Prelude to a Return
Current mood: Back for the attack
Category: Back for the attack Dreams and the Supernatural

There's plenty to say.

But for now, let me just say that I've been dreaming again.

There I was, at the long anticipated Alice Cooper/Mercury Rev show... It must have been unannounced, as it was a pretty cozy venue for a fucking golden ticket lineup like that...
It doesn't stop at that... During the entr'acte, who appears on stage but Michael McDonald, total surprise, doing a series of duets. Somehow or other I had an In, and I knew all I had to do was call a favor and I'd be up on stage belting out "On My Own." 
Except I knew I couldn't sing like Patti LaBelle unless I was entirely blotto, natch.  Luckily, my parents' bachelor-sized fridge from the 70s was in the next room, and after a moment of panic, there on the top shelf appeared two bottles of Absolut Citron.  One of them was opened. One of them was not.
I remember it was of the utmost diplomatic, never mind dipsomaniac, importance that I take the right one.
I can't for the life of me remember which one I chose...

Hi.

Currently reading : Los Angeles Noir (Akashic Noir) By Denise Hamilton Release date: May, 2007

4:19 PM - 7 Comments - 9 Kudos - Add Comment

New Excercises in Futility
Current mood: bitchy
Category: Pets and Animals

From: d------
Date: Apr 21, 2007 8:53 PM


I think you're really special...I love guys who are girls. YOu're cute in and out of drag...don't be so weird though.
________________________________________________________________

From: Miss Katonic
Date: Apr 22, 2007 2:35 PM


Don't be so weird though? For 90% of the general daylight population, men wearing lacy underwear is pretty weird. All a matter of context, brother.

_______________________________________

---------------- Original Message -----------------
From: d--------
Date: Apr 22, 2007 9:05 PM


You sed: "For 90% of the general daylight population, men wearing lacy underwear is pretty weird. All a matter of context, brother."

Well, while 90% of the male population doesn't wear lacy underwear, it's certainly not unusual anymore---it's almost a mainstay of popular culture, especially rock culture. Transexuals, crossdressers, gays all over prime time TV / day time soaps. Rock stars been wearing makeup and girly clothes for years.

All this stuff you write in your description, all this nightlife, clubbing, gay bars, counter-culturalism is all old stuff...if you read about the 60's and the 70's, you should know that everything you write and say is old and recycled. Andy Warhol, the Factory. San Francisco and LA gay scene. The Swinging 60's, the "Me" 70's. The Madonna look of the 80's. It's actually sort of tired it's been done better before YOU were around.

I just think you're pretty, and YES, special because you're a "femme". But it's hardly new or revolutionary as a cultural phenomenea.

You sound brainwashed by popular culture and maybe some old left-over hippies that unfortunately dominate the media and education system. Hey, most of the idiots who go around talking about the 60's were wanna-bees, and don't the fuck what they are talking about. As Robin Williams said, anyone who remembers the 60's is dead. Ditto with the gay scene, which makes YOUR modern club culture look like an Old Lady Guilting Bee.

It gets old after a while honey. You'll just burn out, and end up an old hack, blubbering like David Crosby or Ozzy Osbourne, looking dumb like Alice Cooper still in mascara.

Gosh, Miss. I don't mean to have an argument with you. I think you're beautiful! I just don't want to see you end up a burnt-out old crow, but find someone who thinks you are a special as I do.

Sorry if I offended. I don't know anything about you except for your MySpace. I had the best intention, but it came out wrong, and I'm sorry for that.

Sincerely,
DAVID
__________________________________________________________________
----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: Miss Katonic
Date: Apr 23, 2007 8:55 AM


You patronizing old cadge!
___________________________________________________________________

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: d-------
Date: Apr 23, 2007 10:30 AM


You sed: You patronizing old cadge!

I don't know if that's an insult or a compliment. Probably an insult.

All that LA/Club/Goth/AlternativeLifestyle stuff is nothing new, honey.

It's really tired and old. Its' all been done before, and better then anything you or your generation can imagine.

You think you're edgy, in the scheme of things, you're just RETRO-tired.

Sorry, I really didn't mean to have an argument...but an exchange of ideas.

Good Luck,
DAVID
______________________________________________________________


----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: Miss Katonic
Date: Apr 23, 2007 11:31 AM


Who the fuck even started in with this "revolutionary" angle? Did I say anything of the sort? I was only reacting to being called weird, which is not tantamount to revolution. "Perversion is not subversion," as they say... You're really projecting here, buddy. Yes, I was weaned on postmodernity, bucko, I know full well how "tired and old" everything is, present company most definitely not excluded.

(Though speaking of generational woes: either you're lying about your age - and this would be only one of your legion groaningly cliched MySpace sins - or you're only four years older than me. Which would make you delusional about your lived experience to the past. Believe you me, I long for our dear prelapsarian golden age as much as anybody, rightfully so or no.)

