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Pearls For Swine
“Havalina
Walking in the breeze
On the plains of old Sedona
Arizona
Among the trees
Havalina”-The Pixies, “Havalina”
I was supposed to see The Lemonheads tonight. They’re playing The Rhythm Room, performing their “It’s A Shame About Ray” album in its entirety. An album I love. But I’ve started a new job a few weeks ago, slinging coffee and cupcakes at early morning hours at Tammie Coe, and my body hasn’t adjusted to the odd hours yet. Given the choice between hearing “My Drug Buddy” live or getting 6-7 hours of blissful sleep in my own bed (as opposed to all the couches I’ve been surfing on lately), I’ve made the choice of sleep. That choice makes me feel old. But I don’t regret it; if I had gone to the concert, I never would have seen the javelinas.
I saw them at first as black shapes lumbering in the corners of my eyes. The sun was setting on Raintree. I was walking back to my apartment, a bag of groceries from the Safeway I had just left planted in my bag, when I saw the shapes and froze. Across the street I saw them, emerging (I think) from a drainpipe in the gravel that sloped down from the sidewalk. Six of them weaved through the bushes in the gravel, walking past a closed down tire repair place, five big javelinas and one javelina piglet walking in the middle of their formation. They were big: it was clear that they were in no danger of starving to death anytime soon. But they were in danger of being crushed by oncoming traffic, as they attempted to cross the street.
I watched it play out: the first time two of the biggest ones entered Raintree, saw cars slowly coming round the bend in the distance and doubled back to the sidewalk. Spooked by the cars, the javelinas vanished down the gravel hill, out of sight. I stood on the sidewalk for a few minutes, wondering if they were going to try to cross the street again, a part of me hoping they wouldn’t (for fear they’d be hit) and a part of me hoping they would (for reasons I’ll explain later). Perhaps I was so tired that I had just imagined the javelinas. But they came back out of whatever pipe they were hiding in, and tried crossing again.
They walked into the street in an “Abbey Road” formation. I saw cars in the distance, driving through the dimming sunset, heading right for them. They saw the javelinas in time and pumped the brakes: as the cars skidded to a halt, the javelinas dashed across the street, right into the parking lot of a condo complex. The “Abbey Road” formation held as they descended a gravel slope near the condo’s gate, and they disappeared, presumably into another pipe or tunnel. I stayed standing in place for another five minutes, waiting to see if they’d come back out, but it seems (as night crept closer and closer) that the javelinas had wisely decided not to press their luck and were calling it quits for the night.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen them in this part of town. Sometimes I’ll walk at night and see eyes looking up at me from tunnels and grates along the sidewalks and make out the forms of javelinas, resting beneath pavement and landscaping. Everytime I see them it gives me this odd jolt of… hope. Much in the same way that seeing the occasional coyote running around in Phoenix makes my heart beat in appreciation. If Grant Morrison’s theory (posited in “The Invisibles”) that cities are viruses is true, I like to think that the javelinas and coyotes that thrive within the concrete desert of Phoenix are spiritual white blood cells, immune to the plague of civilization, walking yipping “Fuck You”s to the manifest destiny of builders turning every square inch of Arizonan nature into a parking lot or suburb.
To be clear on something: I’m no Edward Abbey. I’m a city boy, through and through. I love neon and tall buildings and graffiti and manhole covers and cracks on the sidewalk. I feel lost and exposed and vulnerable in the wilderness. When I went to New York, I felt no fear wandering around by myself at 3 in the morning, whereas the thought of wandering alone anywhere in the dark of night in a forest or desert chills me to the bone. At least in a city I know what kind of predators roam the wild: I’m prepared to face the claws and teeth of muggers and drunks and cops and lunatics. Walking amongst the trees and mountains, though, I’m not sure what threats lie in wait for me. And it is that fear of not-knowing that makes me cling to cities, safe in the arms of the Devil I know.
