Somewhere Between Art and Love

Tangibility and Permanence

2012-01-22T09:45:00.000-05:00

Tangibility;the attribute of being easily detectable by the senses.

Nothing is easily grasped and every moment is just vapor. Time is not pliable. It moves forward whether we appreciate it or not.

I played a record the other day. Tangible. Plastic, I held it in my hands, like a clock. Like a photo. I felt as if I was standing on the roof, ten feet tall grasping at clouds. I have boxes full of vapor made of sound. They are heavy and they take up more than room in my mind.

Yet they are a part of me as much as their mass a part of the space in my garage.

I used to feel the need to hold something, to make the emotional connection a slave to my hands. To have me on the shelf. With age comes the realization that we are just statues being shaped by the memories of where were frozen in that moment. We are all still just damned babies learning object permanence. We need to know that things will still be there even when we are gone. We are not objects. We are not permanent. We are blood and guts. The tangible evaporating mostly. We want bookmarks of us for others to see, touch and feel - when the air is gone and all that is left of the balloon is the memory of its buoyancy.

I am digital now. All of me. You can barely touch what I used to own or used to be. I am ones and zeros, contained in hard drives - files to be organized. Like an outside brain. Hairstyles come and go, machinery whirrs on, the laundry remains mostly undone. Yesterday's newspaper can't be rolled up anymore, it's hard to see our headlines.

I have mostly let go of holding things in my hands. Books are just the shapes of words turned into thoughts. Paper turns yellow, and we fade and burn along with the items on our shelves. We keep what we can inside in a small radio made of glass dancing to memory.

I am the cloud. Everything that I have is stored there. I code what gets stored. I let it rain on me when I need more than logical representation. When I need something big and ambiguous, symbols of everything that I was and what I will still become in the short time left.

You can't hold me in your hands, I am a map made of dust, daybreak and the conscious actions towards meaning and love right now.

The record I played was 'Storefront Hitchcock". It is still one of my very favorites for so many reasons. I am not sure why I chose it of the 3000 I have. It could have been anything. This is the first track, and this may explain why I chose it. Unfortunately, I could not find the Storefront Hitchcock version to post. Do yourself a favor and find it yourself - the whole thing.

Band Crush of the Moment!

2012-01-15T11:54:00.000-05:00

Dum Dum Girls - Bedroom Eyes (OFFICIAL VIDEO) from Sub Pop Records on Vimeo.

The Perfect Song!

2012-01-06T06:42:00.001-05:00

The perfect song doesn't really exist. Mostly because it is ephemeral, and based on a particular space in time. What could be the perfect song for one instant, may not be for the next. While it is always opinion and emotional connection that drives these choices for us folks, there are songs that from a pure construction point of view are closed to perfect for their purpose. Besides, I really know what I am talking about.

The song that hit me this morning, and always does is ' Yer Blues '. A version by my sweet departed Elliott Smith from some muddy bootleg came on, and I was bowled over, at how stunningly simple and effective this song has always been, and how no matter how many times I hear it, it always works. To be clear, that happens with a hell of a lot of Beatles songs.

Resolutions 2012!

2011-12-31T09:13:00.000-05:00

A year is becoming a sweet short thing, so there is little point in weighing it down with the usual litany of resolutions. Hell, if you want to do something, then do it. What does the turning of the year have to do with anything?

I do love that 6% list "quit procrastinating" as one of their resolutions. I would recommend starting this somewhere around the 3rd week of January, since the first two weeks are likely going to be busy with other things you are putting off. I also enjoy " have more fun". This does not seem particularily measureable to me, and therefore not easily achievable. How about a goal to set achievable goals? ?

Here are some of the things I already do but would like to do more of in 2012 [besides the indespensible stuff which I should be doing anyway]:

1. Study design and aesthetic more. Walk with eyes even wider open.
2. Shop in more retro furniture stores to find odd stuff that I won't buy. Enjoy looking.
3. Considering I have 300,0000 MP3s - make the time to listen to a record, mostly jazz, now and then.
4. Learn more about one composer, and one artist during the month. Be inspired.
5. Go on even longer bike rides. Breathe more.
6. Take the boy exploring. Be curious as hell. Enjoy every now.
7. Buy and do something with a canvas at least once a month. Don't give a shit about the outcome, do the process.
8. Learn 3 new songs on the guitar per week, write one. Sing as if my heart would explode.
9. Understand the facts behind the politics as much as possible. Thought, not dogma.
10. Simplify further.
11. Laugh even more. Including at myself.
12. Know the promises I make to myself and keep them.
13. Learn to really dance, and to really ski.
14. Relax.

Some of My Favorite Design 2011!

2011-12-24T09:10:00.000-05:00

In addition to listening to things, I like to look at things too. There was just so much to look at in 2011. While I wait patiently for Calatrava's new PATH station to finally take flight at the WTC sight here in NYC, here are some things that caught my eye this last year;

my favorite business card design

My 4 year old did this on computer without training

I can see this from my balcony

Social Media Propaganda Posters!

2011-12-23T09:04:00.000-05:00

I was researching a blog post on my favorite design of 2011, and came across these by Massachusetts-based graphic designer Aaron Wood. In the meantime, the kid is out of the tub, and my time for research has run out. More design favorites in the usual categories later; stuff to sit on, stuff to be inside like buildings, stuff for business, stuff for the kitchen, stuff to look at, and just generally cool stuff.

Flying:Obey the Rules!!!

2011-12-14T18:12:00.000-05:00

I fly a lot. Mostly in planes. Planes tend to bring out the worst in people. Let’s face it, it is stressy being crammed in a little metal tube, squished between strangers that may or may not smell and trying to keep track of your stuff. It involves being somewhere exactly on time and making your way through a series of Survivor-like challenges all designed to fuck up your day. Stay strong people. People do behave badly. Not always -I am sure that human nature has its good side, but it is mostly not apparent when traveling. Security is always interesting. Everyone complains about it, even knowing that it is there to prevent them from blowing up. The line is always too long, the TSA employees always too gruff and it is always better at another airport [unless of course they are at another airport, in which case it is another airport that is better]. Food in airports is overpriced and is designed to lead to flatulence. Clearly, the airport menu chefs have conspired to ‘hack’ the food so that unsuspecting travelers are forced to hold their gas in the middle seat for two hours. Or for the braver amongst us, just to let it go, and hope that no one recognizes where that the smell is emanating from seat 26B. There are crying babies, who should by all rights have an airline of their own. Then there are those that snore louder than an Antonov. I suspect that may have been me at some point, but I will never know. Occasionally, I do wake from a particularly deep 15 minute head bobbing coma with a small puddle of drool on my or my neighbor’s shirt.

I would like to set some rules, posted here for all to see so that I singlehandedly can make the flying experience just that much better for everyone. Please be so kind and pass this blog address along to everyone you know. While you are at it, kindly transfer $100 each to my Paypal account to allow for further marketing of the site, and to buy myself something really nice.

Flying: The Rules

Arriving at the airport/check in: Know how to use the check in Kiosk, or get out of the way. Don’t congregate in groups in front of the Kiosk looking like a group of stunned deer. Should there be an actual human being doing the check-in, which is a rarity, do not engage in small talk, and talking about your French Poodle for ten minutes while I stare at the back of your head wondering whether I will miss my flight. Don’t ask for an upgrade if you are not a qualified miler, or are willing to pay for it. It ain’t gonna happen.
Security: Don’t complain about how long the line is, and then wait to get ready for screening when you arrive at the screening area. Take your shoes off, take your jacket off, WAKE UP. GET READY BEFORE-HAND. I will hit you with a plastic bin, I swear, to get you moving. Be part of the solution.
Getting on the plane: Don’t congregate like cattle around the gate door. Wait for YOUR section/zone/area to be called. The plane is NOT going anywhere without you. I know why you want to rush on, because you brought way too many carry ons, and need to find a place for your elephant head trophy or whatever. Check that stuff, you ingrate. Find your seat and sit down. Again, prep. If you need your book, or whatever, you had 10 minutes in the jet way to get it out of your bag. Once inside the aircraft, do not ride the back of me pushing me along the aisle with your impatience-prod. We will all sit down before the plane takes off, don’t you worry. Give reasonable, repeat reasonable, distance and time to sit down. I don’t need your hand-carry up my ass.
Sitting: be conscientious. If you want to recline your seat back, do not do it with the force of 12 stampeding water buffalo. Do NOT rock up and down on your seat the entire flight like you are humping the person in front of you. My laptop screen, as I type has almost been snapped in two twice. I am already sitting here like T-Rex-short-arm-carpal-tunnel trying to catch up on 500 emails in a few moments of semi-quiet. Watch your space, pogo man, this is my little office back here.
Attitude: We are all in this together. Your snappy, sense of entitlement because you are flying has to stop. Planes generally do well. They don’t fall from the sky. Generally they are on time. Shit happens during the miracle of air travel. Planes are late. Weather is pretty much everywhere. Don’t take what cannot really be controlled out on your crew or your flatulent travel mates. Also keep in mind that you are in an enclosed space. The normal rules of decency do not go out the window in planes. Cover your mouth, especially. Do not pick your nose like a champion. Clean up a bit if you piss all over the floor in the lav. Do not eat food and stuff the dodgy remnants in the seat pocket in front of you like a slob. For god’s sake, wear deodorant, you are crammed in here with 150 (or more) other human animals. Have some decency.
Landing: Go ahead and clap. That’s kind of cool. Flying is amazing. We clap at more mundane shit, so actually going 3000 miles in a few hours and not barreling into a mountain deserves a round of applause.
Disembarkation: Ready set, “ding “. DO NOT jump up in a mad race the milli-second that the seat belt sign has gone off like the damned plane is about to combust. It takes a while to get off the plane. Relax. Create flow, not blockages in the aisle. Help others smaller and older than you to quickly get their crap from the overheads. I have watched old ladies wrestling with their bags for minutes while others just practically trampled them to escape the metal tube. DO NOT congregate in the jetway or in front of the connection screens just outside the aircraft thereby blocking others. Key-word again; conscientious.
Baggage claim: Folks, you do not need to practically be standing ON or within millimeters from/on the carousel, blocking everyone else from seeing their mangled luggage. It works better if you stand back a few feet, and when you spot your stuff approach the carousel. If you cannot see your bag from a distance of a few feet, get glasses. No one will steal your bag, although granted it would be so easy to do in most airports. I am not really clear why more thieves don’t just walk into (say Hartsfield in Atlanta is the worst) get a bag cart, and just grab a few suitcases get in a car and drive off. There is NO check at the door. I have been tempted myself in a kind of “baggage lottery” idea to leave my suitcase and grab someone else’s just to see what I would get. They may have better stuff after all.

That is really all. Simple and to the point. I have sent a copy of this to all the world’s major airlines for publishing in their in-flight magazines, and hope to get a few hundred thousand air miles as reward for my efforts at making the world a better place. At least then I can sit in First Class more often.

My Favorite Music of 2011

2011-12-11T07:23:00.001-05:00

I keep getting older, and oddly this year was no exception. I listen to a lot of Miles Davis, Bill Evans,Bach and Albinoni these days -- but I still listen to a whole mess of everything.

2011 will go down as the year of the 'fed up". You would think that kind of inspiration would lead to an equally tumultuous year in tunes, not really.

So just in time for Christmas, to put it on the list of that hipster near you, here is some of what occupied my space this year in no particular order:

1. Freedom Run - The Rifles
2. David Comes to Life - Fucked up
3. Father, Son, Holy Ghost - Girls
4. Suck it and See - The Arctic Monkeys
5.The Big Roar - Joy Formidable
6.Double Cross - Sloan
7.The Long Surrender - Over the Rhine
8.Slave Ambient - The War on Drugs
9.Bad as Me - Tom Waits
10. El Camino - The Black Keys
11. Cults - Cults
12. The King of Limbs - Radiohead
13. The King is Dead - The Decemberists
14. Hurry Up, We're Dreaming - M83
15. The Whole Love - Wilco
16. Helplessness Blues - Fleet Foxes
17. You were a dick - Idaho

That's all that I can remember. But at my age that's a lot.

Life, Gratitude and the Power of Balloons

2011-11-26T09:21:00.000-05:00

What are you smiling about ? You big yellow jerk

Everyone dreams of going to the Macy's Thanksgiving parade. For eighty five years it has been one of America's great traditions. Fifty million homes have it on as Turkeys are getting stuffed. So it was an obvious choice when we had all, well most, of our kids together for Thanksgiving for the first time in years. I can only say now that the thing I am grateful for the most this year is that we escaped that tribulation alive.

Myself, my wife, my 16 year old daughter, 14 year old step-son and our 4 year old headed down to the city around 6:30 AM, which we thought was going to be too late. In a way it was. We had a strategy, one of many posted on various web-sites, basically find a spot and stay there. What the web-sites fail to mention is that it is complete and total pandemonium. Generally everyone was nice, but there were just too many of everyone. I am still just so shocked that in all these years of history that more people have not been trampled like at one of those raves that happen in big fields somewhere in Germany. I even Googled it when we got home " People trampled or dying from panic at Macy's Parade" But all for naught. I can say this; it is not safe, and they will have to soon work to control the crowds. Any emergency, any slight reason for panic in a crowd like that, and dominoes will fall hard and not get up.

At first we had space, because it was early. We were not too close, but not too bad. We were proud of our little spot. We had made it to within 100 yards of where the big damned balloons would be dragged by and we were pretty sure we could see something. At very least Cee Lo Green, because he is kind of rotund and visible, like the Doughboy with a potty-mouth. It filled up quickly, and our spot became a living hell, a constricted pulsing mass of human jello moving back and forth with the force of energy. The ebb and flow of people pushing and squeezing through. It was a claustrophobic phantasm. Kids were slipping through our legs, and people were doing anything to get closer - making up stories that their grandmother or dead uncle or whoever was " up there" I had my kid, who is heavier than a cement block, on my shoulders for four hours.

I must say once the parade finally started, after what seemed like centuries of waiting, the tension lifted a bit, as if the crowd too was suddenly full of helium. Cameras were hoisted, cheers erupted and everyone smiled. But it was still hell. My wife became very nervous about the kids, and I could barely stand, but due to the super-human strength only given to dads in parades I was the rock.

At one point our 14 year old decided he had to get out of our ever smaller space, as some smelly old dude with long fingernails, an old bag of newspapers that he was fondling and likely a turd in his pocket got just a little too close. We hugged our son as if he was going off to war at the end of the world. 37th Ave between 5th and 6th was full. It was wall to wall people with nary a way out. At some point, I said, let's go. My wife did not think she could do it. My daughter got scared. With my son on my shoulder I tried to pave the way for us. This, my loyal reader (singular on purpose) was one of the most harrowing experiences of my life. It was damned near impossible to get out. We pushed - there were times when we had less room than our bodies' mass actually required - like we were inverted sans breath, deflated balloons slinking our way out. It took us a full 40 minutes, including my daughter's tears, losing my wife for a whole 10 minutes and a lifetime of emotional scarring, and a few real bruises.

We met up with our son on 5th Avenue and it was as if we had all just survived the holocaust and were re-united.

It is times like these that you recognize how truly precious family is. It is all we have really. And in those 5 hours we became closer than we have been in a long time. Whatever the experience was it is something that we will never forget, and will re-live year in an year out. We are a better family for it, and we have Macy's and a few big dumb balloons to thank for it.

The Last 10 Songs!

2011-11-06T08:47:00.000-05:00

Mine is slightly more scratched

Music is on, always. It is in my head, in my car, in my bed, when I work-out, when I ride, walk and run. My iPod is a random time machine, 14000 songs strong. I have had it since the darned things came out and revolutionalized all this music stuff. I have never upgraded it. It is my memory's workhorse.

Here another entry about the last 10 songs that came on in shuffle:

1. Richard and Linda Thompson - A Heart needs a Home: Damn near cried at this one, which would have been odd while I was folding the laundry{A bit like women's television} This tune is from 1975, and still amazes with its simple beauty. And Richard Thompson remains one of my favorites all these years later.
2. Social Distortion - When she Begins: I will never forget seeing these boys twice from the 1st row of some sweaty venue when I was much younger and could handle being in sweaty venues, and didn't have to leave the pit to use the potty every 30 minutes.
3.Golden Age - TV on The Radio: Wonderful band that continues to evolve. I need to go see them in Brooklyn one day, but likely they will play in a sweaty venue.
4.Stereophonics - Nothing Compares to You: I am pretty sure this is my favorite version of this song, better than the famous one by baldy or the original by Prince. There is something about the all out raspiness and simple arrangement that is darned stunning.
5. Cigarette Tricks - Guided By Voices: One of the most prolific bands ever that generally maintain a high level of quality. I always smile when one of their short esoteric pop songs comes on.
6. Reckoner - Radiohead: My 4 year old and I blasted this in the car, and were fascinated by the drumming in the left channel. It hardly rocks, but still does in a way. We both howled along with Thom's vocals, and in the end it was otherworldly. I guess that is the point.
7. When Under Ether - PJ Harvey: Few women give me goosebumps regularily. PJ, Chan Marshall, Aretha Franklin and that girl from Over the Rhine never fail. Oh, and my wife.
8. Black Star - Gillian Welch: A Radiohead cover which is darned purdy and sparse.
9.Car Thief - Beastie Boys: What has not been said about Paul's Boutique? I cannot forget when I first got this and listened to it over and over on headphones and danced around the room like a jazz monkey.
10.Unreachable - John Frusciante - The Red Hot Chili Pepper guitarist. This is a spacey cool record that more people should hear.

