Foreign Devices

Pamela Martinez - Self-Titled EP
CD Review from Sonic Heart, June 2005 issue

Okay, sure. First impression is that Pamela Martinez is doing butterfly strokes through Bjork's end of the pool. This is due to a certain vocal weightlessness and melodic riskiness. A minute and a half into the first song on her new EP one quickly remembers that you can only get so much mileage out of comparisons before a work honestly must be dealt with on its own terms. The sonic palette stretches across a wide span of temperatures, from warm resin-caked strings to frosty electronics. Meanwhile Pamela's voice glistens down the resulting corridors of ice and earth like some sort of disembodied sorceress. The album contains four songs in total. The first three could be tone poems told from the p.o.v. of a kite wafting across a bed of refrigerated circuit boards as synapses spark through the troposphere. Gravity is toyed with and time is perverted. The epic-length final song, "Foreign Devices (Remix Balanc3d)," is a desperate pursuit across an existential terrain of broken Atari 2600 video games embedded in ice. Sort of an arctic nod to that prototypal chase sequence, Pink Floyd's "On the Run." The vocals are used more as a smear of background shadow than as a central narration. Ms Martinez and crew are talented weavers of sound. I recommend listening to this album in a dim, candlelit room, preferably with a strong aroma of wood.

Release the Hounds

Alright, folks. I contributed a CD review to the latest episode of Sonic Heart magazine. Reportedly it can be found in all sorts of Boston area independent music stores, most notably Newbury Comics. The purpose of said magazine is to spotlight the local electronic music scene, & so they do. Pick up a copy today & help pay for the kindly editor's excessive parking tickets.

By the way, the album I reviewed belongs to one Pamela Martinez. Give her a spin. She helms some diabolically good tunes. And her live show is nothing to sneeze at either.

Flim Flam

Hate to come across as backwards thinking, but does anyone else find it rather odd when a band takes the stage, the keyboard presses start on his sequencer, & the musicians all stand there motionless while the pre-recorded music plays? Especially when it turns out that every song in their repertoire is sequencer-dependant. A large percentage of the music is not created in front of you, but rather replayed from computer disk. I've seen a number of such performances lately & it makes me wonder what the point of focus here is. The barrier between performance & karaoke is narrowing.

I remember watching a DJ open for The Eels. He took the stage with pipe in mouth & proceeded to play a series of records for us. The audience, myself included, stood there watching him do this, as though he were the act itself & not just the sound operator. We watched him smoke his pipe & flip through his crate of albums looking for suitable followups.

This opens the door for a whole slew of performance art. Imagine next time David Bowie comes to town, his opening act could be the carpenters & electricians actually building his set. During the show the lighting booth could be backlit so that should we grow bored with the onstage events, we could turn & watch the lighting engineer pulling levers. Between acts we could turn & focus on the bartenders. And we could hoot when one of them delivers a particularly stunning head of beer.

I sense potential here.

Revelry to Nowhere

A quick summing up:

The Can Kickers. A threepiece backwoods jug band featuring banjo, fiddle, & a maniacal drummer who plays the washboard while pogoing crazily off his kickdrum pedal. The crowd burst into a flaying hoedown during the opening song & never relented until it was over. Even joined in on the sea chanty singalong "What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor?" Occurred to me you can fuse punk energy with ANYTHING & have noteworthy results.

Bread & Roses. Can't find a website for these guys. That's probably intentional. They played with no electricity, just gathered the crowd around them in a circle & roared. They had a distinct dusty 1930's Great Depression leftie Guthrie Steinbeck Wobblies IWW vibe. Filtered through the sensibilities of The Pogues, of course. Instruments of choice included standup bass, fiddle, & Irish whistle. The singer looked a little like Gary Oldman as Lee Harvey Oswald. Very impassioned. I think they even snuck a Johnny Cash tune in there.

Black Cat Burlesque. Deliciously subversive strip teases. One woman serenaded another dressed in male clothes with a seductive torch song. As soon as the clothes were sufficiently removed, she proceeded to strangle her with the microphone cord. Another artist satirized jingoism with American flag pasties, faux cheerleader enthusiasm, lewd gestures, & finally smearing ghoulish makeup on herself. At least I think it was makeup. Could have been hummus for all I know.

