Random...

Watching the news tonight... The boyscout Jamboree in Virginia - 300 people suffering from heat exhaustion and heat stroke. So aren't these kids trained for the outdoors? Isn't the whole point of bouscouting to get in touch with nature and find the inner caveman? Was this a case of negligence or just stupidity? When you consider that four of the scout leaders were electrocted setting up a tent I think it was more of the latter and some of the first. Just my two cents as having been a boyscout for two weeks.

Ruminations...

Its pushing ten and I'm sitting here trying to keep my leg elevated as best I can. The orientation of my desk and subsequent furniture, computer, book cases etc. etc. doesn't allow for a very good or even possible angle to keep my foot up. Earlier today I was relieved of 1/3 of the nale on my left foot's big toe. I'm half tempted to take a picture of it and post it, like a scarecrow to ward off varmants in my pumpkin path. Then again, that would defeat the purpose of self expository writing online.

A word of advice kiddies, if you get a cut use some topical ointment. I was informed today by my doctor in training that there's a rather stubborn and antibiotic resistant strain of Staff Infection 'round these parts. I was on Septra but they switched me to Augmentin as the Septra had no effect on what they thought was a bacterial infection on my large (prior to toenail removal, or as Lisa said "trauma") Its not so bad, I have a large bottle of vicodin in case I get bored, popping advil as if it were candy and catching up on some movie watching.

At the moment I've traded in film for music and am listening to Sergei Bolotnikov & The Boloband. The CD was kindly provided to myself and Boobar by Katia, Sergei's daughter and one of our Russian liasons. Basically we bugged her enough till she coughed it up. Truth be known, we wanted to see this cover that she told us about that featured her in a mink coat in the middle of the arctic with penguins. So how can I describe this music? Maybe kind of like the Jimmy Buffett of Russia? Not sure... but there's some lovely flamenco like guitar work on the second track. According to Katia this was not her father's music, someone else wrote it and they just performed it.

Lets back up in time just a smidge and talk about Michael Moore. (oh wait, now it sounds like Sammy Hagar - interesting change of pace). Over the past two weeks I've managed to catch up with my Moore library of Fahrenheit 911 and Bowling for Columbine just a few minutes before I sat down to type. I know this is all old news but I think subconsciously I wanted to avoid Moore when he hit the big screen. Oh come on now people, don't flee, I'm not the conservative right, I just try and sit as close to middle as I can. My family would definately say that I'm left of middle which I agree with. Still, I'm not quite the liberal crusader that Moore makes himself out to be. The meeting with Heston at the end of Columbine was sad. It was contrived and that was the saddest thing about it. As if he could've expected a different answer. If his goal was to demonize Heston as a gun wielding "from my cold dead hands" madman he succeeded but I'm not sure that scene helped reinforce the tragedy of what happened to that little girl. I think the principle breaking down in tears was far more telling than an old misguided man unable or unwilling to answer a question that came far too quickly in an interview doomed before it began. I would rather he spar with him on some real philosophical points than cutting to the chase so quickly. Or better yet take a walk through the little girls home. She was as hollow in that discourse between him and heston as the photograph he left by the pillar of his Beverley Hills Home. It was all glammor with no substance. He didn't bring her back to life, he just showed his capacity to mythologize traumatic situations. Sorry Mike, you failed there. But this is my two cents and I would love to hear what other people think on this topic.

Devotchka

Trying to get a cab in the city on a Friday night is on par with trying to park in the city on any given night. A half hour of waiting and anxious banter left me a little iritated, a little rattled and ready to jump into action.

"Fuck this! Let's go!" I said and off we sped for the Independant on Divisadero.

After finding an adequate parking spot on Fell we made our way for the doors of the Independant. I knew at this point we were cutting it close and I didn't want to continue this trend of arriving late to concerts. The last two being Sleater and before that Psychadellic Furs. No! I demanded punctuality. Granted we'd already missed, no scratch that, skipped the openning band to drink at home and save a few bucks, I wasn't missing this band, or arriving late.

"Give me two fat tires and a Corona." That's all we needed at the bar and then I had enough time to grab cash from the ATM for more drinks later and to make our way to the front of the crowd where I spotted my classmate, Darren, and his fiance Christina (soon to be wed in the Black Rock desert during Burning Man.) We exchanged a few hellos and then I waved over Lu & Ilya and we proceeded to take our positions at the foot of the stage. Not two seconds later did the applause start when Nick, Tom, Jeannie and Shawn took the stage.

