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Staring at the Sun from Underwater (1.4.1)

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Our first act of war was to not let the fact of being at war control us – like Flip Rogers said about the cop-in-the-head: “The rhetoric and irrationals of warfare are so ingrained in our culture and psychologies, that it would be too easy to succumb to some dumb need for violence, to cast the battle in terms of enemies, when what we’re fighting is precisely that mindset.”

So instead we spent the evening having a grand old time, nothing fancy, just sitting around the apartment toking up with Flip and Damien and Damien’s wolf-dog Tia (short for Larentia, the mother of Romulous and Remus, but who Damien calls Tilla after a Grateful Dead song when he’s trying to impress the hippy girls). Anyway, I’d never realized before how much simple pleasure there is in just hanging around other people, instead of feeling my usual tense alienation. “What can war do to us when we can feel this luxurious?” I asked, “And why is it so easy for the good times to fall apart?”

The other night Phoebe and I went out for Indian food at People’s, and she asked over garlic nan, “Do you view yourself in the first or third person?”

“Both, at all times,” I answered. But the more I think about it, I’m caught in a first person narration so objective and rationalized it makes think before you act seem too immediate, and a 99th person perspective a more accurate description.

It reminded me of the conversation I had with this fellow Tak the other day –who keeps interrupting my lunch breaks in front of the Coop to talk when I’m trying to read or write philosophical treaties.

I had a copy of the Romantic Manifesto open, which Tim P. and I’ve been discussing, and Tak just went off on Objectivism. “The problem with reason – like Capitalism and warfare – is that it views everything in terms of use: ideas, art, living beings, when there’s so many experiences and emotions that will never fit in a logical framework or plot structure. Reality is far too subjective to say what’s right. Take Pynchon for instance,” he said, “you’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow, right?”

I just shook my head, not willing to admit that each time I try, I shudder the tome shut when that screaming comes across the sky. I have no desire to read a war novel no matter how non-rational it might be, because war is never rational and I’m beginning to realize the purpose of existence – once collective and individual continuance have been taken care of – should be to enjoy this: to live in pleasurable harmony with ourselves and the universe.
Which despite sounding obvious is really quite a hard feat to master.

Because the violence and hatred and warfare blare at us constantly through the news and entertainment media like we’ve all got Slothrop’s erection when the bombs drop.

“What we need to do,” Flip said, “is find some other story to live in.”

I was leaning back in a dumpstered chair, petting Tia and puffing one of Flip’s fat blunts, feeling not just at ease but positively regal. Damien didn’t want to hear about my great mood, distraught over politics, zombies, and fighting with his mother (and the positive not making for a realistic narrative).

“So what about you,” I’d asked Flip, “do you live in the first or third person?”

To which he laughed, “I plead the second, I’m like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, you remember those? Each moment and option presented to me I ask myself, Flip Rogers, well now, what do you want to do?” Which explains what I find so odd and fascinating about his character – that rather than feeling trapped in someone else’s story he lives freely in his own.

He went on to explain how the Beats felt the same urge: “Not Kerouac, I’m talking Clellon-Holmes, whose book Go you need to read next, god, he was an outcast in their scene, witnessing the breakdown of Herbert Huncke, who screams fuck you six times at the climax, and that would make a pretty poignant chorus for this jazz tune I’m writing for The Moment. No no, you see, after JK’s football accident, at the end of WWII, he and Ginsburg realized they didn’t have a story for their own generation – because you can’t live by the old stories anymore – and they set out to make a new one, turning all the random encounters into fodder for their art, always asking, what now, and, and then? And then picking the most exciting alternative, so that decades later kids still emulate their frantic footprints, the whole bongos and finger snapping image thankfully faded out by now but you get the picture. The first punks did the same, they wrote their own stories in song. And that, my friends, is precisely what we have to do if we hope to be get beyond this dead end plot we’re trapped in. The best teacher is experience and not someone else’s distorted point of view. As Ursula LeGuin put it, to see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may help you live it well. Now who’s with me?”

