Time. No matter what the time, the town has its players. The red autumn sun fades violet, its path followed by trails of starlight — books, used or old, are bought and sold, read and remembered. Will travel to bid on larger libraries.
100 Words: Rock Doves [Birds]
When I imagine pigeons, I think of the peculiar blue and grey birds who waddle, utterly fearless, through the streets of our nameless metropolises. Our worlds are built upon such institutions; we expect that when we see a pigeon, it will look — pretty much — the same as the ones we’ve seen before. So imagine my reaction when, in Patan Square, Kathmandu, I encountered PINK PIGEONS! Indeed, the pink variety do look — pretty much — the same as the ‘traditional’ variety; however, the surreal switch from blue to PINK dealt a blow to my reality; the world would never look quite the same again.
100 Words: Lightning
When I was in gradeschool we spent the summer months swimming at crystal lake, behind my house. But you had to go all the way around the lake to the bathhouse and show your passes to the recalcitrant lifeguards. My parents said we couldn’t swim on our side of the lake because a drunk guy had once fallen in and drowned. Every once and a while our swim sessions would be cut short by megaphoned monotones warning of lightning so would everyone please exit the water immediately. Grudgingly we swam to the docks and hoisted ourselves onto the wet wood.
Describing Metal
I sit down at my desk, pen in hand, headphones on, and click “play” on my iTunes playlist. How do I define this music that I love so? Is there a constant between these many disparate genres? It seems more like a series of spectra in various dimensions. Metal is a vague identifier that describes a subset of this multidimensional space, the boundaries of which are far from definite, and certainly not objective. I hypothesize that there are general lines within which most fans of this genre could agree to label “metal’. Sub-genres are sure to extend beyond this commonly held space, and not all sub-genres will occupy its entirety, necessarily (since some begin on the fringes and then continue into the distance). . Here are a few spectra I can identify..
14 Pieces of Music, 14 Lines of Text
1. Dockwood underfoot, skin bearing jeweled splinters under ocean spray
2. Walking in metallic coiled space under life’s dictate.
3. Simply, I stand awash in life’s bittersweet brightness
4. Borne under aged framing, stretching to show yourself through gauzed nylon.
5. Attempt to reconcile, the old and new; the familiar and the strange; the absurd and the appropriate, that is living in the world.
6. Nature’s lively bouncing, flitting over a veneer of brutal evolution.
7. Awestricken, gazing upon the world as if on its first day, though the history of a people is far from free.
8. When the beating of wheels against track under mourning dissonant time.
9. Ear to thorax, hearing the sounds from a world to which we are outside, I glimpse the essence of life and its living. (img by Troyek)
10. Repeat the slightly similar repeat again straining against forms immemorial and straight culturality to express
11. Floating metal breaths over rolling hills.
12. Celebrate life’s beauty without forgetting its melanchollies
13. Unabashedly, we look into the furnaces that forged this people from the ore of time in the bowels of the earth, in all our glorious good and hideous evil.
14. Emerging, disassociating, yet warmly familiar and recalcitrant, relaxed under one’s own weight.
10 Sentences for 10 Images I Wish I’d Taken
- Walking on Clouds by Gilad Benari
- In Absentia by ilSilenzio
- Little Fish by SeaFairy
- Shadows of Dismember by Caroline Traitler
- enjoy the silence 2 by Troyek
- Source of Life 2 by brunojsn [note: contains nudity]
- CBL Study XXXV by Pedro Inacio
- Mediterranean Dusk by Denis Olivier
- Stormy Clouds by Steven Jodistiro
- My City by Awadh Alhamzany
10 Sentences I Wish I’d Written
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Do thy worst old Time;
despite thy wrong, my love shall in my verse ever live young(from Sonnet 19 by William Shakespeare)
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Listen: imagination is all we have as defense against capture and its inevitable changes.
(Alexie, ‘Captivity’, D’Agata p297).
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In the mind, words are heard bone-dry without the benefit of breath.
(Field, Thalia. “A [therefore] I”, D’Agata 420)
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Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.
(from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe by Douglas Adams)
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The Dean at left, a lean yellowish man whose fixed smile nevertheless has the impermanent quality of something stamped into uncooperative material, is a personality-type I’ve come lately to appreciate, the type who delays need of any response from me by relating my side of the story for me, to me.
(from Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace)
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(from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley)
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(from 1984 by George Orwell, p32)
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I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
(Addie Bundren from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner)
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(from Light in August by William Faulkner)
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100 Words: Furniture & Maps
Sunday [Furniture]: 4500 BC: The first piece of furniture appears in in the Malaysian river delta silt deposit area. We know this with a high degree of certainty, since the area’s silt is quite effective at preserving ancient artifacts. Especially fine upholstery. Yes, the first piece of furniture also bore the first example of fine upholstery. This exquisite upholstery was not surpassed for over 5000 years, when a 19th century seamstress created what her husband thought to be a fairly bland sofa slip-cover. Little did he know, it was the finest specimen of its kind to exist in over 5500 years.
Saturday [Maps]: I love maps. There is something about them that captivates me, causing me to plaster my walls with them. When you walk into my room, you are assaulted by an array of maps. Directly ahead is a 15th (I think?) century map of the world, in all its hand-drawn, distorted glory. On the left, an enormous map of Mongolia with land-use contours that stretch from cool greens and blues to the flaming reds and oranges of the Gobi. To gaze upon a map is to see into its world; whether it be 15th century Europe, or 21st century Mongolia.
Archives: My Destruction (A Digital Story)
I realized I had no post for this on my blog, so I figured I’d add it. I made it a while back, and it’s a little rough in places, but I’m still pretty happy with the way it came out.
My Destruction @ Archive.org or YouTube [PLAY VIDEO]
Inner Peace Through METAL (an early draft)
This is really several pieces mashed together into a collage of different threads and narratives which demand more attention than I’ve given here. So this is a compendium of fragments, more rumblings to the tune of future works. Or something.
A Guitar tech tests a majestically evil-looking guitar while the crowd mills about, joking, posturing awkwardly, cheering on the tech sarcastically. The venue is small. Dingy would not be an understatement, and we can feel that we are in gritty Worcester, Massachusetts.
The crowd is filled with an unusual assortment of people. They are mostly men, and mostly white. Some have girlfriends or wives by their sides. The whiteness of the crowd is accentuated by the blackness of their attire; black shirts, black jeans, black jackets, long black hair. There are a few latinos, and one black man. Maybe. If he is there, people come up to him with curiosity and congratulations for upending the stereotypes of those who revel in subverting stereotypes (yet never really escape them).
Continue reading “Inner Peace Through METAL (an early draft)”