Hermenautic Circle blog

Like GLaDOS sings, I'm still alive. (And thinking about teaching myself that song on the ukulele.) I took another trip to NYC, I went to New York Comic-Con and two very different seders, I came home, I read fiction I'd sort of written in front of an audience, I delivered "remarks" at a party, I went to Stumptown Comics Fest, I've been cranking away on a couple of work-related things and updating Circle the Globe and Mincing Up the Morning and occasionally posting to The Savage Critic(s) and doing my weekly radio show for Shouting Fire. Where, if you'd been listening this week, you'd have heard: - Aram Saroyan: Crickets (theme) - Eno/Moebius/Roedelius: The Belldog - Superchunk remixed by Mark Robinson: Eastern Terminal - Arthur Russell: Get Around to It - Laila France: David Hamilton - Einstürzende Neubauten: NNNAAAMMM - Mecca Normal: Water Cuts My Hands - Little Richard: Brown Sugar - Ida: Worried Mind Blues - Can: The Million Game - Carl Harvey: Guitar Inferno - Maybe It's Reno: Feathers and Wings Plus: both parents and in-laws visiting! Also: learning the difference between activity and productivity! And: planning out the summer! My friends, if you're thinking I might be missing you right now, you are almost certainly right.

Beatles appear in this Godard movie? [MORE] B[r]eat[h]les[s]

Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD, who accidentally ingested some and then found out what it was really for, died today.

I met him in the 90’s in LA, back during the psychedelic “revival.” Maybe now there will be another one.

Hoffman was a soft-spoken and friendly fellow, always ready to answer a query without making you feel stupid for asking. That’s the kind of scientist I like.

(Weirdly, Hoffman’s death is not in his Wikipedia article yet.)

Martin Isaac has added a photo to the pool:

Get Out of My Sky
Selected by LEO MARGULIES

Three great short novels of space and time by James Blish, Poul Anderson, and Thomas N. Scortia

First CREST printing, March 1960
Cover price: 2'6

From the back cover:
CHILLBINDING TALES OF THE UNFORESEEN

A choice collection of thrilling and terrifying adventures into the unknown worlds of tomorrow by three master craftsmen of the science-fiction suspense story.

GET OUT OF MY SKY James Blish
SISTER PLANET Poul Anderson
ALIEN NIGHT Thomas N. Scortia

The Curious Koltsevaya Line, submmitted by Shannon Cassidy.

Every time I speak, people ask me about new media and money - namely, how to make money through the internet. And they always bring up Rupert Murdoch. He wouldn’t have bought the Wall Street Journal if he didn’t think there was money in it, right?

Right, but wrong. There’s money for Murdoch in buying the Journal, but not the money you’re thinking about. What Murdoch wants is a respectable business brand. The WSJ is that. It was actually a profitable online business, too - their articles were valuable enough for people to pay real money to access them.

But that’s not the money Murdoch wants. Murdoch wants to spend the WSJ’s credibility on two very different things. First, he wants an international news brand for TV and the Internet. Fox is too O’Reilly-polluted to serve as a seemingly neutral source of authoritative financial news. WSJ has a good decade of international branding left in it before it would be totally watered down through overuse.

Second, the WSJ has enough credibility to influence markets. And that’s the real game being played here. The last of the credible top-down media companies will be employed in the continuing public relations strategy for deregulation, the stock market pyramid, or whatever else is in its owners’ interests. As people learn to look at bottom-up media for the credibility that top-down conglomerate-owned media must by definition lack, things will change again. This time for the better.

callmecoolchris has added a photo to the pool:

From Fantasy Centre, London.

callmecoolchris has added a photo to the pool:

From Fantasy Centre, London.

callmecoolchris has added a photo to the pool:

From Fantasy Centre, London.

callmecoolchris has added a photo to the pool:

From Fantasy Centre, London.

We've been so busy with the baby (yes she finally arrived) that I haven't had time to post anything. Check her out in her new deluxe swing!

Hazel and her sleep machine from michael lewy on Vimeo.

The RSS/Atom feeds should be working, now. I found a blank line in the functions.php file (for those of you who might be interested) which seemed to be generating an unwanted blank line before the xml thingee, which made some feed-readers break.

So now you should be able to subscribe to this blog (and, soon, my upcoming talks feed) by clicking on the orange button up and to your right.

For those of you unfamiliar with Feeds - most simply, it can create a mailbox for each of the blogs you read, right in your mail reader. New posts just show up, so you don’t have to prowl around the web to see who might have said something.

Now, back to work.

I was a junior in high school when I got my first kiss.

It wasn't because I didn't like girls, it was that I was petrified of them. And by my junior year, I was beginning to feel like the forty-year-old virgin. I mean, some of my classmates where having kids already and here I was.