Listen carefully, you never know when your ears may fall off your head.

Vote for Me for President!

2011-10-29T11:26:00.000-04:00

Whatever it is, I am against it!

It is pretty clear the USA is at a complete standstill. Our politics are so extreme we cannot even see that we will need to make some significant changes or we are doomed to fall off our perch as the dominant world power. I am sick of it. So I decided I would run for president and see what I could do to set a new course.

I am in the process of forming the beginnings of my platform and thought I would test-drive some ideas here in this forum;

For the record, I am neither Republican nor Democrat, just slightly right of center, more Liberitarian than anything. I voted for Mcain last time around, but when Obama was elected, I did what all of my Republican friends said when Bush was in office, I respected the office and him as President. I believe our Presidents should be judged by their decisions, and how they lead, not on their party affiliation. I do believe Obama is a smart man, but ultimately one of the most political creatures ever to sit in the Oval Office and that has quickly turned hope into inaction. The Republicans who basically block his every breath, don't help. It's really a mess.

1. Food stamps: Every grocery store should have a small section with a big neon sign that says " People Who Use Food Stamps Shop Here" The only thing in the section would be healthy food staples like rice, vegetables, fruit, beans, and lean inexpensive meats. This will save billions in food stamp and health-care costs.
2. Foreign Policy: While recognizing the need to nurture certain relationships for security reasons, I would recommend cutting off aid to Israel (2-5 billion a year, depending on who you believe) and several other countries that don't appreciate it at all. Full list to follow.
3. War: I support video game wars. That is it. No involvement of US troops unless there is a direct imminent threat of attack. Those that started the Iraq war should be prosecuted -- it is a crime what we did there, and somehow our new wave of denial in politics conveniently forgets how the country got to its present state. That was not Obama, although he added to the big mess-- he took over one of the biggest messes in history. 8 trillion in debt. An international reputation in tatters -- and a war that left 4500 soldiers, 80,000 Iraqis dead and 32,000 coming home to no jobs and no health-care. Mission Accomplished? At least they are coming home.
4. Supporting Innovation: Bringing back what makes this country great, namely leading the world through innovation. Taking our heads out of our asses about climate change, forgetting about whether this is a political issue or not, and taking back from China the cutting edge technology to support sustainability.
While people "label" people that talk about the environment, China and other countries are taking the lead in what WILL be the leading industry for years to come. Stop making this a political issue, make it a business issue.
5. Healthcare: Tax cigarrettes, booze and gasoline by an additional 35% more and create a fund to help people that are really in trouble. Create clear criteria on what that means. Seperate the freeloaders from those that really need help. There are those too. People that work hard, and just fell on shit times. Again, it is not all socialism and/or people mooching off the system. I thought we were a Christian nation, whatever that means.Stop hospitals from keeping old people alive for longer than natural as a large portion of insurance cost comes at the end of peoples lives -- and often hospitals just keep old folks alive to keep billing. Go to e-Medical records now.
6. Education: Privatize most of it, create competition so that we can remove endless bureacracy, and hold parents accountable in participating in making their kid's schools great. Our public school system will not create the leaders of tomorrow, we are way behind.
7. Invest in our own infrastructure first. Take the foreign spending on war, certain aid and rebuild our own roads, bridges, ports, bandwidth etc. Half of what used to be the third world has better roads etc than us. Have you flown into JFK airport lately? We should be ashamed.
8. Keep religion out of politics. If people want to believe in UFOs or are Mormans (which is similar) so be it.
9. Get back to a better mixture of the public-private formula, less government intrusion but some government oversight when required, so for example greed is not allowed to run as rampant as it has.
10. Get real on the debt. Understand that there is no mathematical way to reduce the deficit without raising taxes (and cutting plenty of spending) and note that the venerable Republicans Bush Sr, and Reagan both realized that it was necessary during their administrations. Today, we are like the captain of the sinking ship that refuses to admit the ship is actually sinking, and he will let everyone go down before he considers changing his foolish opinion.
11. Listen. Listen to ideas. Be intelligent. Think. Do not become blind through ideology. This makes us no better than many extreme movements of the past. There is danger lurking on the left and right extremes of the body-politik.
12. Values. They are simple. They are taught by all the religions. The real part of the religions. Action the message not the dogma. Open minds and hearts change things for the positive, not closed ones.

In the Groove

2011-10-27T19:37:00.000-04:00

I used to listen to records in the dark

With big headphones it was like dying

To float ten feet above the bed, suspended

Watching myself climb to a soft delicate spot

Inside.

I always preferred guitars over piano, Elvis over Gershwin

But also loved piano more than most anything.

Music is just space and time

I struggled with both

wanted it all, like swallowing all of the

Night air when only sips would do.

Tom Waits and Hendrix would be odd brothers,

But I imagine them on shared luminescent wings

At the crossroads scratching out meaning --

All the music ever made contained in one burning point

A swarm of flickering light. screaming --

fireflies marking space

Those little plastic grooves poked to make sound

are like the days we have

the heart a furnace, music/life warm

Exploding in just that moment,

Inside small bumps and ridges

until that big slippery slope where the needle

skates quickly towards the

lifeless core --

the hole that keeps it all together

and all sound comes to an end.

My Favorite Albums - Part (x) - Ambulance LTD

2011-10-22T08:56:00.000-04:00

Another in an occasional series. Music is about time and space. I bump into both often.

This is not about another list, as I have plenty of those. It is about that random-ness where something just triggers you to remember an album that has a special place. A song by this band popped up on my iPod 15,000 song shuffle, and I remembered.

This eponymous album came from nowhere in mid 2003, and it still remains nowhere. It's a shame, because this remains one of my favorites by a band that only released one.It's a bit swirly and Shoegazey, harmonious and poppy, but mostly carves out a place all its very own.I remember at the time being shocked how good this was, especially on repeated listens. It was like when I heard "The Wrens - Meadowlands" or "The Dismemberment Plan" or " The Crimea - Tragedy Rocks" or " Silversun Pickups " the first time. They just came from absolute nowhere and slayed me.

It still sounded good when they resurfaced the other day. Here is one song, but it is really best to listen to the whole darned thing a few times, preferably on head-phones at the end of a long dark pier miles into the ocean.

Spaces I have Occupied

2011-10-17T19:26:00.001-04:00

This story begins with Bert from

Sesame Street

About 23 years ago,I had just purchased a state-of- the-art brand spanking new VCR. This was the kind of proud moment that only comes when you recognize that you are a true pioneer, the driving force of innovation and all that is cutting edge in your neighborhood. I had even rented some just released movies on VHS from Premier Video [which went belly-up mere months after the shiny new Blockbuster went in up the road] to watch on the shiny new apparatus, with my dad –the true film buff. I had 4 speakers the size of file cabinets strung to my 110 watt Pioneer stereophonic-quad system which was plugged right into my new machinery. My Sylvania, 25 inch TV, which weighed just under 3 tons completed what was essentially the first home theater set-up. I was ready to blow the roof off with this analog triumph.

I had a 3 year old girl at the time. She was precious and precocious and loved to stand bolt upright in her bed, which was always filled with more books and toys and girl stuff than any bed was made to hold. She had a big beaming smile and straw blonde hair, which she liked to cover in a blue bonnet that made her look a little like one of those American Girl dolls.

I plugged all the gear in, and my dad got settled on the couch to watch the miracle of technology unfold. I turned the new VCR on, it hummed and the button turned green. All systems were go.

I grabbed the chosen VHS tape [I don’t remember what it was] and pushed it towards the waiting slot. The machine was supposed to automatically take it in and suck it into place. Like a big mouth eating plastic, turning it into light and sound. The tape would not go in. It stuck in the gaping maw, and got regurgitated into my hand. I tried again. It spit it out again. My pop tried. Same result.

We are men that use the instruction books in our family. We lunged for it, and jumped for the trouble shooting section. Check power. Check. Check green light. Check. CHECK FOR OBSTRUCTIONS. I searched for a flashlight in the house. Finding a working flashlight in a house where there are young kids can be like finding the holy grail. I remember always saying “ what if the power went out for a week, and you kids always lost the flashlight, we would all break our arms and legs, and probably starve to death” [So later, I always hid a flashlight somewhere up high, like you would hide a loaded gun, so that the kids would never find it]

Like surgeons my dad and I opened the flap and peered inside the VCR. Nothing. Open flap, change angle. Wait…wait..I see something. Move to the right, dad, move the light just a bit.

YES, wait, there is something there.

I fished a 1 inch plastic Bert from Sesame Street out of the mouth of the VCR. And with this, saved the day.

I recently visited the precocious girl, who is now 26 and married, with a house and dogs and a husband and dishes and appliances and things. I stayed with them for part of the weekend.

She likes to keep things – but over the years has learned to give a few things away [she writes about this on her wonderful, insightful, humorous, lovely Blog that every feeling human being should read, because I am proud of her for being a better writer than I am]

She and her husband gave me a tour of their place as is fitting when dad shows up to use the guest room and guest towels and stuff. In the guest room was a plant stand from when I first got married to her mom from our first apartment. I slept next to it. It still stood. It still held plants, and I occupied the same space as it from before my little girl was even born. There were books that I recognized, and the hand-made rug that I schlepped all the way from

Egypt

and have had with me as long as I can remember. There were other things that kept their shape over the years. There were new things, but they shared their environment.

In one of the boxes in one of several basement rooms that were meant to keep these things was a smaller inner box filled with small toys. The kind you get at McDonald’s or wherever you get these little toys.

I reached down and there was Bert. The VCR Bert. The little trouble-maker was still around.

The VCR, VHS tapes, houses, marriages had all gone by the way-side, but there he was smiling that cocky, smug Bert smile. There was not much recognition from my daughter and husband when I picked the little bastard up. They were not in on the smile on my face. I explained.

I placed him back in the little box. I should have taken him, and put him somewhere safe. Because one day he will just become one of my daughter’s Blog entries. Or mine.

We have to decide what lasts.

The greatest place on Earth for a staycation!

2011-10-08T08:29:00.000-04:00

NYC is the greatest place on Earth to take a staycation. Millions of tourists flock here to see the wonders that this city has to offer. We live here. So when my parents came to town for a week, I had the chance to take some time off and look around some more. Here are just some of the millions of things we came across:

Ways to Keep Track of Everything!

2011-10-01T09:24:00.001-04:00

Just how does the brain keep track of all the crap that gets thrown at it in this life? What sticks and why?

Life is an endless parade of vicissitudes. Childhood, growing up, moving, learning, money, work, romance, kids and Ikea furniture all pass like ghosts in rockets and end up on the curb.

Who is the invisible designer of this life and how do I nail him down for a meeting and recap? A PowerPoint that sums it all up in bullet points.

We are all shopworn, living a series of short scenes full of sleep, tears, truffles, bacon and laughter. We are silken cases wrapped like mummies in the stuff of life often missing the fleet beauty of words and real sentiment. Glass shards to be pieced back together. We are tweets. We are becoming clouds.

I have written often about collecting and finding ways of marking the way.
I like to leave bread-crumbs. Often I am overwhelmed about everything there is to remember. Our brains rain, and our synapses are more nervous than the internet. I have things to do, songs to sing, words to eat. Time is short, and I am trying to make room for more. I am collecting the now and future moments.

I collect those plastic hotel room keys. They literally function as bookmarks.
They have no location or time marked, but remain as tangible evidence that I have been some where. I can link this with calendar entries, and online posts and random photos of buildings and faces that I take. These are the keys to my cloud.

I keep lists, and journal entries and songs, snippets of articles and piles of notes to merge my kooky curiosity with some anchor. Snippets of words jotted down become songs, entries, stories, Tweets, all map-making. I bookmark, take pictures of books, note ideas and snap wine bottle labels and send them to Evernote. It is a pastiche, not quite a masterpiece, but a way to keep track.

I would like to hear what you do.

A Childhood in Pieces

2011-09-18T10:49:00.000-04:00

My Mexican Doctor

I am amazed at writers that can write memoirs with the clarity of yesterday. I often wonder how much of what they capture is really the truth or some muddled herky-jerky version of it. I am not sure I could write a memoir. I find it difficult enough to have clear thoughts about the day before yesterday.

Nonetheless, there are things that stick. Things that surface through association.

So once in a while, without too much structured effort I will attempt to remember what happened in my life, just for the sake of the exercise. It is a bright blue windy day. I have had days like this before where I looked out the rattling window to think of what was.

It was just such a blue day after I had my tonsils out. I remember the ice-cream, and spitting in a cup to avoid swallowing. It was the first time I can remember being a "patient " and having everyone's attention on mostly me. I had priviledge. I could go outside in my pajamas. I could look like I hadn't brushed my hair or teeth in a week. It was the 4th of July, and despite the fact that I was on my death bed, I was allowed to watch the fireworks -- in case it was my last time.

Another time, I was playing in the back yard with my 5 year junior brother. I am not entirely sure how old he was -- likely 2-3, and I was swinging my baseball bat around and around in a circle like a dervish. The little tyke was riding on one of those little bikes that you scoot around with your feet.
He had hair the color of an albino, white as pure snow and he and his hair were thin as a wisp. That kid was almost translucent. I hit him in the head with the bat. Again, memories are like this, so I don't know exactly how hard I hit him. I guess it must have been hard. Because his fore-head had a baseball sized lump on it. I still remember the feeling of panic. My parents were inside, and I skulled their little kid. What was I going to tell them? I did the obvious. I lied. I felt stupid. I have never been, and still am not a good liar, I am as transparent, as my brother's skin was translucent. Somehow I carried it, all the way through the ride to the hospital, the doctor's inquiries -- the whole crappy experience. The smell of alcohol. The exam table, the bile-green color of the walls. Doctors offices are the halls of memory.

My brother did not say a word about what really happened. It was our little secret. Up until about 10 years ago, when I finally came clean and admitted to my parents that he did not really "fall off his bike". At that point they didn't care too much. The memory is a liar anyway. And that was a long time ago and it likely didn't have anything to do with my brother's later station in life. I don't think so anyway.

I remember having chicken pox on our family vacation in Acapulco. What stinks about that is that you can't go out in the sun with chicken pox. So I spent the lion's share of our vacation in the sun, holed up in our dark hotel room, like Howard Hughes. I remember peering lovingly out through a small crack in the blinds at the pool -- and even managed to go there once or twice. I don't actually remember being taken to a Mexican doctor, which I am sure would have been something cool to write about if I remembered it with some ferocity. I am sure it was scarier than some of those early Robert Rodriguez mariachi style movies. I am pretty sure the Mexican doctor had an eyepatch and a gattling gun instead of an arm.

I am trying to keep my memories in check. There will be more.

9/11

2011-09-11T08:21:00.000-04:00

Liberty State Park - Where I Ride my Bike

Those of us that are old enough remember the moments exactly. It was as if the world was coming to an end --and the sky was falling. Ten years later, we remember the day that changed our world forever. Little did I know back then that I would now be living less than one mile as the crow flies from where the buildings used to stand. I get goosebumps almost daily. Especially today, my heart hurts.

Here is a poem I wrote shortly after 9/11/2001;

911

Five little ducks went out one day, over the hills and far away.

Mother duck said, “ Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack “ but only 4 little ducks came back.

~ Children’s Song

The world is full of monsters.

Every new shadow puppet

An opaque dagger, fear - sharpened

Plunged straight into the softest part of the marrow.

Grey skies, chimney-pot black smoke in grave plumes

Thick as the rusty crowbar of anger

Crumpled metal from the angel of death’s wings on fire

We are looking for God in rubble

We are looking for God with bare raw hands.

We are looking for God in the bloodshot shock of eyes.

We are so fragile

Just withered flowers before dust

Everything sacred, taken for granted

In our faces wrinkled new shades of pale

A dream to kiss goodbye,

The country can’t breathe for crying

With pictures of our innocence

lost pinned to our chests,

The loved ones

All innocent bystanders

The nightmare crawling up the bedspread wing

Crashing in the middle of the head

New words made dumb,

Damned tears now

Glass splintered; a new world feared unconquerable

by good.

