with which that dryness is interrupted, the thunderstorms, the flash floods--all conspire to create a nursery for the delirious, the spiritual, the imaginative.

So why would my favorite environments be the northwest rain forest and the southwest desert? You got me . . . although I could throw out the theory that I'm simply a man who loves contradiction. I love to see people in suits with tattoos creeping out the edges onto the hands and the neck. I love beautiful melody played with ferocious feedback and drums that are less played than they are flogged. I love vegans who smoke cigarettes, potheads who won't touch booze. And I like to soak up the rain and fog, or I like to be the rain and fog.

I'm thinking about this because I'm happy with the weather, but generally antsy about life in general. I'm looking for part-time work to supplement our income, because the income isn't even coming close to covering our expenses . . . and we really can't cut out any expenses. We go to and/or rent some movies, but for God's sake! We don't have a car, we don't travel much, I almost never buy CDs, we scarcely eat out (when we do, it's at the pizza/pho/cheap Chinese food level), we play CDs on our DVD player 'cause the CD player on our stereo's been broken for about five years . . . You get the idea. We're not broke because we're living high on the epicurean hog. Anyway, I'm trying to find part-time work, and I've sent out a bunch of resumes, and I'm not even getting reasonable nibbles. I assumed part-time evening/weekend work would be easy to find, since I wouldn't likely be facing competition from other reasonably qualified thirtysomethings. It all leaves me feeling like a bad provider, because the full time job I hold, like all the full time jobs I've held, just doesn't cut the mustard.

Aimless. That's how it makes me feel. Like Bud, the "hero" played by Vincent Gallo in The Brown Bunny, which he wrote, produced and directed. Aimless, like the film itself. Gallo scored an unlikely hit with Buffalo 66, another road movie with Christina Ricci and a cameo by Mickey Rourke (!). And he deserved that hit: The split screens, freeze frames and other devices worked superbly in that film; and the prog-rock tap dance that Christina Ricci does in the bowling alley is so surreal and sexy that it should have won an Oscar all by itself. "The Brown Bunny" is beautifully shot, with a sense of existential stasis that has served directors like Takeshi Kitano, Terence Malick and David Gordon Green well; but where the others use stasis to create a sense of resigned despair, intimate pantheism and uncontainable ardor (respectively), Gallo seems to use this stasis to create . . . more stasis. As it turns out, the film is about stasis, specifically the failure of its protagonist to move on from a failed relationship and a tragic event; but by the time we reach that realization--and the now infamous, highly explicit fellation scene that precedes it--we're hard-pressed to care. There's a nice supporting turn from Chloe Sevigny, and a strangely affecting silent cameo by Cheryl Tiegs (purplestine was nice enough to explain to me who she is), some beautiful travel shots (love those desert road movies!); but for a film that wants to be a meditation on loss and male sexuality to come off as little more than a nihilistic travelogue . . . well, let's just say I'd hoped for better. Not so much a dud as an interesting failure, The Brown Bunny is best viewed as an object of bemused curiosity . . . if, indeed, it's to be viewed at all.

SEVEN, or How I'll Get to Heaven

2005-08-26T14:15:00.000-07:00

(FYI: The title of this post is a variation on a lyric from a song in a musical, "Little Boy: The Epic Rock Fable", aka "Little Boy Goes to Hell", that purplestine and I were in during the hot, booze-soaked summer of 1998.)

7 things I want to do before I die:

1) Write a rock opera
2) Learn to play bass
3) Get at least 3 more tattoos
4) Teach what I've learned through martial arts to at least one person who will go on to teach it to others
5) Smoke a joint with Willie Nelson
6) Be choreographed by Yuen Wo-Ping
7) Be the channel, as a writer, through which a previously unknown band hits it really big

7 things I can do:

1) Twist my tongue to both sides
2) Beat box fairly credibly
3) Remain on my hands--standing, walking or performing various balances--for a very long time
4) Play the saxophone
5) Play the flute
6) Sing almost exactly like Peter Murphy
7) Tie a Windsor knot

7 things I can't do:

1) Hit a baseball with a bat consistently or accurately
2) Drive a stick shift
3) Grow (credible) hair on the very top of my head
4) Enjoy Ben Affleck
5) Tolerate Celine Dion
6) Completely give up smoking
7) Draw three-dimensional, organic figures

7 things that attract me to the opposite sex:

1) A ripe, round ass
2) Sexual adventurousness and willingness to experiment
3) A touch of the masculine
4) Willingness to instruct for the purpose of improving sexual encounters
5) Fearlessness in the face of challenging art
6) Honesty
7) A dark and whimsical sense of humor

7 celebrity crushes:

1) Juliette Binoche
2) Carla Kilstedt (of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum)
3) Dawn "the Faun" McCarthy (of Faun Fables)
4) Bjork
5) Clive Owen
6) Isabelle Huppert
7) Audrey Tatou

7 things I say most often:

1) Fair enough.
2) Jesus-monkey-fucking-Christ!
3) I'm sure I don't know.
4) I dare not speculate . . .
5) Um . . . sure.
6) Aaaaah, fuck me!!
7) I'm not sure how I feel about that.

7 people I want to "tag" to also complete the lists:

1) The Beige
2) Purplestine
3) Izzle Pfaff
4) Four people I've yet to meet but am sure I'll love unconditionally (I know that's a copout, but everyone else I know and have read has probably already done this--remember, I'm very new around here)

All About Adult ADD . . .

