Kidulthood

Some while back, Infinite Thought expressed a combination of concern and digust over the “pyjamasation” of the West. IT saw the constant push towards increasingly casual clothing, the kowtowing to King T-Shirt-&-Sneaker-Combo, as an emotionally-crippling nostalgia for childhood: that carefree era before monkey suits & high heels. Yes, it’s bad to see a bulbous-bellied babyboomer in bermuda shorts sipping a juicebox – but is it worse when it’s a twenty-five-year-old?

More recently on Jodi Dean’s Zizektacular blog, there was a conversation (apparently since deleted?) about the etiquette of stupid questions – that not calling a spade a spade serves only to coddle and infantilize students. Something I didn’t mention at the time, but now wish to address is: what about giving the audience what it wants?

There seems to be a depressing epidemic of Peter Pan syndrome sweeping the West. It’s plain to see in mainstream culture: just catch My Super Sweet Sixteen on MTV. Yes, I know their target is that patented teen/“tween” demographic, but then tell me from whence come all these foghorn-mouthed narcissists in their early/mid-twenties who star in those other obscene “reality”/lifestyle shows. (Speaking of the convergence of the imaginary and the Real…) For further evidence, please note the popularity of Dane Cook, Family Guy, the films of Judd Apatow, etc.

More disturbing to me is the prevalence in the underground – the supposed haven of the media-saavy, the convention-snubbing, the culturally curious, the aesthetically-sophisticated, weirdos, freaks, and progressives – of a pervasive, escapist infantilism. I’m very tempted to lay the blame at the feet of my favourite whipping boys, Animal Collective. Their music is kindergarten-teacher chipper, their voices like an animated musical, their subject matter twee and nonsensical. (What the shit is a “Peacebone” anyway?) None of which is by accident: the lads have admitted that “Magic and childhood and music-making are three things that just have a way of coming together, at least for us.”

But it’s giving them too much credit to claim they single-handedly invoked a sea-change in underground rock. Perhaps the problem is future shock. Those in their mid-to-late-twenties are the last generation to have come of age before MP3s, reality TV, blogs, and YouTube – which means we were the last generation whose pop culture lingered long enough to foster an emotional attachment, before the instant obsolescence of the information age. Now, all our childhood idols are being stripped (or stripping themselves) of their mystique: Satan’s minion, Glenn Danzig, self-caricatures on Cartoon Network; Ice Cube takes Disneyesque doofus dad roles even Eddie Murphey (no longer delerious, just desperate) would turn down; Ah-nold swapped his cinematic cool for political capital. MTV’s aforementioned reality shows are the worst offenders, having reduced modern Hercules Terry “Hulk” Hogan, alpha-thug Xzibit, and the Prince of Darkness, Ozzy Osbourne, to domestic rubes. It’s the yin-and-yang of reality TV: if normal people can be celebrities, then it works both ways. But the result of this urge towards excessive self-revelation is that super-human mythos is impossible to maintain.

Which brings us to Pitchfork-approved party-starters & professional man-children Dan Deacon and Girl Talk.

Deacon’s latest release is the Ultimate Reality DVD, a dizzying video mash-up of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s filmography (by Jimmy Joe Roche) set to a day-glo symphony of Nintendo-style synth squiggles. Deacon & Roche’s mission is plain-stated: to pass off their "psychedelic subversive conceptual Mash-Up" as "a mandala projected from the third eye of suburban back yards, cracked drive ways, and dusty VCR's.. the dawn of this post-postmodern age" – that is, to reconstruct their shattered modern American folklore by regressing to the wide-eyed wonder of a six-year-old sat in front of the TV. They want to enjoy the full thrall of unmitigated fantasy, and Superman can only exist if you believe a man can fly, so it’s back under the blankey we hide. Sure enough, fellow Wham City citizen Jim "Grgl" has remarked that Deacon’s appeal is that "he really lets them feel like infants."

