A Building Roam

Supernova 1987A

2012-03-02T19:52:00.001-06:00

Spotted this beauty on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day website. The ring in the center is Supernova 1987A which, as you may have guessed, is a supernova witnessed by astronomers in the year 1987. There are numerous theories for why it appears this way with two hoops surrounding it, but "their origin is still largely unknown."

Supernova 1987A remains one of the brightest stellar explosions we've witnessed since the birth of the telescope 400 years ago. These gigantic explosions occur as the final event in a massive (larger than our dwarf Sun) star's life. For an unfathomable length of time, a massive star maintains a delicate equilibrium between the strength of its outward-pushing nuclear explosions and inward-pulling gravitational force. At the end of its life, a star stops producing the nuclear energy at its core and the entire thing compresses in on itself through the violent process of gravitational collapse. As all of the matter and energy collapses into a tiny dense sphere, it suddenly bounces back outward and creates an incredibly luminous explosion. They are often so powerful as to outshine an entire galaxy (which is approximately 100 billion times larger).

I don't quite understand this stuff thoroughly enough to explain much more than that but I do want to mention neutron stars which are one possible final scenario after a supernova event.

A neutron star is an extremely condensed little star that, as its Wikipedia page attests to, squeezes 500,000 times the mass of the earth into a sphere smaller than Manhattan. These sci-fi-sounding spheres are scattered throughout the universe.

For more incredible astronomical stuff to look at and ponder, go check out THIS page with a time-lapse image of Supernova 1987A's shockwaves smashing into surrounding debris.

TED talks Sychronicity and Science

2012-02-25T16:22:00.000-06:00

Lately, I find that the topic of UFOs creeps its way into my conversations with people more and more. Over the last year or so, it's something I've developed a gradually increasing interest in. It also pops up a lot in the work of Robert Anton Wilson, whose work I had begun to read for his James Joyce commentary and now I find myself devouring his whole richly varied oeuvre. On the topic of UFOs he remains, as he does with just about everything else, agnostic.

He shares plenty of shocking information and research about alien encounters and UFO sightings but always with a humorous tinge in the background, never going as far as to say that he believes all of it is true, but it is clearly a deep fascination of his. He likes to bring up the fact that many hundreds of scientists have had what they believe to be alien encounters and this usually leads Wilson into a far-ranging discussion of the newest ideas in modern physics. Frequently he will cite the work of Jacques Vallée, an astronomer and computer scientist who spent years working with NASA and has written a number of books on the phenomenon of UFOs from a soberly scientific perspective.

I am planning on gradually introducing some material here about the cosmological implications of UFOs and the disclosure projects that have taken place over the last ten years or so. But for now, without any alien stuff at all, here is Dr. Vallée's recent TED talk about the current state of physics and where our world view is headed.

First Glimmers of a New Baseball Season

2012-02-23T23:10:00.001-06:00

For a couple months now I've been kicking around the idea of writing a piece about my desire to step away from following baseball this season, let my attention go to more important things, and especially not allow my emotions to get invested into the ups and downs of any baseball team.

This piece was going to be a list of reasons for Why I'm Done with Baseball (for now), one of the main reasons being that the sorry state of the New York Mets and the departure of their best player to an arch rival are just too frustrating for me as a Mets fan. Other reasons include the steep price of following the game (for years now I've been an MLB.tv subscriber but in order for that package to carry over to either the iPad or iPhone device, one has to pay extra---as if Major League Baseball needs my money more than I do) at a time when I don't have much disposable income; the long hours spent watching games or reading baseball articles could certainly be better spent (especially at a time when I'm trying to put together two book-length projects); and after the dazzling crescendo of the 2011 baseball season, I figure the excitement has nowhere to go but down this year.

Add to that the fact that my favorite angle of baseball coverage, sabermetrics, has finally gone mainstream with stat experts appearing on MLB Network alongside the dunderheaded TV analysts of old, and it seems like there's just way too much for me to digest right now. It'll digest me, frankly. I figured a step back from intensely following the sport would be healthy for me. After all, baseball will still be there waiting for me whenever I want to return.

With 2012 baseball starting to show its earliest glimmers, though, I find my excitement and anticipation about the new season is as high as it's ever been in my life. It isn't as though my mind isn't occupied by other things, other sports even. I'm watching the NBA season closely (more on that in an upcoming post) and keeping my eye on hockey as well but now that the first drops of real baseball news are trickling in it feels like I'd been in a drought this whole time.

Besides the season previews that are starting to pop up, the sad news of Mets legend Gary Carter (perhaps the smiley-est guy in baseball history) succumbing to brain cancer at the age of 57 sprung up some great writing in remembrance of the 70s and 80s baseball icon.

The retirement of knuckleballer Tim Wakefield led sportswriter extraordinaire Joe Posnanski to wax poetic about that rare bird. One of my favorite writers, Josh Wilker, also put together a great Wakefield piece.

Lastly, solidifying my Mets pride is this New York Times piece on the first ever Spring Training for the New York Mets which took place exactly 50 years ago in 1962.

As it's only mid-February and I'm already completely sucked into the baseball sphere, you can expect plenty more pieces to come in the next couple months including my usual divisional previews. Hopefully I can manage to find the time and mental energy to cover my other pursuits as well.

Book Review: The Illuminati Papers by Robert Anton Wilson

2012-02-15T21:57:00.002-06:00

It is not very often that I shell out the cash for a brand new book. Most of the books I read are worn-out, tattered pre-owned texts that I buy as cheaply as possible either online or from one of Austin's many wonderful used bookstores (the Half Priced Books chain is one of my favorite things about this city). Whenever I do opt to purchase a brand new book it's usually something that has just been released (like the Baseball Prospectus annual which I always need to have as soon as it drops) or something so special that I couldn't resist paying full price.

In the early stages of my addiction to reading Robert Anton Wilson's work, I couldn't resist snatching up a fresh copy of his book The Illuminati Papers from a local New Age bookstore. Many months and re-readings later, I'm very happy with my decision. After quickly zipping through six different RAW books, this is definitely one of my favorites.

Illuminati Papers (1997 edition, published by Ronin) is certainly one of his nicer looking books physically; the cover is a bright neon orange with a rendering of one of the full-page illustrations from Cosmic Trigger showing a cartoon face of the author winking with one eye while a motley of symbols and spaceships dances around him, with the outstretched body of the Egyptian goddess Nuit surrounding it all. It's wider than a normal paperback and reminds me of a small graphic novel.

The book is a collection of essays, interview excerpts, and short pieces presented in a newspaper-style fashion with big headlines announcing the title of each piece and the text appearing in narrow columns. Pictures, diagrams, and sketchings are strewn throughout. Originally published in 1980, this work serves as a perfect companion text to Prometheus Rising (published three years afterwards, though originally written in the 70s) because here RAW uses the model of eight neurological circuits developed in Prometheus and applies it to everything from Stanley Kubrick's movies to the problem of poverty in a capitalist society. In this rather diverse compendium of pieces, the 8-circuit brain model really seems to be the connecting thread.*

*I've written a little about the eight circuit model once before, there are also plenty of online sources that explain it. The first four circuits are those that are socially imprinted upon us starting from birth, the latter four are higher functions of the brain that are able to re-program the first four through practices like yoga or deep meditation.

What initially sold me on the book is that it contains pieces devoted to artists like James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Beethoven, Raymond Chandler, and others. Pound had always seemed intriguing whenever RAW would mention him in passing but after reading the excellent little piece in this volume entitled "The Goddess of Ezra Pound," I'm now very interested in checking out the work of ol' Ez for myself (especially The Cantos). The same goes for legendary American crime novelist Raymond Chandler about whom RAW writes, "the emotional impact of Chandler's books lies in something that critics have not widely discussed: his capacity to render physiological sensations (neurological nuances) which most writers have avoided as being totally beyond words. Chandler found the words."

The piece on Joyce and Finnegans Wake is also quite interesting in that, other than his Joyce-heavy book Coincidance (and an older essay that appears in his book Email to the Universe), this is the only time I've seen Wilson write about Joyce at length. As expected, he brings a unique perspective to the table, summoning one of my favorite psychologists: "There are many good literary studies of Joyce, but the best introduction to Finnegans Wake is probably Stanislaus Grof's Realms of the Human Unconscious, a study of the head spaces experienced under LSD." (Either Wilson or the editor spelled Dr. Grof's name wrong---it's Stanislav Grof---but that's beside the point.) Grof uses the term "coex systems" to describe the clusters of memories/sensations/experiences we encounter within the deep psyche (coex means condensed experience) and this, RAW argues, is exactly what Joyce presents in Finnegans Wake where each phrase condenses multiple allusions, references, and experiences at once. As RAW puts it, "Joyce was a quantum jump ahead of the psychology of his time" which is why attempts to analyze his work through the lens of Freud or Jung are inadequate. He concludes that "Finnegans Wake is not just a great novel and a semantic symphony; it contains a whole science of psychoarchaelogy and historical neurolinguistics." Amen.

As fun as it is to get RAW's drawn-out thoughts on his favorite artists, I felt that the essays on economics were some of the most striking pieces in the book. These came across as perfect examples of what RAW often said his work is about: brain change through "guerilla ontology." He is a master of thinking outside the box while still using the sharpest and most precise tools of knowledge to make the reader think. Two of these pieces especially managed to shock me into a fresh way of thinking.

The essay entitled "Neuroeconomics" deals with the problem of poverty in capitalist society where, RAW explains, "money equals security and lack of money equals insecurity." He uses William S. Burroughs' analogy of a heroin addict: the junkie must have regular doses just as "the capitalist citizen must have a regular money fix" and we go through the same withdrawal as a junkie whenever our "fix" is not available. That's why there's such a mass anxiety in this country: we're all made to be "money mad." RAW links this with the so-called biosurvival circuit, the early imprint of the nurturing mother---without money we have separation anxiety, the same as a junkie without his heroin and once he gets his fix, it's a state of infantile bliss. This creates a prevalence of "chronic low-grade paranoia" that our external source of biosurvival security might be cut off. Everybody, even rich people, can't help but be anxious and worried about money. The piece goes deeper into things, including an analysis of the welfare system and the experience of poverty in America as opposed to the rest of the world.

Along these same lines is a piece called "The RICH Economy" whose ideas reminded me of an audio interview featuring Wilson and his brilliant wife Arlen in which they posit shocking and thought-provoking solutions to some of humanity's problems (the interview is called "Gonzo Sociology" and you can check it out here). Here the oft-blabbered-upon issue of unemployment is tackled soberly, as RAW quite bluntly states that "I don't think there is, or ever again can be, a cure for unemployment. I propose that unemployment is not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced technological society." Calling upon the ideas of genius engineer Buckminster Fuller he quickly makes it clear that a rapidly advancing technology inevitably leads to fewer jobs as the technology can "do more with less." With that out of the way, he completely flips the switch so as to examine what real solutions might be available:

Let us regard wage-work---as most people do, in fact, regard it---as a curse, a drag, a nuisance, a barrier that stands between us and what we really want to do. In that case, your job is the disease, and unemployment is the cure.
"But without working for wages we'll all starve to death!?! Won't we?"
Not at all. Many farseeing social thinkers have suggested intelligent and plausible plans for adapting to a society of rising unemployment.

He proceeds to outline some examples such as Robert Theobald's Guaranteed Annual Income or Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman's Negative Income Tax that sound stunningly logical, especially in the face of the mental sewage being vociferously presented by our current presidential candidates. The final example is "The RICH Economy" with RICH an acronym for Rising Income through Cybernetic Homeostasis. This idea encompasses the ones already mentioned while also encouraging unemployment by offering people financial rewards for designing machines that can replace the work of humans. Of course, this sounds ridiculous but you're forgetting that the goal is to cure the disease of wage-work. The final stage of the RICH Economy is to massively invest in adult education since, if everything goes right, so many adults will be unemployed and have nothing to do with themselves. The purpose of this would be to foster their creative potential because, as he concludes,

the first thought of people, once they are delivered from wage slavery, will be, "What was it I was so interested in as a youth, before I was told I had to earn a living?" The answer to that question, coming from millions and then billions of persons liberated from mechanical toil, will make the Renaissance look like a high school science fair or a Greenwich Village art show.

(You can read the full essay online here.)

Despite the title, the book doesn't really deal with the Illuminati very much at all. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if it were just a marketing gimmick because RAW's name, at the time this book was published, was essentially synonymous with the Illuminati because of the popularity of his Illuminatus! trilogy (written with Robert Shea). The interview excerpts, most of which are excellent, do contain some conspiracy and Illuminati material but otherwise it does all seem like a marketing facade or perhaps satire.*

A brilliant and mind-blowing example of this kind of Illuminati satire is a piece that is essentially a report written by someone in the Sirius star system section of the Illuminati reporting to "Galactic Central" about how "the domesticated primates of Terra" have been slowly advancing ever since these intergalactic beings introduced the deeply neurological game of chess. He proceeds to thoroughly breakdown the chessboard and the game of chess as a device specifically designed to lead one upwards along the 8-circuit neurological scale. This piece, and another essay entitled "The Science of Godmanship," were so brilliant that they caused me to burst out in vocal shock while reading them. It suffices to say, RAW is a magician with words.

For anyone interested in reading Robert Anton Wilson or even just a funny, intelligent book, this would be a great place to start. Even if you're a RAW devotee, if you haven't picked this one up, I consider it essential. As I mentioned, it goes perfectly with Prometheus Rising. The wit and liquid prose are present as always, and the incorrigible optimism is especially prevalent. In our current harrowing global situation, RAW has the solution: "The evils of the world... challenge us to use our heads better" and that is what this book is all about.

*Many of the essays have bylines showing the name of characters from the Illuminatus! novels but, the more one learns about RAW, the more clear it becomes that these are all written by him. Again, I wouldn't be surprised if those bylines were a late addition. (They seem pretty convoluted if you ask me.)

Folk Flavor (Madlib)

2012-02-13T21:24:00.000-06:00

This delicious, folk-flavored track originally reached my ears via Madlib's 2009 appearance on the Radio Nova show in Paris. Check out the full 30-minute set here, plenty of rare old records and mellifluous melodies. One of my favorite DJ sets from Madlib.

Happy Birthday James Joyce

2012-02-02T00:05:00.000-06:00

"I am trying…to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own…for their mental, moral and spiritual uplift."
- James Joyce, in a letter to his brother Stanislaus

130 years ago today, James Joyce was born. He was the first of many children in a family that grew too large for his parents to support and they slowly descended into poverty. His father had a knack for not holding on to money and so, unable to meet the rent, his family moved from one domicile to the next throughout most of his upbringing. Joyce inherited this itinerant habit into his adulthood as he lugged his belongings and family (wife, son, and daughter) to multiple homes throughout Rome, Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. While all this was going on, he somehow managed to find the time to put together arguably the greatest literary contribution in human history.

From 1914 until 1922 he labored on Ulysses, an experimental, encyclopedic epic that was unlike anything anyone had ever written. During the seven-year writing process, excerpts of the book were being published serially in a literary magazine called The Little Review. After the appearance of the "Nausicaa" episode, which features a very creatively written and partially concealed masturbation scene, a storm of controversy erupted around the book and Joyce's unfinished novel suddenly came under fire in the English-speaking world. Because of this, when the novel was near completion he was unable to find a publisher for it despite it being perhaps the most highly anticipated book in the world. Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate who owned a little bookshop in Paris called Shakespeare and Company, offered to publish it.

Ulysses was first published on Joyce's fortieth birthday, February 2nd, 1922 (2/2/22 that is, and the book has a recurrence of 22's). It was banned in the United States and England for more than a decade because of charges that it was too obscene. Nowadays there's far worse obscenity appearing on primetime television every night. The novel was hugely popular at the time despite its complexities (which continue to repel readers to this day), while it remained banned in America it was frequently smuggled past the borders, oftentimes people would chop the 700-page book into sections and tape it to their bodies. I recently came across a great video interview with Sylvia Beach from the 1960s in which she portrays the atmosphere at the time Ulysses was published, you can view that here.

Shortly after Ulysses was published, Joyce began working with the leftover notes he had (his stacks of notes were once weighed at something like 15 pounds---15 pounds of little pieces of paper, that is) and developed the material for his next book. Whereas Ulysses was the story of the day, detailing the journeying of two characters through one single day in Dublin, his next book was to be a book of the night, delving deeply into the collective unconscious. Once again, his new book was released in serial form through literary magazines but now the public was almost completely baffled. The new work seemed like gibberish. Many of his most ardent supporters (Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach, his brother Stanislaus) began to question his sanity or accuse him of wasting his talents.

For the next 17 years, Joyce became deeply absorbed in composing this strange book, the title of which remained a secret the entire time (it was referred to only as Work in Progress). Whereas previously he had to deal with difficulties in finding a publisher for his first epic, now most of his supporters were questioning his approach while he put his entire soul into this, his magnum opus. In response to all of the mass confusion and complaints the book excerpts were receiving, Joyce gathered a group of 12 supporters who each wrote an essay helping to explain the nature of the book's weird and difficult prose. This was released in a collection entitled Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress in 1929, still ten years before Joyce's completed book was to be published.

As Nino Frank writes describes this period:

"Penetrating year by year more deeply more deeply into this work, advancing with slow, groping pace in his mine tunnels, perceiving ever more clearly that he no longer knew exactly where he was going, Joyce was giving the slip to a distinguished intellectual world, which had at first found the experiment amusing (thus the praise and glosses) but had dropped out as soon as the game proved to consist of an obscure, stubborn, and interminable undermining ... In the name of Ulysses, a work of sure merit, people shook their heads at the great man inexorably leaping into the unknown. By ridding himself of the dead weights with which life had loaded him, he sought to attain the utmost velocity of thought, a velocity of lightninglike immobility---the tragic surplace of bicycle racers and perhaps the measure of the eternal."

The book finally saw the light of day in 1939, bearing the title Finnegans Wake, but by that time the world was preparing for World War II and Joyce's masterwork didn't receive the attention he'd hoped. Those who did read and review it were, for the most part, perplexed. Less than two years later, Joyce died from a failed operation for a stomach ulcer, and the world was left to discover the depths of this massive dreambook on its own. A few years later, Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson published the first exegesis of Finnegans Wake and, while now considered to be a very surface-level study, it clearly laid out the approach Joyce had taken. Finnegans Wake is a book entirely written in the language of dreams, they explained, and this language is densely packed with tons of references to mythologies from around the world as well as the entirety of human history, science, and knowledge. The key to it all is a connection between sleep and death in which Joyce poeticizes reincarnation and eternal return, thus the book begins in the middle of a sentence, the same sentence that abruptly cuts off at the end of the book.

"A way a lone a last a loved a long the ... riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."(FW pg 628-1)

To conclude, here is a list I put together of 16 reasons why James Joyce is the greatest writer ever.

And here is Joyce himself reciting a chapter from Finnegans Wake. Notice the musical sound of it all, the Wake is a book written for the ear (and Joyce had a beautiful voice, had he not been a writer he certainly would've had a career as a tenor).

Aurora Australis

2012-01-31T21:50:00.000-06:00

This video was the first thing I came across when testing the internet connection in my new apartment this past Saturday afternoon.

The lights are an effect of Earth's magnetic field (acting like a shield) protecting against solar winds. There have been a bunch of massive solar storms bombarding our planet recently and this video displays the resultant auroral lights seen from the coast of Australia on January 16th and 22nd.

Our planet's magnetic field comes from its constantly churning iron core, extending out from the center into a large invisible magnetic skin. I've always thought it quite closely resembles the shape of an apple.

This shape resonates in my mind with a painting by Vladimir Kush that I've been thinking about a lot lately, depicting the close connection between an apple's shape and that of a butterfly.

Getting Familiar with the NHL at Midseason

2012-01-15T22:08:00.001-06:00

During my recent trip back home to New York I refreshed my perspective on a number of things, most prominently New York City itself (as I detailed in a post around that time). Alongside my renewed appreciation for New York was a brand new appreciation for hockey and the current NHL season. Having spent more than half my life as a hockey player, I've always loved the game and followed the pro hockey season closely. But after a knee injury sidelined me in the summer of 2010 I've been unable to sit and watch hockey games, embittered that I can't play. As a result, I've been almost completely ignorant of what's gone on in the sport, the exception being the Stanley Cup Finals of last June which I watched from within an enormous sports bar in Pasadena, CA while having dinner with a bunch of folks from the James Joyce Conference I was attending (the main buddy I made there was a big hockey fan from Calgary, a professor at the University of Alberta).

Most if not all of my close friends from New York are connected with hockey, we grew up skating on the same teams and continued to be play the game into our 20s. They all remain devoted hockey fans and with the local New York Rangers having their best season in almost 15 years, the hockey buzz was humming palpably during my visit to the city. When my family picked me up at Newark Airport and drove me into Manhattan where I met a friend for dinner, the sounds of the Rangers battling the Philadelphia Flyers blared over the car radio. Later that night, I happened to walk past a crowded post-game Madison Square Garden and some surrounding pubs where blueshirt-clad fans smoked cigarettes out on the sidewalks in the icy winter night.

The next night was Christmas Eve. After dinner I stepped outside to briefly speak to an old friend/nextdoor neighbor out in the street, the gist of our conversation being that I needed to watch the ongoing HBO series 24/7: Road to the NHL Winter Classic as soon as humanly possible. Thanks to the wonderful human advancement that is on-demand television (and my dad's near-obsession with having adequate cable television in nearly every room in my parents' house), I got to stay up late that night watching the first two episodes of the highly-regarded HBO documentary. The show follows the Rangers and Flyers behind the scenes and through their season as they prepare to collide in an outdoor game, the NHL's recently concocted New Year's Day celebratory match which is played on an outdoor surface. With all of the Manhattan scenes featured in the show, my newly minted perspective on the city was augmented and getting to know the personalities of players, seeing the dynamics of an NHL team, and witnessing the brilliance of Philly's cosmic-minded goalie Ilya Bryzgalov officially re-lit the spark on my hockey interest.

Two weeks later, that interest has exploded and so I'd like to let that all vent here and share my thoughts on the current NHL season, which has just recently crossed its midpoint.

Watching hockey games with a renewed vision has allowed me to see it from a broader, more detached perspective and thus I've been struck by the game's utter uniqueness; it is truly unlike any other sport. Its essence perfectly balances the diametrically opposed elements of grace and grit, smooth aesthetics and crashing collisions, in a manner unlike any other game. Because of this, it has a special pace and flow to it that the hockey fan savors. After watching hockey games every day for a week I woke up one Sunday morning and found that my first thought was "I wonder what hockey has in store for today." I was craving it.

My hockey viewing has yielded three other general observations about the sport, each in regards to the game's three main positions.

1. It's all about the goalies.
As a kid, even though I skated as a forward, the goalie was always a fascination for me. I've had the opportunity to don the pads and skate as a goalie twice in my life and both times the task felt impossible with over 50 pounds of bulky padding weighing me down. I had a terrible time trying to stop any pucks. With this in mind, the movements of the NHL goalie are awe-inspiring. They also play arguably the most important position in the game.

I realized that one could get a great sense of what's going on in any game (and derive plenty of enjoyment) simply by paying close attention to the goalies. Nobody on the rink moves the way they do: jostling with opponents for a clear perspective of the puck, flailing their padded limbs around desperately when they've gone down on the ice, snatching a shot in their catching glove, sliding dangerously far out of their crease and having to scramble back, or paddling a loose puck away from their eminent domain.

In an attempt to quickly familiarize myself with new players and rosters, I've spent a lot of time perusing the pages of Hockey-Reference.com lately. In the process, the advanced statistics have confirmed the massive importance and value of goaltenders in hockey. It's all about the goalies, basically. The site tracks an all-encompassing stat that measures each individual player's total value, similar to Bill James' Win Shares or all of the other current variants of it in baseball stats. It's called Point Shares and looking through each team, the goalie is often the most valuable and important player. In fact, the most productive player in all of hockey right now is a goalie (Jonathan Quick of the LA Kings) and this has been the case for six out of the last eight seasons. We Rangers fans are getting a clear example of this with the sturdy play of our superstar goalie Henrik Lundqvist who's actually 2nd in the league in Point Shares at the moment.

The sheer abundance of good goalies has also struck me. Obviously, they don't all play their best at the same time but there are is a large population of talented goalies in the league right now covering almost every single team. If you look at all of the top teams right now, each one has a terrific goalie in net (with the possible exception of the Chicago Blackhawks). Out of the thirty teams in the league, most of them have either a very good or formerly very good goalie:

The Rangers (Lundqvist), Bruins (Tim Thomas and Tuukka Rask), Canucks (Roberto Luongo), Red Wings (Jimmy Howard), Predators (Pekka Rinne), Kings (Quick), Blues (Jaroslav Halak and Brian Elliott), Wild (Nicklas Backstrom), Sharks (Antti Niemi), Capitals (Tomas Vokoun), Canadiens (Carey Price), Coyotes (Mike Smith), Ducks (Jonas Hiller), and Flames (Miikka Kiprusoff) all have goaltenders that are either elite level or playing extremely well this season.

The Flyers (Ilya Bryzgalov), Panthers (Jose Theodore), Devils (Martin Brodeur), Sabres (Ryan Miller), Penguins (Marc-Andre Fleury), Hurricanes (Cam Ward), Oilers (Nikolai Khabibulin), Avalanche (J.S. Giguere), and Islanders (Evgeni Nabokov) all have goalies that have once been considered elite level but are currently playing below their best.

The Senators (Craig Anderson), Blackhawks (Corey Crawford), Jets (Ondrej Pavelec), and Stars (Kari Lehtonen) have solid-but-unspectacular netminders. Anderson in particular is a favorite of mine because of his unorthodox style of coming far out of the net to challenge shooters.

And that leaves just the Blue Jackets, Lightning, and Maple Leafs with goalies that are nothing to write home about (and two of those teams are among the worst in the league). With this in mind, my advice for anyone wanting to learn about hockey would be (to paraphrase Seinfeld) "look to the goalies."

2. Forwards, as a whole, have gotten obscenely talented with their puckhandling.
Watching all of the best-of highlights for the past couple weeks, one thing that really strikes me is the sheer number of different players who appear in the clips doing acrobatic stickhandling maneuvers. It occurs to me that there are probably between 20 and 30 different forwards in the game right now who possess such a high degree of finesse skill that they'd have been among the very best puckhandlers in the game just 10 or 15 years ago. The overall talent level is simply soaring right now.

I'm talking about guys like Matt Duchene, Patrick Kane, Alexander Semin, Steven Stamkos, Evgeni Malkin, Pavel Datsyuk, Mike Ribiero, Bobby Ryan, the list goes on and on. They may not all be among the game's best players, but their ability to handle the puck and artfully shake defenders is otherworldly.

3. Influx of great young defensemen
So we've already said that the league is filled with great goalies, the forwards are growing incrementally more adept as a whole, and now I'm saying that there's suddenly a rush of young superstar defensemen flooding the league. It's true. Hockey as a whole is in a great place right now. Even the officiating has gotten more precise as the league has been the first of any of the major sports to adopt a "control room" of people monitoring every single play in every game as they happen so as to make sure they get things right. The only blemish on the game right now is the massive amount of concussions, this has become a very serious problem with the rapidly increasing speed, strength and violence of gameplay causing dangerous collisions.

When I stepped away from the game for about one full season it seems like a dozen or so rookie defensemen suddenly snuck in under my nose and started dominating. Now I'm just getting to know their names:

The Senators have probably the best Swedish defensemen since Nicklas Lidstrom, his name is Erik Karlsson and he broke into the league at age 19 two years ago. Now he has the second most assists in the NHL and sits second on his team in Point Shares behind only their goalie. The Rangers have a 21-year-old stud named Michael Del Zotto who is one of their best players and already one of the best defensemen in the entire league (he's 5th in plus-minus and leads the league in Defensive Point Shares). The St. Louis Blues' two best players right now are young defensemen I'd never heard of before: Alex Pietrangelo (22 years old) and Kevin Shattenkirk (23). The 6-foot-8 blueliner for the Sabres, Tyler Myers, has slipped a bit from his excellent rookie season two years ago but he's just 21 years old. The Sharks' Marc-Edouard Vlasic's name is a mouthful but he's 24 years old and already has five strong seasons under his belt, right now he's sit behind only the Rangers' Del Zotto on that Defensive Point Shares list. Drew Doughty seems like he's been around for a while but he's just 22 years old and finished second in Defensive Point Shares last year.

I find myself often grousing that all the four major American sports have too many teams. I like to follow leagues as a whole in addition to rooting for individual teams and it becomes a nuisance to muster up any interest in, for instance, the Charlotte Bobcats or Phoenix Coyotes. Looking at the overall makeup of teams in the NHL, though, one thing's for sure: there's plenty of talent to go around and fill up 30 teams' worth of rosters.

Now, for a few words about those teams.

Eastern Conference
I am a big Rangers fan and have been for my whole hockey-loving life, but I have to be honest and say that the Boston Bruins are the top team in the East right now, if not the top team in all of hockey. They are quite clearly a team that opponents must be afraid to face because not only have they blown a number of teams right out of the rink already this season, but they're also tough and dirty. They love to fight and they've got quite a collection of players who can both score goals and pound someone's face in. They don't seem to have any one single superstar but instead they've got a deep roster with two excellent goaltenders, a deep defensive rotation led by the towering Zdeno Chara, and plenty of offense up front (as I type this they're tied with Chicago for most goals scored while having allowed the fewest goals). Their best player is only 20 years old and they've got plenty of youth throughout the roster as well as plenty of room in their salary cap, so these defending Stanley Cup champions are really the team to beat.

