tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47560384692855071612023-11-16T10:18:00.864-06:00Buffalo TattooYoung Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.comBlogger44125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-3540602803032695362011-02-23T16:37:00.000-06:002011-02-23T16:37:21.276-06:00<div class="caption"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/31qEaiKQu70" title="YouTube video player" width="425"></iframe><br />
YouTube can offer up some real gems sometimes. I’ve been watching various Van Morrison videos, my favorites of which feature him performing on some German (?) TV show called <i>Musikladen</i>. They’re some fantastic performances, especially his awe-inspiring version of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpPSBzGEklE">“Into The Mystic.”</a> There are also, if you look around, some beautiful, epic versions of “Cyprus Avenue” and “Ballerina” from the early 70s. They’re incredible and moving in all the ways we’ve come to expect from Morrison.<br />
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This Van Morrison oversaturation led me to consider the video above, which is a clip from the 1995 film <i>Georgia</i>, which stars Jennifer Jason Leigh as a strung-out, no-talent wannabe singer who has a tumultuous relationship with her famous folksinger sister. I haven’t seen the movie in many years, but seeing it when I was fourteen or so was a major event: the soundtrack features songs by Elvis Costello and The Velvet Underground, artists I was only beginning to listen to, as well as a supporting performance by John Doe of X, a band I discovered because of this movie, and loved, and of course there is Jennifer Jason Leigh’s long, painful, terrible version of Van Morrison’s “Take Me Back.”<br />
<br />
The thing that’s most frustrating about Van Morrison is that, because he’s an artist of such transcendent power and talent, he quite often—more often than not, I’d say—fails to live up to that transcendence; for every breathtaking, almost supernaturally beautiful song in his catalog, there are ten than fall flat, or are merely pretty, or just sort of boring, or outright bad. “Take Me Back” is a perfect example. When I saw <i>Georgia </i>and heard Leigh’s version, I heard something that, crippled as it was, was straining to take flight, a yearning so great that it could lift even a singer as poor as her and set her beyond herself. Leigh’s version of the song is agonizing, but so human, so empathetic, so unafraid, it becomes something much bigger.<br />
<br />
And then, years and years later, when I heard <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjswnG69EVg">Morrison’s version</a>, from his <i>Hymns To The Silence </i>album, I heard what I so often hear from him: a nice little song, one that, with its talk of walkin’ by the water and thinkin’ ‘bout all the trouble and confusion in the world, its labored repetitions of the title phrase, its pleas to “let me understand religion,” its green fields in the summertime, didn’t speak of transcendence, but was rather content to indulge in any number of forced “mystical” clichés. Rather than a singer being so entranced by the song he has created he disappears into it, I heard a pretty decent approximation of that release, one that is completely obliterated by Leigh’s ragged, highwire version.<br />
<br />
And it’s not like I really blame Morrison for this; unlike almost any other artist I can think of, his best work truly seems to come from a place that is beyond him. I generally find that whole notion of an artist as a kind of divine antennae, picking up Mysterious Signals From Beyond, to be bullshit…but the disparity between his best work and his more common efforts almost causes me to bend enough to put at least some creedence into the thought. Or perhaps, more likely, the kind of intensity required for such moving work is just too much for any kind of sustained effort. In <a href="http://personal.cis.strath.ac.uk/%7Emurray/astral.html">Lester Bangs’ peerless review</a>—and “review” is really too small a word for what Bangs does; his essay is almost as beautiful as the album itself—of <i>Astral Weeks</i>, he writes<br />
<br />
“<i>no wonder…that Van Morrison never came this close to looking life square in the face again, no wonder he turned to </i>Tupelo Honey<i> and even </i>Hard Nose the Highway<i> with its entire side of songs about falling leaves. In </i>Astral Weeks<i>…he confronted enough for any man’s lifetime. Of course, having been offered this immeasurably stirring and equally frightening gift from Morrison, one can hardly be blamed for not caring terribly much about Old, Old Woodstock and [other] little homilies…”</i><br />
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And one can hardly blame Morrison for, having reached the peak in his art any number of times, finally backing away.</div>Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-54199042153272401982011-02-11T06:51:00.002-06:002011-02-11T06:53:23.806-06:00Someone to do your dirty work<iframe width="425" height="344" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/QhJAR6UZsCk?fs=1" frameborder="0" allowFullScreen=""></iframe><br /><br />For years, I always assumed that the reason I didn't believe in God was that I lacked the capacity for belief, but I'm not sure if that's really the case. What I've come to suspect is that I lack the capacity for zealotry—because, if you believed, truly believed in an immortal and omnipotent being who existed before the dawn of time and who will exist forever, a being who exists outside the laws of space and time, who in fact is the <span style="font-style:italic;">creator</span> of the laws of space and time, then how could you not be completely out of your mind? How could you not be one of those people standing on a street corner yelling at the passersby. How could you not be the sort of person who shoots abortion doctors or hijacks airplanes? How could the weight of something so immense, so beyond even the most extreme scope of the human imagination, not drive you completely insane? <br /><br />Of course, the short answer is that it <span style="font-style:italic;">couldn't.</span>Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-20313808396441256582010-12-31T12:21:00.002-06:002010-12-31T12:26:36.275-06:00A-riding On A Pony<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://macandcheese.kraftfoods.com/ykyli_img/easymac_box_original.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 370px; height: 370px;" src="http://macandcheese.kraftfoods.com/ykyli_img/easymac_box_original.png" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />So I bought a box of Easy Mac, which, if you don’t know, is macaroni and cheese that you don’t have to boil, either because you’re too lazy or because…well, that’s the only reason, actually.<span class="caption"> <p>Anyhow, there are six packets of noodles/cheese mix in the box, and when you look at one of the individual cheese packets, which has the instructions printed for preparing a single pack on one side, on the other side, it asks “WANNA MAKE TWO PACKETS AT ONCE?”</p> <p>Look, motherfucker: don’t patronize me. I just bought a box of microwavable mac and cheese. Of course I want to make two packets at once. I can hate myself that much faster that way.</p></span>Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-58643239423818964562010-09-22T01:19:00.003-05:002010-09-22T15:46:42.301-05:00If you see me coming, look across the rich man's field<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5fQ91a_GecHEHTchcwShIvaJcYGZnRMJGbm7c7Ji9Hh0vSeMtEbRp_H1Elk8xpQuMPQ-5dWNTXL7N5rBHpd-PXX6aV1Oc9CmG6l51_vSHOJGum2ha1I0lPXXEMcgsI62B1u9vC4Ac5zk/s1600/100-male-film-buscemi.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 160px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5fQ91a_GecHEHTchcwShIvaJcYGZnRMJGbm7c7Ji9Hh0vSeMtEbRp_H1Elk8xpQuMPQ-5dWNTXL7N5rBHpd-PXX6aV1Oc9CmG6l51_vSHOJGum2ha1I0lPXXEMcgsI62B1u9vC4Ac5zk/s320/100-male-film-buscemi.