Eat the light!- GHOST ADVENTURES (Travel Channel)

I don't like most investigative ghost teams, but Nick, Aaron and Zak are pretty cool. I can imagine partying with them. I love how they get scared but excited, forgetting instantly they just asked the ghost to make a noise. They're right on the fence of being obnoxious, but it eventually tumbles over into callow vigor and innate showmanship. The funniest guy, the anchor to Zak's boisterous leadership, is Aaron, who deals with the haunted house hunting stress by filming himself with mouth agape and eyes popped open.

Aaron, in a rare not-spooked moment.

These guys are serious bros. "If they want us out, they're going to have throw us over that damned wall," boasts Zak. I believe them. They're not as charismatically-challenged as most ghost hunters and the lame MUFON guys over on Planet Green who think that by somehow separating truth from fiction they'll be any closer to understanding. Aaron knows best! He knows this stuff will never be understood. The whole thing is a dog chasing its own tail, but so what, the tail is ours.

Zak. He's kind of the alpha bimbro, a bit too eager to show off his perfect abs. He leaves in footage of a girl on a school bus telling him he's hot, but feels the need to explain he's taking his shirt off to show his tattoos to the ghosts of intolerant ghost nuns. There's cutaway subliminal images of a guy eating a light bulb, and old weird dolls stop motioning with their eyes. Weird sound effects and liberal interpretations of the AVP ghost whispers, "oooh! I just heard a whisper. . Oh my god! I felt that guys, that was arrrffl!" They're steadfast in their willingness to be scared but their refusal to be scared for long. "Dude that was, like, footsteps!"

Zak gets all indignant "is that what you did? You chained them up to this wall? Are you trying to communicate?" "Did my taunts just anger the spirit of a Spanish soldier?" He's about a third Clyde Beatty, a third Ben Affleck and a third Michael Moore, though he's much more transparent (not literally) it helps him be believable; he's earnest and just a little forced, and that's what TV is all about! Zak actually reminds me of me when I'm filming and bullshitting my way around as a narrator without a script, making it up as I go and barely staying on the right side of the coherence border, feeling I have to belittle my comrades onscreen when I get nervous.

I keep being afraid these guys are going to show up in my apartment and shout taunts at me, and I'd have to scream into their AVP microphones just to get a faint whisper. They'd freak out when I rose from the couch to go refill my beverage.  How else do you ever really know you're dead?

Favorite TV Women Part 2

Carrie Brownstein
Portlandia

I saw the first five episodes in this hilarious IFC series before putting two and two together and realizing this is the Carrie Brownstein, from that awesome post-grunge Olympia yodeling band, Sleater-Kinney. It was the biggest Sleater-Kinney moment I'd had since a 1997 road trip, passing the Sleater-Kinney highway sign driving through Washington State and going 'Hey!'  That's twice Sleater-Kinney's caught me nappin'.

Brownstein herself is a two/two pinnacle: as ballsy and swaggering as any man (look at her primal stare above) and yet hot and sweet when she wants. Brownstein is some kind of amazing non-diva talent that she can match Fred Armisen scene for scene and bring all sorts of minute, letter-perfect comedic inflection in an array of hilariously skewed characters, then go kick ass as a guitarist and singer for one of the best all-girl rock bands in the history of the Pacific Northwest: "Oh - you've got the dark / est eyeyeyeeyeyeyeyeyeys..."

Jackie Barrett
America's Psychic Challenge 

Speaking of darkness. When the psychic who won said she represented the light and Barrett was 'evil', or used 'dark energy', I smelt a rat. A truly 'light' person isn't going to rain on the parade of darkness, because to rain is to become darkness. Dig? Jackie is an expert crime scene analyst, a serial killer profiler, and if you don't have a good balance of light/dark  that stuff can kill your soul. You can tell Jackie is made for the job because she doesn't prioritize one polarity over the other, and that is the path of the truly enlightened who see 'death is great as life' (to quote Walt Whitman). When Jackie circles a subject, feeling their aura and telling them "you know who I am? They call me the white serpent," you get a chill in your soul but also a sense of relief, she's using spookiness as a tool, not a crutch. She's balanced - she knows when you repress the darkness you give it strength, so she lets the illusion go. Seek not to destroy darkness altogether lest you become darkness, this I say to you. And Heaven only knows the amount of pain and misery she's prevented in her work. In staying true to her quirky self, and using dark power to combat darkness, Jackie is a true agent of karma, and a living example that psychics--the real ones--are true treasures to be revered. Read her awesome web page here.