La Gata Negra. The finest in masked lady wrestling. The evening's bouts featured Mistress Cheetah vs. La Hornita, The Irish Twins ("I'm gonna cut you!") vs. the Bad Habits (yes, nun wrestlers), & the tag teams El Gecko/Agent Orange vs. Missy America/G.I. Jane Doe. Has to be seen to be believed.

The whole shindig was organized by Black Ocean.

The Illustrations of Mister Reusch

www.misterreusch.com

La Gata Negra

Cinema of Sleep #2

Making their way on creaky bicycles through the gloomy shrouded caligarian streets, our elderly heroes pedal for freedom. The triangular walls of the streets, narrow at the top, wide at the base, feature long dark stripes running lengthwise along them. The city seems to be sleeping & the escapees keep as silent as possible so as to not rouse notice. But just as they reach the gate leading out of this godforsaken city, a bark of authority in French (with subtitles, mind you) orders them to STOP! Closeup of bicycle tire grinding to a sudden halt. Burly guards approach with threatening scowls. There is a brief interrogation which we can't hear but can easily follow the body language, resulting in a fluid swing of a guard's sword. As a whimsical circus waltz kicks in, we see from the point of view of the decapitated head as it arcs gracefully in the air, then back down again towards a squat old housekeeper in an apron, arms poised to catch it. But the head lands back on the torso of its owner because our heroes cannot be disposed of so easily. We see a dazed look on his face, a nick on his wizened forehead as a reminder of the sword. The youngest of our trio of Don Quixotes — the newcomer — speaks out of turn in outrage. Next it is his bewildered head's turn to sail through the air, again to the tune of that evercheery circus waltz. A craggy darkclad figure comes up the street & passes through the gate, perhaps a doctor headed with medicine bag to an urgent call, or a lawyer on his way to trial, or more likely an undertaker on his way to the grave. Our heroes, the guards, & the housekeeper all turn silently to watch him pass. The moviegoers (for this is all a movie) recognise this figure as Bob Dylan, & his tale will follow shortly. A few whispers of reverence are heard throughout the audience. One of the guards turns partially to face us with a furrowed brow. This is Dylan as well, perhaps a younger version, & his expression is to be interpreted as "where have I seen that man before?" & we all understand that, in an error of dreamlogic, the man passing through the gate is supposed to be his mentor in real life & his puzzled expression is an inside joke — two actors stepping outside the story momentarily to recognise each other.

Fun With Your New Head

Coming to a piano factory near you... the Messiah!

Okay, I exaggerate somewhat. In fact it's a sparkling new play by the indefatigably bewildered Sean Michael Welch. Reluctantly based in New York City, land of crumpled yogurt containers, Welch whiles away the hours fighting mail fraud & selling subversive literature to nuns, biding his time until he becomes the next brilliant playwright you've never heard of because you don't leave the house much these days & they don't feature him on Masterpiece Theatre because he's not dead yet. Regardless, he's got a body of quality work behind him more vast than many playwrights twice as dead as him.

Welch's first big success was Earl the Vampire, which won big bucks at ACTF & was subsequently published by Samuel French. Manufacturers of plastic vampire teeth reported record high sales that year. Coincidence? Could very well be. Success number two was Boise, Idaho (the play, not the city) which was published by Francis Ford Coppola's swanky Zoetrope Magazine & has been performed in all sorts of weird countries which I can't spell. To this day the citizens of Boise, land of unbreakable shoelaces, proclaim their adoration of Welch for putting their town on the map. Aside from his achievements in playwrighting & cartography, Welch has also been churning out film scripts & novels at an alarming rate. Recently he's been negotiating to have his quasi-Pythonesque screenplay Well Done, Pear Danube! turned into a film of Pantagruelian proportions. And that's far from all.