I had met the girl when she moved into town my sophomore year. One of her parents was working with the same company my dad worked for. She had a car and lived nearby so she drove me to school. We became friends, but nothing more. In fact, she almost immediately began to date someone else, joined the cheer leading team, and became really popular. I took the smart classes and played on the soccer team. Not much more.

So they dated for a while and broke up over the summer. Though I didn't know it at the time, I think I was her rebound.

We probably went to a movie or two before the kiss. It happened when she was dropping me off at my house. We were in the driveway. She turned off the engine. My mouth went dry. It was plain daylight.

"You probably know I've never kissed anyone before," I said.

"I know."

"I don't even know what to do."

"Just lean back and close your eyes."

So I did, there, in the passenger seat, in my driveway, in plain sight of anyone and everyone.

I felt her coming closer.

When her lips touched mine I did an unexpected thing. I wrapped my arms around her tight and tried to shove my tongue as far down her throat as I possibly could.

It must have only lasted a few seconds and then she pulled away.

"How was it?" I said.

"It was a kiss."

"It was bad, I know. I'm sorry."

She shook her head.



Travis Leger
New Orleans

That is the apt title of the Columbia University fight song. It's odd that I remember it, because I can't have heard it more than once or twice--my time there was the absolute nadir of school-spiritism, fraternities, attendance at sporting events. The old traditions were dying like bugs in a jar, and I did my best to help see them off. Still, the song's sentiment was implicit in the university's conduct, an arrogance barely dented by the events of a few years earlier--forty years ago this month.

Columbia University in the spring of 1968 was preparing to construct a gymnasium in Morningside Park, a park outside the school's property line and used mostly by the residents of Harlem. Very generously (in its own view) the university would allow Harlemites--who in those days were nearly one hundred percent African American--use of the gym, as long as they entered through the back door. To make a complicated story very simple, Rap Brown informed the citizens of Harlem of Columbia's plan and Students for a Democratic Society informed the students, and very soon the campus was enjoying an occupation and a strike. The gym, and the Jim-Crow and land-grab matters it entailed, remained at the center of the outrage, although Vietnam, corporate investment, institutional racism and elitism, the purpose and design of education, unthinking assent to social injustice, and dormitory visiting rules also entered the equation. Few people realize that Columbia's Spring '68 bacchanal preceded the one in Paris by several weeks.

A bacchanal it remained only briefly, though. The administration refused to negotiate with the striking students, the police came in with helmets and clubs and badge numbers blacked out, and they were abetted both by right-wing students and by the faculty, whose studied neutrality led them to block food deliveries to the strikers--their high-minded cowardice illustrates better than anything why "liberal" remained a vitriolic insult on the left for many years. Quite a lot of blood was shed. The police broke heads of people who were only standing up for principles. Nothing like it had been seen, at least not subsequent to the 1930s or north of Mississippi. If you want to read more, please see Hilton Obenzinger's extraordinary personal account, Busy Dying (Tucson: Chax, 2008).

I entered Columbia in the fall of 1972. The last real flare-up had occurred the previous May, when an antiwar demonstration led to a Days of Rage-style smashing of Fifth Avenue shop windows. I enthusiastically attended the semester's first meeting of SDS, only to have it turn out to be the meeting at which the local chapter dissolved itself. After that came political fatigue. I first heard the term "political correctness" then, but what it meant was that some campus politico would confront you on the Walk and ask where you stood on, say, the Polisario Front, and you knew it was a trick question--were they the true Spearhead of the People, or merely running-dog roaders for the CIA? Political involvement meant endless factional disputes, paranoia, poison. Lyndon LaRouche was prominent, as well as several competing varieties of Maoists. You can tell by looking at the eyes of the figure above what replaced political passion for the rest of us.

Despite the prop robes, I never bothered graduating, although to be fair I had a number of great teachers and happily lost myself in the vastness of the library, as well as making seven or eight friends who are still my friends. Not having graduated (nine incompletes; hundreds of dollars in library fines) did not prevent me from returning to teach there, in the MFA program, a couple of decades later. The place was no friendlier then than when I had been a student, maybe even less, since the Reagan years had infused a renewed spirit of entitlement, and the radical shift in the value of Manhattan real estate had considerably increased the institution's wealth. Right now Columbia is engaged in a wholesale annexation of West Harlem, proving that some things never change, although today there is little organized resistance and no publicity given to what there is. Anyway, the university is now only one of a hundred entities that could adopt the fight song as its own.

Photo by Matt Kennedy. And where is he now?