2005-08-25T09:35:00.000-07:00

No, this isn't going to be a case study (although one could easily make a case study of me). The title's just a disclaimer: I have no subject, just an overactive cranium channel-surfing over many topics. You've been warned.

Now, then . . . OK, tattoos. I just saw a mailman walk by, a younger guy, arms covered with dark tattoos. Neither dense enough nor continuous enough to be called "sleeves", but close. He was the sort of lithe, well-muscled youth who can pull off sleeves attractively (note: large arms and tiny waist are a must for full sleeves, because they tend to make the arms look smaller and the torso larger by comparison; hence, only skinny-but-buff guys can really afford the effect). The young buck in question was too far away for me to identify any particulars with regards to his body art, but the lines were nice: Waves and curls, an illusion of motion, flow like water currents or the billowing of clouds.

I've encountered a number of people who dislike tattoos for purely aesthetic reasons, and have no argument to offer them other than the sheer force of my preference. Some are so vehement--or just plain snotty--in their dislike that I avoid the topic altogether. More interesting to me are those who actually see tattoos as signs of a moral failing. I remember, when we first moved to Seattle, a girl we knew had just pierced her nipple. She had a liaison with a man who claimed certain spiritual beliefs (I won't go into what, except to say that it was apparently some variation on rastafarianism; but being ignorant, largely, regarding the rastafarian tradition, I'd hate to assert anything that portrays the belief system inaccurately) shortly thereafter; and the man insisted she remove it. Apparently practitioners of this man's "system" take the whole "body-as-temple" thing very seriously, oppose body-piercings and tattoos on the grounds that, as our friend put it, "You wouldn't walk into a church and start painting on the walls, would you?"

Well, first of all, maybe the world would be a better place--and religion a more positive force therein--if we did get to paint or draw on the walls of our churches. Second, I tend to view the body less as a temple than as a something of a mobile home, a property that, for the time being anyway, you own; but that, like a house, will belong to forces outside the realm of your control when you die. And modifying your house . . . well, I'd say that's your perogative, n'est-ce pas? Indeed, isn't being able to furnish, paint, remodel and restructure your house kind of the point of owning property? I can also take the Franciscan view of the body--that attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi, for those not in the Catholic-or-ex-Catholic know--which posits that the body is best referred to as "brother ass", a useful, obstinate donkey which carries on our burden of existence. And God knows I'm all for decorating my ass.

And just as you can learn much about a person by looking at what she hangs on her walls, plays on her stereo or watches on her DVD player, I think that the best tattoos, if they're wisely chosen, offer certain insights into a person's essential character. The mandala on my wife's foot or the mantra in the small of my back are useful examples: Pieces of text or spiritual symbols pretty much come right out and advertise the POV of the tattooed. But even the guy with, say, the Lorax ("I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues!") scrawled on his shoulder is saying something about what he seeks in or from the world around him.

Tattoos also make for a great special effect during sex, the ultimate permanent toy. The artwork both separates you from and more fully integrates you with your partner. Separates because the art itself gives off a whiff of fantasy, the exotic; integrates because, if the tattoo really reflects something psychic or spiritual about its wearer, that aspect, otherwise locked in the abstract, is then represented by a concrete symbol in the midst of the act. You no longer make love just to a body, or even merely express relation with an idividual: You engage in communion with the ideas that person has chosen to represent.

I've often been fascinated by the tribal histories of tattooing. Even removed from its context in primitive cultures, Western tattoos have largely been a function of ethnic, class or tribal identification. Until fairly recently, the tattoo was largely a function of blue collar and/or military solidarity: Soldiers in units would get matching tattoos, sailors would get tattoos that varied according to the purpose of their seafaring (whaling, naval, merchant marine). Mechanics have always been a standard bearer of the tattoo. The association with both working-class and tribal concerns inevitably allowed the tattoo to become a prevalent symbol in rock, and the gradual democratization of rock, in turn, made tattooing acceptable to the middle-class.

But the tribal aspect of tattoos persists: The Yakuza, the popular name for the Japanese organized crime syndicate, uses tattooing as a sort of branding, an assertion of neo-feudal tribal identity (the hierarchies of the Yakuza aren't unlike those of classic Japanese feudalism, where mob leadership essentially takes the place of the Shogun).

This makes me think of movies (because all things in this world make me think of movies). Takeshi Kitano--known, when he acts, as "Beat" Takeshi--has directed some beautiful and meditative Yakuza films (if a meditative tone poem about mobsters sounds like a contradiction, rent Sonatine immediately). In many of them, tattoos are featured prominently as part of the visual design, and emphasizes the patently Asian character of his cinema. Even his non-Yakuza themed films use tattoos in ways central to the visual design. His campy, instant-classic samurai film The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi features card dealers with ornate designs on shoulder, arm and neck. Even Kikujiro, a small but lovely film that basically resets the hackneyed thug-with-a-heart-of-gold-finds-redemption-on-road-trip-with-lonely-child plot in modern Tokyo (and brilliantly making use of Kitano's patented, existentially resigned blank slate of an anti-hero, evolved directly from Alain Delon's frigid hitman in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai), spends at least a few minutes showing long, still shots of a rising sun on Kitano's back, as if his very tribal criminality is also, paradoxically, the source of both his redemption and the child's.

Speaking of Japanese cinema, Purplestine and I saw Kiki's Delivery Service last night. What a lovely little piece that is. Not as rich as Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away, but with the same thoughtful approach to fantasy. Interesting how, even when aiming for children, Miyazaki's animated fables are still more thematically potent and intellectually rich than most of the animated fare our own studios try to sell us.

