Shoveling the walk from under a weak inch of slush and snow. Some of it parallel brick, some of it curved and cracked, some straight fading concrete. A typical fractured New Jersey confederacy, no agreement from patch to patch, everybody losing their minds by themselves on their own little plots.
Rose bushes swollen bent trapped in ice, puddles freezing strategically around fat crystals of rock salt. It snuck in in the middle of the night: Impostor cold, past its globe-warmed prime cold, cold to be acknowledged and cherished in the manner of our elders, neither long for this world.
Good times with Nat today, watching him scheme and burble and roll on an warm ocean of carpet, picking him up so he can look out at the snow. He just takes it in, without any precocious sense of school-close or sledder's optimism. With sense data more than concepts, bright or brighter and his palm held against the front door window, digging the cold.
That opposed to the lame grownup way, where the world is a prop supporting lame concepts and boring utility. My game when we talk is to tell him the names of things, as if the concepts are right at the threshold of his understanding. Welcome, my son... to the machine.
Andrew Bird was on PBS tonight. His songs are dense and nuanced, escaping traps of expectation every couple bars. His manner of performing them live, as a one-man band layering track upon track, is frustrating. Like watching a virtuoso wrestler try to take himself down. Like the scene at the end of "Lawnmower Man," infinite possibility being tried by one too-bright guy all at once. The lyrics don't combat the air of solipsism. (Pot picks black to distinguish other pot.)
This tour he's mostly performing live with a full band again, and oh-shucks-pedal tricks aside that sounds like a better plan. But I wonder if it ends up him letting other musicians run through a maze of delay he's set up on the fly, dungeon master style.
Maybe it's a friendlier read to see him as a mad inventor, building robots that are quite passable dancers, dancers you'd watch on TV, celebrity dancers that turned out to be robots with wires and circuits loose and who shot sparks as the credits rolled, their owners looking nervously on from backstage, extinguishers at the ready. Probably better listening if you can put away your concepts.
1.29.2009
1.23.2009
frozen creatures
The downturn was first identified as economic in nature. People with loads of money suddenly only had tons, and the poor ran out of even predatory credit. Then the effects spread.
Businesses prioritized and settled for less staff. Bus lines got cut; trains ran slower. Then one day they all stopped in place, on bridges, in tunnels, occasionally in their right stations. Cars stayed parked where they were and ticketing increased until the meter maids also slowed involuntarily, until it got to where they could deliver at best a ticket per month, if several coordinated their efforts.
The internet slowed. T3 connections trickled at 9600, 2400, 1200, finally settling at 300 baud. Soon you could only email a word at a time. Simple conversations took months, but emails was meticulous and more likely to be understood by their recipients.
Foot traffic slowed to a crawl, and avenue blocks took a day to span. Music came to require measurement in beats per hour. Baseball games took months, with sleep in the outfield or even at the plate a regular occurrence, and extra innings typically involving the deaths by natural causes of key players.
Eventually it was all we could do to remain motionless wherever we were, like frozen creatures. Then we could only smile, look in each other's eyes, and say we loved each other, watching the snow gather in slow drifts out the window. From house to house, apartment to apartment, all over town you could hear people talking, and that was all.
She and I took turns holding our new son, who still seemed to be growing a mile a minute, and told each other stories.
Businesses prioritized and settled for less staff. Bus lines got cut; trains ran slower. Then one day they all stopped in place, on bridges, in tunnels, occasionally in their right stations. Cars stayed parked where they were and ticketing increased until the meter maids also slowed involuntarily, until it got to where they could deliver at best a ticket per month, if several coordinated their efforts.
The internet slowed. T3 connections trickled at 9600, 2400, 1200, finally settling at 300 baud. Soon you could only email a word at a time. Simple conversations took months, but emails was meticulous and more likely to be understood by their recipients.
Foot traffic slowed to a crawl, and avenue blocks took a day to span. Music came to require measurement in beats per hour. Baseball games took months, with sleep in the outfield or even at the plate a regular occurrence, and extra innings typically involving the deaths by natural causes of key players.
Eventually it was all we could do to remain motionless wherever we were, like frozen creatures. Then we could only smile, look in each other's eyes, and say we loved each other, watching the snow gather in slow drifts out the window. From house to house, apartment to apartment, all over town you could hear people talking, and that was all.
She and I took turns holding our new son, who still seemed to be growing a mile a minute, and told each other stories.
1.10.2009
May 8, 1950
Charlie Parker. After trading his horn for 50 cents and a quart of Jim Beam, Parker arrives with a toy instrument. When the mouthpiece melts during his solo on "Rifftide," he fashions his right hand into a tube and contorts his left into a bow and bell, a technique he will rely on for the remainder of his career.