I'm confident in my Rangers though, too. For years now, ever since they've had Henrik Lundvist in net, they have been among the best defensive teams but have had much trouble balancing that with enough scoring. Now they've solidified the offense enough to step up into the league's elite with Marian Gaborik among the top scorers in the league and Brad Richards not far behind him. They've also developed two excellent young forwards of their own in Ryan Callahan and Derek Stepan. They're on a collision course with the Bruins for the Eastern Conference finals and it should be a great match as the Rangers are also tough enough to not back down from a physical team (they currently lead the league in fighting majors, the Bruins are in third).

The main challengers to the dominance of the Rangers and Bruins appear to be the Flyers, a few up-and-coming teams, and the disappointing Capitals. The Flyers revamped their team before the season and have had some trouble getting all the pieces to come together in harmony (plus they've suffered a bunch of injuries, mainly concussions) and yet they're still in the mix. Even though they're the Rangers' main rival right now, I have a fondness for this Flyers team because they combine finesse and roughness as well as any team out there. They're always good for plenty of fights and tough physical play but they can also score. Their top line of Jaromir Jagr, Claude Giroux, and Scott Hartnell is an exciting trio and they've got a handful of other young forwards contributing as well. Their defense is pretty stacked and, of course, the quirky Bryzgalov plays goal. He's had a rough first half but I expect him to get it together as the playoffs near.

The Florida Panthers have an interesting mix of mercenaries but they've actually been outscored overall this season by 12 goals and I don't think their ceiling is anything higher than a low playoff seed and quick first round exit. The Ottawa Senators are the big surprise team thus far and I do think they've got a chance to stick. They play a pretty exciting style that's fun to watch. I've already praised their goalie a few times in this piece, they've also got one of the best two-way defensemen in the sport, and plenty of scorers up front.

The only other team in the East worth caring about is the Capitals and they've just kind of floated along thus far whereas most people expected them to dominate. This is the kind of team they are. Last year's HBO special followed them around and it was clear they've got problems getting motivated for games despite their great collection of talent. Because they've finally got a top-notch goalie, I'm confident they'll stay in the mix but I don't think they'll make any noise in the playoffs.

(Edit: Originally I didn't mention the Pittsburgh Penguins because they're currently 7th in their conference and losing key players left and right. As of this typing, though, they've won three straight and scoring machine Evgeni Malkin looks to be heating up. If he can carry the team on his back until Sidney Crosby comes back, this team shouldn't be counted out.)

Western Conference
So many interesting teams out west right now and they're all pretty closely bunched up. Even after letting go of many important parts from their Stanley Cup run in 2010, the Blackhawks remain strong and currently sit atop the conference. They can put up goals with the best of 'em but I don't think their goaltending is good enough for them to keep pace with the elite and their weak goal differential (+17 which is fifth in the West) reflects that. Their rivals in Detroit never seem to be anything but awesome, they are sort of like the San Antonio Spurs of hockey. In addition to a core that's as good as any group in the league (led by Datsyuk, Henrik Zetterberg, Johan Franzen, and Nicklas Lidstrom), their young goalie has stepped his game up and is now one of the best in the league. The constantly churning wheel of successful hockey teams in Detroit never ceases to amaze me and we should expect them to once again be in the mix for the Stanley Cup this spring.

Staying right up there with the Hawks and Wings is one of the more interesting teams in the league right now, the St. Louis Blues. What intrigues me is that they are led by two defensemen in their early 20s while their goaltending situation is a rare 50/50 split between Halak and Elliott who are both playing very well. Their offense is carried by the seemingly ageless Jason Arnott and one of the league's more underrated forwards, David Backes (who wears the number 42 on his back which is extremely rare for hockey). The Sharks have made an interesting transition from a team that relies mostly on a powerhouse offense to one of the league's best goal-preventing teams. Their defensemen are strong and goalie Antti Niemi is one of the better netminders in the game right now. The offensive workload is gradually being passed down from the veterans Patrick Marleau and Joe Thornton to youngsters Joe Pavelski and Logan Couture.

The Canucks are back to their old ass-kicking ways, they look primed for another deep run in the playoffs. They are one of the more entertaining teams to watch as Swedish twins Henrik and Daniel Sedin play in what I see as a very unorthodox style. They often look nonchalant and perhaps too smooth, constantly curling back or otherwise shocking both viewer and opponent with some anachronistic move. It certainly seems to work for them, though, as they're among the top producers in hockey. Besides the Hawks, Wings, Canucks, and Sharks, the Los Angeles Kings are a team that interests me even though they're sunk in mediocrity right now because of a season-long scoring slump. Their goaltending and defense are both rock solid but the offense just hasn't produced. The personnel is certainly good enough; Anze Kopitar is one of the league's most exciting young forwards and they added Mike Richards to the mix but something just isn't clicking for them and I haven't seen enough of their games to ascertain what that may be. If they can manage to get it figured out, they'll certainly catapult right up into that mix of Western contenders and make things interesting in the playoffs.

Album Review: N.P.R. (Nihilism Produces Revolution) by A Man Called Relik

2012-01-12T16:11:00.002-06:00

"Many a house of life
Hath held me---seeking him who wrought
These prisons of the senses, sorrow-frought:
Sore was my ceaseless strife!"
- The Buddha

"My counsel is that we hold fast ever to the heavenly way
and follow after justice and virtue always, considering that the soul is immortal
and able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil."
- Plato

It has taken numerous revolutions of this disc over a period of years for me to come upon a full understanding of its message. The display of poeticism (a style best described as "eloquent ferocity" or "ferocious eloquence") and the unconventionally unbroken, smooth (often drumless) hymnal music of the beats easily induces a state of tranquil marvel rather than rigorous contemplation. Now that I've managed to experience the latter and fully assess what's being said and presented on this record, I'd like to shed light on an underground gem of condensed mental minerals.

As it has interweaved with the rapid growth of the internet and technology, Hip Hop music has evolved to a point where there are far too many individuals pretending to be rappers. As MF DOOM once put it, there's "a whole host of roller coaster riders/ Not enough tracks." Listen to him rap for two seconds and it immediately becomes apparent that A Man Called Relik is a natural-born lyricist, an individual who deserves to cut straight to the front of any rap roller coaster line.

A Man Called Relik is the name of a brilliant young spoken-word poet and emcee hailing from the state of Indiana. His 2010 debut album Nihilism Produces Revolution (N.P.R.) is a unique showcase of hip hop music's ability to withstand the corrosion of its art form into pop materialistic commercialism---clearly the genre continues to produce otherworldly gifted poetic youths each generation. It should come as no surprise that there is a detectable Wu-Tang influence in his lyrics (explicitly referenced in the journey of adolescence described in the track "Middle School Militant"); from my first listen of Relik's music I could especially tell that he must have been impacted by the near-mystic spoken-word poetry displays of Killah Priest. The entire record consists of such spoken-word poetry tracks, all very much in the same vein as Priest's "Heavy Mental," "Places Where Pharaohs Go," and "Behind the Stained Glass." It sounds a bit like what one would expect to hear on Def Poetry Jam except that it's infused with a more powerful perspective that easily maneuvers from a cosmic view down to the Earth's minuscule grains of dirt and rock; a perspective that spans multiple lifetimes, generations, epochs while often being stuck in the grave dramas of young adulthood.

As I mentioned already, there are two ways to enjoy an album like this, the easy way and the hard way. The easy way is to just sit back and prepare to be awestruck by the display of lyrical brilliance, the hard way is to ascertain the complex overall theme and how effectively it is carried out. I want to try and explain this theme (or what I perceive as the theme) as clearly as possible in this review.

The record is essentially a journey through darkness trying to find light. The overall sound is often dark and dreary, the artist seems stuck in the perspective of the Buddha's first noble truth: "All life is sorrowful." Indeed, Buddhist elements recur throughout the record, especially reincarnation, and A Man Called Relik sounds like a Buddhist who's fallen off the path while seeking nirvana through multiple lifetimes. As a new lifetime of growth, maturity, and experiences unfolds, his poetic sensitivity is struck by the negativity in all existence, the grim sorrows, the dark shadow of life that makes it temporal. It's as though he's stuck here in earthly existence and has lost hope as a result, leading to a negative outlook on life (and, as the Buddhist cosmology sees it, guaranteed further reincarnations of earthly existence and suffering).

The key to this record is the process of revolution that is eventually produced by the artist's nihilistic outlook, as in the last song he realizes "purity is only found where there is nothing left to be polluted." As I'll explain later, the musical journey eventually reaches a conclusion where the character finally does experience the ego-shattering light of nirvana, but upon encountering the gates of this realm he decides to turn back. He is determined to return to this earthly life with a more affirming outlook and a desire to free the minds of humanity through social change (calling to mind Amita, the Buddha who refused to remain in nirvanic bliss until he could help all other beings achieve the same, so he came back to earthly life).

The album opens with the rantings of a soul that has died after a harsh life, now he denies the existence of anything better, of anything positive, and his soul thus returns to the womb again and into a new life. The first track deals with this initial death ("Cremation"), in which the final part of the song is "guilt-free, I'm reborn in this grimy nudeness" before the next couple tracks focus on themes of a young person coming up in the world.

Throughout the journey of life, he encounters the darkest realities, the plight of humanity in its modern earthly existence, and elucidates the voices of drunks, prison inmates, a raving schizophrenic homeless man on the streets, harrowed 9-to-5 slaves, and eventually (once again) someone who has died, their soul passing among the gravestones. It's quite a dark album overall, some tracks are too dreary for me to listen to for very long, but a flicker of light dances in the background throughout. In the midst of the musical excursion, it's clear that the speaker is a keenly sensitive aspiring mystic seeking to go beyond the veil of life ("I talk through my flesh to free my spirit like Hindus in Southern Asia, a priest appearance") but so thoroughly entrenched in the clutching grasp of society, which he represents in the skin-crawling "Spiders Land On Me Constantly":

"Spiders land on me constantly
constantly victimized by society's image of success"

Halfway through the album there's an interlude ("Repetition" featuring one of my favorite beats on the album) with a wise man giving advice to a seeker. The seeker is presented with the same striking dilemma that rests at the heart of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the idea of eternal return:

"What if some demon were to say to you that this life, as you now live it, have lived it in the past, you would have to live it not once more but innumerable times more. There will be nothing new in it. Every pain, every joy, every unutterably small or great thing in your life would just return to you. The same succession, the same sequence, again and again, like an hourglass of time.
Imagine infinity. Consider the possibility that every action you choose, you choose for all time. Then all unlived life would remain inside you. Unlived. Throughout eternity. You like this idea? Or do you hate it? Which?"

This represents the first major step toward achieving a personal revolution. Because the key, as Nietzsche held so firmly, is not to deny but to affirm this life. Six more tracks follow this midpoint skit, their theme following the maturity of the poet who's once again challenged as he enters into the world of adulthood, jobs, family, escapist intoxication, and dreary monotony until finally a physical (or mental, or both) death and rebirth in the conclusion.

Here are a few brief thoughts on each track.

1. Nihilism (Intro)

This is perhaps my favorite beat on the entire record. Underground producer Woodenchainz provides the musical element throughout the LP and his contribution is a unique blend of serenity, darkness, and contemplative melodies, all of it from chopped samples but often in a form different than what might be called hip hop. The beats feel suited for the spoken word poetry approach.

The opening presents A Man Called Relik's most grim, nihilistic, rejection of life. A perfectly glass-half-empty perspective on life. "Paradise doesn't exist" he declares repeatedly, because he hasn't experienced it yet, hasn't escaped the cycles of earthly lifetimes. Childhood imprints darken his present outlook, "Someone stole my pair of dice when we was up in the bricks" or projects, meaning both his property was stolen and also the lost chance at living his dreams and aspirations. This is the modern depressed and impoverished youth, the anxiety of an apocalyptic generation in 21st century America with its endless wars and class discrimination.

Even the medium is cursed:

"Hip hop: America's stepson/ The accident/ Only loved by Mother Earth/ and changed by Father Time"

2. Cremation

The spooky, dark and "gloomy" skipping record, Billie Holliday's oft-sampled haunting tones on "Gloomy Sunday" crackle here. Sunday is either the beginning or end of the week, depending which way you look at it. I've always seen Sundays as gloomy because a new full week of school or work always lies ahead. Here in the first track, Sunday is both a beginning and an ending. We open with the words of someone who has just died:

"Do not mourn me my brother
I am exalted at rest as potential energy
subconsciously manifested in the randomness of dreams
dreamt by friends and family"

There are detectable elements here of not only the death of an individual, but the death of hip hop, and one considers the possible meaning behind the name A Man Called Relik, a relic from the days when A Tribe Called Quest briefly reigned and a true American art form was born.

The song concludes with a rebirth, the beginning of another cycle, "Guilt-free, I'm reborn in this grimy nudeness"

3. Middle School Militant

After rebirth, "my parents raised me to carry the kerosene through Hades" and we have here a full (and fervent) outline of the chronology of growing up, going to school in the 90s hip hop era, "quoting Biggie in the middle of any relevant speech with melodies," all delivered over the marching bootcamp drums of the beat. He carries us through 8th grade before the beat suddenly slows down to a tribal hum.

"I replaced addictive crazes
my only savior was pen and paper
I found my poetic nature in lonely places
at home in basements"

And suddenly, into this gestating soul's life, came hip hop... What follows is a steady streaming story weaved of both the artist and hip hop's evolution through the mid 90s until it was "misled by riches, cribs, MTV hit list shit."

His description of the initial spark of enlightenment brought upon by exposure to Wu-Tang, Gravediggaz, etc is verbally sharp and also a good description of my own incipient infatuation in those days. But the overall enduring image is bleak: commercialism took over hip hop, corporate record labels determined what should be popular and

"The music business has nothing to do with music, it's just business."

4. Fragments

Hypnotic beat. Once again focusing around early human life as he begins each of two verses with a human being's first experiences after birth and leads up into adolescent sexual urges ("boys and girls trade ancient grunts").

"Could nine months in the womb, give you such wisdom?
from years of evolution numbered in the billions
first you were a one-celled organism
you were a nebula that was spinning with precision
until osmosis was the beginning of your division
cell-splittin' until you resemble an amphibian
Reptilian, then you reach your peak as mammalian"

The second verse in this track (just quoted) is not only one of the best pieces of lyricism on the record, it's one of the best pieces I've heard in the last few years. Stunningly dope.

5. World Asylum

The last song had elements of puberty and now the development of the artist is nearing young adulthood. Eyes opening to the frightening scene of unadulterated reality. "I am a madman" he repeats. This is a personification of the muse, the beautiful and eloquent street soul of hip hop, reduced to a muttering madman. Those mutterings contain a frightening display of raw truth, though, in this very brief track.

6. Elephantiasis

This is high praise, but I'm reminded of 1997 Rza by this track. After the repeated mantra in a meditative opening we are treated to an intense display of verbal imagery, nearly delusional yet extremely eloquent and descriptive. This is Relik hacking jagged bars with maximum ferocity.

"CDs repeat release my creed in street meetings
my demons leak through emcee's teeth
breach through psychic readings"

"I scream until ears ring, treat brain disease like Nietzsche!"

7. Invisible Woman

A nice little vignette, our poet encounters an exotic beauty in a bar and admires, deeply fantasizes about an encounter before waking up "to the bartender's raspy screech: last call, 3:30 AM/ I must have fell asleep."

It was all a mirage.

8. Spiders Land On Me Constantly

"Constantly caught up in cobwebs and other nonsense"

Spiders and spiderwebs spun out into various metaphors, especially for ideologies and vast webs of mind-control. A brief, poignant, but dark and spooky track.

9. Dionysus

I would have loved this track had it not been for the manipulated vocals, which have been changed to sound so thick that the lyrics are barely understandable. A great beat to this track, one of the ones that comes close to the standard hip hop sound (i.e., drum loop and sample).

10. Repetition (Interlude)

See opening section.

11. Infidelity

This track has by far the darkest aura to it, very Edgar Allen Poe, so much so that I can barely stand to listen to it.

12. Top Bunk

Another very dreary song, fitting for the theme presented as Relik raps about the insanity of our prison industrial complex which currently imprisons more people than any nation on earth. The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population, but almost 25 percent of planet Earth's prisoners.

"it's comedy to the aristocracy
mockery of street kid's problems"

Three verses present the perspective of a prisoner confined within thick cement walls.

13. Laundry

This is my favorite track on the album, to my ears it's the most perfectly executed song in every aspect. The piano loop strolls in a perfectly lulling rhythm and lyrically this track is a statue of sound, achieving steep heights as it progresses. The recurring motif is "just this room and nothing else," the image presented is one of a recluse, veering off the edges of sanity. "These walls romance an ascetic/ And growl at my tragic smile." He carries on intensely about the room and the society he's hiding from. Inside he seems to be hoarding thoughts, memories, words that "live between fits of dry heavings/ spit into napkins and tossed into this overflowing waste basket called consciousness." Stacks of dirty dishes cover the surfaces in this "old sanctuary", "a simple dwelling for a complicated untidyness."

The delivery and wordplay intensify as the track progresses until he's rapidly squeezing in bars that are overflowing with syllables like this:

"When it's just faded masterpieces
in this undecorated museum
in this underdeveloped gutter with a gun under my seat and a lead foot under my gas meter"

The track often borders on schizophrenia with dashes of OCD but its macrocosmic structure (repeated refrain, increasing intensity) and intricate brilliance (some of the best wordplay of the album) stamp it as a work of art. And that beat is so perfect I could listen to this song over and over again.

14. Centipede

With its slow beat, depressing chorus, and bleak tones this could've been a pretty sad track but the energy and occasional humor of the lyrics manage to uplift it. Coming from the perspective of a young adult now forced to give up his hopes and aspirations so as to pay the bills via some mundane 9-to-5 customer service job, this track rails against society's system of marching kids through a soulless path of school, work, marriage, babies, etc. until we "get buried, and that's it." His laments on the stages through which the average person robotically marches reminds one of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall."

There are a couple of funny gems on here. In the first verse he's describing showing up late to a job interview and he walks in "with the chorus from 'It's Yourz' on my mind"---a perfect juxtaposition to this apparent sacrifice of his goals, the chorus goes "It's Yourz, the world in the palm of your hand." He pretends to be flustered, makes up a story about having to fight off a gang who tried to steal his bike as an excuse for being late, and then tries to make small talk with the job interviewer. Sounds simple enough, but the presentation is pure poetic mastery:

"Faking like my pulse was racing
I lightly take a seat and invite
a conversation, similar to the ramble in ancient
Coliseum animal cages, a string of meaningless phrases
the subject of psychoanalyst papers
But anyway I was hired cheaper than machines
and now 40 hours a week gets sacrificed
out of my dreams"

By the third verse, he's already stuck in this lame job and struggling to muster the will to wake up in the morning. We've all been there:

"Wake up. Get up.
Fuck it. Just give up.
Call in and tell them you have the shits then hang up
No, go in have a fit, spit in ya boss' face then quit six months
after you started the gig, instead fuck it
Let's just get drunk"

15. Leashes

What an interesting song. The only musical accompaniments are bongos and the thumping heartbeat of a caged beast. Coming on the heels of a song about being shackled into a soul-draining, low-income job, this track repeats a motif of "waiting at bus stops." The theme opens one's eyes to this whole idea of collars associated with our grinding daily labor, something we all seem to accept unflinchingly. Relik does not:

"I hate blue collars, and white collars
and all other things related to leashes carried by anyone anywhere throughout history"

The fury increases as he goes on until towards the end he realizes he is becoming "more and more animalistic/ just as a way to tear through this blue collar/ and leave my leash tied to this bus stop." Great presentation in a song that really challenges one to think.

16. Graphite Huey

This is perhaps the song with the greatest density and thus I'm really reaching when trying to come up with the meaning behind it. It's clear that the tone has changed and matured since the opening. The repeated motif of "gravestones" suggests death once again (just as does the opening), except now there's deeper reflection, and a sense that the artist has achieved a personal revolution. "The meaning of death is much harder to find than the meaning of life," he states at the opening.

Perceiving the imbalances and injustices in existence, he is less nihilistic and seemingly more optimistic about everything and prepared to participate in the betterment of society. When the beat reaches its most tender tones, we hear:

"Dreams of idealists in the faces of children
ancient fulfillment of traditional sentiments of the savior is willing but..."

17. Return to Reality (Outro)

This final interlude is very important to a complete understanding of the overall transformation we've been talking about. A man who has been practicing deep meditation confesses to a woman that he had achieved a state of such incredible light that he couldn't withstand it and decided to turn back. He had been "bathed in light and suddenly time and space did not exist, only absolute radiance."

This is the experience of nirvana, the shattering of one's individual earthly ego and he could not withstand it. He felt something urging him to return to reality, "something that I do not wish to let die." Whereas the album opened with a negative outlook on life and the assertion that "paradise [or nirvana] doesn't exist" now paradise has been realized but the character has purposely turned back and returned to life. This will or drive to come back into life is the affirmation, the saying YES to life, that allows one to live with fulfillment and so the Revolution is now completed.

Overall, I'm not quite sure I can give a rating to this album because it's so unlike anything I've ever listened to. It certainly has elements of hip hop but the emphasis is strongly on poetry and elocution with heavy themes being presented. It seems like an unorthodox approach but there's no doubt that this is the revelation of a very gifted poet; this guy needs to be heard whether one initially understands the material or not. It's loaded with awe-inspiring lyricism. As for the dark, often dreary feel of things, I look forward to hearing if his next album builds on the growth and transformation we've heard here. Would also be nice to hear him rap over some good hip hop beats in the conventional style.

Extras:
Here are a few other favorites of mine from this artist.

The Darkest Hour (prod by Kevlaar 7)

BC 2 Me (Relik appears in the second verse and shows what great potential he has in a regularly-paced song)

And here is a new video of Relik reciting an original piece entitled "Autopsy of a Supernova"

Remembering R.A.W.

2012-01-11T23:20:00.000-06:00

Today, 1/11 is the anniversary of writer/thinker/guerrilla ontologist Robert Anton Wilson's departure from the physical world back in 2007 (can you believe 2007 was five years ago?). For the last few months, I've found myself often going through lengthy binges of listening to his interviews or lectures or reading one of his books. His work really creates an addictive drive in followers, probably because in all of his writings, lectures, and conversations he presents such a broad abundance of knowledge in such a funny, pellucid package.

The first time I heard RAW speak I was blown away because I'd never heard someone with such a thick and gravelly Brooklyn accent speak with such intelligence. I grew up in Staten Island with numerous Brooklyn ties so that dialect surrounded me growing up. But here was a guy speaking about James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, quantum physics, Carl Jung, synchronicity, and the I-Ching all at once in my mother tongue. I've been devouring his work ever since.

I got into his work through his passion for Joyce but he's most well-known for a series of science fiction novels called the Illuminatus! trilogy. He's also written over 30 nonfiction books on topics such as general semantics, mysticism, psychology, physics, eastern religion, sex, libertarianism, conspiracies, and the future. His work is prone to completely change the way readers see the world. The website Boing Boing is doing a RAW week starting today and there are already a few great pieces about him that are worth checking out. From one of the posts (and the accompanying comments) here is an example of that powerful reaction his work engenders in readers:

...There are few works of art or pieces of media that have altered my nervous system to the extent that Illuminatus! has...

...I first read his work in college (Cosmic Trigger) and it literally rearranged my brain...

Helping to feed my insatiable hunger for RAW brain food have been a number of blogs and websites including the author's own page RAWilson.com which features the opening chapter from just about all of his books. The Maybe Logic blog is great and has years of great material in its archives, RAWillumination.net has been providing good material almost every day, the RAWilsonfans.com page has tons of resources (including many of his published essays and articles), and there is one prolific blogger writing more than a dozen different RAW-related blogs from different angles, Steve "Fly Agaric" Pratt. I've mentioned Steve's work on this blog a few times but not nearly enough, he's got tons and tons of great material to check out. I'm going to close with a few things I've gleaned from his websites over the years.

Writing about the anniversary of RAW's death, which occurred on January 11th or 1/11, Steve draws our attention to RAW's love for James Joyce and especially Finnegans Wake. In writing about the Wake, RAW often mentioned the number 111 and its prominence in the book:

"This 1:11 business turns out to be more curious than we realize at first, even if we note that it is connected with Bloom's son, who died at age 11 days, Shakespeare's son Hamnet who died at 11 years and the 22 (2x11) letters in the Hebrew alphabet or the 22 words in the first sentence of Ulysses. If ALP and APL invoke all this, the LAP, a further permutation, invokes the LAP where a Freemason wears his apron, as in Aleister Crowley's BOOK OF LIES, Chapter 54, in which some Freemasons guess that the lost Mason Word is AMO, whose number is 111, and some guess that it is LAP which also has the number 111. (By Cabala, AMO=A which is 1, M which is 40, and O which is 70, 1+40+70=111, while LAP=L or 30, A or 1, and P or 80, and 30+1+80=111.) William York Tindall, a Joyce scholar who likes to count, has noted that many long sentences in FW have 111 clauses. Anna Livia Plurabelle's untitled "mamafesta" in Chapter Five has 111 alternative titles; when sad, she is described as "wan wan wan"; in Chapter 8, she has 111 children. Most books on Cabala hint at trancendental meanings in the fact that the Hebrew A or aleph=ALP=111 when spelled in full as aleph-lamek-pe." -- from Wilson's book Coincidance

On this blog (and in person) I'm prone to gush about the intricately designed spinning wheel of meaning that is Finnegans Wake and this silly but mind-blowing little synchronicity that I'm about to show you is a perfect example of what makes this weird book so intriguing. If you flip open to page 111 of Finnegans Wake, here's the first thing you'll read:

peraw raw raw reeraw puteters out of Now Sealand in spignt
of the patchpurple of the massacre, a dual a duel to die to
day, goddam and biggod, sticks and stanks, of most of the
Jacobiters.

Emphasis mine. Check out Fly Agaric's lengthy post about the whole thing.

When you manage to pick up the pieces and put your head back together, here's a great little video of RAW explaining the rapid acceleration of knowledge and information through the last 2,000 years which he calls the "Jumping Jesus" phenomenon:

And lastly, here is a link to one of Wilson's earliest published articles, one that I come back to often, on Joyce and Taoism.

PS: As pointed out to me by the Maybe Logic blog, today is also Albert Hoffman's birthday.

Where We're At (The Center of the Universe)

2012-01-03T23:11:00.006-06:00

The Railway Station at Perpignan (1965) - Salvador Dali

During the year that has just concluded, a good deal of my mental energy was devoted to Salvador Dali and his paranoiac-critical method. The paranoiac method was one of the keys to my study of Dali and James Joyce. For Dali, one of his favorite means of sharing this theory was always his deep infatuation with Millet's famous painting The Angelus (this was discussed in more detail here). During the 1930s, Dali penned a book-length analysis of this seemingly simple painting, asserting that the two farmers, who appear to be observing the daily Angelus prayer devotions in their field, are actually kneeling over a tiny casket. Millet decided to paint over the casket, Dali declared, because it came across as too morbid.

In the early 1960s, Dali arranged to have the original Angelus painting x-rayed at the Louvre museum laboratory in Paris. He and his longtime companion Gala left their home in Cadaqués and headed toward the train station at the town of Perpignan in Spain. While waiting at the station, Dali experienced a deep realization. Standing amid a mass of railway travelers he felt isolated. "I sit on my bench as at a border crossing, I feel myself available, and intense jubilation invades me, a monumental joyfulness," he writes. He came to the "overpoweringly evident" realization that there in the Perpignan train station was the center of the universe. He outlines this experience through glowing language and wit in The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali, pgs 156-159.

So, for years, the station at Perpignan has been a source of enlightenment, a cathedral of intuition to me. I long thought it was because genius needed a trivial place in which to assert itself. The Parthenon and Niagara Falls are too overwhelming! The absurd and the anodyne are better handmaidens to enlightenment. The memories of the unconscious let their passages get through only when the mind is vacant, and toilet seats are a high place for the state of grace, quite as good as the Perpignan station.

He goes on to describe his vision of the station as center of the universe in more precise scientific terms.

Physical, mathematical and astronomical sciences are split over whether the world is finite or infinite. No one has yet answered that key question. At that moment, I knew that the world is limited on only one side, which is its axis. I cannot put into words the vision and certainty I had, but from that moment on there was no longer any doubt in me: cosmic space began in front of the facade of the Perpignan station in the area marked off by the circle of cables, and the universe ended at the same point... Non-Euclidian space stopped at the point where it met the dimension of the mind. This limit could not be defined but could appear only as a vision, a snapshot of absolute time-space that illuminated me viscerally.

With these heavy words clanking around in my brain this summer, I discovered a densely packed little shop along Barton Springs Road here in Austin, Texas, just a bit south of the Colorado River that splits the city. The aura of this little place, a juicebar called Daily Juice (its name recently changed to Juice Land) struck me in the same way the Perpignan station hit Dali and I declared to anyone who would listen to such absurdity, that the Juice Land on Barton Springs Road is the center of the universe.

Center of the universe

The little building is thoroughly decorated both inside and out, the inner walls covered in artwork, articles, bumper stickers carrying powerful quotes ("We have guided missiles and misguided men" by MLK is perhaps my favorite), and even album covers, including one of MF DOOM's classics. Above a refrigerator there is even a diorama displaying a miniature reproduction of the building itself. The place is tiny and built mostly out of stone so it has the appearance of a little hut carved into the side of a hill. It reeks of chlorophyll, its menu of juices and smoothies is vast and just about every single time I've been in there, the entire place is vibrating with the thumping sound waves of some beautiful obscure music.

My deep appreciation for and connection to this place was confirmed one morning when, rushing off to work through the main South Austin vein that is Barton Springs Road, I pulled over to grab a quick smoothie. After I parked, the titillating sounds of Brazilian jazz coming out of the car stereo via Madlib's Medicine Show No. 2: Flight to Brazil held me from leaving the car immediately. Once I managed to get out, my brief walk to Daily Juice had one of those smiley "it's a great day to be alive" feelings and I entered the little juice hut only to hear another familiar frequency of delicious sounds. It was Madlib Medicine Show No. 3: Beat Konducta in Africa. My soul hummed with ecstatic energy. (Read my Medicine Show review sometime why don't ya.)