All we feel,

All we fear

May just go away at any moment.

Labor daze and Led Zeppelin!

2011-09-05T06:17:00.000-04:00

I heard Heartbreaker by Led Zeppelin, the live version off Song Remains the Same just yesterday. It never fails to blow me away. I listen to Led Zeppelin a lot lately, even if I am just slightly younger than its remaining members.

Today is Labor Day in the U.S. - the holiday that traditionally marks the end of Summer. When last ditch beach trips are taken, desperate picnics are held and the kids squirm at the thought of heading back to school. Fall is coming, the air starts to cool and the rest of the remaining year goes faster than a steel marble down a playground slide. It goes like this over and over.
Life is short, and Labor Days come and go with the quick turning of the seasons.

Every year we wait for the Summer - for the feel of the heat on our bare feet and a cool drink in a shady place,when laughter carries on sunbeams and rock and roll is the best soundtrack. I used to carry it with me on a boombox every where I went.

The boombox is gone, the Summers are speeding up, but the memories and the songs remain the same.

I have always loved Led Zeppelin, who hasn't? Even when I went through my {more} snobby phase in the late 70s and early 80s and listened to punk and new wave and was supposed to eschew the old grand-dads, I never did. I just never told my erudite record store colleagues.

The riff in Heartbreaker is arguably one of the greatest in rock and roll. {Sir Page is the father of many of the greatest} And hearing it, even when I have heard it a million times before, in the basement caves of my youth, in cars, walkmen, boomboxes, never ever does not make my every hair stand on end. It hits the gut, it hits the heart, it kicks your soul. Rock is like that. And God knows there is not enough of it around. I just don't see the kids getting absorbed in anything like we used to. Just to make the effort to get a record out, dust it off, set the needle in the groove, read the dust-jacket over and over again would seem too much these days. I am grateful we had it. It makes us who we are. Old.

The Summer has come and gone again, and each moment is one moment less. But there is still rock and roll. There is the life we made around it. There is every feeling you have ever had condensed in a lick, a drumbeat, a lyric.

This is one way I make memories.

Hurricane Irene Awakens the Numb!

2011-08-28T10:32:00.002-04:00

Although I had been commuting since May of 2010, I moved the family to the NYC area in January of this year. Since then we have had record snowfall, an extreme heat record, an earthquake and now the first major hurricane in 100 years, the big bitch - Irene. Can't say it has not been interesting. Lord knows we love NYC like home now regardless. Home is where the heart is, not where your stupid stuff is.

We moved from a large home to a small condo very close to the city, surrounded on three sides by water. We are 150 yards away from the Hudson River and can see the Statue of Liberty and Battery Park and the big city from our place. We traded stuff and space (that we never really used anyway) for experience.

In watching the news coverage of the hurricane, almost every time they showed the water and the Statue looking out from Manhattan and Battery Park you could see our home in the distance. I don't remember a time ever when I have seen my place on TV so often. Usually seeing things on TV is not good news.

In moving into our tiny place, and the material possession purge that proceeded it, coupled with the advent of the digital age, we hardly have a stitch of anything that is worth worrying about. That is except what is really important. Us. Our family.

I used to be a collector, and have written about that before. There was a time when what I owned, possessed meant everything to me. It defined moments, places, time and to a big extent, me. My huge book collection, my comics, my records, my CDs, my art, my lunchboxes, my toys, my Shakespeare VHS collection, my wall of faces etc. Some of it, I still own, but it is locked into the modern-day mausoleum - a storage place. Somewhere dark and impersonal, and not at all like the " sanctuary/the male caves" that I used to have. I can go look at it, and will one day have the courage to fully divorce myself, but for now it is there when I need it.

Shit why have/move literally thousands of pounds of books/records/CDs/photos when one small device, or the precious "cloud" can now hold it all in your virtual pocket or floating above your head? Besides, who cares?

So when we left in the eve of Hurricane Irene, it was us. Our dog. A few digital devices. That was it. The rest is well, as they say replaceable. We don't have a Steinway Grand Piano, or endless stuff to be worried about. I like it this way. Indeed, you can't take it with you.

When we packed up to get out to hole up in a hotel some 45 minutes away with our precious few things, it dawned on me, even despite the endless flatulence of our kids, and the tension and stress that comes from being in a small space with the little rats - this is all that really matters. The rest is just detritus.

I am not sure why it takes the brink of catastrophe to make us understand what is really important. Or why human empathy is shocked awake. Or why all of a sudden you realize just how many or how few friends you really have. This all should be obvious enough. Life is precious enough without all these extreme reminders.

You should be exercising now!

2011-08-21T10:15:00.003-04:00

Exercise is a royal pain in the ass. It never ceases to amaze me whenever I turn on the TV, which is rarely, how I am confronted by the latest wave of crazy shit to make us get off of our saggy asses. I recently saw an ad for the latest hot trend - which is basically handing inside what looks like a tablecloth stolen from a cheap New Jersey restaurant. Look! Your flying! Your hanging in a hammock, you normally lazy sack of potatoes and now, with this feeling, you are Superman, an angel of fitness, a God. Dream on, chubby spaceman.

My all time favorite is the "miracle" exercise machine where the workout can be done in 4 minutes a day - you will be TRANSFORMED into a buff, cut, 24 year old supermodel, the next candidate for excercise ads, having people in the mall beg for you to take your shirt off - all for $14,175. Small price to pay for your vanity and shirtlessness in public. Grow up.

I say poppycock. Recent studies have AGAIN suggested that all it takes is some common sense and a little activity every day. As little as 10 minutes. And sorry, infomercial marketers, pimps of our credit cards, NO MACHINE necessary. Walk a little more than you do. Take the stairs. Make love to your wife of whoever she lets you make love to. Do a few pushups.

Years ago I wanted to write a book, a deep treatise on how easy parts of life are and call it " Just do pushups " When all else fails, and you can't get started - just get down and give me 10. Anywhere, anytime. It's a bit like planking, that new Facebook fad, that bored kids that don't have any rioting to do started - it's just that much more productive.

Stop reading this crap and get out there. I dare you to drop in the vegetable aisle in your local Shop Rite/Kroger/Whatever grocery store and do as many push ups as you can right now. Then when you get to the aisle with the chips and soda do 20 more.

Your body, and maybe some other flacid strugglers will thank-you for it.

Live a better life, do less of the stupid

2011-08-07T08:11:00.000-04:00

Quite some time ago I purchased this little book used called " Dream It, Dream It, List It - Do It! (How to live a Bigger and Bolder Life, from the Life List Experts at 43things.com)

Besides having one of the longest titles for such a little book, this thing has been irritating me for the entire time I have had it.

Look, the idea is fine. It is basically a mammoth checklist to answer the question "what do I want to do in my life?" It is split into chapters that include, Finances (yawn), adventure, create, ignite change and "get it on", amongst many others.

The sex chapter, which I flipped to first, includes; have sex 8 times in one day, have a threesome, make love on a high-school football field and have tantric sex. (I had to bundle these into one item for efficiencies sake)

Which brings me nicely to the first point.I don't know about you, but I don't have time for 428 pages of check boxes. I will have to start combining things, or skipping them all together.

So I am flipping to random pages/random items, and slowly but surely using the power of elimination;

Pg. 175: "Love without fear" - Nah, what fun would that be? Love is partly about walking the fine line between razor blades and rose petals.
Pg. 58:" Live my life with arms wide open" - Just the Creed song is enough for me not to do this one. I don't know what the song, or this life-do item actually means.
Pg. 258: "Jump in a pool full of marshmellows" - Sounds kind of ok, albeit sticky, but I will not waste my time on the totally unrealistic. Get real, people.
Pg. 155: " Promote my blog" - Oh sure, for what? I have 4 readers. That is plenty.
Pg. 54: " Fall asleep in a field of daisys, while someone reads me poetry" - Ok, perhaps the marshmellow thing is not that far-fetched.
Pg.224: " Read every book in my library" - If you have 3 books, fine. I have a lot more than that. I still buy books like some people buy Starbucks. One of my biggest frustrations is that life is not long enough to read everything. Realistic expectations are not always the same as compromise. Read as much as you can, but don't expect that you will ever have read enough.
Pg. 174: "Balance my chakras"- Nah, what for? I have an app for that.
Pg. 318: " Discover the meaning of faith" - I don't believe in this.
Pg.384: " Build my own oscilloscope " - I wouldn't even know where to start.
Pg.399: "Wear a beehive hairdo in public" - Big deal, this is a normal occurence when I use the wrong hair product.

It is good to know what I don't need to do in order to really live this life. The list is by no means comprehensive, but I have a few years still left to work on it.

Do less of the stupid.

Perspective

2011-08-06T16:37:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite philosophers!

2011-07-31T09:39:00.000-04:00

I have raised a bunch of kids. I am still raising them, while I attempt to grow up myself. I have many heros - the philosophers that try and help shed light on this life. One constant has always been Dr.Seuss. He was around when I was a little nib. He has been around for every kid that I have been a part of. His simple, yet deep messages set in his crazy parallel world will always be part of all of us.

"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go..."

"You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams."

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."

"Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You."

"We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love."
"How did it get so late so soon?"
"Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!"
"Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them."

If you don't like gay marriage, don't get gay married.

2011-07-30T20:01:00.002-04:00

This is a guest post from my 15 year old daughter:

I’m straight, but not narrow.Same-sex Marriage

Since 2001, same-sex marriage has been recognized as an issue around the world. The conflict is known as a political, social, moral, and even a religious issue. The arguments revolved around whether these couples should be able to enter into a marriage, be together under a different name, or simply not have the right at all. Why? Why, in this case, is love limited? You hear, read, and find so many quotes and sayings that state, “Love does not have boundaries” or “You can find love anywhere.” Why do these situations get treated differently? If love can be found anywhere, why does it matter if love has chosen a man/man or woman/woman relationship? Along with that, many people believe that denying same-sex couples the right to marriage is discrimination in all forms. How are these couples supposed to trust that “All men are created equal” if they are being ostracized for falling in love? On the contrary, one argument states that same-sex marriage runs against tradition. Since when has tradition played a role in this world? Back then, women weren’t allowed to vote. The 20th century changed tradition. African-Americans were not President of The United States. Barack Obama changed tradition. The world has the ability to alter tradition. However, numerous countries throughout the world make individuals endure the death penalty or life in prison solely for being homosexual. These people do not deserve to waste their lives away in a jail cell much less be sentenced to death, because of the way they were born. Today, things are changing. Many countries are now beginning to accept same-sex marriage and recognize it. If the world continues to react as well as they are now, same-sex marriage could be legalized throughout the globe. For now, personally, I’m happy to be just another straight girl fighting for gay rights.

Everyone has to have a vision!

2011-07-23T06:07:00.001-04:00

Here is another one from my archives. I am not quite sure when I wrote this, as it is not dated - but its message and applicability is timeless. You should click on the picture to experience the full meaning of this valuable artifact.

One of the greatest stories ever told!

2011-07-16T06:50:00.001-04:00

In a recent trip back to my hometown in Germany, I (re)discovered a treasure trove of classics both from my and my kid's childhood's. I am more than grateful to my mom and dad, for not only making such good memories, but so carefully protecting them. Here is one of my first brilliant poems in a line of many to come:

Nostalgia, what a waste of time!

2011-07-03T08:50:00.001-04:00

The problem with nostalgia is that it distorts the past through idealization. As cool as things probably were, they are likely not as cool as you remember them. The brain has a lot of work to do, you cannot expect that it always knows what it is talking about.

For me there is nothing quite like music to bring me back to a space and time somewhere in the before. It is one of the reasons I both enjoy and am dizzied by the massive collection housed on my iPod, which is on constant memory shuffle. Time traveling on a shoestring headphone budget. Dizzying, surprising, random - a collection of chronological photos thrown in the air and then picking some from the pile. Amazingly most, if not all songs, have some deeper anchor in a specific memory. Music does this more for me than photos, or smells, or the scar that runs most of the length of my left arm.

Here is some of what I heard this morning during my ritual one hour morning workout, and the strange places the songs brought me;

1. Perfect Opening Line - The Frames (1999): Kids have always been present. I remember listening to this CD on a (CD Player) during Spongebob. Spongebob premiered in 1999, and it more than The Frames have been a fixture around here ever since. The Frames are a great, under-rated band, and this always brings me back to the movie, Once, which you all should see and reminds me of the Academy Awards, becasuse the soundtrack was nominated that year. All of this reminds me of Elliott Smith who also appeared on the Academy Awards. I miss him.
2. Let Me In - Rory Gallagher (1975): This reminded me of listening to this and Roy Buchanan so loud in my college apartment some years later just to impress a girl upstairs who really liked the blues. Just once, she asked me to "not play my music so loud, so early in the morning". Heartbroken, I listened to it even louder on headphones. Rory opened for Aerosmith once, way back when, and I remember no one except for me appreciating him.
3. Fall on Me - REM (1986): It does not matter the time or place, this song still gives me goosebumps. I saw them perform in Birmingham, AL one year, and when they played this I had to cover my tears. Likely to be played at my funeral, just from the world of memories and how REM was such a vital part of my growing up in Georgia.
4. The World is Full of Crashing Bores - Morrissey (2004): I always remember wanting to like Morrissey more than I did, considering that I love The Smiths. I religiously bought everything that he released, and ironically found myself bored most of the time. Love me, indeed. Don't get me wrong, I like the old poof, but nothing will ever touch the amazing song " Suedehead" that gave me hope when he first went solo.
5. Alex Chilton - The Replacements (1987): In this case, there is a complete alignment of nostalgia and the present. This song used to save my life. It still does. I remember at the time thinking that my beloved Replacements were going way too far pop, but Pleased to Meet Me is still damned great, even now and it represented their real last stand in the end.

Life is a series of short songs, and soon enough the record is over. Enjoy whatever you can, and whatever you choose to remember, make it good.

You Should Be Listening to this!

2011-06-23T13:11:00.000-04:00

Half the darned year is over. I am still 50. There has already been a solid handful of cool things to listen to, even at my age, where by all rights I should be listening to James Taylor's greatest hits live from your local dentist.

Here is some of the stuff. Conspicuously absent is PJ Harvey,Adele,and The Strokes, Fleet Foxes amongst many others - go find your own videos.

Go act your age, whatever that is.

We are all so spoiled!

2011-06-16T21:37:00.000-04:00

I was going to write something about how darned spoiled we all are with all the various wish fulfillment devices we carry around, but then I was reminded of Louis CK, who says it all for me:

Life is Easy - Revisited

2011-06-03T06:30:00.000-04:00

I have written about how easy life really is before.

If someone else hadn't already stolen my idea to write a " Life for Dummies " book, surely I would have by now. That's one of the rules in life, if you have an idea, don't wait for someone else to pinch it.

Now that I am 50, I think a lot more about life, since there is less of it left. That is another golden rule. " The less you have of something, the more you want it"

Sex is a good example of this. My kid feels this way about Skittles.

So, I get up early, to have a few moments of quiet, before the rambling troops of kids wake up and suck up any chance of me finding the last precious keys to all of life's mysteries.

Knowing they will all be awake very shortly, as the Sun is already up, I will have to limit my ruminations to a few key observations this morning. My treatise on epistemology will have to wait for a longer day.

1. Coffee is very likely the greatest drug every invented. Slightly above Aspirin and its distant cousin Ecstasy.
2. Most of people's ills could be cured with just having more discipline. Once someone finds the mental maps that control this part of the brain, and creates a drug to manage it, the World's problems from obesity, to crime, to messiness, to religious tomfoolery will come to a end.
3. Every bit of this is made up on the spot. Some of the best and worst writing comes from just typing.
4.Everyone should ride a bike a few times a month. It brings a feeling of flying that normally only comes in dreams. It's good for the soul.
5.All this diversity in the city is good for people. Our kids need to be exposed to it, and it builds character.
6.Life is easy. Just calm down.
7.Take the time to take a lot of pictures, random stupid ones. It sharpens the aesthetic sense and its fun. I like cool buildings.
8.There is really nothing that can be done about teenagers. Short of killing them, that is.
9.Walk more than you do. We have legs to move us forward, not to dangle off a couch, balancing chips and a beer.
10. Read more than you do, your brain will live longer, and it makes traveling to a lot more places possible.
11. The hardest one of all, force yourself to read a poem once in a while. Not the kind that is on a greeting card. A real one. They reinforce the beauty and power of language, which is slowly being eroded by our electronic ADD lives.
12. Sex is good. Get as much as you can, but keep it moral. (However you define that for yourself)
13. Keep working on it, and don't stop on observation 13.