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5519842072557713538" border="0" /></a><br />The other night I had a genuine <i>Ghost World</i> moment. I was on my way home from wherever, probably just driving around. I was listening to <a _mce_href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAKfy2W70Qg" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAKfy2W70Qg">"Last Kind Word Blues"</a> by Geeshie Wiley, a woman who is so mysterious no one even really knows the proper spelling of her name. She recorded this song and two others in 1930 and then more or less disappeared. It's a motherfucker of a song--it's dark and beautiful and almost impossibly otherworldly. When you listen to it you might as well be listening to a transmission from another planet. It's a haunting fragment from a place that no longer exists. It's a favorite of mine, and I doubt I will ever get to the bottom of it. <p>It was a nice warm night, late summer, and I had my windows down. I was sitting there in my car at a red light, across the street from the Circle K, and a blue Mustang convertible pulled up next to me. There were a couple of girls (women?) sitting in the car. I have no idea how old they were, but they were dressed like <a _mce_href="http://dvd.es/data/docs/20060403010107/virgen2.jpg" href="http://dvd.es/data/docs/20060403010107/virgen2.jpg">Leslie Mann</a> in <i>The 40 Year-Old Virgin</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, like women who were pretending they were still girls. When I sensed the car pulling up, I turned the radio down a bit as an act of, you know, simple human courtesy, which was something apparently lost on these two, as they continued to blast whatever the hell that Eminem/Rihanna song is called. The girl (woman?) sitting on the passenger side apparently noticed what I was listening to, because she asked the driver to turn down their music for a second. “listen to this,” I heard her say, indicating me. Eminem went momentarily quiet as they listened for my radio, paused for a moment, then started laughing. </span> </p> <p><span style="font-style: normal;">The light turned green, Eminem roared back to prominence, and the three of us drove on into the night and the rest of our lives. </span> </p>Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-9082761632757457602010-09-14T13:19:00.004-05:002010-09-15T02:19:40.792-05:00Stop And Look Around; It's All Astounding<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiInrsHYg5RilV5KaJfIZqPyd9lQIb4_xGmT_pRf1ztm_XVl-HMgc-ejqh_fs7VRdM9yhDSqzGfpNCzrgt4exiq0wxIeKdXP7yxY9Izt4Etfp12-m_EdVEhlZ5DKKIKPTDZ8d2zEzJuwnA/s1600/big-money-rustlas_M_jpg_595x325_crop_upscale_q85.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 174px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiInrsHYg5RilV5KaJfIZqPyd9lQIb4_xGmT_pRf1ztm_XVl-HMgc-ejqh_fs7VRdM9yhDSqzGfpNCzrgt4exiq0wxIeKdXP7yxY9Izt4Etfp12-m_EdVEhlZ5DKKIKPTDZ8d2zEzJuwnA/s320/big-money-rustlas_M_jpg_595x325_crop_upscale_q85.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516835854638860498" border="0" /></a> <em>How should he love thee? Or how deem thee wise?</em><div class="caption"> <p>I know I’m late to the party on this one, but I thought I would mention that in that Insane Clown Posse <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-agl0pOQfs">video</a> for “Miracles”, the duo make essentially the same argument for blissful ignorance as Edgar Allan Poe’s “Sonnet: To Science”, wherein the poet decries science as a “vulture, whose wings are dull realities,” who “prayest…upon the poet’s heart.” Walt Whitman, too, echoes Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope in his “When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer”, where the poem’s narrator becomes “tired and sick” of “the proofs, the figures…the charts and the diagrams” presented him by the titled astronomer, and instead seeks the simple childlike wonder of the universe splayed dark and infinite above him in the night sky. finding “perfect silence” at the mere sight of the stars.</p> <p>Like Whitman, The Insane Clown Posse also realize the intangible nature of beauty: “It’s just there in the air,” they tell us, “you can’t even hold it”; Like Poe, they realize that science is, at best, a poor substitute for the poetry of the heart: “I don’t wanna talk to a scientist,” says an impassioned Shaggy 2 Dope, “y’all motherfuckers lying/and getting me pissed,” his anger at man’s destructive urge to know all no matter the cost palpable and stirring.</p> <p>One must dissect a thing to discover its works, these poets tell us, but the cost of knowledge is the death of wonder, and who but the most base and dull among us would make such a trade?</p> </div>Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-43047106467007787792010-08-30T01:25:00.002-05:002010-08-30T01:36:59.525-05:00This guy Heath that I went to school with--he was a year behind me--got blown up the other day. He's some kind of oil field worker, and there was an explosion, and hey you know the rest. He's not dead, though, and is currently in intensive care some place close by, waiting for the day when the doctors tell him he's free to again walk the earth, and how lucky he is.<br /><br />My most vivid memory of him is when I went to take the ACT. I went along with my friend Robby, and this guy, the one who got blown up, went along with us to take it as well. The three of us, packed into the brand-new Mustang that Robby's parents had just bought (a horrendous idea, as Robby was a fucking insane driver--he was going 110 mph the entire way to and from the testing site, on a two-lane highway, <span style="font-style: italic;">in the rain</span>), drove from the little town we lived in (population 925) to the slightly larger town of Magnolia, Arkansas (population 11,800) to take the test. I guess Heath had never been in such a large and exotic city before, because every time he saw a black person, he was happy to point out to us "there's a nigger," or "look at that nigger over there," or, while waiting for our food at a fast food place, "I hope these niggers don't fuck up our order."<br /><br />When I found out about his getting blown up, I took a look at his Facebook page. There were an enormous amount of get-well messages, and I scrolled through probably thirty-five and counted only three that didn't include some variant of "we're praying for you" or "you're in our prayers" or something along those lines, which means, I guess, that if he dies, then they were just not very good at praying, and God hates them.Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-65148904929349073472010-08-17T22:18:00.001-05:002010-08-17T22:22:30.301-05:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6kJ3-UAa9csFnd4uSLil7bYRPPSfPpuntgLwRkUUtr1AwbS9a0XzYEB2olYBC421QyYvYafOS5CDjMM5OAE5N3unQWQuC-dVGTd_KrkUDKGof4dsf42cWGcBJBpwD8CA-xmBLHyr2LsU/s1600/clarks.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 259px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6kJ3-UAa9csFnd4uSLil7bYRPPSfPpuntgLwRkUUtr1AwbS9a0XzYEB2olYBC421QyYvYafOS5CDjMM5OAE5N3unQWQuC-dVGTd_KrkUDKGof4dsf42cWGcBJBpwD8CA-xmBLHyr2LsU/s320/clarks.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5506585050250179362" border="0" /></a><br />I spent the first twelve years of my life in Texas, and then another four years shortly after I graduated high school, going to what was technically a college, and living with my grandparents. Practically all of my extended family still lives there, and though I only moved about eighty miles away, it feels much farther in my mind, and I rarely go back. I doubt that anywhere I live will ever feel like home the same way it does when I take that left turn off Highway 155 onto the one-lane blacktop where I spent the majority of my earliest years. I left a lot of bones buried back there. <p>Guy Clark--seen above with his incredibly beautiful wife, Susanna--is from Texas. He’s one of those great Texas singer-songwriters you hear so much about, along with Steve Earle and Willis Alan Ramsey and of course Townes Van Zandt; he and Van Zandt were great friends, and while Clark is nowhere near as consistent as Townes, every now and then he would strike gold—“LA Freeway”, “The Randall Knife”, “Dublin Blues”, and, probably my favorite, “Desperados Waiting For A Train,” a song about the relationship between a young man and an older mentor figure—in this case the young man was Clark and the older was his grandmother’s boyfriend. It’s a beautiful song, and sad, and it tells the truth about how cruel time can be, its thousand little thefts that leave even the strongest of us with nothing. It tells the truth about what it’s like to love someone.</p> <p>Funnily enough, the lyric I respond to most is the line about “them old men…playing/Moon and 42,” which are both domino games, and one of which, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_%28dominoes%29">42</a>, was played by all the adults at every family event I can remember. Everyone would come to my grandparents’ and after whatever big holiday meal we would have, the shitty old card table would get broken out and the clack of dominoes would be inescapable for the next five or six hours. It’s honestly one of my favorite memories, and probably all the more precious to me because I never learned to play the game despite it being the background to literally a couple of hundred hours of my life: it’s just one of the countless regrets that pile themselves up on top of you when you think back to the people you knew and loved and all the things you could have done or said.</p> <p>I could still learn to play, of course, but what would the point be? Anyone I would want to play with is long gone.</p>Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-23623162197191291622010-06-07T22:31:00.005-05:002010-06-07T22:35:31.935-05:00I went to a barbecue at a friend's house the other day, and there was a little girl there. She was maybe twelve years old, pretty tall for a young kid, and she was wearing a t-shirt that said "Hating me won't make you pretty," and it was easily one of the most depressing thing I've seen in a long time. It made me feel absolutely awful. Do people really <span style="font-style: italic;">want </span>to turn their kids into vapid, catty little bitches? How can you see something like that and not feel sad? How can you see something like that and <span style="font-style: italic;">think it's funny</span>?Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-25634198791845434392010-04-04T01:07:00.003-05:002010-04-04T01:28:39.540-05:00On Friday, I had the day off work, and I had couple of errands to run. Nothing too major--I just had to cash a couple of paychecks, then use the cash to pay my rent and my electric bill. Simple.<br /><br />So I set off for the grocery store. There was an old woman in front of me, maybe 65 years old, but hit pretty hard by life. She was maybe five feet tall and at best she weighed 90 pounds. She had an oxygen tank with her, hanging from a sling around her shoulder. Her skin had taken on that old-person quality--translucent and thin, with networks of bluish veins plainly visible. It would have the texture of cold wet silk, if you were inclined to touch it. She was meekly trying to catch the attention of the man behind the glass partition, who was working to repair the money-order printer. "Sir...sir...sir," she muttered weakly, trying her best to peek over the countertop. She had a pretty ghetto, rail-thin nurse with her, who took time from scolding her two children to caw "he tryin to fix that thang," at her patient. Finally, the man behind the counter finished repairing the printer, handed the woman two money orders, and the four of them made their way out of my life, hopefully forever.<br /><br />While all this was going on, I took some time to look around. In the grocery line behind me, a guy was checking out. Older, wearing a t-shirt and cargo shorts. Baseball cap with long stringy hair hanging down. Moustache. He had a fanny pack on, cinched so tight around his gut it looked like someone had tied a piece of string around a sack of meal. Not terribly strange, true, but for the fact that he was wearing one of those weird claw-ring things that Ozzy Osbourne and Alan Moore wear.<br /><br />I managed to cash only one paycheck: the larger one was over $400, and the store would not cash it, so I had no choice but to take my business to the liquor store. This was a little annoying, but so be it.<br /><br />At the liquor store, as I was paying my electric bill, one of the employees came walking by. "Did you hear about Michael, that used to date Susan, when she lived next door to you?" he asked the clerk who was attending me. "No," she replied. "He killed hisself last night." "Oh my gawwwd," she said. "Yep. Hung hisself with a chain." And then he went right on by, back to work.<br /><br />I finished up my business and turned to go, only to come face to face with an old man who looked sort of like a combination of Murderface from <span style="font-style: italic;">Metalocalypse </span>and Captain Beefheart, only with long Willie Nelson-style braids. Right behind him was a youngish white guy with a sort of Kurt Cobain/grunge rock hairdo, ratty face, and ragged soul patch. He had a rather--ahem--effeminate walk, and was wearing a ripped-up red muscle shirt and cutoffs that were riddled with holes. Sticking up a good four or five inches from the waist of his pants was a leopard-print thong.<br /><br />These nightmarish images still fresh in my mind, I made my way outside to my car, where I was counting and arranging my money. I looked over to my left and saw a youngish woman in a Statue of Liberty costume adjusting her breasts in her bra while smoking and playfully slap-fighting with a tow-truck driver. A few minutes later she was texting on her cellphone and disinterestedly waving to traffic while picking a wedgie out of her ass.<br /><br />And I thought to myself, what a wonderful world...Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-59978718892633051582010-03-12T10:09:00.003-06:002010-03-12T10:20:26.480-06:00There is a garden in the memory of America. There is a nightbird in its memory.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRN31FiQ9XVqheVKd5r3bghyi5Nnvs8Hd-inkagshCFo6ocjlNeiee-C6Uk4K18xJs8oz-7cGHRFjOGf4FpYTNkJh0TZ_lsMgXcDQTytq685EXYxVUcfufWXn6QfSj4qzY9NP3EQRQNQE/s1600-h/tumblr_kuvxaxHywH1qz6f9y.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 261px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRN31FiQ9XVqheVKd5r3bghyi5Nnvs8Hd-inkagshCFo6ocjlNeiee-C6Uk4K18xJs8oz-7cGHRFjOGf4FpYTNkJh0TZ_lsMgXcDQTytq685EXYxVUcfufWXn6QfSj4qzY9NP3EQRQNQE/s400/tumblr_kuvxaxHywH1qz6f9y.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5447782953193069138" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;"><br />So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody...</span><br /><br />12 March 1922--<br />21 October 1969Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-53546677758608162082010-03-07T18:28:00.002-06:002010-03-07T18:32:31.950-06:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh25t8KNJrvSbWCJ8_RrODxz2-ltWKi8BrhhteWHZX12BZ7Tsl5dWxXLPt7S-k3fx89iLa3skGDSHF_QDpyvn2jYR58VR1qj9FEmH6D1Fsjff3UM5_kFmizqOrwUawUWiYGi74_POi0iJg/s1600-h/ache.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 275px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh25t8KNJrvSbWCJ8_RrODxz2-ltWKi8BrhhteWHZX12BZ7Tsl5dWxXLPt7S-k3fx89iLa3skGDSHF_QDpyvn2jYR58VR1qj9FEmH6D1Fsjff3UM5_kFmizqOrwUawUWiYGi74_POi0iJg/s400/ache.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5446053625246922946" border="0" /></a><br />Every year at Christmas, my mother invariably buys me clothes. Which is fine, as long as it's just jeans or socks or maybe a button-down shirt. But she insists on buying me t-shirts with wacky sayings on them. It's a real window into what my mother thinks I'm like when you consider that past shirts have said things like "You call it slacking--I call it dedicated inactivity" or "I just can't take it anymore". I look forward to next year's shirt, which will most likely say something like "I'm not really a worthless piece of shit, but I can see why you would think that".Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-78960979139465604312010-02-22T00:48:00.000-06:002010-02-22T00:50:26.177-06:00Script notes for <span style="font-style:italic;">Meerkat Manor: The Movie—Meerkats In The City</span><br /><br />Note: all meerkats will be CGI.<br /><br />We begin with a meerkat scientist/researcher, a Jane Goodall type, ideally played by Patrick Stewart. He lives among the meeerkats and observes them. He is struck by how extraordinarily intelligent the group he is studying seems to be. We see a lot of shots of him beginning to train/teach the meerkats. We see him reading to them as they sit in a semicircle, showing them how to take high tea, etc. The meerkats are a sassy and lively bunch. <br /><br />Sadly, the meerkat scientist dies. This is a real tragedy, but there is a silver lining on this dark cloud: the scientist has left his substantial personal fortune/grant money to the meerkats, who quite naturally use this newfound wealth to travel to the city to live. They are convinced to do this by the wistful young main protagonist meerkat, who discovers the meerkat scientist's notes, outlining his dream of taking the meerkats into the wider world to show everyone just how smart and wonderful the meerkats are.<br /><br />The meerkats take up residence in a fancy downtown hotel (think <span style="font-style:italic;">Home Alone 2</span>), where they almost immediately run afoul of the bellhop, played by John Turturro. He is dedicated to the hotel and cannot stand to see it being overrun by what are in his mind vermin. A good introduction will show him walking to a limousine to open the door only—to his horror—to be confronted with a band of sassy meerkats. “Keep the change,” our young meerkat protagonist will quip as he and his friends scurry past, tossing the bellhop a quarter. “Meerkats,” the bellhop will mutter under his breath, “I <span style="font-style:italic;">hate</span> meerkats.”<br /><br />There will be the inevitable montage, where we see the meerkats inspecting their swanky new digs. James Brown's “I Feel Good” will play as they run around the suite, acting crazy, dancing, wearing sunglasses, etc. We will see the meerkats don swimming trunks and do cannonballs into a bubblebath. <br /><br />Hopefully, Joan Cusack will be available to play the concierge, who is secretly in cahoots with the John Turturro character. She too, hates the meerkats, and the two of them are together scheming to swindle the meerkats out of their inherited fortune. Not sure how this will play out; most likely by befriending one of the stupider/less outgoing meerkats and spinning some kind of tale. <br /><br />The meerkats will need a human friend to stand in for the audience. Probably another hotel employee, or, better yet, one of the meerkat scientist's students, who helps the meerkats. Need to do some work on this character. <br /><br />Unsure of exactly how to wrap this up. Perhaps the meerkats will lose or squander their fortune in some way, and wind up in the laboratory care of the student, who will be full-fledged professor in the sequel.<br /><br />Note: idea for sequel: the meerkats are stolen/kidnapped from the lab by someone who wants to exploit their intelligence for his own ends. <br /><br />Need to continue workshopping these ideas so a full script can be shopped around. With any luck this can be in theaters by Christmas.Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-81241180701980323052010-02-19T03:19:00.003-06:002010-02-19T12:26:56.629-06:00Late winter in Dallas, a city that wants to pretend that it's still 1984, and that the oil will never stop flowing. With all its ugly angular buildings that send sunlight out in every direction, but mostly directly into your eyes. A city that desperately wants to ignore all those cool, skinny kids with their too-tight jeans and their little flannel shirts all scuttling around the periphery. Six Flags and six hundred convenience stores. Hard to get a fix on the weird, meaty sadness you feel when you're ten miles out of town and you see a herd of alpacas calmly wandering the perimeter of a manmade lake in the middle of a subdivision. Steak houses the size of churches and churches the size of soccer stadiums. East of the city, just outside Canton, you pass a pasture where a dozen camels sit calmly, being slowly covered up with snow. There is no way for anyone to explain to them just exactly what is happening.Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-35291672058746766002010-02-18T00:40:00.004-06:002010-02-18T16:31:10.924-06:00For whatever reason, 2009 turned out to be a really good year for music. It was probably my favorite year for music in half a decade, and certainly an improvement from the dark days of 2007/08, gloomy years when I sort of began to wonder if I actually liked music anymore (I didn't even bother making a list for 08—can't even remember what if anything I was enjoying at the time). But anyway. That is in the past. Let us be grateful for today. Here is my list, arranged in no particular order:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Top Ten Albums</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Vic Chesnutt—<span style="font-style:italic;">At The Cut</span></span><br />I think I sort of took Vic Chesnutt for granted. I loved <span style="font-style:italic;">Little</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">The Salesman And Bernadette</span>, but found his other work sort of patchy, and largely stopped listening. When <span style="font-style:italic;">North Star Deserter</span>, his previous collaboration with Guy Picciotto and Thee Silver Mt. Zion came out, I gave it a cursory listen but didn't hold it in any particular regard. But a few days before Christmas, I sat up late drinking and giving <span style="font-style:italic;">At The Cut</span> the attention it deserved: it's a stunning record about death and decay by a fantastic singer and lyricist that will unfortunately be forever linked with the circumstances of Chesnutt's death. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Built To Spill—<span style="font-style:italic;">There Is No Enemy</span></span><br />Built To Spill's previous album, <span style="font-style:italic;">You In Reverse</span> was distressingly by-the-numbers: it wasn't a bad album by any means (the band has never released anything even like a bad album), but it sounded aimless, which is probably worse, implying disinterest or lack of commitment. It felt like the band only made the album because making albums is what bands do, and it had been awhile since their last one. But <span style="font-style:italic;">There Is No Enemy</span>, despite sounding more or less exactly like every other Built To Spill album, feels light years ahead of its predecessor. Doug Martsch actually sounds engaged with the songs he has written, and even though the subject matter is often less than sunny, <span style="font-style:italic;">There Is No Enemy</span> makes me feel an incredible joy.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Phosphorescent—<span style="font-style:italic;">To Willie</span></span><br />This was the year that I rediscovered Willie Nelson. Having loved <span style="font-style:italic;">Red Headed Stranger</span> for years, when confronted with Nelson's other, later, albums, I was invariably disappointed by their uneveness. As it turns out, I was just going in the wrong direction: <span style="font-style:italic;">Red Headed Stranger</span> is actually just one of about a half dozen great albums he produced in the 70s. <span style="font-style:italic;">Phases and Stages, Yesterday's Wine, Shotgun Willie</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">The Troublemaker</span> are all fantastic records that I introduced myself to thanks to Phosphorescent's woozy collection of Nelson originals. Great, beautiful record. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Mt Eerie—<span style="font-style:italic;">Wind's Poem</span></span><br />This was the first Phil Elverum album I ever really got into, and it's a grand, amazing thing. The sonic equivalent of being alone in a huge dark forest and listening to the roar of wind shake the trees. An album about being a very small thing with a very small voice that sounds both humbled by and in awe of the enormity of the earth and the forces at work upon it<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Mountain Goats—<span style="font-style:italic;">The Life Of The World To Come</span></span><br />Apart from <span style="font-style:italic;">At The Cut</span>, no album made me think about dying more this year than <span style="font-style:italic;">The Life Of The World To Come</span>, from the suicide (David Foster Wallace?) in “Phillipians 3:20-21” to John Darnielle's mother-in-law, cancer-stricken, in “Matthew 25:21” (“the last of something bright burning/still burning”) to the captive Thylacine, last of its kind, baring its teeth in defiance in “Deuteronomy 2:10”, a song about the eventual extinction of everything.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Califone—<span style="font-style:italic;">All My Friends Are Funeral Singers</span></span><br />Much like Built To Spill, the last Califone album seemed more like the work of a band making a record just for the hell of it. It is to their credit that in spite of its rather workmanlike quality, it was still pretty good—an album they could have made in their sleep, but still pretty good. They came back in a big way with <span style="font-style:italic;">All My Friends Are Funeral Singers</span>, though. It's what Califone do best: combine ancient Harry Smith <span style="font-style:italic;">Anthology</span>-style songcraft with modern production—clanky percussion, washes of synthesizer, buzzing frets and distortion. Califone are masters of creating dreamy sonic landscapes that are at once incredibly vivid and somewhat hard to pin down. A great album by one of America's most overlooked bands. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Lil Wayne—<span style="font-style:italic;">No Ceilings</span></span><br />For all the praise heaped on <span style="font-style:italic;">Tha Carter III</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">No Ceilings</span> (despite a kind of crappy final third)beats it by a mile. A friend of mine once described Wayne as a really smart dumb rapper, which, to my mind, is a perfect descriptor. And with that in mind, he sounds his absolute best, to me at least, when backed by the shittiest, ringtone-stupid beats, which are in abundance here, making <span style="font-style:italic;">No Ceilings</span> my personal favorite Wayne album. <br /> <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Magnolia Electric Co—<span style="font-style:italic;">Josephine</span></span><br />I have reached the point with Jason Molina and his work where I've sort of lost my ability to be objective. Most reviewers thought this was a mediocre effort, but for my money <span style="font-style:italic;">Josephine</span> is the best album the band has released since 2001's <span style="font-style:italic;">Magnolia Electric Co</span>. In theory a concept album about a recently deceased friend, <span style="font-style:italic;">Josephine</span> in fact tackles the same issues Molina has wrestled with for over a decade: disappointment, failure, the inability to live up to one's potential. Probably the most musically varied Molina release yet, with traces of doo-wop (“Rock of Ages”), straight-up country weepers (“Song For Willie”, the title track), and the haunted, rootsy numbers most closely associated with the band (“The Handing Down”, “Map Of The Falling Sky”). My favorite album of the year. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Bill Callahan—<span style="font-style:italic;">Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle</span></span><br />Bill Callahan continues being one of the four or five best lyricists working today. He is an absolute master at paring things down to their most simple components, whether it be heartbreak or coming to terms with one's atheism. I suspect that this album, along with <span style="font-style:italic;">At The Cut</span> have probably the most staying power of all the records listed here. Fantastic, heavy stuff. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Sonic Youth—<span style="font-style:italic;">The Eternal</span></span><br />I have to confess that I never really “got” Sonic Youth. I respected them immensely, and I liked a handful of their songs, but their albums always sort of bored me. Growing up I made a couple of efforts to get into their music, but it never clicked. But somewhere around the time of <span style="font-style:italic;">Murray Street</span>, I began to come around to their sound, and have as of this writing, fully embraced them, and would rank <span style="font-style:italic;">The Eternal</span> on par with my own favorite album of theirs, <span style="font-style:italic;">Washing Machine</span>. I still don't like <span style="font-style:italic;">Daydream Nation</span>, though. Go figure. <br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Top Ten Songs</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Shakira—“She Wolf”</span><br />The single of the year, hands down. Shakira decides to make a sexy dance-pop track, and she does it so well it's a shame the rest of the album isn't as good. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">We Were Promised Jetpacks—“Quiet Little Voices”</span><br />I listened to a lot of Scottish rock music this year, bands like The Twilight Sad and Frightened Rabbit and We Were Promised Jetpacks, lots of very serious young dudes being serious about their feelings. They all sort of remind me of my old favorites Idlewild, who were also Scottish, and also terminally serious. The Twilight Sad are probably the best of all these groups, but “Quiet Little Voices” is probably the best song of the lot, soaring and anthemic and full of muscle. It sounds like it could have been a hit once, a long time ago. A song that has the kind of romantic melancholy you can only associate with youth. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Sunset Rudown—“You Go On Ahead” (Black Cab Sessions)</span><br />I typically only really like Sunset Rubdown in small doses, or not at all. I feel like Krug (and basically all of those guys in the Frog Eyes/Swan Lake/Destroyer/Wolf Parade mafia) has a tendency to be needlessly cryptic and yelpy and irritating, but this version (which is infinitely better than its studio counterpart) is loose and joyous and makes me wish I liked more of their material. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Keri Hilson feat Lil Wayne—“Turning Me On”</span><br />My favorite single sixty seconds of music this year was Wayne's gleeful, breathless verse dropped into the last third of this goofy Rihanna-lite club track.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Destroyer—“Bay Of Pigs”</span><br />Dan Bejar is probably the only person who could get me to intentionally listen to a weird ambient disco track that runs somewhere near a quarter hour. Its opening lines (“Listen, I've been drinking”) set the stage perfectly, conjuring images of a young socialite (“a crumbling beauty trapped in a river of ice/a crumbling beauty trapped in paradise”) gently staggering around a fabulous home on the edge of some personal—or, owing to the song's title, literal—apocalypse. A song bathed in pale white fluorescents. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Taylor Swift—“White Horse”</span><br />Swift's big hit this year was “You Belong With Me”, a pretty terrible song about a young girl who pines for an asshole who ignores her in favor of a vapid cheerleader-type. In the infinitely better “White Horse”, the girl gets what she wants, and finds out it's not all it's cracked up to be. An inversion of the standard high-school-love-conquers-all bullshit so prevalent in pop music, and a nice addition to the canon of leaving-my-stifling-small-town-behind-me songs. Swift is really likeable: I hope she gets better at music. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Animal Collective—“My Girls”</span><br />I've never really cared much for Animal Collective—they always just sounded so formless. But even I was won over by this song, which manages to shackle some kind of structure to their usual clusterfuck of directionlessness. “My Girls” was a refreshing blast of open-hearted optimism, a trait I generally lack, but one that, in the proper amounts, I'm more than willing to open myself up to. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Girls—“Hellhole Rat Race”</span><br />A trebly burnout's final words, recorded on cassette, and chewed to bits by the churning California sun. From an album dotted with a handful of bright spots, this one was far and away the brightest. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Twilight Sad—“Reflections Of The Television”/“I Became A Prostitute”</span><br />One of the things I never liked about shoegaze was how wimpy if often sounded. I like pretty, ethereal vocals as much as the next person, but I also like a little passion. The Twilight Sad are the best of a handful of young Scottish bands, and the closest to being a full-on shoegaze act, but one thing they are not is twee. The first two tracks off their album <span style="font-style:italic;">Forget The Night Ahead</span> are seething, angry storms of distortion with pounding drums and ear-ringing feedback. If their feelings are hurt, they're out to hurt yours back. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Lady Gaga—“Bad Romance”/Britney Spears—“3”</span><br />I strongly suspect the me of ten years ago would probably have been horrified by most of the songs I enjoyed this year, but the me of ten years ago was pretty stupid sometimes, and was probably a bit too concerned with keeping it real (the me of ten years ago didn't even like bands with keyboards, unless they were like, upright pianos or a harpsichord or some shit), and the me of now really does not give even the slightest shit about that. There was a lot of trashy pop music I liked this year, including Miley Cyrus's “Party In The USA” (fantastic bubblegum) and “Videophone” Beyonce's collaboration with Lady Gaga, the It Girl of 2009. I find the argument that Lady Gaga is some kind of avant garde genius a little silly; she's obviously smart, and has an aesthetic ideal, but that hardly makes her Andy Warhol. The Britney Spears song, an ode to what the French would call a <span style="font-style:italic;">menage a trois</span>, is more or less indefensible, but what the hell: I really liked it.<br /><br />Which in the end, is the best defense one can ever offer in these kinds of situations.Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-32017932516991247122010-02-10T20:23:00.001-06:002010-02-10T20:24:47.306-06:00<a href="http://osmium.tumblr.com/post/88076667/to-be-good-whiskey-has-to-be-named-after-a-dude">These</a> are wise words indeed:<br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><br />To be good, whiskey has to be named after a dude. Jim Beam and Jack Daniels are perennial favorites; Evan Williams is a dark horse; George Dickel is my favorite. Preferably a number will be involved as well. No. 8. For example. The label should read like a secret Masonic world government, just like the back of a one dollar bill, Dr. Bronner’s soap, or anything else cool. If you understand any of it, do not swallow the liquid inside.</span>Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-46354250401092001132010-02-02T23:19:00.001-06:002010-02-02T23:22:13.529-06:00A postscript to the previous William Eggleston entry:<br /><br />"...a photographer wants form, an unarguably right relationship of shapes, a visual stability in which all components are equally important. The photographer hopes, in brief, <span style="font-style:italic;">to discover a tension so exact that it is peace.</span><br /><br />"Pictures that embody this calm are not synonymous, of course, with what we might see casually out of a car window. The form the photographer records, though discovered in a split second of literal fact, is different because it implies an order beyond itself, a landscape into which all fragments, no matter how imperfect, fit perfectly."<br /><br />--Robert AdamsYoung Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-54295410080732484322010-02-02T18:51:00.008-06:002010-02-16T03:04:29.027-06:00Morals of VisionI bought my first camera sometime around 1999, during my senior year of high school. I'd been interested in photography for a few years before that—my favorite thing about being on the yearbook staff was getting to roam around the school taking pictures—and finally saved some cash and bought a sturdy black Pentax point-and-shoot. I haven't really used it for a few years now, but the last time I dug it out of the drawer, it worked as well as it ever had.