Meanwhile, ex-tourmate Greg “Girl Talk” Gillis is the thousand-samples-per-minute king of mash-ups. His brand of regurgitated hip-hop comes bite-sized and aims for the ass, never the head or the chest. Consequently, he’s been accused of robbing hip-hop of its essential anti-authoritarian aggression. But this isn’t censorship for the sake of dance-floor levity; this is a studious whitewashing (no pun intended) of hip-hop’s history, a self-induced amnesia to forget the threat ever existed. Gillis has no doubt seen The Wizard of Oz: once the curtain is pulled back, the man behind it can’t escape his own smallness. Eminem’s won an Oscar, Ice Cube can make a whole movie without capping a single motherfucker, and Snoop’s encouraged an arena to “give it up for the Bedwetters.” It’s damned hard to recall what danger they ever posed. Rather than deal with disillusionment, Gillis prefers to reimagine hip-hop as a foot-stomping LP pile-up that bids no more than to bust a move.

But I can’t discuss these two clowns without immediately recalling an Onion headline: “Adulthood Spent Satisfying Childhood Desires.” What kind of sociopath wants to return to a time when the Tooth Fairy was real, or dancing like a drunk giraffe qualified as rebellion? What kind of art forgoes insight and enrichment for sugar-coated regression? My digust with Animal Collective, Deacon, and Gillis (among others) springs from the same roots as Dean’s contempt for indulging stupid questions: that it shields us not only from discomfort, but the truth.

Yes, rock has always suffered from developmental self-arrest. But rock is most rewarding when it transcends simple-minded black/white contrarianism and reckless hedonism. (Anyone who disagrees would probably argue that Meet the Beatles and Pablo Honey are better albums than Revolver and OK Computer, and fuck that.) This isn’t some condescending aesthetic privy only to the old & busted. When I was 19, I bought the buzzed-about sophomore record by …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead. I sold it back three days later, ‘cuz I already owned Bad Moon Rising. But what conclusively killed my enjoyment of the record was the ersatz anthem “A Perfect Teenagehood.” Here were grown-ass men in their late-mid-twenties, still pissed at their parents and shrieking “FUCK YOU!” ad nauseum like petulent pubescents. This music was emotionally retarded – and I was still a teenager at the time.

Rearview Ear, Or: What Didn't Suck in '07

It’s that time of year! Everyone, set sail across the ocean of cyber-soapboxes and offer hyperbolic-yet-half-assed rationalizations for whatever records turned your crank over the past 12-month period! Huzzah for the forced fossilization of personal opinion!

Having ignaminiously slunk out of the music press over a year ago, I’m mercifully exempt from pleading with people to believe my banter about why Artist X is on some, as they say, Crucial Shit. All the better for not having done my homework: I still haven’t heard Kala, American Gangster, Curtis, or Graduation beyond whatever video’s in immediate rotation; I was achingly underwhelmed by a grab-bag of MP3s by Deerhunter, Grizzly Bear, the Celebration, Yeasayer*, the Black Lips, and other hippy-happy blog-buzzees and subsequently ignored their releases utterly. But scanning the scant smattering of CDs I actually bought this year, I grew suspicious: have my tastes started to ossify into crusty “specialization?” Has my record collection become self-copulating? My year-end toppers are a line-up of the usual suspects: angular, Amphetamine Reptilian rock; smarmy, satiric singers; epic instrumental workouts – same ol’ shit as the past five years. Dare I ask myself the same question at every year’s end: am I losing my edge?

Which begs another question: the edge of what? A knife, a cliff, or a ballpit at Chuck E. Cheese’s? I honestly can’t tell, looking at the parade of technicolour banality and melodic doldrums marching across MTV & the Forkcast. The truth is that The Edge is not only a pathetically mediocre guitarist, but the very concept is suburban high-school insecurity, the bourgeois delusion that life is perfectable via checklists. An analogy: I’ve met a number of people whose travel C.V. dwarfs mine, but very rarely did they earn anything more substantive than a few snapshots and superficial observations – the typically incurious narcissism of backpackers who “do” countries and spend most of their travels drinking with other foreigners. I may not have hit as many countries, but I always prefer to linger and learn the layout of a town, to wander the streets and absorb the flavour of the place so I can relate the experience beyond a binary Pass/Fail mark. So I haven’t been to Thailand or Bali, but I can give fifty reasons why the city of Nanchang sucks.