The iPhone's incredible Shazam app has been put to good use very often in Juice Land as I've needed to identify the source of some sweet sounds blaring through the speakers. Over the last six months or so I've discovered many great songs in my stops for morning or afternoon smoothies. This morning a song slapped my sleepy soul awake and the orchestra's vibes have been bouncing around my brain ever since. I'm tempted to bow down in awe and appreciation at the folks who are responsible for exposing me to this:
Quantic and his combo Barbaro - The Dreaming Mind, Pt. 1 by chabistreet

Tonight begins the entry of the Quadrantids meteor shower into the Earth's celestial sphere and my evening has been imbued with the music of Quantic and his mighty orchestra. Quantic's real name is Will Holland, he is a musician currently residing in the city of Cali, Colombia, the same city wherefrom my brother's wife hails. Within her womb rests the newest member of the vast Quadrino clan, a little girl named Valentina, expected to appear sometime in late April. I will hopefully be headed eastward to Florida around that time to welcome her to the world.

As for now, my ladymate and I are busy preparing for yet another move, this time to a location closer to South Austin and the aforementioned center of my personal cosmology. We should be in the new place by the end of this month so it's possible that my blogging/writing might once again (exactly one year after my last move and brief disappearance from the electronic global village) suffer a bit due to the transition. But, as the New Year has just recently dawned, I do want to state a few of my plans for this blog in 2012. Not resolutions and certainly not guarantees, just projects that I'm aiming for:

expect plenty more analysis, discussion, etc. of James Joyce and his two great epics.
a reintroduction of hockey and basketball posts to the blog
perhaps most importantly, I'm ever so slowly working on a book with two of my favorite living artists: Bronze Nazareth of the Wu-Tang tribe, and his brother Kevlaar 7 (both part of their own hip hop crew called The Wisemen). I was excited to see this officially mentioned by Bronze himself in an interview a couple of weeks ago.
lots more random blobs of thought like this post

So stay tuned...

Album Review: MF DOOM - "Born Like This"

2011-12-29T13:32:00.001-06:00

"Can it be I stayed away too long? Did you miss these rhymes while I was gone?"
- DOOM

After pretty much disappearing off the scene for a few years, DOOM (who dropped the "MF" from his name) released this short but densely rich little album in early 2009. With a total running time of just 40 minutes, four tracks where he doesn't even appear, and plenty of short solo tracks, it's a minimalist approach but then again his previous solo record MM..Food played less than 50 minutes long and was stuffed with lengthy skits and interludes. This is just his style. Madvillainy and DangerDoom were short records too, each one was also eminently replayable.

This album is the same way. The overall beat collection is relatively superb but the highlight is without a doubt DOOM's consistently ridiculous and mesmerizing multi-syllable flow which carries lyrical content that is some of the wittiest shit ever heard from the Doomster. Decades deep into his rapping career, he's evidently focusing on elevating the rhyming craft to new levels.

While there is a nice bunch of superb tracks, there's certainly a few annoyingly lame ones and the album quickly tapers off at the end leaving it feeling like an EP instead of a full-length album. Nevertheless, this release stood up there as one of my favorite albums of the year 2009 and I found myself playing it over and over for months at a time. This is arguably some of the best stuff we've ever heard from hip hop's metal-masked poet.

Album cover:

Overall this is an outstanding piece of artwork, a four-panel folded cardboard booklet laced all over with funky designs that look like alien inscriptions, along with chunky graffiti lettering spelling out DOOM. Interesting theme to it with the solid stone statue of the DOOM mask and slabs of strange hieroglyphic writing. The same cuneiform is on the CD itself and I tried for months to decipher if it was spelling out "Born Like This" but eventually gave up on the possibility that it's not all just gibberish. Absolutely great album cover and I really like the new symbol/logo for DOOM with the two O's forming the eyes in a mask. I hope they stick with that for a while.

1. Supervillain Intro
prod by DOOM

A Special Herb introduces the record before an extremely corny-sounding skit featuring your average Doom-tastic supervillain talk, provided this time by some random dude yelling shit like "Doom's got a plan that's gonna shake the heavens!". I wonder whether or not this was originally supposed to be some kind of old radio or cartoon sample and they had to replace it at the last minute.

Best thing about the intro is that, because it opens with the same beat as the outro, it carries over perfectly from the end of the album and you can spin the cd over and over again in smooth transition.

2. Gazzillion Ear
prod by J Dilla

This is flat-out one of the best DOOM songs I've ever heard. Three verses, 4+ minutes of the metal-faced bard unleashing a variety of rhymes over the sounds of the late J Dilla's classic soul sample chops. DOOM certainly tried to make up for the long absence here at the very beginning, making it clear that not only does he have new lyrical flavors on this album, he's also got a "chip on his shoulder with a slip-on holster" (which perfectly conjures Bruce Willis gunning down an entire gang in "Last Man Standing") and this aggressive approach continues throughout pretty much the entire record. He delivers a ton of astounding rhymes and images in this song and even briefly takes a break to clear his scratchy throat: "elixir for the dry throat, tryin to hit the high note, Villain since an itsy-bitsy zygote." This clearing of the throat is frequently heard on most of DOOM's material nowadays, his raspy voice starting to fade while he attempts to make up for it with ever increasingly complex and visual rhymes. "Raps on backs of treasure maps, stacks to the ceiling fan."

There are a few witty and well-weaved tales of "indiscreet street haggling" here including this beauty:

"Once sold an inbred skinhead a nigger joke
plus a brand new chrome smoker but the trigger's broke
I thought I told him firing pins were separate
he find out later when he tries to go and rep it"

And if you listen closely, all three verses begin with the same theme (reap the benefits of his artform) repeated three different ways:

Verse 1 "won't stop rockin til he clocked in a gazzillion grand";
Verse 2 "do a deal for kicks and get rich quick";
Verse 3 "his agenda is clear: ending this year with dividends to spare."

The three verses are tied together even further than that, too. Doom is lyrically on fire all throughout this album and this opening flame ball is a great way to set it off. "Split, the wick's lit!" he warns in the final line.

5/5
3. Ballskin
prod by Jake One
There's very solid and consistent production on this album as he relied mostly on Jake One, Dilla, and himself (with one excellent contribution from Madlib). After clearing his throat in the opening, Doom rolls out a lengthy and uninterrupted verse, showing the same energetic style he's bringing through the majority of the record.

He's also always good for weaving some old-fashioned parlance into his rhymes like "Don't get keelhauled in, villain always been---thee real genuine ballskin." He summarizes the whole DOOM approach and message pretty well on here, first explaining the unifying element of hiding his face behind a mask ("when he dogs his face, each and every race can enjoy the bass in the place to be") and the standard approach of awakening listeners and making them think ("came to help the people with they minds in they asses").

4.5/5

4. Yessir! feat Raekwon
prod by DOOM

Rae puts the Wu stamp of approval on the record over a classic (overused?) beat break provided by DOOM. Would have been nice to hear DOOM get on the track with him but as it stands it's a nice little interlude from the Chef who was at that point in time (2009) preparing to release Cuban Linx 2 and smash the game.

3/5 [only because of DOOM's absence]

5. Absolutely
prod by Madlib

Like most DOOM releases, this album has a nice flow it to it. It feels like an album, with skits and movie or TV show samples transitioning between songs. In the previous track, after Rae does his thing, a SWAT team clip plays in which the cops are trying to bust into someone's house when shots are fired at them. "They got the villain surrounded," DOOM begins...

Over a vintage Madlib beat with crackling vinyl, a deep muffled bass and neck-snapping drums, DOOM twirls together one of the most villainous verses I've ever heard from him. Only the metal-face villain can so thoroughly outline plans for a crime syndicate with this much lyrical dexterity. He details every part of a vast plot, the payoffs of cops, the contingency plans if anyone's caught, and all the other dark schemes in a perfectly poetic way that sounds DOPE.

"Get bagged, you on ya own, acted alone
back home, your family provided for while ya gone"

One of my favorite joints on the album and a definite Madvillian classic.

5/5

6. Rap Ambush
prod by Jake One

The SWAT team raid theme comes up again here and DOOM is ready with RPGs: "rhyme-propelled grenades." Another awesome song, DOOM goes absolutely nuts and proves once again why he's one of the best emcees in hip hop.

"Old to the new know who holds the hat
custom tailor-fitted, big since first born
head stayed same size, well-spitted game-wise"

Whereas on the previous song he details every aspect of a vast crime sting, here he's basically fighting a lyrical war with land-mine rhymes exploding all over the battlefield. The only artist I can think of who can do something like this is Killah Priest. DOOM basically takes out an entire army in one verse.

"Drag the remains into the open by the bootstraps
dog tag attached to explosive human booby-traps"

Track is short but every bit incredible.

5/5

7. Lightworks
prod by J Dilla

Never really thought of this beat as a battle-joint but DOOM continues a streak of bringing his best with every track so far. Here he's smashing opponents like it's a wrestling or UFC match and he's whooped ass before the match even started. "Welcome to the octagon, lay a player flat before the trainer felt his clock was on."

He stomps out an imaginary opponent for about 1 and a half verses in another pretty short track. This beat is so familiar and well-known already I think he should've opted for a different Dilla joint.

3.5/5

8. Batty-Boys
prod by DOOM

Seemingly a typical DOOM joint, rinky-dink cartoonish beat, lots of sampled quotes, and humorous, witty lyrics. In calling out the gayness behind many super heroes I don't think he's necessarily being a homophobe at all, he's kind of drawing attention to the rampant homophobia in society, except he's doing it in an extremely creative way. He's basically playing the role of a supervillain, talking shit about his enemies (Superman, Batman) and then in the second verse there's a funny scene where he busts in on Batman and Robin getting intimate. "Y'all already got ya belts on the floor so....kick them shits over there and click off the porno. Alfred come home and find 'em both naked, handcuffed to each other just as he had suspected."

Not one of the album's highlights but very creative rhymes on it. DOOM's got a helluva gift for social commentary through funny poetry. (In a similarly controversial way, the latest Madvillainy joint "Travis 911" does this too.)

3/5

9. Angelz feat Tony Starks
prod by DOOM

Great track from the DoomStarks combo. This version is actually tweaked a bit compared to the original one that dropped way before this album, seems like Doom added some extra snares in there, he also changed a few bars from his verse. Lyrically I prefer this version, beat-wise the original was a little better.

It's a great track, nonetheless. Both emcees tell stories, recreating their own episodes of classic 70s TV shows. Ghost delivers an episode of Tony's Angels entitled "Death to a Brooklyn Man," the highlight of which is definitely his impression of a Chinese guy (Mr. Lee) yelling out the window. "Three pay now, you fucking weed head!!"

Doom's verse is Three's Company and the episode is called "Family Jewels," told with ridiculous wordplay ("Feelin woozy, no Uzi, who's he see in the lobby?") while bringing in multiple characters to tell the story. I love this track but I'm still trying to figure out what exactly is going on in Doom's story.
5/5

10. Cellz
prod by DOOM

This track opens with almost 2 minutes worth of dystopian, gruesome ("radiated men will eat the flesh...of radiated men") scenes delivered via Charles Bukowski reciting his poem "Dinosauria, We." With Doom's ominous tones and sound effects blaring behind the poetry, it almost seems like Bukowski was there in the studio recording this piece for the album, but he's has been dead for almost 20 years. His poem stands as a great, though lengthy, intro to this track in which DOOM raps ferociously while crafting scenes of a frightening future society with "savages scavenging for scraps, perhaps road kill, if that" and android women, "dimes quiet as mimes, by design mighty fine."

As is the case with most of the album, DOOM really blasts off lyrically here. The flow and spinning of syllables is amazing, so much so that it's been pretty difficult for me to ascertain much of the lyrics and what he's getting at most of the time. He even pokes fun at this inevitable confusion among his listeners, "Don't know what he saying, but the words be funny." With the dark opening poetry and the quote that separates his verses ("Every human being is responsible for his actions, or that being is still a beast--not yet human!") it's obvious that DOOM is touching on profundities in ways we've never heard from him before. The second verse is almost entirely a lashing out against ignorance and a warning about the dangers of living a life of crime:

"Crime pays no dental, nor medical
unless you catch retirement, county, state or federal
You're heard like roaring waters in a seashell, if a tree fell
you couldn't tell from three-cell, be real careful"

On further consideration, seems like maybe he's toying with the word "Cellz," envisioning a scary scenario of science gone out control in the first verse, and turning that into prison cells in the second verse. The rhymes, the complex image he paints, and the flow make this a track that rewards multiple listens.

4.5/5

11. Still Dope feat Empress Starhh
prod by DOOM

Disappointing that he followed up the heights of the previous track with this relatively weak track. Don't get me wrong, this woman can absolutely rap, but it's strange to hear "I'm still dope even if the bag ain't Coach" after the ferocity DOOM wrought in "Cellz."

The beat is nice, one of the best DOOM provides on this album, but his generosity in giving new emcees a chance gets annoying sometimes as a fan. Would be nice if one day we can have an album of just DOOM rapping for 14 tracks, no outside interruptions. This is the second track on the album in which he doesn't even make an appearance.

3/5

12. Microwave
prod by Jake One

Now we've got three straight excellent tracks before the album sort of abruptly ends. All three of them are similar and each are like microcosms for the overall approach of the album (and, perhaps, most of DOOM's material). They're relatively short (around 2 minutes each) but compact and densely drenched with heavy rhymes.

"His own way was strange but it matters not, tuned into a frequency tone that shattered rock."

4/5

13. More Rhymin
prod by Jake One

Over a dusty piano loop that sounds like hip hop in its purest form, DOOM unfurls one of the more impressive showings of rhyme on the whole record. Whereas tracks like Gazzillion Ear, Absolutely, Rap Ambush, Angelz, and Cellz all generally revolved around a certain theme, these next two are simply artful displays of rhyme-spinning brilliance. Wordplay that is like juggling knives while tiptoeing on a tightrope. The only theme to be found is that DOOM has major skills and could seemingly do this all day.

"Get the message by bird mail or turds flail
Villain man best nerd male ya heard wail"

This beat is perfect for DOOM and he brings "excited writin', triflin' times ten" with mind-bendingly witty rhymes before closing with this gem:

"Get your ticket from the telepath
wicka-wicka-wicka on electroencephalograph"

5/5

14. That's That
prod by DOOM

"Rings of tinkerbell sing for things as frail as a fingernail"

This is the final great track on the album, consisting of one long verse over a nice little violin loop plucked out of MF's special herb garden. Once again DOOM showcases a long-winded flow of witty wordplay and multi-syllable rhyme patterns, at one point he spits this whole thing out in one breath:

"Sickest ninja injury this century enter plea lend sympathy to limper simple simon rhymin emcees"

The lyrical display is jaw-dropping on this track, he's teaching a class on how to dismantle a fake emcee: "Give an emcee a rectal hysterectomy, lecture on removal of the bowels, foul technically." The key point of it all is always to provide that raw organic and healthy food-for-thought, "drop degrees [or knowledge] to stop diseases."

DOOM is at his very best on this track. (Except for the Michael Jackson impression at the very end, that is.)

5/5

15. Supervillianz feat Kurious
prod by DOOM

"That's That" pretty much marks the end of the album for me. This song is by far my least favorite and the next two joints are skits. DOOM's got a wild rapid-fire flow but just one short verse while everyone else takes over the song. The beat is absolutely terrible and the gibberish-spewing Autotune chorus is unbearable. I almost think they made this song as a joke aiming at the horrific excuse for music that passes for rap nowadays. A complete flop in comparison to the first classic DOOM and Kurious collabo.

1.5/5

16. Bump's Message
prod by DOOM

A voicemail singing DOOM's praises. The album's basically over at this point.

17. Thank Ya
prod by DOOM

The same Special Herb beat that opens the record, except now we realize the voice is screaming "Thaaank ya! Thaaank ya!" over and over again. This smoothly transitions back into the opening and this CD is infinitely replayable with its rich rhyme collection.

OVERALL 8.5 out of 10
Lyrics 4.5/5
Beats 4/5

It's hard to give an overall rating to this album because if you consider the full 17 tracks there's a nice chunk (at least 4 or 5 tracks) of skippable stuff here. There are also also at least 6 absolutely incredible songs including one of the best DOOM tracks ever (Gazzillion Ear). Out of the tracks I rated, the average rating amounts to 8 out of 10. But because the lyrics are so damned good and the beat selection one of the most consistently solid from DOOM, I give it an 8.5 out of 10.

Extras:
These are a few of the DOOM joints that came out around this same time period that I thought were just as dope as some of the best tracks on this album:

Sniper Elite (prod. by Dilla)

Fire Wood Drumstix (prod. by Dilla)

Mash's Revenge (prod. by Dilla)

"need me? I'll be peeing in the pool, ka-splash
you might feel a slight drizzle
villain give a squealer a candlelight vigil"

Trap Door (prod. by Jake One)

Return to Reality

2011-12-29T13:02:00.002-06:00

Once again, despite many hours devoted to writing, I've managed to go without any blogposts for over three weeks. Been working on a few large pieces that will be posted once completed.

I'm currently back home in New York's forgotten borough, Staten Island, and haven't had much free time in the midst of excessive relaxation, couch-slothing, and catching up with family and friends, but before the great year of 2011 is suddenly washed away I would like to share a few things.

As I mentioned above, the absence of posts on this blog is by no means an indication of a lack of writing. Two lengthy album reviews have taken up much of my time, the latter still waiting to be completed after over two months of writing (and well over a year of listening to the music). Both will be posted here very soon and the title of this blog post actually derives from the closing track on one of the albums.

Returning to the land of my birth and upbringing has also been a return to reality of sorts. In my nearly four years of nomadhood, there have been many times when I've had to stop for a moment to reflect and remind myself that I am a New York native, spent my entire first 22 years in Staten Island, and not only roamed the streets of Manhattan (a.k.a. New York City, perhaps the epicenter of our globe) but spent so much time there that I grew sick of it and had to escape. This week has been my first time back in the New York area since last August, almost 16 months ago, when I flew back here for one of the most memorable weekends of my life---the baptism of my nephew and the funeral of my grandmother (age 101) which occurred simultaneously when my grandmother permanently left her physical body the day before our flight to New York. The initial experiences upon my return were surreal.*

*In fact, I had intended a massive blog post about the synchronistic baptism/funeral experience with many thoughts on reincarnation and Finnegans Wake but I never managed to untangle all those ideas into blog form.

My first night here was spent in Manhattan; its towering buildings, glistening streets, and bustling throngs of people had me in awe. The next morning, my sister and I traveled due south through the narrow city down to Battery Park to catch the Staten Island Ferry back home and I was overwhelmed with a flush of forgotten memories. My first job was as a messenger in 1999 when I was fourteen years old---Battery Park, Greenwich Street, the World Trade Center, even Zuccotti Park (where I learned to play chess), these were my stomping grounds. Somehow, I hadn't dug into my mind to retrieve those memories over the years. They'd been hidden, caked with layers of dust, and now they were suddenly dug up into the bright winter Christmas Eve morning. As we floated on the Ferry back to Staten Island I felt a warmth in my stomach that could only be described as the feeling of being home.

When I left in 2008, my feelings for New York had hardened. I was absolutely sick of this place. It seems the three-and-a-half years I've spent away from it have enabled me to appreciate it with a renewed perspective. Observing the inhabitants of the Isle of Staten, I've often been reminded of a parable I heard recently. Unfortunately, the specifics of said parable haven't responded either to Google searches or my attempts at mnemonics but the main point of it is: fish swimming around are not aware that they are in water. (Edit: found it---told to me by a new friend I met through this very blog---"There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way who nods at them and says "Good morning, boys. How's the water?" The two young fish swim on for a bit and eventually one of them looks over at the other one and goes "What the hell is water?")

Everyone I encounter (family, friends, pot-bellied big-mouth goons at Costco) is a New Yorker not quite realizing that they are swimming in a sea of New Yorkers. Having escaped this ocean and swam out west for a while where I'm a rare fish out of water (a native New Yorker in strange land), it is much easier for me to take a broader perspective on the primitive biological ocean that gave birth to my soul. The high-energy bickering of my heavily New York-accented family or the bustling subway crowd doesn't suck me in and stress me out anymore, instead there is a feeling of observant detachment. For the first time since I was child, there is a deep awe and appreciation as I move about this magnificent city.

Mo(o)nday

2011-12-05T21:20:00.004-06:00

As I've mentioned a few times recently, this fascinating interview with the late Robert Anton Wilson has sparked a fresh focus for me on the days of the week and the meanings behind them. He was illustrating the applicability of the oft-mentioned 8-circuit model of consciousness and the levels of neuro-evolution. While he didn't really try to tie it with the chakra system, I'm sure it matches up pretty closely with that as well.

Briefly, the week looks like this (with the Spanish words for them to illustrate another point RAW made, that all the European languages denote the same type of gods):

Monday - lunes - day of the Moon, Mother goddess
Circuit I: oral bio-survival (nursing experience, attachment to the mother, earliest stage of human physical development and interaction with the world)

Tuesday - martes - Mars the god of war
Circuit II: emotional territorial (political strategies, emotional power tactics, the toddler stage of human development)

Wednesday - miércoles - Mercury the god of communication
Circuit III: semantic conceptual (organizing symbol systems, communicating, calculating, learning to speak the local tongue, "when we first begin to realize all the noises the adults are making are a code and we decypher it")

Thursday - jueves - Thor the god of thunder
Circuit IV: socio-sexual (domestication, the tribe determines moral and immorality with regards to sexual activity, the introduction of sexual guilt, social relations)

The other four circuits are still not completely understood for me, which makes perfect sense because most human beings operate on the four lower (terrestrial) circuits. But the higher ones are:

Friday - viernes - Venus the goddess of love, sexual ecstasy
Circuit V: neurosomatic circuit (blocking out the first four circuits via yoga, meditation, mantra, etc, the mystic level, Freud's oceanic experience, rapture, able to perceive one's own narrow reality tunnel and freedom from the bottom four circuits, the opening of compassion and deep sensitivity)

Saturday - sabado - Saturn the god of agriculture and harvest (time)
Circuit VI: neurogenetic circuit (Jung's collective unconscious, holistic body/mind/soul balance, realization of timeless self, the feeling of timelessness, achieved through advanced yoga)

Sunday - domingo - The Sun
Circuit VII: metaprogramming circuit (ability to change and program lower circuits, planetary or evolutionary consciousness, perception of the relativity of reality)

[just as the 8th chakra is above and outside of the body, the 8th circuit transcends the days of the week]
Circuit VIII: quantum nonlocal circuit (8th chakra, above the body, transcendence of time and space, out of body experiences, extrasensory perception)

As RAW says, the seventh and eighth circuit "can be better described in art and music" so just take a good listen to this and you'll understand (and come back to Moonday):

"His live performances at their best are regarded as transcendental" - wiki

Near to the heart of will and striving

2011-12-03T23:23:00.002-06:00

Violin string-strummed spirals
Miles in the millions, solar system sphere music.
Improvement of my temperament through diametric spear movements
Near to the heart of will and striving
omnipresent in kinetics while still aligning
spiderweb linked grid thread jingling
sphere-headed being dreaming sun-drenched wave glistenings.

Listening for the next vibecrest to carry me beyond
Along for the ride headphones and sonar sonic bombs.
Hominids travel above abyss and listen to bright psalms
Near to the heart of will and striving
alone and still in the midst of moving mobs.
Wirestrung wig connects, check the line for a break
Four-sided square surrounding, asleep and dreaming of awake.

Break the bond of past mistakes,
whirlwind spin the compass
Make up new creations
and aim again for the wonders.

- PQ 12/3/11 11:23 PM

Listen to this Right Now

2011-12-01T23:45:00.000-06:00

Stop right there. You're already here on my blog now relax, take your shoes off, sit down and enjoy this genius at work. I promise you've never heard or seen anything quite like it.

Wednesday Supper

2011-11-30T23:45:00.004-06:00

"Do I dare
Disturb the Universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."
- T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

I'm determined to jot down a fun little synchronicity I experienced today before Wednesday fades away.

Life here in Austin remains busy but exciting and fun. When I finally got a chance to do a little bit of writing today I found myself deeply considering Wednesday and the meaning behind it. An extremely interesting (though lengthy) interview with Robert Anton Wilson I heard recently put my mind on this path of considering the archetypal meanings behind our days of the week. In his discussion, which I will summarize more completely in a future post, he attempts to connect the 8-circuit model of consciousness to the days of the week. Wednesday represents the 3rd circuit, the level of communication, which is usually referred to as the semantic circuit. It is by semantics, the organization of our vast symbols and data of language, that I am able to communicate with, for instance, Lao Tzu who wrote the Tao Te Ching 2,500 years ago.

Wednesday is the day of communication, in Latin languages this is more obvious. Wednesday in Spanish is miércoles, in French it's Mercredi, Italian mercoledi---all named after Mercury, the messenger with winged sandals.

On another note, I've been engaged in reading an essay by Joyce scholar Eric Rosenbloom (a perfectly Joycean surname) breaking down the incredible array of meanings contained within the little story of the prankquean in Finnegans Wake (p. 21-23). He abbreviates prankquean with "PQ" throughout the essay and, among the many layers of meaning in that part of the story, is the prankquean as the Egyptian goddess Nut or Nuit whose "body arched over the earth" forming the sky. This is a well-known image and in fact it's on the cover of a book I just completed (and will review soon), The Illuminati Papers by Robert Anton Wilson.

The sky goddess swallows the sun each night and after it travels through her body it is released in the morning (pooped out? I'm not sure) where it then floats along her body back to her mouth to be swallowed again. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which figures deeply into Finnegans Wake, "the deceased soul was to join the sun on its journey." Rosenbloom notes that later Egyptians conceived the sky as a vast ocean, with the journey of the deceased taking place inside of a boat. (This perfectly reminds me of the cover image on Stanislav Grof's excellent book, The Ultimate Journey: Consciousness and the Mystery of Death.)

This is going somewhere. I promise.

In the Wake story of which Rosenbloom speaks, the prankquean kidnaps a set of twins ("jiminies" or gemini, also the twins Isis and Osiris) from the castle of Jarl van Hoother (a dream-distorted version of the Earl of Howth), and runs off with them. Joyce then gives us this image:

"The prankquean was to hold her dummyship and the jiminies was to keep the peacewave and van Hoother was to git the wind up." (FW, p. 23)

Rosenbloom presents the picture thusly:

"The boat of the soul floats on the waters of PQ, a jiminy at the tiller and a jiminy at the prow, its sail filled by the breath of Jarl van Hoother."

In a footnote, he points out that this same image appears in a book by 16th-century philosopher Giordano Bruno (an Oriental-minded heretic burned at the stake by the church and later revered by Joyce):

The gemini twins are here represented by the flames on the either side of the ship's mast. The name of the book in which this appears? The Ash Wednesday Supper.

Look Around (Wonder)

2011-11-28T23:51:00.003-06:00

"Time is only floating in your mind" - Stevie Wonder

"Everything we see is inside our own heads" - Buckminster Fuller

"The 4th dimension is time,
it goes inside the mind
when the chakras energize
up through the back of your spine"
- The Rza

"there is a future in every past that is present" - James Joyce (Finnegans Wake p. 496)

Unfortunately, I do not have much TIME to write but I do want to mention a few things. I enjoyed a nice, delicious Thanksgiving Day last Thursday (featuring two separate vegan feasts, actually), during which time it struck me that in the last 5 years I've eaten a Thanksgiving meal in 4 different cities (New York, London, San Diego, Austin in that order).

Yesterday I unloaded a stack of about 10 unwanted books at a used bookstore to begin the process of down-sizing to prepare for an upcoming move to a different apartment. This will mark the 5th time I've moved in the last 4 years. Prior to that I spent the first 22 years of my life living in the same bedroom, let alone the same address.

At the bookstore I almost bought a couple of really cool-looking books that intrigued me, but decided at the last minute it didn't make sense to bring more books home when I'm trying to purge belongings. On the topic of TIME, though, the books bear mentioning. They were both part of the excellent Introducing... series published by Totem Books, a collection of paperbacks with illustrations and basic introductory overviews for a whole variety of topics. I can highly recommend the James Joyce, Friedrich Nietzsche, and The Universe editions and if there's anyone else you're interested in learning about (famous minds, but also concepts or historical periods are covered), this series of books is perhaps the best thing to look for. Anyway, the books were Introducing Relativity and Introducing Quantum Theory (for a total of $12), I will hopefully grab them at some point in the future when I get to settle down in a new place.

In between our two Thanksgiving feasts last week, my girlfriend and I sort of randomly made our way over to the movies to see whatever was playing at that time. The film we saw was Martin Scorsese's new 3-D excursion Hugo. The young protagonist Hugo works as a clockmaker (or timekeeper) in the Montparnasse train station in 1920s Paris. Honestly, we had to leave the film early because of time constraints but it was an okay film. Visually beautiful but a bit slow-moving. The reason I bring it up is because of a brief but very noticeable cameo by none other than JAMES JOYCE himself. And, of course, after all the work I did on my big essay this year comparing Joyce and Salvador Dali (noting that there is no record of them ever having met), the scene shows James Joyce and Salvador Dali sharing a table at a café in the train station. It's one of the first scenes in the film.

This morning I received word from the editors of the James Joyce Quarterly that they will have an answer for me within the next two weeks about whether or not they will accept my Joyce-Dali paper to be published in their journal. Very hopeful, very excited.

And now, to tie a knot on this synchronistic little post, here is a famous picture of a train crash at the aforementioned Montparnasse train station in Paris in 1895:

And here is a famous Surrealist painting called Time Transfixed by René Magritte.

