Month: September 2015

multi-love

Open relationships and polyamory…  My, oh my.  Always it starts out in this perfectly reasonable theoretical realm, a logic without reproach, and always also it seems to end with at least one partner crying in the fetal position.  I wish it weren’t so, but that’s been my observational experience.  Jealousy is this biologically hard-wired drive, a competitive evolutionary advantage, passed down and built upon by our successful ancestors.  It exists, no denying it.

But one can also argue that monogamy itself is suspect, that friction fades and sex changes over time in a relationship, that expecting one person to fulfill every important role in your life (to be the consummate lover, your best friend, your intellectual equal, to share your sense of humor, hobbies, tastes, everything) is both unrealistic and an unfair standard to hold a human being up to.  We set ourselves up for disappointment, and our partners up for failure, when we compare our lives to the unfinished happy endings of movies.  Most happy endings are simply stories that didn’t go on long enough.  If you watched past the credits you’d eventually see a fight over dinner about habits, mundane garbage, toenail clippings.  Half of all marriages end in divorce, and that doesn’t mean the people who stay coupled together are optimally happy that way–or even happy at all.

And yet, to move beyond monogamy to a pluralistic, monogamish approach to modern sexuality, one had better prepare to stare down jealousy.  It’s in us, at a genetic level, and our evolution hasn’t yet caught up to our capacity for abstract reasoning.  It does seem to vary, person to person, and insecurity has its greasy fingers in there, but in every case I’ve seen, it’s eventually become a big-ball-of-pain type problem.  I know success stories exist; I haven’t met them.

All I’ve got in closing is a shrug, and an apology if it seems I’ve tried to speak for anyone, or offered any judgement.  For all my misgivings, all the pain I’ve seen it cause, the reward is potentially worth the risk.  I guess the only wisdom I have to pass on, from my observations to any brave explorers, is be open and honest with yourself and your partners, and take your lumps as they come.  Because they will come.  Good luck to you all, my earnest and intrepid sexual adventurers.  I hope it works out.  I really do.

And if you do find yourself crying in the fetal position, I’ll be right here, with music. You’re always welcome to curl up and join me.

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b-side: balance // vireo’s eye

Samuel Herring is my very favorite live performer.  The man is an unabashed entertainer, but not as you might imagine entertainment; he’s a gut-wrenching, heartbroken, operatic performer looking to include his audience in his desperate attempts to heal.  The man cares, a lot, and he isn’t afraid of looking stupid, or sounding stupid, or putting himself out there in his songs.  He just sings and dances and does his operatic thing, while his tight-as-fuck backing band of keys and kit and bass drop amazing synth lines behind him.  That is how you feed your broken heart to living art: throw yourself off the cliff with no fear, no safety net, and soar.

Balance

“And I can sit and talk
Because I was just like you
So arrogant and brave
Impetuous and blue

But trust me as a friend
And I’ll do all that I can do
And I’d do anything for you
Because I want to see you through”

Vireo’s Eye

“Our love was not lost in style
You were strong, I was a child

We… we’re not kings here
We’re not kings here
We’re just strangers”

A-Side: Fall From Grace

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soon it will be cold enough

As I wander deeper into the world of producers and the products of modern music-making technology, I’m gaining more and more respect for the folks who work this craft.  The best of them are audiophiles, true, but they’re also full on musicians, making their own sounds and capable of playing their songs at shows with live bands.  These sounds can be anything, from classical piano notes, to a drumstick on a desk, to the sound of hands rustling grass.  It’s a musicality that’s fundamentally nerdy as all hell, and like anything good and geeky, has many subtle moving pieces when you zoom in close.  Back away though, and the layers begin to blur into a sum greater than its fading parts.  For being such absolute nerd-faces, Emancipator and his ilk’s hip-hop for acid heads is not nerdy at all.

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the path above the stars

(ask the elders do the math
none return along the path)

land laid fallow moving on
to the brink and then beyond

pack your bags desert the base
set a hard line ‘cross your face

pass the oceans skip the earth
leave the land that lent you birth

walk the path above the stars
slip yourself between the bars

maybe there for all your talk
you’ll lose the track of what you stalk

and drift in darkness lost for good
reaping what you sowed and should

or maybe in that distant place
you’ll chance upon a lonely grace

and come triumphant from those lands
with something cupped between your hands.

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canto I // we are gods! we are wolves!

The Throne of the Third Heaven’s Millennium Assembly, largely ignored by the music world at large, was for me, a revelation.  The album works as a whole — rare as that is — sliding deftly from picking strings over a description of depressive despair, to Abraham and Isaac doing devotion on the mountaintop, to the end of the world outside a car.  They sing in rounds, there’s a banjo, and one of the band members is listed as playing “computer.” Are you not intrigued?  Like no other band, I give you, once again, Le Loup.

“There were people around, but, like…

…there was no way to get to them.“

“You could never swing that dagger…”

A-Side: Le Loup – Le Loup (Fear Not)

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pass this on

Ah, The Knife.  No matter where I am or what I’m doing, they make me want to drop it all and do a weird dance.  Like an I’m-still-alive-in-all-my-fucked-up-glory dance.  Like a dance so weird it becomes a celebration.  This video, with its Hedwig and the Angry Inch vibe, is a beautiful example of what The Knife were all about.  In a way they were themselves a sort of strange dance.  I like it very, very much.

