Ours go to '11...

May imagination and reality, concept and execution, abstract and practicals, inner and outer be kind and sharing with one another. May being find a little nothingness and vice versa. May your days be merry and bright and your nights utterly terrifying (in a good way).

You're not pushing hard enough...

Damn doubt trips me up and derails my better intentions time and time again. What to do? If I'm not stumbling at the starting gate, doubt threatens to envelop and push me further inwards, well away from the life I'm "supposed" to be leading. I know where doubt leads me friends - to paralysis and regret and drooly sweaters. But doubt is a force so deeply ingrained in me that I unconsciously cater to it even as I am vigorously aware of it.

I must look at this image and realize where all of this sorry safety will take me. Get it out there. Stick your neck out. Unconstipate. Push Pablo Push!

You're pushing too hard...

Dear most music on my radio:

Some (unsolicited) thoughts for the new year...

Breathy, raspy vocals, not sexy. Making sex noises, not sexy. Calculated cool, not sexy. Trying or pretending to be sexy, not sexy. Trying to sell music so you can feel sexy about yourself, not sexy. Hiding behind a computer, not sexy. Being a desperate pawn in a mammothly slimy industry, hmm... could be sexy but only if it involves some variant of spontaneous combustion.

Bottom line - 99.999% of processed and marketed forms of sexy, not sexy. Suggestion - forget the sexy?

We are all visionaries...

"We are all visionaries, and what we see is our soul in things."

Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Merry Christmas...

Are you are out standing in fields?

(Pablo in the sunflowers)

Crazy Playground...

Sister Crickett hits it on the head when she says she's got her work and then she's got her "crazy playground." In her case that means a book she's written that might become a play or a movie or both or... who knows? Point being, it's a real project, something to have some fun with, a place for experiments and meeting people and seeing what can happen. So good. So nice. Happiness is love.

The Claire Denis solution...

I'm totally gaga for Claire Denis. Her films offer quiet ecstasies and teeth that sink into your psyche. Until last night, I'd never seen her first film Chocolat, a seriously beautiful reflection on visual fields of power and desire as remembered from her own childhood in colonial Cameroon. Maybe I was holding off because that title was corrupted by the stupid Johnny Depp movie of the same name. I also have an irrational fear that an artitsts' early works will be inferior to their later ones.

Her "textured, contemplative examinations of cross-cultural tensions and alienation" won't be for everyone, but they're high on my list of great things. Some other titles: The Intruder, 35 Shots of Rum, I Can't Sleep, Nenette and Boni, Beau Travail (English titles). Probably hold off on Trouble Every Day though (unless graphic depictions of urban cannibalism are your thing). It doesn't fit into her body of work, which of course makes it interesting, but still tough to watch.

If you do see Chocolat, read Hilary Neroni's excellent piece on the film afterwards.

Fire knows no measure...

While aging does pit one against the concept of irrelevance, there is also something very nice to be said for the illusion of being in the middle of so many opposing forces - young and old, big and small, rebellious and wise, etc. - it's a kind of benevolent doldrums, a gifted vantage point where black and white seem equidistant on available horizons. Also important at this stage to learn how to replace the word "or" with "and" as often as you can mean it.

That delicious tingle of chlorine...

I want to sincerely apologize to any of my moose brethren I might have offended with yesterday's post. Let's face it boys, you do get a bit jammy down there, still, it's unfair of me to use your private region as an exemplar of all that's undesirable in the world. I certainly didn't intend for you to remedy the situation à la piscine, but perhaps that was your way of telling me to go f*ck myself? Point taken.

Hey, guess who's five years old today?

Optimism for the ages...

Hi America! How's it going? I had a couple of silly thoughts to share. Got a second? Always appreciate an open ear.

I'm thinking that our current god, Capitalism, wouldn't suck such sweaty, dung-slung, toxic moose cock if he didn't continually, insidiously, turn good people into willful coprophagiacs. Our rush for success on this god's terms has us all toilet-snorkeling in a rhinestone-studded bowl. We create so much shit and we call it gold. Isn't it great?!

