mushinnoshin

Back when I was just a smart teenage nerd with a budding anti-authoritarian streak, The Manhattan Project, a film a about a teenager who builds an atomic bomb, was a natural and instant favorite. Hell, I eventually even sampled the damn thing:

Chaos Dreary

But of course, whatever real merits the movie may have had, I was also just totally hot for the sexy bad-girl (hey man, she smoked cigarettes and everything!) who partnered up with the deviant genius. I mean, well, she was no Ally Sheedy, but she was absolutely a defining and important celebrity-slash-fictional-character crush

So then it was a weird moment when, maybe a year or so ago, I saw the movie again, and realized — holy shit! That girl went on to become Miranda on “Sex and the City”!

And maybe that was especially weird because I was always uncomfortable with my reaction to Miranda as I watched that show — because while I always found her the most intellectually attractive of the four friends, I never actually found her all that appealing on balance, and I couldn’t place why.

But then tonight I saw her guest starring as the patient in a 2nd season episode of House, and despite the fact that she’s clearly beginning to show her age, I found something very sexy in her once again.

So, I don’t know, maybe it was just something about the Miranda character. Or maybe it was still completely shallow and I just didn’t like her with short hair. I don’t really have any deep analysis of all this prepared, it just seemed like something to write about.

Holy shit. Let me tell you how in love I am with the movie Once.

It would be hyperbolic of me to say that it has paralleled my life — but absolutely it tangentially intersected enough to feel like a 90 minute sucker punch to the heart.

I do have to share one particular scene, in which The Guy tells The Girl to write the lyrics to a song he wrote — he’s tried, but it’s too romantic, and his words just aren’t right –

to which point I give you the song I wanted Monica to write and sing: Downshift

She chose not to, so you’re stuck with me.

Allright, so I’m drunk blogging again. Shut up, I’m on vacation.

Anyway I just watched The Pursuit of Happiness. Great film, but what’s bugging me is I’m seem to remember some mumblings about it being a good pro-conservative-values film.

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Are you fucking kidding me?

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First of course being, “hard-work-triumphs” is not a value exclusive to conservatism, no matter what ridiculous propaganda has convinced you otherwise.

Second of course being — OK, so an extraordinary person graced with extraordinary intelligence and extraordinary perseverance can beat the odds in a game extraordinarily stacked against him — and this somehow justifies the game, and its odds?

Please.

Perhaps you see justice in a world where the extraordinary may one day rise from the gutters in the hopes of perhaps being able to feed their fucking children.

I see insanity in a world that wastes such intelligence and energy on subsistence, and leaves the merely ordinary in the gutter, as if that’s somehow natural.

It isn’t.

The key, as ever, is that wealth controls who benefits from access to the Earth’s resources. So long as that remains true, everything else you think you know is spin.

The play the ends against the middle,
They hide the truth behind a riddle,
They make their victims their accomplice,
They lie, and say it’s in your interest

Sometimes I’m hard pressed for a better way to say nothing and everything.

Chaos Dreary (circa somewhere near 1999)

Heh. It was actually just a challenge project. “60 in 60″ or something like that, 60 bands writing songs exactly 60 seconds long, for one of the spontaneous collaborative compilations from back in the beautiful day before corporate money corrupted and eventually killed mp3.com. Art was happening, the internet was the Paris of the 21st Century — a few years before the 21st Century even got here. Well that’s just how things work in cyberspace.

And so too, the end, is how things work in our modern economy. Corporate “persons” — “rights” without souls. The sort of absurdity that leads us to the existentialists which leads us right back to Paris.

Well since we’re doing noise, and while we’re talking existential –

Cerebral Anesthesia (1995 or so)

We’d spent a night at Squeeze dropping acid and drinking like there’s no tomorrow. Except there was a tomorrow, and when it came we were still tripping. So [guitarist] Jim [LeClaire] and I walked clear from the southside beach area apartment of Pogo’s latest whore, across the center of Lauderdale to my cracktown apartment, far too dosed to even have even a clue just how far we’d walked in the early but still scorchingly bright Ft Lauderdale sun. And when we got there I showed him what I do. And this is what we we made together.

Still noise was nothing new. What better milieu to record the echoes reverberating throughout the vast and desolate hole Nicole left in my heart?

When Hope Is Gone (1992-ish)

Well, BeerCamp was fun. At least the parts I remember were fun — I did have a little beer. OK, a lot of beer. Too much beer. Did I mention there was beer? Well, beer AND a ludicrous amount of heat, prompting rapid consumption of said beer.

I think I met a few cool people, and saw some good presentations, and of course saw many friends, but, ya know … the beer…

I was in a weird mood anyway. Somehow I wound up spending some time listening to a lot of the old band material in the morning before coming out, which always does strange things to my head. Then there was the “I spend 40+ hours a week buried in internet geekery, do I really want more of it on the weekend?” aspect. Figuring “probably not”, I just made snarky comments and had more beer :)

Well speaking of the old music, it’s probably time to throw another one up, so here ya go:

NV (Re-Animated Tissue)

This is another one from the Acid Fist X days, so it’s a bit of a rough recording (resurrected from a well worn cassette), but not too bad. Musically it’s sort of a weird conglomeration of an industrial-hip-hop thing with a space-rock groove. Foreshadowed Linkin Park meets Hawkwind, maybe? It’s funny how it’s always the little things — my favorite part of this one is the creaking-door sample timed & pitched to harmonize with Jim’s guitar harmonic . Good times.

It’s been a while since I posted any music, so here’s:
Encryptionite (Mediterranean Morphine).