Top 5 animated movies ever, according to thelyamhound:

1) The Triplets of Belleville
2) The Incredibles
3) Spirited Away
4) Kiki's Delivery Service
5) A Bug's Life

That's how I feel about it today. There's a French film called Fantastic Planet . . . or maybe Strange Planet (much abuse of the short term memory since we saw it) which deserves honorarable mention and might have made the list on another day. I'm also very fond of both Toy Story films; and while I thought that, for its year, Finding Nemo fell short of the majestic heights reached by The Triplets of Belleville, it's still a fine and worthy piece of animated cinema.

Anyway, Kiki's Delivery Service featured some nice, deadpan vocal work by Phil Hartman, and some sweet work by Kirsten Dunst as the eponymous heroine. It's message of personal empowerment and self-esteem was simple and very directly stated; but it managed to convey said message with a winking sense of humor that never became overly smug, a sweetness that was never saccharine and, being a Miyazaki film, a sustained sense of wonder at beauty both natural and man made (the waving grass that opens the movie and the lumbering dirigible that close it are among some of the best pieces of eye-candy in the canon on animated film).

The night before last, we watched Layer Cake, a British crime thriller with Daniel Craig, whom I'm growing to like quite a bit, and Michael Gambon, whom I've adored for some time (if local video stores or libraries have the British TV series The Singing Detective--not to be confused with the recent, condensed, Americanized cinematic remake with Robert Downey Jr.--pick it up immediately, and prepare to see Michael Gambon in probably the finest television ever produced). Anyway, the producers of Layer Cake are apparently the same cats responsible for Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which I loved, and Snatch, in which I loved Brad Pitt--with his tattoos (hello, full-circle) and incomprehensible "piker" accent-- and Jason Statham, but which I merely liked as a film. Matthew Vaughn--producer of the two aforementioned pieces (both directed by Guy Ritchie)--takes the director's reigns here. His style, while still possessing a certain "music video" flash a la Ritchie, has a more deliberate and, dare I say, adult feel to it, inspired (one imagines) by the weightier crime dramas of Mike Hodges (Get Carter, Croupier, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead). Craig is a great presence, Gambon is funny and menacing, the pace is nearly perfect. An erotically charged sex scene is cut short quite cleverly and abruptly; but sadly, it has the (perhaps unintended) effect of making the woman (Sienna Miller) seem like a prop. Still, while it's no classic, Layer Cake is a solidly entertaining piece of genre cinema.

So I'd have to say my ramble has run its course. Sorry you're not getting my best writing today; but what I'm lacking in lucidity, I'm making up for in the raw exposure of my thought process (or at least that's what I'll keep telling myself). So have a lovely afternoon, folks, until the 'hound bays again.

Ass Mints

2005-08-23T09:27:00.000-07:00

I like mints. A lot. Tiny little lozenges that freshen the breath, making every exhale into a little gust of wintergreen.

My question: Can they make ass mints? Anti-gas medications tend to mess with the system, so I need something a little more elemental in its approach. I need a tasty mint I can pop in my mouth and ensure that my intestinal gas smells like green tea, or a pine forest.

I'm just sayin' . . .

In other news, Robert A. Moog (1934-2005) died Sunday of a brain tumor at his home in Asheville, N. C. Robert Moog, for all intents and purposes, is the engineer credited with inventing the music synthesizer, and was one of the first to commercially market synthesizers to musicians. You've heard Moog synthesizers in songs by the Beatles (the Moog was featured prominently on Abbey Road), Manfred Mann, Yes, Pink Floyd, Emerson Lake & Palmer . . . Early albums by The Rentals, a side-project by one of the members of Weezer, functioned almost exclusively on Moog synthesizers. Artists who patronized his instrument sales and repair business include Trent Reznor and members of Sonic Youth. R.I.P. to a great innovator.

BODY POLITIC

2005-08-22T12:39:00.000-07:00

Between a picnic for a chiropractic center, a graduation ceremony for a massage school and Hempfest, one could say this was a weekend of EVENTS. Of course, one of those events being hempfest, my recollection of the weekend's events is hazy at best. I'm getting ready for a second refill (3rd cup) of (black, sorta sludgy) coffee. A delivery man has dropped off our bi-weekly supply of shortbread cookies. The perk is that he drops a giant plastic bag of said cookies on my desk. The drawback is that, as a result, I have a giant bag of shortbread cookies on my desk. I tend to eat them. With coffee. The result is my feeling fat, oversugared and highly caffeinated.

So . . . Hempfest. Great outdoor setting, vibrant, fun atmosphere, sunny day, lotsa "hemp-fortified" food and cooling lemonade. Semi-interesting music blared from at least three different stages (and numerous DJs, with the occasional MC, played sets in tents strategically placed throughout the venue), and some attendees created their own performance art. One girl (with whom my wife and I were in mad lust) wore a shimmering wraparound with a top and gossamer wings that folded back into a cape, opening her wings ("spread" by means of wooden, hand-held extensions and waved in arcs) and creating a psychedelic spectacle that might not have needed chemical enhancement to be trippy (though I may never know for sure).

As an all-weekend festival, the event was a doozy. As a political rally, I had a lot of misgivings. The political diatribes weren't much more articulate than those offered by the average Judas Priest stoner: Vague pronouncements about the criminals in the current administration, unweildy comparisons between the drug war and Vietnam, exhortations to "come out of the closet" as potsmokers . . . Levels of veracity vary on the talking points; but sadly, I fear that stonerdom is gonna need to, erm, sober up a bit if we're going to come up with a coherent political agenda.