His style is eerily similar to Harold Pinter forced at gunpoint to write episodes for Three's Company. In fact, Welch claims he learned everything he knows about comedy from John Ritter. Of course he's also been known to say that about Robespierre & Manfred von Richthofen, so we tend to take such remarks with a slug of salt.

The new play is called The Trojan Whore & we feel you'll agree when you see it. Whore is being staged by the Mill 6 theatre troupe, who also claim moral responsibility for previous performances of Welch's Boise, Try Not To Step on the Naked Man, & The Last Adventure of Lance Adventure in Boston, land of belligerent fire hydrants. It promises to be funnier than anything you can possibly fathom. I recommend you go see it immediately, or risk having your kneecaps bitten off by anthrax-infected raccoons. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Here's the bird's-eye lowdown.

Guerrilla Artwork with Ron English

Mullets Against Hunger

I recently watched the DVD compilation of Live Aid, twenty years after the fact. Hadn't paid attention to it the first time around. (My favorite band as a kid was the Beatles, & since they weren't performing, I wasn't interested.) A few thoughts:

• Quick summary - "Hairspray, eyeshadow, DX7s, & lots of prancing."
• Rik Ocasek has the world's most prominent gullet.
• Who's Nik Kershaw?
• Tom Petty's muttonchops blatantly overstep regulation standards. Was he issued a fine backstage?
• At least we can be thankful John Lennon was mercifully spared the sight & sounds of "Revolution" publicly castrated by Carrot Top.
• What on earth prompted Bowie to go evangelical in the eighties?
• U2 kicked some serious rump in those days. Wow. Hands-down the strongest performance.
• For all his crimes against humanity, Phil Collins is still a pretty rockin' drummer when he shuts up long enough. Remember those early Genesis records?
• Was this Roger Daltry's final musical appearance before hanging up his microphone & going into politics under the pseudonym of John Kerry?
• George Michael is so gay it's painful.
• Duran Duran frontman Simon Le Bon kinda looks like Ewan McGregor. Is it the chin?
• Wasn't anyone heterosexual in the eighties?
• Other than U2, the scant few performers that came off with some degree of dignity include The Pretenders, Elvis Costello, & Judas Priest.
• Peter Gabriel is suspiciously missing.
• Imagine the same concert, only with the principle players recast as REM, The Replacements, Kate Bush, Tom Waits, The Cure, XTC, Husker Du, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, The Pogues, Talking Heads, Cocteau Twins, Stevie Ray Vaughan. There was good music going on somewhere back then. Honest.
• Twenty years ago, Mick Jagger was lookin' pretty old. Man, he's one floppy sockpuppet.
• Mmm... Tina Turner's legs.
• That end bit with Dylan, Richards, & Wood was spectacularly horrible. As in, "Bob, quick, get outta bed, zip up your trousers, & get on stage!" "Whu-?" Kinda charming though.
• "We Are the World" is a dreadful tune. Sorry folks. I hope we're not going to get pummeled with it on its twentieth anniversary.
• Run-DMC was at Live Aid? Everyone watches with blank looks. "What is this stuff these crazy negros are pumping out? They're not even singing."
• "Dancing in the Street"?
• I hope this thing ultimately fed a lot of people. It was a high price in cultural damage to pay.

Man, I hated the eighties.

Ophelia Drowns

The Greatest Show in Hell

Getcher genuine packaged sawdust right here, folks. Ringleader's Revolt by the fabled Beat Circus. One whiff & the damn thing won't come out of your stereo for weeks. It's one big trapeze act of banjo, accordion, trumpet, & tuba mayhem. As an evil ringmaster twirls his mustache in the corner, plotting the demise of your sanity. It's glorious. You can smell the salted popcorn & elephant dung from your living room. And it's not one of those scratch-n-sniff CDs either.

This outfit of crazed windjammers is masterminded by Brian Carpenter in his caulked Belgian hat, who leads them through song titles like "The Contortionist Tango," "Requiem For John Merrick," & "Daredevil Chicken Trapeze." Two-thirds of the Sob Sisters even put in a glamorous appearance, bedecked in peacock feathers (bad luck, y'know). More fun than a rubber ladder. More thrilling than a runaway lion with mange. More tasty than gobstoppers & fried dough.

