Snowstorm Blackout...*

Imperatives:
Rock luminaries and neo-sadist post-grads from the school of hard knocks, easy lays. Made in America, fresh of the grill, hot off the presses and dribbling red ink. Industry towers, insipid smoke rings. River run thick w. mud & trash; total re-hash. Standing in yr. wake. Enormous weight of influence and I'm under the influence and you--have a curious way about you...like a feline grace, could be sex appeal --could be shake appeal--maybe lust or indigestion. (mimes indiscretion). Other suggestions given in bad taste. Escapist tendency--no vacancy--emergency room tenant.

Towering stalagmites deep earth tremors and the tenor of reverberant deceit. (Sweet and Meet! Sweet, and Decorous!). Incomplete and rough-hewn window dress. Deep red arterial spray--warms yr. heart--another toxic impulse and phlegm rattle inside the cholera-blue-biled royal son--deviant house servant insolent smirk and now the milk is wasted. White white milk straight from the teat gone sour, gone sour. in a quarter of an hour. that's the one. sullies me 'n' you. that's the milk of human kindness.

etc, etc.

*tx J.

Astronaut's Log: Forbidden Fruit

1.0

The very same weightlessness that once seemed so liberating has now become utterly toxic. That there is gravity in nothing here—that all is in a constant and furious state of flux (hurried ‘how are you’s’ and awkward quiverings of the lips)—is the root cause of this unusual depression.

1.1

In the canteen Lt. S---- prepares frozen berries for a late night snack. She offers me some in a bowl at the end of one slender, feline limb. I gratefully accept a few and I sit there, talking and talking. Nothing lost, nothing gained.

Eventually, I take one encrusted raspberry from the bowl and its inky juice stains my thumb and index finger. I begin to chew and taste only a trickle of sweetness. I try to savor the little that is there.

My patience at an end, I take another, and mash the bloody blue-black currant between my freezing teeth. I look towards S----, who has her back turned, and I watch with shameful attention the way that she prepares the fruit. She turns now, and I let my guilty gaze wander over the comfortless furniture of the place. I glance back, and for a single moment it seems to me that there is more than a little of Mother Nature left to us still. It is like a sleeping lion, or a panther waiting to pounce, and for a short while I can feel something stir inside of me. My heart begins to beat to a faraway drum.

The ruins of life are there. Somewhere, buried in a heap at the bottom of some Marianas Trench, it lurks undetected. Only, time is of the essence. A spring is pressed between two great providential fingers, and when will they let go?

…TRANSMISSION ENDS.




Originally posted on Anesthetic Hymns

Astronaut's Log: Laika

2.0

On 3rd November 1957 the Soviet Union sent a mongrel dog into space aboard the Sputnik-2 spacecraft. They smoothed her coat with rubbing alcohol and they attached electrodes to her body. Once in orbit, she lasted from about five to seven hours before succumbing to the extreme temperature and stress of being catapulted into space. Her name was Laika. The word means “barker.”

From the portal in my bedroom I can see the earth, huge and magnificent, turning in oblivion. I imagine Atlas struggling beneath its terrific weight and for a minute I’m completely overcome with sympathy. I try to imagine all the lives that are beginning and ending on the planet below, but I do not shut my eyes. I tell myself, “This is your home. This is the place where you were born.”

I keep staring through the little pane of glass until I lose focus and I am suddenly presented with my own reflection. My features are taut and I have high cheekbones. My hair is buzzed almost to the skin and I can hardly recognize the face that returns my gaze. I turn away from the window and try to fix my mind on vague events of the distant past.

I am a child of seven. The sunshine floods the empty street and I am riding my bicycle around the pagoda of the neighborhood park. Then I’m eighteen again, sitting on the hood of my dad’s car and staring up at the moon on a humid summer night. Next, I am lying in a bed freshman year of college. A girl is singing something from The Phantom of the Opera.

Images rise and fade. Voices echo and die. I look back through the portal—back at the earth. I let my mind go blank. Then I rest my eyes on a random, distant star and I think about Laika hurtling through the deep void.

They smooth her coat with rubbing alcohol and they place electrodes on her body. She barks and wags her tail. One of her trainers strokes her head gently and, I hope, has shed some tears. She gazes from the portal. The last man out averts his eyes.

5…4…3…2…1…

...TRANSMISSION ENDS.