Love Letter Unknown

2011-05-30T06:52:00.001-04:00

Love Letter Unknown

Our lives nourish themselves
like art on the deepest particulars

Love, floats
Plays/bobs

a cork over the sweetest wine
steaming like a pie fresh from the oven

We.

More touchable characters, vivid-touching
everything that matters most in the world.

I understand you like clairvoyance
deep heart-mind answering questions

clockwork chameleons
always turning the right colors.

We love like everything we love.

The simple things.
The new moon clearly drawn over night's trees.

The smell of a book freshly cracked.
Aretha Franklin.
The silly smile Sun.

A tear ripped from its socket from so much feeling.

We are learning to trust the world
like children again.

Democrats and Republicans Explained

2011-05-28T10:08:00.001-04:00

This graphic is courtesy of one of my favorite sites, Information is Beautiful. You should go there if you like information. The original of the below is here.

Cyclus

2011-05-27T10:39:00.002-04:00

Spring.

A beginning.

We prepare ourselves

for Monet’s drunk show swirl

of the red, green,

yellow dust

becoming seed.

Life sprouts like popcorn.

Dogwoods, big cotton candy trees.

The light blue screen of sky.

Desire born, pushing up through the crust,

Drinking the sweet water underneath.

Summer

barges in without transition.

The Sun, a smear of wax, a languid egg cooked against shiftless haze.

We are talking the shadow language -

on the constant search

for the imminent whisper of garden rain,

smooth and cool to the tongue.

Fall.

The bloodshot sky.

The leaves drain blood, waiting

to drop with grace.

Winter.

The long road home.

Milk-white crush. Cold feet.

More time in bed,

dreaming of mom’s hot chocolate

putting on dry, warm clothes by the fire

the skin’s bone white shrivel underneath.

The calm glow. The strength of will to start all over again.

(Update via Blackberry Blogger)

My Favorite Albums - Double Nickels on the Dime

2011-05-22T08:01:00.000-04:00

"No hope? See, that's what gives me guts." ~ D.Boon (Minutemen)

If I were to try and be comprehensive in these lists one album at a time, I would be writing for what is left of my life, which is less by the day. I have made lists. This is more about what has hit me hard again lately. Something that comes on the iPod and just manages to smack me square in the gut.

This is a sprawling manifesto of short punk songs that cover all of your life. It is influential, experimental, manic, terse and philosophical. And it rocks ,is funky and pops like a rubber band snapped upside your head.

"Twinkle, Twinkle, bla, bla bla " ~ D.Boon (Minutemen)

I remember seeing these guys with R.E.M. just before the late great singer D.Boon died.
It was one of the many rock deaths that left me in tears. It marked a time where it felt like my youth died along with him.

On Turning 50

2011-05-15T09:17:00.000-04:00

Why the hell would I not quickly spew a poem on this momentous day?

On Turning Fifty

Big fucking deal.
This life is like shrapnel, little shards
stuck in places
I am grateful just to pull them forth
twist them into shapes
to bridge the gaps
of everything exploded
and unspoken.

I don't know exactly when I will figure it all out,
would bullet points on a powerpoint suffice?

I had a journal with answers
I used to write in it everyday
I filled a book a year and
started the last one in 2003
haven't finished it yet,
it's about how - writing
is just another affliction.

Big fucking deal.
I am a spare, but freshly painted room
flaking from the best parts of me.
I am the hinge of the book, barely cracked.

Half a century. Wars don't last this long.
Love barely keeps up.
I am around --
A current, just patterns
I just gave myself up to it
And ended up here.

There are a million songs, and
just as many kisses to remember it by.

If I had a coloring book, it would be simpler.
There would be a bright yellow and red
Sunshine, wandering

The place where my kids are. And your big smile.
Silly happy places that are supposed to be colored
way outside of the lines.

There would be shiny Chess pieces with minds of their
own -- making moves turning to flesh,
I am controlling the outcome

going back changing a few moves.

We are the grainy home movies we used to watch.
Like those old slide shows
we used to make a big deal out of,
where we turned out the lights and ate popcorn
and we were the stars who watched themselves.
before everything became ones and zeros.

There would be a world of memories
to recreate.

Big fucking deal. Smiles,
they come from it, they bleed from it
This searching, this half-century
glint - there are a thousand diamonds
yet to crush into what's left of forward.

It's a big fucking deal.

Osama head shots found!

2011-05-07T10:06:00.000-04:00

Bye.

Now that the dirtbag is finally gone, I thought it only fitting to repost the links to my open letters to al-Qaeda. They just seem just that much more timely now.

May you get everything coming to you in hell.

Grow Up!

2011-05-06T06:04:00.001-04:00

Web Slinging time

I was having a conversation with my three year old about what he wanted to be when he grew up the other morning during our ride to school.
Often it is during this precious time that we have our most intellectual discussions. If I had a plum nickel for every time he said " Papa" with a probing question right behind it, I'd be typing this on a much nicer computer right now.

I have rarely heard such a clear and simple answer to that complex question. " I want to be Spiderman when I grow up, Papa"

Of course. " So do I " is what I literally said.

Now I suppose my reaction is somewhat related to my ongoing (30 year) mid-life crisis. Damn right I want to be a hero, in a cool outfit, with superhuman strength, saving the world, yet has a pretty well rounded dysfunctional background.

Who wouldn't? I am almost 50, and will be toting a colostomy bag around before I know it, so being Spiderman is just that much more colorful.

It got me thinking about this whole life thing again - which I think about a lot. It is a damned short ride with more jerking around than that scrambler ride at the carnival. Except it does not stop, and you can't get off until it is over. You can look back, but that is dizziness you feel.

So I was thinking about all the jobs that I could not have done when "I grew up", and how I rationalized them then and now:

1. A dentist - I could not look into other people's mouths all day. It is bad enough have to hear them talk. In addition, I am not good with glue. I tend to use too much, and it gets everywhere, I would not want to make that mess in someone's oral cavities.
2. A fireman - As noble as this is, and I have amazing respect for Firemen (and women), as a kid, all I could think of was burning up. Not for me.
3. A mechanic - I can't fix a shoelace. Forget it.
4. Porn star - it would have its moments, but sustaining it would be tough over the years. Likely this job sucks.
5.Golfer - I don't look good in hats, and I don't like golf shirts very much. I would likely drink too much.
6. US President - a great ambition to have, but let's face it, there is not other job in the world that is more thankless. Depressing.
7. Astronaut - again, cool, I just figured these guys will all be out of work one day. Which they more or less are.
8. Walmart Greeter - I kind of like the speed of this.
9. Ob/Gyn - don't even go there.
10. Manager - nah, this involves people.

So you see, being a superhero does have some appeal.

I am a Superhero to my son and that is really all that matters.

I never thought I would end up here!

2011-05-01T09:34:00.001-04:00

This is your brain on NYC

I never thought I would end up here. I suppose we never really know where we will end up. Sure, you can have a plan. Plans get sidetracked by fate and choice. "Recalculating route" as my GPS would say.

We live by NYC, very close. We look at the skyline from our living room. The Statue of Liberty is our neighbor. I see her standing there proud and tired in the Hudson every morning. I have never shared a Sunrise more with any lady other than with her.

My wife and I always would have liked a more urban life-style, despite having been in the country or suburbs our entire lives. We just never assumed it would be in the greatest city on our fair Earth, nor this soon.

This place is everything everyone says it is, and more. A big fucked up wonderful circus of energy, color and magic. My kids will be the better off for having had the chance to experience the diversity, the culture and the endless power of this place. It is exhilarating, exhausting and endless. Our kids have learned more in the last few months just from being here, than from the years before it.

The suburbs homogenize our kids. They make them bland as Wonder Bread. Duller than a butter knife. [Which is used to spread something that is definitely not butter]

Sure you can bring the city into the house, through books, computers, and what-not, but you don't learn " street " from a screen.

Sure, it can be tough. When it rains here, the color fades and all gets grey and cloudy and the buildings disappear into mist and fog, and the throngs just don't give a shit, mostly. I love that people don't give a shit around here. At least not about the wrong stuff. It can get cold. But people go outside. People walk. People dress for it.

Food is everywhere. It pours onto the streets. This is fast food that is good. It smells of the entire planet here. Art is everywhere. The city is art walking.

Fate has a way of doing the right things sometimes.

Sketches of China: Part 1

2011-04-23T08:48:00.000-04:00

Shanghai'd In Shanghai

I recently went to China. This is not a geopolitical or economic treatise. I will not talk about how the world's leading economists forecast that China will take over the USA as the world's dominant power somewhere between 2020-2027. I won't cover that all of us are more or less responsible for this forecast, by wanting to have more of the cheapest, and borrowing Chinese money to mortgage our kid's future to pay for a few stupid wars, and to pay for gas from the Middle East so we can drive SUVs to our super-sized houses that are upside down.

Make no mistake, China is not interested in becoming the West, they are interested in doing it their way. They will undoubtedly shape the world in their image, while liberally borrowing from ours.

China is trying damn hard, almost too hard in a way, as the facade of glimmer, bedazzle and big-money-business is often obscured by a thick, pervasive smog, literally and metaphorically. It's hard to see what is inside sometimes. I believe they like it that way.

When I first arrived in Shanghai, it was a bit like seeing Disneyworld for the first time. Or Vegas. It was at night, and everything is lit up like a combination of the future, a casino and a whorehouse. It was as if the schizo Jetsons had designed the place. The only thing missing were the flying cars. And believe me this city could use some flying cars. A few more dimensions might help with the near constant traffic quagmire. It is total metal sludge.

I write things down. So without editing, I will just share a few of my hastily written fragment observations from my journal:

1. Two " The Carpenters" ring tones. I have never heard a Carpenter's ring tone. Then to hear two in a span of 3 days struck me as absurd. Research on the popularity of this band immediately ensued. Neither Google, nor Billboard could shed any light on this mysterious fact. More is known about the construction of The Great Wall, than this fascinating nugget. There are strange priorities on the Internet sometimes.
2. One morning when I was working out in the very American looking gym, with machinery mostly made in China, Taiwan and Japan, I noticed some window washers who were about 7 stories off the ground, walking along a ledge carrying what looked like very heavy buckets of water and soap. They balanced like monkeys, and stretched to clean windows. They had no harness or rope to keep them from falling. Luckily they were good at it. Luckily there is not O.S.H.A. in China. But the lack of regulation certainly helps them to get shit done. There are a lot of windows in this city to clean. And plenty of folks to clean them if a few fall to the pavement.
3. I tried to get on Twitter on my PC, but couldn’t. Hmm.
4. It smells in a lot of places. It smells like fish soup with a base of marine fuel and manure. You get used to it.
5. Mysterious fluids are puddled in a lot of places. Mostly I stepped over them, so I survived.
6. There are bars where I was amazingly popular with the women. They ALL really liked me. These ladies are affectionately called ‘ chickens’ and it turns out they like everyone, so my self-esteem is back to where it was before I arrived.
7. Chinese people like to eat a lot. One lunch we ate off a lazy susan, and it was very much like a VW Beetle at a circus where clowns emerge endlessly. The desert is typically very sticky and mostly looks like Baseballs. Luckily most of the food is excellent, identifiable or not.
8. Most of the big highways looked like they were paved yesterday. They are expansive and shiny and many have electronic Google Map type signs hung above showing traffic patterns. Here we mostly drive through pot holes with mysterious liquids of their own. One day we also will invest in the infrastructure of our country, after we reconstruct the roads that we have blown up in the far corners of the world.
9. I watched a man balance on one leg on a park bench for nearly half an hour. I thought it was a statue at first. He certainly acted like one. I am pretty sure back home, in order to do this, one would need to buy $ 500 worth of designer workout clothes first, order a handsome personal trainer and drive 75 miles to an exclusive fitness club. We like to talk about working out more than just getting out there and standing on one leg.
10.One of the coolest things that I witnessed, in our office of approximately 1000 people was that the majority lay their heads down on their desks at lunch and take a power nap. No wonder they get shit done, they are rested, and eat lightly at lunch.
11. Congee - weird. But I sort of like the stuff.
12. Manners are extreme. The Chinese do not think twice about spitting, burping and farting in public, but are generally amazingly professional and polite. Especially like almost all cultures when they can get some of your money.

China, I miss you already.

Happy Birthday Little Girl!

2011-04-20T06:21:00.000-04:00

She is older now

26 years ago, today, I caught my first glimpse of this beautiful sweet soul, my first kid, Helen. Today there is great consolation in getting this old, by being enormously proud of the person she has become.

Things Given, Days to Count Them

Celebrate !

the blessings started on the first day
you came tiny and wrapped, a gift,
shimmering like the fragile lovely singing of the angels.

Blessings !

life’s goblet cannot hold all of your promise for you are blessed; happiness, the sunflower of your heart
see it in the eyes of all of your friends
compassion is your flame
it is like glitter in your eyes,
creativity is the fixed star in your sky,

words your wings.
(Just a glimpse into the given things )

I could make a cake a thousand miles tall
Bake in your blessings to try and hold them all,
I could wrap a million words,

try to sing that famous song
in just the right voice, or

I could just hand you a seedling,
watch you plant it,

watch ambition flower, grow
this day
like the first day of eternal spring.

Blossom !

Tomorrow, the horizon
a mirror with little memory
but for the flame of your petals.

You deserve this day,
blow out the candles,
close your eyes
and always keep the glow

of your sweet promise.

Jesus Fever

2011-04-19T20:56:00.000-04:00

No, this is not about everyone's favorite savior. It is much more innocent than that. I cannot get this new release by Kurt Vile off rotation in the earbuds. This is American guitar music, this is a guy sitting in the corner at a party playing that no one dare ignore. This is a conversation meant to be heard. Check it for yourself, then go listen to the rest.

Song(s) For a Saturday Memory

2011-04-16T07:03:00.000-04:00

I am a huge Verve fan, and still would be prone to say things like "Richard Ashcroft is one of the top 30 rock singers ever" It's funny how memory works. I took my girls to Germany shortly after I got divorced. The album that this song came from was our soundtrack almost the entire time, driving on the autobahn. We listened to nothing else. By all rights, those kids should have been listening to one of the top hits of 2000, but they asked for this CD over and over again. I generally hate music videos, but as these things go, this is at least clever in its own simple way:

And just for good measure, another from years later, just because I like the song and I was reminded.

The Ultimate Do List from Ben!

2011-04-13T22:43:00.000-04:00

More of The Pesky Future!

2011-04-10T07:21:00.002-04:00

This is part two. Part one is here

The future is shaping up to be a bold,visionary place which scares the living hell out of me. Good thing I won't be there for too much of it. Here are some further predictions from our resident populist physicist futurist Michio Kaku, and my observations:

1. We will be able to create designer children. Look, I am all for good-looking people, but this would just be boring. If everyone looked good, in the end no one would look good, and what fun would that be? At some point quotas would have to be put in place for breeding more intelligent, stronger kids and I am sure rogue nations (and by that I may or may not mean the USA, not sure what will happen there) would find ways of abusing this and everything will end up like an episode of Power Puff Girls, where marauding mutations are terrorizing the homogenized blue-eyed masses. Scary.
2. Being able to stay at one age by attacking aging at the molecular level. Great, see the above. Many would choose to stay at the damned fun but not the brightest age range of 24-27. The world would turn into a one big party of hot looking people that have been genetically altered, with large organs ( see growing your own organs, previous entry) that can use the Internet in their eyeballs to check out your entire history, and can ingest whatever libations they want since they can grow a new liver on their balcony the next day. Marriage as we know it would wither. There would no longer be any old people to make fun of. The joy of finding strange hairs growing out of the wrong places would disappear. Hair colorists, nail shops ( because we now can grow fingernails with color) and aging spa's business would vanish, causing the Korean beauty revolt of 2076. The AARP would fizzle. I can't stand hot young single people now, why would I want a world full of them?
3. Our toilets and bathroom mirrors will contain DNA sensors. Everytime I look in the mirror or sit on the pot, I will get an entire medical check-up, which can be automatically uploaded through a combination iPad and toilet. My complete medical history will be contained on a chip smaller than the head of a pin. This is probably the most amazing prediction of all, since considering today in 2011, we still have to fill out the same medical form every single time we go to the Doctor, and clearly part of the exhorbitant medical costs are going towards paying for enormous warehouses to store all the paper records. It is rumored that Doctor's offices will start to go digital towards 2020.
4. Tourists will go to outer space via space elevators. Basically super-strong cables will be made using nanotechnology, and rich people can shoot up into space on a crazy Willy Wonka gone even madder elevator. I just hope that someone has found the cure to flatulence by then.
5. Robots will be everywhere. Well it's about time. This is the one thing that all the soothsaying fools have always said. From " Lost in Space " to Jules Verne, they always show up somehow. But so far besides a vacuum (the dreamy " Roomba" which I have always dreamed of owning), and the inhuman looking beasts that you see in manufacturing, not too much has happened with "humanoid" robots, and that is what I mean when I talk about robots.

