Fashionably Deranged: Best of the 00s.

(culled pith from old pre-meds live journal entries)

from 1/28:

What is worse: To not receive a return text message from the one you love, or to be tortured by the Catholic Inquisition?
To have the most beautiful creature turn their back on you after wooing you with their flowery lies,
or to be drawn and quartered in the public square?

The unrequited love is worse
because it's harder to pinpoint - no one else understands it.

Torture only hurts the body, and your screams are the signal your body exists==

love hurts the soul, and only poetry can give that pain voice,
and poetry takes unbroken fingers
while the heart
can never gauge its fractures,
until its pulled from its rib prison
and held, still pulsing,
before its horrified front-page mirror.

 -------------------
the best thoughts are the ones most easily lost.   -- (They Spoon fed me Ritalin - 1/3/08)
--------------

After visiting my 97 year-old grandmother in Chicago - 12/08:

....all through the long visits I felt death pull me like gravity, like time pulls the meat off a chicken bone, like it pulls the planets along behind it as it sucks and roars along, like stringed tin cans on a wedding-cum-funeral car, like Flash Gordon gradually fading into youtube and then all just raw conscious thoughtlessness - a dull roar of white static, in which you may at times think you hear the ocean, or vice versa... all voices that you hear are your own, you realize, in this 2001-Kubrick room of the self, and outside that, the serpent swimming through the blue veins of your aging relations, swimming both towards you and away, towards you and away...

I've been unable to leave the house, no matter where I go.

----------------------------------------

from "Nobody Feel as Bad as Good as Me" - May 6, 2007


Spring is fall's dark underbelly,
so much shinier,
so much more poisonous,
its dandy pollen separating me from the herd
to the fringe
where the wolves of lonesome wait
for the prey too sneezy
to see them.

I'll be up out of this mountain soon,
once again the stronger for all the climbing
and skin tougher from all the wolf bites,
my steely artistic persona warped from the forge's constant flame,
the God who shapes me as tireless
and dissatisfied
as Picasso
with nothing but sand and sea
for His clumsy canvas.

-----------------------------

" Suicide is like peeking at your presents before Xmas..." -- From Too Pissed to be Zen, to Zen to be Pissed 1/5/07)

Stuff I Liked in the 1970s. - Part 1

My earliest recollection of getting really into a toy was my Dr. Zauis doll, which was about 3/4 of the GI Joe size, but we in the Knapp Elementary ape society wouldn't play with ordinary Joes, and one kid tried to infiltrate with his pint-sized Six Million Dollar Man. Apes kicked his ass! Then Zaius lost a leg, but my wily babysitter tied a shoelace lasso to his little ape hand so he could lasso things and swing around. Those were some crazy adventures, climbing the stairs like it was Everest. Eventually he disappeared... at least I can't remember losing him or throwing him out or outgrowing him. And of course we had viewmasters (above), with which to see dinosaurs, Alice in Wonderland, the Planet of the Apes, and various geographical excursions in exciting 3-D!

The arrival of Aurora monster models changed everything. Dracula was always my favorite, so I got him first, and shunned Dr. Jekyll and Quasimodo, who looked to much like Bruce Glickis a kid I fought with a lot because I couldn't stand his fat dumb face. It wasn't bullying because he was actually bigger than me, and all our fights were bloody nose draws. Fuck Bruce Glickis!

Charlie's Angels was my first big introduction to the appeal of girls. I couldn't stay up to see the show, but I clipped pics from magazines, TV Guide and Time especially, then later Teen Beat and all that crap. Eventually I made a big scrapbook of it all and then sold the scrapbook to a kid down the street for $40, a fortune at the time. And I'd moved on by then.

And then - well, WW2, you can guess the rest. I was a boy! I joined forces in 6th grade with a kid named Alan Pyle -we started drawing and selling our own line of comics, and of course playing a lot of WW2 HO scale campaigns. Later we moved onto designing TI-994A computer games and D&D modules. I left my girl obsession in the dust until the Playboy years began. Next stop: punk rock, real girls, and the dawn of the VCR!