<br /><br />What is it about photographs that makes them so fascinating. I think, for me at least, they're a way of rendering a moment—a single moment—forever. The subject of the photo, in the moment that it's taken, will never exist again. The light will never be the same, the branches of the tree will never be the same, the expression in a face. A photo preserves something otherwise ephemeral and imparts a simple object with profundity. <br /><br />A good example of that aesthetic is William Eggleston, who I think I'm willing to call my favorite photographer. His images are, on the surface, so simple, but there is a strange, implied tension. When you look at one of his photographs, you feel as if you just missed some incredible revelation. Critics can say that Eggleston's photos are mundane, that anyone could take them, but those are the same people who decry Jackson Pollock or Piet Mondrian. If anyone thinks Eggleston's photos or Pollock's artwork is so easy, they should try replicating it. They'll undoubtedly find it a lot more difficult than they think. <br /><br />I love democracy in my art, whether it be Walt Whitman or Carl Sandburg or Robert Frank. That dedication to democracy—no one image is more important than another, all things are equally valid subjects for photography—is what I love most about Eggleston. He takes the banal and creates something sublime of it. <br /><br />Photography is, like a few other pursuits I enjoy, something I feel I have some talent for, but I lack the discipline to perfect. And when I started taking pictures, without my realizing it, I was ripping Eggleston off. Not because I'd seen his work, or even knew who he was, but simply because his influence was so prevalent. I had the same experience when I discovered the Beats and realized that my own writing was similar to theirs due entirely to the fundamental nature of their work. The same way any American teenager who picks up a guitar and starts playing rock and roll songs is going to, whether they know it or not, owe something to Robert Johnson and Hank Williams and Chuck Berry. <br /><br />Still, it's hard to shake the feeling of remarkable synchronicity. Imagine the feeling I had when I saw these Eggleston photos, compared to my own pictures, taken years ago with that old Pentax:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI1k0rkrBPeVTJWMDgkvkbDEQCFl70b9wPN-54hnbt_8zwA0VTB3z9SZwA7qCeqOxtp1jJyWUSH-CR7Bv_48HXapZa4ma3bRYd8mFpePN1vNISV-Slh4Vy93eP1ZbuOaf8NHKR_9boKBU/s1600-h/eggleston.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 281px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI1k0rkrBPeVTJWMDgkvkbDEQCFl70b9wPN-54hnbt_8zwA0VTB3z9SZwA7qCeqOxtp1jJyWUSH-CR7Bv_48HXapZa4ma3bRYd8mFpePN1vNISV-Slh4Vy93eP1ZbuOaf8NHKR_9boKBU/s400/eggleston.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5433813913445261122" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgNIcNiuE9tugxZUGMrppIZR1gccWXS6SjkxvGS7R8Zl1XRPWcqxhBF7aTvq6mOJHL4T208lSCZsXc8LIawL_KV_w5T5kQBRpm9LBt_Ws1CGvcU_U1zSgV76m85I6HKM4HHEnenNFDyIk/s1600-h/5n_a.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 272px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgNIcNiuE9tugxZUGMrppIZR1gccWXS6SjkxvGS7R8Zl1XRPWcqxhBF7aTvq6mOJHL4T208lSCZsXc8LIawL_KV_w5T5kQBRpm9LBt_Ws1CGvcU_U1zSgV76m85I6HKM4HHEnenNFDyIk/s400/5n_a.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5433814176162960994" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho62W1yuMJzBdnuYfsx0d0af3vlDtlcVqX0kQIvFg5xtD9djSc8vJjwuOJewluE_lWRvO28Os25orx1RijSk3nbf-F5stEZyD6gwBdOD65zh3FDClw668ueDljUGsA0-HSohyphenhyphenHIzXHtU8/s1600-h/eggleston2.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 271px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho62W1yuMJzBdnuYfsx0d0af3vlDtlcVqX0kQIvFg5xtD9djSc8vJjwuOJewluE_lWRvO28Os25orx1RijSk3nbf-F5stEZyD6gwBdOD65zh3FDClw668ueDljUGsA0-HSohyphenhyphenHIzXHtU8/s400/eggleston2.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5433814396099034402" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQFwGer1BIsqFVFL8Cg2N0p8q0nr6-9c2c9eFH5eVu8pha4d6T-MKSMPAza5du5gKaZ1W-sLD781dkBexJWvflXeLEK2CHFG7Zskj5TE2qQng-yqmoVE71Z8nEPNwXpgKjux5L90gbdIE/s1600-h/6n_a.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 276px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQFwGer1BIsqFVFL8Cg2N0p8q0nr6-9c2c9eFH5eVu8pha4d6T-MKSMPAza5du5gKaZ1W-sLD781dkBexJWvflXeLEK2CHFG7Zskj5TE2qQng-yqmoVE71Z8nEPNwXpgKjux5L90gbdIE/s400/6n_a.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5433814602248019202" /></a><br /><br />It was like meeting a kindred spirit.Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-72909666331903674872010-01-12T03:32:00.003-06:002010-01-12T03:45:46.997-06:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiu7i553FucmLvkwtyRINLenNUoNP3CGbl3rnst0g0wqRYh02UywTBwdV11T4b2qb06jJnYcdl1WCsXiqdP8BaeHOOm-DxgliUSapQ4iueFBtSygs6IbwsxyihWHCPuiR6ZI3YEP0CXpk/s1600-h/108461_cameron-diaz-points-two-guns-behind-tom-cruises-head-as-they-film-knight-and-day-in-seville-spain-on-december-9-2009.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 290px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiu7i553FucmLvkwtyRINLenNUoNP3CGbl3rnst0g0wqRYh02UywTBwdV11T4b2qb06jJnYcdl1WCsXiqdP8BaeHOOm-DxgliUSapQ4iueFBtSygs6IbwsxyihWHCPuiR6ZI3YEP0CXpk/s400/108461_cameron-diaz-points-two-guns-behind-tom-cruises-head-as-they-film-knight-and-day-in-seville-spain-on-december-9-2009.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5425784730732837346" /></a><br /><br />Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz are going to be in some movie this summer, and there's a scene where he's got sunglasses on, and he's riding a Ducati motorcycle, and she's sitting in front of him with her legs around his waist, shooting two pistols over his shoulder. <br /><br />I can't really put into words just how tired, how <span style="font-style:italic;">exhausted</span> this photo made me the first time I saw it. People have been making movies for about a hundred and twenty years--haven't we gotten past this? How can anyone look at that picture and honestly get exited in any way about what they're looking at? <span style="font-style:italic;">Is everyone a god damn <span style="font-style:italic;">moron</span> but me?</span>Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-11475284710695913972009-12-28T22:18:00.004-06:002009-12-28T22:45:23.674-06:00Excuse me while I rally round the family<a href="http://3.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kvcu277o471qz6f9yo1_500.jpg">Ugh</a>.<br /><br />Dude, so a <span style="font-style:italic;">business</span> is using <span style="font-style:italic;">advertisements</span> to <span style="font-style:italic;">sell</span> things and then make <span style="font-style:italic;">money</span>? Disgusting.<br /><br />Sleep now in the fire!Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-10248887667856773172009-12-25T01:22:00.005-06:002009-12-25T18:24:29.388-06:00There's no more perfect place to give it all up<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE0tc_I8WrViK6OZyrmveZwuoydCEmVGkggMNMwhhU6Yn0kbJxDmEOzkt1UD7E-Gc3ec211Aa173PY3Pqm_u0w73OAmg7PCBOhYlgGS0CsYYGxy7EogZSSl2Y15q1vYUFMZvZReCe8L6E/s1600-h/vc.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 313px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE0tc_I8WrViK6OZyrmveZwuoydCEmVGkggMNMwhhU6Yn0kbJxDmEOzkt1UD7E-Gc3ec211Aa173PY3Pqm_u0w73OAmg7PCBOhYlgGS0CsYYGxy7EogZSSl2Y15q1vYUFMZvZReCe8L6E/s400/vc.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5419086747893608322" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">A man must make unpopular decisions surely from time to time<br />and a man can only stand what a man can stand:<br />it's a wobbly, volatile line<br /><br />A man must take his life in his own hands,<br />hit those nails on the head<br />And I respect a man who goes where he wants to be<br />even if he wants to be dead</span><br /><br />Of course, that's total bullshit. <br /><br />Goddamn, people do some stupid fucking shit sometimes.<br /><br />Vic Chesnutt,<br />11/12/64—12/25/09Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-55239891605465448842009-12-24T12:42:00.005-06:002009-12-24T13:16:25.512-06:00I used to spend a lot of time reading Glenn McDonald's music-review site <a href="http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=twas">The War Against Silence</a>. It was much more than just a music site, as any random sampling of a 20,000 word Shania Twain review can tell you. Rather, the site was, in McDonald's own words:"a weekly music-review column, and then a weekly column about music, and then a weekly column that was often inspired by music...It was against many things, beginning with but not necessarily including silence, and in favor of many more, including some of the things it was once against and eventually its own end."<br /><br />The site taught me a lot about music writing, about actually thinking about what music meant, or could mean, to you, and how to actually think about its larger worth. I think the most noteworthy thing about McDonald's writing is that his taste and mine only occasionally overlapped--I had no great interest in Japanese pop bands or Tori Amos records, but I wanted to know what he thought of them, and how his understanding of them could benefit me. I still miss the site.<br /><br />Anyway, the point I'm getting to is this, from McDonald's <a href="http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=twas&id=twas0256#entry1">review</a> of Low's <span style="font-style:italic;">Christmas</span> EP. It contains one of my favorite pieces of writing on the subject of the holidays, sums up and expresses a lot of similar feelings on my part, and I include it here:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">I hate Christmas for a host of small reasons, too, but most of them are variations on two fundamental objections. The first is that at least here in the US, Christmas is the single most egregious and pathologically self-contradictory example of systemic insincerity I regularly encounter, edging out the entertainment industry and the political process. "It's over-commercialized", everybody has been taught to grouse; even dissent has been co-opted, as if the problem is a matter of degree, and the holiday season would be a paragon of cultural discretion if only K-Mart would tone down the graphic design of its December circulars a little. Christmas isn't over-commercialized, it's <span style="font-style:italic;">defined</span> by commerce. The carefully meta-religious phrase "holiday season" isn't informed magnanimity; it's just pandering to a wider audience.