"I have painted thought." --Nicolas Poussin

"The magnificent light in Courbet's paintings is for me the same as that of the Place Vendôme, at the time the Column fell." --André Breton, Nadja

It's just occurred to me that I have less than a month to see shows at the Met by two of my favorite painters. For someone who runs a blog carrying a name that means "picture gallery," I've gotten very much out of the habit of visiting museums and galleries. And yet they were crucial to me once. If I had a single Damascus-road experience in my life, it was seeing Géricault’s "Raft of the Medusa" and Delacroix's "Massacre at Chios" at the Louvre when I was not quite nine years old. I went to high school a few blocks from the Met, when it was still free, and used to wander through at random, haunting it as if I were its ghost. When I was 20 and very earnest it seemed to me the whole point of traveling, to go see pictures in remote churches and unlikely state-run cultural complexes out in the middle of fuck-all.

Then, a few years later, I stopped. Why? Maybe it was the Met's Book of Kells show circa 1976, which as far as I'm aware began the era of massively hyped traveling exhibits with their advance ticketing and crowd control. Maybe it was the awkwardness of accompanying nice young ladies to museums on Sundays and shifting my weight from one foot to the other as they drank in the Monets. Maybe it was the increasing authority of the must-see dictates issued by the cultural commissars of the media in New York City. Maybe it was the time ten years ago when I visited the museum of fine arts in Lille, France, a vast train station of a museum laid out in an ellipse and stuffed with mediocrities, and I realized the best way to take in its holdings would be by bicycle or possibly roller skates. Maybe it was when I discovered that I derived more enjoyment and illumination from sifting through big piles of trash. But I figure I owe some discomfiture, at least, to Poussin and Courbet.

R. Walker posted a photo:

Park Rapids recently got two feet of snow in two days. Even the snowplows got stuck.

Needless to say, the Incident Report is saturated with rollovers and stuck-ness. Here is a selection of recent shenanigans:

A Park Rapids service counter representative reported an intoxicated customer; A pregnant woman reported being pushed and harassed by a male in Park Rapids; "Mudding" was reported on a closed forest road in Lakeport Township; A male was reported running southbound without a shirt, yelling for help with a bunch of guys chasing him in Farden Township (call cancelled, kids were making a video for YouTube); A caller reported he had a vehicle stolen and tracked it to a salvage yard, where it had been crushed; A water fountain was stolen from the Flower Boutique while in the process of moving; A stolen - and recovered- van was stuck in Straight River Township; Loud music and loud exhaust were reported in Park Rapids; A hitchhiker was reported flipping people off and "flashing" just west of Park Rapids; Passing on the right was reported in Straight River Township [note: this is reported on two separate days]; A male was reported to be possibly buying liquor for minors in Park Rapids; A verbal altercation was reported by Nevis School; A Park Rapids caller reported finding a locked safe under the Red Bridge; A male was reported trying to break down a door in Lake Hart Township, caller was hit in the face and cell phone taken; A field was on fire in Helga Township, imperiling buildings; Tires were taken from a vehicle parked at the county garage; Wood was reported stolen from property in Crow Wing Lake Township; A boat came off a trailer in Park Rapids; A young male reported his parents are in the ditch; A Hubbard Township caller reported his mother stuck in the ditch, twice.

The heifers, however, retain their typical pragmatism and foresight (as per caption.)

Interesting article in the globe today about the down economy hitting Roslindale. We were concerned when it didn’t even mention that we were leaving, until we noticed that they’d already taken our move into account by removing our building from the map. I love the idea that butchers and thrift stores are counter cyclical - [...]

Took some time off due to rl and spent time in-world only to work on Ada Lovelace exhibition. And I found I missed my mates...got that feeling that I used to get in high school when my parents would drag me off to the country on the weekends - that I was missing the big party, something really fantastic. There's no feeling of guilt, like in rl, when it comes to balancing relationships in rl and sl. RL comes first, no questions asked.

That said, I want to spend some time cultivating my in-world friendships. Colleen and I just met a really wonderful gal, Wynn Grumiaux (there she is above, with her goggles on). She creates dioramas in an underground bunker she calls home, setting a mysterious scene full of artifacts; the fragment of a note, a book open to a specific page, a bottle full of mysterious liquid, a buzzing machines which invites you to twirl its knobs. The visitor wonders, what happened here? Wynn dresses for every occasion and is one of the wittiest chicks...she came up with a fabulous steampunk name for herself - Monocle Lewinski.

Anyway, back to blogging. I've got other plans which I've been putting off - furrydom and creating an alt. So, my dear, few and far between readers, onwards into the aetherworld...

Birmingham Phil has added a photo to the pool:

I've got hundreds of these - literally. Green Penguins, Orange Penguins, Pelicans, old Pan and all sorts of other miscellaneous 1950's type literature.

