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Internet-Correspondance Repair

Sunday, February 25, 2001

With the long-distance help of my dad, I am fixing a lamp which was a New York street find. This follows in a peculiar tradition of long-distance repair between the two of us, the most notable moment being the time when my dad accurately diagnosed the ominous scraping sound coming from the wheel wells of Evan’s two-door Honda when all we could find to fix the car on a rainy holiday-weekend night in outback Massachusetts was two drunken guys who may or may not have been employees of the closed Citgo station where we stopped. Dad says he is going to be digitally recording progress of rebuilding his 30s-era Cord soon, too. I envision a network of illustrated Click and Clack-like help for anyone fixing something, be it a computer, a toaster, or an elderly jalopy… would have been useful the other day as we were trying to figure out how to hack together an Appletalk-to-ethernet cable down at the IMC. (We’re still looking for illustrated instructions, if anyone has ’em.)

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Bush movements

Sunday, February 25, 2001

Somehow I expected that Bush would be cutting corporate welfare, but I’m still a little startled… Why did I guess this? Well, Clinton did all sorts of things to betray his party in being so middle-of-the-road… doesn’t it stand to reason that Bush would have to do some of the same to follow up on his promises of “compassionate conservativism?”

but I know sh!t about politics. if you wonder why I don’t write for Indymedia, that’s why.

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Si Fulano…

Saturday, February 24, 2001

Listening to Paul Simon’s album You’re The One — specifically the title track, and only the title track, which has caught my attention in the sick I-will-listen-to-nothing-else-for-a-week, then-I-won’t-be-able-to-stand-it-for-a-year way.

So, when did Paul Simon and David Byrne switch personalities without my noticing? Yeah, they’re both middle-aged white ex-rocksters with a tendency to “borrow” (I’ll let you hash that judgement out) music from Africa and South America, so I suppose it was inevitable they cross each other’s paths. But “You’re The One” is a little less wistful than most Paul Simon songs. It’s a little sharper at the edges.

The song opens with a benediction, “May twelve angels guard you while you sleep,” and then admits uncharacteristic self-doubt — “maybe that’s a waste of angels, I dunno.” No “days of miracles and wonder;” this is Paul Simon after taking a drubbing for the Capeman incident, maybe, a little less confident of his prophecies.

As a certain ex-boyfriend pointed out in a long embittered letter, my ear is for sh!t (and if you wished to imbibe the rest of that poison, you’d learn it’s not my worst feature). I think, though, that I hear Simon exploring scales more here — top of his range, bottom of his range — and using minor chords more for irony than melancholy. The guitar is tic-y, obsessive, an echo of the Talking Heads circa I Wish You Wouldn’t Say That. Vocals range from ethereal to percussive. You half expect Simon to leap out of his melted-by-the-Central-Park-summer-heat murmur and deliver a screed against the parking lots of the Bible Belt.

The song plays with big symbols, which has traditionally been more Byrne’s preserve than Simon’s. Here there are no Fullbrights, wandering Jews, marital contracts, boys in bubbles or babies with baboon hearts; no Graceland. Just love and anti-love, regarded from all sides for symmetry’s sake:

You’re the one who broke my heart,

who made me cry…

but when I hear it from the other side,

it’s a completely different song

and I’m the one that made you cry

and I’m the one who’s wrong.

Tight as nursery rhymes, or a kid’s taunt. This stanza really kicks me in the head:

Nature gives us shapeless shapes,

clouds and wings and flame,

but human expectation,

is that love remains the same;

and when it doesn’t,

we point our fingers

and blame, blame, blame.

You can see the sticks moving the puppets here; not the clothing of daily negotiations and love songs, but the drives beneath. As he ages, Paul Simon makes us mortal.

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The Temporary Home Of The John “Chauncy Berry” Seabury Fan Klub

Wednesday, February 21, 2001

Hey look, gang! My cousin was nominated for a Grammy! Way to go, John! Gee, I wish someone had told me EARLIER (ahem); I would have cast my precious Recording Academy vote for him, but you know, Billboard was all on about Madonna’s packaging, I mean her PACKAGING, because if you noticed the whole damn ceremony was about women and their PACKAGING… or LACK of it… except in Joni Mitchell’s case for some reason… and so I voted for… you know, the eventual winner, and I, well… the whole affair is a fscking crock. fsck the man and give me back my fscking free Napster.

Pynoman is one of John’s projects. I don’t know if he has anything else up online, but he’s a keen artist (though not for the faint of heart mind you), and we all get Christmas cards from him (SOME of us, ahem) and you don’t. John’s an accomplished musician, too, as is his brother Dave. If you are in Oakland/Berkeley, go check out the Kensington Circus. Ask for the Feztones. And if you’re still on the remains of Napster, search for the two Napster users– count ’em two– who have a copy of the Psyco Pyno song “I Want Her So Bad.” (Actually, there appears to be a song or two on MP3.com as well.) It sounds just like tha art!

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All Your Base Are Belong To Us

Tuesday, February 20, 2001

It’s sublime. Finally a winner in the ongoing worst-possible-translations contest. Also in the category of portentous incongruous juxtaposition. Makes the little hairs on my back stand up straight. Sub Lime.

