Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Good




When I die I want to be resurrected as a Clash album.

"The wives hate their husbands and their husbands don't care
Their children daub slogans to prove they lived there"

Trailer Man

I'm close to having enough songs for an album. I tried to get the harmonica out for this one but the heat had warped the reeds.



Monday, July 29, 2013

Pray

The headlines today literally read like a dystopian novel: Bankrupt City...nationwide child prostitution sting...multiple bodies of women strangled in plastic...1000 year prison sentences...
Did Stephen King start writing for CNN?

It's common sense that we're fucked. But I've been reading the history of Mexico and I see that when a true democracy exists, where people vote with assassinations and not electoral college promises, total chaos usually reigns. People say, "America is as good as it gets." Bankruptcy, child prostitution...fear and violence and economic insolvency...governments pushing drugs...that's as good as it gets.

I guess I'm an asshole for thinking it can be better. Things are very bad when men hoard toys and cower in fear...but they are almost worse when they stand up for themselves. Because there are too many people. There will always be one faction that is so dissatisfied that they'll die to change the status quo. Except in America, where no one cares. So maybe it is as good as it gets. Stay drunk, watch TV, buy useless shit, take your pills...stay out of trouble. Look what activism did for Mexico.

Skelaxin

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Sunday, July 28, 2013

Silver Wheeled Ponies


Kimberly McCarver sings a song about a cowboy who rolls around on a wheelchair in his final days. It's a steel horse, or a silver wheeled pony. Well, my audience at the home is no different. Not one of them is self-mobile...which is a dark prediction for my own future. I can hardly imagine a time when I can't walk, or shit without assistance. Someone will wipe my ass for me. Wash my swollen feet. Feed me. Pick my fork up when I drop it. Get me more peas when they fall on my lap. Read to me? So bleak. Medication and incontinence. If I'm in chronic pain now then what will I be like in 40 years? Hopeless. Junk.

A similar piano
This song is Cuatro Milpas...about leaving home. The piano is actual a Wurlitzer. It's falling apart after only a few attempts to play it.




Not included in this video is when a woman slumped over in her wheelchair setting off a high pitched alarm. The cameraman is the master electrician who taught me everything I know about refinery electrical but who secretly wants to be a guitarist. He didn't accidentally turn the camera off after fifty seconds, I absently left it on internal memory so that's all it could record. A daughter of a resident (50 years old) asked me if I gave lessons. I said I was only there for the free peach cobbler.

Post Office

I've been going through my posts and "drafting" anything that references CNN. "Breaking News" media is pure poison to me and I've said enough about it to fill a book. It's pure manipulation. But contradicting or criticizing media outlets is basically using poisonous source material as a topic for what I want to be an antidote. But it isn't an antidote, it's more poison. It's derivative poison, so bit by bit I'm going to return those posts to drafts that are no longer published. High profile criminal trials are THE WORST. If you see something I missed then please forward me the link and I'll take it off.

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Modern Movies

My knees are almost totally ruined so I've been watching movies instead of walking. Someone showed me a website where every movie under the sun is available to stream. Once you wade through some pop up jungles you watch anything. I'd post the link here but I don't want to encourage illegal streaming.

I watched Spring Breakers, by Harmony Korine, and while you'd think it would be for the bikini girls, it's not. I like Harmony Korine's approach to his modern reality. Bully, Gummo, Julian Donkey Boy...Kids...he gives me hope that someone actually will risk being unpopular and starving but will make movies that are true to his creative ideal. Because the story line of Breakers veers into insanity, a Spike Lee film with skinny white girls, I can't say I liked it. The scenes don't add up...and the characters seem to be developed on the spot.
I totally get that some 19 year old girls will go to St. Petersburg, Florida to "go wild" and show their ass and snort coke. So what? I already knew that. I'm a bit puzzled that this is true but I'm an anti-social loser so that's understandable. I wonder why a girl would grow up today and suddenly decide getting drunk and stoned and oil wrestling another nude girl while a bunch of men pretend to piss beer into their mouths is cool. When did that become cool? Korine has absolutely no answer, but he seemed to be entranced with the ritual results. The directing and editing was titillating. But I'm not sure what Korine was making a statement about. I really don't. The bleak amorality of Spring Break, or the life and death decisions of gold-toothed gangbangers? Because I don't think there was a case made that they are equivalent. For a minute it seemed that Korine had become a director of a higher budget "Girls Gone Wild" video, which would make him artistic dirt in my judgmental eyes. Like he was standing behind the camera saying, "Now, give the gun barrel a blow job..." and the actresses obeyed and Korine was thinking he was capturing something enigmatic when in reality he was merely manipulating girls who wanted to get paid...which is what Girls Gone Wild does.
There's a scene in "Apocalypse Now" when a Playboy Bunny does a dance routine for the Vietnam grunts. It's classic and the use of Suzie Q makes my mouth water.