Gza/Genius Harvard Lecture

2011-11-25T00:44:00.002-06:00

The Gza aka The Genius, one of the core members of the Wu-Tang Clan (he, Rza, and ODB are all cousins and had been running around as the All In Together Now crew prior to the Wu birth) will be delivering a lecture at Harvard University next Thursday December 1st. It's open to the public, I wish I could go up there and witness it.

Gza is getting up there in age these days and I've rashly complained about his sleepy flow and delivery on his last disappointing (for me) album but he still remains one of the premier intellectual lyric crafters on the planet. His Liquid Swords and Beneath the Surface albums are personal classics and he was always one of my top 3 favorite emcees in the 9-member Wu-Tang Clan.

He's always good for giving forth fascinating thoughts on the universe, chess, poetry, water, etc in interviews and discussions so I imagine this Harvard lecture will be something pretty monumental. A few years back, an art magazine in Germany did a full issue on The Gza/Genius called "Weapons of Math Destruction" that was superb and I ended up purchasing this magazine straight from Berlin and still have it (in my Staten Island bookshelf, actually). When I go back up to New York for Christmas this year I'll be sure to retrieve that little booklet and inscribe some quotes from it here.

For now, here are a few exemplary Gza tracks beyond the commonplace favorites on Liquid Swords (an album that Rolling Stone magazine listed as one of the "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die").

"I fashion the first tool
from the elements the earth use
and built it to a complex
network of communications"

Many people forget or just don't even know the profundity of this man's mind and the minds he molded. The Rza (one of the greatest teachers in my life) was mentally civilized and enlightened originally by his older cousin Gza (real name Gary Grice). Gza also mentored and brought into the globe's musical atmosphere two other of my favorite artists/lyricists/thinkers in Killah Priest and Masta Killa. (It's worth noting that the frequency of the word Killah in Wu-Tang names is, as Killah Priest has explained in the past, not simply a different or creative way to spell "killer" but a reference to killing the negative thoughts in one's own and in listeners' minds, the "-ah" suffix combining Allah with the slang Killa; the point is to rebuild oneself into a knowledge of one's own godliness, the Arm-Leg-Leg-Arm-Head so beautifully captured by Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.)

"Form metaphorical parables that fertilize the Earth
wicked niggas come trying to burglarize the turf!"

"Uncompleted missions/ throw in ya best known compositions
you couldn't add it up/ if you mastered addition
Where I come from/ gettin' visual's habitual"

Gza sparsely appeared on the Clan's third album, The W but he delivered a few incredible verses. Observe:

To top it all off, here is a film clip with Rza, Gza and their good friend Bill Murray:

Watch Delirium - Gza, Rza & Bill Murray in Comedy | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Thankful

2011-11-24T23:01:00.000-06:00

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

This 5-minute clip pretty summarily presents what I am thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day.

Watch the video first but also here is the list of what is shown, in order of appearance:

1. Aurora Borealis Pass over the United States at Night
2. Aurora Borealis and eastern United States at Night
3. Aurora Australis from Madagascar to southwest of Australia
4. Aurora Australis south of Australia
5. Northwest coast of United States to Central South America at Night
6. Aurora Australis from the Southern to the Northern Pacific Ocean
7. Halfway around the World
8. Night Pass over Central Africa and the Middle East
9. Evening Pass over the Sahara Desert and the Middle East
10. Pass over Canada and Central United States at Night
11. Pass over Southern California to Hudson Bay
12. Islands in the Philippine Sea at Night
13. Pass over Eastern Asia to Philippine Sea and Guam
14. Views of the Mideast at Night
15. Night Pass over Mediterranean Sea
16. Aurora Borealis and the United States at Night
17. Aurora Australis over Indian Ocean
18. Eastern Europe to Southeastern Asia at Night

Grab Your Gas Masks

2011-11-20T13:32:00.000-06:00

A group of college students were holding a peaceful protest at the University of California Davis to rally against recent tuition hikes as well as the acts of police brutality that had occurred at other University of California campuses earlier in the week. Apparently, they had linked arms and set up a blockade to protect tents that they had set up for the protest.

What isn't shown in the video is that after the line of students was sprayed in the face with pepper spray, officers tried to separate them using batons, and when students attempted to cover their face with clothing, "police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood." That quote is from a powerful open letter written by one of the school's professors to the school chancellor demanding her resignation.

Earlier in the week in New York, after police raided the encampment at Zuccotti Park, they disposed of some 5,000 books from the library that had been set up. There is no greater sign of the dire situation we're in than when authorities confiscate and destroy BOOKS, documents of knowledge. There are, in fact, few things that could rile me up more than that. Police forcing pepper spray down the throats of peaceful college students is one of those things.

An 84-year-old woman was pepper-sprayed in the face during a protest in Seattle this week. A priest was pepper-sprayed as well. A couple weeks ago, an Iraq War veteran nearly died when a tear gas canister was fired directly at his face. (By contrast, take a quick listen to this speech from President Obama earlier this year demanding that the Egyptian authorities "refrain from violence against any peaceful protesters." If you find the absurdity of his hypocrisy completely unbelievable, then you might need to take a look at all the Goldman Sachs employees currently in the Obama Administration. This is not a new phenomenon. )

If it hasn't sunk in yet, consider also that among the protesters on Thursday in New York City was a large group of children carrying signs and singing. There was also a retired Philadelphia police captain among the protesters and he was arrested in full police uniform.

I'm not sure there is an another image quite as striking as that. Perhaps only this one sums things up better:

If somehow, someway you still do not understand the magnitude of what is going on or why it is happening, take a look at this New York Times article about the 100 million Americans that are now in poverty or on the brink of it.

As scary as things may seem, it is certainly an exciting time to be alive.

Four Books Reviewed

2011-11-12T19:37:00.002-06:00

"The critic...tells of his mind's adventures among masterpieces"

- Anatole France

A tetrad of loosely interrelated books has been occupying my moments of free time the last couple of months and now that I'm just about finished reading all of them, I'd like to share my thoughts on all four.

Prometheus Rising
by Robert Anton Wilson

The legend known among fans and followers as RAW first began to interest me a couple of years ago when I discovered the Maybe Logic blog and the all the rich brain food that's been roasting over there. I was led to the site through messing around with Google, searching for combos of names like Joseph Campbell and James Joyce until eventually I stumbled upon this incredible audio interview in which Robert Anton Wilson discusses Finnegans Wake and Campbell's Skeleton Key. The raspy voice and thick Brooklyn accent pouring out infinite multifaceted knowledge was very appealing (I grew up listening to mostly Brooklyn/Staten Island accents) but it wasn't until this summer that I finally started looking into Wilson's body of work. The first book I picked up was his collection of essays entitled Coincidance which features a good chunk of Joyce analysis unlike anything you'll find elsewhere, along with some humorously written conspiracy pieces and brain exercises.

I found his writing style so engaging and captivating that I put some of his other books on my future reading list and eventually picked up the highly-regarded Prometheus Rising. The book has been such a great read that RAW has rapidly shot up into my list of favorites and lately I can't get enough of his writings, interviews, and YouTube lectures. The book is primarily a study of the evolution of human consciousness and how most human beings advance only to a certain level (barely half way up the ladder) and remain there all their lives, condemned to view the universe through a narrow "reality tunnel." Using psychology, biology, neurology, mythology, history, and plenty of other elements, Wilson weaves an engaging and entertaining analysis of Timothy Leary's eight-circuit model of consciousness in an attempt to shake the reader's perspective of reality and allow us to elevate to higher levels of consciousness. Each chapter includes exercises at the end to help break out of our imprinted "circuits" or systems of receiving and reacting to the world.

His main goal is to make us think, to shake us free from the shackles of preconceived notions that are constructed during our upbringing and experiences. The end-of-the-chapter exercises often consist of things like "if you're liberal, subscribe to a conservative magazine for a few months" or "if you're straight, pretend you're gay for a week" and so on; the point, of course, is not to turn liberals into conservatives and make straight folks gay but to allow us to understand that we (and everyone else) sees the world through their own conditioned reality tunnel. It is not all about seeing things the way others do, though, a main point made in the book is also the fact that we convince ourselves that we can't change, can't excel, can't elevate. My favorite exercise thus far is "convince yourself that you can exceed all your previous hopes and ambitions."

It's an extremely eye-opening book and really changes the way I look at humanity (and I'm still not even finished reading it). I can't recommend the book highly enough and I will definitely be devoting another blog post to expanding on its material in the near future. For now, if you're interested in getting a taste of what the book is all about, go check out this roughly one-hour lecture in which he summarizes virtually the entire thing. Wilson's work is quickly sucking me in like a blackhole so you can expect plenty more posts about it in the future.

War and Peace in the Global Village
by Marshall McLuhan

Along with Robert Anton Wilson, McLuhan has become someone whose work I can't get enough of lately. After reading a couple of books summarizing his life and philosophies, I finally decided to pick up a few original books by the man himself. I've got The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media waiting on the shelf and I devoured War and Peace in the Global Village over the last few weeks. It looked to be the most appealing of the three books I received, with illustrations and photos on every page, plus Finnegans Wake quotes on just about every page (he provides a fascinating little breakdown of the ten one-hundred-lettered thunder claps that appear in the Wake), and a small stature, small enough to squeeze in one's back pocket. I got an original 1968 edition but it looks barely touched.

The first thing that struck me about it is that I could easily see why McLuhan was often a hated figure among his contemporaries in the 60s and 70s. His style of writing is strange, meandering and very difficult to follow (he calls this style "probing"). Rarely does he write two paragraphs without resorting to quoting some other author, often at absurd lengths (two or three pages). He also doesn't ever explain his ideas in clear terms, usually making opaque assertions and trying to back them up with big quotes or seemingly unrelated allusions. It's obvious he had a very unusual mental structure.

A few flashes of bright insight show that he was also quite clearly a genius. The book is broken up into about 5 sections, some very long and some very short. He opens by circulating around his famous vision of the modern technological world as a Global Village. This was in the late 60s, long before the rise of the internet and smartphones but he was so on point, it's unbelievable. McLuhan speaks of all technology as extensions of the human body. So the telescope is an extension of the eye, the wheel an extension of the foot, etc and this leads to computers and digital devices as an extension of the human nervous system. The entire planet is now covered in an invisible nervous system that connects everybody together so that an event that occurs in New York City is instantly felt in Hawaii, Japan, and the remote reaches of the Russian Tundra.

He goes on for far too long in this first section, starting out by detailing how the advances of technology over the last 2,500 years specialized military and warfare while facilitating the growth of empires (he gets things a bit twisted in the process) and moving to a discussion of the proliferation of psychedelic drugs among young people in the 60s, arguing that it was a response to the rise of technology, comparing the effect of TV and computers to a "high" state that must be replicated or dilated through the use of drugs. He also makes a much more salient point on this last subject (and this starts to bring in what I see as McLuhan's main theme) which is that as humanity moves from the fragmented industrial age to the revival of the tribal atmosphere in a digital global village, the ritual becomes much more important and prevalent among the new generations, and here he quotes drug users lauding the ritual aspect of communal drug use.

It is in the next sections that the book finally gets engaging and truly fascinating as he first talks about "War as Education" and then "Education as War." The former has to do with the rapid advances in knowledge and technology during times of war, the latter with our culture's way of imprinting old and out-dated ideas onto our youth. This discussion of education actually perfectly aligned with what Robert Anton Wilson was saying in Prometheus Rising. As McLuhan writes:

"In the information age it is obviously possible to decimate populations by the dissemination of information and gimmickry...It is simple information technology being used by one community to reshape another. It is this type of aggression that we exert on our own youngsters in what we call 'education.' We simply impose upon them patterns that we find convenient to ourselves and consistent with available technologies. Such customs and usages, of course, are always past-oriented and the new technologies are necessarily excluded from the educational establishments until the elders have relinquished power."

Wilson talked about this exact same thing in his elaboration of the so-called "semantic" circuit or level of consciousness:

"Cynics, satirists, and 'mystics' [McLuhan can be considered something of a satirical mystic, actually] have told us over and over that 'reason is a whore,' i.e. that the semantic circuit is notoriously vulnerable to manipulation by the older, more primitive circuits."

Further exploration of the similarities between RAW and McLuhan will be forthcoming in a separate blogpost, but for now I will stick to the script. Overall, War and Peace in the Global Village is a fascinating and often frustrating book; it's visually pleasing and there are plenty of great insights but for a tiny book it can get boring quickly.

The first two books reviewed here are ones that I've been reading as part of the preliminary process of preparing for the big study of Ulysses I am hoping to begin soon. Both Wilson and McLuhan are obsessed with Joyce and offer interpretations of his work unlike anything you'll find in regular Joyce critiques and analyses so I want to soak up whatever I can from them right now (while also familiarizing myself with their work). The two reviews below are of books that I'm reading more for fun and personal development.

Integral Life Practice
by multiple authors

This book is a kind of instruction manual or school textbook written by a bunch of people. It is a very clear and simple-to-understand exposition of Ken Wilber's Integral Theory and how to apply it to all aspects of life. Back in 2008, while visiting a graduate school in San Francisco I had gotten into a nice discussion with the clerk at the school bookstore. We were discussing Carl Jung, Stanislav Grof, Joseph Campbell and some of my other favorites when he brought up Ken Wilber and started gushing about how he's the best philosopher/writer/psychologist there is right now and his books are the greatest shit ever. Despite his proselytizing, I decided to push off reading Wilber's stuff for the future and picked up Richard Tarnas' latest book instead.

Four years later, I came across this Integral Life Practice book in a used bookstore and finally decided to give it a chance. It's not really written by Wilber; he wrote the introduction and oversaw the book's production but other than that, a group of devotees took his ideas and expanded on them in terms that a layman could understand.

The subtitle for the book is "A 21st-Century Blueprint for Physical Health, Emotional Balance, Mental Clarity, and Spiritual Awakening" and that just about sums it up. It's more vanilla consciousness-expanding tutorial than New Age, esoteric tome. The whole Integral theory is built from a simple foundation: a quadrant. In the upper left is the individual interior (feelings, emotions, consciousness), the upper right is the individual exterior (physical body and its actions), bottom left is the collective interior (culture, society, morals), and the bottom right is the collective exterior (the planet, the state, community).

From the base of this very useful quadrant, the reader is taught how to achieve their highest potentiality in four fields: the shadow, the mind, the body, and the spirit. The inclusion of the shadow within the normal "mind, body, spirit" bunch seemed strange at first but the authors stress that it is important for us to confront and assimilate our psychological shadows first before progressing through advancement in other states. Each of the four fields (shadow, mind, body, spirit) include very simple tutorials and directions for practice, the so-called "shadow work" was actually very beneficial in my experience and I'm thankful to have come across such a thing. The other practices were also very rewarding.

It's easy to see what is so special about Wilber and his integral theory; it is a pretty damn admirable attempt at integrating the greatest wisdom and knowledge of all possible fields, presented in a relatively simple manner. The highest advances in psychology, nutrition, exercise, yoga, physics, spirituality, sociology and more are combined to formulate the elevation of humans to their highest potential. It's not too far off from Prometheus Rising in that sense, though with RAW the writing is much more entertaining and often daring. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone trying to elevate their consciousness, mind, body, etc. A consistent approach to carrying out its methods will undoubtedly reap huge benefits.

Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings
by Rob Brezsny

In a way, this book combines all three of the other ones. What a whacky and spectacular book this is...

This book sort of found me, I was at the house of one my girlfriend's co-workers and it was sitting innocently on the couch, unnoticed by anyone. It's a large book (thick but also tall) and the huge glowing mandala on the cover caught my eye. I flipped it open and found a mention of Joseph Campbell and thought "okay, it's got my attention." Wondering what else it might have to offer, I flipped through it a bit more and came across a mention of Finnegans Wake and then Robert Anton Wilson and I was officially hooked in. Bought it a few days later.

The message of the book is quite perfectly summed up in its title---the author argues that the entire universe is designed to shower you with blessings (if you can learn to see it that way). It sounds silly and, of course, it is kind of silly but through all kinds of whacky humor and stunning intelligence in this unusual book, the point is made quite strongly. The more I read RAW's work, the more I see this book as a descendant of it, but nevertheless it is still a special achievement. Once again, here is a book attempting to shake you out of your rigid bounds, to burst you free of your shackles.

It looks sort of like a big coloring book or the type of workbooks kids use in elementary school. There are mandalas and every other conceivable spiritual symbol flooding each page while Brezsny jots a handful of personal stories of creative awakening and spiritual liberation in a wonderfully humorous and intelligent manner. He's got a gift for writing and coming up with the funniest-yet-profoundest phrases, very often it seems like he's poking fun at himself and the book itself but he's delivering powerful messages at the same time. A perfect example is in the book's outlined objective on page 7: "To explore the secrets of becoming a wildly disciplined, fiercely tender, ironically sincere, scrupulously curious, aggressively sensitive, blasphemously reverent, lyrically logical, lustfully compassionate Master of Rowdy Bliss."

As funny as it can be sometimes, it's also a book that continually shocks me with how much intellect it contains. As I mentioned, there's discussion of Joyce, Campbell, and RAW but also Jung, Freud, Shakespeare, Dante, and pretty much everything else I've ever been even remotely interested in and then some. Besides the handful of personal stories that are shared, there are 15 chapters featuring great quotes on particular subjects (dreams, the shadow, the universe, etc), thought-provoking collections of (positive) world news & events, and so-called "Pronoia Therapy" which consists of exercises (888 of them altogether) in a similar sense to those presented in RAW's books, except much whackier. Similar to how Joyce's greatest books contain a sort of alchemy or black magic ritual under the surface, Brezsny loads this book up with all kinds of masonic, occult, religious, mythological symbols and twists their axioms to promote the pronoiac, positive aura in the reader. It's been a very nice panacea for me after all the deep study I did on the subject of paranoia for my Dali-Joyce paper, plus it really is a perfect antidote to the cynical, world-renouncing feeling one gets when reading or thinking about the numerous atrocities and abuses of power destroying the planet. It's perfect for those who desperately need to balance their minds from too much conspiracy (Illuminati, world government, evil oligarchy) material.

This is a book that I can't seem to ever stop reading, I imagine it will be in my pile of books for at least another 5 years. It's not quite inexhaustible but flipping it open to a random page any time always yields some bright light and sends me off on some rewarding path. Mounds and mounds of ponderous, positive, and productive stuff in here. To close, here's a selection from the book that quite perfectly ties all 4 of these reviewed books together while also aptly applying to the turmoil of our times.

As much as we might be dismayed at the actions of our political leaders, pronoia says that toppling any particular junta, clique or elite is irrelevant unless we overthrow the sour, puckered mass hallucination that is mistakenly called "reality"---including the part of that hallucination we foster in ourselves.

The revolution begins at home. If you overthrow yourself again and again and again, you might earn the right to help overthrow the rest of us.

Peirce Quincuncial

2011-11-11T17:57:00.002-06:00

Peirce quincuncial projection

Envisioning the Wake

2011-11-09T13:25:00.001-06:00

"No other human being in the history of the world, including Beethoven, has ever given every single piece of emotion and thought and feeling the way Joyce did. He dredged up every ounce of his soul, every cell, every gene."
- John Gardner on Finnegans Wake

"We may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we're presurely destined to be odd's without ends."
- Finnegans Wake, pg 455

Artist Stephen Crowe has been carrying out the ambitious and impressive task of illustrating James Joyce's Finnegans Wake one page at a time for almost two years now over at his blog Wake in Progress. I've drawn attention to his excellent work before and it's nice to see that he's getting more and more recognition for it. On Bloomsday earlier this year, his art was displayed at the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris and recently some of his work was prominently featured in an art magazine called Her Royal Majesty. (The magazine's got a cool cover, too, shown on the right.)

Their website published a brief but interesting interview with Crowe, delving into the reasons behind the project and what his goals are with it. I highly recommend checking it out and there's a nice sampling of his art pieces there, too. Considering the quote at the very top of this post, it's amazing to contemplate the fact that, as Crowe declared in the interview, "Finnegans Wake might be the single most neglected book in history by a major writer." It's admirable that Crowe is undertaking this project to try and bring light to this classic book of the dark and the work he's been creating in the process has been extremely impressive. I look forward to whenever he might complete this enterprise so that perhaps a new edition of the Wake can be put together with Stephen's illustrations on each page. It's a book of nearly 700 pages, though, so it's gonna be a while.

If you've got any interest in Joyce, you must explore Stephen Crowe's blog devoted to arguably the greatest and most neglected artistic achievement in human history. He makes it about as understandable as that crazy book can be and provides not just illustrations but occasional essays, including this one on why Finnegans Wake is better than Ulysses (though I offered my own response to this assertion in the comments). He's also selling framed prints now, hopefully I'll grab one of those this holiday season.

Abandoned Library

2011-11-09T09:20:00.000-06:00

Happy Halloween and God Bless The Dead

2011-10-31T20:14:00.001-05:00

"Every one of those unfortunates
during the process of existence
should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as of the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests."
- George Gurdjieff

That picture came from a random blogpost I came across by a writer from Argentina who wrote a very nice little analysis of James Joyce's story "The Dead." The final scene in that story is what makes it so famous, in fact, I met at least one Joyce scholar who thinks it's the greatest piece he ever wrote. Long before the enormous epic novels.

"The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached the region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out in a gray impalpable world: The solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight."

It starts to snow, interrupting his transportive trance while staring out a hotel window at night.

Over the weekend, my home city of Staten Island saw its worst October snowstorm in recorded history. The whole northeast was absolutely blasted by snow worse than ever before. Millions of people lost power, Connecticut had its worst power outage in history.

"Snowfall like blankets of death..."
is a line heard in the album that I published a review for today.

Today I learned that an old friend, a man who worked for my father for as long as I was alive, passed away at age 91. He had been sick with pneumonia for a little while. Tony Bassolino was a big man, tall and sturdy with a gruff Brooklyn accent. He'd been a Marine in World War II and then worked for many years as a New York City Sanitation worker; a lifelong garbage man. He was in his 70s and 80s when I got to know him best. Even at that age he was something like a giant bear who didn't even know he had clothes on---roughing it up with heavy, enormous, gooey bags of garbage he would get nasty slop all over himself with no regard. Often he'd be wearing some old football sweatshirt or something.

I spent a few summers working alongside him, picking up garbage all around my neighborhood and loading it into a truck to be personally delivered to a dump in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He was afraid of nothing, and shocked if I was afraid of anything, even a maggot-infested half-opened bag of old garbage. Or enormous pieces of wood or old trees covered in old rusty nails or spiders and ants. We always bonded on the trips to the garbage dump. His attention was curt and he didn't really prefer to listen to me all that much, just a few questions here and there ("heh?" he'd bark loudly when he couldn't hear me) to get him started on talking about something and I was ready to listen.

On one of those trips he let me hold the steering wheel for the truck, first time I can ever remember controlling a car in any way. On another of those trips he let me drive the truck, at age 16, for a little while on a service road. It was the first time I ever controlled a vehicle on my own. I remember being amazed at how loose the steering wheel seemed, so easy and soft to move it.

On just about every one of those trips, he'd always stop at the Burger King on Route 1 & 9 in New Jersey so I could eat breakfast (we always worked in the morning and I could never wake up early enough to eat breakfast at home). He was always very obliging, he'd just sit in the car and wait as I went and picked up french toast sticks, always the same meal. On one occasion he came in with me and ordered the same thing as me, we sat there sharing a breakfast of french toast sticks with syrup, me at 16 years old and Tony in his early 80s. It must've looked to people like I was having breakfast with my grandfather but instead he was my co-worker (and superior), he was also old enough to be my dad's father and since my dad was old enough to be my grandfather (I was conceived in his late 40s), I could've been sitting there sharing breakfast with my great grandfather.

But he was my co-worker and friend. And we were about to go down the road to an indoor dump, where I would don a little mouth-mask to guard my senses from the foul and oxygen-smothering stench of a garbage dump the size of a football field. Tony never wore a mask. And when we'd get out and quickly try to empty a truck full of garbage in under 5 minutes, he'd fling heavy pieces of scrap and garbage with a ballsy voracity and zeal unlike anything I'd ever witnessed. Towards the end of the load were always the biggest things; huge blocks of wood or brick, whatever it was he would attack it like battling a dragon or a huge whale. I remember the sight of him overtaken by an object's enormous weight one time, he looked like a sea captain hanging by the very end of his ship's mast in a vicious storm. It was so beautiful I burst out in uncontrollable joy and laughter. "Get back in the truck!" he screamed; I was in danger and not offering much help.

When we were done he'd drive us back home, his brown-spotted bare hands bloody or dirt-strewn, his face sweaty, the radio blaring WFAN 20-20 sports. Back at home, my workday was done before 11 AM most days and I'd relax and do whatever the hell it is teenagers do on lazy summer afternoons.

I will never forget those mornings. I hope big Tony rests in peace now, the winds of time having finally eroded that sturdy temple of his.

Here are those final words of "The Dead":

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Album Review: Who Got the Camera? by Kevlaar 7

2011-10-31T15:48:00.001-05:00

Note: this review was actually written in August, about a month before the Occupy Wall Street protests started springing up everywhere. Obviously, that stuff is extremely relevant to the album but I'd rather leave the review as it is and let it stand as a time capsule to show the building pressure and anger mounting right before things started blowing up into mass protests in this country. Also, please see my condensed version of this review, published in Slant Magazine back in March.

I write this now six months after it was released and its message is as relevant now as it was the moment it dropped. This EP, a musical outcry for "revision of the whole system," was released while mass street movements erupted in Egypt and throughout the Middle East, and now London is experiencing a violent uprising of the deprived on its city streets. The London uprising was reportedly sparked as a reaction to the police murdering an innocent man, Mark Duggan, similar to the slaying of Oscar Grant and the many other innocent victims mentioned throughout this album.

This is Kevlaar 7 asserting himself as one of the best hip hop emcees on the planet right now (or at the very least, "the illest nigga in the mitten [Detroit]"), by tapping into and broadcasting the present revolutionary aura of the earth, this zeitgeist of dissent and uprising, truth vs. power, speaking on it loud and clear for all the listeners who may not have been hearing the loudly churning wheels of history since most rappers don't acknowledge it (instead, they blindly exacerbate the plight of their own people). The miserable state of the art (hip hop) is just another symptom of the nefariously corrupted system in place, begging for a destroying/rebuilding flip from the conveyors of real(ity).

Hip hop, which in its truest essence is a form of revolt, is here returned to its impassioned glory, the rebel army fighting back with violently pulsating waves of knowledge and wisdom.

On this 11-track EP, Kevlaar gathers the sounds of producers and emcees from all over the world to help convey the message. "Is you cowards or coming with me? It's gritty/ Before it gets better it gets more shitty." The overall result is what I think is a deeply meaningful and memorable piece of music. This album has defined my entire year thus far, personally (or at least the first half of my year). As an EP with a close consistency of quality its replay value is enormous and I found myself listening to this everyday (on repeat) for more than two months straight when it was first released. I still throw it on pretty regularly, its aggressive and well-spoken criticism of things works as a panacea, a means of relief from the stress this often hideous world brings, while the chords struck at the end of it are uplifting.

Above all, it is an album of consistently DOPE hip hop with a heavy message inside of it that doesn't manage to disrupt the musical, artistic element.

1. Empires
produced by Zakat

Smooth, somnolent strings open the album. The looping record of brainwashed sheep. Off in the distance army machine guns rattle, police sirens fly by. This is the sound of our empire, the New Roman Empire. The eminent voice of Cornel West articulates the immensely eye-opening paradox of Jesus, "a jew living in the underside of the Roman Empire." He was put to death as a political prisoner, hung on a cross by the Romans---the same Romans who later adapted Christianity as their official religion before "going on persecuting the other folks, jews and others."

The question is raised: with all this talk about Jesus, does anybody consider the relationship between the empire that put him to death and the empire we are a part of now? (The same empire that "uses theology as a gun" to quote Kevlaar later in "Garden of Eden.")

And, "given what he [Jesus] was willing to sacrifice in his own imperial moment," wouldn't Jesus ask of us the same revolt, the same sacrifice in the face of oppression?

This is the awakening of those who are asleep. The beat, becoming increasingly soulful, drifts into the distance, its sounds emanating like the tones of the wake-up record in Inception. A voice sings "this is how I feel..." while the song fades away.

A perfect intro by Bay Area producer Zakat (the word "zakat" referring to the almsgiving pillar of Islam), this is a bestowal of alms in the form of music, a sign of Kevlaar devoting his art as a loud voice for the oppressed, an offering of art in the service of truth.

5/5

2. Tears (Why Me)
featuring Zagnif Nori (of Noble Scity) and Shake C (of I.W.G.)
prod. by Bronze Nazareth

The notion of tears is carried on from the closing words of the previous song. This world, when the wool is lifted from our eyes, is certainly an ugly place, ugly enough to bring one to despair. A chilling scene opens this track, the recording of an interview with a young black man in prison for murder who confesses that he's "got nothin to live for, I don't know why the fuck I was born in the first place." He presents a sad reflection on existence but affirms this life in the end, saying that there "ain't no use cryin' over it."

This song is an affirmation, the will to be "positive through the worst fate as drama builds." The beat is one of the most emotionally-charged joints from Bronze Nazareth I've heard in a long time, Kevlaar certainly picked a ripe instrumental from the Bronze beat farm. All three emcees rise to the epic occasion and deliver powerful verses.

"Welcome to the revolution, see the rebel movement, 1080 resolution" - Shake C.

Zagnif Nori, a New York emcee representing Noble Scity (one of the like-minded underground groups arising) delivers an egalitarian verse with an impressive array of adeptly delivered lines with many syllables, heavy with imagery. He deserves major props for delivering so well on this opening verse and introducing the message of the track (and the album overall):

"Uphill climb, facing death, misery/ Present victory, walking a hard road to follow/
Speaking truth, deep in proof through bars, poems, and novels."