Early in the set, Bird loses consciousness and dreams of a circle of fifths spinning circumscribed within an infinite number of others, each coming to a stop at one of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. Charting his progression, that of a butterfly whose patterns change with each flap of the wings.
Fats Navarro. The eccentric of the group, Navarro (born Theodore) adds obsessively to his prized collection of animal fats, which by 1953 will require that he transform his Manhattan apartment into a custom walk-in refrigerator.
"The most noteworthy functions of fat include maintaining healthy skin, regulating cholesterol metabolism, and carrying the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K, aiding in their absorption from the intestines," he can be heard to tell an attractive and impressionable young fan during the break. "Fats also help living creatures to use carbohydrates and proteins in a more efficient manner."
Art Blakey. Inventor of drum jumps, Art leaps one foot each onto the toms, perching there on custom footrests and finishing the number without missing a beat. Blakey's profane exhortations to the rest of the group can be heard in the left channel beginning 1:06 into "Perdido" and continuing uninterrupted throughout the set, during the closing moments of which he can be heard to vomit loudly onto the table of three socialites, after first proclaiming the universe, and space-time in general, to be cylindrical in shape, declaring that art must attempt to draw the viewer into deeper spatial awareness, and swearing adherence to a Constructivist ethos in response. For subsequent performances, Blakey will incorporate found objects into his kit, including plastics, fishing line, bronze, sheets of Perspex, and boulders.
Curly Russell. I drink ten screwdrivers and take three pills that I can't identify and pass out in the head. Then there’s this guy shaking me, "Wake up, man, you're Curly Russell." The problem being that I am not Curly Russell, I am a tax attorney from Long Island. He drags me on-stage and I realize to my horror that I am a jazz bassist who has never played a note in his life. We keep stopping mid-song, with Bird giving these agitated snores and starts. Finally, Blakey takes over, still standing on the toms, plucking with his foot and hitting notes with different parts of his face, me just holding the thing upright, him telling me that if I drop it, so help him God...
Bud Powell. Numerous treatments for this session. A0 is a toggle between 33 rpm and 45 rpm for the whole group, often deployed to begin and end Powell's solos. C8 serves as an eject button for the piano bench (force variable based on strike pressure). Middle C triggers an off-stage player piano, with each key synced via EKG wires to a distinct rat. Rats receive variable stimuli (e.g. food, light electric doses, pictures of other rats) to trigger variable notes and durations.
Powell is famously said to channel the swift dances of leprechauns. "I like how those green little fuckers move," he will tell Downbeat in 1951. "In my own work, I have always sought to capture that spritely precision, that capricious violence. Have I succeeded? Let history be my judge."
Early in the set, Bird loses consciousness and dreams of a circle of fifths spinning circumscribed within an infinite number of others, each coming to a stop at one of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. Charting his progression, that of a butterfly whose patterns change with each flap of the wings.
Fats Navarro. The eccentric of the group, Navarro (born Theodore) adds obsessively to his prized collection of animal fats, which by 1953 will require that he transform his Manhattan apartment into a custom walk-in refrigerator.
"The most noteworthy functions of fat include maintaining healthy skin, regulating cholesterol metabolism, and carrying the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K, aiding in their absorption from the intestines," he can be heard to tell an attractive and impressionable young fan during the break. "Fats also help living creatures to use carbohydrates and proteins in a more efficient manner."
Art Blakey. Inventor of drum jumps, Art leaps one foot each onto the toms, perching there on custom footrests and finishing the number without missing a beat. Blakey's profane exhortations to the rest of the group can be heard in the left channel beginning 1:06 into "Perdido" and continuing uninterrupted throughout the set, during the closing moments of which he can be heard to vomit loudly onto the table of three socialites, after first proclaiming the universe, and space-time in general, to be cylindrical in shape, declaring that art must attempt to draw the viewer into deeper spatial awareness, and swearing adherence to a Constructivist ethos in response. For subsequent performances, Blakey will incorporate found objects into his kit, including plastics, fishing line, bronze, sheets of Perspex, and boulders.
Curly Russell. I drink ten screwdrivers and take three pills that I can't identify and pass out in the head. Then there’s this guy shaking me, "Wake up, man, you're Curly Russell." The problem being that I am not Curly Russell, I am a tax attorney from Long Island. He drags me on-stage and I realize to my horror that I am a jazz bassist who has never played a note in his life. We keep stopping mid-song, with Bird giving these agitated snores and starts. Finally, Blakey takes over, still standing on the toms, plucking with his foot and hitting notes with different parts of his face, me just holding the thing upright, him telling me that if I drop it, so help him God...