Wrap Your (Girl) Troubles in Drinks - a vidmix.

The divine Mary

Ah the 1990s - the last gasp for mopey depression- if you were in your 20s during this era, as I was then you know that it was a good time for music. Nirvana's explosion in 1992-93 had opened MTV up to all things even remotely grunge, so weird college acts that would normally never see the light of day got a chance to become fleeting stars. If you were a mopey feminist who liked to cry all night in his bourbon, it was your time to shine. It all ended with Napster killing small labels and Elliot Smith stabbing himself in the chest. Now. all we have are dusty CDs hidden far away in case books, and memories. Even the depression that spawned this music and made it listenable is largely gone thanks to SSRIs, and of course Britney Spears and MTV changing its tunes. But the music never dies!


Helium - "Wanna be a Vampire Too, Baby" - love the scrolling effect. Elegant.


Cat Power - "Bathysphere" (cool found footage video by AnititonyA)



L7 - "Pretend We're Dead" - Lesbian feminism in a grunge-angst setting..."Wake up and smell the coff-fee!"



Jennifer Trynin "Better than Nothing" - one of my favorites, since it mentions doing shots of whiskey!



Kittywinder - "Crazy Weed" - 1997 - a Boston / New Hampshire / NYC band that broke up only months before I started dating the bassist... crazy weed is right?




PJ Harvey - "Legs" - (live in 95) its host album "Dry" was released in 1993, but it's as forward leaning as ever. I love her more than a word could say, though her last few albums have left me... well, not dry, but not soaking like Dry or Stories from the Sea.



The unforgettable Space Team Electra - "Luminous Crush" 



The awesome Pixies -"Gigantic" in '88! BN (Before Nirvana)



Even farther before, one of my all-time favorite songs ever, "The English Roses" by my first rock crush, one that's shaped my destiny, Chrissie Hynde and her Pretenders. Half the band would be dead soon, and 30 years later, she's still rocking. I love you, CH!

The Despair of Total Harmony: A Short Mix

Lee Hazlewood - "The Night Before"
(Aka "I see those empty whiskey bottles.")


Evie Sands - "Anyway that you Want Me"


Fontella Bass - "To be Free"


Heart - "Magic Man"


Howlin' Wolf - "How Many More Years"


Kimberly Linn - "The Sparks" - for Bela

"Into Dust" - The Gears of War 3 commercial

There's an ingenious TV commercial for some video game coming out Sept. 20 called GEARS OF WAR 3. It uses one of my favorite songs, "Into Dust" by Mazzy Star and the juxtaposition of this magnificently still and existentially melancholy song with these apocalyptic visions of war and sci fi machinery is so beyond the usual for this sort of thing that it becomes art. It's not a video game commercial anymore, it's a quick, devastating reading of America's post-apocalyptic pulse. Acidemic salutes the advertising team of Twofifteen McCann!



There's a vibe in the "Brothers to the End" tag line which makes us see that this dismal cityscape, with all the black rainy clouds and robot monsters, isn't going to rise again, not for a hundred million years, and the hopeful little blue lights on the backpack straps of the warriors backing up on their hillside defense position, are going to go out, very soon. It's an Altamont moment, the Stones carrying on under their little stage lights as the best ideas of humanity are crushed under the heel of bad drugs and idolatry right before their eyes. And there's no more fallback position, no backstage safe area, no green room, no supply depot. Just brothers. Street-fighting men. I have no idea what kind of backstory to past Gears of War commercials or game plots this may allude to. I'm just reading the commercial as it's own thing. On that level, it's just a shout away from devastating.

I always thought that Mazzy Star would have saved Zack Snyder's SUCKER PUNCH from sucking as bad as it did, and it turned out I was right. There needed to be a counterpoint to the soulless CGI mayhem of PUNCH's 'fantasy' scenes, which instead were all set to obvious strip club remixes of hits like "Sweet Dreams" and Bjork's "Army of Me." There's more mood and emotion in this damned Gears of War 3 commercial than in Snyder's last two films (by which I mean PUNCH and WATCHMEN) combined. The last time a song worked this well in a violent montage was "When The Man Comes Around" in the credit sequence of 2004's DAWN OF THE DEAD remake, directed by who else? Zack Snyder. When's that man going to come around, again, Mama? 15 months and counting...