As for tired 60s cliches, how about writing to someone you don't know and telling them how "special" they are? CREEPY! And not in a general Free to Be You And Me hippie Dr. Spock kind of way, it turns out, but because I'm a "femme," though calling this "special" runs completely contrary to everything else you've said!

Added to all this, you say you didn't want to start a fight. Here's a free introductory lesson in tact an rhetoric, fella: don't tell someone with whom you wish to have discourse on this side of friendly that "you've obviously been brainwashed." Where the hell do you think that'll get you? Please, go to hell. Or at least go to finishing school!

Toodles!
;P
___________________________________________________________________________


----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: d-------
Date: Apr 23, 2007 4:41 PM


You sed: "Yes, I was weaned on postmodernity, bucko, I know full well how "tired and old" everything is, present company most definitely not excluded."

Oh, I get it now. I'm a creep for giving you a compliment about being a femme? I was wrong, and I apologize.

You're just another boring LA lounge lizard. How does it feel to be an empty vessel who knows that he has absolutely NOTHING to contribute to life, except the reflection that looks back at you in the mirror.

Bye, dummy.
DAVID
_____________________________________________________________________

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: Miss Katonic
Date: Apr 23, 2007 4:56 PM


For the record, I've lived in L.A. for all of six months, and have very short tolerance for most superficiality.
And no, you've been a creep by a) complimenting me for the most plastic part of my profile and then subsequently attacking me for being plastic and empty, b) calling me weird without any qualification, c) making all kinds of totalizing judgements based on your guesswork, rather than anything I've written to you - points of which you elided altogether .

So basically I went from "special" to "boring" because I didn't like getting talked down to? You obviously have no interest in real spirited communication, just giving lectures. Why did you even bother writing in the first place, tell me that much...?
___________________________________________________________________________

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: d-----
Date: Apr 23, 2007 7:57 PM


You sed: "So basically I went from "special" to "boring" because I didn't like getting talked down to?...Why did you even bother writing in the first place, tell me that much...?"

Gosh...I guess neither of us can tolerate not having the last word!

I wrote you because I admire femmes, and wanted to compliment you. I read your writings, and found them excessively narcisstic, and overly obsessed with the sillilest and most meaningless of things. Your replys confirmed my worst speculation, but you still remain awfully pretty.

If you just don't like superficiality, why did you move to LA? It's the home of the most superficial culture in the world. I lived in SF for 5 years and LA for 3 years, and it's full of these cultural refugees thinking they'll find "freedom" to "be-themselves". It's rather sad really.

Well, honey. This hasn't been the most pleasant exchange in the world, and I'm obviously an annoyance to you. I didn't want it to be that way, but I'll take the blame...you're too pretty to be mad at for long. I'm sure you'll find lots of friends who will put up with your weirdness to gaze on that sweet face. Unfortunately, I SAY what I think, and it's not going down very well.

I hope your innocence isn't your downfall, I've seen a lot of dashed dreams in places like LA and SF. I'd hate to think somone so pretty as you would have something bad happen to them.

I wish the best of luck, and I hope you find what you are looking for. I won't write again, even if you reply---so you can have the status of giving me the LAST word on why I'm a complete and utter idiot.

Sincerely,
DAVID

___________________________________________________________________

From: Miss Katonic
Date: Apr 24, 2007 10:56 AM

Jesus, David, you're really stuck on this "pretty femme" thing! I have arms like a dockworker, and my demeanor can be outright slovenly; is most of the time. All of which is stated on my profile, which in the end is just a performance. If you met me, I seriously doubt you'd call me "honey."

And I moved here because, ironically, New York these days is even phonier, if you can believe it! City energies wax and wane, and the friends I've had here over the years have lured me. Most of them are not "the beautiful people" in the sense I think you mean.

So last word, sure. Admittedly, writing back to you is a kind of narcissism, since i can't deal with being grossly misinterpreted, as well as being treated so rudely, a fact you never apologized for or even addressed. Since you are not writing back -and I do have the final word here, thanks - for your future cruising out here on the internet: most of the "femmes" out here will in fact live up, or down, to your expectations of being completely self-obsessed, shallow, and uneducated. (Again, this is all too funny, as no one bitches about today's illiteracy more than I, but tee hee! I guess I'll just pout in the corner and read my little "femme" Us magazine until Angry White Man shows me the way!) But look at what's in front of you, not what you feel the need to see. If either of us is brainwashed here buddy, its you - even if in your case I guess it's less a matter of being a subject of social hegemony than the glaucoma of personal bitterness.

________________________________________________________________

Currently reading : City of God By E. L. Doctorow Release date: 30 January, 2001

2:39 PM - 18 Comments - 18 Kudos - Add Comment

It's All True
Current mood: sick
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes

All the circuits have burst.