From the first notes of Tom's Violin we knew that it would be a great night. That sad lonesome, haunting violin carried with it the very grief and mystery of Eastern Europe. Nick lifted a bottle of wine to his lips and toasted the crowd who in turn toasted him back. He pointed the bottle to the sky taking a big long draught of red and layed into his guitar with Jeannie on upright bass and Shawn laying down the back beat.

The music of Devotchka is an oscillating ferris wheel that spans the expanse of Europe dipping into the world of Mexican Mariachi with persian and near eastern rhtyhms. Lyrics in French, English and Spanish round out the pan-galactic sound that crosses as many countries as the instruments employed: violin, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, mandolin, upright bass, sousaphone, drums, trumpet, accordian, toy piano and a theramin! Did I mention that Nick plays the tambourine with expertise employing a half full wine bottle of flying vino as his striker??? Well he does.

Its not that you haven't heard this music before. You might have run across it in a dream where you sat in black and white with a paper thin moustache in some cellar cafe in a dark corner of Paris talking about your eventual breakup with a woman who would only be seen from above the brim of a hat with a dangling veil in a black dress with a polka dotted blouse and a fox shoulder wrap. You might have heard Edith Piaf's sonorous lament for a love lost before having had, but here, in this reality, its Nick and you can't help but fall in love all over again with the sweet ecstatic pain of falling out of love.

The band was very generous, the entire show wran for about an hour and forty five minutes. They ran through songs from all three albums and even a cover. At one point I thought, that's it, they're done, this must have been about an hour into the show. They began to walk off stage but wait, they were coming down off the stage to stand right in front of us. The bass was brought down, Shawn took up the trumpet Nick on acoustic guitar, Tom on violin and a roadie with a shaker and they went at it as we all pushed in shoulder to shoulder to hear them without the benefits of amplification. And so we swayed to a somber little tune with a catchy melody that evolved and evolved. They returned to the stage and kept up the pace, at times frenetic with driving percussion and fast paced rifts, then slowing it down a notch and falling into a laconic slumber where you wanted to go to sleep inside the music and feel the warmth of a gypsy caravan, lit by fire, lying on a rug of near eastern design. That's where we were... and I'm happy to say, we didn't miss a moment of it, not even the huge guy on the right that screamed "Sousaphone, Sousaphone, Sousaphone" over and over again until Nick said into the mic "For God's sake will you pick up the Sousaphone?!" as they returned for their encore. No, we were there for that...

Go listen to them... you'll love them... and here are some pictures from the show... taken with my little phone cam... its all the digital that I have... sadly...

For sometime after

you spoon feed yourself fiction
the dream ended like day time TV
you've approved your promotion to farse
directorial debut now seen in perpetuating
dream into day time drama dreaming about
being asleep faking the dream so you shut your eyes

harder and longer and cling to the memory of doing nothing
sleep evading day evading dream evading all manner of doing
what's left to dream is to write and the pages that follow

supernatural premonitions the stuff of flimsy wire racks
like regional airports selling -- LATEST BOOK FROM _____
write the byline here where you think you might see yourself
ending in Xanadu or standing under that waterfall
superimposed from a neighbor's vacation

make Jung into Rove you are painter and prophet
hoping that breaking dawn and seeds and hay
you can fall back into the stuff of imortality
there's only one catch at night
turning down the sheets
gesso the brain.

Intentionally

In a language spent internationally, silence kept its distance while you adjusted the antenna bringing in a broader range of subspace lies. My birthday cake read like a wish--when read it made the cake even sweater but the candles never burned themselves quite out.

Standing in the rain was really the only way to douse the auto-da-fé. Your oven leavened while heavens rained stone giants - they bludgeoned me on the head that grew two feet tall, walk/talk and proud mighty incandesence where only a ring of dust outlined steps leading back to what you said.

Semper fi do or do or this is done at four hundred some odd degrees of seperation interjecting distance--wedges apart the organs--but its still in the body strolling circles in jail. And a city can be seen in a woman's blouse so I look harder and write to Matvei asking for a zipper code as you finish and walk outside.

From "The Jackal-Headed Cowboy"

"We are homesick weary travelers in the
jungian sense and miss the brew of the
long night's pipe."

-Ishmael Reed

The Visitors

The Visitors

will make themselves known
backing into the door
prepared to step back
out with the feeling of being
there on the their backs
the beings have been
unfinished on purpose
to carry the stain of creation
when arriving in order to leave
lightness in their wake
a flood of photographs
foot lights shinning out
the real lights shinng on
backlit without shadows
standing at the passing
portals made to order
they bring chairs with them
having stood them down
to seat themselves
standing down foot rests
deciding what isn't seen
like an English exaunt
disturbs the absence
where dust might
show the progress of feet
someone said in passing
they might have gone
that way.