But no one is going to confuse Apocalypse Now with a tit flick. Call me crazy, but Spring Breakers actually has a shadow of Apocalypse Now but gets lost on the way to the finish line.
What was missing was a line like..."Charlie's idea of R&R was cold rice and a little rat meat..."
Hey, Harmony Korine, GET THE FUCK OFF MY LAWN!

Paupers Field Trip

Back To The Future
The staging of this film is outstanding. There's a scene when Marty first meets his grandparents that's all one take and timed with precision. When I was 14 years old I didn't know I was seeing real talent and excellence. It shows me that it takes work to make a good movie. The generic directing of today basically reduces each scene to composite parts...allowing actors and directors to do the bare minimum. There's no effort involved. Furthermore, acting has taken a place to real life "personalities" who then basically play themselves.

A few notes:
1) The red-headed student who cuts in on George is the Red-Headed drunk on the park bench back in 1985. But that suggests George had pushed the red headed kid in the original 1955 because Marty recognizes him in the altered 1985.
2) I love that George is the agent of change in his own life ultimately. He changes and that's the movie. And the Lorraine/Marty romance is cut short because Lorraine realizes something is wrong when she kisses him. It's all tied up neatly.
3) However; The photograph that is symbolic of 1985 reality being erased would not suddenly spring back to original form when George kisses Lorraine. Because that reality has been totally erased, Marty's brother and sister would never have staged that photo. The future changed and so that photo can't exist, for the same reasons that it was being erased as the future was being altered, it would've been erased completely, but Marty would've technically existed. But his parents led totally different lives from that point on so that photo couldn't exist.
4) The movie on the Town Theater marquee in the original 1985 is "Orgy: American Style" but when Marty comes back from 1955 (where the movie is "The Atomic Kid") it is now an "Assembly of Christ" meeting place.

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Wolf Walk


It seems that the codecs for video format finally caught up with my archaic Windows Movie Maker and now all video that I record with my cheap digital camera can also be edited. This was not the case for the last 7 years. As .AVI required Apple specific video editing software. This should explain why the video ends when I walk up and turn the camera off. Because if I wanted to make a neat edit I would have to transfer that file to my computer, convert it with some bootleg software that left a watermark on the video, then import it into WMM, then edit the first and last 4 seconds off, save the file as a movie, then preview it and finally upload the video to my blog.  Now WMM works. But I'm still going to leave the last few seconds on because it seems in-genuine to cut them out, like I'm some kind of hip movie star in my own fantasy film...with make up artists waiting nearby to make me pretty. I'm not. I have prostate pain and my back aches. The bottoms of my feet are a horrifying paper mache type texture like a 90 year old diabetic. I have dry mouth syndrome. I HAVE BIGGER PROBLEMS THAN THE LAST 4 SECONDS OF MY VIDEOS. My normal videos are real. This wolf quest video is supposed to be commercial so I can justify the edits.

This Newfoundland footage was taken with my video camera, a different animal, in fact, a camera that broke from cold and heat exposure two winters ago, so I had to buy a different camera to capture the video to my laptop, which also broke over the winter. It's all so complicated. But this latest development means no more uncut songs because I don't want to bother getting my video camera out. I'm boring myself with this kind of talk.

The footage is not good...but I have to concentrate on finishing the video for the sake of the wolf. Even though I have sold out to corporate ventures I can still pay tribute. My hypocrisy doesn't deter from the message.

Monday, July 22, 2013

Leaking

The exhausting hunt lead me here.
Not as important as NSA secrets, but this leaking window caused me so much grief. It's right over my bed, and the water would actually pour on my back as I drove. I replaced the sealant, my attitude, drilled holes, made a shrine to Shiva, everything but the rain still poured in. But I looked for the leak last time there was a tornado and I think it was the very edge of the glass. We'll find out when it rains for 40 days and nights soon.
These might be the worst designed windows ever.

Round The Bend

"Perhaps the road has a curve in it. Perhaps it is necessary to go round the bend a little before you can see clearly to the end."
Homage
Here are some more words that aren't my own. Mainly because if you can't improve on something then it's prudent to plagiarizer.