Seriously.

I thought the brownouts had ended back in Astoria, back in that crowded-out motherboard of Mammon, where rats chew through wires perforce of a landscape greedily subdivided by fatted pigs in top hats. (See, my legs always bow towards Wobbly, diplomatically or dipsomaniacally.) Didn't Pynchon give us L.A. as a sprawling computer circuit where every chippy can stretch out by the hotel pool and breathe? Oh yeah, and wear down too. Thanks Tom.

There is my dead stereo receiver, surged with the phantoms of the wires of this glorious 20s flophouse that might have vanity-lit some burny-burning extra from the set of King of Kings eighty years ago, in this same paint-palimpsest of a mirror I doll up in now, through the same circuits that spell out the name "DeMille" in saturnine neon on nights my super is so inspired to guide me back up the hill home. I am all but without music, my lifeblood, my foremost power, and greeted daily with a plaintive L.E.D. flutter and a palmed-out Technics appeal of "OVERLOAD."

Yep.

Then there was my dead car battery. That..s a great way for a day in your F'ed out life to begin. That, anyway, was simple enough to replace. Well, simple enough for the Mexican construction crew that happened to be landscaping nearby to replace. I..m not sure whether a propped-up hood alone is sufficient siren-song to horseshoe men with eager ratchets 'round, or whether I..m again enough of a damsel for my distress signals - nothing more than an adjustable wrench in a tight-back pocket, I insist - to work. Ave Maria, sometimes people are just nice.

There are heels breaking, chains snapping, tires bouncing, air-mattresses gasping towards death, and I must add, although overriding the presiding metaphor, people just disappearing.

Disappearing into my own brownouts. Which at the personal level are in many ways far worse than blackouts. At least then you have the sober demarcations of memory..s end, however more drunken the genesis. Your sins are simply not there. In a brownout, they scurry off on the periphery, as down round the bend that curves between the aforementioned vanity and the hand-mirror, just enough to know what you've done but not enough to know why you were stupid enough to get there. Snatches of bawling beneath the 101, of offending someone somewhere in the Hills..Well, at least I no longer have to look at that on-ramp-to-mullet into the bargain amidst those hermeneutically obscuring lacunae of mercury long gone. At least the preamble to a spare tire is not staring back at me (as is unfortunately the case when I pop the trunk of my bald-wheeled Hyundai..). Salving the brown-outs are the Grey-outs, in the Dorian mode of course. My face IS getting a little younger - yet still I need a drink and a quick decision..

This is what I get for letting my life-spine be guided by 70s Quaalude-rock lyrics. Actually, for not listening closely enough: You can check out any time you like but you can never leave. Or: showbiz kids makin' movies of themselves you know they don..t give a fuck about anybody else. Or: it never rains in California, but girl let me warn you, it pours..man it pours.
Not that it's rained since I..ve been here, but metaphorically..
And not that I..m not more than happy to have traded in Albert Hammond Junior for Senior, or to be just another hopeful in a great, awful tradition. The oblivion of Didion, the damned West coast of West, the breakdown of Brecht, and of course the blown-out-ness of Bukowski. Okay, that last one didn't really work, but it gets us back to the bottle I'm getting away from. Yes, there's the thru-line these Hollywood kids keep telling me every script needs.. (How am I ever going to write for television like this???)

The problem is that drinking yourself to death is one of everybody's favorite thru-lines out here, as reliable and lousy as another remake of Beau Geste. The porcine impresario kicking back Sidecars at the Brown Derby with bad-breathed, priapated hams.. Those darlings of American modernism passed out over their Olivetti as their stream-of-consciousness trickles away into matinee pap in a coldwater flat.. And of course, the legion of blowsy floozies from Des Moines or Topeka or Cherryvale, gin-flask strapped to gams at all times.. They poured all this shit into the foundation along with the concrete, and brother, it's budged a lot less than Charlie McCarthy's footprints. (Did I mention my hands fit perfectly into DeMille's? Into Marcello's? Monty Woolley's even? ) More than all this boy-meets-girl, strong resolution in the third act hooey is the unfortunate mytheme of liver-popping self-destruction .. and its romanticization.

Well, I've decided that my days of being a romantic are numbered.

I hereby tender my resignation.

Or at least a request for transfer to the part time division.

Oh, and otherwise, I'm doing pretty damn well, according to the Tinseltown Bildungsroman. Hackneyed though they may be, these frayed old circuits of palm-trees and barely paid rents still beckon me to plug in. I just can't get them wet.

Currently reading : The Information By Martin Amis Release date: 19 March, 1996

12:18 AM - 8 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

Everbody Else is Doing it!
Current mood: cheerful

Type the answers for all of the following questions into Google ImageSearch and post one of the results for each.

First car?





Where you grew up?