(previous: 1.3.10) (next: 1.4.2)

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Staring at the Sun from Underwater (1.3.10)

Sunday, January 22, 2012

This is it. Enough is enough. I cannot serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my country.

As of today I declare myself at war with the Capitalist Behemoth.

I’ve got a bone to pick with capitalism, and a few to break: this week at the Economic Union Summit in Goetenberg, Sweden, two of our fellow protestors were shot, with real bullets, lead replacing water and rubber, which I felt like a blow to my own gut. How can the life of a human being be worth less than the sanctity of the dollar? Human life is not commodity, figures, statistics, or make believe.

While here at home, Timothy McVeigh was executed for the Oklahoma City Bombings, the worst terrorist attack on our country, so far. “Of course,” as Emma explained, “that absurd animal rights group PETA just had to campaign for McVeigh’s last meal to be vegan, so he wouldn’t hurt any more lives. But he rejected their self-aggendizing, saying, ‘Sometimes lives will be hurt.’ More have died fighting their wars than the 186 he was unfortunately forced to kill to promote his message.” Instead he ate two tubs of mint chocolate chip ice cream and read a poem, his absolute lack of remorse striking fear into the hearts of every law-keeper in the nation, as if he knew there’s much worse than his crimes ahead.

And though McVeigh’s is not my way of fermenting revolt – there are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for – I knew this was coming, our worst fears turned to reality right before our eyes:

Yesterday evening I was riding bikes with Lucy when the cops followed us – they must have finally caught up with my involvement in the May Day parade – not followed but full on chased, pedaling furiously down back streets to escape.

I chose not to be afraid, like Flip told me, “do not fear, fear is the mind-killer,” but that didn’t stop them from swinging their cruisers ahead and blocking the road to safety.
The police leapt out and without a word opened fire on us!

I tried to turn, the wheel of my bike stuck to the curb, when the first shots struck me, one in the upper calf and one in the arm. I fell, more concerned if Lucy had been hit or arrested, but I couldn’t see through the darkening storm clouds and the collapsing tunnel of my vision.

When I regained consciousness I dragged myself to Emma’s for help.
That’s when she told me about the shot protestors, and I realized my own execution was just a dream, which would have been funny if it was not chillingly prophetic, as if I had felt their deaths even as they were being committed.

Surreal, especially since it turned out Lucy really did have a run-in with the cops.

But this paradox doesn’t lessen the import, just makes me more outraged. And so I am at war.

“Though,” as I explained to Emma while she organized her funny hat collection and made us tea, “my enemy is not the ignorant layman or the corporate CEO, not the policeman or soldier. Not even Jr, who’s still going on about his new empire.”

“But even if absolute power does not corrupt absolutely,” Emma said, “absolute power does attract the corruptible, the all-too despicably human.”

“But we are all human here, and despite being trained to do our jobs, to have certain frantic passions and fears, to feel that furthering the Machine will bring us happiness or salvation when the only true joy springs from freedom – I still believe each of us contains the potential to do good, we just haven’t been told that we do.

But not the System, the corporate entities taking on a life of their own, Moloch and Mammon feeding greedily on monetary exchanges, alienation, passivity, granted existence and personhood through our acceptance of their will to exist. No, I am fighting the ideologies and media revisions that keep us living in fear, dying in this American Nightmare from which it seems we might never wake.

The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm, but because of those who look at it without doing anything, those who have been trained not to notice anything is wrong, that everything could be better.

Those who do not weep do not see.

It is as if the violence and numbness of this world, of these corporate entities, is somehow stealing the souls of everyone who participates in them, and casting us into darkness.

And though my weapons are only words and song, though we still have our lives to lose, and will always lose them anyway, we have a world to win for those who come after us, a world in which this violence and conflict are only a bad dream.