"I inspect some of the work you do upon these engines and these aeroplanes," Connie said. "God, the All-Seeing and All-Knowing, He inspects it all.....With every piece of work you do, with every nut you tighten down, with every filter that you clean or every tappet that you set, pause at each stage and turn to Mecca, and fold your hands, and humbly ask the All-Seeing God to put into your heart the knowledge of whether the work that you have done has been good or ill." - Connie Shak Lin
 Round The Bend by Nevil Shute

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Prescription of The Day

Nothing beats a dose of Beethoven. I Was tempted to post only the 4th mvmt but the transition from 3rd to 4th, indeed, every note from beginning to end, is important. Only the grief of the first 3 movements can be soothed by the 4th...and the 4th can sooth any grief. I was also going to post a picture of my tear-filled eyes, my wrinkled and bloodied hands, my mortal spirit fluttering in disillusionment and revived by the music, but it would only detract from this. In fact, the video of the music in action is more of a distraction. The recorded appearance of these musicians is irrelevant. Yes, the conductor Dudamel uses no score. It's traditional for seasoned conductors to work from memory on this. Most of the orchestra could play from memory too but the sheet music is part of their tradition too.

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Public Enemy

This is a screenshot from the documentary "The House I Live In".

The two certainties is that there is no democrazy with widespread drug use. I don't know what political system we have. Something close to a kindergarten class for 400 million people? And the second thing is that the criminalization of drugs doesn't affect drug use.

"What drugs haven't destroyed, the war against them has." - David Simon, Journalist, Creator of The Wire


If Nixon had doubled the federal minimum wage instead of the minimum sentence for drug possession, this would not be a problem today.

Maybe sentence a crack user to an all-expense paid semester at Duke. Is that so crazy?

But don't listen to a stoner. Trust Nixon.

To Be A Dog

The little white one hides her Milk Bones

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

What am I missing?

Isn't this supposed to be plural?

Years ago, against my better judgement and in a spasm of desperation and sadness I got wretchedly drunk on scorpion bowl poison, my liver fell out in the bathroom and I stuffed it back in, and it seems like the very next day I was climbing this mountain called Chocorua* wearing bell bottom jeans and a polyester shirt. I thought my heart was going to crack a rib with the thumping of a dying man. No heart defibrilators or nothing nearby. See that peak? I almost died getting there.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Joseph Knecht's Search

"What I am in search of is not so much the gratification of a curiosity or a passion for worldly life, but something far less conditional. I do not wish to go out into the world with an insurance policy in my pocket guaranteeing my return in the event of a disappointment, like some cautious traveler who would be content with a brief glimpse of the world. On the contrary, I desire that there should be hazards, difficulties and dangers to face; I am hungry for reality, for tasks and deeds, and also for privation and suffering."

From The Glass Bead Game Hermann Hesse
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Sunday, July 14, 2013

Easy Rider

"Try this." - Captain America

Easy Rider isn't a great movie. In fact, the plot has less depth than a teenage comic strip that gets passed around in the cafeteria. Two hippies cross the South and encounter people and prejudices. There's no plot. A few flimsy statements about culture are made but it's all "Tell" and little "Show". The hippies are free to travel...and the locals are free to be leery. How can you complain? When has this not been the case? America is huge and the idea that you're going to travel from Los Angeles to New Orleans, over 2000 miles across several cultural boundaries, without some difficulties is crazy.

Saturday, July 13, 2013

Plinio's Wish

"I wished for nothing better than to be as one of them and to have no other life than theirs--that passionate, childish, gruesome, uncontrolled life that vacillates between happiness and fear." -- Plinio Designori
From The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse


"And I, for my part, would always stand outside, alone and uncertain, full of intimations but without certainty."

"Distant as my childhood is, and incomprehensible and fabulous though it seems to me on the whole, I still sharply remember all the suffering and doubts I felt at the time, in the midst of happiness. All those feelings existed in the child's heart, where they have been ever since: doubt of my own worth, vacillation between self-esteem and discouragement, between idealistic contempt for the world and ordinary sensuality. And just as I did then, I later continued to regard these aspects of my nature sometimes as a miserable morbidity, sometimes as a distinction. At times I believed that God wished to lead me on this painful path to a special isolation and deepening of my nature, at other times I took it all as nothing but the signs of shabby weakness of character, of a neurosis such as thousands of people bear wearisomely through their lives."