Where you live now?





Your name?






Your grandmas name?






Favorite food?






Favorite drink?





Favorite song?





Favorite smell?





Last thing you ate?

8:17 AM - 7 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

The Discrete Charm of Broken Noses
Current mood: awake
Category: Quiz/Survey

This assignment might be more of a "long answer" inquiry than Mrs. Shreck's Honor Roll of Femmes Fabu, and stems from a long fascination with what my ex-wife called "ugly-hot" (The original point of our reference was Willem Defoe.) Various conversations with Agt. Honeypants has led me to expand this to include the more forgiving corollary category "weird hot" into the survey.

The question is: who do you find inextricably alluring in spite of or probably more accurately because of something unconventional in their appearance. And can you put your finger on what their "It" is? Furthermore, Id like to see if there are any gender-based patterns here Is "ugly-hot" more often fetching as a masculine trait, as a surplus of distinction from delicateness?

My own poster children for this category:
Fairuza Balk



can really freak people out, but I find her so yummy I almost went to see The Waterboy. Almost. Is it the fangs?

New Wave homme dur Jean-Paul Belmondo



is definitely a limit-case here. Sometimes I see him and see only ugly, other times just hot. There is no denying, however, the fact that his face looks like it was smacked with a cast-iron skillet. (Aside: why does France have such a disparate admixture of beautiful women and ugly men?)


Okay:


Peter Sarsgaard. That lazy-South lazy eye. The slightly paunchy, totally average physique Not as dramatic as Fairuza but theres just something "off" about him, though maybe only set against a sea of molded plastic people. Definitely on the odd, rather than ugly, pole.

Okay, off we go! And remember, one man's



is another man's

8:06 AM - 44 Comments - 10 Kudos - Add Comment

Power in the Darkness
Current mood: post-millenium tension
Category: post-millenium tension Dreams and the Supernatural

A mild disclaimer. This is not another "as above, so below" amplification of Miss K's quotidian foibles into the Great Themes of our time. This is simply a time to unravel or at least drop a purl or two at the feet of the Greater Sewing Circle

In my heat-wave haze, I want to slide off the paradigmatic ladder of weaving altogether and land onto the lazy cushion of the Laundry List. I just want to drop it off and be done: the blackouts, the near-evacuations, the lantern-lit celibataire slump into Repulsion-style dementia. So be it: here is a sweaty, teary, cat-pukey hamper-full, fully unsorted. And please be careful with my delicates.

Although NYC has retreated from the 100 degree mark, the power outage in my hood is still ongoing. Con Edison is not On It. They are nowhere Near It. (By their own estimation, it will take them three days longer to fix our grid than it took God to toss off the Earth) And so without a fan, without A/C, I fell asleep last night on my fire escape granted this has been an unfulfilled peripheral in of my childhood New York fantasy (see: Rear Window), so well done. As I've done for so many nights in the past decades, I drifted off listening to a lecture on Iraqi history from a high school model U.N. course. I like the grain of the lector's voice. So on perhaps a thousand and one nights, for over half my life, Ive listened to this précis of empire and oil, Babylon and Nebuchadnezzar, a sedimentary fairy-tale of Armageddon looping over and over

Sleep and heat and dream and wake are all becoming one mirage-edged parallax Miss McKay is away in the placidity of Fairfield, Iowa, amidst breezy green and the looming gold domes of the Maharishi's meditation center and so there is no one to there to affirm or deny. Was it really snowing this morning? It took me five minutes to figure it out. The grid of streets is mapped out all night by the parade of fire engines, the cats in heat.

Toss.

Turn.

Do I really want to work in the entertainment industry? TELEVISION? Another fairy tale of power-madness, another Babylon in another desert?

Is it really World War III, Mr. OReilly? Or Four?

Is my resume good enough?

Will I ever fit into a 28 waist again?

The sleep-dep is catching up. The bike ride into work keeps getting scarier, what with the blank-eyed traffic signals, the panicked jumpiness of drivers bottlenecking towards the bridge, and my poor one-braked Schwinn, once my steed now a death trap; a suicide rap. This morning one of my eyes did not work properly, either: perhaps out of sympathy with my brakes. Objects, are after all, closer than they appear.

They keep getting closer.

Maybe I should take the subway for a few days. If its running.

Though why go down there? The first morning of this mess, there was smoke pouring out of the streets as I unlocked the Baby Blue Beast. Not steam, smoke. I smelled it. The odor of something smoldering that should not burn.

What the hell am I doing with my life?

Why are all these beautiful people so nice to me?

WHEN WILL MY STEREO COME BACK FROM THE UNDERWORLD?!?!?! I NEED MY LIFEBLOOD BACK!!! GAH!!!!

"I got some credit in the straight world
I lost a leg, I lost an eye
Go for credit in the real world
You won't die."

