Self-Immolation

A day or two before completing Quim Monzo’s two-part novel Gasoline I told my friend how much I was enjoying it, how familiar it was to me, which she was surprised to hear because normally familiarity makes me feel unoriginal and depressed, but this was somehow different. I tried to explain that there was a frailty and honesty in the characters that was a welcome change from other instances of shared brain syndrome.

But then, upon reading the last few sentences where a character is describing what might be his first bout with insomnia, a strange thing happened within my brain. A tingle developed near my brain stem, followed by a sudden wave that surged through my brain and which I rode to the completion of the book. It felt like the reawakening and release of a stored train of thought, perhaps from my own first bout with insomnia. And the description was so on target and familiar that I wanted to throw the book across the street of the cafe I sat at and curse at it. I could feel the corners of my lips furl, my eyes narrow, and my eyebrow scowl as an unexpected rage surfaced from my mind. The feeling of familiarity was too much and it sparked an unexpected reaction from within.

After the smoke cleared, so to speak, I was sitting there quietly thinking to myself, how did Monzo do that? It is as if he was soaking me in gasoline and those last few sentences ignited me.

There was a young man on the television, he was on the verge of tears, saying that this was the most important thing in his life. You could clearly see and hear the passion he must have felt, I thought he was going to light himself on fire in protest. He was upset that basketball player Lebron James was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat. The song, “We are the World”, was produced to raise funds for and awareness of the famine in Africa^wikipedia, Cleveland Cavalier fans sung a parody of this song in an effort to keep Lebron James in Cleveland. The late Manute Bol, another basketball player, spent all the money he earned from his 10 years in the NBA, and many say his life, trying to improve the conditions in Sudan.

I am just saying… and I’m not doing enough, or anything for that matter. I listen to songs on repeat for hours on end, but to what end? Familiarity with a sentiment at the cost of strangeness to the spectrum? Or to a severe crush on Julie Doiron, all you need is unattainable love, to paraphrase a pop group from the past.

Beautiful Days

This autumn has been a roller coaster temperature-wise. We’ve had two extremely beautiful days in a row, one more tomorrow, all above 60, the real Autumn stands up, finally. But I find myself wondering if I’ve taken full advantage of the days? I am thinking of taking tomorrow afternoon off.

An extremely passionate pastime of mine is to drive through the autumn bliss with leaves trailing past and a cool breeze flowing through my open windows and Eric Chenaux’s Dull Lights playing on my CD player. The combination is nothing short of euphoric, and Eric Chenaux’s latest release Sloppy Ground is a terrific addition to this pastime.

Perhaps my most favorite song writing in a long time is on this new album, the second track, in fact, Love Don’t Change. In this song, Chenaux breaks up a beautiful poem to frame a 5-plus minute long masterpiece of a guitar solo.

The solo perfectly feeds into the continuation of the poem, driving into the emotional and hapless desire expressed at the end. It is a microcosm of this autumn, so is this:

Friday Night Blight

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore…

True story, tonight I made pizza, entirely from scratch (well the mozzarella was not from scratch but it was delivered by an Eye-talian). I made a pretty good whole wheat crust. During the pizza festivities my Italian friend and collaborator recited a few poems to me. A piece in Italian went over my head and landed somewhere near the boiling pot of pizza sauce. He cursed the plethora of ingredients in the sauce, but couldn’t stop dipping into it with chips.

Later that night, we — a group of seven or so — headed out to a local club with a mechanical bull. Right… (long pause) if you know me at all, you are currently in the frame of mind known as “WTF”. Needless to say, I was not very entertained by the sights:

• large-breasted, scantily-clad bartenders (talk about violations of equal opportunity employment, as one in my party would point out…) spanking men, really spanking men, with leather belts and without restraint, then pouring Jack Daniel’s down their throats (talk about health code violations, H1N1 people…)
• loud, terrible music that I had never heard in my entire life, but which was easily mouthed or sung along to by everyone else in the club
• men ogling women with a penetrating stare beyond obvious, straight pass malicious, and just shy of physical assault

There is a small segment of a street in my neighborhood that I’ve set out to never set foot on. There is no danger on that street, probably, and there is no overwhelming reason for me to take such a bizarrely obtuse stance on such an innocuous object like this small stretch of street lined with family homes, but I’m doing it. As far as I can tell, the only reason is to say, “I have never set foot on that stretch of Crossman’s Terrace; at best, it is a personal test, a personally imposed limitation purely for fun, at worst, it is blind stupidity. I should apply these limitations to the kind of place I went to last night.

But maybe turning a blind eye to what is there is just as bad? There is known harm from living in a self-affirming bubble, where every new bit of intellectual consumption is just a continuation of the same, leading to a tragically static mental state. In which case, perhaps events like those of last night, provide a new calibration on one extreme end? But maybe the sights of last night are just as reaffirming?

Maybe I am just a major fuddy-duddy slash buzzkill. Afterall, I did not ride the bull.

At the Reservoir

My friend Roxane asked me about some prints she was making, one reminded me of this video I had made at the Cobb’s Hill Reservoir with Aimee, circa 2006, so I dug it out and with the new computational power afforded from my new laptop, I could finally work it into something neat, check it out, it is only one minute long.

At the Reservoir from rudybang on Vimeo.

duh nuh; duh nuh–duh nuh, duh nuh.

mp3 sample from new DMST album

The tracklist:

1. Do
2. Make
3. Say
4. Think

If you could see and hear my head exploding.

(insert exploding sound here)

Preordered, now I just have to find a way to get sated faster.