BFD

Request

I would like reaction to Advent Violin. On one hand, I think it’s a dork-wad of a story. On the other, it won a prestigious contest, back when I was slim, trimmed, hunky and so tan that my swim-trunk covered ass was blindingly white.

UPDATE: Fixed the story, for now. As per Ann's comment. The change is buried, but it's there.

Don't stop believin' (is this an i before e word?)

Religion? I think we’re all correct in our beliefs, as long as we know a metaphor when we see/hear/read/invoke one.

The bigger challenge is to go beyond the force that created the universe. There’s your fucking god, goddamn it. There’s your god with his back to the wall, her force painted into a corner. Then dare to think further.

Go to the unfathomable dual singularity with the eternally open womb on one side, the eternally bleeding wound on the other. Fear the fusion of the spray of dark and light. Or red and white.

It’s eons beyond the eleven strings of said thread-borne theory. It’s out there one atom of an atom of an atom ever closer but still only halves of tinier halves to the beyond of what will seem as primitive as 2 dimensions someday. Still, though, it’s in our sky. Or fingernail. Depending on how stoned you are. Mine’s gone, threw it away. I’ll partake some other day.

Overlap in Manhattan

It’s weird. My dad’s side came from Boston. My mom’s side went to L.A. That’s an unorthodox DNA chess move.

My Grandfather on dad’s side thought Bob Cousy was the best. My Grandmother on mom’s side thought Shaq ruled.

I’m a weird hybrid of Larry’s Bird and Magic’s Johnson.

Plus I’m some damn crazy rook in the middle. Manhattan. The shadows here make me think it’s ever north in the east and always south in the west.

This is a damn crazy world we live in.

Damn crazy.

A compass would drive me crazy. But a dame with a flask would be magnetic north, no matter her GSP. (He said with Dashiell Hammett-esque emphisis.)

f3 e5
g4 Qh4#

The California sector

of the family is roaring to life.

The Aunt Judy is on the mend from ovarian cancer (hopefully-she’s the most beloved in my immediate family. Next to me.)

The Aunt Mary (Great Aunt?, not pictured. Yet.) just turned 82 and wears Gucci shades (maybe more suited to Paris Hilton, but she’s never not stylin’.)

And I just found out I have a cousin who I somehow never knew about but is Gucci-sunglasses-wearing Aunt Mary’s granddaughter. Her name is Lilli and she emailed me on a lark through an environmentally-oriented social networking site we both belong to. Go figure.

And apparently, there is some ungodly number of uncles and cousins by marriage or proxy, if not blood.

There is some serious soap opera material here. This here internest thing is opening whole new doors, breaking bricks in iconoclast San Clemente mansions, Los Angeles locks, San Diego stone, Manhattan mortar blocks, Arizona adobe and Red Bank rocks.

Do people still watch soap operas? I used to watch General Hospital with my mom and sisters after school. Last I remember, Luke and Laura got married or had implied and church-sanctioned, missionary-position sexual intercourse, I went to California for a summer, and the chick who played Laura pinched my shoulder in a Marina Del Ray restaurant before I twirled around and turned out to be jailbait. Either that, or she gave him one hell of a blowjob. Wait a minute, that was one fucked up spot in that paragraph for that most recent sentence to end up.

Pictured are the aunt, the mom (lasagna maker, cookie baker, doldrum breaker...) and the newly found Lilli at a restaurant in Long Beach.

Advent Violin

I thought the trees were trying to tell me something, their creaky bows breaking with the weight of snow and the ache of wind.

“No son, the trees aren’t talking to you,” my father said. “Listen, Shhhh, listen close. That’s a violin. That’s Ol’ Mr. McNair playing his violin.”

Dad whispered his words, but they were loud against the neighborhood hushed by the day’s big snow. Hushed the way a bird stops singing when you toss a cover on its cage.

It was quiet, but for two tranquil sounds: the soft, rhythmic scratch of my father’s brushing the snowy blanket off the firewood pile and Mr. McNair playing what was the truest version of Grandma Just Got Over By a Reindeer ever heard.

I stood still, transfixed, my heart flooding with a warmth that nowadays I struggle to regain.

The moon was full. And dad’s face glowed blue from the light mirrored off the snow. I watched him pause and listen to the music before he dusted off an icy log. He smiled down to me and asked, “So, what’s Santa going to bring you this year?”

“A violin,” I said.