Do you see what I see? A gifted continent being consumed by its blind spots. A hypnotized nation in faithful zombie-like service of a shimmering sputum-catcher of a social space. The way we move, the noises we make, the things we obsess over, the things we build. Our shared American reality has become a graceless, affected, overwrought, hideous, and blaring place. Like a broken commode, it overflows with ugly things, dumb ads, useless media, sneaky politics, junk food, shopping holidays, brain-erasing myths, and fat-sucking devices that swamp our money-addled attention until our bank accounts are zeroed out and/or we thankfully drop dead to make room for more eager, photo-ready latrine flies.

But you know amigos, if we could change this shared sewage dump for our ugliest messages, scheming political manipulations, and shittiest hopes for cash reward, then our participation might mean something. It might lead us to a social space actually worth living in. We all want to participate in humanity. In this wonderful thing called life. We accept the need for a communal, imaginary reality that is malleable and safe and inclusive. But it doesn't have to suck.

As it stands, the rules of the game are just too masochistic for many of us. Why should we savor the stench of our polluted mainstream? Why should we contribute to sewer lines engineered to irrigate a rancid, econo-drunk system? Why pass on irradiated DNA that wants to slavishly maintain such manic, worthless offerings? Why play nice in a greedy system that encourages its players to earn and turn away from the maggot-infested culture they've created? Is it truly our highest calling to ferret pennies away from the marketplace back to our caves where, at last, we can reupholster our unseeing eyeballs our unhearing ears in combed Egyptian cotton to the envy of our disliked friends? What's going on?

Fix this shit or asphyxiate. Right America? Let's stop identifying ourselves as careless producers-consumers of garbage. Let's reclaim our human dignity. What content do we the people want our social space to hold? Isn't that the conversation?

Quantifying quality...

"I said to myself when I saw you - I said, 'That's a guy with the most normal-looking face I ever saw in my life'...It's great to see a normal face, because I'm a normal guy. It would be great for two normal guys like us to get together and talk about world events - you know, in a normal sort of way..." - Clare Quilty

How much energy goes into maintaining an appearance of collective normalcy? In your relationships? In your community? On your planet? Is it quantifiable? Of course not. I ask because I think a lot of this is going to start to unravel as we redefine ourselves and our concepts of social space in the years ahead. It could be a bumpy ride for some. Or a welcomed less-normal normal for others.

If the 20th Century was about fighting to build mega-systems, if it was about quantity and achieving scale, then I have an optimistic hunch that the 21st Century will be about reducing the numbers, rethinking the scale of things, and reinvesting the systems with quality. And by quality I mean soul, though I'm sure other unreliable narrators will have other perfectly normal definitions.

Welcome to the Crackerdome...

I think it's high time we brought back the word "cracker." Only this time, instead of it referring to "white folk," let's focus its use on college educated, urban white people who emit a telltale aura of crackerdom.

Crackers are trapped in their own existential nausea and despite best effort, it shows. Denying the dry blankness of their existence, their thin voices, their apathetic reserve, their time-is-up-ness, crackers operate in tightly wound knots, seriously cutifying everything around them with clever word play and I'm-not-my-mom/dad,-or-am-I fashion statements. Crackers have funny Chocolate Labs with rare names taken from books. Crackers go through life with a pained expression, wandering the aisles of Whole Foods, following the dictates and fine print of logic and refinancing. They love their kids and want them to be crazy and where the wild things are and they dress them up like kooks.

But try as we crackers may to whitewash this eternally-frustrating distance from a soulful, in-the-skin existence, we just can't escape this sucking white hole we live in. There just isn't the escape velocity to set a cracker free. Or is there?

What if only us crackers can call each other crackers? What if that's the trick? It's not a pejorative slur, it's a kind of self-referential verbal meta-mirror (am I talking your language cracker?) that shows us the spinach in our teeth. It's a key to cracking the Crackerdome wide open. (Oof... And then what?)