Cool, I need a ping pong partner

They are coming along, but far from being household items that could replace your spouse, lover or kids or whatever. I could use one as a masseuse right about now, so I hope that we can accelerate this development before my demise, which I predict to be in exactly 32.3 years, considering my current state of health.

But you know it gets worse. Terrorists will be able to create nasty biological warfare, by launching gingivitis and acne attacks on unsuspecting military age teenagers. (that is if there are any teenagers, since age will be controlled by the government). Flying cars will cause insurance rates to sky-rocket, and the skys will be full of souped up cruisers jamming to Lil Wayne's grandson, Little Bwayne. Global warming will be a thing of the past,as large portions of the Earth will look like burnt toast that has been sitting in warm water for a week, and people will just move somewhere else or take elevators into space.

It all sounds really cool, but I will stick around here for as long as I can, but not too long.

I have seen the future and it's weird.

2011-04-09T07:41:00.001-04:00

Civilization is a complicated mess. It goes in cycles and no matter how hard prognosticators have tried to predict the distant tomorrow statistically speaking the majority have failed to come even close to what actually happened. I suppose the beauty of being a futurist is no one can hold you accountable later on for your horse-hockey ideas. A study some years ago by The University of Pennsylvania examined 27,451predictions by a whole slew of really damned smart soothsayers and concluded that over half the time the predictions were wrong. Coin flippers, basically.

The Jetsons were wrong. The "World Fairs" that used to take place were mostly wrong.

We don't have flying cars(yet) and don't eat our food in flash frozen pellets. But compared to dirt farmers, or the Mesopotamians we certainly are wizards and sorcerors, like the Connecticut Yankees in the court. Just look around, the future is everywhere. It's getting really weird, folks.

So what will the future really look like? It is pretty clear, at least to me, that technology will become the dominant world religion, followed closely by the blind allegiance to the Pharmaceutical drug companies. Today's religions will fall behind, since most " apps" associated with them are antiquated, and have been hacked to the point where the associated content has been so widely misinterpreted that no one understands what exactly the point was.

Just for fun, here are a couple of predictions from physicist Michio Kaku about the year 2100, and my brief comments:

1. The internet will be in your contact lenses. In a way cool, but I can only imagine how even more distracted the entire world will be. Think about how smart phones are diminishing our ability to really pay attention to people. Now think about having a conversation with someone who is blinking and watching porn as they pretend to talk to you. In addition, online eyeball shopping will make credit card transactions as easy as winking and scratching your ass. Frightening.

2. We will be able to mentally control computers which will be embedded in the environment everywhere. Dude, I can't even get my kids to listen to me, I am not so sure a bunch of uppity computers will work. And getting the "blue screen of death" on certain devices would be catastrophic, say the coffee machine or the toilet. The idea of programmable " matter" is fascinating however, and I would be behind this. We just have to watch how intelligent we make all these computer chips, and who makes the chips. I don't need my couch turning into a rack of nails, or my beer fridge into a hunk of cheese, because some hacker accessed my network and wanted to f**k with my matter that matters.

3. We will be able to grow body parts and organs. The whole world will be like Jurassic Park. And male-enhancement drugs will go away.

4. Cars will be driverless and use GPS to drive themselves. Sign me up. One of civilizations greatest problems is human beings behind the wheel of a car. Stop it. Now.

Part two to follow. The future is just too exciting to contain in one post.

Your Emails are Too Long

2011-03-29T07:24:00.001-04:00

This is a guest post on one of my favorite subjects.

Your Emails are Too Long
Post written by Leo Babauta.

"If you can’t write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don’t have a clear idea.’ ~David Belasco

One of the worst problems I’ve seen when people send me emails is amazingly common: they’re way too long.

I’m a fairly busy guy, but who isn’t busy? I try to be responsive but when I get an incredibly long email there is no way I’ll answer quickly. If an email is short, I’ll shoot out a reply as soon as I read it.

So why send long emails?

Here’s a rule: a long email is never necessary. Never.

Why am I writing this? Is it a rant against people who’ve emailed me? No, it’s a general problem that I’ve seen with email, and I hope this will help people write more effectively.

How I Use Email

I’ve written before about how I ditched email. That’s only 90% true. I still do email on a limited scope — mostly for people I collaborate with (partners, designers, printers, etc.). I also respond to customer emails (refunds, download problems).

For reader feedback and comments, I use Twitter. For family communication (like my family on Guam and other parts of the world), I use Facebook (I don’t “friend” anyone other than family, and have fewer than 100 friends on FB).
That said, my email problem isn’t unique to my situation. No matter how you use email, no one you’re emailing wants to read a long essay or respond to 10 questions. We are all busy, and we all value our time.

When I do email, I try to get through all of it quickly. I don’t like to be stuck doing email all day, so I get in, read and respond or archive/trash, and get out.

When someone sends me a long email, it’s likely to be archived. If I absolutely have to respond, I probably won’t do it that day.

Please note: this post is not just about me. It’s about anyone who is busy and who values his or her time. If you send that person a long email, you are saying you don’t value his time, and you’re saying you haven’t thought out what’s important. And you’re decreasing your odds of getting a response.

Why Long Emails Suck

A few brief reasons:

It takes too long to read. I don’t have a lot of time to read, and by sending me an essay you are saying your email is more important than the other things I have to read.

It doesn’t respect my time. When you send me an email, you’re making a request on my time (to read, process, respond). If you send a long email, you haven’t edited. You haven’t decided what’s most important. You are saying, in effect, that I have to do that instead. You’re sending a message that your time is more important than mine.
You don’t get to the point. What’s the main point you’re trying to make? What’s your main question? Spit it out, or it will get buried.
You ask too many questions. I won’t be able to answer all of them without half an hour of my valuable day. So don’t ask so many — just ask one or two.
I won’t respond. If you’re looking for me to read the email right away, or worse yet, do something for you, good luck with that. I’m not a diva, but I also have things to do and can’t get to every long email. And there are many of them, not just yours.

Rules for Short, Effective Emails

Ignore these rules at your peril:

Keep it to 5 sentences. No more. I stole this from five.sentences of course, but I’ve used it for years and it works. I usually try to do fewer than 5.

Figure out your main point. If you think you need more than 5 sentences, you haven’t figured out the key thing you want to say. Take a second to figure it out, and stick to just that.

Ask one thing. Don’t ask 10 questions, just ask one. Or two at the most. You’re much more likely to get an answer quickly.

Edit. If you stretched it to 8 sentences, cut out 3.

Link. If you need to refer to info, include a link to it on the web.

Post it. If the info you need to share isn’t on the web, put it there. Create a long answer or long background document (then edit it to the essential info) and post it online. Use your blog, or one of the many free tools for posting info. Create an FAQ if it’s useful. Link to it in your email.

This post, by the way, is an example of the last rule

Love! Sex!

2011-03-08T20:08:00.000-05:00

Now that I have your attention, a poem;

Trace

My hands are warm
They are warm whenever I say
I must go find you
My lover with the cool skin.

To shape a cheek for this hand
To trace the eyes of this love
One love
In the mid night one hand with chalk.

Along the whole body curved cool
I am finding a sound
I want you to have a sound
In the love in the mid night in my lover a sound

Wherever I go you are getting warm
You find me from my hands always
Then I taste your lost pieces
A wrapper full of secrets

Falls from skin
From sign language and braille.

The Greatest Inventions of All Time - Part Two

2011-03-06T17:49:00.000-05:00

This stuff has been around for 7000 years.

You Should Have This - And It's Free! - Girl Talk Music

2011-02-27T02:10:00.000-05:00

Greg Michael Gillis, better known as 'Girl Talk' has been releasing mindblowing mashups since 2002. This is the kind of stuff, where even the most knowledgeable of us cannot manage to tag all of the samples he uses in just one track. His Feed the Animals won various best of accolades in 2008. He dropped his newest release All Day in November of 2010, and has been giving it away for nothin' ever since. This is not only some of the most amazing DJing around, it has some of the most unexpected sampling, and could carry a party all its own at your house, any day or night. You should get it here. You will be a better person and dancer for it.

The Revolution Starts Now!

2011-02-23T09:49:00.000-05:00

Rise Up

The current wave of uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East are spreading like wildfire through the power of the human voice, the standard media and the new soapboxes that are our Social Media. These are interesting times. Ladies and gentlemen, the democratic swarm is coming to a town near you.

In the spirit of the times, and without taking away from the plight of the oppressed all over the world, I offer a list of things in America where people should stand up and just say enough is enough. Non violent protest is a form of social change, and we need to take advantage of the momentum outside of our borders. Organize groups on Twitter and Facebook. Talk to your neighbors and fire them up with propaganda and cheap liquor.

The revolution starts with you. Facegroup groups forming now for:

1. Stop the cable companies! We have all had enough of paying 100 bucks or more a month for TV. TV is our God given right, and these people are autocrats. Oust them!

2. Allow Liquor sales on Sundays! It is inhuman to put someboday through having an empty beer fridge on Football day.

3.No more sweat pants in public unless you are running!

4.Let us choose how our taxes get spent!

5.Tell Airlines to stick their baggage fees!

6.Build roads in the USA that are better than some of the roads in the countries that are currently in revolt!

7.If you have less than 3 kids and 2 dogs, ban the SUV!

8.Ban backwards ball caps in public unless you are mowing your lawn!

9.Shave Biebers hair! Enough!

10. Affordable healthcare for everyone! Oh wait, that's ridicoulous. Scratch that one.

11. End musical tyranny! Avoid iTunes!

12. Make US public schools on par with some of the countries that are currently in revolt!

Stand together, stand strong, together we can begin to make a difference.

Relentless Random Thought!

2011-02-22T11:28:00.000-05:00

I daydream, I dream. My mind is a machine gun constantly firing, day or night. I write whole songs and blog entries when I dream. I struggle to remember them the next day.I am endlessly fighting the deluge. My skull percolates.I write things down. I don't write things down, I Tweet and bleep and practice spontaneous capture. I forget half of what I thought was critical to remember. The other half is somewhere.
On the one hand, I am the the classic right brainer; logical, sequential, objective and mostly rational. The " German " side of me.

I am not good at Math though. Not really. I do like order a heck of a lot though. Chaos bothers me, although I have a healthy respect for it. I have seen it in action.

On the other hand, or head I am all left brain. Intuitive, random, creative, a holistic synthesizer. I am a walking dichotomy that makes lists of all the creative things that I need to do. I dream the whole painting done and sometimes paint it.

So thoughts come, and all this lead to another installment of the random thoughts of the week [see another list];

1. With revolution becoming a hot trend again, it occurred to me that typically we see the people doing the uprising as " bad people " at first, even when what they stand for is noble. Is there a connection between terrorism and revolutionaries in our minds?
2. Since moving to NY, our dog likes to spend time in the closet. This may be a statement on the size of places up here, not sure.
3.I have taken to measuring my life in the amount of days I have been alive. 18180 to date. This granularity seems to lead to more presence in the moment.
4. I have grown used to all the honking on the roads around here. I simply don't have the energy to give 100s of people a day the finger so it balances out nicely.
5. I am just amazed that the original Scooby Doo cartoons from the late 60s still enthrall my 3 year old. It goes to show you that crappy graphics and predictable story lines still go a long way. So do the drugs that the cartoon creators use.
6. There are few things more pathetic than a constipated child, sitting on the toilet for 45 minutes, saying " I have to poop " with a sad look on their face.
7. People in NYC are a lot nicer than their reputations. They are just busy getting around, because there is just so damned much to do.
8. My brain has been locked on Cee Lo Green's song "F-You" for days. Well that, and the new Radiohead, which is antithesis.
9. I only listen to Classical Music when I am at work. I am pretty sure Mozart and the rest of the boys would not appreciate being background music. Good thing they are decomposing.
10. I never listen to jazz anymore. My jazz albums are all in storage, and probably jam at night when the security guard takes his nap.
11. I love the smell of the subway, weird as that sounds.
12. I have no clue what people looked like before they constantly had iPod earbuds in their ears. The whole damned planet is wired to something.
13. I am pretty sure that Libya's mercurial, flamboyant leader Gadhafi is a closet trannie. What is the deal with the strange head-dress?
14. I don't mind cold weather if it is Sunny. It is endless clouds and grey that is the downer, man.
15. It has been scientifically proven that Monkeys also feel self doubt. I am pretty sure that Monkey boob jobs are not too far behind.

End of transmission.

Hell Hath No Fury! Video of the Week!

2011-02-19T21:22:00.000-05:00

Wow, don't fuck with this woman. What power, soul and such simple execution in the video production. Bravo.

Simple Words

2011-02-19T20:00:00.000-05:00

Simple Words

The fine drops on the pillow
Where a tear left an image, sweat white
Like a cloud.

How we set the night in motion
With our mouths,
And one syllable. The dawn drawing us aside

With one foot in the door.

Half-sun rising without secrets, pitching
Forward wanting to stay here
Hugging the long white pillows

looking straight at me
Fearing the screech when the plane
Leaves the runway.

We’ll be sitting on the beds with the shades down,
Saying each other names in tongues
Making love with explosions

Leaving a trail of breadcrumbs.

Things to Look Forward To!

2011-02-18T06:21:00.003-05:00

The thing that differentiates us from the monkeys is better grooming products and the ability to be grateful. In this spirit, I always like to occasionally pause and reflect on a few things that I am thankful for or am looking forward to.

1. I always look forward to when the new Radiohead is going to be released. This is a small symptom of the much larger music obsessive's disease. This band is its own barometer, and although over the years I have wanted them to fall, they really haven't. So tomorrow the digital download releases online and I will have to put a bag over my head in the panic room and listen damn carefully for mistakes.
2. Waking up with my son's foot lodged in my ear: My wife is out of town, which means my kid knows that he can sleep with papa. He sleeps like a sideways buzz-saw, and snores and poots like a champion. Precious few these moments.
3. Watching non animated TV: On occasion I watch TV that does not include exaggerated talking animals or the delusions of some acid flake from the Cartoon Network.
4. Running along the Hudson by NYC.
5. Not having to take a coat today.
6. Just enough snow one more time to hit the biggest hills with the kids, and feel the flush of laughter and cold cheeks.
7. Waking up. Drinking coffee.
8. Going to Museums and not having to rush, because I live here and can always go back.
8. Finishing all three books that I am reading presently.
7. But mostly seeing my daughter who arrives this weekend.

This is where we run most of the time

How Beer is Really Made!

2011-02-17T05:36:00.000-05:00

I didn't see anything this cool during the Super Bowl.

Rock Like an Egyptian!

2011-02-12T13:51:00.000-05:00

All the old paintings on the tombs
They do the sand dance don't you know
If they move too quick (oh whey oh)
They're falling down like a domino
All the bazaar men by the Nile
They got the money on a bet
Gold crocodiles (oh whey oh)
They snap their teeth on your cigarette

~The Bangles " Walk Like an Egyptian"

Na Na na hey hey hey, goodbye
~Steam "Na Na Hey hey kiss him goodbye"

Revolution, insurrection, uprisings, rebellion and coup d'etats have been around since man first practiced oppression. And man loves his power, so it has been around as long as man.

People just tend to get tired of being pushed around at some point, they get pissed and start throwing rocks or, these days,Tweeting up a storm. In a little known or press-covered fact as recently as 2009, even Iceland had a revolution called 'the saucepan revolution' to bring down the Icelandic government after their economic collapse.

The mounting pressure from 19 days of historic protests finally drove Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak from office, after three decades as his nation's iron-fisted ruler. The prick had to go.

How is it possible that in a country with per-capita GPD of just over 6000 bucks, that the man in power has amassed more money than Bill Gates? Although no one really knows, some estimate his worth to be over $50 billion. With a suspended constitution, the douche-bag never had to worry about transparency and could take a slice of virtually every significant business deal in the country, while his "own" people were poor.

The chronic lack of jobs and upward mobility was perhaps the biggest factor driving millions of enraged Egyptian youths into the streets, demanding change. And rightly so, it was time. You would be pissed too.

The Best Invention of All Time!

2011-02-08T04:49:00.000-05:00

Song for A Sunday - The National

2011-02-06T13:38:00.000-05:00

I never can get enough of this band. Never could, never will. This video is just a bit silly, but I am pretty sure it is dead in earnest.

Finally the Internet Pays off!

2011-02-02T06:19:00.002-05:00

The internet is a sometimes handy, wonderful, big and sprawling place to waste inordinate amounts of time. it is a bit like a shopping mall inside a black hole.

Now Google does some good work. They help get people places with their maps, sometimes even to the right places.