Oh great Behemoth, your days are numbered; we will see your power go out, your towers crumble, your calendars torn to shreds, your towns swept under by hurricanes and thunder. We will see every last dollar dwindle in the dawnlight of a new era. I have seen a future containing the collapse of everything awesome we humans are still capable of, and to prevent that I will attack your shattered and sold world and demand a greater unity! This is your death knell, and though you want to take us all down with you, I still want to live.

(previous: 1.3.9) (next: 1.4.1)

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Staring at the Sun from Underwater (1.3.9)

Friday, January 20, 2012

Since we began this last and most likely final hiatus, Phoebe hasn’t said more than five words to me. She just scowls and ignores any attempts on my part to communicate, her looks at band practice accusatory, implying somehow it’s my fault that she can’t make herself happy – as if responsibility for our actions and emotions lies anywhere but in ourselves.

Of course I don’t know how to feel either; not even riding bikes with Rocky helped, looking for the large house we planned to rent, which Phoebe found an ad for on Craigslist before she stopped speaking to me; huffing up a deliriously steep hill we didn’t expect to be there, and down into a wreck of a neighborhood: boarded up houses next to boarded up churches, only the liquor stores open it looked like, the all-black citizenry shuffling along sidewalks that couldn’t have been repaired since they were forced into this ghetto. And all this under the aegis of another sports arena, perched on the cliff overhead, like if they don’t accept their place at the bottom the building will topple down and crush them to it.

Thankfully the house we wanted was on the other side of this depression, in between neighborhoods overlooking the bridge to Riverside. The landlord was jolly enough but clearly desperate, not up on his repairs but promising to do them, pointing out the multiple porches with a view of the freeway, any selling point to keep another crack house from springing up on his street.

“Five bedrooms for $850 though, we’ll take it,” I said, and then we biked back over the hill chased by a summer thunderstorm.

But not even endorphins can mute my madness. I considered spending the evening in, again, listening to Tones On Tail in post-goth paralysis, the glissandoing ennui of Rain on repeat.

“Ooh the rain…”

But when it stopped raining it was time to crush this feeling. Lucy told me they’re playing Pee-wee’s Big Adventure on the Midgardens hilltop, the kids all out on their bicycles, eating vegan ice cream on the lawn while Paul Rubens rides his love-cycle out of the massive projector screen, blocking the frenzy and festering of the firestruck skyline.

But when I rode up I found Phoebe was there, chatting with Azure and the other punks I thought she’d been too snobby to become friends with. So I ignored them all, and sat on the high pedestal of a statued Robber Baron in the middle of the street, trying to get above this bustle of feigned laughter and entertainment to dull the boredom, stoned again (my sober month lasting less than a week, like Flip’s did, of course), writing and watching the sun set behind the soot-covered Tower of Knowledge, that gothic Pinnacle of Ignorance, as Reynard called it, wishing I could tear all the edifices and illusions down.

Finally Phoebe climbed up beside me and said, “I don’t want to be your enemy anymore.” It turns out she was upset because she thought Lucy and I were together, and it was Flip Rogers who said something to make her think so – that cad and provocateur – after I’d trusted him with my romantic woes.

Miss Windrose didn’t even show up though, and I explained to Phoebe it wouldn’t have worked out anyway because Lucy’s moving into our new punk house. “And you know I’d rather not court that kind of drama.”

To illustrate my continuing singularity I showed Phoebe some lyrics I’ve been working on, which the girl’s reticence evoked: “You are everything, you eclipse me, no! You exist as yourself, not as a god to me,” this last line repeated, once for her and once for Phoebe, and might as well make it thrice for my first steady sweetheart, that witch Lara I still refuse to write about.

And yet, I still feel incomplete, gods-awfully lonely, as if I need someone to make me feel whole, the impossible halfness of being a twin which a friend like Flip can’t quite fill. Not that I want to put a lover on a pedestal (or date my brother, good gods), but there is this need for a partner, in life, in crime, an opposing female principle to balance my leaping heart, to keep my feet on Earth while I reach for the twinkling stratosphere…

(previous: 1.3.8) (Next: 1.3.10)

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Staring at the Sun from Underwater (1.3.8)

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Today marks the first day of being sober through June, another of Flip’s clownish moves everyone agrees to follow out of sheer giggles. He and Tim P and I have been writing songs in various genres, to test our range for The Moment (the only and most obvious choice of a band name Flip came up with, though we briefly considered Dr. Mayhem and the Electric Teeth, like the Muppet rock stars we all seem to be): jamming atmospheric jazz storms, James Brownish funk countdowns, a cover of Mr. Bungle’s telescope song.