Originally posted on Anesthetic Hymns

Astronaut's Log: There is the Flower

3.0

In the oxygen garden I have seen a lovely flower. It has pallid blue petals that remain crisp even when the misters run. The light in the garden is unkind; the white, numbered walls austere and uninviting. Still, the delicate beauty of this lovely flower draws me back and back again. I stand, even now, gazing upon the precariously poised blossom. I am reminded of a dream I once saw hanging in a now long-forgotten gallery. It was a riverside scene in pastels. Another reverie comes to mind, this one painstakingly recorded in the visions of Chaucer. The young poet lies in a merry field, his eyes heavy with the tiresome strain of “the olde bookes,” and he contemplates the dandelion. How he adores the precious wild dandelion! For a long time he is perfectly happy there, enraptured, whiling away the happy hours and making love to his happy flower. The faery court arrives. The poet is chastised. He is grave and, perhaps like Dante, near the point of swooning. The faery king defers to his devastatingly beautiful kinswoman. A ghastly pale blossom upon her cheek, she charges the poet to write on the works of good women, so that he might atone for untold wretched libels.

3.1
Hands, that cut the rose. Bleeding hands, that have too much felt the barbed stem. Funny how the rose is our favorite flower. We can’t resist it. It’s too poetic. I think about some frozen roses in one of the supermarkets back home. How lonesome can you get? Try to think about dried up rose petals. Some pressed in a book. Some crushed into weird open house potpourris. I think of many things to say to a rose. I think to myself, “This is the day I shall speak my mind,” but even Churchill struggled with speech impediments in his youth.

I dream of the day. I imagine the soft-filtered reel of the unreal running in a smoky movie house before my mind’s eye. The day never comes. Never comes the day, and other clichés. If I wrote one ode to a rose I must keep it short, spruce. Not more Petrarch, not mere romance. Just some simple, objective words upon the usual subjects.

3.2

I gather my thoughts like so many fallen petals, and resume my duties on one of the upper decks. In the research labs and conference rooms, my colleagues and I scour endless data reports and star maps into the wee hours of another stealth morning. There is a ceaseless furrowing of brows and smearings of hands over faces as we push ourselves harder, and ever closer to the brink, in a race against time. Time.

“If we had but world enough, and time.”

…TRANSMISSION ENDS.




Originally posted on Anesthetic Hymns

brother can you

it is the night-time
i am awake still and thinking upon the many occurences of the day
and, not unusually, i have a stomach ache, which is no metaphor or symbol but mere coincidence alone, thank you very much.

---

brother can you spare a dime? this is a question hardly anyone answers. they either give or they don't, but they almost always ignore the question.

my younger brother has no blood-ties with me and because of this we are very close. he is naive and it frustrates me and it also encourages a more optimistic world view.

it is the night-time
i am awake still

i am thinking about things that happened today and i am hoping that i made the most of my chances

and that i minimized the possibility of injury

s

Philip K. Dick and the Science of Friction

(Above: Philip K. Dick (right) and Director Ridley Scott)

Recently, deciding to find out what all the fuss was about, I picked up a collection of Philip K. Dick's short works (Specifically, The Philip K. Dick Reader) I'd seen the movies, of course. The first of which was Blade Runner some years ago, but I must confess I can't recall a single scene. Needless to say I wasn't interested enough to catch who had written the original novel (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). Then, this summer, I caught Total Recall and A Scanner Darkly and really enjoyed them both. After that a friend of mine clued me in to Dick's work, and I'm extremely thankful that he did. Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) was an American sci-fi writer who, in my opinion, was what almost every other Sci-Fi writer longs to be: both undeniably readable and thought provoking. Here is a man who writes as though he's seen a ghost, or a whole legion of them for that matter.

Take his "The Hanging Stranger" for a start. The story opens and in a matter of a page we are suddenly plunged into a paranoiac world of alien conspiracy. Here Dick is a pure sci-fi writer, and a brilliant one at that. With a skillfulness that recalls Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s intricate work, Dick makes us feel for ourselves the self-doubt of his protagonists, who are invariably (not to say predictably) desperate to find out whether they are insane or there really are plots forming against them.
In "The Golden Man" and "Tony and the Beetles" Dick tackles the much-treaded subject of world domination, and brings us face to face with the prospect of our obsolescence. In the former, mankind comes into direct contact with homo superior in all his shining glory. In the latter, the insects we so carelessly squash become an intergalactic menace to humanity. But perhaps the most refreshing thing about Dick's work—and indeed, probably the crucial element to his standing out in the veritable sea of lesser sci-fi writers—is the fact that his stories tend to end unresolved. Like a piece of music that ends on a dissonant transitory chord, they leave us hanging. We are left stranded at the edge of some god-forsaken trench on a dark and distant moon in the Betelgeuse galaxy.

