young lefty:

home:

musha … my favorite restaurant in the world. wilshire at 5th in santa monica, right around the corner from the shotokan dojo.

we call this spicy tuna tartar … a top five favorite thing to eat on planet earth for me. that fish and the nutty, crunchyness of the rice cracker … whew.

murph’s favorite … pepper seared tuna with ponzu, seaweed, and some kind of radish.

“mfc” aka … musha fried chicken. ginger batter. more radish. savory dip. lemon.

shumai – scallop filled dumplings with ponzu, hot mustard sauce. rich and weird.

char han – a spicy fried rice with sausage and pickled ginger. always served last. i could never figure out why, but it always comes last.

green tea ice cream.

the day after musha, i went out walking toward nader’s house. ran into this guy on alvadaro street …

playing a bach piece on bassoon through two guitar amps, pedals, the works. the guy called himself …

and he was “dressed” as bach in a tux and white wig. pretty awesome stumble upon.

but white couldn’t make lunch which meant i was miles from an in-n-out and on foot, so … i thought fast, hopped a bus, and was rewarded with a double-double animal style, fries, and a dr. pepper.

i also saw the jim henson studios, which bore a striking resemblance to the muppet studios that fell into disrepair in the latest installment of the muppets movie. pretty cool. kermit …

how ’bout them apples?

NDR is the graduate student run literary journal at LSU. it used to be published in paper, but due to budget cuts (and the magic of the 21st century) it is now published online.

this is probably a good thing, as the multi-media component is pretty hip (i particularly dug Eric LeMay’s Excerpts from Resistible: A Comic Memoir about Comedy).

anyway, have a look.

and thanks, e!

i’ll get you back someday. i’ve got connections too, you know. like, you’ve probably never been back stage at phil brady’s, have you? i figured … i’ll hook you up.

even in my springsteen revival of the last year or two, i never dropped the needle on born in the u.s.a. again. i’ve listened to the song ‘incident on 57th street’ no less than ten thousand times in the last two years. born to run? i almost need a new copy. but born in the u.s.a. has just been sitting there. waiting.

it was always bruce’s ‘commercial record;’ dancing in the dark has more than a little touch of that 80s pop sound (the record was behind prince’s purple rain for weeks before finally becoming number one). and it was when bruce was really being framed as that manly, lotta bravado kinda 1980s icon, you know? and the record was HUGE … had like seven top ten singles. and i just figured, i don’t know, eh. so i stayed away …

when i finally dropped the needle a few nights ago, it struck me that i might not have really listened to that record since i was ten (same copy, btw. “also available on cassette”).

and it sounded … like heaven. and the songs were … shit, man. and when you think about it, the record he released before born in the u.s.a. was … nebraska. several of the songs from born in the u.s.a. almost ended up on nebraska. think about THAT shit …

side one. born in the u.s.a. get over yourself. that song fucking rages. desperate. violent. a fucking desperate, violent rock and roll anthem.

side two. first two songs. no surrender, then bobby jean. so fucking emotional, man. two, three-minute rock anthems. three chords and four chords, respectively. woulda sounded right at home on a ramones record. (then you remember bruce once wrote “hungry heart” for the ramones, but then kept it cause it was just too good …)

been making me cry all week.

so fucking emotional.

maybe it’s all the occupy stuff that’s got me me thinking that maybe – maybe – people might be remembering that we’re all in this together, and that the poor people you don’t want your taxes going to help are, in fact, your neighbors, so their problems are your problems whether you want to admit it or not. and maybe it’s teaching marx the last two weeks to a bunch of good, safe kids who have never thought about the fact that the game might be stacked against a lot of people out there. and maybe it was reading the beautiful, 1930s communist (and extremely popular at the time) play waiting for lefty again, and remembering that’s why i named lefty, lefty … cause he’s a pack animal. and a dirty red.

but it all got me thinking about 1985 again. about being in mt. zion. about living on westside with my mom and roger, about going to see reagan at the decatur airport. and watching rambo movies all the time. and red dawn. and rocky iv.

and everyone back then thought born in the u.s.a. was a patriotic anthem. thought springsteen must have been another fabricated tough guy, another reagan, a rambo. he had an american flag on his album cover for fuck’s sake, right? (funny aside, the album cover, as you recall, is bruce’s ass with an american flag behind it. someone reading way into the rebellious nature of the record thought it might symbolize that he was pissing on the flag. bruce recollects, ‘nah, they took a bunch of photos and the ones of my ass looked better then the ones of my face.’) people thought he fit right in to the ‘morning in america,’ trickle down bullshit reagan was preaching …

but, you know.

he didn’t.

and if you actually listened to what he was saying … well.

working down at the car wash, where all it ever does is rain … you were waiting for me at home … sitting around here trying to write this book … with these romantic dreams in our heads …

and i realized i was listening back then. to a lot of things. listening in my ten year old hungry little heart.

and all of it made me happy.