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Pat Boone and Eminem

Monday, February 19, 2001

Pat Boone and Eminem, sittin’ in a tree…

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Found Documents: California Calendar Journal

Sunday, February 18, 2001

I discovered that I’d written the following down in the back pages of an old wallet calendar. Sometimes in college a situation or discussion seemed so important I decided I must write it down right then and there for a later assignment or personal project. It bothers me no end that I have no idea what this was about now, or even when it was that I wrote it down… OK, so checking out the clues it appears this was when Mom drove me up to Redwood City for my internship at Sunset… but what in god’s name was I going to do with it?

tide box

end of the world

“That’s it dude. 3 squid.”

plastic bag in mouth

no cares

they’re not kids anymore

I don’t think I’m a man/ woman/ etc.

I think I am a… well, I don’t think I’m a man until I sleep with 15…

discussion of 90210

huevos viejos

social area

No Woman No Cry

the unadulterated dust of the equestrian centers… the road monsters and how once they were all I saw [ed. note: I used to call the power line supports road monsters. I drew them as we drove from Maine to California on my first big move.]… the map is crazed with meaning, my life, laid out over a state, denser in places… Morro Bay + the mud…

Is it that everything has been bleached + so it seems like a canvas + there is so much you can paint but it’s depressing because it’s so hot

Mom narrates the drive. “Ventura is where most of our produce comes from… celery, as well as strawberries, but that’s not as well known.”

“Last time I checked Ventura had only one tall building… Up around the mountain there is Rancho del Cielo, that’s Ronald Reagan’s place… (I tune out, and when I come back in, she says) This is where we mine the animals that died and have been decomposing in the sun for years… (I don’t respond) And then we burn them and let out the sun again. Someday we’ll run out, and we’ll have to find some other way to let the sunlight out. (pause) Something else to burn.”

She turns on the radio, because I’m not talking. I turn channels and find something we start dancing to before we know what it is. (It’s Sublime.)

a mixed bank of CA poppies

Icelandic ponies in the blond hills

broadleaf fields w/herds of ppl bent + scattered… port-a-potties and stacks of plastic crates between rows… then coming over a hill, a pink, red, orange, yellow, white field

Most hills subtle variations on yellow — beautiful, + then you get up close and see what ugly scrapple it is

Madonna Inn [a pink-painted hotel at the edge of San Luis Obispo]

Your Beauty Is Your Smile in big Disney letters

… “He was just a man with excruciatingly disgusting taste — real American taste” + into neckties. “He had more neckties for sale than you would ever wanna see”…

gilt mirrors

huge goblets

just outside of [San Luis Obispo] a few shadowed hillsides of live oak

trunks recently burned black

taller trees among them that didn’t grow back — hardy oaks

* * * *

Number one on the list of things to absolutely never do if you want to accomplish something on a given day: Pick up an old yearbook. Yours or anyone else’s.

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Found Documents: Trivial Pursuit Award

Monday, February 12, 2001

Found in a Trivial Pursuit box at a place where I’m housesitting. Small notepad sheets tied in one corner with dark blue yarn.

To whom it may concern:

Mazel tov!

Congrats on a mind boggling victory. Take pride in your mastery of this insignificantly paltry frivolously frothy inconsequentially immaterial trifling molehill, this flimsy shallow mediocre petty puerile piddling inanely ludicrous farcically picayune somewhat unessential scruffy cheap wretched futile fiddle deefee of a game.

You are the unparalelled king of all that is worthless, unproductive, fallow unprofitable superfluous dispensable fruitless and of no earthly use to man or dog. You reign supreme in the realm of the pinprick, the fleabite, the gimcrack, the gewgaw, the mist, you rule the empire of bagatelles of trinkets and baubles and bubbles and cobwebs and fairydust and froth, of rubbish and trumpery and stuff and smoke and small potatoes. Your brain is a finely woven net into which all matters of importance are poured and only the most worthless items of bunk are retained. The medulla oblongata that is yours (ie – the winning medulla oblongata) is surely crammed to bursting with every splinter, morsel, crumb, snicksnack, thimbleful, scraplet, granule, iota, fragment, particle, ion, speck dot jot fraction grain minim sip dab droplet dripule dash and tidbit of orphan information from here to wawa.

You have clutched this lonesome lore to your bosom and given it a home in your snug skull. As a reward for this selfless act of bravura and god knows we need more people like you we crown you Trivial Turkey of the Week.

–Gzy Gzint

wait — suddenly it occurs to me that this was not written for the owners of the game. I don’t remember seeing it when we got the game out. that’s fscking eerie. it might not be an incongruity after all. maybe it’s meant for me.

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Detritus peripatetica

Thursday, February 8, 2001

Coming home at night I smell dinner being cooked all over Sunnyside. People are making better food than I do. I think this is because they are not making it for themselves alone.

I feel like I haven’t said what I needed to say to put this election to rest for me. Then, I don’t think I can. Every time I think how farcical and debased it was I am utterly floored. Hunter S. Thompson needs to come out of retirement. The whole process warranted a frame of giant iguanas and Samoan lawyers threatening people with guns and periods of utter debauchery with cigarette boats and smack. It’s just as awful as anything that happened in the Sixties, if not worse because nobody can stop it and so many people think they don’t need to. What’s worse than iguanas? I’m sending Godzilla into my landscape. damn, why he have to mess up his head like that. If the man wasn’t completely wrecked from the horror of the Nixon era we might have someone fit to hold up a mirror to it all.

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Look at these babbies!

Monday, February 5, 2001

Look at these babbies! Aren’t they dear! They remind me of my gang. Oh, I wish Xephreniaq had had a blog in high school. I wish we had a blog now (AHEM.) Salutations, kindred spirits and fellow travellers!

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