Bardo Pond and synaptical misfires at Louise Point

Bardo Pond is the best and only ones who do what they do - which is create panic attack at the club music... the drugs kick in and everything gets slow and weird and you're surrounded by weird beautiful loving people, but the guitar-=-slowed to an alien crawl by your push into timelessness--slowness, blanking - wha? The guitars of the Gibbons brothers cut in and out of tempo, the way a brain stuttering its dehydration S.O.S. might cut in out of your aural perception. Is not hearing just illusions of coherence the way the eye fills in blind spots and the memory remembers what it wants and buries the rest under thick layers of carpet and yet can still hear the hideous beating of its miserable twin? This is music for when you're in love with someone and its like a druggy sickness. You smoke cigarettes to fill that void the way a kid tosses a rock in the ocean. But love makes that cigarette a surfboard. Bardo Pond find you on the floor in the corner of the Knitting Factory and reach down with one jangly hand to pull you off your wave like a lifeguard in reverse. Blacking in and out of consciousness downstairs at the dance shouldn't be so easily condemned as a bad thing. In the end they're all just experiences. As Isobel Sollenberger puts it in "Sunrise" (off of Dialate): "Watching it happen / watching /
it / happen
And then this chunky distorted fuzz guitar so tasty you can feel it in your saliva comes spiraling out of the yellow distance and when Isobel suddenly starts singing again "When words to breath / and silence reigns golden / the sky is falling / ... watching it happen."

The bass and drums just keep kicking over the same can and almost catching themselves from falling into the basement foyeur of the nearby apartment house. It's music to swoon too, and while Isobel and the brothers swoon these guys keep grabbing your arms right before your head smacks the concrete.

Rock and roll is ultimately, the devil's music, and its appalling when acts like U2 and Green Day profess to have ins with punk and the devil crowd. People like that don't even KNOW what they're missing when they just say no all the time. How could they? It's a war of realities, and between where they sit, you look like squares. Uh here comes a rant, and one more thing, let's talk about peace and Buddhism and shhit and who the real posers are now, it's the new generation of hippie gurus, beware the carpetbaggers that would be the mouthpiece to "your generation" every time you make a collective swing towards the light.

Beware the prophesizing and brazen attempts to be cool and religious at the same time. Be a leader of yourself and you no longer need to put yourself in a superior position to others. When the object is humility, this is even more important, which is why a book title like HARDCORE ZEN smacks of "More Humble than thou" histrionics. A true Buddhist hardcore path would be to make your book as intentionally mauve and tacky as possible "Love Affirmations for Mom" or something like that. What about writing something about how to understand and embrace the hobbies of one's unenlightened parents, such as golfing, drinking, going to church, sewing, and television watching? Warner's book should be called "If I'm enlightened why can't I finally can't let go of wanting to be a badass" That would be hardcore if for no other reason than all the hardcore kids are afraid to do it. I know I am.

Even in being "open" there's pitfalls, so don't think I blame the coming wave of plastic fantastic shamen. Emotional openness and a posture of universal love and acceptance of all things as inherently good, but judging not by any pair of opposites or dualities, this stance is the most fearsome of all. Kids will jump off cliffs or empty out their wrists just to avoid being loved. The tattoos and piercings and fight clubs are just extreme forms of distraction from the whirling hole of raw forgiveness that is the full you, the you who blows parent's minds with your raw positive acceptance and creates room for dialogue so heartfelt it would make Hallmark Cards writers sick in the hallway. Hardcore kids can't even make eye contact half the time, let alone say I love you with eyes moist like black velvet puppy dog eyes. Plus, the minute you're noticing other people not living with their whirling raw hole open as wide as yours, then man you may as well admit it: it's closed again. Mine's closed again. Can you tell? My book would be "It Closed Again, but I can still get off to BArDo PoNd.