Rooftop in Brooklyn: The Post-PJ Ipod

Holly Miranda - you are truly the holy miracle your name resembles.

Mopey girl rockers - I love them, provided they don't 'over-sing' or get all slick and professional and hollow and sound like everyone else. Keep it neither too raw and lo fi nor too AOR slick and oversung and you have me at hello - it all started with PJ Harvey's 1992 classic, "Dry" - which changed my life, and  let's face it, great as PJ Harvey's new album "Let England Shake" is in principle, there's only two songs that I'd ever want to hear over and over as the soundtrack to my anguished obsession du autumne, the rest is just way too serious, continuing a downer trend Harvey's been cultivating since her alleged big romantic crash following the jubilant "Stories from the City, stories from the Sea." Will we ever have a song as awesome as "You Said Something?" Look at how happy she was, rolling her eyes and being goofy:



Now she may smile and stuff, but her songs are devoid of romance and humor, and more just glum and haunted. Still, I love White Chalk and these basement videos she made (below). I wish she'd give Bob Dylan a harmonica lesson:


Luckily, my ipod soars with new and recent girls who nail that moody emotional swamp I walk home in, opening doors to past loves and doomed romances, and making my feet leave the ground in cathartic movement.

SMOOSH - "The World's Not Bad"
From their awesome album of the same name - these girls are too young for me to ever see play live (shouldn't they have curfews?) but there's no denying, for me anyway, the genius simplicity and power of this album, and this song in particular - love that simple, almost percussive piano and the whispery harmony - this is the kind of stuff that girls tend to grow out of as they start dating guys who try to get them to be more slick and professional and let their boyfriends add long elaborate dobro solos. It's what ruined Azure Ray! Smoosh sisters, don't ever change!



EMA - "California"
Love this song, with its apocalyptic organ/drone chords and EMA's rattled off anguished lyrics about the alienation of L.A.: "Now you've corrupted us all with your sexuality / tried to tell us love was free / tried to tell us love was free." And it's not long before she's carrying a gun like Lou Reed in The Blue Mask - I love walking home from work with this song on my ipod, "I'm just 22 / I'm just 22 / I don't mind dyin'" Video's kind of dull though...



JEALOUS GIRLFRIENDS - "Secret Identity"
There was a year where I listened to this song and this album every day on the way to and from work, so now I can't help but think of my East village walk-up, my gorgeous long lost ex, and the grotty subway whenever I hear it. I thought Holly Miranda was kind of busted for some reason, as I never saw waht the band looked like - how could she be as gorgeous as her voice? But she AM! The below video is cute but you can't hear the bass which is one of the best aspects. Still love her rock and roll arms.



ELECTRELANE - "Oh Sombra!"
I love these girls! We were myspace buddies for awhile, maybe still are. This video is perfect at recreating that ipod and Q Train commute vibe, and the slowly mounting beauty/anguish of the song and Spanish lyrics perfectly match the sinking feeling of returning to Brooklyn after a rainy day of city errands.



LANA DEL REY - "Video Games"
This girl reminds me of at least two of my long lost loves, and the sweet pain of remembering her and how I lost the last one (in 2003) and the pain of dating a hot and bi-polar and having to fend off hordes of richer, younger, more confident dudes at every gas station, restaurant, and AA meeting. The tragic tender sadness that memory creates is all tied into Lana's husky, Los Angeles voice; the inclusion of the drunken stumbling audio is genius, as is the found footage ensemble around her, conjuring a Hollywood of ghosts, roadside attractions, and sun-drenched graveyards where 'happiness is never experienced, only remembered.'



BARDO POND - "Tommy Gun Angel"
Loved this song all through my 2003 divorce, so expressive, druggy, and deranged! Read my Bardo Pond appreciation here. I kind of dig Matt the Mad Hat's found footage edit for it too.



To be continued with my own mash-up for Kimberly Linn's "The Sparks" plus: Ida, Ida Maria, Rainer Maria, Mount Rainier, and Rainier Wolfcastle!