Lizzy Caplan
Party Down 

I'm always wary of the perennially single cute smart girl in the ensemble sitcom, as they're clearly meant for male audience members like myself to crush over, without having to factor in some boyfriend to be jealous over, or kids and domestic life to bore us to death, but I'm also highly responsive to that approach.  Lizzy Caplan is a great example - cute, fun, a genius comedienne, and adorable beyond description. Here's what she said about landing the gig on this STARS comedy (avail. on Netflix streaming):

It was starting like three days after I found out about it and I just gunned for it, because it's ten episodes and it's hilarious people with a whole lot of freedom. You're definitely not pandering for huge ratings or anything, so it's the sweetest kind of gig.

Sweetest gig, for the sweetest girl!

Rashida Jones

Parks and Recreation

With Amy Poehler embracing her post-baby weight gain and dolling herself up in unflattering knits, it's up to Rashida Jones to carry the hotness weight on the sporadically amusing Parks and Recreation. The problems with the show seem to hinge around its attempt to be 'nice' -- and those of us who know comedy know niceness has no place in it (see Jackie Barrett, above). We look to comedy to channel our aggression - the comedian acts out and says the things we want to say and does the things we want to do, but wouldn't dare, and we're purged. It's like when you're really upset and pissed off and you meet someone who is acting even more pissed than you feel and suddenly you're calm and telling them to relax. Ever notice that happen? Comedy is like that, but Parks is not like that because it misunderstands and tries to be nice in itself, leaving you to deal with your accumulated venom some other way.

Rashida Jones is awesome though, dusky beauty with a sexy voice and impeccable pedigree (Quincy Jones is her father, Peggy Lipton [Twin Peaks] her mom). With all that star wattage you'd think she wouldn't be as grounded and intelligent as she is, but she makes a great gal pal for Amy and brings a smudgy, accessible hotness to the show that no one, including her roster of handsome but bland boyfriends, can match.

Ms. J. Alexander, Runway Diva Coach Extraordinaire

America's Next Top Model

While not a woman per se, Ms. Jay certainly qualifies as a queen of wit, sharpness and knowledge - his/her eye for fashion and proper model runway walking makes him/her a permanent panel member on America's Next Top Model. Nothing makes me fall on the floor laughing more than when s/he gets his/her voice all deep and breathy to discuss girls who look to 'dragalicious.' Next to Tyra, Miss J. makes the show the awesome paragon of simulacra self-reflexivity it is. Go Miss J.!

Favorite Women of Television - Part 1

1. Tyra Banks - America's Next Top Model:
The modern Kali of reality TV, this host and creator of America's Next Top Model can be super nurturing one minute then cold as ice the next as she sends another chick off the show, but not before a good luck hug. Even if you're not a fashionista the show is amazing as it's so meta-textual. Think about it: a reality show about young girls who choke up when they get in  front of a camera for a photo shoot, but meanwhile they're on camera constantly for the actual show. Together with the judges you get to do modeling crits, judging the success of photographs - so you're watching a show about looking at photographs. The result is a weird hybrid of commercial-within-a-show (I know lots about Cover Girl designer lip gloss now) and meta-within-meta Russian doll boxing, and over it all Tyra stands like a beacon of always-on-point dynamic brilliance, demonstrating in every head tilt and enunciation exactly what she's trying to instill in this cross section of our female youths.

2.  Tina Fey - 30 Rock: Her repartee with Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock is one of the more inspiring things on TV, with the whole 'will they or won't they' element scuttled for a more progressive mentor-mentee relationship. As someone who's sponsored and mentored women over the years, I salute! The stuff about eating your feelings and the Cathy-esque spazzola stuff seems forced though, Tina. You're so much more than an everywoman!

3. Maya Rudolph - SNL 2000-2007:
Perhaps she's just too confident to demand top billing or seek a film career, and that's why her name doesn't strike a chord the way her SNL top-shelf alums like Fey and Amy Poehler do, but Maya is the bomb! Her seven-year spin in early 00's SNL included the Donatella Versace holiday parties, her tragically hilarious rendition of Whitney Houston on her way up, down, and semi-up again, and Vinnie Verdecci's daughter reciting her English class days of the week... and man can she sing! Tru-baller SNL fans ask: When is she going to get her own Best Of?

4. Candace DeLong - Deadly Women:
For those of us too squeamish to watch serial killer dudes abduct and torture innocent girls, the Deadly Women show on Investigative Discovery is a godsend, recreating three factual scenarios each episode with actors playing an array of poisoners, shooters, manglers and matricidal maniacs, all of whom are women. It's narrated by a woman with a great if predictable sense of pausing and dramatic enunciation, and presided over by the regal Candace.