From A Child's Heart

Long Long Time




I tried and tried for a week to tune my voice to belt like Linda Ronstadt and all I did was hurt my larynx. Her recording of Long Long Time, written by Gary White, is actually my alarm on my phone now so I literally wake up every morning at 5:27 am to the words, "Love will abide, take things in stride, sounds like good advice, but there's no one at my side." And I look ruefully at the queen sized bed, empty mostly except for piles of Hermann Hesse memorabilia and the fleeing ghosts of my dreamtime fantasy lovers. The awful back spasms that greet my morning are doubled in terror by this beautiful song about facing the reality of fear and tears and loves that never were. I hit the snooze button and 5 minutes later the song starts again. This repeats 4 times until I get my boots on and prepare to meet a blazing sun that has roasted my flesh beyond recognition.



Friday, July 12, 2013

This Call is Being Monitored...

Funny how life works...I was typing out a furious essay on the state of the world. Basically, the essay, which I now decided was written in the wrong spirit, argued that a person speaking privately needs to be worried their words are being spied on. But a person blogging about random events or posting on social network sites needs to be even more careful because the internet police may take some random uber-ironic joke about school massacres and lock you up to make a point. It's better to decide if the threat was credible with the mouthy teenager in jail for 4 months, rather than learn too late he was serious. I guess that's the idea and sadly I can't really argue with their reasoning anymore. Fuck it! We live in a police state because we're all assholes who can't police ourselves.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Wait, I Haven't Ordered My Guitar Yet

"Chesapeake, the company that McClendon founded more than two decades ago ended up reporting a $769 million loss for 2012, a dramatic reversal from $1.7 billion in profit the previous year. Since then it has sold off $3.6 billion in assets, a selloff that may ultimately reach $7 billion by the end of the year, the company said in May."

Seriously, how can you lose $769 million dollars? Could it be by paying musicians to drive 3 hours to do 3 hours of automation work and then turn around and drive 3 hours back but pay them 12 hours? Don't listen to me, I'm an asshole. And don't worry, none of this applies to you because you all bicycle to work merrily with reusable bags in your basket.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Sober Thoughts From A Drunken Man

I watched the movie Heathers yesterday and laughed and laughed through the whole thing. I was drunk then but I'm sober now and reflecting on the movie. It has Winona Ryder and Christian Slater doing a Jack Nicholson impression and if you haven't seen it then you might want to track it down because I predict it will be on the hit list of the new censorship regime that is fixing to take down American liberties. Of course, what you think of Heathers isn't going to be a big priority when we're all wearing uniforms to our job in hydroponic food towers where the toilets flush up and soil and complicated filters purify our shit and piss into water to nourish the GMO vegetables. Humans can adapt to 23 hour/day solitary confinement so I'm pretty sure a child born in a food tower will be no more or less unhappy than a caveman born in Manitoba 9000 years ago. The principle is a philosophic bone that Oggy likes to chew but it's irrelevant. Our generation will force the next generation into conditions I'd consider intolerable, but that's because I've been to Yosemite, I've limped up a hill in the pristine Okanagan valley in the fall when the only sound I could hear was a cow bell far in the distance...I picked apples off an old tree and ate them in the afternoon sun. So I've been spoiled in a way that will be impossible eventually and I'm probably projecting my own enjoyment onto others. I'm not even sure most people alive today would have joined me had they known where I was going.

Monday, July 8, 2013

Word Got Out

One white eye

shaggy

waiting for scraps

Saturday, July 6, 2013

Hurricane Category 5

The oldest pain killer
This was Cow Milk's favorite beverage. I toasted him with a 2x4.

Tupelo Honey


I've been listening to more Van Morrison than is good for me lately and while the album Astral Weeks was reportedly sung entirely by Van Morrison and an acoustic guitar and then everything else was added later by stoned genius jazz musicians, it doesn't really work as a solo acoustic set. Sure, Van Morrison could make it work but Oggy has his limitations.

Tupelo Honey is one of those songs that I've heard quite a bit and never really paid attention to it. But now that I read the words it makes no sense.

