Digital Killed the Mixtape Star

We’re all quite old, aren’t we?

That “we,” of course, means those of you who, along with me, experienced the mixtape as something other than a piece of dialog in a Tarantino film, and remember when $200 got you a thing you could hold in your hand that played music, as opposed to a thing that plays music and makes phonecalls and writes short or long letters to your friends and colleagues and is also a rolodex and a compass and a chronograph and a camera and a candle.

Today, we can buy any app we need to feel young (at heart, in mind, of body…)

But the artifacts of our youth are barely recognizable to the people
Who today comprise the ranks of the actually young

They don’t love the weight and the warble
They resent the heft and the hiss
And they don’t understand how the choices work.

Watchmen Study Questions and Thought Experiments

Watchmen Thought Experiments

(Drafted before seeing the film)

1. Do you believe the course of history is managed by secret cabals, shadow governments, or other conspiracies?

2. How are police officers distinct from government sanctioned costumed superheroes?

3. Of the liberties and freedoms you enjoy, which are preserved through your own vigilance?

4. Which are preserved and protected by forces outside yourself?

5. Does the human capacity for violence, hatred, and other horrors result because of childhood experiences?

Epic Comic Book Runs that I will read someday

Preferably in tandem with a comic-book-club, at least the first several…

1. Cerebus #1-300, plus the collected letters and Following Cerebus Magazine
2. Sandman #1-75, The Dreaming #1-60(?), Various mini-series, Lucifer #1-75(?), Books of Magic #1-75, and more… this could really be a list unto itself…
3. Akira
4. 100 Bullets #1-100
5. Promethea #1-32 (Awfully short but very dense… And probably with From Hell, Tom Strong, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the Supreme trades, and several reference texts nearby)

Here is a coil

Because now is a question whose atom of an answer is continuously sheared across the diluted electronic landscape, when hundreds of people I know have their given names written in a magical box in my pocket, and somewhere in some other cloud of electrons is another list of chosen names revolving around the nearly 15,000 messages they and I have shared.  In this era of networked instantiation, my location is a long rope of places where I can be reached, all various distances from the swirl of electrical impulses that is my own very head.

The Food Kitchens are all booked up, so instead we’ll

1. Ride BART out to the end and back
2. Call all of our friends
3. Invent new facebook/myspace awesomeness and distribute to same
4. Respond to all the craigslist CE ads with encouragement
5. Dress up like Clowns and make balloon animals at the airport

Ailments of the Rotting Donkey

1. Or Brother Mule, if you prefer the nomenclature of those that misquote Mr. F from Assisi.
2. I’ve eaten half a bag of snow peas, and I expect to see the dividends later.
3. I’ve gotten used to getting old enough to find the benefit of that sort of daily review.
4. After all, I’m a growing boy. Growing hair where there wasn’t as much, that is.
5. On the back of my hands, in particular.
6. Though I’ve been masturbating less, all told, not counting the last half-week.

Following the breath, tracing the sinew

Yesterday the fella that runs my local 7-11 in the morning asked me where I’d been…  It’s been a double handful of weeks since I sped through for my 15 ounces of coffee and 8 ounces of starbucks slosh in a 24 ounce cup…  Flattering and alarming that he noticed, though perhaps that’s always how it feels the first time you’re recognized as a regular.  There’s a guy down at Farmer Joe’s who knows me for buying the peanut butter cups… Nobody has spotted me today, I don’t think, though the bagel and cream cheese and coffee and banana/blueberry smoothie at the stand in the middle of the oil-change place might get me back a few more times…  That’s enough elipses, isn’t it?

A Cascade of Shoes

So many are dropping.  Yellow and pink and white stripes up and down 11 months of phone calls.  All of our laminated cards and proof of coverage in splotchy black and white, enshrined in some little folder behind the glass door.  I don’t begrudge our new dauphin, mostly because I was one once, in a far away fiefdom, and someday I might be again.

I have to tell you Sparks, that’s the farthest yet…

A long September less than halfway gone today,

Nothing wrong except the things that always were.

I can’t remember what the last thing was I meant to say here,

It’s gone and done and gone away.

Expected Surprises

I get it now–she’s wearing a red hoodie because she’s little red riding hood.  Except she’s the wolf.  Which is to say that Hard Candy  is every bit the taught psychological fable of abusers and victims and tables that turn which I expected when I first thought it was a movie by Andrew Vachss, who wrote a book by the same name but with a different set of victims and wolves and tables.  There’s no relation, in fact, but I think Vachss must love this movie anyhow.  It is ugly and brutal and filmed in a lingering and loving way that ratchets up the viscerally disturbing plot to the point where I was quite glad in the end that I wasn’t watching it alone at my apartment.  And watching movies at my apartment but not alone…