They were my old Dad's.

The artwork on many of them is extraordinarily good. All done by hand of course - fantastic.

Birmingham Phil has added a photo to the pool:

I've got hundreds of these - literally. Green Penguins, Orange Penguins, Pelicans, old Pan and all sorts of other miscellaneous 1950's type literature.

They were my old Dad's.

The artwork on many of them is extraordinarily good. All done by hand of course - fantastic.

Birmingham Phil has added a photo to the pool:

I've got hundreds of these - literally. Green Penguins, Orange Penguins, Pelicans, old Pan and all sorts of other miscellaneous 1950's type literature.

They were my old Dad's.

The artwork on many of them is extraordinarily good. All done by hand of course - fantastic.

Just back home from Comic-Con, where I had the unique pleasure of doing a “conversation” with Scott McCloud, moderated by Marianne Petit.

I’ve received dozens of emails from people who were unable to attend, asking if there’s a transcript anywhere. Turns out there’s a lot better: a full video and an audio podcast, along with some commentary from the brilliant folks at DailyCrosshatch.

The conversation, as well as the whole convention, made me feel quite at home in comics again, after a brief hiatus to get caught up on my regular book. Honestly, there’s nothing like comics, and I feel like we’re still safely insulated from some of the forces that are diluting the power of alternative media. It’s safe here on the margins.

Here’s the first part of the discussion, which amounts to a monologue from me about what attracted me to comics, and why McCloud had such an impact on me and my comic Testament.

I found the anniversary of my Dad's death, on St. Patrick's Day, more difficult to manage this year than ever before. And so too with the anniversary of his birth, today, St. George's Day. Previously on these occasions, I've been surrounded by familiarity; things familiar to both of us: London, my school friends, the Times, Arsenal, Vic Reeves, Broadstairs. But this year, I'm surrounded by the unfamiliar. There is nothing and nobody around me that he ever knew or ever will know. There is no fabric connecting the now me to the me when he was alive. I feel like I have drifted away from him. I missed him terribly on St. Patrick's Day and I miss him terribly today.


So my Mum's card, cheesy and sentimental though it was, helped soothe the deep wound. It didn't mention my Dad but it didn't need to.


I have a complicated relationship with my Mum. Distance, disconnection, denial. And all three in abundance since I've moved to Los Angeles. But sometimes I'll see a glimmer of something and remember why, despite all, I love her and always will.

A short trip to Austin earlier this month felt like a homecoming, even though I’ve never been there before. I’ve rarely been bombarded with so much music, with so little planning or effort, for so long into the night, since I left Chicago for California more than two decades ago. Austin is the sort of place where you venture out for coffee after your night of music and find out that the coffeehouse (in this case, Jo’s Hot Coffee on South Congress) has its own house band playing a bang-up set of western swing. A record store mural across the street from the UT/ Austin campus registers the city’s sense of music history: among others, Buddy Holly, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash share wall space with Dylan, Iggy, and the Clash.

If one figure spans all those influences, it is the provocateur, painter, raconteur and raver Jon Langford. The Welsh-born Leeds-to-Chicago transplant and Bloodshot Records mainstay has—in the 23-year stretch dating from the Mekons’ often-mentioned, seldom heard Fear and Whiskey—done more than just about anyone else to resuscitate the withered heart of post-punk and reclaim the tarnished soul of American country. In Austin, I was thrilled to discover that the Yard Dog Gallery has a fantastic collection of Langford’s visual art, mostly densely layered, distressed images of iconic American roots musicians in graveyard settings. Blindfolded, sullied and marked for extinction, the characters remind me of Chicago artist Ivan Albright’s studies of decay and corruption; constantly “dancing with death,” they are unsettlingly alive and a reminder of the slow death that comes out of greed, fear and homogenization.

As a curmudgeonly first-generation art school punk who writes lines like “John Glenn drinks cocktails with God at a café in downtown Saigon,” Langford is smart enough to realize he doesn’t play or paint “authentic” honky tonk any more than Vampire Weekend is a gang of African tribesmen. And unlike some of his retro-worshipping peers, he acknowledges that the “golden age” of county music had its own problems with pills and pretenders and poor directions. Yet he uses his outsider’s distance as an advantage. While bemoaning the death of country music at the hands of what he calls “suburban rock music with a cowboy hat on,” Langford’s work cuts deeper than that, excavating the signs of life in a cultural landscape pockmarked with interchangeable strip malls and Kenny Chesney records. There’s also a redemptive element in the search; like his protagonist in his Waco Brothers anthem “Hell’s Roof,” he’s reclaiming a lost history, “walking on hell’s roof, looking at the flowers” (and not “walking in a clown suit, looking at the flowers,” as I misheard Langford’s impassioned growl for more than a year).