That night was the beginning of a small blessing that forever kept me anchored to that moment in the snow. For years, starting December 1st, Mr. McNair counted off the days to Christmas by playing a different carol each night.

Decembers were extraordinary. There was no music like it. I lived to hear the soaring sound of those unadorned songs.

Mr. McNair lived alone in a room above the neighbor’s garage. Dad told me his heart was broken to pieces as a young man—something I did not understand until I got older.

He didn’t like people bothering him and he talked to himself. Some thought he was mean.

I met Mr. McNair once on Christmas Eve just before he passed away. Dad asked me to carry a load of firewood up for his stove. I entered the dark room and set the wood on the floor. I caught sight of that violin by the stove right next to where would have been his last log. I asked right out if his heart was broken. I was curious. He stared at the wood and told me that indeed it was.

I turned to go but he invited me to stay a minute. He told me that a broken heart still is full of precious gifts. That’s how love sometimes finds its way into music.

“Like a violin carries love into song,” he said, “memory guides love to your soul. Thank you for the firewood.”

“Merry Christmas,” was all I could say.

It still amazes me how a man stung by life still could summon such divine music from his heart.

I never did get a violin that Christmas, but every December I still stop and listen to the trees. I listen to try, to recall that original warmth I felt in my heart.

The music is gone. The sound is forever a part of my soul. The bow is not broken.

pk - '93

My Annual Top 8 Million List

It’s the end of the year, so everyone is putting out their annual Top 10 Lists.

I was reading a bunch of them today when it struck me—dude, put out your own Top 10 list!

I like lots of things, especially if there are 10 of them. So here’s my first Top 10 list:
The Top 3 albums of 12/19/08:

3: The Hold Steady – Stay Positive. This band really likes to rock out. They’re almost like a bar band from Brooklyn. Oh wait, they are. Sounds like they’ve listened to a Springsteen album or two. I can’t wait to listen to the actual music, since I’ve written this review based on other opinions.

2: Coldplay – Prospects March EP. I thought these guys broke up. If I had a choice between Gwyneth Paltrow and a bald drummer, I’d choose Gwyneth Paltrow. No offence to my friend Bob, who is a bald drummer.

1: Girl Talk (DJ Gregg Gillis, pictured above) – Feed the Animals. This accumulation of samples is fucking stocked with the panties of raving sorority chicks. But, unlike other perhaps once similarly noted albums like the Breakfast Club Soundtrack or a bootleg Third Eye Blind MP3, this actually doesn’t make me want to vomit zombie acid. It is so dense with mix it rivals dark matter in how much space it occupies in the universe. It actually defies Newtonian physics in how much stuff it packs into each “song”. They’re not songs. They’re those dancy-trippy things you could make up in your head while walking to the bus stop in 4th grade, but could never articulate. Plus they’re infused with some kind of hyperkinetic sense of all night fucking. I give it 8 million stars. But I’ll hate myself in the morning.

Tapetum lucidum*

As a matter of fact, yes, I do own a Mexican Fighting cat.





*Refers to the effect of a flash photo taken in a low light ambient setting. It's kind of a thing that happens to the fair-eyed. The flash hits too quick for the eye to blink, and the result is some king of bizarre reflection involving melatonin, dilation and the back of the eye, an effect that leaves me clueless. It, tapetum lucidum, is not latin for Mexican Fighting cat.

You figure it out...

These are lyrics from one of the most underrated bands of the past 10 years, Shudder to Think. This band was invented to pop your mind from white bread to golden toast.





Hold back
The road that goes
So that
The others may do
What you let me in
Just to pour me down
Their mouths

Inventing Constellations

Dead to the world and open to infinity.

Let’s do it all.

Let’s be diabolically seductive.

Let’s be the sensual apprentice to shared experience.

Let’s whisper to be easy on the ear. Let's breathe and touches that ultra sensitive lobe, glide down the body core, flutter the heart, warm the tan lines and stir latent arousals laying in wait.

The longest day of dark will be here soon. It’s so opposite of what we want. It’s exactly what we need.

Let’s acquire aural fire and write the worst words ever about desire and despair.

Let’s talk.

Let’s go primal.

Let’s get riled and listen to Korn.

Or Arcade Fire.

Anything that stirs us to inspire.

Give me the impossible power to edit myself.

Let’s stare at the thin winter sky and invent constellations.

The air is so thin, the sky is so close. Our breath is the vapor that distorts eons.

Oh no, I've said too much.

I have so much more to say. Interested?