This is the friction. The idea of tension is not new, of course, and nowadays Dick's work is so popular that his influence is likely to be found all over the sci-fi universe. However, the questions he brings up in his stories combined with the fact that they just don't end happily forces us to deal with these often-bitter forecasts in a way that most science fiction material simply doesn't. The fact of the matter is, when things don't tie up nicely—when the universe isn’t put back to rights—we are left only with the reality presented us in the story, with no soothing balm of resolution to ease the disturbance that lingers.

The Revolving Lounge's 2006 Picks

I've been reading a bunch of year-end lists lately, so I figured I would do one here at the Lounge. I'll continue adding on to the list for the next week or so. I'll start with a few of my favorite albums from this year.

Album Picks:

1. Grizzly Bear: Yellow House



First of all, I've seen these guys play twice over the last year, and they are one of the best live band's I've encountered. Each member demonstrates a refreshingly mature appreciation of restraint and balance, and the resulting sound is phenomenal. From their four-part harmonies to their impeccable dynamics, Grizzly Bear are a real pleasure to see perform.

These qualities are all on display on Yellow House. The album, whose booklet artwork is made up entirely of photos of an old house, is tremendously unified. Sharing an undercurrent of yearning and richly textured production, the songs fit together perfectly like a striking collage of mysterious photographs. While each song is crucial to the graceful dynamic peaks and troughs, stand-outs include "The Knife," "Marla," and "On a Neck, On a Spit."

P.S. Try to track down an acoustic performance (they've done a couple for radio shows and AOL) of "Little Brother." The live version is a little different and it's a real treat to see that the band seems to be constantly working on new ways to present their brilliant songs.

Nick Cave: "Breathless"

On our way back from lunch today, my friend and I wandered into the soon-to-be closed down Tower Records on Broadway to browse their clearance racks. They've been trying to clear out their backstock for a couple of months now and most of the good stuff is gone, but we thought we'd have a look anyway, in the hopes of finding some hidden gem.

We sifted through the messy bins for half an hour or so without success, but luckily as we moved over to the singles section I spied a copy of a Nick Cave single. It turned out to be "Breathless" from his latest album with The Bad Seeds, Abattoir Blues. I hadn't heard anything from the album, but after reading a transcript of Cave's lecture to a group of students in Vienna in 1999 (which you can find here), I was eager to get my hands on all the material I possibly could from this truly enthralling songwriter.

I put in the disc a few hours ago and I can't stop replaying it. "Breathless" is a simple pop song (clocking in at just over three minutes) that demonstrates just how versatile Nick Cave is. With it's airy flute runs and it's nylon-string guitar chords, the song is actually pretty. I was amazed that I was listening to the same artist that wrote the ferocious "Deanna" and who is responsible for the lecherous (and sometimes hilarious) vocal on Grinderman's current lead-off single "No Pussy Blues."

"Breathless" is a simple ditty that you hum in the early morning lamenting an infidelity. It is a sweet song sung by a world-weary sinner. It is a song of windswept beauty whose mystery beguiles. I could continue to attempt these vain poetics, but I instead simply implore you to listen.

The Secret Winter (Cont'd)

Searchers

Linda lifted her head from the buzzing window pane. She looked round. The stale air taste and bus-vomit odors met her senses and she felt dry. Looking out through the dirty glass she watched the road slipping past. Lines and paint, zooming parallel towards infinity.

She sat up straight in her chair and turned to the old man sleeping in the seat next to her. His arms folded, his head was cocked upwards and his mouth was agape. He made a slight guttural sound, but continued in his slumber. Lindsey breathed a sigh and turned towards the window again.

It was mid-December and the verdant blur of ferns began to lull her into a daydream. She brought her legs up against her breast and lost her thoughts in a stare. Images of the old house floated through her head: the lock on the front door that she could never figure out as a young girl; the old phonograph that no one ever used; and the cozy fireplace with the quaint, tarnished picture frames on the mantlepiece.

