iampatsquires: whats gayer than harrison ford’s earring?
me: what
iampatsquires: nothing
v?
high level conversations
09/13/09
high level
08/02/09
Cryptomnesia
I was visiting a friend on Lake Winnipesaukee last Saturday when he started playing a guitar riff that sounded very familiar. I asked him the name of the song, and he said it was the theme from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 masterpiece, L’avventura (seen & heard in video above). I suggested that it sounded very similar to Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ Egyptian Reggae. He agreed. Now, composer Giovanni Fusco died in 1968 and The Modern Lovers formed in 1970, so they weren’t broing down in Boston, or even Italy for that matter. It is quite possible however, that a young Jonathan did see the film and fell victim to one of our implicit and ubiquitous human faults, cryptomnesia, or unintended plagiarism.
07/30/09
CB slang game
I got excited last night talking to Victor about tightening up our CB slang game for texting and live conversations. Little did I know that the citizen’s band is no longer the exclusive domain of truckers and teenage hobbyists. In Sydney, Australia, the citizen’s band has been taken over by thugs!
If that’s too much for you, enjoy the grave nostalgia of Dick Curless below. If you like that one, then listen to his 1970 track “Truck Stop” about the gentrification of the greasy spoon by a “swell cafe…a brand new coffee shop.”
Wait. I thought I was done here but check out Sir Mix-a-Lot’s alter ego, Prime Minister. He broadcasts and converses regulary on Channel 6.
06/28/09
technosis extronality clusterfuck
James Howard Kunstler is undoubtedly brilliant: A social poet with the sharpest of sharp wits, a truly visionary and pragmatic thinker. In the TED talk below, he’s funny and occasionally charming (Pol Pot got big laughs). But Mr. Kunstler is fighting hard, (and weekly), to change the way that we think about, engage, and use the spaces we all share. And while some might hail him as a god-sent prophet, I think everyone, on both sides of WalMart’s fence, can agree that he’s a really special kind of dick. Just saying.
Read: The Dystopians (The New Yorker, 1/26/09)
Related: a few lines from Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives:
Where there is wealth and poverty, there is awkwardness in any one of these four situations:
A rich man speaking in praise of wealth
A rich man speaking in praise of poverty
A poor man speaking in praise of wealth
A poor man speaking in praise of povertyComic primness, or “prim irony,” is an an attitude characterizing a member of a privileged class who somewhat questions the state of affairs whereby he enjoys his privileges; but after all, he does not enjoy them, and so in the last analysis he resigns himself to the dubious conditions, in a state of ironic complexity that is apologetic, but not abnegatory.
On the left we see Wipers frontman and guitarist, Greg Sage circa 1981; on the right, an Etruscan statuette of a kore from the end of the 6th Century B.C. The Wipers are a punk band from Portland, OR formed in 1977. The Etruscans are a pre-Roman Italian civilization who existed from 750-90 B.C.
What I’d like to pose to you all is that IF punk music is ancient Greece (ie. truth, discourse, liberal democracy and generally outrageous behavior), AND Rome is Grunge (ie. started out noble, built around Greek (punk, remember) traditions, grew massively popular before becoming too large and unwieldy, then collapsed and fucked up the world (and/or popular music) for years afterwards) THEN the Etruscans would be analogous to The Wipers. If you’re still with me, there’s more after the break including where Sonic Youth fits into all this…
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06/11/09
high level IX
06/04/09
G.O.P.Y.T.
Harper’s, June ‘09. Search the Harper’s Index, too. So dope.
05/12/09
Art Bizarre’s Kwik Way Memories
My friend Adrienne posted a great photo she took of a gutted drive-thru menu from the shuttered Kwik-Way hamburger joint in our Oakland neighborhood. I recalled learning about someone else’s affected nostalgia for this spot that was, for me, just a wrinkled old rhino near its end.
Over a Thanksgiving weekend a few years ago, I was riding back to Oakland on the bus at night. I met an aged hippie named Art Bizarre who grew up in Oakland in the 1950s and 1960s. He had not been back here for awhile and was really excited to see the Kwik-Way still lit up and hopping.
Art said, “I used to run across that park there near the lake to go get a hamburger at that place. That was in 1969. Man.”
“Where have you been?”, I asked.
Art was an Artist. He lived in a small town in the mountains of Northern California where he made his art. I suspected, however, that he made more profit by growing green weeds than selling objets d’art.
He described how his family was angry at him for being the enigmatic uncle. After tuning them out for several years, he dropped in at Thanksgiving without warning. He had no respect for their lifestyle and enjoyed visiting them at his own free will rather than by obligation.
When I said that my bus stop was coming up, he offered to get off with me to share a joint. Imagining Art Bizarre’s free will exercised on my couch for the next three weeks, I politely turned down his offer.
I asked, “Where are you gonna get off, Art? This bus goes to the Oakland airport.”
Art said, “I think I’l go hang out there.”
I said, “At the airport? I’m not sure you’ll enjoy it much anymore.”
This was a post-911 world. He didn’t realize that you can’t just go to the airport, smoke a joint and hang out.
While I was parting, Art exclaimed, “Hey check out my band: Cosmic Dissonance!”
“OK, ya. I’ll look out for you guys.”
Google turned up nothing of Art Bizarre and his band. I respect someone who is really that far off the grid. Art assumed, however, that I would somehow be able to “check out” his band. I’ll take that assumption as a compliment.
–––
Victor chided me one night because our subscribers have no clue who the hell I am. I have little motivation to show off my wares. Cheers to wrinkled old rhinos making precious things you’ll never see and playing in bands you’ll never hear.
04/24/09
high level VIII
who’s coming to my party?
-mm
04/23/09
high level VII