Sort of a light and dancy song — by my standards.

The Shawshank sample I think centers the aim pretty well to target: “I think he did it just to feel normal again — if only for a short while”

(click to “embiggen”)

My gear sits piled up in the corner beneath a nearly five year accumulation of dust. It calls me, it cries out to me.

I need to write again. I’m almost there, I think I am at least. But not here, not in this apartment. I need the change of scene. this place is like a threadbare coat that no longer suits, and I can’t create — hell I can’t even find comfort, I just mill around the place, biding my time. I need the space I’ve been imagining, I need to build the studio I’ve always wanted. Basically I need to buy a fucking house already.

Well I’m almost there. Lease is up in October. Just a few more months.

Meanwhile, what do I want to write? I think I’m beyond the “band” thing. I think it’s time to write my — I don’t know what to call it. Too orchestral for rock music, too industrial for classical. A rock opera, but maybe no plot, maybe no lyrics. A rock symphony? Well a symphony would require there be, umm, a symphony orchestra. How about “Concerto for Synthetic Instruments and Sampled Noise”? Well, maybe something like that.

But then, maybe there should be a plot. A genuine modern underground opera? I do like the sound of that, if it’s not more than I can chew. I have been hanging at the Darkhorse a lot, maybe there’s a reason… Hey Agonyzer, think you’re up for writing a libretto?

Perhaps a little tease is in order… here’s some of what I worked on the last time I toyed with it — about ten years ago. The working title, as borrowed from Hermann Hesse — “Tsing Tse (The Music of Decline)”. Just fragments, unfinished, unpolished, just a sense of the direction.

• Intro / Overture
• 1) Process Flow 2) Recover & Awaken 3) Spread It
• The End of Time

…My soul is yearning.

One of the primary teachings of Buddhism is that the root of all suffering is desire and attachment. I am currently in a place where I desparately need to remember and apply this teaching. My soul quakes with a desire the likes of which it hasn’t felt in years; this desire goes unfulfilled for reasons I don’t comprehend, and attachment — to the desire, as well as to the need to comprehend the obstacle — is leading as it always does to a heart and head full of suffering.

But none of that is the point. The point is music time. I bring up both the teachings and the sufferings because they happen to coincide well with the song I’m posting:

Man Made Hell

This was the flagship song of the Acid Fist X days, our standard show closer. Of all the pieces I’ve written or recordings of which I’ve been part, this is probably the one of which I’m most proud. This was one of which the whole band could be proud, it was a true collaboration; everyone brought their part to the table and it all came together beautifully. And though we weren’t necessarily going for “Gothic Buddhist Anthem” or even suspected at the time such a thing would make sense — well here we are.

Addedndum: OMFG. I’ve been listening to that ending over and over. I think the whole song is good but to me it’s all about the ending, the last just-about-exactly-one-minute, that last chorus and especially the controlled chaos that errupts on the second round. The raw emotion that surges through me when I hear it, I wish I could impart it. The song is but a meager attempt to do so.

I wish at least the recording were cleaner, there are things going on that ring out clear to me but that I fear others might not hear, getting lost instead in the distortion. Just details, like the way some of my clank & scream samples play off Jim’s guitar harmonics and Pogo’s cavernous bellow, the interplay between the unflinchingly rigid insistance of the drum machine & the tribal fury of Mark’s human drumming, or the way the horns sneak in to provide a foundation — oh those horns alone — to me they connect this crazy music the kids are making to more ancient traditions, pointing out just how much older Hell is than any impermanent emo nonsense these 5 punks were gong through — oh shit shit shit shit shit.

I swear if it’s possible for the ears to orgasm, I do so every time I hear it.

I figure it’s about time I dig back into the archives and post a little more music.

I guess it was 93? 94? when I first hooked up with guitarist Jim LeClair. Wait, actually this is easy, hold on a sec — December 5, 1993. It was the day after Frank Zappa died. Jim worked with my old friend the loungraptor at this cheesy yuppie coffee bar called the Nocturnal Cafe. Jim was looking bummed, he tells me Zappa was his hero, we get to talking, turns out he’s a guitarist & he knows some guys that want to start an industrial group. And so it went from there. Jim, myself, guitarist Pau Galgolzy, bassist/vocalist Eric “Pogo” Simons, and drummer Mark Andrew formed a band called “Acid Fist X”.

The first song we wrote was this little ditty known as “Wax”, and what I’ve got for you here is the “Sinthetic Life Mix” — so named because, well — we recorded a demo version, but the master is lost to the ether, so when I started putting together material to go online, all I had was an already too worn cassette copy. Meanwhile I’ve got a stack of video tapes of the band live. So with some intense Cakewalk surgery — and the help of some black magic, thunder, and lightning — I was able to stitch together this Frankenstein monster of a semi-live recording that actually came out better than the sum of its parts.

Enjoy!

Wax (Sinthetic Life Mix)

Heh, cool. I finally get around to checking out last.fm, and out of curiosity I plugged in the old name, and sure enough:

Minor Procedure – Last.fm

20 Fans, woo-hoo! Rock on. Granted, it’s just the Shai Hulud remix I did, so probably not one of the 20 really knows who I am, and maybe only about 5 of ‘em actually like the track, the rest just have it because the have the Shai Hulud disc. Still it was a fun suprise.

On a related note, I just discovered from the Amazon reviews that Chad went off & became the guitarist for New Found Glory. Good for you man! Your new band sucks, but I can’t argue with your success : )

PS: for you ipodders, you can now subscribe to my podcast to automatically grab songs as I post ‘em. Or so I’m told — I haven’t tried it myself…