After the evocative chorus of "tears have erased most of the words..." and Bronze's gargantuan orchestra of emotive horns, Kevlaar expresses the resilience of one battling oppression: "The purpose of my tears is to magnify and cleanse, every dirty year I've got to stand in defense." His verse taps into the marching tone of this beat, a "militant advance" with elucidated grievances against the system that murdered Oscar Grant, "saying shots were accidental." The anger boils up as he's tempted to "burn the bush down to Egyptian sand, mothafucka!" (calling to mind the Egyptian street revolts as well as a batch of other meanings), pleading for positive change on the brink of all-out war and retaliatory blood baths.

Shake C. of I.W.G. (IronWorkers Guild, a large group of artists from Indiana) grabs attention with possibly the best verse on the track. His flow is smooth and his wordplay stunning while carrying so much weight. His talk of "the rebel movement in 1080 resolution" is a clairvoyant description of the movements that began erupting right when this song dropped and his final line is eerily close to describing a man's martyrhood in a Detroit police station that happened shortly after this album dropped: "hold grudges with both hands/ like the pump grip."

One of the standout tracks on a high-quality record.

5/5

3. Coming back as...
prod. by Colonna

A short track with strictly boom bap drum breaks over a Haile Selassie-flavored sample. The beat from Colonna (who hails from Paris, France apparently) has a great pace to it thanks to the mashing drums and Kevlaar runs down it like Jason Kidd on a fast break, dishing out bars with an adept flow. Keeping with the theme of a wake-up call ("nigga, good morning!"), it's as though Kevlaar's wielding a bullhorn on this one, it blares a few times and he speaks loudly into it to emphasize the line: "yall ain't foolin us/ WITH THE WAR CRIMES YOU COMMITTIN"

Very outspoken lyrics throughout, he's aware that what he's putting out there "may be bringing either repentance or" his own death/disappearance but he ain't holding back ("no apologies") as he reasserts the camera element of the album ("freeze the imaging") and presents the famous image of the By All Means Necessary album cover ("peepin out the curtains with the uzi sniffin"), acknowledging an influential predecessor while stating the intention to step out the shadows "of history's gallows" and finally get past the problems we've faced over the decades.

A great, high-energy little track that serves as a nice transition between two bigger ones.

5/5

4. Black Heroin
feat. Mystery School (Merc Versus & A Man Called Relik) and Iron Braydz (of All Elements)
prod. by Central Intelligence

There's a lot going on here, four lengthy verses and a complicated beat. It took me a little while to assimilate everything on this joint but it's a great track overall.

The beat is highly original, I call the sound "cosmic spaghetti western," and it slowly morphs from one meandering loop to a different one with heavier stomping drums. K7 gets vicious on it:

"Fuck the US Parliament
eat this, drink that, here take this shot
infecting us with serums, infertility, delirium
no options but long shots"

The "Ice Cube of 2010" angrily and articulately airs out the snakes and tries to "stir the riot homes" and wake up the revolutionary spirit, which has begun to happen recently throughout England as we've seen. Bill O'Reilly, Fox News, our New Roman Empire with its Manchurian Candidate leader all fall in the Kevlaar crosshairs here. One of the best verses on the album.

"Billy O'Reilly and Fox despise me, fuck em
they're just the chips in ya mental construction
go natural, the path to reverse destruction"

The featured artists all bring great mic work to the table as well though the song does seem to drag at times. Merc Versus (from the same crew as Shake C, Woodenchainz, and A Man Called Relik who all appear on the album) has some absurdly impressive wordplay but his verse lingers a few bars too long.

The third verse is from his brother, A Man Called Relik, and you really need to get familiar with that name if you aren't already. He is tremendously talented lyrically (my next review will be of his superb debut album, N.P.R.) with a gift for enunciating his raps in a way that I would describe as intense eloquence. Iron Braydz is another great emcee and his verse completes this solid socially-conscious cypher joint.

4/5

5. Boulevard Article
prod. by Kevlaar 7

One of my personal favorite tracks from the overall Kevlaar catalogue, this joint had been floating around for a while and finally appeared here in fully-mastered form for the first time. With DJ scratches, ill chops on the beat and a heavy snare crash this a smooth yet chunky banger . "Puff the double mint" to this one.

Kevlaar twirls two symmetrical verses with ridiculous imagery ("splash graffiti in the ravine") and weaves out bars that often sound like perfectly spoken tongue twisters. I find this to be an amazing track in all aspects: the lyrics are thick and delivered with a great flow that feels like a descent down a spiral staircase (or strand of DNA) if that makes any sense; the chorus is a memorable anthem, and the beat is of the pure hip hop, hard-drum and smooth-sample essence.

In the context of the overall record, this serves as a brief, thoughtful bridge before the intensity starts to really explode in the next few tracks.

5/5

6. I Have a Dream
prod. by Woodenchainz

Can't say enough about this track. I wrote 3,000+ words about it already, analyzing every bar to show how it perfectly parallels MLK's speech, even down to following the theme of each of King's paragraphs. The passion is through the roof on this one and many of the lines attain the height of timelessness:

"Storms of persecution should spark swarms of revolutions"

"I have a dream today that the devil vanished,
replant this in our handbooks, teach our children the answers"

One of the best songs of the year.

5/5

7. King's Truth
prod. by Paragone

As much info as this album contains, as many facts and sharp observations as it presents, the key element imbuing this EP and making it so worthwhile is the energy in it. There's a raw emotion rumbling underneath every track and here's another example of that energy bursting out. This is a rare speech from Dr. King, rare because his eloquent anger is palpable and he strongly condemns the oppression of blacks in a way that can really shake someone up. This is the MLK that was at the forefront of revolution and upheaval, not the peaceful diplomat he's conventionally painted as nowadays.

The combination of the beat's ominous tone and King's deep passion make this a track that will strike you in the heart.

5/5

8. Garden of Eden feat. William Cooper
prod. by BP

The increasing energy of the album seems to culminate in these next two tracks. This beat thumps with the urgency of a conspiracy movie climax and both emcees reveal the scary hidden truth behind things, Da Vinci Code style. I like Will Cooper a lot and this is about as rough as I've ever heard him, his style fits perfectly on this album. After putting "congressional car artist" faces on the curb, he passes the mic to Kevlaar who proceeds to spit one of the most ridiculous verses anybody has ever aimed at the establishment. To me, his verse is the scathing-social-critique equivalent of Cappadonna on "Winter Warz."

There's so much science in there that it needs to be studied (which I'll do soon) as he first breaks down the global and historical ubiquity of the Christ archetype and how that whole mythology is derived from "astrological sequence, the birth and the death of God's sun." It is an urge for us to "study the enemy" and the truth behind their "trick-knowledge" and he even calls for "mixed violence, race riots and uprisings" which, as I said, began blowing up in the streets at the same time this album dropped. The most important part of it all though is the breakdown of 9/11 as an inside job, essentially the key reason behind the need for mass street movements and uprisings here in the US. We let the Wall Street "demons run wild" and Kevlaar announces straight up: "True terrorists are financiers, hear my plea!"

I'm not a huge fan of the beat but it does serve this track perfectly.

4.5/5

9. Who Got the Camera?
feat Bronze Nazareth
prod. by Endemic

"If this offends you, it's meant to, it's that simple"

The "call for justice" reaches its peak here as this joint is a street demonstration on wax. Kevlaar directs the crowd in the chorus, yelling out for witnesses to cluster around the police who, if we were to hit the streets, would inevitably start beating people down. The drums are heavy and the pace is fast, giving that feeling of moving around through a violent crowd. K7 warns us against the system that "monopolized the news, feeding us toxins, watch it don't be boxed in" and makes it clear that he'll continue to condemn the system no matter how much heat it puts him under. He's ready to "take a hit like Jesus did" because at least he'll be fighting for the truth.

Bronze, in his only lyrical appearance, delivers a verse whose structure and patterns are as incredible as the powerful message they bring. "I write on the same trees where strange fruit hung/ with the same pencil chiseled from where the axe swung." His verse is a poetic reminder that our generation is barely past slavery and, in fact, the same mindstate manifests today in many ways, particularly in police brutality ("officer Jeffrey Cotton: modern day confederate") and the prison industrial complex ("prisons with brothers cramped like slaveship clusters").

At the end, Kevlaar dedicates the track to those who've been brutalized by the police and reads off a distressingly long list before telling the story of Detroit's Ayiana Jones, a seven-year-old girl who was killed by the police in her sleep. This occurred during the filming of the A&E show "The First 48" and yet the police still managed to cover it up.

This leaves us struck, hit hard emotionally, which leads to a somber reflection in the next track.

5/5

10. I'm Open (Changes)
prod. by Lastchild Musik

The organization of the music on this EP is terrific. After the culmination of anger and emotion in the previous tracks, there is a feeling of exhaustive sadness here as he reflects on the image of the world we've just witnessed. Another great beat from an outside producer, this one has a nice kick with a deeply soulful sample. This is the most personal track on the album as K7 somberly considers the "family structure holding on a thin line, it's a grim time to be born" and promises to try to clean up the dirt on this globe, get things right for his own seeds and their generation. He speaks potent words on the murder of his cousin and the recent death of his grandfather before considering the inherent necessity for change in the world.

A beautiful, honest, and affirming way to close things out.

5/5

11. This World (Outro)
prod. by Kevlaar 7

A superb beat with thick bass, heavy drums, and a tender melancholy sample. Carl Dix speaks powerful words on the epidemic of police brutality and the system designed to leave inner city youth either killing each other on the streets, wasting away in prison, or killing people around the world as "trained mass murderers" extending the empire's reach around the world.

There is so much depth and intricate orchestration in this wonderful beat as its sample cries "this world!" over sweet rising and falling flutes. This smooth instrumentation transitions nicely back to the opening of the record, making it so easy and natural to listen to the album on repeat.

5/5

Beats 5/5
Lyrics 5/5
Overall: 10 out of 10

I've never given an album a perfect 10 before. In my ratings for each track I've tried to be as conservative as possible but even if I tack off another few points it still adds up to a 9.5 or 9.6 out of ten and I give this album an extra half a point for the heavy MESSAGE it communicates no matter what. It also helps that this is an EP of only 11 tracks so it doesn't have quite as much room for failure or low points.

In the grand scheme of things, this is an important album in the vein of Black Market Militia and Immortal Technique except with better beats. You've been missing out big-time if you haven't already been listening to this.

Giving Insight to the Blindman

2011-10-31T15:21:00.002-05:00

Please check out my new review of Bronze Nazareth's School for the Blindman album that's just been published in Slant Magazine. For five years that record was the most anticipated thing on my whole radar and now that it's finally here, it doesn't disappoint. For those interested, the Slant review is basically a preview for a much more thorough song-by-song review that will be coming soon. I've had a hectic but very fun and exciting last couple of weeks and I'm still trying to get through a bunch of writing projects.

Many more things will be appearing on the blog now that I've got some time as well. Look for a couple more new hip hop album reviews in that song-by-song, enormous breakdown style, should have them up here by the end of today.

Bronze's brother and fellow member of the Wisemen, Kevlaar 7, also just released a new mixtape that's free. It is entitled Redux on the Boards and features 10 tracks from artists like Jay-Z, Nas, Outkast, Ghostface, and others, all remixed over Kevlaar 7 beats. Plenty of heavy bass drums and creative sample chops, as is K7's specialty. If you enjoy quality hip hop music at all, definitely go check that out. You can preview and download it here.

Last Tuesday, I actually go to attend a Snoop Dogg concert here in Austin. Although I was a fan of his (and Dr. Dre's) music years ago, I haven't really listened to their material in a long time and really didn't know what to expect as over the years I had begun to associate Snoop in my mind with movies and parodies instead of actual rap music. Walking into the venue, the outdoors atmosphere and college student-populated crowd kept bringing to mind the hilarity of Snoop's house party appearance in the movie Old School (when he was interrupted by a naked Will Ferrell bursting onto the stage).

The show was outstanding, though. Tracks from The Chronic 2001 brought back memories of when that classic was first released and the whole venue bounced in unison to the smashing drums and booming bass. Snoop is a helluva master of ceremony, he kept the crowd into it for a set that lasted almost 2 hours, bringing tons of wit and humor into the mix in between songs. It was a really great time overall, one of the more memorable concert experiences I'll ever have, I'm sure. Even got to go backstage and meet some of the artists, including Kurupt prior to the show when he'd just awoken from a long nap on the tour bus, and ended the night eating consuming late-night grub with the opening acts at a pizzeria across the street. Much thanks due to Matt "M-Eighty" Markoff for bringing me along and introducing me to everybody.

World Serious

2011-10-19T15:36:00.003-05:00

The story of this blog over the past few months has been that its author can't find the time to write on it. One of the reasons for this has been the exhilarating and absorbing finish to the baseball season, so with the World Series starting tonight I figure I must say a few things about it while I sit here in a coffeeshop/restaurant eating lunch.

Despite the negative feelings for the Cardinals I've expressed a few times on this blog, I will be rooting for them to win what should be an exciting series against the Texas Rangers. Why? Because the unprecedented run this team has been on since the beginning of September and on into the playoffs has swept me up into their bandwagon. And I really don't like the Texas Rangers.

The story for both teams is remarkably similar: high-scoring offense and deep bullpens. Both teams received minimal contributions from their starting pitchers throughout the playoffs, finding themselves calling upon relievers early on then mixing-and-matching throughout the games. Of course, as unpredictable as baseball always is, you can expect the starting pitchers to play the biggest role in this World Series.

Texas boasts an incredibly deep and potent offensive attack, with five straight excellent hitters bunched up in the middle of the lineup. Really, it'd be hard to put together a better lineup than theirs, perhaps the only weakness is that there are so many right-handed hitters (Josh Hamilton and David Murphy being the only lefties) and you can expect Tony LaRussa to exploit that with his slew of hard-throwing righty relievers. The Cardinals also have a terrific offense; they led the National League in runs, on-base percentage, OPS, and tied for the lead in slugging percentage. They are led by the best hitter on the planet, Albert Pujols, and as Rany Jazayerli pointed out in his World Series preview, Pujols traditionally plays even better in the playoffs. I'm really looking forward to seeing the Rangers' late game flame-throwers having to face off against Pujols.

On the run-prevention side, the Texas defensive attack (baseball is the only sport where the defense has the ball so "attack" is apt) combines to be much better than the Cardinals. The lineups are so good that they kind of cancel each other out, but it's the run prevention part that separates these two teams so let's look at that real quick:

Rotation
The Rangers possess an extremely rare combination of three southpaw starters who are all capable of throwing in the mid-90s. The other guy, Colby Lewis, is right-handed and doesn't throw very hard but he's still a pretty damn good pitcher. The Cardinals counter with the righty/lefty combo of Chris Carpenter and Jaime Garcia atop their rotation, both of them succeed by keeping the ball low and generating ground balls. Their third starter Edwin Jackson is a very good pitcher (he has nearly identical strikeout-to-walk numbers compared to Carpenter and Garcia) but he really hasn't shown it lately, and fourth-starter Kyle Lohse isn't anything special at all but if he can keep the game close into the 5th inning, he'll have done his job. The Rangers have the clear advantage here.

Bullpen
General Manager Jon Daniels has assembled an absolutely fearsome bullpen here and they are a major part of why the Rangers are here in the World Series. As I already mentioned, it will be really exciting to watch closer Neftali Feliz pitch against the middle of this St. Louis lineup. The Cardinals also relied heavily on their bullpen on their way here, in fact, their funky bullpen is one of the reasons I've come to like these Cardinals. They've got some characters in there and they can all pitch. Jason Motte is the closer and he's one of the meanest looking guys in baseball with beady eyes and a lumberjack beard, his short-armed, explosive throwing motion and 100-mph heat amplifies his menacing aura. I think the pundits and analysts give the Rangers the advantage here but with LaRussa pushing the buttons and showing a clear willingness to break from conventional bullpen usage (the team's saves leader Fernando Salas pitched in the 3rd inning already in this postseason), the Cardinals have the edge.

Fielding
Not only is Albert Pujols the best hitter on the planet, he's also the best defensive first baseman in baseball and probably one of the best defensive players in all of baseball at any position. Yes, he is that good. The Cardinal catcher Yadier Molina is also one of the best players at his position but the rest of the St. Louis defense is very poor. Nick Punto is a punch-line in sabermetric circles for his poor hitting, but he's a great fielder and if he gets any starts for the Cards he'll certainly improve their D. The Rangers have a clear advantage here as they've got a great defense. The keystone combo of Elvis Andrus and Ian Kinsler will certainly make some highlight reel double plays in this series and third baseman Adrian Beltre is one of my favorite players to watch in the field.

We saw what happened to the Brewers and their crappy defense in the NLCS, so it's certainly possible that the Cardinals might lose some games by not catching the ball. The Rangers as a team struck out fewer than anyone else in their league and the Cardinal pitchers usually don't strike out too many hitters anyway so there should be plenty of balls in play and plenty of opportunities for Lance Berkman to make a mess of things out in right field.

With the Cardinals having home field advantage (due to the National League winning the All-Star Game, if that makes any sense), a tactically superior manager, and the Albert Pujols factor, I think they make up for their shortcomings against an extremely well-rounded Texas team. The Rangers are favored to win and they look like a superior team on paper, but there's something about these Cardinals that reminds me of the 2004 Red Sox, a team that just looked like you could put them out on the field against anybody in any atmosphere and they would tough it out and find a way to win. Those Red Sox actually beat the Cardinals in the World Series that year in another matchup of powerhouse (the Cards won 105 games that year) versus Wild Card underdog, and the Red Sox steamrolled the birds in a sweep.

I think this shapes up to be one of the best World Series matchups we've seen in a long time and I would put my money on the Cardinals to win in a long series with many tough battles. My pick: Cardinals in 7.

(One last note: the title of this post comes from my old boss in San Diego. He had a very heavy Croatian accent despite three decades living here in the U.S. and he always pronounced World Series "World Serious." Also, it's common for people to think that American Major League Baseball is being conceited by calling its championship round the "world series" but the way I see it, the MLB teams feature the greatest players from all around the world competing against each other. That's why players from Japan and everywhere else come here to play in the major leagues. Just wanted to point that out.)

Pennant Picks

2011-10-09T14:58:00.000-05:00

Baseball events often serve as a time marker for me. I can look back at past exciting or historic events happening in baseball games and recall where I was at the time, what was going on in my life or in the world at large.

I watched the first game of the Yankees-Mets Subway Series in 2000 on a little portable television in the back of a car while my dad drove me and some friends home from a Saturday evening hockey game in Long Island. When the Yanks and Red Sox started their marathon Game 7 in 2003 (eventually won by Aaron Boone's walkoff homer) I was playing a roller hockey game for my college team at an outdoor rink in Chelsea Piers. I saw the White Sox win the World Series in 2005 at Mickey Mantle's restaurant near Central Park while on a date with a girl from Italy.

The last two Octobers I watched from the living room of my San Diego apartment and now I've witnessed the excitement of this year's pennant chase here in Austin. The classic deciding game Friday night between the Phillies and Cardinals will forever be etched in my memory as I watched it unfold in amazement while eating baked ziti and sipping beer at an overpriced bar/restaurant down the road. (I attempted to watch the first game of that series at another restaurant last week but once the Texas Longhorns game started, every television in the bar was switched to that crappy meaningless game against Iowa State and I was screwed. Will certainly always remember that, too.)

I wasn't alive in the late 1960s but from watching Ken Burns' baseball documentary over and over again, I've come to associate the baseball events going at that time with the social upheavals and global events going on at the same time. In that documentary series, each decade gets its own lengthy treatment and the 60s is by far my favorite. The Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, the assassination of JFK (and RFK, Malcolm X, and MLK) aren't ignored, in fact they are perfectly weaved in to the baseball events in that decade as Bob Gibson's Cardinals dominated the era, Carl Yastrzemski carried the Sox in '67, the Orioles built a powerhouse and Washington DC nearly burnt to the ground after rioting in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Protesters burned their draft cards and choppers flew over the jungles of Saigon.

As incredible as the crescendo of this baseball season has been, it will always be associated in my mind with the movement springing up in downtown Manhattan (my former stomping grounds) and spreading across the nation, the peaceful uprising and dissent against oppressive oligarchy and austerity measures. I confess to being a severe baseball addict, but as exciting and engaging as it has all been this year, the Occupy Wall Street news has been competing for my attention since it began in mid-September. The baseball games have often absorbed me in transfixion but at the same time my thoughts are constantly with the people out sleeping on the cement in the cold New York autumn.

Now, on to the baseball...

It seemed like nothing could touch the melodrama and excitement of the regular season's conclusion, but then we witnessed a Divison Series that featured four tightly fought matchups, three of which went down to the final game, and two of which saw huge upsets. The Rays series only lasted four games but the last three of those were all nail-biters. Now the smoke has cleared and we're left with just four teams in matchups that look to be just as competitive and entertaining as anything we've seen all year. Here are some thoughts on the two series we will watch over the next week.

National League Championship Series
Cardinals (90-72) vs. Brewers (96-66)

The Brewers were a popular World Series pick but I don't think anybody imagined they would be in this position, facing their sworn enemies for the NL pennant. The Cardinals don't belong here. They lost their best pitcher before the season began, were written off as a contender in Spring Training, and were trailing the final playoff spot by 9 games in early September. When they managed to climb all the way back into it and win on the final day, that only guaranteed them a match against the best team in the major leagues, the 102-win Phillies. Well, they've slayed yet another dragon and here they are.

This looks to be an extremely close and exciting series. These two teams genuinely don't like each other, they had some bean ball incidents this summer, lots of trash talk, and they represent two different poles on the spectrum---the Cards are the gritty, scrappy veterans and the Brewers are young, loud-mouthed and here for the first time. The Cardinals have been doing this for a good 12 years now, this is their 6th appearance in an LCS during that span while the Brewers organization had not won a playoff series since 1982. At that time they were still in the American League, led by manager Harvey Keunn, they were known as "Harvey's Wallbangers" and they went all the way to the World Series where they lost to... the Cardinals! (Dan Okrent's great book 9 Innings covers those Brewers at length.)

On the field, the teams are closely matched in the rotation, bullpen, defense, and lineup. While the Brewers boast a superb top-three starting pitchers in Yovani Gallardo, Zack Grienke, and Shaun Marcum, the Cardinals' top-three are no slouches and perfectly capable of matching up against the much more heralded Milwaukee trio. Chris Carpenter leads the St. Louis bunch with his alliterative appellation and strike zone carving repertoire, young lefty Jaime Garcia put up basically the same numbers as Carpenter in fewer innings, and Edwin Jackson is capable of matching zeroes with anybody the Brewers have. Both teams run deep in the bullpen, too.

Both teams pack high-octane offenses mostly led, again, by superior trios. For Milwaukee it's Ryan Braun, Prince Fielder, and Rickie Weeks in the heart of the lineup while St. Louis relies on Albert Pujols, Matt Holliday, and Lance Berkman. Combined, those trios match up pretty well although maybe the Cards have a very slight edge. Outside of those, the role players seem to tilt in the Cardinals' favor. Third baseman David Freese would be a household name by now if he could ever stay healthy because the boy can hit. Yadier Molina emerged as one of the better hitting catchers in baseball this year, shortstop Rafael Furcal has looked like his old self in this postseason, and the Cardinals even boast a pretty strong bench (that micromanager Tony LaRussa loves to employ).

In comparison, the Brewers have a few more liabilities on offense. Guys like Casey McGehee, Yuniesky Betancourt, and Jonathan Lucroy can pop out a homerun every now and then but they had poor seasons overall. Neither team is any good defensively, although I think analysts are sometimes a bit too overzealous in dismissing the Brewers in that respect.

Really, the teams are so closely matched that there's no way to pinpoint a particular weakness that will decide the series. It should be one for the ages, perhaps the best LCS since the Red Sox and Yankees in 2004. I prefer to see the Brewers win and they are my pick because they have homefield advantage but I think it will go all 7 games and feature plenty of fireworks.

American League Championship Series
Tigers (95-67) vs. Rangers (96-66)

This matchup, to me, looks closer than it really is. The Rangers are a far superior team, in fact, they were probably the best team in all of baseball this year (Baseball Prospectus has a rather complicated extraction that bears this out). Jon Daniels deserves a lot of credit, he was the youngest general manager in baseball history when he stepped into the role for the Rangers in 2005 at the age of 28, and he has built this team into a well-rounded, deep powerhouse.

Let me get this out of the way: I live in Texas right now and the team Daniels has assembled is an admirable one, but I'm not a fan of this team at all. Eric over at Pitchers & Poets recently wrote a nice piece about why he's pulling for the Rangers despite their shady associations (George W. Bush being the most prominent one) but I'm not falling for it. I'd certainly like to root for this team because of a guy like Jon Daniels and what he's done here, but I've been to the ballpark, I've watched this team for years as an Oakland A's fan and I just don't like them.

As I wrote earlier this year, the Detroit Tigers are a team that I can root for. They represent a decrepit, broken down and demoralized city that has hosted baseball since the beginning of the American League. Detroit is a rich sports town with a great baseball history. Texas? I couldn't watch a Texas Rangers playoff game at a bar because a fucking Texas-Iowa State college football game was on. I can't root for that kind of stupidity. Anywho...

The Rangers are an all-around powerhouse that can beat up any team and their dad. Adrian Beltre blasted three homeruns in one game the other day and he's probably the third-best hitter on this team (behind Mike Napoli and Josh Hamilton). The lineup is absolutely scary. If there's one thing that might be in the Tigers' favor here, it's that there are so many right-handed hitters in the lineup and Detroit has an all-righty pitching staff but the Rangers don't seem to care what hand the pitcher throws with. They'll blast off against anybody. The Detroit offense can put up runs too, most of them will come from Miguel Cabrera and Victor Martinez. Jhonny Peralta is an interesting player not just because of the misplaced "h" in his name but because he seemingly resurrected his career in the Motor City and renewed his status as an offensive threat. Alex Avila, the rookie catcher, had a spectacular season at the plate but so far in the playoffs he hasn't shown up (just 1 hit in 16 at-bats).

Like every other part of this team, the Texas pitching staff runs deep. If five starters were needed in a playoff series, they could throw out five great ones, but they only need four so Alexi Ogando was put into the bullpen and we all saw what he's capable of last night (97 mph fastballs at the corners). This very interesting rotation boasts three tough lefties and a righty who remade himself after a stint in Japan. The Japanese league guy seems to be the only liability here as Colby Lewis followed up his superb 2010 campaign with an up-and-down season this year (he pitched fine, just gave up way too many homers). Detroit depends on their workhorse Justin Verlander, the easy Cy Young choice this season, but he seems to be losing steam this past month or so. They'll need him to pick it up and possibly pitch 3 times in this series if they hope to win. I predicted Max Scherzer would have a huge year for Detroit before the season, but he didn't. He pitched well with plenty of strikeouts but, like Colby Lewis, he surrendered a bunch of homeruns. I worried about that coming into the playoffs but Scherzer pitched great against the Yankees in two appearances so look for him to be a big part of this series.

Joaquin Benoit basically became a national hero with his heroic relief effort for Detroit against the Yankees to seal their demise in the previous round, and the Tigers do have a nice bullpen. But nothing comes close to this Rangers relief group. As I mentioned, they brought Alexi Ogando out of the pen in Game 1 yesterday and he was nearly untouchable. They also have two of the best relievers in baseball over the last few years, Mike Adams and Koeji Uehara, at their disposal and then flame-throwing Neftali Feliz as the final piece. Even their middle-relief or platoon pitching options are solid. It's gonna be really tough to score against the group late in the game.

I really don't like the Rangers but there's no denying how strong they are as a team. While I will be rooting hard for the underdog Detroit to knock them out, I don't realistically see it happening. My pick: Rangers in six.

What It's All About

2011-10-09T12:27:00.000-05:00

Potent Quotables: Cosmic Contemplation

2011-10-08T16:03:00.000-05:00

"Ancient stars in their death throes spat out atoms like iron which this universe had never known. The novel tidbits of debris were sucked up by infant suns which, in turn, created yet more atoms when their race was run. Now the iron of old nova coughings vivifies the redness of our blood.

"If stars step constantly upward, why should the global interlace of humans, microbes, plants, and animals not move upward steadily as well? The horizons toward which we must soar are within us, anxious to break free, to emerge from our imaginings, then to beckon us forward into fresh realities.

"We have a mission to create, for we are evolution incarnate. We are her self-awareness, her frontal lobes and fingertips. We are second-generation star stuff come alive. We are parts of something 3.5 billion years old, but pubertal in cosmic time. We are neurons of this planet's interspecies mind."
--Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

"Physicist Roger Penrose, who helped develop theories about black holes, has said that the chance of an ordered universe happening at random is nil: one in 10 to the 10th to the 30th, a number so large that if you programmed a computer to write a million zeros per second, it would take a million times the age of the universe just to write the number down."
--from Rob Brezsny's book Pronoia (in fact, both quotes came from this excellent book)

The Occupation

2011-10-05T22:52:00.000-05:00

For a few days now I've been hoping to compose a lengthy post about Occupy Wall Street and the global uprising but haven't had the chance. I will hopefully get to put my thoughts together soon, after all I spent years down in that area of Manhattan and particularly Zuccotti Park (mentioned here a while ago), went to school right next to Wall Street and the Brooklyn Bridge, my experiences down there are even one of the meanings behind the title "A Building Roam." It's highly significant to me that this communal flowering of awakening and dissent has blossomed from a spot on the map that has played such a huge role in my life and growth.

I spoke to my sister on the phone today, she's living about as glamorous a life as any 23-year-old could right now, staying in her friend's brownstone on the Upper West Side, commuting to work by way of strolling through Central Park. I asked her about Occupy Wall Street and she said "you mean that protest thing?" She had heard of it, seen it on the news but rather aggressively told me "I don't care."