Grinning clowns prowl the midway with daggers, among the hypnotised ballerinas with lost eyes, psychopathic swordswallowers, roguish roustabouts, angst-ridden acrobats. Somewhere in the depths of Clown Alley a snooping towny gets a pie in the face. And JP Sousa has risen from the grave, seeking revenge. And this is the soundtrack to it all. These maverick carnies were probably cosmically intended to be the backing band for Tom Waits circa Frank's Wild Years, but things didn't pan out. Accidents happen in threes.

Yes indeed. These are the songs I want playing on the gramophone when I take that final boxcar ride into Hell. Hey Rube!

Mah Spoon Is Too Big

Cinema of Sleep #1

On top of a tall building under a windy grey sky, someone is scheduled to jump off the roof at four o'clock. I lurk around the edge pensively, wondering if it's me who is to jump. All those ants below, none of them are concerned on just another workday. I even start crawling over the edge, clinging to the underside of a stony outcrop, feet dangling in space, fascinated by the thought of impact.

Aboard a bus, grainy archival footage of the Rolling Stones playing "Under My Thumb" is shown on an overhead monitor. But something's wrong with the bus - mechanical failure? All very vague. The twerp in charge of the excursion goes up front & turns off the video before the song ends, then announces that the bus will be pulling over soon for repair. And warns us not to use the bathroom. A haughty middleaged woman in jewelry & strategic makeup, clearly used to getting her way, comes back to use the bathroom anyhow, goes past the twerp dismissively. Through the bathroom door we hear her complain, "hey, the water is coming over the sides of the bowl." The twerp snickers. I notice a puddle forming at my feet too, oozing up from beneath the carpet. And the water is a very artificial red. Tainted by some chemical. Maybe this situation is serious after all. I'm still sore about him shutting off the music midsong though.

Sitting in the passenger seat of an old jalopy, staked out overlooking a railroad track on an arid Texas road. I'm trying to explain to the driver why I disliked a particular scene in a movie which went on much too long. The driver shakes his head & defends the scene, saying it's an effective use of climax. "What climax?" I protest, "it takes place at the beginning of the film." The old bloated transvestite beside me sympathizes. She can't hear too well & I find myself talking into her ear, which is gnarled & misshapen, maybe even partially chewed off. "What? I can't hear you," she keeps saying.

Garter Belts & Bathtub Gin

In my continuing saga of fledgling musical journalism, I bring to your attention The Sob Sisters. These three feisty flappers play from a repertoire of jazz standards culled from the Roaring Twenties. I was fortunate to catch them recently at the nefarious Ukulele Noir.

Karen & Renée flank the stage on artful cellos. Haven't quite figured out their musical modus operandi, but I'm under the impression that Renée is mostly responsible for the grunts while Karen takes care of the swoons. Meanwhile, Kitty in the middle bows her singing saw, coaxing out warbles like a ghost on a wire. She's also adept on kazoo & a variety of tiny wooden instruments that go plonk. Karen doubles on ukulele & Renée blows a mean pennywhistle. All of the Sisters take a turn on vocals.

This night they took to the stage with fleurs in hair & pearls around necks, & launched into a mischievous version of "I'm Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover." Karen sang "Paper Moon" in a husky voice full of aplomb. Renée treated us to a devastating rendition of "Am I Blue." Kitty sang a ditty about a magician making her inhibitions disappear. Ukulele maven Craig Robertson tilted his fedora & joined them for "My Blue Heaven," an original called "The Hypnotist," & several others. They capped the evening with a rousing "Mister Sandman."

It was a fabulous show. I spotted F Scott & Zelda at a table in the front tapping their feet along in merriment. Harry Houdini, that sly scoundrel, hovered near the side of the stage behind a potted plant, sneaking glances at Renée's pulse-quickening gams. Near the bar, Clara Bow couldn't help but break into the Charleston during Kitty's swinging kazoo solo. TS Eliot hunched over a table, scribbling a mellifluent ode to Karen on a cocktail napkin. I'm fairly certain that was Lady Brett Ashley I saw lurking near the door with a frumpy look on her face because all the male attention was devoted stagewards instead of on her. The RCA Victor dog even left his post at the victrola to waggle over & give a listen.