Still, it's hard to knock a day when stoners from all walks of life can congregate and partake, shop for jewelry and pastries (enhanced or otherwise) and listen to live music. So maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree worrying about the political rhetoric; maybe it's enough that a public space was set aside so that stoners from all walks of life could congregate, partake and chill.

Now I'm sure some of you are thinking that you may have gotten away without having to read a movie review. Well, no such luck. I had the pleasure and privelige of seeing Murderball this weekend, and I'd be criminally remiss, I think, not to share my observations. So, without further fanfare . . .

MURDERBALL: A Review

As the son of an amputee--my father lost a leg in Vietnam, well before I came to be (in point of fact, before he even met my mother)--I've always had mixed (but strong) feelings about the "overcoming adversity" storyline in cinema about the (for lack of a better word) disabled. Obviously, it's not intrinsically problematic to admire one's accomplishments all the more in light of the obstacles which he's had to overcome; but all too often, such admiration takes on a paternalistic and self-serving tone. Documentaries are both more immune to such posturing and more prone to it: Limiting the scope of cinematic observation to the real keeps filmmakers from imposing the facile narrative contrivances of the average "inspirational" film. At the same time, in this age of reality TV, the intrusive camera can be used to shoehorn the ostensibly real into the ill-fitting confines of our prejudices.

Murderball, the fantastic documentary in theaters now about the mind-bogglingly rough game of quad-rugby, the well-deserved nickname of which provides the film with its title, nicely avoids such traps by making it clear from the beginning that these guys could kick your ass. No, really. You may, for a moment, feel a trace of pity or sadness when the opening shot--a deliciously stark digital framing of Mark Zupan changing from his jeans into a pair of athletic shorts, preparing to work--sucks you in. Watching Zupan struggle through a simple act of changing, after all, may make you appreciate how easy it is for you to do the same. But it becomes clear soon after, when a quick-cut montage of a typical game of murderball is set to the chugging riffs of a Ministry song (I couldn't quite identify the track, but it was definitely from the A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste/Psalm 69 era of the band, shortly after their peak days of Land of Rape and Honey), that this movie isn't here to offer facile truisms about courage or strength of character (although there's plenty of both on display). No, this is a movie about hard, complex, beautiful people playing the toughest game on earth.

No, really. The toughest game on earth.

You've seen rugby, right? The one where burly, largely toothless guys play something like football, but with fewer rules and no body armor? Yeah, well, these cats play it in wheelchairs. These guys--all of them quadriplegic, with impairments in all four limbs (but with enough upper body function to operate a wheelchair)--run a ball across a modified basketball court in chairs tricked out like the armored cars in The Road Warrior, and score goals by getting both large wheels of the chair across the goal line with the ball securely in their laps. Oh, and the defense does everything they can to halt the would-be touchdown. Defense usually involves crashing hard into the chair and knocking it over, sending the receiver tumbling across the court.

The game scenes in this film operate on a visceral level not unlike that of Fight Club, wherein all manner of suppressed or misdirected emotion emerges in calculated burst of sheer physical force. Those who are not inclined to see documentaries in the theater should take note: There is no action in any movie this summer more potent, more adrenalizing, than watching this game being played. And the prefab uplift of most sports movies--the adrenaline they try to raise in films like Rocky, Victory or what have you--will seem seem false, and possibly misguided, by comparison.

Indeed, the real subject of the film would seem to be testosterone. A segment on the sexual function of quadriplegics (yes, there is such a thing, thought the sheer squareness of a medical video primer on the subject excerpted in the film is downright laughable), in which Zupan asserts asserts that those in a chair are likely to "really wanna eat pussy", seemed to confirm my suspicion that, more than overcoming any obstacle, these men seek potency, confirmation that they're still forces with which to be reckoned. It's not just that they manage to be fathers, lovers, athletes, pranksters, drinkers and brawlers. It's that they want to be good fathers, great lovers, funny pranksters and hard drinkers; and if they're gonna play the games and get into the fights, they wanna win. Zupan takes exception to the notion that anyone would hesitate to hit a man in a wheelchair . . . and slyly, almost cruelly, warns that the real danger of hitting this disabled guy is that he'd hit back.

The movie has so many subplots that it would be useless to go through them. Bob Lujano, who lost all four limbs to Miningococcerina, a variation of meningitis, provides both the most poignant meditation on disability and the funniest comic relief (he's hidden in a small box as part of a gag cooked up by the guys to mess with the staff at an hotel), is worth special attention; and watching Joe Soares try to navigate his relationship with his intelligent, talented but dissolute son is as powerful an exploration of parenting as I've ever seen.

I should also note that the film makes exceptional use of pop music from The Polyphonic Spree, Ministry and others, giving a cogent focus to the narrative and aiding scenes in succeeding on a truly cinematic level.

Indeed, this is more than a good documentary, a good sports movie or a good movie about the disabled . . . though I'd have to say it's the single best example of all three that I can think of at the moment. What Murderball is, first and foremost, is great film: Beautifully shot (within digital confines, of course), perfectly edited, chocked with surprises only real life can offer but conveyed with the precision that only great storytelling can achieve. It's the best film I've seen all summer. Go. Now.

Leaving the Apartment is Performance Art

2005-08-19T12:52:00.000-07:00

Any coffee is too much coffee. And too little.