The chorus is a love poem to an angel. The first verse is kind of a vague reference to tea, which needs honey, and the narrator wants no part of it. The third verse is a liberty march anthem from Dylan's journal which is unrelated to the song but had meaning for the time it was recorded in 1971. And that's the whole song. It escalates and builds in interest but that's all Van Morrison's doing. The lyrics don't go any further. It's like he wrote a verse and a chorus that sort of made sense, then he took another verse from another song and figured it would do more harm than good to rewrite so he recorded what he had and no one really noticed. But the song itself, analyzed, sucks balls. Even the chord progression....[ Bb, dmi...Eb...Bb.  // Bb....dmi....Eb....F] is monotonous. So it's perfect for Oggy's master play list. Someone asks for something by Van Morrison, "Maybe Brown Eyed Girl"....Oggy winces...."How about Tupelo Honey?" and everyone is happy.

This is dedicated to Cow Milk Blues who texted me from an ambulance on his way to the ICU as he'd had a heart attack today. I really meant to record more songs with him, including this one, but it never came together. I feel that Cow Milk might be better off checking out entirely, making room, as Updike would say, for the fresh meat. He's worn out and maybe the next dimension will be better. He's done with this life. From now on he'll only be repeating his songs.

Help me

Here's a comment I made on my climate sounding board. It's been 102-110 around here in Texas and so hot the lizards are drinking their own blood. Of course this is Texas and it's hot here so everyone will say that it's no proof the climate of the whole planet is getting worse. And there will always be a sunny day somewhere on earth so some asshole on Fox News will cast doubts on the scientific evidence. They are the flat earth society of modern culture, distracting the masses with pantyhose ads and celebrity cellulite gossip...side boob, liposuction of the soul. It's enough to make my heart throb in desperation and sadness. The topic today was mitigation or adaptation. Do we concentrate on recycling aluminum cans (for 20 years I did this and ended up in Texas where nothing is recycled except polluted wastewater for hydrofracturing. haha.) or do we build sea walls (which will do tons of good for wildfires) but might save Miami's porn and luxury yacht industry? This was my response:

Why Risky Business Forecasted The Future

"It was great the way her mind worked. No guilt, no doubts, no fear. None of my specialties. Just the shameless pursuit of immediate gratification. What a capitalist." - Joel Goodsen

I watched Risky Business (1983) last night instead of attending the annual whore bazaar at the local donkey show festival. Call me a prude. I grew up with Risky Business and thought it was a fantasy but the events of the last 30! years have me reconsidering that assessment. See, Joel Goodsen (Borrowing Hawthorne's "Goodman Brown" as a source name) wasn't a fantasy...the high school senior who fucks a hooker, damages his father's car, flunks two midterms, ruins his GPA, fucks up an interview with a Princeton admissions suit, and then eventually has to buy all his property back from a pimp but ultimately gets the hooker (whose heart is closer to a real hooker than most) and his reputation is slightly tarnished with his parents but who overlook everything because he does get admitted to Princeton Business School (on the strength of his hookers blowing the interviewer at the brothel (Joel's house). Fantasy? Pure Titillating Nonsense?  No. IT WAS COMPLETELY TRUE and I'm going to tell you why.

Thursday, July 4, 2013

Historic Settings


Here's a photo of me in Cambridge, England, where they denied my request to build a monument to beloved alumni Rachel Weisz.

What, you never saw a duster in Cambridge?



Once Upon A Time

Independence Day 2013

This dog has no idea he's a midget
A year ago I was collapsed in the Corpus Christi visitor's center and the police came by and told me to leave...ON JULY 4TH. I don't know if you can be slapped in the face harder than that by the stark realities of a police state. It was like a telegram from the governor saying, "No Refuge For Yankees". I mean, I couldn't even be welcomed by the visitor's center.

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Labrador On My Mind


This footage was taken immediately before and after the ignition system fell apart on my van. Then the exhaust system fell apart. Then the transmission. But I willed that van back south. The wolf remained a mystery. Now I'm dealing with null modem adapters and baud rates. It's enough to make me chew my face off.
Astral Weeks by Van Morrison is the soundtrack of my life.

Monday, July 1, 2013

Ray Bryant's Mother Was St. Cecilia





His chord voicings are rich like a chocolate ganache cake. So unique and original. This is interpretation at its best. The levels of intrigue keep building as he plays. And the source theme is so simple...AAAB. Question, question, QUESTION, ANSWER. And the larger form builds from simple to complex with the harmonization. It's really a statement by Bryant that you can play all the Rachmaninoff you want but it still amounts to tension/release...dissonance/ consonance ....fragments/unity....conflict/harmony. Those dualities are the nature of music and life.



When Ray Bryant was faced with a choice between a paycheck and learning to play the piano better I bet I know what he did. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child who turned his back on his Knabe piano for a handful of gold.
Creative Commons License
Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.