I hadn’t realized how far from the rat race I’d strolled until I almost relapsed. Early this summer, while enjoying the rare luxury of a lazy day in western China, I was reading the about the current listening index of Battles (one of maybe 3 bands I’m actually kinda jealous of musically) over at the Wal-Mart of Indieness. Well, I almost spit blood when Tyondai Braxton leaked what had been my under-lock-and-key musical secret of this decade: Nino Rota’s score to Fellini’s Il Casanova. Fan-fuckin’-tastic, now every sweater-vested scenester would be name-dropping one of my treasured audial experiences like a back-biting housewife comparing brands of toaster oven. True, I could console myself with the fact that I was still several years ahead of the curve, but relief only came when a friend reminded me, “You’re not even on the curve. So the record will be on some hipness index by which some smug little shit will size up other people at his favourite bar for the next little while. In another year, you’ll still be listening to it while they’ve run along to the new flavour, trying to convince themselves it really matters the way Rihanna or the Klaxons ‘matter’ now, like Ashanti and the Strokes five years ago.”

I’ll drink to that. Happy New Year. (Click on the mix title to download.)

A Baker’s Dozen From ‘07

1. The Heads – “Your Monkey Is My Master” (from Under the Stress of a Headlong Dive, 00:00)
2. Feist – “My Moon My Man” (from The Reminder, 01:46)
3. Tarentel – “Dreamtigers” (from Ghetto Beats From the Surface of the Sun, 05:05)
4. Jarvis Cocker – “Running the World” (from Jarvis, 08:11)
5. Patton Oswalt – “Alternate Earth” (from Werewolves & Lollipops, 12:48)
6. The Horrors – “Count In Fives” (from Strange House, 13:57)
7. Bachi Da Pietra – “Altri Guastri” (from Non Io, 17:09)
8. Battles – “TIJ” (from Mirrored, 21:10)
9. Grinderman – “Grinderman” (from, you guessed it, Grinderman, 28:10)
10. Pissed Jeans – “Bad Wind” (from Hope For Men, 32:34)
11. Qui – “Belt” (from Love’s Miracle, 35:37)
12. The Brian Jonestown Massacre – “Golden Frost” (leaked rough mix, 40:23)
13. White Rainbow – “Waves” (from Prism of Eternal Now, 44:05)
14. Acid Mothers Temple – “Crystal Pyramid Under the Stars” (from Crystal Pyramid Under the Stars, 48:05)

And to give credit where credit is due, here's a handful of tracks from older albums that opened up my audial horizons over the past year...

Why You Gotta Keep Bringin’ Up Old Shit?

1. The Psychic Paramount – “Perpignan Pt. 1” (from Live 2002: The Franco-Italian Tour, 00:00)
2. Sonic Youth – “White Kross” (recorded live 1990, 02:23)
3. El-P – “Deep Space 9mm” (from Fantastic Damage, 05:05)
4. The Brian Jonestown Massacre – “If Love Is the Drug…” (single, 08:46)
5. Magma – “Zombie Dance” (from Üdü Wüdü, 12:39)
6. Selda – “Yaylalar” (from Selda, 16:54)
7. Machida – “Doteraiyara” (from どてらい奴ら, 20:39)
8. The Fall – “Wings” (from Perverted By Language, 23:57)
9. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion – “Write a Song” (from The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, 28:20)
10. Meiko Kaji – “Jin’s Blues” (from 梶芽衣子全曲集, 30:11)
11. The Billy Nayer Show – “Only I Can Save the World” (from Return to Brigadoon, 33:42)
12. Radiohead – “In Limbo” (from Kid A, 36:30)
13. SunnO))) – “Orthodox Caveman” (from Black One, 39:47)
14. Angelo Badalamentani – “The Pink Room” (from the Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me OST, 46:01)
15. The Skatalites, “Herb Man Dub” (50:01)
16. Laddio Bolocko – “The Going Gong” (from The Life and Times of Laddio Bolocko, 53:12)
17. Ween - “The Stallion Pt. 2” (from The Pod, 01:03:05)