City boy loyalties aside, I still like seeing those stubborn stowaways of mother nature, the old tenants of the desert who refuse to be relocated. Their very existence seems to say “I can survive anywhere; drop hundreds of tons of concrete on my home, and I’ll just live underneath it, motherfuckers, and eat your trash”. And maybe they provide hope and comfort because they remind me of my childhood, growing up on 72nd St & Sweetwater, where if you drove not even 10 minutes down Scottsdale Rd civilization would peter out and there would just be desert. That’s the thing about being a lifelong native of Arizona: I remember just how much nothing there used to be, I remember all that desert before the sprawl rolled over it and swallowed it up. Seeing the coyotes and javelinas darting past “Yield” signs (they would do no such thing!) shows a continuity. Phoenix may destroy its own history, tearing down its architecture and burying its past, but the Phoenix that was here before Phoenix, the Phoenix whose tallest structures were saguaro instead of bank buildings, endures. It grows in the cracks and drainpipes of the new city, growing fat on our refuse, grinding our traffic to a halt so it can parade itself in the streets, show itself off, make a much-needed mockery of our “progress”. Living here for so long, I can see both of those cities. Perhaps that’s why I’m confident that Phoenix will be a great place to live, will become a thriving community, convinced in a way that many of my friends who aren’t lifers can’t understand. Because I remember when there was nothing but desert, and how quickly the city grew to become this mammoth, unrecognizable thing. And because I can still see the old world getting strong and sly inside the thing that was supposed to kill them.
Somtimes at night I can hear the javelinas grunt and murmur to each other in the pipes. Sometimes I wonder if they’re grunting at me to join them. “Not yet”, I wish I could grunt back to them in their peccary tongue. “I’ve still got traffic of my own to stop”.
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Heaven is not a place guarded by immigration officials interested only in passports and certificates, nor is it the higher class to which we are promoted by passing an examination showing what we have learned in this world. Heaven is this world as it appears to the awakened imagination, and those who try to approach it by way of restraint, caution, good behaviour, fear, self-satisfaction, assent to uncomprehended doctrines, or voluntary drabness, will find themselves travelling toward hell, as Ignorance did in Bunyan, hell being similarly this world as it appears to the repressed imagination.
Northrop Frye, “Fearful Symmetry: A study of William Blake” -
Before you leave today, I should like to direct your attention for a moment to a side of fantasy-life of very general interest. There is, in fact, a path from fantasy back again to reality, and that is- art. The artist has also an introverted disposition and has not far to go to become neurotic. He is one who is urged on by instinctual needs which are too clamorous; he longs to attain to honour, power, riches, fame, and the love of women; but he lacks the means of achieving these gratifications. So, like any other with an unsatisfied longing, he turns away from reality and transfers all his interest, and all his libido too, onto the creation of his wishes in the life of fantasy, from which the way might readily lead to neurosis. There must be many factors in combination to prevent this becoming the whole outcome of his development; it is well known how often artists in particular suffer from partial inhibition of their capacities through neurosis. Probably their constitution is endowed with a powerful capacity for sublimation and with a certain flexibility in the repressions determining the conflict. But the way back to reality is found by the artist thus: He is not the only one who has a life of fantasy; the intermediate world of fantasy is sanctioned by general human consent, and every hungry soul looks to it for comfort and consolation. But to those who are not artists the gratification that can be drawn from the springs of fantasy is very limited; their inexorable repressions prevent the enjoyment of all but the meager daydreams which can become conscious. A true artist has more at his disposal. First of all he understands how to elaborate his daydreams, so that they lose that personal note which grates upon strange ears and become enjoyable to others; he knows too how to modify them sufficiently so that their origin in prohibited sources is not easily detected, Further, he possesses the mysterious ability to mould his particular material until it expresses the ideas of his fantasy faithfully; and then he knows how to attach to this reflection of his fantasy-life so strong a stream of pleasure that, for a time at least, the repressions are bout-balanced and dispelled by it. When he can do all this, he opens out to others the way back to the comfort and consolation of their own conscious sources of pleasure, and so reaps their gratitude and admiration; then he has won- through his fantasy- what before he could only win in fantasy: honour, power, and the love of women.
Sigmund Freud, “A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis”. This passage was quoted in its’ entirety in a chapter of “On Acting” by Sanford Meisner, which I’m reading right now. -
Merry Marx-mas!