I keep waiting for them to do one on Brenda Wiley, my Central NJ champion of incarcerated girls who killed their mom and nosy brother at age 15: who knows if DeLong gets my letters? What's important is that she was the first female FBI criminal profiler and the inspiration for Clarice Starling. And she's still hot! I love the slightly bitchy way she lays out the behavioral underpinnings of the girl killers, saying things like "She needed to buy things to feel better about herself, and if she had to kill someone to pay the bills, that was... fine... with her!"

5. Jan Hooks (SNL 1986-1991, recurring guest appearances on 30 Rock)
Now most recognizable as Jenna's greedy meth head nympho-alcoholic stage mom in 30 Rock, who'd have guessed Hooks was once super hot and sultry and a regular on SNL?  I admire how she now acts as if she's been kind of white trash Liz Taylor brazen and busty all her life as said mom, while her foxiness at SNL tells a whole other story.
****

Yeah, I know, some of these chicks is from yay far away in the past, but so what? I really only watched SNL reruns on Netflix streaming (cuz I lives with a comedy writer), and discovered Deadly Women, 30 Rock, marathons of America's Next Top Model, (cuz she likes the trash) and lots of WW2 documentaries (that's my reward for enduring the chick stuff). I'm turning into a vegetable, but that's what 2011 is all about.

New PJ Harvey Song / Beautiful Video

My god, she looks so relaxed. I love this girl, I feel like we've grown up together. From me blasting "Dry" in my old Plymouth Maverick going to and from work in NJ in 1991, to tripping on delerium tremens and a broken heart through scorching summer 1993 in 1993 to "Rid of Me" in my cassette walkman, shuddering on the bring of O.D.s and hollow e fabulousness for the overrated but still cool "To Bring you My Love," sobering up in the emotional release tearful flood of "Is this Desire?," then the super hip release and moving to Brooklyn and happiness with Stories of the City, the break-up fuck you of "Uh Huh Her" - I was never really happy following that, and then the mellow hammer-hitting shorty (and last CD I've ever bought) "White Chalk" which saw me through my early divorce, And now, god bless her, she seems very happy, her hair looks good, the video is in Hi def, gorgeous and not pretentious.... her skin looks clear, she looks relaxed. I'm so proud of her for maintaining her integrity and brilliance for all these decades.... she's a survivor and never sold out or bought into the bourgeoisie or downtown snobbery. She's her own being, and has given me a soundtrack for my emotional life, I know she belongs to the world, but her music seems created just for me and that's the mark of  a great artist.

She got pinned down at the party pit: My mad love and props for the Hold Steady

I love the first three albums of the Hold Steady! Right? Until they got straight and realized you gotta stay positive. With the E Street Band-style rockin' piano and swelteringly badass electric guitars, their first two albums are amongst my all-time favorites, both as great literature and great music, a mix of Born to Run and Denis Johnson's Jesus Son.

Ask someone who was in the fast lane for awhile and got out: it's amusing, heartbreaking and deeply thrilling to listen to Craig Finn's detailed stories of drug use among the Minneapolis youth and be able to connect deep, even though I've never done heroin - and taking years to realize that my initial translation of the lyric "she got pinned down at the party pit" (from the song "Party Pit") was that she met a nice clean cut boy and started going steady. I figured there might be some hidden sexual assault meaning in the idea of 'being pinned down..."

For shame! It shows you how a lifetime of hearing bad lyrics to pop songs make you presume the worst about even druggy troubadours like Craig Finn. Is Finn so desperate for a rhyme that he would just through 'pinned' in there as a kind of antique phrase signifier term that's not been used since the mid-60s. ala "Bye Bye Birdie?" -- I was in the chorus for that in high school and one of our lines went: "I heard she got pinned" / yeah yeah, I was hopin' she would / now we're livin' at last / goin' steady for good."

Am I such a square as that? Should that be my initial thought, rather than presuming it's about heroin, the only drug I never got to try before I had to start going to AA and living the life of a reformed alcoholic on the somewhat straight and narrow? That's the breaks... Finn makes heroin sound pretty awesome, until it tightens up its tentacles and you take that crucifixion cruise (i.e. the Golgotha-level agony of withdrawal).

But hey, I got other things to slide in there --ecstasy, love, acid, shrooms, and headlining rock shows lost in the glitter and the gold. Finn keeps my options open.