Jon Langford, “Hell’s Roof”

Many of Langford’s paintings are collected in Langford’s 2006 book Nashville Radio: Art, Words and Music, which intersperses his artwork with lyrics and some unforgettable stories. One of my favorites involves Jon and the gang in East Berlin just before the wall fell, unable to buy souvenir Stalinist bric-a-brac with their worthless East German marks; another, during their short brush with near-fame following the release of 1989’s Mekons Rock and Roll, found A&M cofounder/ vice-chairman Herb Alpert’s secretary forging an autograph on a CD for Langford’s mother: “Dear Mrs. Langford, you have a fine and talented son—Herb Alpert” (sadly, Alpert himself was never present to shower them in whipped cream and other delights).

The Nashville Radio book also comes with a thoroughly enjoyable 18-song CD, The Nashville Radio Companion Earwig, which contains powerful acoustic renditions of some of Langford’s most striking country-related songs, supported by a strong cast of Langford comrades including singer Sally Timms, bassist Tony Maimone, and violinist Jean Cook. Earwig is an indispensable treat if, like me, you find it too daunting to keep up with every release of Langford’s many groups (to name a few, the Three Johns, the Waco Brothers, the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, the Sadies, Ship and Pilot, and even a children’s music band, the Wee Hairy Beasties). Keeping up with these could be a full-time job. The Waco Brothers just put out Waco Express, a first-rate live album recorded in Chicago. On April 27, Victory Gardens in Chicago will debut a theatrical version of Langford’s 2004 solo concept album, All the Fame of Lofty Deeds.

All of Jon Langford’s bleak musing about commerce and decaying culture could come off as misanthropic and pretentious if he didn’t spend most of his time being genial and side-splittingly funny. If you find yourself in a Langford book-buying mood, don’t miss his amazing turn (under the moniker Chuck Death) as the illustrator of the cynical, hilarious and usually dead-on music criticism cartoon book Great Pop Things, penned by his Pythonesque partner in crime Colin B. Morton. In its only slightly fictionalized history, the bass player in Led Zeppelin was Jean-Paul Sartre. Brian Eno is credited with the creation of “ambivalent music, which you can’t quite tell if you are listening to it or not.” Bono gets mercilessly tweaked, and Morrissey takes it on the chin more than once. Robert Christgau reports that at the EMP Conference, Langford defended himself against charges of cynicism by saying, “We really like all these people. Except Sting, of course.”

Mekons, “Ghosts of American Astronauts”

Mekons, “Memphis Egypt”

Waco Brothers, “Death of Country Music”

It all began a year ago. It was a premature present for my dead father whose birthday is tomorrow.


An incredible amount has happened to me in that time. I left a job, left England, got divorced, got married, applied for a Green Card and, today, received an Employment Authorization Card.


The sense of completeness after a solid year of posting and the impending reduction in my spare time as I re-enter the full-time paid workforce (crossing over from the sporadic volunteer workforce) mean that my Modus Eundi persona can start to relax. I will no longer be whipping myself into ensuring that a post exists for every day of the year. I won't go out looking for things to photograph or write about. I won't push myself to dredge and analyse the recesses of my memory. Sometimes, things will crop up that will inspire me to take pictures, think and write. And I will think, take pictures and write. Sometimes, nothing will crop up or I won't feel like thinking, taking pictures or writing. So I won't.


I'm going full-time. Modus Eundi is going part-time. Stick around.

The subject, a recent immigrant approximately nine years of age, was asked to depict his mother. It was specified that he should present her in a particular context of his choosing: a setting or activity. The resulting picture is of considerable interest. The woman is only marginably noticeable, and then only because her coat presents the largest single expanse of white space in the composition. Clearly, the subject entirely subordinates maternal affection to the far greater stimulus of commercial consumption. For that matter, the nature of the consumer products themselves is of secondary interest; the subject is enthralled by packaging, and above all by names.

Because the composition is so crowded and frenetic, it is worthwhile to break down its constituent parts. The woman is pushing a shopping cart overloaded with products down a supermarket aisle. It would seem to be aisle six: coffee, tea, juice, soda. The items heaped in the cart seem at least partly stereotypical: the protruding head of celery in particular is a trope familiar from myriad cartoons and illustrations. It might likewise be doubted whether she purchases toothbrushes on a regular basis, and ditto for "wax"--presumably floor wax. Other items seem more likely to be true to his actual experience of grocery shopping: that the sack of potatoes has been placed in the cart's bottom tray, for instance, or the exact replication of the Fritos logo, or the prominence of the detergent Beads O' Bleach.