Return of X

I was scared of 'rap' as a 20-something negotiating my way through the end of the Bush years but my friend Max was insistent I learn Public Enemy, NWA, the Geto Boys.. damn that stuff scared the shit out of me. But there was also cool shit, hip-hop: Young MC, Brand Nubian, De La Soul, and--my favorite--KMD.

While many of the albums linked major tracks with little in-between skits, KMD took it to a meta level with an old 'learn to speak a foreign language' record, the narrator's patient white male voice coming off clueless and arrogant to the KMD brothers, as when the narrator says "your mother likes to visit the old churches," and you hear in the back "oooh, I know he didn't just dis your mama". Hilarious! But best of all, was the feeling that the KMD crew weren't just scaring white kids and preaching local block unity, they were letting the white kids come home and see their bedrooms--finding they all could agree those old stereotypes were history -  as in time to dust off "Little Black Sambo" and see what may be sampled.

Now Little Black Sambo was an album I actually had on 78's as a kid--inherited from god knows what dead relative along with Peter and the Wolf. Both albums took up about 8 double sided, inch thick 78s. Sambo depressed me, even then as a kid in the early 70s, only dimly aware of how godawful racist it was (I think I smashed the discs after ROOTS premiered). I hated it because the were just too many pancakes and tigers, too much eating and running.. it made me nauseous. So hearing the sample brought me back, but Zev Love X wasn't about to come down on me or my white brethren. He brought us along with bemused disbelief, half blaming the accusers of racism as much as the racists "you mean that coon is me?" in the joyously inclusive "Who Me?" While in "Banana Peel Blues" he waxed off about racism like he'd just gotten the textbooks at some Strong Island college class and was seeing what still applied and what didn't. You could imagine him reading passages out loud to his pals in the dorm, half mocking the text. There was something so direct and sweet about it because X refused the us vs. them of so much rhetoric on either side. Rather than try to bury Sambo in the ditches of culture's verboten junkyard--where, as Freud taught us, nothing stays buried for long without an eventual rise up zombie-style from the repressed--he dressed him up in a big parade costume, as below:



(I never actually saw any of their videos, til now, writing this, by the way - 1991 was looong before the internet and MTV was strictly commercial)  Anyway, we loved the album. It sounded great high on acid.

Then, as all good things do, the summer of love ended-- groups like "Reality Used to be a Friend of Mine" and ("G'head Mr. Wendell") took new age tolerance to an almost icky new age level. And in the established acts, humorless rhetoric and druggy aggression took over. Cube left NWA and their follow-up album was just sensationalist parent outrage-courting misogyny. Brand Nubian got sucked in the undertow that followed rap's commercial success in the mid 90s, and thinking man's hip-hop got steamrolled (in the waterless horizontal bong sinse) by blunt acts like Cypress Hill and Dr. Dre.

I could not get into Dre, so rap, hip hop and I parted. I still listen to Brand Nubian and KMD, and Ice Cube, but little else. Years later while on a trip to San Francisco I found KMD's abandoned sophomore album at the famous Amoeba Records. With it's picture of a lynched Sambo on the cover. I didn't know of course that their label had dropped them over the cover, which is a classic example of the way literalism and overbearing PC ninny-itis was clouding issues in the early 90s, and that Zev's brother Sub Roc had died around the same time in a car crash, and KMD was history... and X had disappeared without a blip on my radar.



That's why another ten years later, discovering MF Doom was such a thrill, a veritable Phantom of the Opera unmasking, with a new identity, or lack thereof. Zev Love X had returned, once again quietly and under my radar, I recognized his voice in an MF Doom track playing at the old Kim's Video. It's done my OG heart a good turn to see him still out there, blazing his own unique trail, proving that straightforward examination of stereotypes causes them to melt away in the sun.

I only hope I have the balls to wear the mask one day if I should fall from grace, and thence seek to return anew, reborn, and if you need help taking down that fucking arrogant dickhead Johnny the Human Torch, let me know. And if you want to switch up, switch up!!