***

here’s the acoustic version of no surrender. so fucking vital. if this doesn’t make you cry you should kill yourself. or join the tea party …

from the live 1975-1985 5 LP record set released in 1986 to commercial mania. debuted at number one. think about that … a five record live set debuting at number one.

***

he suffocated her with the avant-garde and stabbed her through the heart with a bamboo kubing. then he snapped her neck. his sticky fingers tickling and painting and leaving cherry-red dna fucking everywhere. like signature prints on every last corner of her heart. that crime scene was something to see, man … a beautiful death. like your first shudder. your very last sunset.

they’ll play feedback at the funeral.

***

but death is not stop and birth is not go. without a clock life is unaware of its own timelessness. images in immeasurable forms, like the material earth that devours and swallows and brings the abstract death down to become an element of renewal. to bury, to sow, to kill simultaneously. to bring forth something more and better.

this realism is grotesque!

but don’t be afraid.

there is abundance. transformation. transition points. a life eternally reborn. a becoming interchange of death and conception. don’t close the confines. we can’t smooth the bulges. yes, beneath our feet our shadows are hanging on. until we all get off.

***

he told me once about love, and i believed him. a furious sort of love. always. delicately aggressive. safely dangerous. he tried to leave many times. changed his address. wore new shoes. took his time. shady ladies come. shady ladies go. vegas sugar daddies. girls from the bar. the quilted arrangements, the nowhere hounds, the past. the past. raging like a liar’s jealousy, and all selfish and should be. shit man, haven’t you ever seen love fight in a bar before? the sounds of time and space. wars are won with battles lost. never? shit, man. you’d never understand. but when one walks too close to that dumb edge … he loves her so. i remember. sparkling stones and snow white foam. and i know you know.

***

they always talk motive. can’t finger a man clean without a good motive. but shit, man … the universe loaned him every motive there is: sincerity, time, love, poetry, lies, form, genius, loss … swing a dead cat, man. there’s your motive.

they’ll probably hang blasphemy around his neck and try to get him on a tradition rap. cause we love conserving tradition around here. but don’t kid yourself. tradition is nowhere. it’s eternal. it hasn’t happened yet. origin is a myth. still sleeping with that phony, plastic broad named authenticity. genius is the first repetition. inspiration is an echo. the copy is richer, yet deeper somehow. yeah, they’ll try to say he killed tradition, for sure. say he just flipped the binary. say he tried to simply say no to an established truth. tried to just destroy for the sake of mere negation.

***

but we are not so reckless. motive is force. impulse. action. the undefinable, untraceable trace of deconstruction. not new genres, new methods of analysis, new systems of stifling oppression. new-and-improved system B is just mossy system A in this year’s lapels. meet the new boss. same as the old boss. the motive is not to establish new identities within the same old tired and bound rules. we aren’t looking for new taxonomies. we’re looking for ways out. ways beyond. ways of singular rhythms that never end. ways where not all repetitions are the same. ways of excess. ways to alter again for the first time. to bring the outside in. to leave, the world, differently.

***

they caught the poor son-of-a-bitch red handed. and it really wasn’t that hard. just straight up the going nowhere trail. there he was. sitting poolside with mermaid on lap. smoking whiskey. reading my mind. thinking about you. believing everything can change. guilty as the day he was born. deeply quilted. and shoulda knowing better.

***

sean fayecullen killed folk music.

and they’ll play meyou&them at his funeral.

***

kevin casper,
with thanks to jacques derrida, mikhail bakhtin, and sean fayecullen.

october, 2011

2009 Flaming Lips – Watching The Planets from George Salisbury on Vimeo.

that’s the strobo trip light phase illusion toy.

the idea, according to wayne, is to take some acid, put on the six hour song, and play with this toy while you listen. as part of the song, they had a benefit project where you could donate money to be given to the humane society and your name would be read in the song at some point. the reading of the names was done by sean lennon.

their previous music release was the gummy skull:

another usb stick is embedded inside this life sized human skull. the usb stick contains a four song EP. to hear the music, you have to eat the skull. one of the gummy flavors available is marijuana.

wayne has said that they will probably never release a traditional record again. maybe they’ll collect some recordings from a period and put them together, but no more conceptual records.

in that case, their last full length record was the double length LP embryonic:

when i first heard this record, i really hated it. like, i thought i’d never listen to it. then, one day, i put it on when i was writing one of my papers for my general exams. omigod. a grower of the highest order, this record just sits somewhere in your cognitive space that makes you want to make academic arguments while you listen. it is such an unbelievable tool to me at this point. it will be mentioned in the acknowledgements of my dissertation.

and if anyone wants, they can buy this for me:

this is heady nuggs. the first five warner brothers records (not including zaireeka) re-released on vinyl. that’s hit to death in the future head, transmissions from a satellite heart, clouds taste metallic, the soft bulletin, and at war with the mystics. it’s only $125. if you loved me …

oh, and btw, wayne doesn’t do any drugs.

none.