So again, that's The Sob Sisters - keeping the romance alive & now appearing at a speakeasy near you.

One From the Golden Era

An elderly couple had dinner at another couple's house and, after eating, the wives left the table and went into the kitchen. The two elderly gentlemen were talking, and one says: "Last night we went out to a new restaurant, and it was really great. I would recommend it very highly." The other man says: "What's the name of the restaurant?"

The first man knits his brow in obvious concentration, and finally says to his companion: "Aahh, what is the name of that red flower you give to someone you love?" His friend replies: "A carnation?" "No, no. The other one," the man says. His friend offers another suggestion: "The poppy?" "Nahhhh," growls the man.

"You know - the one that is red and has thorns." His friend says: "Do you mean a rose?" "Yes! Thank you!" the first man says.

He then turns toward the kitchen and yells: "Rose, what's the name of that restaurant we went to last night?"

Ods Bodkins

Ah bugger, I'm googable now. From now on I'm gonna have to watch my cussin'.

Speaking of which, a friend & I were discussing the bizarreness of swear words. In our culture it's most often the word itself that is objected to, rather than the meaning of the word. (No surprise there, we're a shallow people.) So whereas "fuck" is outlawed from the public domain, "intercourse," "fornication," & "reproduction" are not. Further, you can often say "fuck" all you want as long as you bleep it. Which means everybody knows what you've just said & your intention still comes across. The only people who don't know it are those who don't know what the word means anyhow. And they'll learn soon enough, especially if you tempt them by withholding it. Point is, the information is still getting across. You've only tampered with the name the information is going under. To me this is like having a Red Scare where no one minds if you dabble in Marxism, so long as you avoid using the word "Marxism" while explaining your economic theories. Very backwards.

Creating a firestorm about swearing naturally fuels the potency of the words themselves. You'll notice "gadzooks" doesn't cause much of a rise in blood pressure these days, though at one point in history uttering something along the lines of "God's hooks" was pretty effin' vulgar. Seems as though as we've lost our interest in the word, it subsequently lost its teeth. We now regard the word as quaint. Imagine that.

On a related note, nipples are apparently illegal in North America. Correction: female nipples. Despite the fact that nearly everyone at one point drank from them. Cleavage is fine, it seems, but the areola itself is right out. Bras are okay, though they imply that breasts will be contained within. Everyone can see that the breast is there, but we must shield it from our vision or it might stir up unholy thoughts & turn us into slavering rapists. By the same logic, shouldn't we make food similarly hidden? When I'm hungry & I spot a juicy looking cheeseburger, it produces a form of lust. Then I scarf down a gluttonous amount of cheeseburgers, keel over from high cholesterol, & wind up in Heck. Far more virtuous it would be to avoid the temptations of the cheeseburger, faint from hunger, & end up in Heaven.

Oh... except that there ain't no Heaven or Heck. Them's fables from some old book. Instead you wind up six feet under with either a size-large casket or a size-small. With swear words graffitied on your tombstone.

Dressed in Yellow Yolk

The people who coordinate such things really should make Easter & April Fool's occur on the same day. That would make more Biblical sense, wouldn't it? That way when Jesus returns after the crucifixion, everyone would say "oh, we thought you were dead." He'd reply, "No, just an elaborate prank the Romans & I cooked up. April Fool's!"

And then they'd pelt him with eggs.

Travels in Nihilon

I saw this hardcore punk band play for a benefit show last night. They followed the punk template to the letter - loud, offensive, confrontational, heavily tattooed, sardonically ironic, with songs that mostly sounded alike (a high voltage buzz). And they successfully shocked a number of elderly women right out of the hall.

I must be getting older. Responsibility is setting it. I enjoy a good bout of nihilism as much as the next fellow, but it makes me very tired to watch all that energy being expelled on nothing. Just leaking into a puddle only to evaporate. Maybe that's fine when you're twenty, but a decade later you start thinking about leaving something in your place. Less wastefulness, please. Let's channel that energy into building something that wasn't here the day before. Let's bottle adolescent angst as a natural resource & use it to power hospitals.

