This Week: Low/Pedro The Lion
Tuesday February 1 In the Ballroom – 8 PM
$12.50 DOS / $14 ADV
……………………………

My new favorite song goes…

city stops moving and the subway dies
clock stops ticking and the traffic sighs
I can’t keep living these strange goodbyes…I need you
I don’t wanna feel love
I don’t wanna feel naked

I close my eyes, as the pink majestic disco light shines across my face, I’m wearing a short sleeve shirt with a penguin on it, steel toed boots plant me down deeply into my space, time and heat pass through me, suddenly…

It’s monday morning, and I’m obsessively checking e-mail. My Strattera soaked cortex loves the fuck out of you, it loves the fuck out of everything, even the words, Andalusian, Leipzig and Cibachrome. I love the fact that I championed the switch from ‘mountain grown’ coffee to Trader Joe’s Kona, brightening everyone’s day at the office. I love that Ulrich Schnauss was heavily influenced by The Orchestral Manoeuvres in The Dark, of which you may compare and contrast if you are so inclined. I love using the term ‘Smut Mouth’ in the same sentence as ‘Catholic Discipline’. I love the way my body looks, and I am happy with my workouts, gaining mass, and strength, busting out like a super hero, even though super heros probably don’t fall asleep to repeats of ‘Are You Being Served’. I love the way my boss looks at me when I am working on Jockohomo, thinking ‘what an industrious worker’, when in reality I’m trying to keep paragraphs from being utterly incomprehensible, frankly ominous, narratively burdened. I’m easily distracted these days by sites like Yong-Fook (pumping the stomachs of all mankind in colour) and opening lines like;

Every so often in between eating potato chips that taste more like the rancid scabs of a balrog than whatever is depicted on the packaging photo or jam made entirely from pickled seahorse gills, I find a snack in this country which I herald as a a true saviour of the Japanese culinary tradition.

I am suddenly compelled to stand around Shinjuku Station, while listening to an mp3 of The Plastics chomping on Ichigo Pocky. Hopefully, I will dodge the robotic spotlight and acoustic beam system.

After nearly 5 years of this site, things might always be utterly incomprehensible, frankly ominous, narratively burdened, plainly insulting, creepily suggestive. I’m still here, and still loving e-mail, looking to read a masterpiece or write one, and the minutia of everyday life.

My brother comes home from work
and climbs the stairs to our room.
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop
one by one. You can have it, he says.

The moonlight streams in the window
and his unshaven face is whitened
like the face of the moon. He will sleep
long after noon and waken to find me gone.

Thirty years will pass before I remember
that moment when suddenly I knew each man
has one brother who dies when he sleeps
and sleeps when he rises to face this life,

and that together they are only one man
sharing a heart that always labours, hands
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?

All night at the ice plant he had fed
the chute its silvery blocks, and then I
stacked cases of orange soda for the children
of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time

with always two more waiting. We were twenty
for such a short time and always in
the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt
and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.

In 1948 the city of Detroit, founded
by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes
of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died,
no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,

for there was no such year, and now
that year has fallen off all the old newspapers,
calendars, doctors’ appointments, bonds
wedding certificates, drivers licenses.

The city slept. The snow turned to ice.
The ice to standing pools or rivers
racing in the gutters. Then the bright grass rose
between the thousands of cracked squares,

and that grass died. I give you back 1948.
I give you all the years from then
to the coming one. Give me back the moon
with its frail light falling across a face.

Give me back my young brother, hard
and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse
for God and burning eyes that look upon
all creation and say, You can have it.

Philip Levine’s … You Can Have It

www.google.co.ck searching…

Snow bombs I got mixed up, I got turned around, everything turned white and I fell to the ground. Cleveland, more snow, go figure!

Wow! Costco is going to sell my art! It’s markup is just one tenth that of traditional galleries. In an article in today’s New York Times, Martin Forstenzer tells enterprising art buyers that they can now find including limited-edition lithographs by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and others. Costco guarantees the authenticity and condition of the art and will accept returns. Go to Costco.com and search on “fine art.”

“The magic ingredient set to revolutionise the pop industry is, simply, a piece of software that can ‘predict’ the chance of a track being a hit or a miss. This computerised equivalent of the television programmer Juke Box Jury is known as Hit Song Science (HSS) A computer program is changing the face of the music business by allowing record labels to predict a hit at the click of a mouse. Is this the death of pop as we know it, asks Jo Tatchell, or a new hope for unsigned bands everywhere? Read It

Let us not insult the Bush regime’s nominee for Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice by impugning her integrity or credibility, as she claimed Sen. Barbara Boxer did in yesterday’s Senate confirmation hearing. After all pointing out her contradictory statements disturbs the nominee. Jan Herman is Straight the Fuck Up.

Personally I had a great time at MAL, the event was well planned and well organized. Tons of hot guys showed up and overall the experience was a positive one, I’m sorry that others did not feel the same. Here is a photo of me getting in on some group action.

I caught this on Meta-Filter today, and it’s worth noting, if having a weblog is your thing. The Rebirth of the Semantic Web. On the heels of the Technorati taggregator, the Oddiophile bookmarklet, the tag search (new today!) and much ensuing buzz, Jeff Jarvis brings up people tagging. This concept drove Friendster and FOAF, both of which petered out. But with Technorati’s elegant synthesis of photo, link, and post tagging, the web may once again tap into networked The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism.

A statue honouring late punk guitarist Johnny Ramone has been unveiled at the cemetery where his fellow bandmate Dee Dee Ramone is buried. Make a pilgrimage to Stand by Your Statue, or rather stand by your Ramone. More on The Punk Legacy of Johnny.

Don’t push me cause I’m close to the edge, I’m tryin’ not to lose my edge, it’s like a jungle sometime it’s makes me wonder how I keep from goin under…

Title: The Message
Artist: Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five

How fools thought they were celebrating the 30th anniversary of hiphop the year Bush came back with a gangbang, when they were really presiding over a funeral. We’ll tell them how once upon a time there was this marvelous art form where the Negro could finally say in public whatever was on his or her mind in rhyme and how the Negro hiphop artist, staring down minimum wage slavery, Iraq, or the freedom of the incarcerated chose to take his emancipated motor mouth and stuck it up a stripper’s ass because it turned out there really was gold in them thar hills.

Hiphop Turns 30 (Greg Tate/Jan.4 Village Voice)