"First Night" taps more beautifully into the sorrows of life post-ecstasy than any song I know -- the melancholy warm glow remembering the first time you really got off with just the right friends around and everything fell magically into place and it's all warm fuzzy and you feel like yourself and loved by people whose love you actually want, and free for the first time--extroverted!--and even into the morning until you say goodbye to people who are now far more than friends because your open souls bled into each other's for keeps and always.

Then you wake up alone the next afternoon, hung over, a puffy gray stranger in the mirror. It's already dark outside--the whole Sunday afternoon long gone. You sit around and realize that even if you do more drugs than you did last night, with the same people, you'll never feel that good again... You think you can get back to the garden the following week, but then 10 years later you realize it was just a tortured memory--you got that one great night just to make all your other nights horrible by contrast. So while every time I hear the sweet juicy opening chords of "Hummer" by Smashing Pumpkins I get the chills of that lost rush, and thanks to Finn and co,m I also get the sadness of knowing "we can't get as high as we got / on that first night".

Heaven is Whenever is a pretty good album, but it's no Boys and Girls in America which captures that giddy "first night" feeling so well it never fails to make me cry, get chills and rock out all at once. Separation Sunday, the album before that was pretty great, too, with that instant favorite song "Your Little Hoodrat Friend" which nails Golgotha-like being16 and trying to seem cool to the older kids and love all the obnoxious punk rock they like, and then you hear the first Violent Femmes album and you know it's all going to be okay and two minutes later your very first alcohol buzz kicks in and finally black and white Kansas fades away and everything glows in Technicolor and you can talk to girls without blushing and stammering. We all start out the hoodrat, then date the hoodrat, then avoid the hoodrat, then we decide to "give back" and help a hoodrat stop being one. Boys and Girls in America reminds me of that.

Some reviews say Finn's characters are 'low-lifes' but I don't think that's true, aside from that when you hang out with heroin people or cocaine people the scene naturally gonna get a little gnarly. That's why I stopped going to NYC parties, because cocaine came back, circa 1998, and as far as I know it's still there... I couldn't deal with coke, too ego-ish and too hard on my nostrils, which would swell shut and bubble out hot liquid snot all the next day which turns off all the models your roommate slept with and who are now eyeballing your pockets and nostrils. I did drugs not to get laid or be cool anyway, or use to get models into bed, but to see God and ask him to make me a better writer and painter and less depressed, not to sit with beautiful models too ritzy and stuck up to talk to me and watch them fall over themselves coming onto skeevy hoodrat low level runners who follow in the wake of the coke dealer's cell phone call ("yo! they got hot bitches here! Get yo ass over!").

Sometimes just to annoy them I'd act all high, sniffle a lot and act suspicious and moist-eyed after exiting the bathroom; them models would be all on my tip after that until they realized I was faking them out, but then again getting into bathroom was impossible, no one ever left, so if you weren't drunk enough to pee in a bucket in the back of the kitchen, you had to go home early, and fast.

That scene became like listening to how she got pinned down at the party pit, it was so funny to realize that I'd just assumed--and subsequently never liked the song as much as the others--that getting "pinned down at the party pit" means, you know, the de regeur of the life- the going steady for good - instead skipping off the bathroom with girlfriends to pop some H, some horse, a first timer! Some white lightning, usually offered by a sketch dealer to get you intrigued but also any guy wants to get you in the mood but not comatize you.

A pin, it turns out, is a needle full of heroin, or a pop, what else do you pop the skin with? I presume it means you don't do a whole mainline into the vain but just pop some into the skin. I in my blithe laziness had assumed it meant the old-fashioned phrase of going steady. What? It made me realize that while that kind of lazy thesaurus rhyming (I need a one syllable word for going steady!) might do for a normal singer, Craig Finn is a real writer, a man of few words where every word counts, and every other word is about the scene. I assumed he was too hoodrat to be that detailed. But I was thinking of my scene, how it devolved with half going off to get married and the other half going sketch, until it was ALL hoodrats.

God! How many other lyrics have I misinterpreted!? "Shooting Star" by Lou Reed? "Hit me with your best shot?" by Pat Benatar? "Monkey Man" by the Stones? "Shot of Love" by Bob Dylan? Who knows, maybe every single rock song worth a damn is about getting pinned down....

Only I never got pinned... not once.

The Tao of Cash

I’d been reading Sogyal Rinpoche’s THE TIBETAN BOOK OF LIVING AND DYING and had a panic attack when I read Rinpoche’s response to a student who said (referring to a talk Rinpoche had just given on impermanence: “All this seems obvious, tell me something new.”