"Fuck you" just isn't a very important message to me. I've heard it before. But I guess they're just discovering it for themselves, rolling their tongue over it experimentally, like a baby's first teeth.

The guitarist sported a really spiffy Gibson Les Paul. Looked expensive - wonder where he got it from. He'd better have stolen it or I'll be disillusioned.

Bonfire

Walking home, I heard a fire truck racing madly down the street, cars swerving to either side, pedestrians diving out of the way. What if it's my house that's on fire, I thought. Everything I own, gone. The material manifestations of my existence wiped out in one short afternoon. Freeing in a sense, but mostly tragic. Especially concerning that which I have produced from nothingness. The contents of notebooks, computer files, recordings, all returning to the nothingness from whence it came. I'm not prepared for that kind of purification right now, quite frankly.

I watched as the fire engine continued down the road without turning down my street. Wait, I protested, you're going the wrong way! I continued on, lamenting the fact that by the time they finally got their directions straight & their course reversed, my identity will have burned to cinders.

Ruminations

"This general died in a trench dug in snow, high in the mountains, wearing an Alpine hat with an eagle feather in it and a hole in front you couldn't put your little finger in and a hole in back you could put your fist in, if it were a small fist and you wanted to put it there..."

~ Ernest Hemingway, "A Natural History of the Dead"

"From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away."

~ Raymond Chandler, The High Window

"This is the moment when I know that a sign reading 'To Versailles,' or a sign reading 'To Suresnees,' any and all signs point to this or that place, should be ignored, that one should always go toward the place for which there is no sign. This is the moment when the deserted street on which I have chosen to sit is throbbing with people and all the crowded streets are empty. This is the moment when any restaurant is the right restaurant so long as it was not indicated to you by somebody."

~ Henry Miller, Black Spring

"What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?"

~ Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

"People will always be tempted to wipe their feet on anything with 'welcome' written on it."

~ Andy Partridge, "Snowman"

"I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul. It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!"

~ Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

"I hate quotations."

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal entry

World's Forgotten Girl

I reckon most people spent St P's day like I did - at a blue collar bar on New Wave Goth Night, drinking imported beer from plastic cups & trying to avoid clunking your head on the low ceiling.

A few weeks ago I caught a solo performance by Sophia, lead singer from the band Blitzkriegbliss (a moniker I've found extremely difficult to pronounce after a drink or two). She battered a low-slung acoustic & howled passionately in a way that marked her in my mind as a descendent of PJ Harvey. After seeing her in full electric battle regalia last night, though, I've reassessed this impression. A more likely blood relative is Iggy Pop. Whereas she & Polly Jean were probably leaders of rival street gangs in high school. [Cue scene from Switchblade Sisters here.]

Blitzkriegbliss is primal, relentless, & frickin' loud. Sophia is the obvious focal point, right out front with her arsenal of unyielding growls & screams destined to stir up impure thoughts in the minds & trousers of her male audience. But the real sonic anchor is provided by the bass player, referred to by their website as The Sleepwalker (who probably gets mighty sick of being told he looks like Frank Zappa, so I won't mention it). His monstrous basslines are firmly rooted in the mix, like a sturdy corrosion-resistant pipeline running through the more jagged bursts of guitar. Meanwhile, the drummer thunks & whacks with a confidence that proclaims "sure, I could play more if I wanted to, but I choose not to."

It's really pure, immediate, blisteringly cathartic basement rock. What's not to like? They even turn Tom Waits' "Goin' Out West" into Ramones-fueled rockabilly. Clearly they're onto something - take a look at this vehemently negative review for their album from New ("birthplace of punk") Hampshire's 168 Magazine. Sounds suspiciously similar to whitebread America's initial reaction to Chuck Berry, eh? Almost certainly to the first Stooges album. "What's that racket you whippersnappers are listening to? You'll go deaf, mark my words."