Here to paradise we go, brighter than our woe, as above so below, sock it to me now! Yeow!
But when we went to write a straightedge hardcore number we realized we lacked the experience.

“Just what does being drug-free feel like again?” I said, “It’s been five years almost since the last time I haven’t smoked.”

So now I have this boundless energy and a desire to do something crazy, though I’m not sure what, like strap my viola to my back and bike down to Riverside with Lucy Windrose to busk on the street corners.

Neither of us remembered any of the duets from our classical training – maybe a snatch of Pachelbel’s Canon in D still resides in my fingertips – so we just fiddled and fugued to whatever haphazard melodies tumbled out of the already open barrooms. And though most only glanced over uncertainly at our strange sawing, a few listened, even throwing some change into my blue-lined viola case (which I’d casually seeded a few bucks into to encourage their generosity).

One punk couple actually stopped to talk, I don’t remember about what, maybe the tax cuts Jr’s planning to sign into law next week.

I was too busy watching the girlfriend rage on about it, all dolled up in a sleeveless jean vest showing off her tattoos and breasts, black and bleached bangs almost hiding a pretty pouty smile that got my heart racing. Much more so than Lucy, who’s flatly shown no emotion or interest even at her most outgoing, whose bony boy’s body elicits not an ounce of sexual attraction in me, and yet somehow drives me crazy, like I feel I could explode in her presence.

It might just be the lack of THC in my system, or the lack of sex since Phoebe’s been busy and away. But stepping back from the situation I realize that, like most people, even she fills me with dread at best. I also couldn’t help but notice someone standing in the shadows of an alleyway watching us, wearing a black trench coat despite the heat like he was some secret agent, making my paranoia flare up again.

Anyway, after making thirteen dollars – enough for sandwiches and iced sodas at the café – Lucy and I lugged our strings through winding back alleys over to a roofless brick enclosure near an old brew house converted to artists’ lofts, which F. Markatos had convinced Emma Goldman and some other artistic nomads to lock themselves inside of, for two whole weeks, in one of his infamous think tank experiments: this time revisioning a Saab 9000 automobile into musical instruments and a performance piece, stripping the whole car down, banging and blowing on any part that might make a sound, cooking meals on a camp stove, shitting in sawdust-covered buckets, sleeping under the tarpaulined side of the enclosure through some unexpected midnight downpours, their resident technophile recording the whole procedure for a movie and gushing as if he’d known us forever about the didgeridoo he’d made out of the exhaust pipe with toe-operated valves so you could get at least five tone-shifts on it &c. all with no more human contact than can squeeze through the small grated slit in the massive doubly-locked door.

They were probably throttling each other at this point, and still have a week left until their release performance.

Thankfully music can penetrate everywhere, and within moments of Lucy and I tuning up an improvised sonata – from that melody line I can’t stop humming when my mind’s clear – all six of the inmates had their faces pressed up against the door grate, weeping profusely from the joy of it, hopefully inspired to create some string instruments from the rusty innards of this auto-materializing culture.

“And songs,” as Emma thanked us, “that an blow the doors off any prison, but especially the prisons inside us all.”

(previous: 1.3.7) (next: 1.3.9)

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Staring at the Sun from Underwater (1.3.7)

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

A couple weeks back, hanging on the edge of the Hollow, Flip (it’s just easier to call him that, though he still persists in the Fred routine) asked if I wanted a beer. I told him, “I don’t drink, much, and especially not that schwill.”