Tonight marks the second annual Marx-mas! Following in the time-honored American tradition of making up alternative December holidays/Christmas substitutes just for the hell of it (i.e Festivus, Ludachristmas, winter solstice*, etc), I decided last year that I would mark the passing of each Christmas with a Marx Brothers movie screening. Last year it was “A Night At The Opera”. This year to my delight Turner Classic Movies decided to honor Marx-mas too by showing “Duck Soup”, so after heading to Anthem to visit my Dad and eat a very, very filling Christmas dinner (washed down with heavy amounts of red wine), I sprawled on his couch to watch the Saintly Screwball brothers do their thing. Ah, the glorious sight of watching St. Harpo Of The Honky-Horn torment the lemonade stand man with the miracles of Hat-Substitution and Hold-My-Leg. Or the mysterious wonder of the Mirror Gag in Groucho’s palatial digs.
I don’t consider Marx-mas to be a substitute for Christmas. I like to think of it as being a bonus feature holiday, a nice epilogue added to this laziest of days. I don’t mind X-mas: I was raised in a secular house-hood. The only thing my young brain found out that was more shocking than the fact that there wasn’t a Santa Claus was that Jesus Christ had anything to do with Christmas in the first place. Honestly, it wasn’t until the 6th grade that I made the connection. I just always thought of Christmas as a day of neat looking trees, eating sweet stuff, getting free stuff and having a shit-load of poinsettias around the house. As I got older, the day maintained all these associations, with one significant change (dreading the free stuff, since it implies getting other people free stuff… and I happen to be a very hit-or-miss gift giver). So I have very little sympathy with folks who rail about Jesus-actually-wasn’t-born-on-Christmas-this or Boo!-Nativity-scenes-that; I’ve never had the peanut butter of Christianity mixed in with my Santa chocolate. I prefer mixing the crunchy nougat of Groucho and his posse into my crunchy Christmas candy bar. Screw the three wise men; I’ll take the three wise-asses.
P.S. Having some computer problems at ye olde crib, but I’ll be posting more later in the week. Hurray internet access at the library!
*Just kidding, Wiccans. Don’t hex me. Please.
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Best Essay about Comics in 2011
“He has the requisite Spidey qualities, but more importantly in a multicultural society, Miles gives today’s kids a really cool guy to look up to.”
There is so much that is horribly wrong about this article, it boggles the mind. But that sentence… to think it came out of a writer’s mouth and not the mouth of a brain-damaged Marvel ad exec is astounding. When will the comics industry finally accept the fact that “today’s kids” don’t read comics, their parents and socially maladjusted older siblings do? The youth are too busy playing video games, posting on their own Tumblrs & Tweeting on their own feeds. What they’re not doing is giving a shit about DC’s universal reboot or whatever Matt Fraction is doing on Twitter. Ah, if only people still fell on their swords…*
*On that note: that would make a great samurai pickup line, wouldn’t it? “Feeling dishonored, uh? I got a sword you can fall on right here…”
USA Today actually published the perfect summation of what comics looked like in my head in 2011. It is … perfect in ways I could never hope to achieve. I could never come close to this. I’m… I’m envious of this.
It’s a list of “36 of the best things that happened in comics” — 36! sure, why not?— punctuated with cliches like “epic epicness” and “nuff said”, repeating marketing hype over and over and over, interjected with random nonsense about who had the best twitter feed.
NAILED IT! Fucking nailed it! It’s terrible writing about terrible writing— it’s like the mirror shot in Citizen Kane, except instead of an old man, if the mirror shot were reflecting a steaming piece of dog shit with worms wriggling on top of it, or worse, an issue of Fear Itself.
He starts with the fact that Scott Snyder is “the nicest guy.” The winner for Best Villain gets an “A+ in Evil”. He gives out awards like “Best Event”, “Best Writer When Animals are Involved”, and “Who Can Best Rock Out Future Events“— rock it out, rockers!
Every reason to avoid comics in 2011, to dismiss the “creative” people who make them, and to think less of their audience— it’s like he squeezed out that rag into a perfect Chalice of Failure. Awesome. Sincerely: awesome work. Excelsior.
My favourite thing in this is his definition of “genre-jumping”.