Just as long as they don't find it boring. A review to be damn proud of.

Human Alchemy

Here's a delicious little film I stumbled upon not long ago, which goes by the name of Grace. It was directed by Lorelei Pepi (who according to her credits had some sort of hand in the '99 South Park feature film, among numerous other things).

Grace is a nightmarishly beautiful metaphor of transformation. Amateur reviewers at Atom Films mention David Lynch, Tool videos, & Jan Svankmajer frequently when grasping for comparisons.
(Who are some of these nitwits, with their "it can't be a film, it doesn't even have a conventional storyline" mentality? What, no dialogue? No car chases? Absurd!)

Word on the street is that Ms Pepi is currently putting together a satire of Max Fleischer-style cartoons, to be named Happy and Gay, which looks to be a crafty full-thruster guerrilla attack on various hypocrisies in our society. The soundtrack is certainly destined to swing mightily, with contributions from macabre merchants Leah Callahan & The Beat Circus.



Looking forward to its mischievous birth. A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

"What Are You Rebelling Against, Johnny?"

Holy credenza! That's Bud Cort in The Life Aquatic as the bond company representative. Now there's a transformation.

The whole aging, evolving, maturing concept is not one I can grasp easily. How did Brando get from Stanley Kowalski to Superman's dad? I've been around just long enough that I'm starting to get concrete glimpses of people turning into their parents. It's still a bit of a shock to the system, watching all the former young cocky gunslingers of the eighties buying station wagons so they can drive to their PTA meetings. Having back surgery. Practicing their golf swings. Joining Republican fundraisers.

I'd like to watch a timelapse film of a person, from baby to corpse. Shot at an interval of every six months or so. Growing up, out, muscles forming, strength developing, flourishing, stabilizing, then beginning to wrinkle, sag, decay. And die out. It's a similar arc for both plant & animal forms, but attaching a personality to it adds quite a stirring new dimension.

Funny how most people are repulsed by the aging body, creeping closer towards inevitable death. The fear that one day it will be us slowly falling apart. Recognizing our fate. And all that. Not really worth spending much brain energy on, I suppose, other than as motivation to drink from the well before it dries up forever.

This isn't supposed to be a morbid post. Stop looking at me like that.

Spam-Free Oz

Stand back, I've got some vitriol to spit.

I'd like to take a moment to point out the obvious - that spammers are the most despicable loathsome putrid scatmunchers on the face of the earth, barring only pedophiles & totalitarian dictators. They deserve nothing but immediate banishment to the bog of eternal stench where they shall rot forever in their own fleshy decay. They are mosquitoes with no purpose whatsoever except to annoy. Bandits along the information highway, only the word "bandit" sounds too romantic to use on these gutless wonders. They are selfish ogres, ripping wood from the hull of our ship to sell as spare timber, unconcerned with the consequence of the ship sinking, just so long as they make their paltry bucks. At least revolutionists are opposed in principle to the existence of the ship in the first place. Spammers have no principles.

They must be hunted down & slaughtered, strangled with their own foul intestines. There are so many problems that need repairing on this planet, how dare they poke their greedy snot-encrusted snouts into the works & make things harder than they already are. They deserve to be ripped apart by rabid wolves, an explosive charge jammed up their urethras & detonated, strapped down with Clockwork Orangean brutality & forced to endure endless tape loops of David Hasselhoff songs. I want every single one of them to hurt. Their pain should be legendary.

And what pisses me off the most is that even if we spend five years launching technological warfare against these cretins, designing computers to explode instantly when "send" is pressed on an unwarranted email or whatever - even if we are victorious in battle, we will only have returned to a state in which we should have been all along, were it not for these vomit-engorged Visigoths. What needless agony.

I'm not sure of the figures - is it six million spam messages sent per day? Bogging down the servers & flooding inboxes across the network. What's probably going to happen sooner or later is the formation of an electronic postal system under which each individual email will cost xx cents. This would deter spammers, but would be a hassle for the rest of us as well. So much for the beauty of free electronic mail.

Those fuckers.

And now back to your regularly scheduled white noise.