See, I'm sometimes a tea person. And sometimes I avoid caffeine altogether. Sometimes, though, nothing but black coffee will do. It's an acquired taste, I suppose, like beer, heavy metal, Samuel Beckett. But it's a taste I've managed to acquire, for whatever reason and through whatever channel; and try as I might, I can't seem to give it up for good.

Sometimes I abandon coffee for tea. Tea seems more British/Asian in character, so I feel like I'm declaring solidarity with the people who make so much great pop music (those limeys) and those who provided the earliest seeds for my physical and spiritual self-cultivation (the Chinese, Japanese and Indian). Still, there's something so patently blue-collar about coffee that I can't resist: I keep imagining Depression-era cab drivers in New York, wrapping their frost-bitten hands around a cup of hot joe for the warmth, or Western plains drifters cooking bitter, black general store coffee--ancestor to the truck-stop sludge I used to down by the pot back in Utah. If tea seems like the short-cut to Zen because of its association with the East, its association, in this country, with the sort of Zen sought and practiced by upper-middle-class liberal intellectuals gives coffee a level of credibility as the drink of the true "Zen lunatic" of Kerouac's obsession: The worker, the drifter, the self-taught ascetic.

Not only that, but the association of coffee with beatniks, hippies (the "hippie-speedball", a staple of my diet, is simply the chemical combination of THC and black coffee), and bohemians--a leftover from the boisterously political and intellectual coffeehouse scene from the Enlightenment--lends it a sort of credibility one who sets himself outside the walls of the norm. Ironically, though, the norm is as coffee-powered as anything else: I never consumed so much coffee--nor saw so much consumed--as when I worked at a bankruptcy trustee's office, where the coffee was free, and sucked down by various type-A personalities (or type-A personality wannabes) to power the soul-sucking machine that is the Protestant work ethic.

The real question I imagine you're asking is, "Lyamhound, you nut, why are you even thinking about it this much?"

The short answer is that I'm avoiding more important matters by turning my attention to trivia. Really, though, I tend to filter everything I do through how such actions might seem to the casual (or not so casual) observer. What do the things I do, wear, say, drink, eat represent? Because let's face it: For the homeopathically medicated manic-depressive with a messianic complex, getting out of bed and going out to face the world is a performance. The idea of pure function is anathema: It reeks of effort without reward, a daily endurance of the maddeningly prosaic without reason to hope that one's presence outside the walls of the apartment may actually affect the people he encounters. When one's effect on the world is abstract--as it is necessarily to the office lackey, the retail clerk, even the artist (only doctors, policemen, soldiers, possibly teachers and certainly professional killers can measure their effects in number and matter)--the significance, real or imagined, of tiny gestures is magnified.

My own tastes, with regards to foods and flavors are hard to discern: Circumstances in my upbringing left me afraid by my adolescence to indulge any preferences one way or the other. The plus side is that I like the taste of pretty nearly everything that's considered food in Western culture. The downside is that, in order to narrow my field of the desirable, I have to imbue everything with some pesky meaning or other.

So bear with me when I analyze something as mundane as coffee for its broader spiritual and cultural implications. Think of it as the obsessive-compulsive loop of a neurotic gnostic: If one is to know God through the world, the world through the daily environment and the environment through the self, it goes to follow that the quirks with which I experience my environment--chemical veils, cultural associations and all--will color the analysis which drives and accompanies my search. Or, if nothing else, I'll be awake enough to notice the more important stuff.

So no cream, thanks. I've got an epiphany to chase.

An American Sociopath in Hamburg

2005-08-19T11:15:00.000-07:00

I promise to have some new content soon (and some thoughts on something other than movies or music, although those are my twin obsessions). But this is the last of my "heralded" posts from the fray; and I think the film I review is an obscure-ish should-be classic that, if you can find it, you would greatly enjoy.

So here we go:

DVD REVIEW: THE AMERICAN FRIEND

I had seen my share of Ripleys. Tom Ripleys, that is. Most people see Matt Damon when the think of the eponymous sociopath of "The Talented Mr. Ripley"; but that book had already been adapted once before, in a French film entitled "Purple Noon" in English-speaking countries. The always dashing--and always ice-cold--Alain Delon played Patricia Highsmith's budding sociopath. A more recent adaptation of "Ripley's Game", with John Malkovich in the role of an older, wiser, more self-aware manipulator stumbled straight to DVD without the benefit of wide release.

But like "The Talented Mr. Ripley", "Ripley's Game" also has an earlier film adaptation with an altered title (presumably to justify or offset certain liberties taken with the text). The great German filmmaker Wim Wenders--director of two of my top 10 films ever, "Wings of Desire" and "Paris, Texas"--created, in 1977, an acclaimed thriller based on Patricia Highsmith's "Ripley's Game", the story of a European innocent manipulated into participation in a mob hit by a certain American named Tom Ripley, a suitable master of such games due to an utter lack of anything resembling conscience. In the role of the hapless protagonist, Wenders casts Bruno Ganz, who would later be the sad-eyed angel at the center of Wenders' "Wings of Desire". And Tom Ripley? Well . . . that would be Dennis Hopper.

Alain Delon, Matt Damon, John Malkovich . . . Dennis Hopper. One of these things--as the TV show used to say--is not like the other.

I'll be damned if it doesn't work, though.