Well, I am thankful that there are so many people who do care.

Right Here All Over (Occupy Wall St.) from Alex Mallis on Vimeo.

The Day After

2011-09-29T23:00:00.001-05:00

Mere words cannot convey what occurred last night.

My spine and my skull have been tingling all day and I've been devouring all the recaps, reflections, and write-ups I could find but nobody has accurately described what went down last night. The eminent baseball penman these days, Joe Posnanski, wrote a fine piece and yet it disappointed me until I realized that all of the articles I was reading were disappointing. The shockwaves of sublime joy and amazement shook up the best baseball scribes so much that they were rendered speechless. Twitter was fun:

"Holy fuckity fuck fuck. That's all I got"
- Kevin Goldstein(@kevin_goldstein)

"Khhoihdfslj sjfslkjf fjsfs;ljsdf chjkabdskjfh boop de doop. #mlb"
"The night has reduced me to gibberish"
- Dayn Perry (@daynperry)

The Tampa Bay Rays completed the biggest comeback in baseball history with perhaps the most exciting and unbelievable single game in baseball history. And it all occurred while three other meaningful games intertwined with it to create arguably the most amazing evening in baseball history.

I've actually been keeping a notebook of baseball thoughts for the past couple months and during the action last night I jotted that there was a stunning symmetry to it all. The four games we were all focusing on seemed eerily similar (featuring 2 first place beasts, 2 last place spoilers, 2 desperate failures, and 2 history chasers) and around the 6th inning in each game the scores were: 7-0, 7-0, 3-2, 3-2. The symmetry didn't last, though; in fact, the very bounds of rational existence came undone. In so many of the pieces I've read today the authors have cited the mind-boggling mathematical odds against any of this happening: the odds that the Rays would ever come back from a 9-game deficit in September, odds that the Red Sox would lose with 2 outs in the 9th, odds that the Rays would win when down 7-0 in the 8th inning or when they were down to their final strike in the bottom of the 9th.

The odds of all of that happening were essentially zero or something like 0.00000014 meaning "hell no it'll never happen." And then it happened. And it all seemed to happen at once. All of it unfolded in a mesmerizing sequence that left the global baseball community in breathless rapture.

A miracle happened last night.

Baseball's Insufflation

2011-09-28T15:18:00.000-05:00

Two weeks without any posts. Not a nice way to treat a perfectly good blog.

As I've indicated a few times recently, my life is pretty hectic right now, at least relative to my past periods of prosperous blog posting. In the slivers of free time that I do have, my writing has been confined to notebook scribbles so as to keep my writing game sharp. I had hoped to start a monumental study and breakdown of Ulysses here at this blog by now but I've got a few things I'd like to get out of the way first and they're moving along very slowly.

Three straight weeks of family visitors certainly threw me off too, though it was nice to see familiar faces. As great as Austin has been to me thus far, I haven't made any real friends because I haven't really socialized all that much. Although, in an incredible example of synchronicity, a good friend of mine from San Diego who I had drifted away from in the months before moving to Austin actually relocated at the exact same time and now lives about 10 minutes up the road from me.

The baseball season's progressively dramatic developments have kept me occupied as well. Weeks ago I had drafted a blogpost about the complete lack of drama and close pennant races in baseball at the time and my conclusion was to be that, no matter how bad things look, somebody would inevitably make things interesting for us. Parallel epic collapses by the Boston Red Sox and Atlanta Braves (whose franchise, incidentally, originated in Boston) plus resiliency on the part of the Tampa Bay Rays and St. Louis Cardinals have created as exciting a final day of the season that we could have ever possibly hoped for.

As I type this, the Wild Card races in both leagues look like this:

AL Wild Card
Red Sox 90-71
Tampa Bay 90-71

NL Wild Card
Braves 89-72
Cardinals 89-72

All four teams play tonight in four separate games and if the results don't yield a clear winner in both instances, we would see an extra one-game playoff tomorrow to decide the winner. Needless to say, it doesn't get any better than this.

For me, the NL race features two teams I don't like at all. The Braves are mortal enemies of the Mets but that doesn't bother as much as the stupidity of their manager, Fredi Gonzalez. One could write a lengthy piece detailing his numerous managerial transgressions throughout the year but it's enough to mention that he blatantly fails to put his best team on the field often and perpetuates the most idiotic bullpen strategies this side of... Tony LaRussa, the Cardinals manager. The Cardinals are no friends to the Mets either but, again, it's the manager that ticks me off the most. Since the Braves are a beaten down, limping team right now I'll prefer to see the Cardinals surpass them so at least they can be a viable contender in the playoffs.

As for the American League, I was sucked into rooting for the Red Sox during their incredible run in 2004 and had been rooting for them in all of their gargantuan battles with the Yankees over the years. That they employ Bill James and generally follow an intelligent, sabermetric approach to building their team has always appealed to me. Ever since reading Moneyball way back in 2003 (if I ever get to see the movie, I'll certainly share my thoughts on it here) I've had a strong fascination with the A's and other teams that employ statistical measures to team-building and the Red Sox certainly brought all that stuff to its highest peaks with their two championships in four years. But lately they've too closely resembled the Yankees and their distasteful tactic of throwing bags of cash at the best players on the open market.

On the other hand, the Rays, with their minuscule budget, have become a Moneyball East type of operation. Except their task is much more daunting having to play in a division with two deep-pocketed powerhouses and even the perpetually competitive Toronto Blue Jays. The Rays have a number of exciting young players (I'm starting to realize Evan Longoria might be my favorite player in the league) and even an eclectic manager.

I would love to see the Rays win, in fact, I'd love to see them win and then carry on to a World Series victory (perhaps a rematch of the 2008 Fall Classic against the Phillies?) but the scenario I most prefer to see would be both the Rays and Red Sox winning today and then playing an epic one-game playoff on Thursday. Same with the Cards and Braves. To nobody's surprise, all four teams have their best pitcher on the mound for today's game. I'll be watching intently and hoping the season drags the excitement out for as long as possible.

Wu-Tang Bats All in the Sky

2011-09-14T18:20:00.005-05:00

As embarrassing as the pop and glitter music that parades itself as hip hop may be to the true fan of Rhythm And Poetry, and as ubiquitous as that hollow and monotonous commercial sound may be on the corporate airwaves, the essence of real hip hop music remains powerful if not exactly popular. This is especially evident for loyal fans of the Wu-Tang Clan and their endless throng of talented affiliates.

Almost 20 years after their debut upon the music scene, Wu generals like Raekwon and Ghostface Killah are still highly sought-after by both fans and fellow musicians, while The Rza has soared straight past the heights of musical production and film soundtracks into the director's chair for his film debut, The Man with the Iron Fists, starring Russell Crowe and set to be released later this year.

The Wu camp continues to release a steady stream of quality music, staying true to their formula (the original hip hop formula) of sharp lyrics, skillful flows, and sample-based loops with crackling drum breaks while giving birth to another generation of diehard fans (40-year-olds and teenagers alike can be found making the eagle-wings at concerts). This summer was particularly profuse as not only the Wu and their affiliates but even outside artists have delivered offerings in homage to the name of the mighty Shaolin supergroup. Here, I will briefly go over all that we've heard this summer.

Bronze Nazareth - School for the Blindman

First off, and most importantly, the ostensible 21st Century messiah of Wu-Tang, Bronze Nazareth, has finally released his sophomore album, the follow-up to his 2006 debut (one of my favorite albums of all-time) The Great Migration. The Detroit-based emcee/producer is considered the heir to the throne but unlike many of the Wu-Tang affiliates and Killa Bees, he did not simply inherit this title, he earned it. He's not a relative, old buddy/schoolmate, or record label-appointed collaborator, instead he's something of a savant who so impressed European Wu-Tang affiliate Cilvaringz (himself, an important part of Wu-Tang's new breed) back in 2002 that he was given an opportunity to show his work to The Rza who immediately signed him and housed him up in New York for two months to work on The Abbott's new album.

When that record, The Birth of a Prince, came out in 2003 there were two beats in particular that shot steam out of my ears and led me to declare that Rza had regained his magical touch production-wise. It wasn't until two years later that I actually thought to look at the album credits and realized it wasn't Rza who had made those beats, it was the debut of someone named Bronze Nazareth.

We eventually got to hear Bronze speak his piece lyrically and it was immediately evident that Wu-Tang had once again uncovered a gem: a gifted poet as well as sublime beat-crafter. His debut album made hip hop heads explode (one particular Amazon user review has always stuck with me) and he subsequently unveiled his own group, The 7 Wisemen, who released two highly-acclaimed albums while Bronze received an increasingly steady stream of production work for Wu affiliates hungry for the vintage chops (more on those in a minute).

The new record, School for the Blindman, was released yesterday amid high anticipation and, speaking for myself at least, it has definitely met the absurdly high expectations I had. The lyrics are mostly pretty heavy though delivered in short aphoristic lines (he indicated in a recent interview that he's prone to work on a verse for days/weeks to make each line strike the right note), his flow has added some new complexities, and the beats are out of this fucking world. Here's one of the album's bonus tracks featuring The Rza:

"Squeeze the page, please / my blood, sweat and tears
drip off my inscription / no minor incisions
unless you fail to listen"

Go get it!

* * *

Timbo King - From Babylon to Timbuk2

When the Swarm was upon us in the mid-1990s, Timbo King was leading the pack. He was one of the few artists outside of the 9-member Wu-Tang Clan circle who, right from the beginning, proved he could match up with anyone when it came to clutching mics. The notoriously poor business management of the Wu enterprise left him waiting to receive his time in the spotlight though and his blacktop-hardened street personality didn't soften up to the corporate record execs who preferred to call the shots and this mega-skilled emcee found himself black-listed in the industry.

He continued to stay relevant in the ears of listeners by featuring on albums with Rza, Gza, Killah Priest, and being a part of the supergroup Black Market Militia, but it wasn't until this summer, nearly 20 years after he began his career, that he finally released his debut solo album. He put his best work into it and brought plenty of great production to the table, mostly from Bronze Nazareth. I've got a big review of the record covering every track all written up, just need to make some edits and I will post it here soon. It's definitely one of the best albums of the year.

Here's one of my favorite tracks from the record, a clever takedown of all the industry executives who've been ruining the rap industry for the last decade or so.

* * *

Wu-Tang Clan - Legendary Weapons

Earlier this summer the group released this short compilation album, a sequel to 2009's Chamber Music, with live production from The Revelations and features from rap legends like Sean Price and AZ plus some of the Killa Bee affiliates. The production, despite being handled by a live band, was a bit lacking for me and certainly a step below the similar 2009 showcase. As this might be called The Summer of Bronze, the Nazareth man got to step on to a track next to legends Rza, U-God and Cappadonna to outshine all of them ("tempted by Satan, put a bullet in his diaphragm / Walk around, black clouds and quiet violins").

The most important part of this latest effort, though, was the return of fan-favorite Killa Sin. Sin, like Timbo King, had been impressing everybody for years but never got a chance to shine on his own. These last 5 years or so (maybe longer, I'm not sure) he's been in and out of prison and hasn't put out much music at all. This record hails his return as he and his water fountain flow were featured on two tracks, including a solo track.

* * *

Wu-Tang & Jimi Hendrix - Black Gold

Last year a musician named Tom Caruana released a free mash-up album combining the Beatles and Wu-Tang that was absolutely superb. He deftly weaved together Beatles interviews, quotes, instrumentals, songs, and all kinds of Wu chops for a magic musical tour (the mash-up was entitled Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers). It was so good that Rza actually mentioned it in a verse on the aforementioned Legendary Weapons album.

Caruana just recently released another homage to the Wu that's getting plenty of attention, it's a mix of the bass-heavy flavors of Jimi Hendrix with verses from the Wu and friends (Killarmy gets a song on here as well as other lesser known affiliates). I don't like it quite as much as the Beatles mix but it's no slouch either, I highly recommend it.

Another similar project that caught my attention is Shaolin Jazz - The 37th Chamber, a smooth combo of jazz (both old and new) and classic Wu-Tang material. All three of these mash-up homages (the Beatles, Hendrix, and jazz mixes) are totally free and available for download.

* * *

Tragic Allies - Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil

Tragic Allies is a trio from Massachusetts that has been putting out great new music steadily for a few years now through mixtapes and free internet tracks but they've yet to release an album. As seems to be a common thread with some of the artists I've mentioned, they announced their record a while ago and it suffered a bunch of pushbacks and delays.

Well, finally, the Tragic Allies debut album is coming. It's due September 27th and features Planet Asia, Canibus, Killah Priest, and (yup) Bronze Nazareth. The reason I mention them here next to all the Wu-Tang stuff is that, while they aren't affiliates or associated with Wu-Tang at all, their new record not only features some Wu legends but they bring that similar style of classic 90s-era hip hop. I've felt for a while now that Tragic Allies are making some of the best rap music in the world, period.

Of all the great music I've mentioned, this track stands next to all of it:

Here is the first single off the new album, "God-gifted" featuring Planet Asia.

* * *

Madlib Medicine Show No. 12: Raw Medicine

Lastly, since I've written so much about Madlib and his Medicine Show series, I should mention that Stones Throw just released Part 12 of the series, a 37-track remix album that features a whole crowd of various emcees including Wu-Tang's Inspectah Deck, Ghostface, Raekwon, Cappadonna and a bunch more. I've only just received it so I can tell you that the artwork is as awesome as usual and the sounds are vintage Madlib, that is, dusty old raw hip hop sounds.

Gustav Klimt's Medicine

2011-09-03T01:22:00.001-05:00

Painted in 1901, destroyed by a fire in 1945. I hear music in my head whenever I look at Klimt's work.

"Keeper of My Soul" by Yesterday's New Quintet

2011-08-31T22:41:00.002-05:00

Somebody put together a great video for this track by YNQ (otherwise known as Madlib pretending to be a jazz quintet all by himself). It displays some of the jazz record covers for Madlib's multitude of forays into his father's genre. This is off the first Yesterday's New Quintet album entitled Angles Without Edges. I need to review that one soon. Check out my other Madlib reviews, especially this one about some of his jazz stuff.

The Ides of August

2011-08-30T15:55:00.002-05:00

Irene knocks down a tree in Central Park (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

This was initially supposed to be written at the end of July or beginning of August but it got lost in the shuffle. Of course, had I managed to get it out there it would've seemed more than a bit prescient.

Reflecting on the calendar's eighth month as it approached this year, I realized that August has been a particularly stormy, eventful, and often painful month in my personal history. Or at least as far back as my journals go (four years).

August 2007 - After graduating from Pace University in May with a business degree I didn't really want, I set out to try and make some money with it for a little while. I needed to save some funds so as to execute a major cross-country move from New York to San Diego in the near future but I had no desire to wear a sycophantic suit and tie and sell my soul to some dull accounting firm. Most of my classmates immediately went into big accounting jobs in Manhattan with high salaries but I not only wanted to get away from New York City, I wanted to avoid the monotony of a regular office job at all costs.

My resistance was relatively futile. My mom brought up doing temp work and got me a brochure about it. Even though the plastic smiles and business attire of the figures on the pamphlet frightened me, I gave it a shot (I was an unemployed college grad and my parents weren't going to be patient with me mooching off their estate). Over the next few months, I worked a couple of relatively harmless and manageable positions. In July, I was doing accounting work at a chemical manufacturing plant in New Jersey working inside of a little cabin. As bad as that may sound, I enjoyed it. It was laid back, I got to eat lunch outside amid grass and trees, the people were nice and really appreciated my work. Best of all, the workload was small and I was actually able to read and write in between tasks.

Then at the end of the month, after having been acquired by a bigger firm, the company started laying people off and suddenly they had to choose between me and a secretary who had been there for 19 years. I endured the awkwardness of training her to do my job for a couple days and then was let go.

The temp agency found me a new position quickly and I was to spend the month of August working at an egg product manufacturing plant in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The job was about as shitty as you would imagine from reading that previous sentence. In fact, it was much worse.

My first day coincided with a Nor'easter storm that found me stuck in traffic on the trip from Staten Island to New Jersey and when I did finally make it over to the hideous industrial grid of Elizabeth, my destination was nowhere to be found. I drove around the supposed address a few times screaming curses and stressing out before parking somewhere and calling the temp agency as the skies poured a steady dump of water on my windshield. Apparently, the business had changed their name but didn't bother to change any of the signs displayed outside.

After parking in the crunchy, muddled mess of a rocky parking lot, I stepped knee-deep into a puddle before failing to locate the door to the warehouse where I was to spend the next four weeks. When I did finally make it inside I was soaking wet and an hour late. The warehouse was dark and stunk like eggs. The office where I would work was situated in a little box within the warehouse. They didn't really care how late I was and immediately put me to work.

The job itself was ridiculously easy, leaving me way too much free time after finishing my workload by late morning. My boss was a bipolar Vietnam vet who would often bounce from jovial laughter to furious screaming within the same breath, something I've never encountered before or since. I worked alongside the warehouse forklift drivers, a couple of ex-convicts who treated me like a new piece of meat in prison and constantly, til the very end, gave me shit because I wasn't doing "real" (i.e., physical) work and got to sit at a desk most of the day.

Without even taking into consideration the terrible commute each day (standstill traffic morning and afternoon every single day as cars squeezed onto the narrow Goethals Bridge), it was an absolute nightmare. I was stuck there for the entire month of August before managing to escape in September to one of the best jobs I've ever worked.

August 2008 - Not nearly as bad as some other Augusts, this one was still memorable.

I had been living in San Diego for two months without having established myself at all aside from moving into a little studio apartment. No job, no friends, no idea what the hell I was doing with my life. When I left New York, I only put thought into the journey (a 10-day road trip across 15 states) and focused on getting myself safely to the other side. The rest would figure itself out.

Well, two months had gone by and nothing was figured out. I was drifting aimlessly in unfamiliar territory. Depression started hitting me and often sabotaged any attempt to do anything productive. One night things got so dire that I resorted to a therapeutic session of writing down all my fears, worries, desires, etc. and seeing what came of it. What came of it was the realization that I had a lot to offer and a general plan (soak up knowledge, write books) but no direction.

The solution proffered itself on my notebook pages: contact some universities that fit my mental framework. I started grabbing my favorite recent books off their shelf and looking for the names of universities that had lit a spark of interest for me in the past. Pacifica Graduate Institute, C.G. Jung Institute, California Institute of Integral Studies. I looked up some of their e-mail addresses and started contacting admissions offices. Plenty of responses came in the ensuing days and suddenly I was flying up north to San Francisco to visit schools.

My first experience of the Bay Area was one of the most interesting and memorable times of my life. Initially, I absolutely hated the place. It was cloudy, freezing, windy, reminiscent of the crisp autumns in New York, except it was the middle of August. I roamed around the city in a state of mild depression, raw cold, and confusion. I visited one school and it was an enchanting experience as I befriended the bookstore clerk and he brought me up on the roof to look out at the Bay Area skyline. We talked books for a while and then he left as I sat amid the roof's Zen garden and tried to reflect on all that was happening. "I'm on a rooftop in San Francisco. In a Zen garden."

The trip ended as quickly as it began and there I was back home in San Diego trying to figure out a way to get myself into the school for free. It never happened and three years later, I still haven't gone to graduate school.

August 2009 - Possibly the worst month of my entire life. Shortly after returning from the Bay Area trip one year prior, I finally found a job in San Diego and stayed there for about nine months. It was a great job in many ways, the people were great, the business was interesting, but the pay absolutely sucked. The salary was better than no salary, but I couldn't keep my head above water when it came to monthly bills. Southern California is a very expensive place to live after all. I sought a better job and found one, a place that offered a much bigger salary but demanded a lot more work and, as I would later find out, feats of emotional strength that I couldn't maintain.

It was an office made up entirely of women, mostly attractive women, though not friendly women. The owner of the business was a genius but a loose cannon. She spoke openly about wanting to retire soon and pass the business on. I should mention that this was a highly successful operation with numerous wealthy clients and the owner had become obscenely wealthy herself. (On the day I was hired, she insisted on showing me pictures of her huge house as well as her summer home, which she offered to let me and my girlfriend stay in.) Her minions were eager to please her and inherit whatever she was about to drop them. Suddenly I stepped into the mix and, while just trying to catch on with the fast and complicated operation, understood everything they taught me a little too quickly.

My first day at the job was Bloomsday, June 16th, and by early July I understood the basic mechanics of how things worked. But it was an extremely complicated enterprise with seemingly infinite variables and understanding the basics only meant that I could now begin to learn how everything else worked. I was given a stack of 75 (!) clients and managed to get through about three of them in the first few weeks before hitting a huge wall of complexity with the other clients. But my training was seemingly over. I was reprimanded for asking questions, given snappy, bitchy responses and chided for not getting it.

In late July, I flew back to New York to participate in a hockey tournament that had been arranged long before I started the job. The owner approved of the trip when I was hired, there was supposedly no problem at all with me missing two days of work to play in the tournament.

It was great to be back in New York and skating on a team with all of my good friends who I'd left over a year prior. Playing five games over three days, I somehow had one of the best hockey performances of my life (probably THE best) and led our team to the tournament championship. We lost because of an insurmountably poor performance by our goaltender.

Our goalie for the tournament was my good friend Mike who I'd known since I was about 8 years old. He was two years older than me and played goalie for the first team my older brother ever played on. Our families always car-pooled to the games and I got to know him very well over the years. In college, I joined an intramural team with him and his brother and we played together for the next six years or so, still driving to the games together because we lived in the same part of Staten Island.

Even though we remained friends when I moved to California (he was one of the few people who would call to check up on me), he had changed a lot in the intervening time---he'd gained weight, started smoking cigarettes again, and didn't look well at all. But he did manage to find a new girlfriend who he spoke about endlessly.

When I returned to New York for the tournament, as always, we drove to the games together. It was great because we got to catch up on things after I'd been across the country for a more than a year. Mike's performance in the tournament was all over the place. He singlehandedly won us a game, then fell apart in the next one. Everything collapsed for him in the tournament final. We battled a team from New Jersey in a back-and-forth affair, scoring 10 goals (I had two and assisted two others) but still we found ourselves tied because Mike wasn't stopping anything. We kept falling behind, fighting back, taking the lead, and then falling behind again before finally losing when Mike let in two easy goals at the very end.

My teammates, who had been playing with Mike regularly for the last few months, were furious and they lambasted him for his poor performance after the game. He had no excuse. It was the worst I had ever seen him play. He looked like he was half asleep. In years past, Mike had always complained to me that he had trouble sleeping. Oftentimes, after our late weekday night games, we would often have to pick up some Tylenol PM for him at a gas station so he could manage to fall asleep when he went home.

I drove him home after the final game and he was distraught. I didn't know how to console him other than to suggest that he quit smoking (something I always got on him about) and start exercising again. He agreed. We didn't get to talk much as his girlfriend called him and they had a long, unpleasant conversation. He argued with her the whole way home. Mike's birthday was coming up and they wanted to go out to have dinner together, but neither of them had a car (a recent accident had wrecked his only means of transportation) and Mike didn't have the money to pay for a cab. Neither did she. It was ugly.

Right before I dropped him off I calmly told him to stop yelling at his girlfriend because it seemed he was taking his hockey frustrations out on her. He hung up and we said our goodbyes as I dropped him off. As he dragged his goalie equipment into his house I looked at him feeling a deep sadness and regret. I couldn't help him. I had tried to help him for years and he wouldn't listen and now I was flying back to California when my friend seemed to need me the most.

Two weeks later, on August 14th, my ringing cell phone woke me up 6 AM. It was Mike's brother. Mike was dead. He went to sleep and didn't wake up. It was two weeks after his 26th birthday.

At this point my job had gotten pretty bad. When I returned from the tournament in New York, everyone seemed mad at me. I heard them talking about me down the hall saying things like "maybe he should work harder or stop missing work for hockey." My days were numbered. The day I learned of Mike's death, I was in shock, didn't cry at all, and went on in to work to endure the bullshit. A day or two later, the owner left to go spend a week at her vacation home and all hell broke loose.

The girls turned a shade of evil that reminded me of the demonic females that flanked Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate. The main devilwoman, the owner's main lieutenant, warned me that if I didn't step it up at work I would be fired. Yet when I asked her a question about a complex project, she yelled "can't you see I'm busy!" and didn't allow me any of her time again until it was after 5 PM and everyone went home. I had gotten a cold that was becoming increasingly worse with all the stressful drama and as I sat in her office I blew my nose in a handkerchief. She looked up with an annoyed glare and snarled, "Did you just throw your snot in my garbage?"

A day or two later I had descended into a bad fever but couldn't miss work because my job was seemingly hanging by a string. Mike's death had finally sunk in and I was having moments where I'd burst into uncontrolled tears as his voice and image haunted me. The rest of August was spent in a state of physical and emotional decay. Everyday I woke up to liquid snot pouring out of my nose and it lasted throughout the day. Combined with a steady stream of tears in grievance for my lost friend, I was a pretty pathetic sight.

On the final day of August I sent the boss a scathing letter of resignation, detailing the way her sycophantic soldiers had sabotaged my position and never saw any of them again. The whole experience inspired me to turn my journey into an autobiographical novel and soon this blog was born as a means to hone my writing.

August 2010 - Another trip back to New York. This one was so eventful and thought-provoking that I've been meaning to compose a huge essay about it but something keeps holding me back from it. I haven't even managed to write the whole story down in a journal. The whole thing was surreal and, as time passes and I don't transcribe it all, the experience becomes "fabled by the daughters of memory."

Shortly after her birthday (one day after Mike's birthday, actually) my grandmother died. She had just turned 101 years old. The interesting thing about it is that it happened the same day my brother and I were to fly to New York from California for my nephew's baptism. He was to be baptized in a fountain that my devoutly religious grandmother had funded with a big donation to the church.

It was all a pretty magical experience with lots of instances of synchronicity once we got there. Since this post is already exceedingly long, I don't want to go into all the details now except to mention that my nephew was baptized and my grandmother buried on the same day. It was all quite surreal and, as the creative/artistically sensitive person in the family, it really struck me. I wrote my grandmother's eulogy and my sister delivered it.

Just this morning I drove my sister to the airport at 5 AM to conclude her visit here in Austin. She had been at a business conference last week and then stopped over here to pay me a visit since I haven't seen any of my family members since January. Interestingly enough, she avoided all the natural disaster drama in New York.

The last few Augusts have pretty rough on me but this one, despite being busy and leaving me sleep-deprived, has been relatively peaceful. But my hometown was rumbled by an earthquake and then battered by a hurricane. In fact, Staten Island bore the brunt of the storm worse than any other part of New York City. I'm just glad the month is almost over.

"Teems of times and happy returns"

2011-08-28T13:38:00.001-05:00

After finally completing that big list about James Joyce in the last post, I wanted to let it simmer atop the page for a while. I didn't intend to let the blog go dormant for three weeks, though.

Things have gotten a little hectic here lately, my life is becoming more and more like that of a normal young person: very busy. I'm only working 20 hours a week (to avoid succumbing to the soul-killing clutches of a cubicle) but my girlfriend and I are sharing a car and managing to stay occupied from morning until early evening, which doesn't allow me all that much creative/reading/relaxing/baseball-watching time. I'm not stressing about it though, because I know plenty of people my age have it a lot worse than me. Aside from the slow suffocation of my finances (and similar bodily reactions to the intense Texas heat), life here in Austin is pretty damn good. At the moment I'm sitting outside at a coffee shop with wooden decks extending up into the woods. Very cool place.

In the intervening three weeks between blog posts, I did manage to complete two rather large and detailed hip hop album reviews as part of a trio. I'm in the midst of writing the third review and once they're all finished I will share them here. I've got a bunch of posts coming up soon (if I can find the time) including a big one covering all the new Wu-Tang-related music that's springing up right now.

For the moment, I want to share a few (mostly) Joyce-related links that have interested me lately:

- friend of this blog Bobby Campbell is a very talented artist and graphic designer and he recently produced a smooth, peripatetic illustration of the scene in chapter 3 of Ulysses where Stephen is "walking into eternity along Sandymount strand" that is definitely worth checking out. This represents one of my favorite sections from Joyce, as I wrote about last month.

- More great stuff from BC, he created some spectacular looking artwork (including the piece atop this blogpost) demonstrating Vico's four cycles of history which Joyce used as the structure of Finnegans Wake. Go check it out at the Maybe Logic Academy blog, it is part of a nice essay entitled "Falling on Deaf Ears" elaborating on Vico's philosophy, the Wake, Marshall McLuhan, and more.

- The past couple weeks I've been reading an extremely fascinating essay on Finnegans Wake by Dan Weiss that was posted on the The Brazen Head blog. It is written in an easy-to-read style of short sections and it serves as both an introduction to the complexities of the Wake and an exploration of how Joyce tried to construct it so as to encompass the entire universe, thus creating something that closely resembles modern hyptertext and the internet. The essay is lengthy but well-written and worth the read. Another piece covering Joyce in a similar vein (internet, universe, hypertextuality) made my brain cells swell recently; it explores Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, and Thomas Pynchon and their attempts at creating a "cosmic web" through their art.

- This last link is not exactly Joyce related (though the author maintains multiple blogs with Joyce and Wake material), but Steven James Pratt (aka Fly Agaric 23) wrote an intriguing and thought-provoking blog post about the recent race riots in the UK using his favorite splicing style of weaving together mini essays, poems, and article clips. I highly recommend you check it out.

Please stay tuned as there will be more to come soon.

16 Reasons Why James Joyce is the Greatest Writer Ever

2011-08-01T00:30:00.007-05:00

I actually started to write this over a year ago and now it's finally complete. It was originally intended to be posted on June 16 (thus the 16 reasons) but that never worked out. It's not meant to be exhaustive or even all that serious, but I think it gets the point across.