I asked my friend James Marshall if he thought the current dismal state of music was likely to improve. “No,” he said. “It’s got to get worse, because everybody’s into their own thing and doesn’t wanna know. Pretty soon every band will have no more than three fans, and nobody will have even any friends. Then after that you’ll start resenting the other guy because he likes the same thing you like: it’s your turf! How dare he encroach? So then people will start killing each other for appropriating each other’s musical tastes and thus infringing on the neighbor’s hipness space. How can you be smug about being the only person in the world cool enough to appreciate some piece of New Wave shit, or a blues band or arcane jazz artist for that matter, if you find out somebody else likes it? Don’t dare tell ‘em! Don’t even tell your wife or girlfriend! Keep it safe inside your Walkman!”

~Lester Bangs, from “Bad Taste Is Timeless”

*Full disclosure: Two of these dudes and I started our first band ever together. It admittedly makes it a little hard to take someone’s art seriously when you can remember them covering Weezer back in 8th grade.

I Am the Gift!

Just 'cuz I'm such a nice guy (and I'm not making a living off it anyway), I'm offering everyone the yuletide treat of my brand-spankin'-new album, available in high-res MP3 format for absolootely free RIGHT FRIGGIN' HERE from now until New Year's.

You can also grab a couple o' sample MP3s from this other page, in case you're weary of committing to the whole kit-'n'-caboodle.

Happy ChrismaChanuKwanzakkah, people of earth!

Happy Birthday, Uncle Frank

It's impossible for me to explain in full the impact Frank Zappa's had on my life. The simplest example I can give is that I date my musical taste "pre-" and "post-Frank." It was through his ideas & sounds that I first encountered Stravinsky, Varese, Boulez, musique concrete, bebop, Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits, Dadaism, the Velvet Underground, what "the clap" was, the Establishment Clause, "secular humanism," CNN's Crossfire, polyrhythmic improvisation, xenochrony, the PMRC, and (most fundamentally) the notion that humour did belong in music, but required a little more sophistication than Weird Al would have you believe.

All this from an impulse purchase using money for my 12th birthday. Who'd have thought a mild curiosity about a novelty record called "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow" could blast open such broad horizons.

Funnily enough, my parents were happy that Zappa was one of the ushers for my mental & cultural maturation (and not just 'cuz my Dad loves the guitar solo on "Willie the Pimp"). Sure, they've said, it means I make music too obtuse & experimental to ever be a rich rock star, but what a relief it was to have a son obsessed with a musician who didn't do drugs - and still made weirder music than anyone else.

"Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is THE BEST."~FZ

Finally the Punk Rockers Are Reading Lacan

"The Real makes me sweaty, GEEAAAAAAAGH!!"

Might it seem like too much to ask complex themes of a band named Pissed Jeans? Maybe so, but then it also seemed like a tall order to expect of the Flaming Lips either longevity or symphonic singalongs back when they were dreadlocked ne’er-do-wells stealing onstage stunts from the Butthole Surfers. So let’s believe in the seemingly impossible, and maybe there’ll be a pleasant surprise or two.

As not-so-subtly alluded to in a recent post, Pissed Jeans are atop my current CD rotation. I came for the vintage pigfucker antagonism, but I’m staying for the ontologically-exploratory subject matter. I shit you not. Over the course of Hope For Men’s frenzied forty-some minutes, Pissed Jeans situate themselves in several different realities and find that none of them fit. They could be (very possibly by accident) the only active punk band searching for the Real in song.