But he laughed and said, “I’ll bet I can get you drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon by the end of the summer, beer is this town’s major pastime.” As if that’s something to be proud of, as if there isn’t anything more we can do with our brain cells than dissolve them.

But Flip’s a man of his word, and it only took him till today, the two of us drinking booze at his place with Speedy and Lucy and some of her girlfriends, until Flip said, “Speedy’s voracious libido is acting up again; we have to get out of here.” But Speedy was so withdrawn on kind buds I wondered if Flip was just projecting his own lust, bragging about the pirate radio station and the girls just have to check it out.

So we trooped down the streets, so warm in this company, or just too lit up, that I didn’t even care when some cops slowed down near us. “Everyone knows this city’s ill,” Flip sang in their faces, “nobody wants to look back, just get high tonight.” And then we were gone, all packed into Emma’s closet, Cannibal Ox blaring through the Iron Galaxy of one of Flip’s fat ones, all the beer and smoke and noise bearing down on me until suddenly I was just not there anymore either.

Maybe I stood up too fast and had one of those darkening head-rushes where it feels like the floor’s been swept out from under you, but it was so much more than that.

Everything went a brilliant white, sounds intensified until too incomprehensible to mention, the shell of my body merely a mechanical ghost, with a rushing hot wind blowing at my temples as if I’d stepped out into the antechamber of a much larger plateau, like seeing each fold of Aldous Huxley’s pants legs on mescalin, except as an internal landscape, a brazen new world beyond these doors of perception, soon to open, but not threateningly, ecstatic really, like the opening frenzy of some shamanic gnosis.

It suddenly felt as if there are things known and things unknown, and if we can cross the threshold between them, see things outside the narrow chinks of our caverns, then we’d find the world is indeed full of magic, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharp enough to perceive things clearly. I had a deep and undeniable sense that there is another world, but it is inside this one – a world beneath the bones of logic and longing, politics and paranoia, shadows and servitude, warfare, the workaday, and this endless fucking worry. A world greater than all that, if only we can get there.

Except I couldn’t go any further into that light, which Huxley compared to schizophrenia, and suddenly opened my eyes to find myself on the floor, my companions looking at me in horror with a tinge of amused fascination on Flip’s part.

“I think you just had a seizure,” Lucy said. Except it didn’t feel like that at all, but I was too drunk and amazed to try and explain it, and the company too involved in their humorous stories to really listen anyway.

If there’s only some way, I thought, of gradually inducing such states of fervor, the only negative affect right now being the lack of control, as if we could learn the right neurochemical keys to cleanse our experience toward true visions, whole unexplored vistas of reality we can inhabit, right behind our eyelids, somewhat like the time back in high school when the Dandy Leone and I dropped mescaline at the cast party for The Sound of Music.

The Dandy was a prodigal stoner who could make a pipe out of anything, even out of thin air it seemed like (and with his penchant for green he’d naturally played the noble savage in Brave New World). Anyway, we’d fallen asleep watching the mutant transmogrifications of Akira, and didn’t come down till the next day, when, on stage, in the middle of one of Captain von Trapp’s solos, I felt myself sink through the floor and then down from the ceiling in a column of blazing white fire, as if the drug had momentarily freed me from all spatio-temporal chains, all without missing a note.

I was trembling with excitement; anyone whose goal is something higher must expect to suffer this vertigo. This ability to break through the oppression of our senses seems so much more important than the partying, as if this internal attention marks some fundamental difference between me and the laughing high human beings who helped carry me home, if it’s possible to see another as they see themselves, or experience this, this radically alien universe, my friends still thinking I’d only been ill for a moment, and not on the verge of, well, either insanity or revelations, if there’s much of a difference between those two, or something else entirely novel…

(previous: 1.3.6) (next: 1.3.8)

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Staring at the Sun from Underwater (1.3.6)

Monday, January 16, 2012

Despite our excitement to get the band going, Timmy P. couldn’t practice today as planned, so Flip, I mean Fred, and I tongued the rest of his strip and tripped down the broken sidewalks to the Heavenside Street Faire, where we ran into one of Fred’s ex-classmates, a girl named Lucy Windrose who’s a musician too, and was on mushrooms.