1. The simple fact that his writing is beautiful
All good writing strives towards poetry as poetry is the highest form of writing. Joyce started off as a poet and was good enough to receive attention from W.B. Yeats who encouraged Joyce to "turn his mind to unknown arts." This unknown art is a manner of prose in which every word and the flow of the words are considered with precise poetical precision. So Joyce's writing is an original, beautiful gleaming mass that yields gems like this one:

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

2. Joyce is to literature what Einstein is to science
In Ulysses Joyce toys with time and space all throughout the book. In the "Proteus" chapter, Stephen Dedalus ruminates and meditates on the nature of Time and Space using Schopenhauer's interesting words Nacheinander (German for "succeeding each other") and Nebeneinander ("beside each other"). The main character Leopold Bloom sells newspaper advertisement space for temporary periods of time. In Richard Ellman's complex exegesis, Ulysses on the Liffey, he argues convincingly that the 18 episodes can be broken into six triads within which the dominant categories of Space, Time, and Space-Time repeat over and over. Relativity (or more specifically what Einstein called "special relativity") also dominates the book, especially in the first six chapters as we follow the movements and thoughts of two different, separate characters at the exact same time of day. Relativity abounds in Bloom's cosmic reflections in the Ithaca episode. Also, Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated explains how Joyce stretches out time by depicting the events of the day through a "rich mix of clock time, psychological time, and mnemonic time."

We are all aware, for example, that we can think and perceive far more in the course of a few minutes of multi-leveled consciousness than we could spell out in words in as many hours. Joyce variously explores this disparity. (Gifford, pg 3)

Finnegans Wake is also overloaded with the integration of modern relativistic physics into literature. I think of E = mc² and the discovery of the condensed energy present within every atom when I consider the unbelievable amount of meaning condensed into each sentence, each word of that crazy book. Most words and phrases in the book contain not just double meanings but triple and even quadruple meanings. As Joyce scholar John Bishop explains in his amazing book, the Wake is also written in such a way that it allows and even encourages a style of interpretation called "Sortes Virgilianae" (Latin for "Virgilian fortune-telling") in which the reader opens the book at random and interprets whatever they come across as applicable to their own personal affairs (just like the divination system of reading the I-Ching) and so you can argue that there's nearly infinite meaning compacted into the words of the book.
(An entire post or series of posts could easily be written about Joyce and modern science and there's already an excellent resource about it on the web.)

3. Style
Joyce was a master of style. It is evident right from the beginning of his career in the short story collection Dubliners which is written in a style meant to subliminally sensitize the reader to the modern day urban paralysis he was depicting. The vocabulary is a limited one since most of the characters endure a meager quality of life and words like "vain", "useless", "tiresome", and "hopeless" recur throughout the different stories. Joyce incrementally expanded on this very modern and original method of writing as he went from the gestation/growth style in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to the "dance of the hours" in Ulysses (where each hour of the day creates its own style), all the way to a completely new and strange night speech of Finnegans Wake. I think the most exemplary and entertaining example of this method of letting the depicted scene dictate the style is the amazingly musical Sirens episode of Ulysses.

4. The Intersection of Myth and Time
One of the things that's most special about Joyce is how he brings together the real and the mythical. His books (aside from Finnegans Wake) are highly detailed descriptions of the events of everyday life even down to minutely recording the flow of a character's thoughts. But at the same time there's always a sort of mythic, cosmic backdrop to everything brought about by the heavy use of symbolism and mythic correspondences and what this achieves (for me at least) is an experience such that the reader clearly sees their own everyday life as a mythic journey. Richard Aldington once wrote of Ulysses that it "made realism mystic."

5. Multiplicity of Meaning
In The Consciousness of Joyce, Richard Ellmann explains that "In Portrait of the Artist, Stephen fears he will always be a shy guest at the feast of the world's culture; in Ulysses Joyce plays host to that culture." The number of different meanings, allusions, and culture that Joyce manages to squeeze into both the macro- and microcosm of Ulysses is simply astounding. Even just in the first chapter, which is probably the easiest section of the book, there are so many things going on amid multiple levels: the naturalistic element is obvious, but Stephen also represents Telemachus and Hamlet at the same time while elements of Dante and Nietzsche are crammed in on almost every page and the entire chapter is a satirical enactment of a mass. This occurs in every chapter of the book, the density of meaning so thick that there are large reference books listing the various allusions and references (and those still don't exhaust all the meanings!).

This method is taken to an unbelievable extreme in Finnegans Wake where one sentence, or even one word, can have four, five, six different meanings. John Bishop gave an example of this in an interesting (though rapidly delivered) lecture. In the introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Joyce, there's a great breakdown of one single paragraph from the Wake in which about 6 or 7 different viable interpretations are unfolded through ten pages and the idea comes up that Joyce could not possibly have purposely included all the different meanings. The response to this is that we can never know for certain that he didn't intentionally include those meanings but also that even if we did know for certain "it need not make any difference, since Joyce has deliberately created a text with the power to generate more meanings than he had in mind." (see #2 above)

6. Architectural Structure
Right from the start, Joyce had an uncanny feel for organizing the macrocosmic structure in his works. His first book, the collection of short stories entitled Dubliners, isn't like most anthologies of stories. The volume was conceived as a book from the beginning, linking multiple stories by theme, technique, subject matter, etc. and the stories are presented through four aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life.

I've thoroughly examined the structure of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in a previous post, and the organized structure in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake is staggering for such enormous texts. I've read a quote from Joyce somewhere describing Ulysses as his Notre Dame and it's not a bad comparison. I'm less familiar with the structural anatomy of the Wake, but it does use Giambattista Vico's four cycles of history as a trellis and, as artist Stephen Crowe recently argued, its structure is even more thoroughly crafted than Ulysses.

7. The Enormous Vocabulary
Ulysses alone contains more vocabulary words (30,030) than the entire Shakespearean canon of thirty-eight plays and 150 sonnets (29,168).

8. The Encyclopedia of Knowledge
Reading Joyce can be very much like reading an encyclopedia. This is not an accident; he sought to make Ulysses a sort of encyclopedia with its tons and tons of references and allusions. There are at least two very large texts that seek to identify and index all the information in Ulysses but (just as with Finnegans Wake) it is often said that we'll never be able to identify all the facts, figures, stories, songs, cartoons, jokes and everything else that's jammed into it. I found my first reading of Ulysses to be extremely rich in learning, all you have to do is wikipedia search some of the stuff mentioned and your historical (or scientific, etc) perspective will be vastly expanded.

9. Ulysses

10. Finnegans Wake

(these two books alone are enough to make anyone the G.O.A.T.)

11. Affirmation of Life (Yes!)
This is perhaps the ultimate lesson to take from Joyce: the affirmation or saying "Yes" to life. At the end of an immense book that presents in gruesome detail the elements of everyday life, the final chapter is a female explosion of "Yes", the word is repeated over and over throughout the meandering monologue of Molly Bloom. This "Yes" is what keeps the wheel of life spinning. Nietzsche in The Will to Power elaborates:

"If we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence... if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event---and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed."

12. His works are humorous
Columbia professor William York Tindall has called Finnegans Wake the funniest and dirtiest book ever written. Ulysses contains tons of jokes, hidden or otherwise, and it guarantees a bunch of laugh-out-loud moments. These two books are big, daunting pieces of so-called "highbrow" literature but they're also comedies.

13. His satire and humor often contains his greatest profundities

"One is puzzled to guess where he is teasing, where serious, until at last it begins to dawn that the mode of disorderly burlesque is precisely James Joyce's deepest seriousness," wrote Joseph Campbell. Joyce considered himself a great jokester of the universe. The entirety of Finnegans Wake embodies this, it's all really a big joke, a great comedy filled with puns.

Ulysses has plenty of mockery and satire that Joyce scholars (in my opinion) often misinterpret, for instance his use of Billy Sunday tirades. These little sermons are quite hilarious but they also contain essential messages as in this selection: "Are you a god or a doggone clod?... it's up to you to sense that cosmic force. Have we cold feet about the cosmos? No. Be on the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that something within, the higher self. You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama, an Ingersoll. Are you all in this vibration? I say you are..." (Ulysses pg 507-508)

14. Hidden Messages
It's fun to discover such things as the fact that the first letter of each of the three parts in Ulysses (S, M, and P) corresponds to the focal character in each of those parts (Stephen, Molly, and "Poldy" which is what Molly calls Leopold Bloom), or that the first words of the book ("Stately, plump") are a good physical description of the book itself. Robert Anton Wilson points out that there are 22 words in the first sentence of the book (and the number 22 recurs throughout the book, plus it was published on his birthday 2/2/1922). Finnegans Wake has so much of this stuff that after 50 years of exhaustive study, they probably haven't even scratched the surface. There are actually multiple books examining Joyce's use of the Kabbalah throughout the Wake.

Okay, maybe this kind of thing doesn't make someone a great writer... so I'll add one more:

14a. He "explodotonated" English and created his own style

"James Joyce was probably one of the greatest poets who ever lived on our globe, so abundant in poets, but he did not trouble himself to create within the limits of this or that literary genre. The principle of his writing was the subordination of all existing literary kinds: prose, drama, lyrics, and epics, to one primary aim, which was the most perfect presentation of what he wanted to say." - Maciej Stomczynski

15. Portrayal of Man (Bloom), Woman (Molly), and even himself (Stephen/Shem)
The depiction of Leopold Bloom has often been called the most complete image of a man ever presented in literature. We follow him through an entire day including his bodily functions (pooping/urination/masturbation), eating, interactions in the streets, stores, and pubs, and the whole vast range of his mental travels. The Molly Bloom monologue in the final chapter has been praised by feminists because of its unbelievably accurate look into the flowing thoughts of a woman's mind. And, personally, one of my favorite things about Ulysses and the Wake are the characters that are based on Joyce himself (Stephen Dedalus and Shem the Penman, respectively).

16. He did all of this while living a harsh, often impoverished life
He was born into a middle class family, but his parents kept popping out children until the family was broke. His father drank away any money they had and they eventually had to move from one domicile to the next because they couldn't make the rent. Growing up he lived in at least a dozen different places. His mother died relatively early in his life (when he was around 20) and the household fell into jagged shambles as his father descended into alcoholism.

When he started a family of his own he inherited his father's penchant for boozing away all the family's money and, again, they kept getting kicked out of apartments and houses. No exaggeration, he lived in at least 30 different addresses. Through all of that, he would have a horrible time getting his work published, starting with Dubliners for which he battled publishers for almost 10 years until it saw the light of day. The greatest novel of the 20th century was banned, burned, and lambasted when it first came out. The book was considered illegal in the United States and Britain for 11 years after it was first published.

On top of all that, his beloved daughter Lucia suffered a mental collapse and had to be put in a mental institution where she stayed for the rest of her life. His daughter-in-law suffered the same fate. While all of this was happening he also had terrible eye problems, requiring him to undergo at least 10 operations on his eyes without anesthetics. Somehow, someway (and this is perhaps the thing I find most incredible about Joyce), he battled through all of this to finish his greatest and most immensely enigmatic book, Finnegans Wake. His friend Nino Frank would later write:

"It was as if around the old hero---doesn't Finnegans Wake seem to be man's answer to the sphinx?---some obscure vengeance of the gods was falling."

Sublime Poetry

2011-08-01T00:02:00.003-05:00

A recent piece in The Guardian by Carol Birch provides a short but beautifully accurate summation of the art of James Joyce, particularly Finnegans Wake. Here's a sample:

The Wake invokes death and the dying of the light with some of the most sublime poetry in the English language. It is almost unbelievable, a madly audacious and impossible work, and I can understand why some people hate it. But for me it's like falling in love with reading all over again.

And here is a cool video with a reading of a selection from the Cyclops episode (pg 301-302) of Ulysses.

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My next post, which will appear shortly, will be my last foray into Joyce for a little while as I am taking a break from his works to spend the month of August writing mostly about music. After that, I will be plunging right back into Joyce with a full, thorough explication of Ulysses.

The Beltran Era

2011-07-30T23:35:00.000-05:00

His final game in a Mets uniform was a typical Carlos Beltran performance. Two walks, a single, an RBI, and 3 runs scored. He went out in perfect Beltran fashion with a strong all-around game that a pessimistic eye would be blind to. That's how he always went about his business throughout his seven year Mets career and, sadly, during that time many Mets fans adopted the unfairly critical perspective of their Bronx neighbors. "They act like they own you," he would later comment.

After the Mets signed Beltran to a monstrous 7-year $119 million contract (the largest in Mets history) before the 2005 season, the fans had every reason to expect big things from him but the normally shy and reserved centerfielder seemed to wilt underneath the massive New York City sports spotlight. He had a poor year by his own standards, hitting just .266/.330/.414 with 17 homeruns for a Mets team that underachieved and finished in third place. The fans weren't happy.

Everything would change in the next season as the Mets loaded up in preparation for a run at a title. They brought in Beltran's friend and fellow countryman Carlos Delgado and this certainly seemed to benefit Beltran as he went on to have arguably the greatest offensive season in Mets history. He hit .275/.388/.594 with 95 walks and a team-record 41 homeruns as the Mets went all the way to the National League championship.

It was during that season that I attended more Mets games at Shea Stadium than ever before, I saw probably 15 or 16 regular season games and even went to Game 2 of the NLCS against the Cardinals (wrote about it here). I fondly remember Beltran running down any fly ball that was hit in his vicinity with a long-striding graceful gait that was nevertheless an image of peak athletic performance. During one game against the Angels I saw him not only chase down a ball that was smashed but he even reached up above the tall Shea Stadium fence and stole a homerun. It was one of the best catches I'd ever witnessed in person.

A seemingly perfect player, he became my favorite on the team because of his all-around talent and consistency. David Wright was terrific but he was prone to frustrating lapses in the field, Jose Reyes was as exciting as anybody in the sport but could have some terrible at-bats in those days. Beltran, on the other hand, was the kind of player you'd create in a video game---he had speed, big-time power, a good batting eye, hit the ball all over the field from both sides of the plate, and played a superb center field.

In the '06 NLCS against the Cardinals, Beltran and Delgado carried the team (Beltran scored 8 runs and hit 3 homers) and they battled all the way to a deciding Game 7 at Shea. That was an unforgettable night for me as I know it was for all Mets fans. I'll always remember where I was. I watched the beginning of the game in my kitchen and saw Endy Chavez's legendary catch right as I stepped out the door to join my brother's future wife and her friend for a few drinks at a bar in Brooklyn. The bar was absolutely packed and I hated it, you couldn't walk anywhere without squeezing in between a crowd of inconsiderate people. The game was on TV but not enough people seemed to care. The teams were locked in a 1-1 tie and as it reached the 9th inning, everybody suddenly started paying attention. For a reason I can't fathom now in retrospect, the Mets didn't put their best reliever in the game but went instead with Aaron Heilman who promptly allowed a two-run homerun to the Cards' worst hitter, Yadier Molina.

The Mets went into their final at-bat needing two runs to keep their season alive. They would face rookie pitcher Adam Wainwright. The first two hitters got on base and I can remember that incredible feeling of hope, a particular brand of which seems to be unique to baseball. The tying runs were on base, the opportunity to tie the game existed. But Wainwright was composed amidst the chaotic Shea Stadium scene and retired the next two hitters. My least favorite Met player Paul LoDuca worked a walk and the bases were loaded for the team's best hitter, Carlos Beltran, with a trip to the World Series on the line.

Wainwright threw two fastballs and got two quick strikes on Beltran. The next pitch would live in infamy. Wainwright twirled an absolutely perfect, knee-buckling curveball that started around the height of Beltran's head and promptly dropped down to knee-level for a called strike three. Beltran was fooled by it, couldn't muster a swing, and the game was over. The Cardinals went to the World Series and eventually won the title, defeating the Detroit Tigers. Beltran, for all his subsequent accomplishments, was never forgiven by most Mets fans for not swinging the bat. My dad still brings it up. As I watched it in the bar, I didn't scream or stomp my feet in anger I simply exhaled "fuck..." and felt the same helpless feeling that Beltran must have had. It was an impossible pitch to hit. Wainwright had won the battle fair and square and there was nothing the Mets could do about it.

It should be noted that, despite that memory of Beltran being fooled by a perfect curveball being burned into everyone's minds, that's not why they lost. They were already trailing by 2 and down to their final out, none of that was Beltran's fault. He'd even scored the team's only run in that game. I blamed all the Mets' failures on inept manager Willie Randolph in those days and while the arguments I used to make have faded from my memory over the years, I still think it's safe to say that Randolph's poorly informed decisions are to blame for the Mets not going all the way.

Beltran didn't let the memory of his strikeout get to him as he went on to post another two huge seasons for the Mets, but in both of those years (2007, 2008) the team collapsed down the stretch and never got back to the playoffs again. Again, Beltran was not the one to blame. In both of those seasons, he put up huge numbers in the final month while the rest of the team faltered. He especially turned it on in the closing month of 2008, hitting .344/.440/.645 in September as the Mets desperately tried to save their season in the final days of Shea Stadium's existence.

These past few years he battled knee problems, had surgery, and missed a lot of games but still hit well in the games he did play. This year he was putting up big numbers again (leading the league in extra-base hits) while playing in right field to give his knees a break, but with his contract expiring he became expendable. He was traded to San Francisco on Wednesday.

I'm sorry to see him go but it's comforting that he's going to a great baseball city where he'll be appreciated for what he brings to the table. He also gets a chance at defending a World Series title so I'll probably be rooting for the Giants the rest of the year with him in the mix. As I learned in my last trip to San Francisco, the love those people show for their team, even through hard times, is enough to make me want to root for them (despite my distaste for their general manager, Brian Sabean).

Jay Jaffe at Baseball Prospectus wrote a nice piece the other day looking at Beltran's performance as a Met, showing that he was actually among the top 5 most productive outfielders in baseball during that time. Nevertheless, he remains under-appreciated by most Mets fans and some still hold the 2006 strikeout against him as his defining moment, conveniently ignoring that Beltran leaves the Mets with numbers that compare favorably to Mike Piazza's output during his time in Queens. Looking at the list of top Mets career performances, Beltran ranks in the franchise's top 10 for on-base percentage, slugging, runs scored, doubles, homeruns, RBI, walks, OPS+, and anything else important.

The guy simply had a great career as a New York Met. I will always remember him for his whip-like swing and the homeruns he crushed (so many of them at crucial moments), the fly balls he ran down, and the way he made it all look so easy. It's a shame that he missed so much time during the two seasons prior, but I see it as representative of the Mets overall organizational decrepitude of that time. His rejuvenation this year coincided with a rejuvenation of the Mets franchise under new management and I'm glad we got to see him go out at the peak of his powers and I wish him all the best in San Francisco.

The Wave that Washed Your Meals Away

2011-07-29T18:36:00.000-05:00

The excitement of the 2011 major league baseball season suddenly burst into supernova recently. It all began late Tuesday night in Atlanta.

After the 3rd inning, the Pirates and Braves were locked in a 3-3 tie. Nobody managed to put across another run for the next 16 innings. They nearly played the equivalent of two full baseball games without scoring a run. I tuned into the MLB.tv feed around the 13th inning and the matchup just seemed far too boring so I skipped to a different game. Once I saw that they were headed to the 16th, I realized this could be something special. The kind of game where managers actually have to start putting their thinking caps on (both skippers confused their thinking caps with dunce caps, though, as evidenced by their long line of stupid maneuvers).

The game got to the bottom of the 19th inning when things finally got interesting. The Braves put two runners aboard with one out. Julio Lugo, who I had only recently realized was still in the majors, stood at third base. The Braves had run out of position players so they let Scott Proctor, a crappy pitcher and an even worse hitter, step to the plate. He managed to make pretty solid contact but he hit a ground ball directly at the third baseman Pedro Alvarez. Lugo took off from third towards home plate and while Alvarez hurled a perfect throw to the catcher I remember thinking that this is one of the things I love to see in baseball, a tense moment with the game on the line and a fielder executing a perfect throw to home plate to keep the game alive.

The throw home was perfect, alright. Pirates catcher Michael McHenry, a minor league scrub acquired from the Red Sox organization after a slew of Pittsburgh catchers started falling apart in succession, received the throw from Alvarez and met the oncoming Lugo a few feet in front of home plate. Lugo was out by a mile and he knew it. He didn't even try to bowl the catcher over or knock the ball out of his glove, he simply executed a feeble slide with a look on his face like he didn't want the catcher to be too rough with him. Perhaps McHenry sensed Lugo's hapnophobia because instead of firmly smacking him with the glove, he waved his arm in the vicinity of Lugo's leg.

Lugo stood up from his slide with his body slumped into disappointment when suddenly the umpire gave the signal "SAFE!" and Lugo quickly touched homeplate. The game was over. And "the umpire" was about to lose his relative anonymity. The world of baseball-watchers exploded in anger. I've never enjoyed following the stream of Twitter messages as much as I did that Tuesday night (after 1 AM, mind you). Everybody had been tuning into the game because of how unusually long it was lasting, it seemed like there was a shot at history being made. Well, it was historic alright. Many people called it the worst call they'd ever seen in a baseball game.

In retrospect, the umpire Jerry Meals apologized and admitted he messed up while some have argued that he may have actually made the correct call. Major League Baseball actually issued a statement saying that Meals screwed it up, but they can't take it back. They won't be bringing the two teams back together to re-do everything. It's in the books. Worst of all for the Pirates, who are contending for the first time in some 19 years, this could be the difference between them going to the postseason or not.

* * *

All of that stuff was going on around 2 AM eastern time and so the next day figured to be filled with all kinds of reactions once everyone got to gather their thoughts on the incident. Well, a huge wave of Wednesday baseball action suddenly splashed, overtaking and washing away all the Jerry Meals news that had begun to pile up.

With the trade deadline looming, the newswire had begun to buzz with big news: the St. Louis Cardinals were going to trade their young stud centerfielder, Colby Rasmus. The 24-year-old Rasmus, although a world class talent, had been squabbling with the team's manager last year and it spilled over into this season with Rasmus having a bad year to show for it. It certainly didn't help Rasmus' standing with the Cardinals that his father had the attitude of a big-mouthed little league dad constantly interfering with the team's handling of his son. Better yet, it was the Toronto Blue Jays' shrewd young general manager who was swooping in to grab Rasmus and bring him up to the nest in Toronto along with a bunch of other rejected fledglings.

Before that trade was completed, the news wire blew up again: the New York Mets had reached a deal to send Carlos Beltran, the most coveted trade bait in baseball, to the San Francisco Giants. The rumors about Beltran had been swirling around for a few weeks but suddenly the wind jutted violently like a cold day in the Bay Area and Beltran was gone. But the Mets managed to scoop up the Giants' best pitching prospect, Zack Wheeler, in return. (Personally, I'm sad to see Beltran go but glad he's headed to a contender defending their championship. I'll have more to say on Beltran and the Mets soon.)

While baseball peeps were still assimilating these two huge events, an afternoon baseball game in Cleveland between the Angels and Indians suddenly demanded everyone's attention. Angels righthander Ervin Santana was pitching a no-hitter. Once everybody (including me, via my iPhone) managed to tune in, Santana cruised through the last two innings and history was made. Suddenly, nobody gave a crap about Jerry Meals.

"Light is Provided..."

2011-07-27T23:57:00.000-05:00

"Light is provided through sparks of energy
from the mind
that travel in rhyme form

givin' sight to the blind
the dumb are mostly intrigued by the drum
death, only one can save self from..."

- Masta Killa, the 9th lyrical swordsman of the Wu-Tang Clan

My plans for this blog as we head towards the month of August include a lengthy foray into the music sphere, mainly through hip hop (and specifically my hometown favorites, Wu-Tang and their enormous tree of influences). This will most likely include a few album reviews, lyrical analyses, and some general pieces on music and the vast world of audio art.

Prior to that, expect a piece on baseball (which has exploded with interesting occurrences lately) and a huge, huge post on James Joyce. But once August hits, the turntables begin to spin.

Here's an old track featuring my personal favorite trio out of the "nine-diagram phoenix": Masta Killa, Rza, and Gza.

"I'm a slave to the rhythm, but never to a mental-deafening power"
- Masta Killa

"What's the square miles of the planet?
why is the axis slanted?
how much is covered by water, how much is granite?

True I Master Equality, godbody be flowing like the chi energy inside ya artery"
- The Rza

"Walk around b-boys, DJs, emcees
through RAP, never thinking airwaves or TV
it was strictly
all about
MAGNIFICENT RHYME CLOUT"
- The Gza/Genius

Some words for Winehouse

2011-07-25T23:38:00.000-05:00

Saturday morning I had to get up very early, around 6 AM, to drive my girlfriend to work. Bursting out of sleep and into consciousness so early brought with it a still-spinning movie reel of vivid dream action. I don't often remember my dreams (although I have tried a few times, including recently, to record them in the morning immediately upon waking up in an effort to tap into that unconscious wellspring) but this time I was still seemingly half asleep. The whole story was fresh and I outlined it to my girlfriend during the short drive over to her job, including my own attempts at interpreting each facet of it.

My memory of the dream began with me checking into a hotel and my credit card being denied. The problem was quickly resolved (although there was intense worry upon my only form of payment being rejected) and I went over to the elevator to head up to my room. It was a crappy, rickety old elevator, probably representing the elevators at the hotel I stayed at recently in Pasadena, those were unusually old and slow as hell.

I went in and hit the button to head up to my floor but then two little children rushed in and started playing a game where they chased each other in and out of the elevator while their mother looked on, unable to control them. I realized the elevator wouldn't be going anywhere so I opted to take the stairs. Walking back into the lobby there was a big beautiful staircase in the middle that led up to a restaurant on the second floor. This lobby, in retrospect, was a dream distortion of the lobby in the hotel I was forced to stay in after I was stranded at LAX last month when the United Airlines computers crashed and passengers had to sit at the ticket lines for over 5 hours.

Walking up the hotel lobby steps I heard a news report blaring out from a television below: a young superstar NHL goaltender had suddenly died in a car accident. This goalie had a name in the dream but it wasn't anybody real, just an unconsciously garbled name but this news hit me hard and I felt terrible for this young man who'd died so suddenly. A very close friend of mine, a hockey goalie who I'd grown up with since the age of 8 or so, died in his sleep two years ago, just two weeks after his 26th birthday and, with the anniversary of his untimely death coming up soon it's likely that the thought of him was present here.

As I continued ascending the stairs onto the second floor, the news report's grim images and descriptions of the young man, normally a spirited and animated presence in hockey games, having his life evaporate from him on a stretcher bubbled up sadness from my heart into my throat and I nearly broke into tears. The stairs led into a restaurant and while walking through the restaurant I spotted a familiar face. It was a distinguished man with glasses and he was carrying on a monologue to a large table of people, I recognized him as an NHL general manager, in fact, the GM of the team who'd just lost their goalie to a sudden death. I went up to him and offered my condolences at this horrible tragedy and he was relieved to see me because he'd been trying to communicate to his dinner guests just how bad this news is. I helped elaborate it for him, noting how this young man was only 25 years old and was at the height of his athletic career, etc, etc.

Shortly after that I woke up. After returning home from dropping my girlfriend off at work it was still super early and I was super tired so I sunk right back into bed and went back to sleep for hours. When I woke up again I was spacey and slow, before I could even get out of bed I languidly checked for new e-mails on my phone and then resorted to Twitter. There I saw the news that Amy Winehouse had just been found dead at the age of 27. It felt like my dream had perhaps tapped into a splash in the collective unconscious.

I never paid that much attention to Amy Winehouse's music over the years but I was certainly blown away by "You Know I'm No Good." The woman clearly had an immense gift for singing, listen to her voice for a few seconds and it will rumble down into the deep recesses of your soul. As powerful as her talent was, her inner demons were just as strong. We all wrestle with our shadows. Nietzsche wrote: "One must have chaos within oneself if one is to be a dancing star." Reading about Ms. Winehouse's harrowing struggles with drug addiction it's clear that her torment ran deeper than we could possibly imagine. She certainly wasn't the first superstar musician to have a drug problem but reading the details of her preferred substances (crack, heroin, ecstasy, cocaine, ketamine, alcohol) makes Ol' Dirty Bastard seem like a choirboy. And her descent played out in plain sight for all to see and judge.

I've been listening to her music a lot these past few days and I'm simply in awe of her voice. Russell Brand wrote a beautiful and personal tribute to her and described this feeling perfectly:

The awe that envelops when witnessing a genius. From her oddly dainty presence that voice, a voice that seemed not to come from her but from somewhere beyond even Billie and Ella, from the font of all greatness. A voice that was filled with such power and pain that it was at once entirely human yet laced with the divine.

I hope her troubled soul can now finally rest in peace.

I also hope that people can come to understand that she doesn't deserve to be tossed into the gutter because of her failure to cope with her problems. Artists are often lightning rods not just for controversy, glamor, and all the other paparazzi bullshit. They are antennas tuned into the aura of their epoch. We live in a chemically consumptive world and this brilliant young woman who couldn't stop gobbling up drugs is representative of our modern mass madness.

"Thought Through My Eyes": Epilogue, Part 3 (Expansive Bibliography)

2011-07-24T13:49:00.004-05:00

To finally close out this treatise, I would like to share thoughts on some of the books used in the research process.

The Secret Life of Salvador Dali by Salvador Dali

Published in 1942, this is really the definitive text to read for those interested in Dali. His writing style is superb though often flashy and exuberant as he tells the story of his life starting with intrauterine memories (seriously). The intrauterine stuff was actually very interesting, especially as compared to Stanislav Grof's research on the subject (which came decades later). As often seems to be the case, Dali's artistic intuition is so precise that it matches perfectly with later scientific findings.

Next to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, this was one of the main texts for my paper and (as the point is belabored in the paper) its style of "autobiographical mythology" certainly makes for an interesting comparison with Joyce's autobiographical novel. One of the differences between them though is that Dali's book is filled with beautiful hand-drawn illustrations depicting symbols, scenes, characters, etc drawn from the story.