Bud Powell. Numerous treatments for this session. A0 is a toggle between 33 rpm and 45 rpm for the whole group, often deployed to begin and end Powell's solos. C8 serves as an eject button for the piano bench (force variable based on strike pressure). Middle C triggers an off-stage player piano, with each key synced via EKG wires to a distinct rat. Rats receive variable stimuli (e.g. food, light electric doses, pictures of other rats) to trigger variable notes and durations.
Powell is famously said to channel the swift dances of leprechauns. "I like how those green little fuckers move," he will tell Downbeat in 1951. "In my own work, I have always sought to capture that spritely precision, that capricious violence. Have I succeeded? Let history be my judge."
1.09.2009
democracy school
The jerks in Parent Relations keep sending around the new draft brochure design like they want our input, when you know they want nothing more than for those of us in the democracy department to admit defeat, proclaim we've never seen better, and make them a whole bunch of god-damned cupcakes.
The one they're stuck on this week stars 233624, a kid mocha in complexion with a desert nomad vibe about him and his arm in a sling, his head wrapped in a bloody bandage, who carries this tiny American flag that looks like it's been through preteen Iwo Jima everywhere he goes.
In the cover photo, triumph: 233624 has just completed his first waterboarding exercise. He gives a strong wave of the flag, his eyes squinting and dripping but it could also be said gleaming in the burning light of the mock interrogation room. In the second he's preparing to cast some sort of vote, and has folded the flag with due ceremony next to what appears to be a classmate's blown-off foot.
In the third, 233624 and Bono are drinking venti Starbucks mocha lattes in front of the Vatican. In the fourth and last photograph, subtitled "Our Flag Was Still There," our star is pondering a bombed-out house that is clearly his family's, sobbing uncontrollably but still radiating Yes We Can, evidenced by the careful planting of the flag at the door of the smoking structure.
True, the kid's got spunk, but with 5 graduates per month from an average class size of 200 we either need better survival rates or hordes of smiling children in every photo, preferably both, or we're never going to survive this recession.
I explain as much in an email that reads to me as a scathing indictment (the logic of which should steer the reader and all cc'd to a simultaneous realization of numerous tragic character flaws, with expedient suicide as the only honorable response) but is probably overly polite. We need to be less functional and more aspirational , I write, etc. etc., Warm Regards.
It is suggested in reply: Thank you for your thoughts, Charles, we appreciate your feedback. (Fuck you, Charles, we hate your feedback and we hate you). And then: Do you think the same child might be judiciously Photoshopped, his injuries obscured through tricks of the light or via careful placement of school mascots, voting booths, or other decorations, and that through a kind of cut-and-paste cloning, several close friends or cousins can be manufactured without enlisting additional models? (Charles, we hate Photoshop, we're training little 233624 to kill you in your sleep).
Each month, we select a cohort of impoverished youth from the world's most oil-rich or otherwise strategic countries. Students, referred to in correspondence with our foundation supporters as democratically-challenged individuals, sleep in the open air and are fed dirt and diet Coke twice each day. (They seem to enjoy mixing the dirt and soda together, rather than consuming either on its own, sometimes adding a sprinkle of airborne dust or depleted uranium, the day's exercises permitting).
Students learn basic math, basic English, and the heroic history of white people, and are by turns broken into teams and hunted like animals, exposed to chemical or biological weapons, or subjected to sleep deprivation techniques and read the unabridged OED in sequence. Grading is on a curve, with the bottom 50 percent of the class rendered each week.
It's cute, they still stick gum under the desks, even when the lesson plan calls for gas masks.
The one they're stuck on this week stars 233624, a kid mocha in complexion with a desert nomad vibe about him and his arm in a sling, his head wrapped in a bloody bandage, who carries this tiny American flag that looks like it's been through preteen Iwo Jima everywhere he goes.
In the cover photo, triumph: 233624 has just completed his first waterboarding exercise. He gives a strong wave of the flag, his eyes squinting and dripping but it could also be said gleaming in the burning light of the mock interrogation room. In the second he's preparing to cast some sort of vote, and has folded the flag with due ceremony next to what appears to be a classmate's blown-off foot.
In the third, 233624 and Bono are drinking venti Starbucks mocha lattes in front of the Vatican. In the fourth and last photograph, subtitled "Our Flag Was Still There," our star is pondering a bombed-out house that is clearly his family's, sobbing uncontrollably but still radiating Yes We Can, evidenced by the careful planting of the flag at the door of the smoking structure.