They allow you to research darned near anything in the universe and come up with 5,417,342 incorrect options in 33.1 seconds. They allow your best intentions to 'just get on the computer for a sec" get swallowed up by an endless mirror maze of incessant garden path options, and you emerge 14 hours later bleary eyed, carpal tunneled and not a word wiser. Woo hoo.

I am boundlessly amazed just how they do street view. They have pictures of every damned place on Earth. Doesn't that just scare you a little bit? I am pretty sure they are holding embarrassing photos of you right now, and are just looking for a way to get them out there without the ACLU or some such pathetic paranoid organization all over them. Oh, Wiki leaks was just the start ladies and gentlemen, we are in the era of show and tell, baby. Wear clean underwear.

But I have to give the few folks over at Google (http://www.google.com/) some credit. They have done something now to partially make up for the mostly vacuous, sugary candy space the Internets have become, and are thereby keeping one of the promises of this medium; that slowly but surely the cultural heritage of humanity, which consists of more than ways to fellate a cucumber, or shallow pointless videos by shallow pointless people watched by shallow pointless people, will be made accessable to everyone everywhere.

ART, yes my dear fools, ART. I have a thing for it.

Humanity used to have this thing for beauty and the extraordinary, and it is nice to see it, technical warts and all here in the Google Art Project.

Google uses their street view technology to let you virtually roam the halls of 17 famous museums. It is really cool to transport yourself to the Tate in London and roam without the pesky airline ticket, entrance price and the throngs of smelly tourists. The collection is bit limited for now, but I am sure, knowing Dave and Joe Google they are working hard day and night to eventually include every piece of art ever conceived by man, including the shit your kids created now proudly displayed on your fridge. The art project virtual museum wander can be a bit dizzying and disorienting at first, and the technology is not perfect, but once you get used to the navigation it is damned fun. That is if you are not as coarse or well rounded as a brick.

I am not clear on how they intend to embed click through ads here. I sincerely hope that they do not add, for example, toothpaste ads to the Mona Lisa's face in the near future, or Red Bull ads to several Bruegels, since the people always looks so tired in those fields. Ads for "ab-rollers" or slim fast are not far off being next to some of the Boticellis.

Next will be "ad placement" where Holbein's " Ambassadors" will be holding a Venti Peppermint Mocha from Starbucks, and the weird late night (after clubbing) crowd from Rembrandt's " Nightwatch" will all be holding a Big Mac.

But don't allow me to go on, the imagination reels, and my stomach turns just thinking of the further bastardization of history. But life and Google has its trade offs.

Do yourself a favor, go do a little virtual museum tour now, you can go back to that "less than wholesome" site after a little culture. And do it before the ads take over the museums.

Thank-you, Google.

A Tree With Roots - Bob Dylan 55 Years Ago

2011-01-30T07:22:00.000-05:00

A Tree with Roots is a complete overhaul of the legendary Basement Tapes sourced over the years from seven various master tapes. Dylan has always been bedeviled by underground recordings, and even his label tried to cash in on it over the years with their very own " Bootleg Series".

In his own words: "I mean, they have stuff you do in a phone booth. Like, nobody's around. If you're just sitting and strumming in a motel, you don't think anybody's there, you know ... it's like the phone is tapped ... and then it appears on a bootleg record. With a cover that's got a picture of you that was taken from underneath your bed and it's got a strip-tease type title and it costs $30. Amazing. Then you wonder why most artists feel so paranoid."

But " A Tree With Roots " amongst the most famous of the real bootlegs is the real deal, with some brilliant surrealistic laid-back talkin' deadpan apocalyptic country blues, and some of his goofiest originals.

If you are a Dylan fan ( and there are typically squarely two camps here) then this is worth seeking out. If you are a music fan you have enough sense to see that Dylan basically spawned genres that would be around for decades to come.

This song alone is worth the price of admission. " I'm Not There (1956)"

The Places we Used to Live - History Revisited - Update

2011-01-25T01:39:00.001-05:00

What it used to look like

After my previous entry, my aunt dug up this old photo of the old house I wrote about. I have added the recent picture I took again for easy comparison.

Now granted, the seasons are opposed, but the house in Summer to my left is the one I remember. Or more likely my memory is a victim of the handful of photos that remain of the place.

Now either we went to the wrong house, which I doubt, or the house has had more plastic surgery than Joan Rivers. It almost looks as if the place had burned, and had to be totally reconstructed. What the hell happened to the trees and bushes? It looks like a mobile home now.

I also went on Google Earth (which is probably one of the top 10 coolest things ever invented) and noticed that the new version of the backyard has one of those big plastic pools in it, exactly where we used to play baseball and proudly smack the ball over the fence as a home run, amongst our adoring fans and non-edible grapes. Have these new owners no sense of the importance of my history?

It's as if someone drew a mustache on my memory of the Mona Lisa. I don't know what to believe anymore.

What it looks like now.

The Places we Used to Live

2011-01-23T07:57:00.000-05:00

My House Almost 40 years ago minus the Plymouth Duster

The mind is a fancy etch a sketch. It gets shaken enough so that most of what was there is gone, but there are those little lines that no matter how hard you shake they never seem to go away.

Now that we live by NYC, I decided to take a short to visit my childhood home on Long Island from almost 38 years ago, and see what would get shaken up.

The years were 72 and 73 and I spent my formative 5th and 6th grade years in this place.

Oh those were fun times. The Vietnam War was finally coming to an end, Roe V Wade was born, The CN Tower in Toronto was just going up( in anticipation of the next place we would move), Lexis Nexis Legal Search began as harbinger to something much bigger later. (Google et al), Secretariat became a Triple Crown Winner, The DEA was founded and " Tie a Yellow Ribbon " was one of the top singles of the year. (Mind you, even at 11-12 I was listening to The Beatles, Stones, Sabbath, Iggy Pop, Santana, The Who and Zeppelin,for the record)

Due to the power of GPS, I did not recognize anything about where we were going at first. I was totally lost except for my blind trust in technology.It turns out we were going in the back way. But once we made the turn into the old neighborhood, I immediately recognized the place where we used to knock golf balls onto the Turnpike. That was the thin line of woods that separated our stomping grounds from the highway. It looked old and balding, compared to the thick vigorous hiding place it used to be. But then it is Winter.
"Oh look, there is the place where Scott almost blew his finger off with a firecracker"
Then it all came back like a flood, as we turned onto my old street. The streets seemed more narrow, the houses smaller and I could hardly believe we played baseball in those streets, where my " girlfriend " was one of the best players on the street. We waited for the Italian Ices guy on that street, and shaved the stuff with a wooden spoon until we got the shivers when it touched our tongues in mock electricity. We went back to playing ball with lips redder than a hookers.

" Oh there is where so and so lived, and so and so" (Not that I could remember, but it seemed like I had a lot of friends. " The people with the dog " " The huge fenced in back yard " and so the memories came in chunks...

While short-term memory seems to record acoustically, long term memory comes semantically, or from "meaning". This makes sense, as memories came more from the associations I had than with the street itself.

We used to build elaborate race tracks with chalk and race up and down the sidewalks.
We used to build hockey nets out of chicken wire and old wood, and pretend we were hockey Gods.
We used to eat potato pancakes, because the Jewish kids parents had the best food.
The first time I drank alcohol was at my friends Bar Mitzvah.
I found about the whole penis in vagina thing on a walk home from school here.
I went on my first " date" to the movies here with Linda Rupe, whom I bought a cheap little ring for.
I used to save money and go to the five and dime and buy Yoohoo drinks and Candy.
I crashed my bike on the bike trail across the turnpike
The " sump " is still there, we used to sled in there.
The Carvel ice cream place, the pizza place, the public pool all still there!

Ultimately, not that much had really changed, the people were just recycled, and some of us had vaporized.

When I approached the old house, I had no idea what I would remember. Of course I have seen pictures of us in our goofy 70s clothes with our 72 Duster in front of the place, but I did not expect the sterile white thing our house had become. I remember our house had color, and a garden with big purple wine grapes that you really couldn't eat growing off the fade pale-green patio roof cover. I remember my 17 stitches from going arm first through the glass front door. But this was not our house, or my front door. It was a reverse ghost. A space that I once occupied. We were both still here, my stitches as testimony, but we had both changed.

I remember my room upstairs. It had a chimney running through the middle of it, and access to the roof(you can see that in the picture above) and my room was cool, and warm and I had my own turntable and when my parent's weren't paying attention I burned incense. I read alot up there, and started my record collection in that room.

Memories are random. On the right side of the house was the TV room, and I mostly remember waiting for Christmas in there. Sitting and counting the hours until Christmas was here, and watching TV. Our kitchen floor was heated, which was just about the coolest thing ever. I am not sure we ever actually used our fireplace. I don't know if the floor is still heated. I was so tempted to knock on the door and ask if I could go in and look around, maybe take my shoes off and feel the floor. But I figured that would likely warp the space time continuum or something worse, so I took my families advice and didn't mess with relativity, or worse be a creeper.

Maybe I will go back again alone sometime, because memories that other people don't share are like a movie in another language. You can watch, but it may not make a whole lot of sense.

I wanted to test the " how far I walked to school theory", since I had blogged on this before. I remember it having been so far. So we drove to Bowling Green Elementary, my alma mater. and it was exactly 0.6 miles. Not exactly close, but certainly not the 45 miles through broken glass that I remember it being. The school looked like it did yesterday, and I could still imagine the smell if I could have walked through those two doors. But alas, it was closed, it was a Sunday and I ain't no creeper after all.

Our minds can store a lot. I am grateful for the places I have been and the spaces I have occupied, and it is more than pictures and words that remain. It is a whole history full of a rich interwoven context. It is more than dreams in reverse, it is a reality that was, and in its own way still is. The ghosts are us.

I will be in Toronto in March. Next stop, my old house there.

Sh*t Parents Do

2011-01-20T21:21:00.001-05:00

I am not a behavioral scientist. It doesn't take a degree to understand that having a 3 year old boy is damned hard work, and a test of everything we are made of as human beings. It it harder than being a big boss, or President, or the CEO of Build a Bear or whatever.

It makes me want to spank TV's super-nanny for making it look so easy. I just want to spank her regardless. Looks like fun.

Our kid has charisma. Our kid has spunk - a personality the size of the Milky Way. Our kid could give a flying shit about anything or anyone but himself at least part of the time. If he wants to use half a bottle of Windex to clean the welcome mat, then so be it. He is in charge. Or would like to be, you see, that is part of the rub. He is just testing the world in his own age appropriate way. I would like to hope that it continues this way, at least the relation between age and appropriate behavior. That would be small measure of success, relative as it might seem.

Other times he is sweeter than the sweetest pie, and wants to snuggle like a bug in a rug. He hugs and kisses, and nuzzles for attention like a little pup. When he laughs it makes your heart melt, and you could never imagine one single second without him in it.

You can't wait to be around him when you are at work, and roll on the bed, and bash each other with pillows and giggle like sick idiots, and then you can't wait for the moment when he passes out, and it is quiet, you can finish complete sentences when you try to converse, actually read a paragraph at a time, hear the music you are playing and then collapse into the bed with all intentions of doing the deed, but too tired to boogie by the time you get there. Ah, life is good.

Our kid does a combination of break-dancing and ballet in restaurants and public places. Our kid says " bye butt" to complete strangers not knowing whether they are actually butts are not. Our kid is big, strong, confident...1 1 0 % all American lineback boy. He eats constantly, gnawing on sandwiches carefully constructed with peanut butter and salami. He totes grapes around and dunks them in pudding and throws them. He carries our dogs like carrion. Luckily he hasn't destroyed too many things lately, like some of these kids on this lovely website. He is rather enjoying wax these days, and took the end of a wax candle and made lovely patterns on our TV, and then promptly spilled hot wax all over my wife's laptop, so it's been a bad week. My wifes computer has a wick now sticking out of the USB and makes a nice natural and un-natural glow all at the same time.

But he is sweet too. And he is so damned cute, you can't stop wanting to eat him up and do raspberries on his little tub stomach. When he says " I love you too, papa" you want to melt, and make peace with everything that has ever bugged you in the world.

His gas is awful. I swear, Gary, Indiana smells better. He passes gas in the car, and the inhabitants must immediately stick their heads out the windows. He loves it. He loves the control the gas has over us. He loves controlling his world, through all his various powers.

So we learn as parents. I have adopted the pictured motto " keep calm and carry on" as my personal mantra during these exciting times. It might be an oversimplification, but it helps with the extreme exasperation that can accompany your child wailing that he " WILL NOT DRINK MILK, AND MUST HAVE APPLE JUICE NOW" in a quite nice restaurant that we will never be welcome in again.

Sometimes our kid is that other person's kid, and question just what the hell the parent's are thinking.

But really most of the time he is cute, sweet, funny and loving.

So I have to learn to seperate my reaction from my emotional frustration, and help the kid through whatever he is going through. I get that. I also get that I have to work on learning how to motivate my child to want to be good. Sometimes it is all out war, won one dirty stinky little battle at a time. These are battles worth fighting. These are lessons worth learning.

Kids are worth it man. The future depends on it.

MLK Day - Not Just Another Day Off

2011-01-17T08:10:00.000-05:00

Since it was first observed in 1986, the holiday commemorating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has served as a reminder of his legacy—the causes of civil rights, nonviolent opposition and community service. We need the messages now more than ever.

Here are some of his own words to honor his memory:

A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.
A lie cannot live.
A man can't ride your back unless it's bent.
A man who won't die for something is not fit to live.
A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.
A right delayed is a right denied.
A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.
All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.
Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.

Peace. Do something good today and tomorrow.

2011 - Music Tsunami!

2011-01-16T15:53:00.001-05:00

2010 is like so yesterday. 2011 is already starting with a veritable wave of new stuff to look forward to. Listen up:

New REM, PJ Harvey, Cake, Cut Copy, New York Dolls, Lady Gaga, The Streets, The Decemberists, Cold War Kids, Destroyer, Gang of Four,Iron and Wine, Bright Eyes, The Strokes,Death Cab for Cutie, U2 and part of the long delayed Beastie Boys CD, since one of the founding members announced cancer all coming out in the short months ahead. Wow. Save your iTunes gift cards, kids!

Also look for:

Random Thoughts from Under the Weather

2011-01-15T08:23:00.000-05:00

Cool Picture, Nasty Virus

Having the sick crud is no fun at all.

Especially when it is that mysterious body-achy it feels like there is glass in my lungs when I cough thing and sputum is the color of Green that does not exist in the universe otherwise and whenever you go to stand up your head starts to pound like Lemmy's bass during the wind up in the song " Ace of Spades" My voice sounds like a cross between his and Mickey Mouses' and cough medicine is fully responsible for run on sentences in blogs that should not be updated lying prone in the sick bed surrounded by tissues, water glasses, meds and blankets that have been arranged by a twister from all the damned changes between hot and cold.

Cold medication is a blessing and curse. Somehow it helps to dry up some of the creeping crud, but leaves you dryer than a popcorn fart in a desert and increases the need to drink copious amounts of water, which leads to more trips to the bathroom, which is really the only time to get out of bed, so probably a good thing. A little exercise and fresh bathroom air helps.

Nothing tastes good. Not even TV. Everything bland as cardboard, also ok, cause I don't give a shit about eating either. I am hungry and not hungry at the same time. As much as I love the idea of reading in bed, even my beloved past-time is painful, as the eyes strain and get dried out and tired, words start to bleed, and nothing makes a whole lot of sense.
I suppose this is the best time to read William Burroughs. Perhaps I will try reading that and listening to Lil Wayne right after I take my next dose of blue-green-orange encapsulated cold daydream goo and see what makes sense. Likely nothing and everything.

Sleep happens a lot more on the surface. It just lies there, you looking at the inside of your eyelids, coughing, stirring, trying to find the right position in schizophrenic temperature nightmare world. It is cold sweat, crusty nostrils and cursing at the blanket for not covering my feet just right. It is a body that usually likes being in bed, hating it and complaining by being sore. Nowhere is good, but nowhere does not exist just yet.

My otherwise decent fasion sense also goes right out the window. There is something about not feeling well where all common sense about style is squashed. (luckily I don't own a mesh shirt and leather pants, otherwise I would probably be wearing them with my " beer is my god " hat on backwards) I a
m wearing plaid green PJ pants with a blue Dallas Mavericks shirt, brown slippers, baseball cap on "hat-tilt" and a brown and purple Flannel shirt that I last wore when Nirvana was still big. My face is a crusty mess, I could brush my teeth 400 times a day and not feel like the Mongols haven't just all shat in my mouth, and my nose is redder than WC Fields best days. Gorgeous.

There are emotions that come from all of this. I was listening to my beloved iPod yesterday for diversion and found myself weeping when " The Winner Takes It All" by Abba came on. This crud and medicine is turning me into a blubbering sissy, although that is a fine song.