But even the groceries in the cart are overwhelmed by the serried ranks of products on the shelves, which are depicted in disproportionate scale. The boxes of Lipton tea bags are nearly the size of the cart itself. (The curious symbol on the boxes represents the subject's attempt to come to terms with the concept of the tea bag. Coming from a coffee-drinking culture, he had only ever experienced tea bags as pictures on boxes, and averred he thought they looked like "pants on a hanger.") It is fascinating to observe the rigor with which the subject records brand names, even the ones that make no sense to him, resulting in solecisms: "Early' Morn" for "Early Morn'" and "Chock O' Full Nuts" for "Chock Full O' Nuts."

A strong reaction to American consumer abundance is typical of recent immigrants. It can take various forms: hysterical blindness, catatonic undifferentiation, at least eighteen catalogued types of aphasia. The delirium on view here, in conjunction with the subject's powers of observation, leads us to predict that he will become a highly achieving adult, one who will subordinate all other drives and desires to the acquisition of brand-name goods. He will work three jobs, if necessary, to purchase the latest model automobile, equipped with all the premium features--such a goal, in any event, will encouragingly overshadow romance or idealism. If the subject is properly steered, he will actually work three jobs to achieve his goals. The danger remains that he may choose to rob service stations instead. The subject should therefore be closely and carefully tracked, but for now we do not recommend deportation.

Last time I found myself running around Echo Lake, I looped it five times and speculated on how many loops would light the fuse of dementia.


Today, I looped the lake six times. Only the need to get home and get on with the day stopped me running more. The first few laps are tough. You're conscious of the repetition. You tell yourself that you need to break away from the lake and search for variation in the streets. Boredom dangles above you in a way that makes you think it might fall, smack you on the head and knock you out. But then you settle into the routine. You forget where you are. Or, more accurately, you disappear into your lungs, heart and head. It no longer matters whether you're circling a lake, bouncing on the rubber belt of a treadmill or zigzagging through the city grid of detritus. If I pushed myself to loop the lake as many times as I could, I'm pretty sure my body would give way before my mind .

The Labi Siffre records arrived and here's the full version of what I mentioned earlier, as it appears in the liner notes of Remember My Song, re: Eminem's sampling of "I Got The..." in his hit "My Name Is."

I've read several inaccurate reports about that song so I will clarify.
1) I wrote it (including the bass riff)
2) When asked to give permission for the sample to be used, I requested changes because I thought some of the lyric was lazy writing. Attacking two of the usual scapegoats, women and gays, is lazy writing.

If you want to be radical, if you want to do battle, attack the aggressors, not the victims. Attack the abusers of power. Attack theism (the new fascism). Attack Christian religious leaders who don't live in poverty, preferring not to emulate JC. Attack child abuse where most happens: in the home. Attack believers who incite the murder of wielders of free expression. Attack corrupt politicians and systems.

"Woman is the nigger of the world." Bravo Yoko. They do about 70% of the work, control about 1% of the resources. They bear most of the effects of war, famine and poverty. Around 80,000,000 of them have to put with the pain and medical problems of female genital mutilation purely to please the fragile egos of gutless men. How would Eminem 'n' Dre and their record company executives feel about having to piss through a straw for the rest of their bladder-infected lives. You wanna be radical? Attack sexism. Attack racism and heterosexism self-servingly euphemised as homophobia. It ain't a phobia. It's bigotry plain and simple, like racism--and no, just like heterosexuality, it ain't a preference, bro. Rant over.

Had it been original work, I would have noted it as the common currency of badly written rap (bitches, hoes 'n' fags) and got on with my stuff. But I don't want my work to be used that way. They made the changes. I gave my permission. It was a success. Smiles all around. End of story.

Plus how great is this album cover.

I've been asked a few times why I insist on having a Modus Eundi post for every day of the year. It's all down to the pathology of the self-punisher; I will beat myself with any rod I can find. I started out last year with a flurry of posts and, before I knew it, I had a whole week behind me. Conscious of how many blogs start with a bang and end with a fizzle, I became my own taskmaster. (I'm happiest and most miserable when I'm making arbitrary demands of myself.) I resolved not to let a day go by without a post; I could take time off, but I made myself return to the gaps and write retrospectively. No fizzling out allowed. And so it continued for a year.


On Tuesday, I will put the rod down and tell the taskmaster in me to piss off. I'm hoping that a weight will lift.

picture care of lolcats
The First Kiss Project is having some technical difficulties of late. But don't worry. We're working on it, and hope to be back soon with even more first kiss stories.

AP - NEW YORK - Rapper Foxy Brown is out of jail. Family and fans greeted Brown Friday outside Rikers Island as she was released from the jail after serving an eight-month sentence.