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Ffunny Ffriends

“Fuck people.”

This has long been a litmus test of mine. I generally enjoy people in the individual, really enjoy them. We’re so earnest and complicated and interesting. In the aggregate, though, we exhibit the traits of a cancer, or a terminal virus. Like a creeping blight we advance across this verdant planet, grinding it up to feed the machine, until one day we’ll reach the end and look back on a lifeless nightmare of our own making, where our last descendants will die deaths of quiet resignation, and our final tottering edifices will gasp and fall to dust and be forgotten. So once I get into a conversation, really get into it, and start wondering who this person actually is that I’ve been sitting here talking to, I’ll drop that:

“Fuck people.”

A fair few react with alarm and a kind of horror that one could even think such a thing. That shock is usually followed pretty closely by pity. Then there is a second, smaller but still significant group, who cock their head and look me in the eye. Yeah, I think. There it is. There is also a third group, with a single lone member: the cab driver in Portland, who when I yelled it at him all wasted and obnoxious from the back of his cab, took a long moment to consider, then gravely asked a follow-up question: “You mean, like, the verb?”

Man, that guy. What a champion.

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venus once had a climate

it didn’t work out because
venus once had a climate
like ours because the sun
is dying and all will tend
to an isolated heat death
because we all die alone
and afraid in the end
because we got too heavy
into drugs because a bottle
by the bed and a bump
for breakfast meant sober
days waiting and fighting
because freak weather
events are occurring now
with increasing regularity
because cells that divide
too often will eventually
mutate and consume
us all in the end because
you didn’t love me enough
to be unhappy anymore.

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my time with philipo

This video is a tiny slice of hundreds of hours, back and forth between Dar es Salaam and Vikindu. We made this trip over, and over, and over, and over again, the soundtrack to Drive on heavy rotation via headphones for a good chunk of it. As substance abuse and my relationship spiraled simultaneously out of control, existence in Tanzania took on an increasingly surreal and cinematic aspect. You’re getting an authentic taste here:  Me and Philipo, coming back from work.  We only ever spent time together like this, in transit for money, me speaking to the back of his nervous head.  In hindsight he was one of my best friends.

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light 3 // eclipse / blue

I came across Nosaj Thing a number of years ago via the illustrious Ruby Chang, when he was the author of an excellent little EP, Views/Octopus.  It was so excellent in fact, that two of the songs remained in playlist rotation forever after.  Last week I discovered that despite my inattentiveness he’s actually been a prolific and successful artist all these intervening years, with three full albums to his name and guest spots by famous rappers and singers.  I dove in excited, floodlights seeking on high, expecting a treasure trove of new yoga beats.  To my surprise it was instead a very pretty melancholia.

1

black sands

Something about this song reminds me of Yann Tierson and the music from Amelie, which then makes me nostalgic and sad for something I had once and lost.  Then eventually I warm to the fullness of that feeling, and I’m glad.  I’m glad to have had and to have lost and to have fallen and to be here to savor it all, glad just to be moved.  You and I are the sensitive fingertips of a blind universe exploring its own face, this is why we exist: to taste and touch and sense and smell, to fear and fuck and love and loathe, to sigh and long and laugh and feel.  Smell whatever is on the air, lick your lovely fingers, listen to life around you, touch the texture of your desk, your dog, yourself.  Feel happy or sad or tired or bad, whatever.  You’re here and alive and it’s happening, this wild ride, this human thing, and you’re doing it just right.  “Keep up the good work,” the universe is saying to itself.

“Keep feeling,” it says.

Feel everything.

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paul

Girl Band are a noise band.  Their music is often grating and discordant, their moments of coherent lucidity few, far between, and difficult to discern.

As the soundtrack to this pocket movie they are perfect.

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be kind, and i will tell you

Drunk as shit on rotgut whiskey on my rooftop in Taipei.  Drunk as shit and heartbroken and unable to cry.  Mired in dark things, doing dark things, being a bad person because I could, because it was available to me, hurting people who didn’t deserve it just to see how it felt.  Crying would’ve been such a relief.  Instead I recorded poems.

be kind, and i will tell you

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meditations

“Remember how long thou hast been putting off these things, and how often thou hast received an opportunity from the gods, and yet dost not use it. Thou must now at last perceive of what universe thou art a part, and of what administrator of the universe thy existence is an efflux, and that a limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind, it will go and thou wilt go, and it will never return.”

-Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus, Meditations

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outro

You thought three songs in one post was enough Vulfpeck?  No.  No, no, lord no.  They play like a live jazz band, setting a theme and then letting Mr. Dart and his magical funky bass wizard wand walk on it for a while, until eventually they all come back for a joyous musical reunion.  Then sometimes they add a special extra piece, like vocals, or a… well, you’ll see.  Goodness me.  They really are something.  I’ll close here with the immortal words of my new favorite Youtube commenter:

“Bass guitarist has the moves
of a rooster with plenty of food
at his feet, but he aint hungry,
just leaving it for his hen’s.
so tight.”

-Patrick Geaney, Youtube, March 2015

Yessir.

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