Whatever the differences, cinematically, between the various Ripleys, Damon, Malkovich and Delon all had the common virtue (if you can call it that) of being able to pass for an Ivy League playboy, but for a certain cold, dissolute intelligence. They were all the kind of guys in college whom you would have found attractive were they not so dang creepy . . . or else the kind you found extremely attractive precisely because of the apparent "defect". Of the three, Delon was the most convincing sociopath--his Gallic iciness pierced through the celluloid and drew blood. Damon gave the most layered performance, capturing the nervousness of a man who doesn't yet understand that he's necessarily missing anything, who hasn't come to understand how ill-equipped he is for virtue, how uniquely suited to evil. And Malkovich--always a sentimental favorite of mine, despite his affectations--seemed like the perfect future version of Damon's Ripley, socially awkward but happily resigned to it, dressed cheerfully in untucked shirts and beret's like an overgrown college kid who never grew out of wanting to be seen as a thoughtful, sensitive indie beau-hunk (though here I could be projecting). Malkovich's lazy, slightly feminine delivery represents, to me, a compendium of the Ripley ideal as the ultimate failure of east coast, middle-to-upper-class character construction: A poncey, predatory organism that knows all the rules, but not what they mean.

This is not Dennis Hopper's Ripley.

If "Paris, Texas", which would come in 1981, seemed to betray Wenders' belief that America was all about open spaces, cars and pop-culture insignia, it probably came as no surprise to those who'd already seen "The American Friend", in which said friend--Tom Ripley--was a dissolute drifter who happened to drift here, to Hamburg, where he deals in forged art and mumbles a sort of psychological journal into a tape recorder (entries to be replayed while driving at dusk). This being 1977, Hopper is at the peak of his incoherence; and his incoherence beautifully, tragically becomes Ripley's. While Tom is never shown doing any drugs, the notion that he might be lingers over the proceedings as he stagger through the motions in what would appear to be a thick fog of incomprehension. With his semi-ridiculous cowboy hat and lopsided swagger, Hopper's Ripley is nearly as dangerous as Delon's, more unpredictable than Damon's and more recognizably human than Malkovich's.

More than that, though, one has to wonder if Ripley wasn't meant to represent Wenders suspicions about Americans: Drunk on open space, prone to rely on firearms at inappropriate times, steeped in tacky decor (a lit neon "Canada Dry" sign hangs overhead in the center of Ripley's living room), constantly seeking identity.

Considering how little screen time Hopper actually gets, it would be criminal of me to fail to mention Ganz, who's as much a marvel here as in "Wings of Desire". His character--suffering a potentially fatal (and unnamed) blood disorder, devoted to his family and contemptuous of those who treat art as commerce--is the sort of simple, hard-working-yet-passively-cosmopolitan European who serves as a perfect foil, dramatically speaking, to Tom Ripley. Bruno Ganz's deep, dark gazes betray a sense of loss even when he laughs, apologizes or offers assistance. When the character is finally lead to kill, his frustration feels . . . for lack of a better word, very real: As in many of the best Wenders films, pathos is here served somewhat chilly.

Wenders is working with his usual cinematographer, the great Robby Muller; and, true to form, the film is beautiful. Like he did in "Paris, TX", Muller revels in beautiful widescreen compositions, with stretches of open road, skylines and long-distance views of barely-overheard events opening the picture up so wide you feel like you can crawl in.

Like his American independent contemporary, Jim Jarmusch, Wenders plays liberally with pauses and poses, disaffected cool, and a passive nihilism that yearns for romantic release. The warmth and humor this lends to what may otherwise play out as another thriller of double-crosses and identity games is delightful, irksome, plodding and gorgeous. What makes Hopper's Ripley different from others--and Wenders' "The American Friend" different from other Ripley movies--is that the man at the center of all schemes seems to see something better on the horizon. He can't picture his redemption, but he truly hopes it's waiting for him, somewhere on the other side of the next great conspiracy.

The Stench of Legitimacy

2005-08-19T10:41:00.000-07:00

Another repost from the fray, this in response to an article on "the canard of 'classical training'". Seems some journalist took exception to the fact that some pop/punk/rock/metal artists make dubious claims of having received "classical training" to "legitimize" their music. I, too, took exception . . . to the notion that an artist needs to do anything to legitimize his or her art other than make it and find an audience for it. I'm particularly proud of this one--not because it's particularly great writing, but because it offers a more complete glimpse into my true artistic values than do the others.

So here, for a second look:

THE STENCH OF LEGITIMACY

I have flippantly tossed about the term "classical training" in reference to musicians I admired, so my hands are a little dirty on this. And yes, I'm sure that a truly classically trained musician may take exception to so glib an application of the term. But the real reason such terms get used so frequently is something only hinted at in the article: Elitist dismissal of modern forms of vernacular and popular music.

I have often referred to Mike Patton's "classical training", which I know about only because I read in an article that he studied some opera. What I KNOW is that Faith No More (particularly circa "Angel Dust"), Mr. Bungle and Fantomas have made some of the most complex and visceral music ever to be too damn weird for the pop canon and too damn pop for the classical canon. The music doesn't need the stench of legitimacy to render it legitimate; and yet I feel compelled to offer it precisely that dubiously sought aroma. Why? Because as an educated man (of sorts) and a (moderately) trained stage actor, I'm supposed to bow to the gods of academic tradition and precedent.