Pissed Jeans start inside the imaginary and withdraw by steps towards objectivity. This is done with a meticulousness that belies their belligerence, in a trifecta of song that forms the centerpiece of Hope For Men. In the delightfully gonzo single “I’ve Still Got You (Ice Cream),” singer Matt Korvette grounds himself in the subjective bliss of, duh, eating ice cream. “Sometimes life is less than a dream,” he bellows, as though struggling for breath under the oppressive mundanity of daily routine. Employed as a claims adjuster (no shit, read the press release), Korvette has played by consensus reality’s rules and found it wanting. The only tonic for his existential angst can be found in the saccharine, numbing escape of his frozen treat: “The taste that all my troubles fall behind, a sweet bowl of sugar to ease my mind.” Though he acknowledges that he “shouldn’t need it,” that his ontological prison is of his own design, Korvette concedes with animal lust, “I gotta have it!” A considerably less sordid psychological crutch than, say, heroin, but a crutch nonetheless.

Discontented with the imaginary, Korvette sets about de-/reconstructing it to his liking. In “Scrapbooking,” he lays out his vision for a more perfect reality: “I’ll make every page different, but all pleasing to my eye.” The dubby piano dirge is laced with a refrain of self-hypnosis, “just looking at pictures,” pictures of Korvette’s past (“This one is old, from years ago…”) which form the architecture of his conscious. This, of course, echoes Roland Barthes' ruminations on photographs as lost time made tangible: forever frozen out of reach, somewhere between the Real and our personal reality. It's impossible to "recapture" anything from a photograph; rather, they remind us of what we missed (or is missing). But being memories on paper, photos can be cut, cropped, retouched, and arranged to suit our preferred vision of the past, and Korvette knows this. With total self-awareness that he “can rearrange [his] memories,” Korvette delights in uncannily restructuring his life: “Put the heads on different bodies,” he moans with depraved enjoyment.

Having become the designer of his own truth, Korvette returns his attention to the banality of normal life and sees it for what it is: a “Fantasy World.” Riding a monster truck riff for four minutes, Korvette’s gravel-gargling howl shreds through the shallow, illusory pleasures which most of the western world is content to call life. “I’m right here in my fantasy world… Sitting near piles of clothes, drinking a soda with a slice of pizza… Watching video tapes and cable television… I laugh at my own jokes in my fantasy world!” All of this could easily be read as a piss-take of some yokel’s pathetically stunted imagination (“LOL! This song’s about a total lamewad!”), but it’s precisely the mundanity of the fantasy that gives Korvette’s bark its bite. This isn’t just his fantasy world, this is our fantasy world – a blueprint bought from and sold back to us with Pepsodent smiles by advertisers, MTV, sitcoms, Hollywood, and FM radio. This is the debris and bullshit we’ve made the bedrock of our existence, tunnel vision and junk food, more stale than day-old Domino’s. This is our reality. It’s all we aspire to, and it’s all we get. The worst part: the longer the shadows cast by our picket-fence fantasy become (globalisation, extraordinary rendition, fundamentalism, Starbucks), the harder we close our eyes in the hope we won’t wake up from our American Dream.

No wonder Korvette sounds so pissed.

God(less), What an Awful Racket

A frigid mid-November night in a Hamburg hostel with an empty wallet doesn’t offer many options in terms of entertainment. Either you try to chat up the Ukrainian cutie working the front desk, or, like me, you’re content channel-surfing on the tiny 8” TV chained to the wall above your bed. Luckily, a cultural news magazine had a segment about the somehow-still-nascent-yet-spreading Noise scene. There were a number of new faces (mostly Frenchmen with horrid haircuts) in addition to the usual cast of “marquee” Noise acts like Hair Police, Magic Is Kuntmaster, and Whitehouse. A larff though it was to see such sonic miscreants on prime-time TV, one thing Whitehouse mayor domo William Bennett said stuck out. I’m paraphrasing from memory:

“The way the audience reacts – they seem to be drawing things out of the music that we weren’t aware of. It says more about them than it does about us.”