Not yet, copper! Although the boiler in the building next door was ready to blow yesterday Follow the smell of gas to your neighbors crowded on the curb: with all of these street-sharking firetrucks, one of them has to come to you sooner or later, right? Just as I was readying to throw my cats in a bag and run, that Dylan McDermotty looking fireman tells us its okay. Funny how those guys are so reassuring when your panties are in a knot.

This is the last month Ill be in New York. Its sinking in now: the temperature hike has catalyzed it all (In my inner ear I keep hearing Robert Palmer singing: "Feel the heat! Pushing you to decide" Oh, but how adept I am at not-deciding I just returned Oliviers Hamlet to the store unfinished, never sure if I wanted to watch it ) Toss. Turn. I have one month to find a job, an apartment, buy a car and say goodbye to this love-hated place, this dirty town. No more Film Forum. No more biking past the U.N. building at dawn on acid. No more wifey. Hot, hot night-fever rolls on, but luckily a surprise thunderstorm has bathed my bed in cool rain and breezes, and in a panicky puddle I ferry over Lethe, for a spell.

It all makes me very very weepy. I see a dish still in the drainer from my camping trip with Miss McKay and I start crying. All these little witnesses street corners, bridges, velvet-chaired movie houses to this bittersweet cozy life suddenly reveal themselves to me to say goodbye. "Were sorry it didnt work out, but we had some good times between the wars, yeah?" I just break up.


I'm standing on the corner, nursing a Q of Asahi with one hand, shoveling in risotto and pumping in rainy-day dimes into the slot with the other. Agent Honeypants, do you know I tried to drunk-dial you collect? Ha! Luckily cellular restrictions maintained what little dignity I had standing there in my short-shorts by the collision shop All those Puerto Rican boys just dyin' to meet me: but in this time of crisis one of my fans/foes had the audacity to try it smooth No emergency sex for you , papi ! Suddenly someone I've never met in a parking lot far away is laughing with me, and in comes the buzz and giggles of a night on the town of another city one much more savvy in FEMA trouble, mind you. The shiny little pile of respite dwindles in my hand in the moonlight, and the two cities end their temporary merger Tears and laughter all together in the dark as I see all those faces that have always been there on the other end.

Thank all of you brothers and sisters. You need a mess of friends to stand alone.

Currently listening : On & On: The Hits of Stephen Bishop By Stephen Bishop Release date: 16 August, 1994

1:44 PM - 40 Comments - 19 Kudos - Add Comment

Part Two: We Are the Robots
Current mood: Enossified

Movement - that's what I'll call the festival from now on, because I think that's the name that has stayed in the saddle the longest takes place in Hart Plaza, smack in the middle of Detroit, directly across from a Canadian casino and its tartish floatilla of neon on the river.  The Plaza is a multi-tiered arrangement of perpendicular offsets and sunken concrete bunkers that allows for a multiply-ringed sonic circus to run discretely yet en plein air  - and  like so many megalithically- staged prayers to urban renewal, it feels like a post-apocalyptic skate park.  Back when I lived in the suburbs, this was a venue I'd never been beckoned to.  I remember it as the sort of place Steve Marriott or the Doobie Brothers or Honeymoon Suite would play for free on Labor Day weekend or something.  They cant seem to scrub the State Fair-style glee out either, along with the elephant ears and overpriced Coors in a cup.  That's one of the great joys about it it's a very specific vibe of  Midwestern bacchanalia, a carny interzone of wholesomeness and bleary-eyed depravity.

From Hart, you are in a vantage point to see the white trestled monorail of the People Mover snake by twice, which tells you how useless it really its path really is.  For Detroiters (the ones who even give it any thought, anyway), the People Mover is a grossly expensive insult to irreparable injury, a quarter-assed symbol of futurism fobbed off on a city robbed of its future.  The auto industry made D-town what it is alright:  a corpse of a great urban machine denied a skeleton by its blind idiot god, a monstrous political machine by default.  Or perhaps even by the machine of Capital itself.   Because public transportation would compete with the auto industry, it never evolved beyond the bare bones of a bus system, and this is a large reason why many think Detroit never took on the urban hardiness of a city like Chicago or New York.   Long after the riots, the white-flight to the more affluent suburbs, and block after block after block of houses being boarded up, Mayor Coleman A. Young unveiled his pathetic two-car air-trolley, a scoliotic spine of a Disney train that loops around the tourist section of someplace you'd be made fun of for visiting.  It's great if you'd rather not move your car between saganaki and Jazzfest, but otherwise it's a travesty of hope.  It's like the city had been scrimping and saving to buy modernity for forty years, only to end up paying for the now retro-kitsch time capsule chosen with the down payment, the future of the past.  The golden spike of insult, as it were, was then hammered in soon after its launch:   the People Mover was revealed to be built from South African materials (when that country was still under Apartheid), which didn't go too well in the very Afro-dense area.  White steel and an hour of chaos:  this already overbudgeted disaster had to be re-railed entirely with less offensive metal, or Coleman was going to be given Dutch hell.