<br /><br />The other big thing I hate about Christmas is that there's virtually nothing good about it that wouldn't be better if it were spread throughout the year. Gift-giving, decorations, baking, holiday parties, sending notes to people with whom you've fallen out of touch, donating to charity: all these noble pursuits, to the extent they are practiced at all, are compressed into a few frantic, resentment-laced weeks, and then forgotten about for the next eleven months. You could contend that without Christmas, even this much wouldn't happen, but I'm not actually that cynical. Take away the inertia towards scheduled solicitude, and I think we would devise healthier alternatives of our own. Without Christmas, I'm almost certain I would do more. I suspect many would. We would celebrate, and give, of our own volition, and in our own terms, and on our own time. And the component of joy, which seems so elusive as we struggle through December traffic snarls and fight like ill-bred zombies over whatever objects' commercials most crassly exploited our emotional vulnerabilities this year, would, I stubbornly believe, have a genuine chance to infuse our actions, rather than being crushed by their logistics. It saddens me, every year, that in a way we never get to find out how good-hearted we are, how willing we would be to touch each other even if the enormous klaxons at Macy's and Amazon.com didn't go off the day after Thanksgiving.<br /><br />Our real gifts are given the moment we write each other's names on a list, the moment that we realize we care about each other enough to brave the swirling debris of a mangled holiday to include each other in what, if we squint and imagine, it might once have signified. </span>Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-5973280199095247822009-12-17T04:04:00.009-06:002010-01-17T19:52:01.953-06:00"<span style="font-style:italic;">...the many things you owe these latest dead...</span>"<br /><br />"<span style="font-style:italic;">He told me once that he wanted to take on everything at one time and conquer it all just so he could feel indestructible.</span>"<br /><br />I have no idea how to begin this, so I'll just say it: it's been a year now since my friend Mike died. Up until this point, I've resisted trying to write something, because it seemed so goddamn hard, and I thought that maybe, with the distance afforded me by the passage of time, I could get some kind of a grip on the situation, some sort of perspective, and talk about it in some kind of meaningful way. But I haven't, and I suspect I never really will. All the insight this year has yielded is that he's dead, and I wish he wasn't, and it still hurts that he is.<br /><br />As best I can remember, I met Mike sometime in early 2006, in the corridor of Bronson Hall at LSUS. I don't think we spoke at all. He was friends with my roommate Charlotte, and we would see him off and on around town, but he didn't come around a lot. My initial reaction was that he was kind of aloof and distant, which was not entirely untrue.<br /><br />But for whatever reason he started dropping by our place a lot more, and whatever reserves I'd had about him melted as I discovered that we shared a common language of books and movies and comics and music. He did freelance work for a local paper, so we had journalism in common as well. I don't think I've ever met anyone who was so much on my own wavelength culturally, and I know I've never known anyone who owned so many books. Frequently, my first thought when running across some book or album or magazine article was that I couldn't wait to run it by Mike, or to ask his opinion. <br /><br />In the six months or so leading up to his death, we had begun to grow closer as friends. On Wednesday nights, he played trivia at a local pizza place, with the first place prize being two free pizzas. After I joined his team, our group routinely placed first. Other friends of mine sometimes wanted to come along, and I never actively discouraged them, but privately I always preferred to keep it as something between us. <br /><br />Some things he loved: Captain Beefheart and Guided By Voices; William S. Burroughs and Alan Moore and The White Album; Moon Knight, John Coltrane, and John Sayles; Captain America and baseball and Superman; hobos and yeggs and second-story men. Whiskey and coffee and cigarettes.<br /><br />He had a kind of offhand, effortless cool. He was a few years older than me, and had lived in Athens, Georgia during the Elephant Six years, roomed with Andrew Rieger from Elf Power, was casual friends with Jeff Mangum, and is listed as playing organ on the self-titled Circulatory System album. It's to his credit that he never went out of his way to mention these things; I discovered his name on the Circulatory System album while searching his name online. He was not the sort of person who felt the need to remind you of how awesome he thought he was. As the son of a prominent local doctor, he came from money, but he never carried himself in the way of a rich kid: I'm sure his family helped him out, but they didn't support him, and I always respected that tremendously. <br /><br />If you needed to know something about a movie or whether or not Grant Morrison's run on <span style="font-style:italic;">Justice League of America</span> was any good or what the coolest figure in Aztec mythology was, Mike was a good source of information. He knew a lot about local history--if you needed to know where something in town was, he could usually tell you, but only after he'd first let you know what it used to be, and when it was built, and what was across the street. And it wasn't that he was trying to sound like a show-off; he just wanted to share what he knew.<br /><br />The temptation, in these sorts of situations, is to try to paint the sunniest possible picture of the person, but I've always felt that overplaying someone's virtues is as dishonest as harping on their faults. Mike had his problems, like anyone else: he could be overly dour, and there was something in his demeanor that suggested a kind of haughtiness that was largely nonexistent, but I could never fault anyone who assumed on first meeting him (as I did) that he had an arrogance about him. But he was also incredibly thoughtful and generous: he went to California last summer and upon returning, he presented me with a book he'd bought—it wasn't a huge gesture, but it was entirely unexpected, and oddly touching. <br /><br />I remember the last time I saw him, three days before he died. We were at Charlotte's house, and it was time to go home. It was late, but I was still very much awake. Mike seemed to be lingering, as if he didn't want to go. I thought I would drag my heels a bit, too, and see if he was up for something. But in the end I went on downstairs to my my car ahead of him. I still sat and waited, though, thinking he might stop when he saw that I was still there. <br /><br />But he didn't. I watched in the side-view mirror as he walked to his car, then started my own and drove home. It's the last living memory I have of him, a tiny figure haloed with frost, moving across the face of a mirror and then off into darkness.<br /><br />And I regret that I didn't stop him, didn't ask him if he wanted to hang out or watch a movie. I regret that I didn't get to talk to him one last time. These are regrets that are common to everyone who knew Mike. He was someone you were always happy to see on your doorstep, and always sad to see go. I never had a bad time when Mike was around.<br /><br />When I got the news I didn't believe it. On a purely rational, reasoning level I did; I knew it was true. But there was a completely irrational voice underneath that was insisting that it was a mistake—Mike might be hurt, or in the hospital, or they <span style="font-style:italic;">thought</span> he was dead, but everything would be cleared up, the facts would be made clear, and we'd all feel stupid for making such a foolish assumption. This, of course, was wrong. We pulled up to his house in time to see them wheeling the body away. It was a fucking horrifying sight, but even then, deep down, there was a desire to refuse to accept reality. <br /><br />A few months before, Mike and I watched <span style="font-style:italic;">Gonzo</span>, the Hunter S. Thompson documentary, and we left the theater discussing how massively Thompson had failed himself—first abandoning his talents and then, when the will to fight became too much for him, abandoning his own life. Thompson didn't have the heart to get old and keep kicking ass, but Mike did, which makes his death all the more senseless and tragic. He had so much more work to do, and so much more fun to have, and so much more life to live. <br /><br />He is dead, but only in the most meaningless sense of the word. Death doesn't even begin to stand a chance against a person like Mike. None of us knew him as long or as well as we would have liked, but all of us are better for the time spent with him, and worse for all the time we will, for the rest of our own lives, be without.