Posted on December 26, 2011 via Twist Street with 22 notes
Source: twiststreet
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Life as it appears to us in our daily experience is an unintelligible chaos of happenings. You pass Othello in the bazaar in Aleppo, Iago on the jetty in Cyprus, and Desdemona in the nave of St. Mark’s in Venice without the slightest clue to their relations to one another. The man you see stepping into a chemist’s shop to buy the means of committing murder or suicide, may, for all you know, want nothing but a liver pill or a toothbrush. The statesman who has no other object than to make you vote for his party at the next election, may be starting you on an incline at the foot of which lies war, or revolution, or a smallpox epidemic or five years off your lifetime. The horrible murder of a whole family by the father who finishes by killing himself, or the driving of a young girl on to the streets, may be the result of your discharging an employee in a fit of temper a month before. To attempt to understand life from merely looking on at it as it happens in the streets is as hopeless as trying to understand public questions by studying snapshots of public demonstrations. If we possessed a series of cinematographs of all the executions during the Reign of Terror, they might be exhibited a thousand times without enlightening the audience in the least as to the meaning of the Revolution: Robespierre would perish as “un monsieur” and Marie Antoinette as “une femme”. Life as it occurs is senseless: a policeman may watch it and work in it for thirty years in the streets and courts of Paris without learning as much of it or from it as a child or a nun may learn from a single play by Brieux. For it is the business of Brieux to pick out the significant incidents from the chaos of daily happenings, and arrange them so that their relation to one another becomes significant, thus changing us from being bewildered spectators of a monstrous confusion to men intelligently conscious of the world and its destinies. This is the highest function that man can perform- the greatest work he can set his hand to; and this is why the great dramatists of the world, from Euripides and Aristophanes to Shakespeare and Moliere, and from them to Ibsen and Brieux, take that majestic and pontifical rank which seems so strangely above all the reasonable pretensions of mere strolling actors and theatrical authors.
George Bernard Shaw -
“Each of us has surely felt at moments that the substance of the world is dream-like, that the walls are no longer solid, that we seem to be able to see through everything into a spaceless universe made up of pure light and color; at such a moment the whole of life, the whole history of the world, becomes useless, senseless, and impossible. When you fail to go beyond this first stage of depaysement- for you really do have the impression you are waking to a world unknown- the sensation of evanescence gives you a feeling of anguish, a form of giddiness. But all this may equally well lead to euphoria: the anguish suddenly turns into release; nothing counts now except the wonder of being, that new and amazing consciousness of life in the glow of a fresh dawn, when we have found our freedom again; the fact of being astonishes us, in a world that now seems all illusion and pretense, in which all human behavior tells of absurdity and all history of absolute futility; all reality and all language appear to lose their articulation, to disintegrate and collapse, so what possible reaction is there left, when everything has ceased to matter, but to laugh at it all? I myself at one such moment felt so completely free, so released, that I had the impression I could do anything I wished with the language and the people of a world that no longer seemed to me anything but a baseless and ridiculous sham.”
-Eugene Ionesco, who unintentionally describes exactly how I felt after my first experience with psychedelic drugs. Right down to the baseless and ridiculous sham.
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My apologies for slacking on the posting. Been busy with shows & getting my butt kicked for awhile by a stupid one-two punch of cold & sinus infections. It’s been an eventful few weeks: I saw the new Michael Fassbender film “Shame” on Monday (review forthcoming), finished reading the Will Hermes book on the NY music scene in the 70’s (also excellent, review also forthcoming), started reading theater books by Harold Clurman and Grotowski, went to an excellent play reading on Sunday for a new work called “Nipsy Pink”, had a delightful birthday & now I’m currently dog-sitting my neighbor’s Shih Tzu. I’ll have more posts up tomorrow. In the mean-time: enjoy the sweet sounds of Pavement. It’s all I’ve been listening to today (that, and listening to all 22 minutes of Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” earlier in the day: “Autobahn” makes for great house cleaning music).
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We are bored with this planet. It has seen better centuries, and the promise of better times to come eludes us. The possibilities of this world, in these times, seem dismal and dull. All it offers at best is spectacles of disintegration. Capitalism or barbarism, those are the choices. This is an epoch governed by this blackmail: either more and more of the same, or the end times. Or so they say. We don’t buy it. It’s time to start scheming on how to leave the twenty-first century. The pessimists are right. Things can’t go on as they are. The optimists are also right. Another world is possible. The means are at our disposal. Our species-being is as a builder of worlds.
McKenzie Wark, “The Beach Beneath The Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of The Situationist International” -
Analysis is the cigarette after.
Peter Gena, composer. Kyle Gann offers some context on the quote: “First you fall in love with a work, and then, only because it fascinates you, you look underneath the hood and figure out how it works”.
A blog about music, magick, performing arts & Discordian life in Phoenix, AZ by Ashley Naftule.