So that’s where I was.

Meanwhile, I’d recently revisited Ian Svenonius’ brilliant book of screwball sociologly, The Psychic Soviet. Quite probably my favourite essay, “Rock and Rolligion,” deals literally with the parallels between major faiths and popular music. It’s not simply that each is an intricate (if often illogical) weave of rituals & values; the analogy is so immaculate that you can match Christian sects to respective rock subgenres. For starters, those greasy-pompadour’d rockabilly throwbacks are the Amish: history stopped at a certain point. Arena rock, with its emphasis on pomp & circumstance, is Roman Catholicism, while indie rock, with its semi-ascetic, guilt-driven work ethic, is 7th Day Adventism. The schismatic birth of Punk was equivalent to the Protestant reformation, and touring is doing missionary work. Similarly, hip-hop is Islam, with all of its competing constituent sects.

So that’s where my head was.

Now, the thing about Noise is that its tech-heavy cacophony is sufficiently abstract that, if you enjoy such sounds, you could feasibly be so entertained by traffic, wind, industrial plants, passing trains, the hiss of an untuned radio or TV. Some ham onstage with a table full of modded electronics is superfluous: raw sound becomes its own Art. There needn’t be a conscious creator pulling the strings. So a thought occurred to me…

Noise is the Atheism of Rock ‘n’ Rolligion.

Atheism is a rejection of many things – heirarchy, superstition – but foremost, it’s a rejection of a dogmatic interpretation of reality. Sense, perception, and experience can be judged subjectively, on their own merits without heeding an arbitrary set of criteria. Life can be glumly mechanical or viscerally poetic; a stoic procession according to scientific rationale, or an absurdly serendipitous success of a chemical cocktail. To squeeze the last sap from an overtapped cliché, beauty – or indeed its absence – is in the eye of the beholder.

All of which can also be said of Noise. Once the need for a conscious creator is rejected, then so too are tautological claims of truth or beauty. Dogmatic adherence to heirarchy & ceremony becomes delusional bufoonery. Sensory experience requires no mystical context to be enjoyed – so get to enjoyin’ it, ‘cuz what you see is all you’re gonna get.

Of course, some of the rituals and behaviours of the faithful are adopted by the faithless, but this is out of pragmatic deference to what is “socially acceptable.” A Noise concert, for example, would be like an Atheist celebrating Christmas: a decent excuse to get dressed up and congregate with those nearest & dearest to you (though this is sometimes more a chore than a pleasure).

This isn’t to say that there is no merit in the words or works of the faithful. There was a lot of wisdom in what both Jesus and Anton Newcombe have said, though I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, nor would I want to pattern my life precisely after theirs. Similarly, I appreciate the majestic contruction & meticulous design of both the National Cathedral and Pet Sounds, but neither betrays any more universal truth or higher aesthetic pleasure than, say, the spectrum-spanning eyefuck of Shibuya crossing or the whisper of falling snow.

But if nothing else, one parallel is unequivocal: Noise is as baffling to pop fans as Atheism is to the faithful. Always smacked with the same, stodgy old dismissal: What “art?” What “beliefs?” Isn’t the point that they don’t have any? Well, as the man said… if you have to ask, you’ll never know.

Bill Hicks

Happy Birthday.

Twin Peaks: Buy the Box Set With Me

She died for your sins... er, entertainment

During my interval of homelessness in Berlin, several acquaintances were kind enough to lend me their couches. Far be it from me to look a gift horse in the mouth (beggars can’t be etc.), but one of them had an ulterior motive: access to the second season of Twin Peaks I’d inexplicably decided to keep in my backpack. She’d only recently seen the first season, and had never seen Fire Walk With Me. Given the chance to watch the show without someone who had no idea who killed Laura Palmer, I was more than happy to proselytize. Good times.