The Fall semester had just ended and she was weary. She was floundering in that big city by the bay, and she was in need of a breather. So when her last exam let out she made her way with winter-wisped steps to her dorm room, grabbed her suitcase, and with little more than a mute smile to her deaf room mate, she was out the door.

Gradually coming to from her little reverie, Linda put her feet back down and sat up in a stifled stretch. She cast a glance down at her watch, not really registering the time, and turned into the cabin of the late 70s interior of the old Greyhound. Pushing herself up a little she looked over the seat in front of her at the little hills of heads, popping up like so many wavy gophers on a barren plain. She sank back down and again looked at her watch. 4:00PM. They would be arriving soon.

Bending down a little she reached for her backpack and took out her diary. She brought her legs up again and opened the little worn leather-bound against her knees. The page facing her was an entry from the previous week.

My room mate lost it today on the phone today. I can't deal with this bullshit much longer, I haven't the slightest idea how she landed herself a boyfriend... Only five more days, five more days and I'm out of here.

Linda sighed once more and shifted in her seat. She hesitated a moment; and then, with forced courage, she turned back to one of the first entries.

There in the middle of the page was an oily polaroid lovingly taped to the beige paper. In it, two happy figures were lovingly squeezed in the camera frame. Two sets of lips were lovingly locked in immature defiance. She scanned one of the faces and then the other. Upon the former, honest bliss. Upon the latter...well, who knew.

Linda looked out of the window again at the roadside scene turning dark. Stars began to flicker on the indigo blanket of sky spread out before her. A murky orange paint trail was slithering off behind the trees.

Linda turned to the next entry. The fast-greying page was almost blank except for an excerpt from an old book of poetry she had found in her Dad's study last summer.

For when I pass these solemn nights
When bleakest chill surrounds,
I seek that shelt'ring canyon's walls
And let my dreams resound.

For all the leaves upon the ground
I dream of springtime clear.
I dream of gardens long forgot
And a river full of tears.

But though I wither in this place;
Though I wish this winter gone;
From my visions I do tinder make
And tend the fire 'til dawn.

The girl closed her diary and replaced it in her backpack.

Night had descended; the cabin lights came on; and outside the cold northern wind blew a tender requiem.

The Secret Winter (Cont'd)

No title 2

Hope is nothing to be ashamed of. I dreamed a dream of silence, last night and every night.

Swirling images of gold-flecked winters blur past me in a sea of warm memory. Having your hopes dashed but once does not validate the total renunciation of the enterprise itself. Indeed, it is an enterprise, and most small businesses fail. It is a bitter statistic, but one that we must not allow to daunt us, lest we be robbed of one of life's last untouched sacristies.

In a dark place now, as I sit and try to recall that dream of silence, I am once more foiled in my efforts. If only we had more control of our somnambulant alter egos. How wonderful would it be to dally overlong in a dream once in a while--to not let such fleeting moments of bliss slip through our fingers like vanishing silk. But there is hardly time for "if's" and wishes in this place we call earth. Time is a heavy yoke that we all must bear.

With each new meeting of old acquaintances we see that it's abrasive hands have been at work. People grow more tired, the luster leaks from their eyes. Ambitions burn down, and resignation and contentment arrive to scoop up the ashes. Yet, we must learn to overcome the tell-tale signs of age and disenchantment. They are but devilish signage to a dark well of self-loathing and regret.

Age brings us much that we must be thankful for. It gives us perspective, above all. To look back on things past: it is one of the great gifts we have. We may cringe, we may cry, but we may also rejoice in some happy times that can never be taken away from us. Past loves give us reassurance that others have needed us--that others will need us again. We must learn to take our memories and shake them in a sieve. Let the good separate from the bad, that we may relish those halcyon moments. They are the agents of hope. Let them infiltrate and re-program.

One cannot take the passage of time for granted. Once there was a starting line, now there can only be forward motion. Take your loved ones by the hands and stay in your lane. All trappings are mere passing fads. Looks and behaviors change with the generations, but I believe the essences of people remain the same.

Hope is a faith at whose temple every being is welcome. There are no restrictions, there are no judgments. In times of despair, we pray. Have faith and try. Try because trying is beautiful, and there can never be too much beauty in this world.

S