Diary of a Genius by Salvador Dali
Although the opening pages, detailing his disputes with the Surrealists and André Breton, make for interesting reading, I didn't find this book to be all that good. Sure, Dali's writing style is always entertaining but this book is literally a diary, a daily account of a few years in Dali's life and we get to read how many times he crapped that day, what he ate, etc. It's not all boring, but I wouldn't read it again.

The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali (as told to André Parinaud)

This book is a written account of Dali dictating his life, his work, and his theories to Parinaud and it makes for a great read. It was composed in the 1970s when Dali had been a famous artist for about five decades so there's plenty to talk about and in the 300 pages there's tons of great material. There are illustrations (and photos) in here as well, hand-drawn in an interesting charcoal style. Plenty of great material on the paranoiac method in here, it's also got the only mention of Joyce by Dali that I've been able to track down. Very briefly, he shares Helena Rubinstein's account of the great writer: "nearsighted and smelling bad."

Salvador Dali by Robert Descharnes
Descharnes is Dali's main biographer and this big coffee table art book has an engaging account of the artist's life and career while also displaying big, beautiful color images of many of his paintings. This is the first Dali book I read and it remains a great one.

Dali: The Impresario of Surrealism by Jean‐Louis Gaillemin
When I visited London back on Thanksgiving 2008, there was an art museum right on the Thames River that had a big Dali exhibit. Of course I checked it out and it was great (they had some of his illustrations of The Divine Comedy which I loved). Afterwards I was in the gift shop trying to avoid getting anything (so as to conserve my meager funds), but this little book caught my attention and I couldn't resist picking it up. I devoured it on the return flight and still pick it up every now and then. It's another book about his life and career but it goes a little bit deeper into certain things like frequent motifs or his interactions with people like Jacques Lacan. In fact, it was reading this book that first put me on to the role Lacan plays in this whole thing. This is a great introductory primer to Dali and his work, I highly recommend it. It's also a very tiny book that could fit in your back pocket.

James Joyce: Portraits of the Artist in Exile edited by Willard Potts
When I was at the Joyce conference last month I often brought this book up in conversation and it seemed nobody had heard of it. I can't recommend this book highly enough. It's a collection of recollections of Joyce by a number of writers, artists, scholars, etc. that encountered him at various points in his life all throughout Europe. It's a highly entertaining book of anecdotes and there's tons of material in it that I've never read anyplace else. This might be meaningless to most people, but it reminds me of the great baseball book The Glory of Their Times.

James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism by Jean-Michele Rabaté
I've always thought this title sounds boring and overly academic but it's a great read. Rabaté is one of the best of the current Joyce scholars and he writes very well.

A Reader's Guide to James Joyce by William York Tindall
This book really came in handy when I first read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Tindall writes in a very clear and engaging style and he weaves through the mass of Joycean symbols and motifs very smoothly. My understanding of the symbols in Portrait really owes a lot to Tindall. (This is also a good book to have when reading Ulysses as he gives clear and brief breakdowns of each chapter.)

Coincidance by Robert Anton Wilson

I picked up this book very late in the research process and so I didn't include it in the actual bibliography but it certainly helped me put everything together. I've been admiring RAW for a while but this is the first book of his that I actually read and it was spectacular. It is a collection of essays dealing for the most part with instances of synchronicity all over the place in art, science, and history (there are also many essays about things that have nothing to do with synchronicity at all). He has three pieces on Finnegans Wake that are as interesting as anything I've come across yet on the Wake and which might convince you that Joyce was really working on some sort of unknown cosmic level. In one essay he details how the characters (and sigla) of the Wake coincide perfectly with the trigrams of the I-Ching and effectively ties both of those in with the composition of DNA. Really, really delicious food-for-thought. (There is also a footnote in which he claims certain parts of the Wake are influenced by Dali but I didn't find his argument convincing at all.)

Jacques Lacan by Elizabeth Roudinesco
For someone who lived such a wild, "rock-and-roll" lifestyle, I thought Roudinesco's account of Lacan was pretty boring. Her writing style was very dry and bland. Somebody at the conference asked me what's the best book on Lacan's life and, as far as I know, this is the only one and I wasn't too impressed with it.

How James Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan by Roberto Harrari

Out of all the books I read for my study, this was the most difficult. The "final Lacan" is Lacan's 1975-76 seminar on le sinthome or "the symptom" and it's the one where he focuses entirely on Joyce who, he was convinced, was schizophrenic but was able to channel his madness through his art and thus remain on the safe side of sanity (although his daughter inherited the sickness and perished). That sounds easy enough to understand but Lacan illustrated his theories using the Borromean knot and twisted and tied everything in all different ways because he was at that time hanging out with a lot of mathematicians. In this book, Harrari tries to explain all of Lacan's darting thoughts but I found it impossible to follow. If you flip around the book using the index, though, it's easier to glean what info you need.

The McLuhan Centennial

2011-07-21T18:16:00.000-05:00

Today is the 100th birthday of the great influential thinker Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan died back in 1980 but his influence has exploded over the last decade or so as most of what he used to talk about in the 1960s has come to fruition lately. I spoke about this in two recent posts reviewing Douglas Coupland's excellent new biography of McLuhan.

Ever since reading that book, I've been devouring all the McLuhan material I can find albeit without picking up any of his books yet (I'm already far behind on a bunch of other books). I can't quite pinpoint what it is exactly that so fascinates me about McLuhan but his intense erudition and his nonchalant, almost humorous way of presenting it certainly appeals to me. He was also a devout student of Joyce, especially Finnegans Wake and he often brings up the Wake in his writings, lectures, interviews, etc. He was also a sort of modern public mystic, one with the physical appearance of a 50-something-year-old English professor (which is exactly what he was). For someone who was technically a literary scholar writing books about the future of technology, he was also very much a poet, an artist.

There is an audio clip of an interview with Robert Anton Wilson that I often listen to where he discusses Finnegans Wake at length and in the opening he describes James Joyce as "one of the greatest archeologists who ever lived." The more I look into McLuhan, the more that quote resonates in my mind and I've been starting to see McLuhan as a sort of successor to Joyce in that respect, a perfect connecting link between Joyce (who flourished in the first three decades of the 20th century) and the current times.

I need not try to expand on all of that here as the 100th anniversary of his birth (his birthday is actually just three days after mine, I turned 26 on Monday) has brought about a whole slew of interesting pieces and profiles all over the interwebs.

A couple weeks back, this big article appeared in Toronto Life completed with photos and an engaging write-up of his rise to fame. Here's a quote from it:

McLuhan didn’t really care if he was right. Right or wrong and good or bad had nothing to do with it. He was, he often claimed, not a moralist but an observer. An explorer, not an explainer. He was too fond of the paradox and the pun, always more of an imagistic and satiric poet. He was not a sociologist, nor was he, strictly speaking, a futurist. “If you really are curious about the future,” he said on CBC’s Ideas, “just study the present.”

That last part brings to mind a quote from Wyndham Lewis that I recently came across (no surprise since McLuhan was buddies with Lewis for a while): "The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present."

The Toronto Star also has a couple of pieces about him.

Douglas Coupland, author of the aforementioned book You Know Nothing of My Work!, wrote a piece on MM in the Guardian.

The American Spectator has an interesting piece talking about McLuhan and Mark Zuckerberg.

And, of all the McLuhan pieces I've read today, the best one is this blog post by Nicholas Carr.

A few more McLuhan links I'd like to share:

Friend of this blog Bobby Campbell created an illustrated article on McLuhan a few years back called "The State of the Art." (Hat tip to the Maybe Logic blog.)

I think I've already linked to this before but here is a great article about McLuhan and Giordano Bruno.

And here is a really good interview McLuhan did back in 1971 (I actually burned this on CD and have listened to it during my daily commute---McLuhan starts off slow but then takes off). This is Part 1 of 6:

"Thought Through My Eyes": Epilogue, Part 2

2011-07-14T00:15:00.002-05:00

"If you like the epilogue look long on it"
- Ulysses, pg 213

One of the important facets of my paper that I really didn't get to delve into as much as I would've liked is Dali's paranoiac-critical method. This is also probably the most complex part of the whole paper and the part I found most difficult to write (and talk) about. Here I would like to expand on Dali's philosophies and percepts with regard to paranoia and also delve into how this relates to the title for my essay.

In Part 2 of my paper, the paranoiac-critical method is first described in what I think is the simplest and most understandable manner: looking at a cloud and clearly observing a rabbit. We do this kind of thing all the time. Recently, I was sitting outside having lunch with my lady at one of Austin's many great food trucks, and we were looking at an enormous conglomeration of what turned out to be thunderhead clouds. They were in motion, morphing into different shapes so that first we could clearly see a wolf, then a woman's face, and so on. One of us would perceive something and point out each little wrinkle to the other and they would see the same image too.

The Paranoiac Visage (1935)

In 1929, when he was about my age (25), Dali started to realize something special about this phenomenon of perception. He became aware of an exceptional ability to look at an arrangement and perceive something altogether different. His mind could look at objects and create its own interpretation. He once looked down at a pile of envelopes and papers on a desk and saw a perfect reproduction of one of Picasso's faces. Turns out it was just a photograph angled a certain way. He later painted this same scene in The Paranoiac Visage. As he delved deeper into this process of perceptive organization, it became clear to him that this was a crack on the supposedly smooth surface of objective reality. If one can systematically and thoroughly outline one's own unique subjective obsessions or unconscious material onto the outside world, then the concept of an objective reality starts to melt down (this image of soft, melting, or amorphous objects is probably Dali's most well-known motif). During this time he published his first essay on the subject of paranoia entitled The Rotten Donkey and laid out the basics of this his theory (which, he would later admit, he still was only beginning to comprehend himself):

As far removed as possible from the sensory phenomena that can be thought of as more or less connected to hallucination, paranoid activity always makes use of verifiable, recognizable materials. It is enough for someone in the grip of an interpretive delirium to link the meanings of heterogeneous paintings that happen to hang on the same wall for the real existence of such a link to become undeniable. Paranoia uses the external world to validate an obsessive idea, with the troubling result of validating its reality to others. The reality of the external world serves as illustration and proof of the paranoid idea and is subservient to the reality in our minds.(emphasis mine)

Before quantum physics asserted to us that nothing really "exists" without an observer, here is Dali hinting at the fact that the external world is "subservient to the reality in our minds." What we are getting at here is a realization that what we see before us and perceive as reality is actually an ambiguous, amorphous flux upon which we project our own being, our own inner symbols and organizing principles.* Under normal conscious circumstances, this fact is suppressed and denied as irrational. But, in a state of delirium when irrational phenomena dominates one's view of everything, suddenly the whole outside world can be seen to mesh with one's own subjective thoughts (i.e., paranoia). What Dali was trying to show is that the irrational perspective presents a more accurate picture of reality and this became a conquest for him, "The Conquest of the Irrational," an attempt to discredit ordinary reality and free humanity from its collective madness, declared "in the service of Revolution" in The Rotten Donkey essay.

*As described by Stephen in the Proteus chapter, "veil of space with coloured emblems hatched on its field." (Ulysses pg 48)

Battle in the Clouds (1974)

Returning to the example of clouds, the cloud is a big puffy, soft, shapeless form as in a thought cloud, the image most often used in comic books to denote the workings of a character's mind. When staring at a cloud, this fluffy ambiguous form can be organized by our minds into a familiar shape, symbol, signifier. Dali explains: "Paranoiac systematization influences the real and orients it, predisposes it, and implies lines of force that coincide with the most exact of truths." We can see Dali's fascination with the anamorphic softness of clouds in many of his paintings including those which I posted in Part 1 of this epilogue. Morphing clouds are essentially the most eye-grabbing and important aspect of The Temptation of St. Anthony, the painting analyzed in the original essay.

The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946)

We see the scene from the perspective of St. Anthony, the ascetic who's been fasting in the desert and now perceives the clouds morphing into enormous and nightmarish temptations (notice how closely the horse's chest resembles the clouds on the right). In Flaubert's novel The Temptation of St. Anthony, the scenes Anthony sees often involved people from his life. This image is thus an exemplary scene of paranoia because this is all emanating from the character's own mind. We will come back to this shortly.

* * *

"He seeks fluid, wavelike forms that will express
immutable laws through infinite mutations,
the clarity of eternal forms through their
opaque but ineluctable modalities."

- J. Mitchell Morse discussing
the Proteus episode in
James Joyce's Ulysses: Critical Essays, pg. 31

If you take a look at most books of Dali's paintings (and there are tons of them), they usually bring up Dali's paranoiac theory in reference to some of his works that feature visual tricks or trompe l'oeil ("trick the eye" in French) techniques. During the decades of his deepest paranoiac explorations (1930s-40s) Dali produced about thirty sketches and paintings that invoke this technique, here is one of the most famous examples:

Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940)

There are many more images like this from Dali including this one which is one of my favorites:

The Three Ages (1940)

The culmination of this trick-of-the-eye technique is probably The Endless Enigma, in which the image can take on any number of forms depending on the observer.

The Endless Enigma (1938)

This multiple-image effect, which Dali calls "anamorphic hysteria," is just one example of the paranoiac method. Dali's inquiry into paranoia certainly goes much deeper than this. As he discusses in the book The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali (pg. 140-144), the word "paranoia" is defined not in the way we commonly think of the word now---fear that the universe is plotting against you--- but in a much broader and more scientific sense as "the phenomenon of delirium manifested in a series of systematic interpretive associations." The "critical" part of paranoiac-critical is, as he says, for the artist to "play the part of a photographic developer" and Dali would self-induce a hallucinatory paranoid state (without drugs, "I don't take drugs, I am drugs" as Dali used to say) and spontaneously record the delirious associations, witnessing the "clash of systematization with the real" and the inevitable "evolution and production" that occurs in the exchange between subjective and objective. There is supposed to be a veil or a wall between these two (subjective and objective, psychological and physical, etc) but they are actually shaping each other. As Eugene de Klerk puts it in his excellent essay on this subject, "If one is able to remain critically aware while inducing paranoia, one can open up the play of representations which shape perceptual reality."

We start to see the importance of this tool for Dali; he's not simply trying to play visual tricks on you, he's going toe to toe with the accepted principles of our very existence. "It is time for us, in the history of thought, to see that the real as given to us by rational science is not all of the real," he states.

The world of logical and allegedly experimental reason, as nineteenth-century science bequeathed it to us, is in immense disrepute. The very method of knowledge is suspect...In the end, it will finally be officially recognized that reality as we have baptized it is a greater illusion than the dream world. Following through on my thought, I would say that the dream we speak of exists as such only because our minds are in suspended animation; the real is an epiphenomenon of thought, a result of non-thought, a phenomenon of amnesia.

Whoa!

The true real is within us and we project it when we systematically exploit our paranoia, which is a response and action due to the pressure---or depression---of cosmic void.

The same paranoiac phenomenon that systematically organizes ambiguous images into meaningful associations through our eyes is also the way we create our subjective individual selves, seemingly separate from all that we see. The space that we see and occupy is also being unconsciously created in this same manner. As Joyce writes: "We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves." I was recently listening to an old interview with Marshall McLuhan who touched on this as well, he said that primitive non-literate man doesn't think of the eye as a receptor but as a creator; it is creating that which it sees. The same idea comes from the observations of modern physics, which state that a particle is in a state of unsure probabilistic flux until it is observed and then takes on a certain form.

Reflecting Glass Sphere (1935) by M.C. Escher

It occurred to me during my studies on this stuff that another image I have hanging on my wall is actually a perfect representation of this idea. If reality itself is a sort of fluid, morphing substance emanating and reflecting our own selves, then M.C. Escher's glass sphere can be seen as a proverbial droplet of this substance, reflecting and staring right back at us.

It is through all these considerations that I came to think about "Proteus," the third episode of Ulysses. It's the episode where readers usually gives up on the book because we get a firsthand look at Stephen's inner attempt to transcend the "limits of the diaphane," the veil of existence. This is perhaps my favorite episode in the book and one of my favorite pieces from Joyce. It is from the opening sentence that my title is derived:

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.

By the very act of perception we are stuck in this modality of visible space, inescapable or "ineluctable" as it is (the word "ineluctable" derives from Latin and literally means "not to struggle against"). The "ineluctable modality of the ineluctable visuality" he says later on. On page 48 he ruminates, "I throw this ended shadow from me, manshape ineluctable, call it back. Endless, would it be mine, form of my form?"

Reality or "space: what you damn well have to see" (Ulysses pg 186) is created by our looking at it through those bulbous organs of ours, eyes, which Dali eloquently considers:

What is the eye? A glob of humors, a knot of muscles, a film of flesh and nerves irrigated by a flow of acid? Beneath that appearance lurk galaxies of microscopic electrons, agitated by an impalpable wave, itself the fluid of a quasi-immaterial energy. At what level then, the real? The truth to me, to Dali, is in the magnifying-glass I aim at the world, called my eye, through which there takes place an exchange that for that moment is known as real. (pg. 144 Unspeakable Confessions)

This whole emphasis on the eye and visual perception is interesting also because Joyce actually suffered from terrible eye problems throughout his adult life. As his friend Louis Gillet gruesomely described it in an obituarial essay:

For twenty years, the great poet was half-blind; the left eye was lost and in the other remained only a flap of retina. Reading and writing was torture. The wretched man retained a gleam of light thanks only to twenty operations---each time a very cruel martyrdom. I still see him, in order to decipher a text, placing the paper sideways and bringing it into the narrow angle where a ray of his ruined sight still subsisted. (Portraits of the Artist in Exile, pg. 168)

* * *

"guide them through the labyrinth of

their samilikes and the alteregoases

of their pseudoselves...

from loss of bearings deliver them"

- Finnegans Wake, pg. 576

Going back to that first line of Proteus again, the "ineluctable modality" also feels to me like a good description of a labyrinth as well and, of course, Joyce bestowed the name Dedalus upon his hero so as to invoke the symbolism of the architect Daedalus who, himself, built the labyrinth on the island of Crete and was also trapped in it because of its complexity. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the metaphor has to do with Stephen Dedalus trying to escape the oppressive atmosphere of Ireland to fly to mainland Europe just as Daedalus seeks to fly from the island of Crete to mainland Greece. Here in Proteus, this most metaphysical of chapters in the sequel to Portrait, Stephen is trying to escape the very labyrinth of space and existence.

This ties back to Dali again as he composed a number of essays on paranoia (including a piece alongside Jacques Lacan) in the surrealist art review called Minotaure, a title that conjures the beastly creature that was housed inside the labyrinth on Crete to keep people from escaping. He did clearly think of this paranoiac creation of existence in the sense of a labyrinth we've created and trapped ourselves in, indeed, he states in the aforementioned Unspeakable Confessions book: "We are at the heart of a labyrinth and can find our way while becoming labyrinths ourselves." Like many of Dali's profundities, that sounds like nonsense, but what he is referring to (intuitively, I assume) is that our souls are labyrinths. We exist in a labyrinth and we ourselves are also labyrinthine, this latter fact has been explored for centuries in the symbolic usage of mandalas to represent the soul and this symbol is still used in many modern psychotherapeutic practices to help people bring their psyches into balance. The labyrinth is essentially a mandala and vice-versa.

Now, to finally get us out of this labyrinth of an essay, let us conclude by once again considering the original point of the entire paper (if you haven't read it yet, contact me and I will send you a copy). What got this all started was a rather peculiar interpretation I made of Dali's painting The Temptation of St. Anthony in which I systematically compared it to the material in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist. The paper has elicited a positive reaction from those that have encountered it and on a few occasions folks have commented to me that it would really solidify the whole thing if I could identify a "smoking gun" that proves once and for all that Dali painted St. Anthony with Joyce on his mind. I would argue that such a thing isn't necessary. The piece-by-piece interpretation of connections/resonances with Portrait is interesting in its own right because it was initially a natural, organic, unwitting example of the paranoiac-critical method in action.

Not in the sense of a simple trick of the eye, no, I didn't stare at the painting and realize it formed a picture of Joyce's face or anything like that (though the Martello Tower does appear to be there in the background). Instead, under a spell of thoughts and speculations on the symbols and motifs of Joyce's work, I suddenly was able to look at the painting of a tempted desert monk and associate all of the characters and objects with the object of my obsession at that moment. The resonances and connections I made can, I believe, probably stand up on their own but even beyond that, the paranoiac analysis led to two new ideas on the painting: that it is largely autobiographical in scope, and that it exemplifies the artist's famous paranoiac-critical method.

Flickerings of Film

2011-07-02T23:24:00.001-05:00

Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali

Went to see Midnight in Paris last night and enjoyed it very much. I had heard a lot of good things about it from people and it certainly lived up to expectations. Getting to see some of the past greats like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, T.S. Eliot and everyone else in a modern film was certainly a treat. I was especially impressed with Adrien Brody's portrayal of Salvador Dali. As you can tell if you've read this blog much at all (or even looked at my previous post), I've been involved in closely studying Dali's life and work for a little while and so I was glad to see him get such a nice portrayal in the film, especially from a big actor like Brody. In all honesty, I can be a harsh critic with this kind of stuff, especially when it deals with something I've spent so much time being involved with, and I genuinely really enjoyed Brody as Dali. In fact, he may have been the best character in the entire movie (though Ernest Hemingway was certainly really good and the laughs in the theater certainly attested to that).

The one thing that bothered me, of course, was the absence of James Joyce. His name was mentioned in an anecdote very early in the film but through all the adventures the main character had with the big figures of 1920s Paris, we never got to meet Joyce. This was really disappointing because I know his character would've stolen the show, just as the real Joyce did within that rich artistic environment. The Joyce of the 20s was also perhaps the one best suited for big screen portrayal; he had the eye patch at that time, the great fame from having just published Ulysses, and was in the midst of his greatest (and most baffling) work of all, Finnegans Wake. And the biographical books are certainly filled with his wild carousing with the likes of Hemingway who had a relatively huge role in the movie. I wonder if there were Joyce scenes that were cut out that might be included in a future DVD set. I'm really interested to find out because I thought Woody Allen handled all these old famous figures extremely well.

While my girlfriend and I were getting ready to go see the movie, I reflected on how for decades and decades couples were in that same spot, getting dressed for a night at the movies to see "a Woody Allen film." It struck me for a reason I can't quite elucidate (eternal recurrence through the ages, perhaps). I've never had any real interest in Allen's films before and, really, I can't name a film of his that I particularly enjoyed. I know of Annie Hall but haven't seen it, and the last time I started to watch a Woody Allen movie I found the whiny arguments so grating I had to turn it off (admittedly, Whatever Works starring Larry David was not bad). This movie was completely different and, really, there wasn't much indication that it was a "Woody Allen" film. The director managed to stay out of his work, as in Joyce's description of the dramatic art form: "The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."

* * *

Speaking of directors, God, and creation, I have to say a few things about Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. As I wrote a few months back, the trailer for this movie captivated me and the scope seemed to perfectly fit my current mindstate. I dragged my uninterested girlfriend to a packed theater on the first night it was playing here in Austin and after nearly three hours of completely unconventional cinema, I was left in a daze. She absolutely hated the film and it doesn't surprise me that it has evoked similarly strong reactions from the public on each side of the pole.

To put it bluntly, the style of the film does not make for a palatable cinematic experience. One has essentially no idea what they are watching from beginning to end. The dialogue is minimal and most of the talking we hear is in hushed whispers. What we encounter is a collage of memories, moments, seemingly personal explorations of the unconscious. Whose unconscious it is, we're never really sure, but it seems to be that of Sean Penn's character as he goes about his work day and experiences a sort of crisis within himself.

The style was unlike anything I've experienced from a movie, it was perhaps a bit more like a (lame) amusement park ride. There is a constant pattering upon the senses of a variety of sounds, gleams of sunlight, and, if it were somehow possible, smells. (A recent piece in Salon magazine likened it to Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man where we also experience the character's developing senses.) I think it is a film that speaks very clearly to our unconscious but is quite difficult for our conscious minds to ascertain. From the trailer, I expected it to be a monumental epic that would hit my emotions and provide that feeling of aesthetic arrest but it was only during one brief scene that I could feel the depths of my own memories get a bit rattled. It was a simple scene within the family kitchen on a bright afternoon and it unearthed a dusty old cave somewhere in my mind that brought about visions of my upbringing and made me a little nostalgic for Staten Island (or, at least, the innocent Staten Island of my childhood).*

I had expected the scenes showing the Big Bang and the creation of the universe to be special and indeed they were. My problem with it is that they seemed to leave something out, as we didn't get any kind of transition from all of that to the small-town Texas family. It was just a bunch of cosmic creation, formation of planets, life, etc and then a cut back to the family scene. While the point ("we are walking manifestations of the history of the universe") seems clear enough, I don't think the delivery of it was well executed. Nevertheless, an extremely admirable and ambitious idea.

I don't want to offer a firm judgment on the overall quality of the movie because I've only seen the film once and really didn't connect with it the way I expected to. That doesn't mean I think it sucked, it certainly left me in a blank daze for a while afterwards, but that may have just been due to the aforementioned tender onslaught of sights and sounds which can be hypnotizing in a way. I think I'd like to give it a look one more time and then decide how I feel about it. It's certainly sending some of our cinema scribes into a state of spiritual serenity.

*Interestingly enough, the final scene (trust me, this won't ruin it for you) is a view of Staten Island from across the Verrazano Bridge in Brooklyn. In the context of the film, I don't have the slightest clue why this appeared but it certainly hit me personally as that bridge holds an important place in my heart for many reasons (one of which is that it allowed my parents, from Brooklyn and Staten Island respectively, to join together.)

* * *

Lately, I've come to think that the movie trailer is, itself, a new medium. I can think of many examples of films that had awesome trailers while the actual film was disappointing (my favorite example is probably Revolutionary Road which had a stirring Nina Simone song). The crafting of movie trailers has gotten so good that we often relish the opportunity to watch previews just as much as the actual movie itself when we go to the theater. I certainly do, at least, and I'm always open for that next big potentiality to light up my eyes and expectations. Well, a new one of those hit me yesterday and it's called Take Shelter. Here's the trailer:

With my recent studies on paranoia (and my own occasional feelings of impending doom within this crumbling American Empire) this one seems right up my alley. Plus those are some pretty strong endorsements included within the trailer.

"Thought Through My Eyes": Epilogue, Part 1

2011-06-29T20:01:00.002-05:00

"Everything that terrifies others delights me, the fears and phantasms that others commonly carefully repress are to me so many fresh sources for my critical intelligence, but one would have to be far more foolish than I to try to analyze the complexity of my intentions and motivations. I who live them am far from understanding all about them! Fortunately, there are still my works which, subjected to the most objective examination, allow some of the truths I have been dredging up from the depths to come through."

-Salvador Dali (The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali, p. 141)

At the top of this post is the cover for the presentation/paper I delivered at the James Joyce Conference two weeks ago. The drawing is from Salvador Dali's book The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (which features prominently in my study) and it was put together by my girlfriend's dad, Luther, a highly talented graphic designer. The talk that I gave in Pasadena was just a very basic overview of the material in the paper. The full version is available in a 17-page booklet format with color images so if you'd like one of those just let me know and I can mail you one.

The essence of my paper is an analysis of Salvador Dali's The Temptation of St. Anthony showing that the material in the painting bears a striking resemblance to the symbols and structure of Joyce's first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Then I go on to explore whether Dali ever explicitly acknowledged any Joyce influence (or vice versa) and what this interpretation of the painting means, concluding with a look at Jacques Lacan's role as "shoelace" tying together Joyce, Dali, and my new interpretation of the painting.

What I'd like to do here is present some of the left-over material that didn't make it into the final version of the paper and also (in Part 2) discuss the meaning of the title which, unfortunately, I didn't really get to touch on at all in the paper. In the interest of graciously acknowledging all of my sources, I will also go through most of the books and scholarly stuff I used in my research (this will be Part 3) and point out some of the material one should seek to study if they have any further interest in this stuff.

Image drawn at the top of a chapter in Dali's book The Secret Life.

So, in analyzing the painting, the first thing I looked at is that tiny image in the very center amid the elephant legs showing what appears to be a parent with child and, as I tried to show, this is Dali himself as a young child, an image of his earliest memories and experiences. What I didn't get to mention is that this is a frequent motif in Dali's paintings from around this era (1930s-40s), as you can see from these examples.

Atavistic Ruins After the Rain (1934)

And (as in the St. Anthony painting) much smaller, barely visible here:

Geological Development (1933)

The Ambivalent Image (1933)

Here are a couple more instances of this motif appearing, this time in two of Dali's works that incorporate the elements from Jean-Francois Millet's Angelus which Dali became obsessed with.

Archaeological Reminscence of Millet's Angelus (1935)

The Architectonic Angelus of Millet (1933)

The Angelus

As a child going to school, there was an image of Millet's The Angelus hanging on the wall just outside the classroom door and young Salvador would stare at it until it was branded on his brain. As you can see, he was prone to incorporate this image or its likeness into his work. In the 1930s, when penning numerous articles and essays on his developing paranoiac-critical method (one of which I've published on this blog before) he composed a paranoiac study of The Angelus in which he asserted a whole new and different meaning behind the painting. One of his assertions was that the man and woman in the scene (to the right) are standing over the buried body of their child. In 1963, the laboratory at the Louvre actually x-rayed the original painting and saw that there was originally what looks like a casket at the mother's feet but it had been painted over by Millet.

Unfortunately, there's no way to x-ray The Temptation of St. Anthony to see if my interpretation of it is accurate but I did confirm that the meanings I perceived within the painting were apprehended, witnessed, or "thought through my eyes" in a process exactly like Dali's paranoiac-critical method. I did manage to magnify and zoom into some of the smaller elements in the painting and the autobiographic aspect of my interpretation is, as I've showed, justified by just taking a look at the images in Dali's wonderful and illustrated autobiography entitled The Secret Life of Salvador Dali.

To be continued...