These days, the Big Three are doing shittier than ever:  GM is about kaput, and who drives a fucking Chrysler these days?   It's really as a defeated-feeling city as you can find, but the mythos of Detroit techno in a large part depends on this beyond-thunderdome entropic pulse, of machines pumping onward as their human creators have run down.  But from my own experience, this never has much to do with nihilism. It's much more of a post-human humanism, or the thrall of a pulsing spirit that lives on beyond the organism.  Somebody somewhere has defined the Detroit the sound as the "soul of robots," or at least I think someone has said it.  (The same phrases in tech-cosmology are often clone-born to a thousand parents all at once, circulating in the same kind of sweaty-palmed swap-and-steal-meet of sampladelica itself, where ownership and authorship evaporate like an e-chugged bottle of Evian.) And into that phrase is packed all the weirdness, the cultural topsy-turviness that makes techno so interesting to me.

Look, I hold no illusions here.  People HATE techno.  Hate it. Precisely because on the grounds that it has no soul, because its made by machines.  As often as not, this gets boiled down to techno being "white" music.  Not just white, but coldly Teutonic, menacingly Bismarckian even.  Years ago I heard some Detroit DJ airing his precis of the history of classic rock, and he referred to Kraftwerk as "Nazis in trenchcoats"  who stormtrooped over the authentic, organic flow of the People's music,  corrupting it forever.  The pure and unmediated spontaneity, in other words, of Paul Rodgers, Jeff Beck, and Eric Clapton: the British, white boutique-dilettantes whose musical foundations were the black mud of Delta blues*.

And in a way, that guy  -  who spoke in the exact same Alpha dog-in-a-glass-booth cadence as do all sportscasters - was right.  You cannot overestimate the importance of Kraftwerk as a kind of clean slate for royalties overdue.  Rolf and Florian owe not one cent to Mother Africa.  Not one bleepin' bleep.  John Tesh is more indebted.  And it was precisely Kraftwerk and the placid washes of 1970s German motorik (that's right, driving music) that served as the foundation for Detroit techno's own Big Three (Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, Juan Atkins) in the early 80s, as these black teenagers pillaged the icy synthwaves of Europe in much the same way as Jagger and Richards did, in reverse, two decades earlier. 

The fact is that the majority of the big name Detroit DJs have always been black, yet what we call Detroit "purists" are those who stick with the spartan, stripped down synths of Kraftwerk.  When too much of da funk creeps in, its no longer "Detroit" anymore.  Luckily, along with Trans-Europe Express, we also learned from the Germans that such ideas of purism can all too easily slip into Nazism even if only in a metaphoric way.  Techno is about the joy of miscegenation at its very heart, and it makes any questions of a racial "sound" or ownership far from black and white.  Not to say that race is negated, or that the real bodies involved in its production or consumption are beyond consideration.  It's just that the standard operator's manual of culture and race (not to mention class and gender, you cultural studies people!) cannot account for the mechanics at work.  Or at play for that matter

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

(Insert outro kick drum loop here... To be continued...)

*This is admittedly a case of reductio ad absurdum, but if the classic rock scholars among you want to give me a tongue-lashing, go ahead.  You don't have to say you're sorry.

Currently reading : Midnight's Children By Salman Rushdie Release date: 01 January, 1991

12:05 PM - 28 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

Entr'acte
Current mood: awake

We're glad you checked in!  None of our representives are sober enough to complete your blog - but hold the line! Raver love isn't always on time!  And our flagging narcissism appreciates your attention...
We're glad you checked/////

  1.  "Don't Stop Believing" - Journey

Getting ready to exit this worm-girded Big Apple; throwing stuff out for the big Manifest Destiny.  Why do I hold on to this shit?)  And am I taking a step down with the curbing of my file cabinet?)  For example:  a notebook from my first miserable job in NYC, when I commuted an hour and a quarter to get paid slave wages to wheedle middle managers into spending their lunch hours answering scale questions about their satisfaction with Travelocity.com or their synagogue or whatever. 

2. Aaron Neville - does it really fucking matter which song?

Luckily, market research was the same job I had in Iowa City, so I could be one of  the star dialers with one or three hours of post 9/11, we're-all- fucked, the chickens have come home to roost, I am the decadent doomed end-product of Third Stage capitalism shut-eye behind me.  I can lead and pace people through formatted questionaires in my sleep, which was given a strong beta testing here.  Sometimes I'd have to run to the bathroom and cry. We had to raise our hands to go to the bathroom, or I woulda been in there all day.

3.  Unidentifiable, shrill cover of "Everlasting Love"

God I'm glad to be leaving this place.