I think that what we forget is that all art begins with someone who doesn't know what they're doing. Sonic Youth picked up instruments they didn't know how to play correctly, and that "incorrectness" has since become the foundation of a new school of technique that has not only influenced (and continues to influence) post-punk music, but led Sonic Youth to tackle composition by some of their aesthetic forbears (Cage, Ives, Glass) on "Goodbye 20th Century". Jean-Luc Godard never attended film school; and yet the French New Wave, which he is often credited with all but inventing, created a new chapter in the academic cirriculuum of modern film theory. And don't get me started on jazz, once a music played in bars and whorehouses by men who, often as not, had no more training in classical music than I do in animal husbandry (that's, um, none, in case you're wondering). Yet now, thanks to the tests of time, jazz is granted high regard quite nearly on par with classical music in measures of aesthetic and historical importance.

I don't object to classical training, or the claim thereof, if classical music is what you want to play. Feel free, also, if you must, to defend your precious "classical training" from any dilution of its meaning. In turn, may I suggest that rock, a form still too young to have earned induction into the canon, and particularly younger, more ostensibly academic variations thereon--post-punk, post-rock, krautrock and its descendants, and whatever genre you may suspect will have future importance--not be asked to serve proof of its legitimacy in order to be taken seriously as an art form.

The Great Diversion, or Why Even Arthouse Hounds Need a Dumb Summer Movie Now and Again

2005-08-19T10:20:00.000-07:00

This is a repost of a review I originally wrote in the fray at slate.msn.com . . . basically, I'm jumpstarting my content by gathering the recent writing/thinking that led to my starting a blog in the first place. Content will get more up-to-date and personal as momentum builds; in the meantime, I'll try to warn you (as I am now) when you're getting recycled content.

That said, please feel free to respond to the recycled posts, because I'd love to get some fresh and friendly eyes on them.

A month or two ago, I had an opportunity to see a free preview of "The Island", which I exptected to hate and ended up sort of enjoying. I wrote this before the reviews came out in the mainstream press, so I was fairly surprised to see that many of the critics agreed with me. Sadly, the movie has since bombed at the box office. While I'm always secretly happy to see blockbusters bomb, it's a little sad when they're among the few such movies that I find myself enjoying.

So without further ado, here's thelyamhound with a movie review:

THE ISLAND

First things first: I hate Michael Bay.

I know, EVERYONE hates Michael Bay. Maybe the average filmgoer doesn't care; after all, he's among the higher-grossing directors in the industry. And there's always some contrarian film geek--and God knows, I've often been a contrarian film geek--who'll sell you on the idea that he is, in his own slick, silly, sensationalistic way, an auteur. Which he is . . . a HACK auteur, to be precise. I'm not one to criticize MTV filmmaking reflexively: I always believed that the damage music videos would to to music would be offset by the schooling they would offer for novice filmmakers. And if I'm looking at films by, say, David Fincher, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and even early Guy Ritchie, the tools of advertising and music promotion have, on occasion, served the industry well.

But Michael Bay is exceptional in his lack of interest in the truly cinematic. It's not just his content (or lack thereof); nor is it specifically the latent misogyny and homophobia that seem to crowd his frames at the margins. It isn't even the popcorn frivolity. In fact, if we were to illustrate the difference between the best of his previous output ("The Rock") and the worst ("Armageddon"), it's that his worst work fails specifically on the the popcorn level. "The Rock" manages, despite comically overwrought and implausible action sequences, leaden dialogue and unlikely plotting, to speed through on the power of its stars. In "Armageddon", on the other hand, even Steve Buscemi and Billy Bob Thornton can't register throught the haze of epileptic camera work and ADD editing. The best thing I can say about that particular cinematic abortion is that it was so scattershot and mind-scrambling that I barely remember that Ben Affleck was in it at all. We can all be grateful for small favors.

So take my word for it when I tell you: This is the best pure summer movie of the summer.

Yeah, I loved "Batman Begins"; and I was impressed, if not particularly moved, by "War of the Worlds". But in their own ways, and on their own terms, these were FILMS, works of art which could actually endure thematic, formal and philosophical scrutiny. Neither was quite the tremendously enjoyable, emotionally manipulative, instantly forgettable joy that a proper summer movie could be. "The Island", on the other hand, spends over two hours spoon-feeding you that which should be laughable and actually moves you with it. And if Michael Bay is a hack, making you swallow that which you shouldn't put in your mouth in the first place and actually making you ENJOY it is a skill that earns him the title of World-Class Hack.

The plot is nothing you need worry about. Basically, it's "Logan's Run" meets "THX 1138" for the first half, "Spartacus" for the last third and an extended car crash in the middle. The car crash in question defies all laws of logic, gravity and spacial relevance; but I don't know that my hands ever stopped clenching the armrests, so my snobbery on the matter can rightfully be called misguided.

The story, such as it is, centers on Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson as residents of a monochromatic compound sealed off from the world ostensibly as the result of a "contamination", the nature of which is never particularly elucidated or specified. Periodically, these individuals are spoon-fed hope by a lottery which promises that the winner will be sent to "the island", the last uncontaminated ecosystem, for the purposes of repopulating the species. What ensues is a sequence of minor discoveries leading to a not unpredictable doozy: That these people are all clones grown for organ harvest, kept in a state of bliss to ensure purity of their tissues, and harvest when their "sponsors"--who know nothing about the sentient nature of the "products"--are in need of organs/skin/surrogate mothers. Escape, chases, moral quandaries and what-not follow. Steve Buscemi makes an appearance as a sympathetic human. Djimon Hounsou shows up as a bounty hunter. The plot loses the fight with momentum.