The other thing is having a 3 year old and being sick is just that much more fun, because I can tell you, I am not laying around in bed. He wants applesauce, and he wants to roll the glass jar off the counter, then spill it, then not want it, then want something else, and wants to make eggs, and play cars and read, and go outside(!) all at the same time ad infinitum. God's little test of our patience.

So I was also wondering also what the origin of the stupid phrase " under the weather " was. The meds are making me angry now, and that phrase really bothers me, for its inaccuracy and ambiguity. Follow the link if you care, I don't anymore.

It will all get better. It will go away - that is the lesson here. It's just the crud come to visit and make me grateful for not feeling this way most of the time. I get that. Now I have to go lie down.

Best Music of 2010

2011-01-07T20:04:00.001-05:00

As life would have it, this last year was the fastest on record. 365 days on fast forward.

2010 was also marked as a year, when unlike previous years, my music consumption slowed down somewhat. This is somehow relative,as prior I was choking myself in new music. It got to the point where I had no clue what I was listening to half the time, due to overindulgence. So it was with all good intention that I was more selective, and actually gave albums the time to simmer in my iPod. Ultimately there were artists that I did not expect would surpass, or even come close to their own high standards, but they did. So for this last year, it is short and sweet; a top couple of CDs and then a handful of runners up. Somehow I am proud of myself for not being such a crazed obessive compulsive downloader, although I can't promise it won't resurface in 2011.

Lord knows, I hate to be cliche, but hell these are the 5 that meant the most to me in '10;

1. The National - High Violet; Just the lyrics and drums would be enough.

2. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs; I hate the world anthemic, but it certainly applies

3. Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz; perennial favorite plugs in keys.

4. Titus Andronicus - The Monitor; Suburban Jersey punks with a penchant for snarling history.

5. Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy; Ambitious, crazy and altogether amazing. Some arrogance is deserved.

Others that loved, The Black Keys, Gorillaz, Beach House, Girl Talk, Vampire Weekend, Deerhunter, Hot Chip, Eminem, Josh Ritter, The New Pornographers, Massive Attack, Minus the Bear, The Hold Steady, The Drive by Truckers & Tokyo Police Club.

Oh, and I forget the rest, I am sure there is more.

Another Adventure!

2011-01-04T06:15:00.000-05:00

We have packed up our lives, almost 27 years for me in one spot in the South, and are heading to the big city. Yes, NYC, the Big Apple, the greatest, most electric city in the world, and a symbol of what America is and started out to be, a big damned soup pot. (Well actually, we will live in New Jersey, just by the Hudson, right across from all that electricity and excitement, but that is splitting hairs – we see the Statue of Liberty from our condo)

Moving is hard. It’s a bit like death, all the filled spaces now devoid of what was and memory the only thing that really stays behind. Well that and a bunch of trash that still needs to be hauled somewhere.

Oh hell, change is hard, and moving is a big change. One of life’s top 20 stressors, up there with the big “ D “s , death and divorce, losing your job and when New Order broke up.

All my kids were born and raised here. The love of my life and I got married here and made a lifetime of memories in 8 years, some of which we remember and some we don’t. Some of the best memories are the ones we don’t remember.

But they are there like stuff in boxes, waiting to be discovered again.

Our roots, and extended family and friends are all here. Our tennis team, the ever constant anchor is, or was here. I imagine them like the seasons, always there, even when we are gone, waiting with cold beer, good food and a supportive hug if and when we get our asses kicked on the court again sometime in the imaginary future.

I swore I would never move North again.

“Who needs the cold?” I always told myself. But when the snow hit over a few days around Christmas in Atlanta this year, I remembered growing up with Winters, and how much I missed being outdoors. When it is clear and cold and the air is crisper than an over starched shirt. We made snow angels, and slid down whatever hills we could find on whatever would slide fastest. We got snow in our pants, and our hands got tingly cold, and our breath was like smoke from the giddy laughter. We were tired, wet, red-cheeked and spent like only a few hours outside in the snow can do, and we loved every damned minute of it. There is snow up North, plenty of it. We will play in it like never before. We are snow angels now.

When I tell people that we are moving to NJ/NY, there are clearly two camps.
One that say, “wow, awesome”, and the others that say “why?”

My answer to the ones that ask why is always the same. “Why the hell not?”

Yep, there are things that I will miss about suburbia, but let’s face it, it is not very exciting. When the weekends are filled with working in the yard, going to the mall, Home Depot or one of 15 restaurants in the area, it just all gets a bit homogenized for my taste. BORING, would be another word.

Am I going to die in this suburb, and have my ashes sprinkled over the local Blockbuster, or am I going to say fuck it, and live my life like an adventure? The once in a lifetime gift that it is. Taste more, feel more, experience more, do more, LIVE MORE. And what better place than the greatest city in the world?

Sure, we are leaving things behind. It has been a very emotional few weeks, coming to grips with the change, celebrating the last Christmas in the house, saying goodbyes, hauling a bunch of crap that we thought we needed once to the curb - but things are bound to change in this life, and we either grab the wheel and steer the bitch, or sit in the back-seat and see where it takes us.

NYC, here we come, be ready, because we are part of you now.

2010 - Best of the Year Stuff!

2010-12-30T07:07:00.000-05:00

The way things are going it is unlikely that I will get to my annual picks for the best of the year anytime soon. I promise if you take a look at Fimoculous you will meander for hours. Happy surfing, and Happy New Year.

An open letter to all our friends in Atlanta upon farewell

2010-12-29T13:22:00.000-05:00

Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened " ~ Dr.Seuss

To all our Dear Friends in Atlanta,

Saying goodbye is never easy. It is the knowing that we will meet again that makes it bearable.

We wish that time would allow us to share some special words to each and every one of you, but you will just all have to come up the Big City to hear what we have to say. Promise.

As LeNora and I start the new exciting chapter in our lives, we just wanted to thank each and every one of you for being our extended family during our wonderful years in Atlanta. We and our children are lucky to have had you in our lives. Little Dallas is blessed to have so many people around him that have shown him such love and attention. We are all better people because of all of you.

The years on the tennis team have always been a place to come home to. The team, the comradery, the food, cold beer and even the hot and cold matches will be missed. Thanks for putting up with us when even our best was not good enough.

There are too many memories to be shared in a short space, and some that we would rather not share again in public-just know that we will carry them into our future with the warmest regard and respect.

It is hard to say goodbye. We have had a wonderful life here. But life has a way of taking turns that are meant to happen. LeNora and I have always dreamt of being closer to the city. We just did not realize it would be the greatest city in the world when we first started dreaming. So answers do come. We are happier than you know about this chapter in our lives, and intend to live life to the very fullest, as we have always tried to do.

We will be back to visit and we more than expect each and every one of you to take us up on the offer to come and visit us in the Big Apple. We are selling lawn seats for the 4th of July Fireworks over Lady Liberty at the end of our street to the first responder with the best wine.

"May the road rise up to meet you, may the wind be ever at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face and the rain fall softly on your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the hollow of his hand.” ~ Irish Blessing

With all of our love and deepest thanks, until we meet again,

Kai, LeNora and the kids, and dogs

Confessions of a collector!

2010-12-28T09:43:00.021-05:00

I have departed denial. I am a collector. Ok, ok, I am coming clean. Literally and figuratively.

Despite my endless desire for clean lines, and an orderly environment I have and have had piles of stuff around me for years. Of course it was organized, put in alphabetical order, neatly on shelves, in plastic wrapping, hung on the wall, but it has always been there. Something to treasure, something to look at, something that came with me wherever I went - even when a lot more was left behind.

I come from a family of collectors. I have to say there was always something to talk about and look at in our house growing up besides the TV. And most everything represented a passion, or a place remembered -something that needed to be discovered over and over again. It was comforting and warm and we ended up the better for it.

Today we seem to collect data/information/quick communication and not much seems to stick around. You can't collect the ephemeral. You can't collect clouds. Just think of letters versus emails and you get the general idea. Who the hell collects emails besides Google?

The process of moving not only stirs up memories, but I am stared in the face with the physical proof of my need to create place-markers. They are there in piles to be considered. It makes packing tough, as the attachment to certain things makes one wallow, turn over, reminisce and delay the whole damned process. Some shit can easily be tossed, other shit is a part of our skin, our nerves, our very being.

There are many reasons why people collect. It may be as harmless and noble as preserving memories, or just the usual run of the mill quelling of exisistential dread.

Regardless, I have tried to list in [somewhat] chronological order what I have collected over the years, and I am pretty sure I have forgotten a lot in the process;

Smurfs: Gone. I wish I had kept them, they are making a comeback and seem to be worth something.
Hot Wheels Cars - Could have kept for my kids. I had a huge box organized and every car was firmly in its space. My first real work with anal retentiveness.
Metal Army Men: Gone. One of the reasons why I have some a good strategic skill set today.
Baseball Cards: Gone. My dad sold them when I went to college. Still have not forgiven him.
Fantasy and Science Fiction Books: Gone. Between the ages of 12-15 I had to have every rare out of print Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs etc etc book, which I kept neatly on a shelf behind posters of barbarians and vixens.
Matchbooks: Gone. Kind of a dangerous collection. My grandma collected these, and they were a source of endless entertainment. She had matchbooks of airlines where an airplane folded out in 3D like origami, wax ones, and one of every shape and size. I had a small collection of my own. I believe Grandmas is still in the attic in Germany. Will have to look next time I go there.
Car/Olympic/Animal sticker books: Gone. A very German thing. Huge books to fill with stickers. My first adventure in completeness which I still suffer from today. [ note:I have every recorded version of the song " Ring of Fire " as one example of the lingering disease"
License Plates: Gone. Gave them away. My father had collected these from his own cars and by stealing them off of other cars. [sorry, that was artistic license]

Pictures of cool stuff: Gone: I have had a least two rooms growing up where every square inch was a collage. What disturbs me is that not a single photo of these self-made masterpieces exist today. I spent man-weeks meticulously cutting out pictures with an exacto knife and sticking to the wall.
Coins/Paper Money: Gone. After much thought, finally gave this to my daughter. This was always a favorite collection of mine and did get hours of viewing over the years.
Movie Posters: Gone. See above, my entire garage at one point was movie posters.
T Shirts: Still have too many. I like a T Shirt, I like a band, I buy it. I am almost 50, so the times to wear a Socal Distortion or Nirvana T Shirt are limited to the gym, and when I am feeling old. I did find a really nice " TV On The Radio" shirt not too long ago...
Rock and Fashion Buttons: Gone. I think everyone had these for a while there. At least my generation did. We plastered our jean jackets with them. I do still have a jean jacket.
Happy Meal Toys: Some still around. I had custom shelves for a while there in my cave, where I displayed these. They always brought me back to a place. A place with a burger and a smiling little kid's face. I have not been able to part with some of my favorites, which are still in boxes. I understand that some of these are actually worth something now.
Black and White Postcards of People I Admire: Still here. I had an entire wall with these framed in one old place. The " wall of heros " we called it. I used to challenge people to see if they could name them all for a prize. No one ever did it. The faces are all in boxes now, waiting for a wall, or waiting to be buried ( in some cases again)
Records: Still here. I have written about them before and before.
Books: I have gotten rid of thousands, I still have about 500. I will likely cut down further. I am attached now to authors and the memory of the book, but how likely is it that I will ever read the entire (eg.) Philip Roth collection again? Collecting books, like records, should have several sub-sets. Eg. Collecting German poets, or rare Kinks 45s etc, all things I have survived.
CDs: Still here. Not sure what to do about this one. Not everything that I have here is in my MP3 collection, but how likely is it that I will listen to 110,000 MP3s, 3000 CDs, 1800 Records, and what is leftover of my cassettes? Done, I will keep them.
MP3s: Ah, digital. So portable, so practical, so cold. I will schlep these to my grave. {Die-Pod?} Be ready for a long funeral playlist, survivors. What used to take up half a room is now smaller than a breadbox, a collectors dream and nightmare at the same time. I struggled with the intangible aspect of this for a long long time.
Lunchboxes: Still in the garage. In jeopardy. Will get rid of. I collected them for a little while, have a few Beatles ones, nothing too old or authentic.
Shakespeare Videos and Adaptations: Gone, gave to my daughter, who is a collector.
Comics: Still here. Will keep until I decide to cash in, or give to one of my kids. I have a lot of cool Xmen and DC comics [ I am a DC guy deep down] from the glory years.
Petrified Wood/Rocks: Gone, released these back to the wild a long time ago.
Airline Swizzle Sticks: Still here. I love the fact that the airlines are gone, but the swizzle sticks are still here.
Mad Magazines/National Geographic Magazines/Music Magazines/Magazines: Gone, gone, gone, although I could have and did pile to the ceiling for a while there. I devoured this crap the way I devour the internet now.

Things I wanted to collect, but never did

Old Radios
Guitars
Old muscle cars

classic porn
Ticket Stubs / Playbills
Wine

So now you know. I will work through this, and continue to find ways to nourish memory and assuage existential angst. For now, it is enough to collect thoughts.

Record Every Moment of Your Boring Life!

2010-12-23T12:43:00.002-05:00

I was recently reading about a new technology that " promises to capture your whole life". It is a pendant like camera that continuously take pictures and even senses changes in your environment.

There are already established " lifeloggers" who " use tech to record every moment of their lives".

Frightening stuff, and quite boring. I am not very clear on how someone could possibly process the data. It strikes me a bit like a tape loop, recorded over and over where eventually it becomes muddled noise. But to each his own.

Regardless, I thought it would be interesting to recount just this morning up until now, which is noon EST, just to test drive the concept.

For the faint of heart, I have removed the horribly menial things like loading the dishwasher, throwing some loads of laundry in and several other necessary, but irksome pastimes.

Kai - Life log Dec 23rd 2010 6.00 AM - 12:00 EST ( A true story)

1. Wake up, roll over, wake up, roll over, stare at Blackberry for time in disbelief, knock book over, roll over, kick blankets, roll over. Grumble, hold onto wife for dear life.
2. Three year old walks into restroom, pees louder than a rainstorm in a rusty bucket.
3 Three year old crawls into bed, kicks me in groin, asks if I want to play a video game. I grumble.
4.Three year old asks for breakfast by repeating " I want oatmeal " 452 times.
5.Giving up any further thoughts of getting lucky with the Mrs, I resign myself to getting out of bed, and trip over my jeans. Kiss my wife on the cheek, the most sex I have had in days.
6.Grab laundry, start coffee, wipe counters, empty dryer, GUZZLE COFFEE in desperation
7.Run bath-tub, and hear the familiar " I have to poop, Dad "
8. Help son with particularly difficult bowel movement, wipe bottom like pro.
9. Put son in tub, play " Ocho Man " for a few minutes. [this is a fictional super hero that only he and I know about]
10. Guzzle coffee, literally scan 200 articles in Google Reader, sharing and bookmarking along the way.
11. Tweet; minddumping
12. Think about how people always remember the wrong parts of the 80s
13. Listen to my new Best of 2010 music mix, trying to not weep when " The National" comes on.
14. Do research on idioms for something or other I want to do with the information.
15. Spend an extraordinary 35 seconds catching up with hundreds of friends on Facebook.
16. Wipe dog poo off of the brand new shoes of the 3 year old which he refuses to wear even without dog poop on them.
17. Get the kid out of the tub, wrap the little cherub in a towel and give him a huge hug. Discuss whether there is school in NY, where we are soon moving. I say " yes, there is school, school is everywhere, son"
18. Finally make breakfast, explain why we don't have Oatmeal, take 15 minutes to watch my son construct a salami, ham and cheese sandwich.
19. Rub the little dudes back for a moment while he eats, relishing the moment.
20. Check work email, toss the BB
21. Make a do list for moving items for consideration.
22. Kiss the wife goodbye, linger just a second longer, always feeling that my wife is freaking hot.
23.Kiss the boy goodbye, tell him that he should teach me something from school later on today.
24.Make a few phone calls, write a few emails. Communicate with folks.
25. MissThe Pixies, Minutemen, Replacements and Husker Du. Thought about the good part of the 80s.
26..Organize a few things for packing in the closet, listening to the new Sufjan Stevens.
27.Read a chapter in the book I am reading, while I wait for something to heat up.
28.Take out the guitar, work on a lick for a song I am writing
29.More emails. Curse email addiction.
30.Walk outside, check temperature for possible run.
31..Decide to go for it, don layers of inappropriate, mismatched running gear.
32. Grab iPod, hit " running playlist" which is mostly heavy rock and punk and head out into the cold air.
33. Feel at once grateful, and at once cold as hell. Think" I could have one leg, and like really bad music"
34. Feel grateful when Social Distortion comes on, on one of the big hills.
35. Speak new song lyric ideas into my digital recorder as I run.
36.. Dream up idea for blog entry, run home, drink water, write blog.