True, the kid's got spunk, but with 5 graduates per month from an average class size of 200 we either need better survival rates or hordes of smiling children in every photo, preferably both, or we're never going to survive this recession.
I explain as much in an email that reads to me as a scathing indictment (the logic of which should steer the reader and all cc'd to a simultaneous realization of numerous tragic character flaws, with expedient suicide as the only honorable response) but is probably overly polite. We need to be less functional and more aspirational , I write, etc. etc., Warm Regards.
It is suggested in reply: Thank you for your thoughts, Charles, we appreciate your feedback. (Fuck you, Charles, we hate your feedback and we hate you). And then: Do you think the same child might be judiciously Photoshopped, his injuries obscured through tricks of the light or via careful placement of school mascots, voting booths, or other decorations, and that through a kind of cut-and-paste cloning, several close friends or cousins can be manufactured without enlisting additional models? (Charles, we hate Photoshop, we're training little 233624 to kill you in your sleep).
Each month, we select a cohort of impoverished youth from the world's most oil-rich or otherwise strategic countries. Students, referred to in correspondence with our foundation supporters as democratically-challenged individuals, sleep in the open air and are fed dirt and diet Coke twice each day. (They seem to enjoy mixing the dirt and soda together, rather than consuming either on its own, sometimes adding a sprinkle of airborne dust or depleted uranium, the day's exercises permitting).
Students learn basic math, basic English, and the heroic history of white people, and are by turns broken into teams and hunted like animals, exposed to chemical or biological weapons, or subjected to sleep deprivation techniques and read the unabridged OED in sequence. Grading is on a curve, with the bottom 50 percent of the class rendered each week.
It's cute, they still stick gum under the desks, even when the lesson plan calls for gas masks.
1.01.2009
empty apartment
When she'd left he'd taken the time to mail everything in their apartment to her new address a thousand miles away. First, to be certain there wasn't anything left to connect them on his side, but also to be sure she'd have to remember.
The shipping cost him almost five grand. For the couch and bed he'd rented a UHaul and driven out on the Belt Parkway (almost out to the airport), dragging them carefully into the marsh reeds in the dead of night, like dumping bodies.
He'd kept just a photo album from a trip they'd taken to Germany, in the fall about a year before things had gone south for good. A lot of spicy sausage and too much beer, you couldn't get a beat on any of the people, and as for the travelers, they'd annoyed each other constantly.
They'd soldiered on, explored Hamburg Köln Heidelberg Berlin etc., each day grayer than the one before it. Photographing each other on every street, like people planting a whole batch of flags all over the moon, in case one blew away or got hit by an asteroid.
He regarded the pictures now as hostages, to be befriended briefly during the long stretches of captivity (in which depraved captor and wary captive fleetingly share the affinity of their isolation), but ultimately, to be torn to shreds and burned one by one, extinguishing the fire in long sprays of whiskey piss, flushing the whole mess and hoping he was drunk enough to sleep.
The first woman he'd brought home a few months later had confronted an almost completely empty apartment. Sleeping bags on the floor, an empty photo album, the bathroom littered in ashes. A fridge with just an unopened bottle of ketchup in it.
Single guy in New York, I've seen worse, she figured, and nestled closer to him on the floor, wondering what it would take to fix this one, the passing cars throwing slow searchlights along the walls.
The shipping cost him almost five grand. For the couch and bed he'd rented a UHaul and driven out on the Belt Parkway (almost out to the airport), dragging them carefully into the marsh reeds in the dead of night, like dumping bodies.
He'd kept just a photo album from a trip they'd taken to Germany, in the fall about a year before things had gone south for good. A lot of spicy sausage and too much beer, you couldn't get a beat on any of the people, and as for the travelers, they'd annoyed each other constantly.
They'd soldiered on, explored Hamburg Köln Heidelberg Berlin etc., each day grayer than the one before it. Photographing each other on every street, like people planting a whole batch of flags all over the moon, in case one blew away or got hit by an asteroid.
He regarded the pictures now as hostages, to be befriended briefly during the long stretches of captivity (in which depraved captor and wary captive fleetingly share the affinity of their isolation), but ultimately, to be torn to shreds and burned one by one, extinguishing the fire in long sprays of whiskey piss, flushing the whole mess and hoping he was drunk enough to sleep.
The first woman he'd brought home a few months later had confronted an almost completely empty apartment. Sleeping bags on the floor, an empty photo album, the bathroom littered in ashes. A fridge with just an unopened bottle of ketchup in it.
Single guy in New York, I've seen worse, she figured, and nestled closer to him on the floor, wondering what it would take to fix this one, the passing cars throwing slow searchlights along the walls.
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