Where this movie succeeds better than any other Bay film is in how potently it allows star power to run the game. Ewan McGregor's rakish charm is in full force, mixing the sly savvy of his work in "Trainspotting" with the sort of innocence he cultivated effectively in "Moulin Rouge" and "Big Fish". Scarlett Johansson has never been so lovely: Her crepe-paper skin, platinum-blonde hair (wig or dye-job?), reflecting-pool eyes and absolutely chewable lips . . . God, those lips . . .

Ahem.

Anyway, McGregor fares well in terms of charisma--the scene where he meets his sponsor, played, again, by himself, is a knockout--but Johansson more effectively conveys a being who's decidedly incomplete, a blank slate newer to the world than she realizes. Buscemi is as funny as ever, and Hounsou is smoldering, sexy, dangerous and, as always, staunchly noble in his own way.

One complaint: The violence level of this film is way too high for its PG-13 rating. With all the shootings and maimings, they might as well have given it an R and given us some nude scenes. Then again, I can practically draw Ewan McGregor's penis from memory for all the films in which it's appeared; and I don't even know if Johansson does nude scenes. So call that a personal quibble.

In any case, Bay has delivered what no one else this summer has (and what I never imagined he was capable of): A nearly perfect piece of cinematic junk food. I may have to eat nothing but broccoli for a week to get rid of that dirty feeling, but boy-oh-boy, did it taste good.

A Rant on Music . . .

2005-08-18T15:37:00.000-07:00

. . . just so you know what you're in for.

I was thinking about King Crimson today. Actually, I think about King Crimson a lot. I tend to like art that claims no antecedents; but of course, NO art in this day and age is without antecedents. So when I try to build a personal canon of popular music (although, as I explain below, I object to broad cultural canon formation in this arena), I keep coming back to a handful of bands. And the one on my mind today is . . . King Crimson.

I not only dislike much classic rock, I fundamentally object to the concept. First and foremost it's an exercise in hubris to begin canon formation on an art form that's less than 50 years old. Secondly, the criteria for inducting most "classic rock" into the "canon" seems to be that some baby boomer who owns a radio station remembers copping a first feel or smoking a first joint to some song or another, and mistakes such nostolgia for a brush with the transcendant. If canon formation in rock resembled, in principle, the same processes in literature or film (which, at around a century old, is BARELY old enough to justify its canon), most classic rock wouldn't make the cut. Maybe Zeppelin. Probably Pink Floyd and Yes. Certainly Zappa. But the Eagles? God, no. Bachman-Turner Overdrive? Please. Bad Company? This conversation is over.

OK, OK, it's not over. There are many potential criteria, of course. Judgement on merits of technical prowess would include the induction of artists like Rush, Jeff/Tim Buckley, Fairport Convention, Zappa, Yes, and, for my favorites, Can, Neu, Brian Eno, Talking Heads, and King Crimson. If we look at issues of social importance, for instance, and/or effect on the aesthetic evolution of the form, my thinking is that we'd be looking at artists like The Clash, Patti Smith, Elvis Costello, Sonic Youth, Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, Captain Beefheart, U2, Black Sabbath, Bauhaus, REM . . . and, I daresay, Can, Neu, Brian Eno, Talking Heads, and King Crimson.

Robert Fripp does more than play a mean guitar: He CHANGES what the instrument is FOR. Other standouts in the rotating lineup: Drummer Trey Gunn--for whom the words "drum solo" mean not some meatheaded rock indulgence but a straight shot to post-jazz, post-rock nirvana (not to be confused with Nirvana)--and singer/guitarist Adrian Belew, both of whom contributed great things to the shape of the band. But I still love the lineups of the band that recorded "In the Court of the Crimson King", one of the two greatest prog-rock albums ever, and "Red" . . . the other one.

More than the musicianship, though, is that they managed to be art-rock without being unconscionably pretentious. They rock as hard as Rush, swoon as romantically as Yes and have all the bluster and theatricality of Peter Gabriel-led Genesis; but they do it all with an ironic wink and self-effacement that would later influence punk, and post-punk art school acts like the aforementioned Sonic Youth and Talking Heads.

If you're a real Crimhead, three acts worth checking out: Cobra High (provided you don't mind your prog-rock laced with a little new wave), Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (provided you don't mind it laced with a little world music, a little goth and a LOT of death-metal) and Turing Machine (provided you don't mind it instrumental with a bubbling momentum that calls to mind krautrock giants Neu). Actually, even if you're not a crimhead, I recommend all of the above (reviews will surely follow).

Puppies are born blind, aren't they?

2005-08-18T15:21:00.000-07:00

First post, so I'll keep it short.

I'm new to these digs, and my eyes have yet to open. It's not that I don't feel at home writing the words, per se; but the idea of creating an online forum for myself . . . well, it's terribly exciting, to be sure. Exciting and nerve-wracking (what does that mean, anyway? what means the infinitive "to wrack"?). Still, I'd best stick with exciting.

What was I saying? Oh, yes--tangents and digressions. Or that's where I would have arrived (eventually). So my guess is that you'll see a good portion of this space taken up with movie and music reviews, some fawning tributes to French actresses and people with tattoos, musings on my marriage and some occasional navel gazing. I may digress into politics or fashion . . . restaurant reviews, if I have way too much time on my hands. Those of you who can't possibly abide such nonsense need not visit. Those who can abide it in moderation ought to visit when you feel like it. I'll try to make you feel welcome if you don't burn things in my yard.

In any case, thelyamhound likes the smell of this place, and is inclined to curl up on this abandoned porch and nap 'til it's time to howl at the moon . . .