...and so it goes, day by day.

Listen! A Few Songs from 2010

2010-12-22T17:26:00.017-05:00

So much music, so little time.

I never expected my beloved The National or The Arcade Fire to keep it up. How could they with those standards. But they did. Holy mother of God, they did. What sublime music they gave us again.

There was a lot of good music again in 2010. Too much to share here, at least today, as I have to wrap presents. A small taste of MP3s below;

Update( links removed due to web sheriff complaint, copied below) Nice to know that someone can find me by web search. The songs are below, now go do the right thing, and buy them at iTunes for 99Cents each, which is actually a rip off, or go to the other millions of websites that offer free tracks.

We have received a DMCA complaint for your blog, Somewhere Between Art and Love. An e-mail with the details of the complaint was sent to you on Dec 27, 2010 , and we reset the post status to "Draft"; you can edit it here. You may republish the post with the offending content and/or link(s) removed. If you believe you have the rights to post this content, you can file a counter-claim with us. For more on our DMCA policy, please click here. Thank you for your prompt attention.

Rocky Votolato - Red River
Lil Wayne - I am Not a Human Being
Arcade Fire - We Used to Wait
Japandroids - Younger Us
Spoon - Take It In
Tokyo Police Club - Bambi
The National - Anyone's Ghost

Oh Holy Hell We are Moving!

2010-12-22T09:50:00.002-05:00

“What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.” ~ Seneca

We are moving. I have said it here before. We are trying to do it without losing our minds, or simply burning the family home to the ground in disgusted defeat.

We are taking 7 years of collected, apparently at one point necessary, shit-crap from this 3000+ SF house and trying to cram it into a small NY area Condo.

Without a deformation of space time, this is about as likely as the Government balancing the budget next year.

What a joke. There may be a show for the far extreme, but deep down inside we are all "hoarders".

So we are making piles. That's what borderline hoarders in remission do, make piles. We are sick, twisted little humans with an interminable penchant for consumption. We don't need all this stuff. Help us.

So we make piles; One pile to take, definitely. One pile that is definitely trash. Definitely. One pile of "oh my God that is so cool, what the hell were we thinking when we bought that and what do we do with it now, we cannot possibly get rid of this" and one pile for " storage ". Shit, storage! Because we do not know what to do, we need to have a place to put stuff until we decide whether we will ever look at it again, because ( my favorite phrase) " you never know " Yea, you never know when you will need a purple rimmed hat that says " show me your boobs " again.

I wish we could scan all our possessions and upload them to our computer, so if we felt the need we could just look at the images, and feel better about ourselves. If memory is information processing why not take the bulk out of the pesky encoding? I will keep my permanent record of my shit where I want it, not cluttering up my physical space man.

If we survive this, we are imposing a several gate process before we buy anything again.

A family sanctioned questionnaire system that will turn us into Buddhists like it or not.

" Do we really really really really really need this?" Or something to that effect.

Buddhist Parable -Releasing the Cows

One day the Buddha was sitting in the wood with thirty or forty monks. They had an excellent lunch and they were enjoying the company of each other. There was a farmer passing by and the farmer was very unhappy. He asked the Buddha and the monks whether they had seen his cows passing by. The Buddha said they had not seen any cows passing by.

The farmer said, "Monks, I'm so unhappy. I have twelve cows and I don't know why they all ran away. I have also a few acres of a sesame seed plantation and the insects have eaten up everything. I suffer so much I think I am going to kill myself.

The Buddha said, "My friend, we have not seen any cows passing by here. You might like to look for them in the other direction."

So the farmer thanked him and ran away, and the Buddha turned to his monks and said, "My dear friends, you are the happiest people in the world. You don't have any cows to lose. If you have too many cows to take care of, you will be very busy.

"That is why, in order to be happy, you have to learn the art of cow releasing (laughter). You release the cows one by one. In the beginning you thought that those cows were essential to your happiness, and you tried to get more and more cows. But now you realize that cows are not really conditions for your happiness; they constitute an obstacle for your happiness. That is why you are determined to release your cows."

Songs for Funerals

2010-12-20T09:18:00.000-05:00

Somehow I think everyone has a list of songs that they would like played at their funeral. Oh sure, it's morbid. But what is life about if not death?

Here are two of many that would make the set-list. It's going to be a long service, folks.
The first is a live performance by Arcade Fire. Holy Mother of God, this song is always just immense.

The 2nd for now, is by REM. Here is a beautiful and sparse unplugged version of one of my perennial favorites:

Another Chapter of the Unwritten

2010-12-18T16:29:00.000-05:00

Every once in a while, I find my way through another chapter of my unwritten book. I am many chapters in, and keep giving up on it, never quite making the time to slog forward. I am beginning to hate the concept. But still mercilessly plod on. It is about a group of people with the curse of Eidetic Memory.

The fellow in the new chapter has himself in isolation so at least he does not have the added pain of external noise creating more memories. It might not be better, however, it just being him and his head...

Chapter 5

Isolation Journal - Day 4

Can you imagine what it would be like to never forget anything? Damned convenient to forget sometimes, trust me. Sure, there is plenty that is good to remember, but just as much to forget. I tried to control even that, to try and only make good memories. That never worked. Inevitably something comes along and derails you. Fate, luck, the shit that happens. Life. It has these places. The dark ones. They just show up, mostly in sneak attack and sit there in your head eating holes. I used to try and close my eyes, and use my brain like a remote. Like going to the dentist, and trying not to think about him drilling your teeth, but rather the beach, or skiing or whatever your distraction fantasy is. Did that ever really work? It still fucking hurt. So despite the fact that my distraction memories are palpable, and real as real is real they start to stack and bleed into each other, like a film going at double speed. So then I am forced to slow it down, and try to pick one memory at a time. Damming the Colorado River with a handful of toothpicks.

My wife used to love me, but she forgot how. My memories of how it used to be make everything now not good enough. Oh sure, I tried the usual stuff to make it come alive again, but shit, how the hell can a store bought facsimile ever compare to the real thing that is right there still in my head ? Chemistry fades and is replaced by comfort in real life and many are perfectly happy with that. I write poetry with my chemistry, it is still there in little test tube synapses, for me to call up whenever I want. Thing is I have to be inside my head to get it. It does not do anyone else a bit of good, when I am inside my skull all the time. I can remember every time I made love. I can snowball it into the biggest orgasm ever felt, stack the synapse photos and explode into it. God my wife hated that. It was worse than porn. Sleeping with my past, holding my dick in my hands like a joy stick to some video game, like The Sims, where everyone in the world is my puppet, because they still live in my head. But, I know all of this. I came here to change things. To find my way back to something real and permanent. To some comfort in the now. To turn this blasted noise down, and stop grinding my teeth to cope with not forgetting it all.

Get well Queen of Soul

2010-12-09T17:43:00.000-05:00

I never cease to be amazed at what an amazing vocalist she is. This is a performance from 1967 from the Mike Douglas show. Listen to how natural her voice is, she doesn't really even need that mic.

Get well soon, Aretha.

There is something so endearing about stupidity

2010-12-08T15:50:00.000-05:00

There is something about getting older that makes it easier to forgive the increasing amount of stupid that we do. It is as inevitable as the seasons and with each passing year, the quotient of absent minded, forgetful or just plain weird increases.

We may be wiser, but we are also losing it man.

Look - we all do silly things; stress, endless life overload and just the way we monkeys are engineered will lead to it. It is our nature to fuck up. It is also our nature to cover it up.

Thing is, as we get older we seem to care a lot less about that. We no longer feel the need to act proud or cocky about our stupid selves. We just let stupid flow.
Have you ever done something really stupid, that no one else saw, or noticed and the only one that you could enjoy a chuckle with was yourself? You all know that little smile of recognition, that slight hint of self-embarrassment, and then your own voice of reason turning on itself and saying “God, that was stupid.” I have even said aloud to myself. “ God, that was stupid. “ Oh what fun to not only recognize your own limitations, but to talk to yourself! The boundless joy of the ever deteriorating mind!

It’s a bit like when you trip on a crack, mutter to yourself like a schizoid, then keep walking, momentarily self esteem dented, hoping no one saw you trip. Or when you raise your arm to wave passionately at a friend in the distance, start walking towards him, still waving, smiling, only to realize it is not your friend at all, and quickly retract your arm like a tape measure back to its case, and hope nobody sees your dumb red face.

Ah, the pain of youth, the burden to care about something as trivial as self folly.
We are fuck-ups, face it and grow up.

Oh, I am not proud; I will post the evidence for all to see, right here in the stupid cloud.
I considered keeping a stupid journal, but thought I would start by recounting just the silly things I have done in the last two or three weeks.

1. I travel a lot. I always write down where I park my car. The trips meld into one another, the brain melts from the geography of somewhere else. I got cocky, and did not write it down for once. I lost my car in the parking lot at the airport. I had to walk around for 15 minutes until panic set in. The alarm on my car is muted and sounds like a drowned weasel, so that was no help. I was convinced that Alzheimer’s now had a firm grip on my brain, and walked back and forth lane by lane dragging my hand luggage, sweating despite the cold. I hate when the brain decides to let stress and anger rule and it clouds over into a fog, like when you need to eat and the brain just shuts down. Low blood sugar, lost car panic meltdown. I did find it, and it was one of the greatest moments of the last weeks being reunited with my vehicle. I am writing the spot down again from now on, guaranteed.

2. I woke up late for a conference call that I had to take from a hotel room. I rushed to make coffee, I needed coffee, I always need coffee. I WANT COFFEE. After 10 minutes, I wonder why the coffee is not done. I NEED COFFEE NOW. I am angry, the way that only NOT HAVING COFFEE can make one angry. I pick up the phone to bandy about my Platinum status with the hotel, and how dare the coffee machine not work, and I am important and have a conference call with Europe, and I NEED COFFEE, and take a peak into the machine and notice I had not put the water in it.

3. I left my black shoes at home during my last business trip, and only had my brown ones, which for a black pinstripe suit on a metro- sexual is more or less like a slow painful fashion death. I had to buy new shoes immediately. Stupid, maybe, stylish, certainly.

4. I forget several PIN numbers, or what they were for. I don't even miss them at all.

5. I put salt in my coffee, I have done that a few times now. At least this time I did not slug half the cup back and spit the coffee all over the restaurant - so progress.

6. I recounted a marvelous favorite story of mine, barreling along like a master and all eyes in my audience of five were glued to me waiting for the punchline or point which I had forgotten, and the story ended up like a deflated balloon flaccid as the day is long. I just smiled, and hoped no one would humiliate me. Its bad enough when you cannot perform.
[This last sentence is a METAPHOR, friends]

It will only get worse. Good thing, age gives the somewhat reciprocal gift of being better able to laugh at oneself. I guess God did have a sense of humor when he created us.

Go forth and be stupid today. I am happy to take your comments on your own experimentation with the fine art below. Come on, you know you are stupid.

Highlights from the news; May I Just Vent for a Moment?

2010-12-03T10:32:00.001-05:00

I am pissed

Enough about the TSA: I am over it; we cannot even manage to keep the political maelstrom away from this. The very same people that applauded wiretapping of phone calls and emails now claim airport security is “big government intrusion” Oh, I am so tired of the hypocritical political toadies on both sides that share a stubborn, non productive dogmatism that I promise will break this country into unsalvageable little shards soon. You cannot pick your stance on defending our security for political expediency. May Barney Frank pat you all down in session, you little lap sheep.

N.Korea: Okay, China you are a kind of a big trading partner with the USA, so do us a favor and exert some power over that little despot in N.Korea and keep us from the brink of WWIII. I suppose it did not help that Wikileaks documents referred to Kim jon-il as a fat little midget with stupid wood shop glasses, hair like a brillo pad that just scrubbed the toilets in an Indian train station and the fashion sense of a sponge. Who calls themselves “Supreme Leader ;“anyway, did he get that from a Bugs Bunny cartoon, or what? Grow up, you little dork.

Bi-Partisanship and keeping the USA from going bankrupt: I just read the 58 page report on deficit reduction amusingly called “The Moment of Truth “

Folks, it is time to act, and stop acting like the spoiled little bastards that we all are, or like kids at the playground fighting over who gets on the slide next. I can only wish that an independent candidate with some real power to get elected in 2012 comes along. This populist, bi-polar, hypocritical magical thinking, blocking and showboating has to stop.

Enough. Obama is running the whole country like a campaign with dangerous and costly policies that have not brought the mess, admittedly left him by the previous White House occupant forward. The Republicans just oppose more or less everything, and have not brought anything solid forward. They want to cut “discretionary spending “however, ladies and gentlemen of the USA that accounts for only 16% of the budget, a paltry 100 Billion in the “teacup” of the total 1.3 trillion. The entitlement programs and defense spending make up 60% of the shit. Without looking at these we are doomed to live on food stamps doled out by China soon. Our kids will be making Polo shirts in sweat shops in our country for the Indians and Chinese, who are better educated than us to wear. This crazy, partisan thinking and believing in Santa Claus policies will not change this. Despite rhetoric, Reagan, Bush both exploded the budget despite preaching fiscal discipline. Blab la bla. Very tough decisions will have to be made that involve sacrifice, and working on the major levers that are tilting this thing.

It is pretty clear that the bi-partisan commissions are acting like little pricks already. And I for one will start looking for anyone outside of the existing parties to vote for in 2012. Consider.

The Royal Wedding: Sure, we need a fairy tale right about now, but I am not so sure I can handle seeing the couple on every magazine ever printed for the next 7 years before they get divorced and it starts all over again with different headlines. I have even heard that the wedding will be broadcast in 3D, kind of like the new Jackass movie.

The pope and condoms: Catholic teaching and common sense are diametrically opposed, so this was a revelation this week, although there was a slight “well, what he really meant was “ Sorry, but this is more than archaic and poltergeists are about as relevant.

My Favorite Albums - Elliott Smith - XO

2010-11-29T15:49:00.000-05:00

Everyone has a handful of records that they like to listen to in the dark. They take us to a place where it is floaty and not quite asleep, not quite awake. Subconscious pillow talk.

This is one of those records for me. It is moody, poppy, layered, thoughtful, endlessly melodic, lyrical and beautiful.

One could argue that this is his transition record, a bit like REM's Monster [which, by the way, stands the test of time almost more than anything else they have ever done], and I am never quite sure which of his work I like best. [It was Figure 8 for a while, which some Elliott snobs sometimes dismiss as overproduced] but XO never lets me down.

Elliott, you are missed, man.

Productivity and Distraction

2010-11-28T14:50:00.000-05:00

Life is about many things. Certainly it is about getting shit done. Intellect, passion, clarity and motivation are some of the criteria that fuel levels of ambition. But still there is the run of the mill crap that needs to get done. Feed the dogs, wash clothes, make appointments, don't forget milk,work, fuel the car, masturbate, run for senate, listen to the new Arcade Fire etc.

There is just so much that gets in the way.

If one definition of productivity is " the measure of output per unit of input", I just wonder what the hell we are doing with the endless barrage of input coming at us every waking second. We are bombarded with information in 1500 flavors, sorted, spit at us, force fed and hand picked. It is getting in the way of being productive. We are all input.

Sure, we get stuff done, but it is a hell of a lot harder to get it done with all this endless distraction. We are drugged into a lazy stupor, a haze of stimuli. An addiction to connection. Crack whores of distraction.

What do we have to show for all this input? Are we fitter, happier, more productive?

Our kids are mosquitos that seem to be able to keep their minds on something for no more than 25 seconds at a time. They are SMS fiends whose fingers are morphing into little pointers to master their various touch devices. They are bored if they are not connected to the grid, to a million friends, to 20 conversations at once. We barely see their eyes anymore. It doesn't take a psychologist to take notice, but they are, and more articles are surfacing by the day.

The average person swallows about 34GBs of information a day. No wonder we have indigestion, headaches and a trunk-load of anxiety and prescriptions.

Oddly, it is not just " them ". It is us, too. Yep, us adults. Many of us are almost as connected and darn near as distracted. We keep our phones by our beds, have them attached to our hips, drive like maniacs as we yack on them. We Facebook and Tweet, and text and read stupid work email 24/7. We are as vulnerable and damned guilty too. Shut up and shut off once in a while.

Is there a limit to how much stimuli a human can take? Maggie Jackson, author of " Distracted" is calling for a " renaissance of attention" to reinvigorate our ADD society, and save our kids.

We have been given machine guns. Immense power must come with teaching, learning control and temperance. I think the school of the future will have to focus on a way to tame the Tsunami, teaching good information consumption choices and practicing balance between the virtual and the outside world.

We have some work to do.