<br /><br />"<span style="font-style:italic;">He smoothed his clothes and calmly stepped through the door, emerging from years of depression, uncertainty, and chaos, and into a world of gleaming hope. He strutted the few short steps to his car, fresh and glad, and drove away knowing that at that moment he was perfect.</span>"<br />--Mike SchwalkeYoung Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-88024595385259938562009-12-02T01:29:00.008-06:002009-12-06T03:39:51.989-06:00A couple of weeks ago, I went to the <a href="http://www.robinsonfilmcenter.org/">Robinson Film Center</a> for a rough-cut screening of the documentary <a href="http://www.carnivalesquefilms.com/Invisible_Girlfriend.html"><span style="font-style:italic;">Invisible Girlfriend</span></a>. The film focuses on Charles, who lives in Monroe, Louisiana, and who is in love with the statue of Joan of Arc on Decatur Street in New Orleans. Charles is convinced that “Joanie's” physical manifestation is a bartender named Dee Dee, who he is infatuated with. Since Charles's driver's license is suspended, he buys a bicycle and decides to ride it to New Orleans, some four hundred or so miles to the south. Along the way, he has a series of odd encounters with a number of genuinely strange and engaging people<br /><br />I'm still not completely sure how I feel about the movie. I saw it with Lindsay, and while I agree that some of her <a href="http://ohwaitiforgot.com/?p=162">criticisms</a> are accurate, I don't feel they detract from the overall effect of the film. There are a handful of beautiful shots throughout and, while some of them don't entirely work, or are somewhat clumsy, or lose focus, this is simply because the camera being used just can't handle the conditions it's used to shoot in, creating an extremely grainy or unsteady image. I can live with this. Bitching about a blurry shot or a little grain when a movie has been shot by literally two people is like complaining that <span style="font-style:italic;">Bee Thousand</span> doesn't sound like <span style="font-style:italic;">The Colour And The Shape</span>. <br /><br />There's the inevitable and more concerning question of exploitation, but watching the movie, I never got the impression that Charles was being manipulated or that scenes were in some way scripted. And while Charles is certainly crazy (and though he comes across as more or less harmless, you get the definite impression that his illness has taken darker turns in the past), the film never paints him as some kind of Funny Crazy Guy and never portrays schizophrenia as any kind of fun. Charles is extremely candid and clear-headed in his discussions about mental illness, and during the aftershow Q&A, which he and the filmmakers attended, he was remarkably lucid—though he still seemed to believe that his invisible girlfriend was with him. <br /><br />Initially, I was troubled by the fact—revealed by Charles during the Q&A—that making the four hundred mile journey by bicycle was actually the idea of the filmmakers. This alone should probably have been enough to cause an outright dismissal of the whole movie, I thought. But, really, so what? The scenes that work best in the film—a farmer proudly showing off his muzzleloader while waiting for a calf to be born; a man who owns a ruined riverboat that he claims belonged to FDR; an old married couple who provide Charles dinner and discuss Walt Disney's cryogenically frozen corpse; a man who owns a strange roadside attraction dedicated to dead US Soldiers, and who breaks down crying while looking over their photos—are absolutely real. <br /><br />That reality is reinforced in the film's conclusion, which is completely unexpected, focusing on one of those moments when you've been utterly blindsided by tragedy in some public place and you wind up all alone, walled up with your grief, your pain soundtracked by some idiotic song (in this case, a live version of The Doors' “Roadhouse Blues”) blaring in the background. It might be <span style="font-style:italic;">Invisible Girlfriend</span>'s single best moment. <br /><br />The movie's not perfect. And it might not even be completely "real", but it's close enough, I guess.Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-55609682103762592182009-11-25T02:48:00.002-06:002009-11-25T02:57:57.392-06:00I don't know if he writes for <span style="font-style:italic;">Rolling Stone</span> anymore, but when he did, <a href="http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/">Matt Taibbi</a> was essentially the only good thing about that magazine. He is vicious and funny and I love his work, especially when he manages to articulate some point that I find myself unable to fully or more artfully express.<br /><br />For example:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Just as she had during the campaign last fall, Palin defied rational analysis by making a primal connection with the subterranean resentments of white middle America, which is apparently so pissed off now at the rest of the planet for not coddling its hurt feelings in the multicultural age that it is willing to embrace any politician who validates its insane sense of fucked-overness.<br /><br />Nobody understands this political reality quite like Palin, even if she doesn’t actually understand it in the sense of someone who thinks her way to a conclusion, but merely lives it, unconsciously, with the unerring instinct of a herd animal.<br /><br />...Sarah Palin [is] the perfect leader for the inevitable pushback against the Obama era, when America in a vague and superficial sort of way decided to celebrate the values of culture, tolerance and knowledge. The other America doesn’t read and doesn’t remember anything it didn’t learn in the last five minutes; it’s angry and unhappy but doesn’t want to think about why, and knows only that it wants someone to pay the price for what it feels.<br /></span>Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4756038469285507161.post-70037971824013799402009-10-30T01:13:00.002-05:002009-10-30T04:06:40.301-05:00The Privilege of ExchangeI've been thinking about that short story “The Gift of the Magi”—anyone remember it? It's one of those they always make you read in school, along with “The Most Dangerous Game” and “The Lottery”. It's an O. Henry (the author not the candy bar)story, which means that it has a crazy twist at the end. Or at least that was supposed to be his trademark. I've never read anything else the guy ever wrote, as far as I know, but in your English textbook, if you check the author bio before the story, they will not fail to mention how famous he was for his surprise twist endings, making O. Henry sort of the M. Night Shyamalan of his day, I guess.<br /><br />(Keep in mind that I have not read this story since I was probably thirteen years old, so I may have some of the details slightly wrong, but don't worry, I remember the main plot points.)<br /><br />ANYWAY, “The Gift of the Magi.” It's a story about Jim and Della, a young couple who are staring down the barrel of their first Christmas together, and they are broke. This is causing some problems for the two of them, because neither can afford to get the other a Christmas gift. Della, the girl, has long beautiful hair, and she loves her husband Jim very much, and she wants to do something really nice for him. So she goes and she has her long beautiful hair cut off, and then she sells it so someone can make a really cool wig out of it. Heartbreaking! She then takes her hair-money and uses it to buy a really nice watch-chain for Jim. This is awesome, the power of love at work, etc. And she goes home and she puts the chain in a fancy box and waits for Jim to get home from working at Mr. Scrooge's counting house or wherever it is a dude worked back then in those days.<br /><br />So then Jim comes home and before she can give him the fancy watch-chain, he tells her that he has a gift for her, and hands over a box of his own. And so they sit down opposite one another and open up the presents. Bored to tears yet? Well, don't worry, because this is where it gets good. You see, while Della has gone and sold her hair to buy Jim a watch-chain, Jim has sold his pocketwatch to buy Della a beautiful set of silver combs and brushes! The irony is just too much, and they realize that—I don't know, love is good, and it's the thought that counts and all that stuff. It is a beautiful and well-crafted story that is beloved by young and old all the world over.<br /><br />But here's the thing. <br /><br />Della's hair—her long, beautiful hair—that shit is going to grow back, and she will be able to use her fine silver combs and brushes and whatnot. But Jim? Jim is shit out of luck—he's not going to be growing a new pocketwatch anytime soon. He totally gets the shaft in this story. A better ending would be, instead of the two of them gently laughing and being grateful to be young and in love and so on, if Jim said “Well, Della, tell you what—in three months when your hair grows back, we'll go sell your combs and stuff and buy me another watch. That way the two of us will be back at square one, you with hair that you can't comb and me with a watch I can't swing around on a chain. Otherwise, this is some god-damn bullshit.” <br /><br />You know. Something like that.Young Stalinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07325726687954849849noreply@blogger.com0