4.  Blasting from a construction worker's boombox below the bathroom: Daft Punk - "One More Time"

That one made me bawl,  real hard-like... Raver divas in exile can't hear a vocoder without breaking down, I kid you not.   Daft Punk even, the music that was going to make it all okay, the music that was going to be playing when we hit Omega Point on Y2K, when the universe implodes into a big ouroborean group hug-implosion... (The music that was playing during Y2K come to think of it..)  Saint Bangalter who made the rock kids get it.  There it was flanging around by a decaying trainyard, less present to the workers, upon whom a survey of local causality would pin its authorship, than the asphalt they are patching into the parking lot. 

5.  Kenny G - "Songbird"

The supervisors, one or two other teacher's pets, and me - well, Kenny G too - were the only white people in the office... But a few of of the high-efficiency sisters immediately interpolated me with those high-sign mentions of sales at Bebe; the tales of their life at Sound Factory in Summer 1986... I had sponsorship.

6.  "Don't Stop Believing" - Journey

  A bunch of the dialers had children, plural, and evidently had some other source of income.   Some were middle aged and seemed happy to devote their selves to this totally meaningless shit job.  The usual crazies that always end up in this limbo of the service sector, this fiberoptic endocrine system of late capitalism.  And the supervisors actually presided from elevated stools at strategic intervals.  Like wardens.  Well, more like home ec teachers stuck with detention monitoring. 

7.  Belle and Sebastian, while waiting for the voicemail of Hyper Space Cowgirls.

I mean, no one really felt that oppressed by the job itself.  The market researcher has no sense of unionism.  It's too stupid a job to make you feel like you're getting exploited.  Your prole hackles do not rise, because you are not working.  You only have to lift a finger.  Actually, we had autodial, so you could in theory get by with nothing but cavalierly apathetic palm-butting.

8.  Almost inaudible version of Sheryl Crow "All I Wanna Do (Is Have Some Fun)"  Steel guitar largely preserved.

"Mr. Smulkin, on a scale of one to seven, how strongly does the following adjective describe your impression of Imperial Hotel Reservations:  VIRILE... Mr. Smulkin?"
"Yeah, can you just///"

9.  Sundry strings of corporate sax.

And various permutations thereof, for seven hours a day, plus the enforced hour of lunch, if you're lucky and not sent home for low productivity.  Every day.  For data you will never see crunched, for people you will never see, for ad campaigns you will avoid, for mission statements you might even morally object to.  And you never actually reach a meaningful goal.  The survey just ends.

10.  General Public - "Tenderness"

Tranced out repetition is fine with me, you mustn't misunderstand me.  But you must have a relationship with it.  You must have some sense of release as it passes through you or it becomes a terminal soulless limbo.  When I don't have that, I start even more repetitive games to stay sane.  Making lists, producing stupid data I can call my own.

11.  Muzak version of "Layla," easily passable for the verison on Eric Clapton Unplugged

You're not angry enough to fight against it, and after you are able to work without really thinking about it, you almost grow fond of the job, of the bathroom breaks, of the food court that salutes world cuisine via a botched speciality from every corner of the world, each reassuring you daily  between lacrimal clock-punches in their pathetic heat lamped ambassadorships.  We're all in this mess together.

12.  Hall and Oates, "Kiss On My List"

My employers, the ominously monikered The Phone Company, ran out of contracts for the season a few days before Christmas, and was plunged from the limbo of phone employment to limbo of unemployment...and back to a new kind of repetitive phone limbo as a work at home phone sex girl... But it looks like the playlist has run out, so we'll have to wait for that story...

You see, I really need to get out of here.

Robert De Niro's waiting...

13.  Theme from The Deer Hunter

Currently listening : La Dusseldorf By La Dusseldorf Release date: 27 October, 2005

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Report from Disco Mountain: A Prelude
Current mood: thankful
Category: Dreams and the Supernatural

(Lots to say here, so I'm pacing myself ...)

    Although all of you, saving possible exceptions like dear seKSeeSerGio69 (holla papi!), know that my posted status of female lesbian is, while sincerely offered, in several senses a lie, that I am indeed 32 (not in internet years).  And I haven't had a birthday yet this year, Jesus... Jesus, yes,  Jesus had done most of his best work by my age and here  I go frittering away money I dont have to fly to one of the most despised cities in America to support a culture for which Americans would deny any responsibility.   But theres no denying it.  We did it.  Well, maybe not all of it.  But those Krauts, those fey little Mancunians with their anoraks and whistles, they couldn'ta done it without us, eh? (Thats the properly American response, anyway.)