“The first place I want to go is church. I’ve got to get on my knees,” said Brown.

Instead, Brown went shopping in Harlem, had some soul food and was driven to her childhood home in Brooklyn in a white Rolls Royce Phantom.

jay: zing!

Her mother, Judith Marchand, presented her with smiley-face balloons and the two hugged outside the family’s home in the Prospect Heights neighborhood. A VH1 crew captured the reunion for an upcoming reality show.

“I did almost a year in prison, a year in prison, just because my name is Foxy Brown,” she said.

Brown, whose real name is Ingrid Marchand…

jay: zing! zing!

was sentenced in September 2007 to a year in jail for violating the terms of her probation after she was accused of hitting a woman with a cell phone. She was on probation for an August 2004 attack on two manicurists at a Manhattan nail salon.

jay: nice job on the subtle editorial, ap.

There's probably only 10% of Angelino Heights, the historic hilltop enclave where I live, that I haven't covered on foot. I bit a chunk out of that 10% today with a run along Bellevue and Boylston. I connected a couple of previously disconnected points in my mental map.


I wasn't expecting to get spat out onto Sunset but that's what happened. Short of ideas, I just stayed with it. Through its Cesar Chavez reincarnation; all the way to the river. And, instead of turning right and skulking through the railyards between 1st, 4th and 6th, I turned left and ran through the flag-waving windscreen repairmen and car undertakers of Mission.


A mechanical elephant is the perfect metaphor for this automotive zoo of an area.


I crossed back over the river along Main, which was a first. Unlike the many ghostly, asphalt-embedded freight tracks south of Union Station, the railroad crossings here feel live and dangerous.


After the river, I made for the breathing space of Los Angeles State Historic Park (nee The Cornfield).


I finished up by contemplating the logistics of a window chessboard of Chinatown graffiti.


And a solo white stiletto on Sunset that hinted at a sexual crime.

R. Walker posted a photo:

I have no idea why, but I find this sort of interesting.

A Taiwanese student whose writing I adore wrote in her essay about manga:

The "Black Jack" series is not popular here because America doesn't like a lesson in the dark; they like to say anything on the surface.

Amtrak trains are the opposite of polite children: they are heard but not seen. You can hear the rumbling when you walk under the platforms at Union Station. You can hear the distant honking and screeching at various places throughout the city. But you rarely see these shy beasts in their shiny steel flesh. Yesterday, though, as I took in a simple circuit of Cesar Chavez, Vignes Street and Spring Street, I glimpsed one. The sight made me hanker for a leisurely rail trip up or down the coast.


And I saw something else novel en route. I'd heard that the area of semi-beautified wasteland hugging the Gold Line just north of Chinatown and going by the old-time soubriquet of "The Cornfield" had been renamed and rebranded. But this was the first hard evidence I'd seen.


The clear postcard view of Downtown, juxtaposed with a hinterland track of weeds, dust and dirt, iced the cake and made an ordinary run slightly less ordinary.

Looks like Reading Comics got nominated for an Eagle Award, too!

NowMimi has added a photo to the pool:

NowMimi has added a photo to the pool:

Last weekend I loaded into the rock camp van with a couple of comrades and we went up to Seattle to check out the Pop Conference at the Experience Music Project. All conferences are essentially the same, I think: this structure of panels with three or four people saying different things about the same thing, or saying different things about different things, as it often turns out, followed by some windy and/or wonky audience questions, followed by everyone shuffling out for a ten-minute break and then shuffling into another room. The rooms are windowless, the chairs in rows, the panelists seated with their elbows resting on a beclothed folding table. This was all true at EMP, but the rooms were pretty cool--the one in the Sci-Fi museum part looked like it molten red lava or Mars or something. (Exhibit A: Douglas Wolk giving his funny and smart and well-technologically-endowed presentation on "The Battle of the Green Berets." Always such a pro.)

What's cool about the EMP Pop Conference is that the idea is to give writers and critics a forum to present their work like art--more like a festival than professional development. I won't go on at length about all I saw, I just want to hit on a couple pieces that really stuck with me, the ones where I left hungry to know more.

Charles Aaron, the music editor at Spin, delivered a really beautiful, heartfelt talk about Labi Siffre, whom I'd never heard of before. It was a simple talk, read straightforwardly from a paper, and at times it almost sounded like he had a lump in his throat. You could tell he really felt it, this love and respect for Labi Siffre, not just an analytical or academic interest.

Notes on Labi Siffre: He had a few hits in the 70s and 80s, notably "Something Inside So Strong," and Eminem and Kanye West have sampled his songs for some of their hits. Born to a Nigerian father and a Barbadian/Belgian mother. Gay. Met his partner when he was 19 and the partner 38, and they're still together. "Something Inside So Strong" is ostensibly an anti-apartheid anthem but the lyrics are straight-up liberation that could just as well be gay.