Rinpoche replies

” Have you actually realized the truth of impermanence? Have you so integrated it with your every thought, breath and movement that your life has been transformed? Ask yourself these two questions: Do I remember at every moment I am dying and that everyone and everything else is, and so treat all beings at all times with compassion? Has my understanding of death and impermanence becomes so keen and so urgent that I am devoting every second to the purpose of enlightenment? If you can answer yes to both of these then you have really understood impermanence.” (p. 27) 

Dude! I totally understood that-lived that, had that recognition, on a mindbender of a trip… once, ling ago, when I had been touched by the electric hand of God, and had the boundaries and walls between my consciousness and unconsciousness clean wipes away so that all was illuminated and perrfect and in this moment.

But what about music video? Is there a video that brings this urgency to light, strips away our petty samsara blindness  from us and makes us feel and embrace impermanence as opposed to the endless “gimme more bling” parade of gangstas, dorks and superheros who all firmly deny death?

I can only think of one and it’s rather short. That’s right…. the video for Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt.”

Johnny Cash - (HURT) - The best bloopers are here

I wrote the above in 2008. Tonight I was listening to the Cash album, or at least to "I Hung My Head," which turned up on ipod shuffle, and once again I shivered with the power and humility in Cash's cracked voice. Like all his fans, I hear a little bit of God and a little bit of Jesus and a little bit of Pontious Pilot and a frightened child mixed together in an old man's voice as he stares unblinking into the void, and sings a Trent Reznor song. And it came to me that all Cash's career and life was leading up to this one album, this one perfect expression of all he was and all that was left, every song every live in prison album was leading him to this one moment of pure grace that was for all of us. It makes other music videos seem so surface shallow as to be invisible in the rapidly flipping pages of time that Cash is privying us to. Even the Jesus crucifixion stuff peppered along the way of the video is deserved.

Shots of him all through his career mesh beautifully with old Cash at a table of the damned, and the nails going in the hands. Reznor's lyrics aimed here right at God and Jesus, a little touch of hate towards the utterly simple funnel design by which they eventually get to roast all of us on the spit of heaven and eat our flesh, gesturing out the lyrics like he's an ancient Native American chief telling the tale of the crazy man in black who once strode the land, his guitar and attitude (the one speaking clip insert is a young punk Cash in some film, shouting "Stay the hell away from me!")

Towards the end June Carter comes downstairs and just looks at him sadly, the Cash museum is clearly real, with all the memorabilia and empty shelves caked with dust. The young Cash seems to be trying to find a way into the house where old Cash is living, a kind of 2001 Bowman time collapse meltdown.

A soul this brave and wise and humble, beautiful, and true deserves not to have to come back to this sorrowful space-time dimension if he doesn't want to, but I hope he does, the star child in black, and if we can find him in his next life before the world has a chance to crush him down, maybe this time our love will be enough to save him. I don't want you to die, dad. I don't want you to die. If I am still right here.

"See this top? Flop!" RAINBOW BRIDGE, a Hendrix Paradise

I have fond non-memories of RAINBOW BRIDGE (1970), a weird cult-hippie flowers on Maui documentary that got marketed as a Hendrix concert film, though he only shows up at the end, like a lost weird traveler. Dude is totally high, and everyone's slurring, and viewers got a rare chance to feel what it's like to hang out with super-high Hendrix in the closest thing we have to a Albert Maysles/Gray Gardens-style fly-on-the-wall eavesdrop. Dude, these people up there in that clip above? They're wasted! Now that I'm decades later and not wasted, I can't understand a word they're saying. It sounds like pretentious hippie twaddle, and I think Hendrix agrees. He sounds like he's got a cold.

Sadly, Hendrix would be dead a mere two months later. And thanks to legal issues, the film itself has been but spottily available. Purists cite bad winds on the day of the concert as to why sound is bad and unworthy of close study, but I disagree. Jimi plays "Hey Baby (Land of the New Rising Sun)" and it's the first and only time he plays it on film, as far as I know.

Not to mention it's the closest thing to a "perfect" audience you'll ever see for a major psychedelic rock star film, as they're all "beautiful" hippies and Maui surfers. Remote location and pure word-of-mouth short notice ensured a total absence of the usual suffocating crowd of wallies, murfs, tourists, freeloaders, dullards, normies, breadheads and buzkillers. In short, it's like one of those beautiful concerts where there's just enough people to make it fun, but not enough that you can't get as close as you want to the stage and lay down a tapestry right at the feet of the performer, spark a joint and watch the clouds as the music sends you flying... and that's what it's all about man.



One day we'll all cross that magic rainbow bridge to that land of the new rising sun, and I hope Jimi's waiting at the other end when I go, and I'll answer yes, Jimi, I'd like to go along...