            This Memorial Day weekend was the third time I've flown home to Detroit for a variously titled, consistently dis-entitled, techno-house-industrial-rave fantasia-on-the-waterfront, and I still really can't explain what its all about to my parents, co-workers, rockist muggles, well, everybody mostly.  Your meat and potatoes Michigander thinks techno - that is, if the word registers at all  - is what you hear when Keanu Reeves is driving in a fast car, or when that credible yet pneumatic brunette with the razor-shag and the laugh-lines is sauntering though the gossamer of dissolving APRs and fine print for a car that, when performing its duties in the suburban streets of Southgate, or Redford, or even Grosse Pointe, will at the very least LOOK like it could go very fast if you wanted it to.

            To be fair, that is techno.

            And when the cars in those commercials  Doppler-fuck you at 65 miles per hour, as you stand and contemplate again why your father keeps half a ton of tarped soil on his suburban lawn ("It was free"), this is the techno they will play.

            Play-music.  You-kids-go-and-have-fun music.  Electronic music hasnt been granted the cultural gravity afforded to rock that causes your baby boomer to take it down an eighth-of-an-octave when speaking the name of Neil Young or David Bowie or Frank Zappa.  Joey Ramone has a street dedicated to him (and you can just see the mealy-mouthed suit giving some corny civic speech-by-numbers to canonize the Saint of Sniffing Glue.  Even sacrilege isnt sacred anymore.)

    But techno is kids music.  Though a 50 year old man looks a lot less stupid sitting at a Technics deck than flopping around a stage power-kicking.  Honestly.

            The thing is, so much of the aesthetic that ripples out of the Detroit  techno ethos is about work. The sublimity of endless grey sparky clanking, the purity in the death-loop of a broken fax machine bleating out a doomed autodial, the beauty of the assembly line.  That kind of thing.  If  you didnt know better, you might think all the tech-heads were going on about some arch-modernist art movement from Italy 1917; spieling Stakhanovist hep-talk.  Sometimes it gets like that.  Founding father Derrick May is famous for saying - quite a few things, in fact -  among them, that he was more interested in Detroit for its factories than its Motown records.   That a peoples music should be a part of its life-world.

            Im not saying its not a party, the festival; the much touted "community" (its more like a cult).  I just mean that were very serious about it.  Well, some of are.  I am.

Currently reading : At Swim-Two-Birds By Flann O'Brien Release date: August, 1998

6:50 PM - 6 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

Six Facts (Further Humiliation)
Current mood: drained

The first player of this "game" starts with the topic "6 weird habits/things about yourself" and people who get tagged need to write a blog about their 6 weird things/habits as well as state this rule clearly. In the end you need to choose the next 6 people to be tagged and list their names. Don't forget to leave a comment saying "you are tagged" in their myspace comments and tell them to read yours....

(This is tough - everything seems normal when you live with it!)

1. I spent a year working in a schizophrenic home. Duties included dispensing meds and cigarettes (a lot of these guys were hooked from Cuckoo's Nest rewards skeds), making disgusting underbudgeted meals, taking the schizos to the movies/field trips, mopping up vomit, smoking dope in the garage... (I forgot this, I was also an assistant to a blind quadrapalegic student when I was in high school. In the beginning I read poli-sci books onto tape and wrote papers, but by the end of our arrangement all I did was dub my LPs for him.)


2. I've been married not once but twice, the first with a truly amazing woman who was also trying to avoid romantic entanglements by working in a gay bar. Our "pastor" was a notorious cruiser who was hung over at the time - we paid him with a six pack. The wedding took place in a beautiful plot of green in Ypsilanti - unbeknownst to us, across the street from the church in which my parents tied the knot. The chosen altar was a statue of the Virgin M. (which my ex claimed to have had conversations with, druid though she was). When we arrived, we found two dice and an unconscious drunk at her feet.

It was very l'amour fou and the bitter end was entirely my fault. I hope the best for her, wherever she is (though she's 10 times more of a survivor than I am!)


3. Okay this is getting really prosaic and even maudlin so in the spirit of things: I DRANK MY OWN PISS. There. I'm not into scat at all, but I was in the desert in this fucking ride-the-snake fury and it seemed like the right thing to do. It was also a long cold walk to the W.C. and ummm some Maharishi type said it was okay. (Ha, I'm wearing my Pink Flamingos t-shirt today - of course.)

4. Still there? Miss McKay and I often pretend to be snot-nosed, milk-moustached 70s raggamuffins a la Meatballs or Jackie Earle Haley, affecting that weird Baltimore accent to assail each other wih "Fag!" "Heyo-mo!" (Phonetic suggestions for this last accepted.) This to me is weirder than Number 3.

5. I have never left the U.S. (unless you count record shopping in Windsor, which I don't - I think Texas comes closer to foreign soil).


6. I was once an honorary booty-ho for DJ Funk. I'm not sure what he thought of it, but it pays to have supermodel-type patronesses.

7:07 AM - 10 Comments - 10 Kudos - Add Comment