Anyhoo, recently my wife was in touch with said acquaintance, who spent the better part of the conversation bragging about her recent purchase of the Twin Peaks “Gold Edition” dual-season boxset. O! the extras, she gushed. What a treat for true devotees…

For some reason, this bugged the shit out of me. But why? Shouldn’t I be pleased with any purchase that would put more money in the koffers of my favourite filmmaker? Or was I in fact the kind of commodity-fetishizing whore I spend most of my life lambasting?

Well… probably not. One of the benefits of moving between countries constantly is that it puts a premium on how material a person you can be. Moving’s expensive, stuff is heavy*, and if you’ve got internet access, there’s very little in terms of entertainment or media that can’t be had. After all, isn’t the defining feature of the so-called Information Age that the most valuable commodity is no longer material, but… information?

This is certainly why everyone seems to be an expert on everything these days. One-time cultural curios of specialized interest – Balkan brass, Zizek, Chan Wook-Park – make overnight entries into the lexicon thanks to the likes of Wikipedia, IMDB, YouTube, and viral blogging memes. As my wife once said, “There are no more questions, thanks to the Internet.” But as our cultural Darwinian drive has shifted from ovens & autos to MP3s and hit counts, so to has the superficiality. A great many rely on brand-name clout without caring about the particular criteria for quality. You know the type: they bought Ray-Bans in high school, insisted on attending an elite uni (be it MIT or RISD), and now name-check Takeshi Miike films or the new Justice album, without once wondering why (or even if) such things are impressive or important.

So perhaps my fit over the Twin Peaks box stems from a detail I’ve so far omitted: during one of those introductory, interest-exchanging conversations, the acquaintance launched the boomerang question of what movies I watched. Upon the mention of his name, she swooned, “Oh, I loooooooove David Lynch!” Yet at the time, she’d only seen Mulholland Drive. Dandy. I once spent 10 hours in the Auckland airport, but that doesn’t mean I know shit about New Zealand. She was a tourist, a squatter, and this rankled every proprietary bone in me.

How to guard against this kind of toe-dipping intrusion on my turf? Well, it would probably behoove me to acknowledge that ideas & information aren’t property and I can stop with the territorial pissings. But if something – an experience or work of art – becomes more common, what’s frustrating is not that it decreases in value (by what standards, anyway?) but that it increases in banality, mundanity, the Who-Gives-a-Fuck Factor. And that is a fate most ignaminious.

*For commodity fetishism at its worst, ask musicians about their gear. Yeesh.

The Great Deutscheland Swindle

Okay, so another month has whizzed by sans post, for which I apologize. I thought that maybe, just maybe, finally nailing down accomodations and signing up immediately for the internet would have meant I could get back to sharing my various incohate ramblings with y'all. Well, turns out it ain't that simple. But if the last four months have taught me anything, it's that nothing is as easy or simple as it should be in Germany.

The single greatest fallacy about this country is that Germans are efficient. Total, complete, and utter bullshit. I'm convinced that the myth took off sometime decades ago when one person misheard the word "officious." But don't take my word for it - just check out the Hamburg public transportation layout, or ask any foreigner about trying to get their tax ID so they could, y'know, get paid. Hell, try getting through any checkout line at the grocery store in under ten minutes.

The point is: I'm back online, and I've got a two-month backlog of material, so prepare for the floodgates to open. Red skies in the morning...

P3NED!!

The horror... the HORROR!!

Please forgive the gaping silence of this blog for the past month or so, because if it wasn't enough I was totally undomiciled and dragging my unshaven self between bus stations and pleather-upholstered couches... my e-mail accounts (yes, BOTH) were hacked by some petty, Stassi-wannabe fucksticks, effectively curbing my communicative capacity and locking me out of here.

But fear not, I've got a few thoughts I scrawled down to post here (in the near future, when I'm not using some extortively-priced hostel hub) so we can get the conversational ball a-bouncin' again... Hope you haven't missed me too much, eh?