When Eminem came to him to clear the sampling rights for his first hit single, "My Name Is," Siffre said he'd do it only on the condition that he rewrite some sneery lyrics about a gay teacher. Eminem complied. In his own subsequent liner notes, Siffre wrote that we should go after aggressors, not victims--he said degrading women and gays is "lazy writing." In two words, that's the most succinct and apt critique I think I've read on that.

Siffre has a blog which is apparently his primary artistic output right now.


This guy spoke too. This is pretty much all I remember. A lot of stuff about Mudhoney.

The last talk I saw--because after it I couldn't imagine sitting through anything else--was Daphne Carr's paper correlating musicality with sexuality--namely, extreme loudness and masochism. This too was an intensely felt presentation, obvious in the occasional quaver and long pause as well as in the gradually more personal revelations, though it followed a more deliberate structure. First, the science of noise, and I loved all this, the way the sound is created from feedback, the physics and physiology of it. Our bodies are full of liquids that vibrate with sound; the proximity of other bodies alters and sets the co-vibration; even when you plug your ears, sound enters through your nose and mouth.

Then the social dynamics of live shows, etc., and finally she worked up to the heart of the piece, where musicality and sexuality meet. The punishment avenue to pleasure of masochistic sexuality=the painful intensity of experiencing noise. The noisemaker is not a sadist, she said, but a sadomasochist sympathetically offering pleasure to his fellow pain-seekers. Finally, a silent slideshow of rapidly shifting words and phrases, simple white text on black, then 3, 2, 1, period, and an immense noise blasted from the giant speakers, filling the room, heavy and all-encompassing. It went for about a minute. Shivers ran up and down my body again and again. It was visceral and awesome in the classic sense of the word.

End result: I ordered two Labi Siffre albums. I went to see Thurston Moore the other night and I thought about the sound traveling into me and the liquids in my body vibrating and co-vibrating. I even, I'll admit, opened my mouth for maximal admittance (Trees Outside the Academy is one of my favorites of late). I had gotten a little jaded about shows, like oh big deal, stand in a room for three hours, shifting from hip to hip, stretching up on tiptoes trying to peer around the huge dude inevitably planted in front of me. But now I got to thinking differently about it, the science and the sound of it, and I felt the way that live music is more than just sound and sight, that it's in your whole body, that it's a non-replicable feeling and experience. It revived my interest in going to shows and being in the singular moment. No camera. No saving it for later. Just being there and feeling it.

This I could stand to do more of in the rest of my life as well.

Runyon Canyon is a small, busy but pleasant enough oasis of wilderness in Hollywood.


Appropriately for a Hollywood attempt at being rural, it feels fake. It doesn't seem to belong.


Like a conveyor belt of soldier ants marching between resources and nest, the well-trodden circuit is in a constant, peopled flux. Professional dog-walkers trying to hold sway over packs of too many. Shirtless out-of-work actors pounding, sweating and trying to preserve their meticulously tanned torsos for the next casting call. Lunchtime power-walkers trying to quell the executive stress.


The Runyon Canyon bustle meant that I couldn't escape. It left me frowning and itching. I think I'll stick to Griffith Park for future impromptu hikes.

...is 2:42! [MORE]From The Morning News:

I’d hit upon the perfect song length. I fist-bumped somebody.

What else is at 2:42? “Don’t Do Me Like That” by Tom Petty. “Divine Hammer” by the Breeders. “Helplessly Hoping” by Crosby, Stills & Nash. “Get Up” by R.E.M. “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas & the Papas. “This Charming Man” by the Smiths.

You need more proof? Jerk. Let’s look at Sgt. Pepper. “Lovely Rita” is two minutes, 42 seconds. It delivers that psychedelic vibe and a coda but then gets the hell out of your life.

Compare that to “With a Little Help From My Friends.” It’s a mere two seconds longer but feels like it drags on for hours. Maybe it’s Ringo, maybe it’s the tedious melody—or maybe it’s the two goddamn seconds.

Then over here we have “Good Morning Good Morning,” rightfully discarded by the masses as a throwaway. Why? Two minutes, 41 seconds. Hey, Beatles, maybe next time think about tacking on an extra second to give a song the grandeur and majesty it deserves.

(Via.)

From author Jeff Gordinier's interesting video promo for his book X Save the World: "Why is Paul McCartney barefoot on the cover of Abbey Road?" [MORE]"I don't give a f---! Just stop talking about it."

callmecoolchris has added a photo to the pool:

From my parents' collection.