The three of us hadn’t gotten a block into the upscale neighborhood – decked in white tents full of expensive artwork and smiling oblivious yuppie couples – when it became apparent we couldn’t deal with the normals or we might become them, even with our preposterous appearances. So we skedaddled back to Lucy’s place to watch a pot of water boil.

Lucy’s a religious studies major and Fred wanted to disprove to her the veracity of old wives tales. It took forever though, probably because we were watching, but it did actually boil, Fred and I enthralled as each bubble rose to the surface, while Lucy sat off to the side slowly dissecting a head of lettuce with her bony violinist’s fingers, to eat each individual leaf in contented psilocybin silence, not giving a fuck about our water.

After we reached a rolling boil, Flip (damn it) and I rushed to my music room, because on the wander he’d come up with the scheme of writing a rock opera.

“Ok, so the plot follows a 300-pound graffiti-artist drag queen named Tink, on her quest to stop hordes of robotic lumberjacks from marshmallowizing the world, turning everything into that bourgeoisie Flatland we’d barely escaped getting stuck in earlier, Edwin Abbott insinuating that most people still live in two dimensions.”

Up against the rows of grey robots who control our lives, the things we have to offer sometimes seem so frail. As they plan destruction and gain respectability, we offer our creativity and are made outcasts. Unless our art is outlandish enough not to be ignored.

Fred jumped behind Trinity’s drum-set and I ran my Fender through my reverb-delay and Phoebe’s flange, Tink’s leitmotif starting at a delicate adagio, a fat man in a tutu dancing in a summer rainstorm, boiling upward through the shadowy echoed notes, until, wait for it, here come the lumberjacks!

I kicked on the distortion and slew them all, in sharp downward arpeggios that multiplied at our feet, spilling out from the five lines and 4/4, staff notation suddenly just another arbitrary order barely able to contain the coda, tonal marks and volume signs inadequate for these 8th-dimensional chord changes, notes not faster now but with more space in between, hemidemisemiquavers cut open so you can fit whole arias in the interval. The beauty of music is, as Beethoven said, in the rests between notes, but the magic is in the total onslaught, the ability to express ages and emotions of such rarity, outside the standard interface of time signatures and keys that will only ever open back on the tonic.

Except Fred kept interrupting to say, “This is an opera, we have to sing, you know, words.”

But words are so fragile and insecure, and we’d already captured the plot in song, and on the handheld tape recorder I set up in the corner. And besides, we were on drugs, I couldn’t sing lyrics while tripping for all the voice lessons in the world.

But before we could take a break and listen to our madhouse melodies, just as the two of us were peaking and in sore need of a few pickmeup puffs, Phoebe bustled in, lugging a new amplifier she went down to Dead City to pick up – I thought she was out of town for at least a few more days – but here she was, followed by, oh gods, her mother!

“Be calm,” I told Fred, who was about to freak out having to deal with adults while under the influence. But Mrs. Zeitgeber didn’t want to talk either. Seeing that we were playing music she rushed back down to get the violin out of her hatchback, and there was no choice but to continue the session, tape still rolling, wishing it was rather Miss Windrose (who did call later to make plans to play viols), us tripcats having to tone the wild hilarity of our noise back, back into recognizable measures, sounds almost refusing to be keyed in again now that they’d experienced that freedom.

But somehow we managed to act normal, normal enough that the recording actually sounded intelligible, when I listened to it later, sober of course.

Until Fred couldn’t take it anymore and leapt up mid-snare roll to bolt out the door.

“Well you’re friend’s quite nice,” Phoebe’s mother demurred, “though there’s something about him… maybe his drumming technique’s off? What an odd bird.”

“No mom,” Phoebe said, not knowing either that we were on acid, “Flip’s just like that, he’s like the Fan Man.”

“Oh, that might explain why he introduced himself as Fred.”

At which I wanted to spill the whole story. Yes, that clown may not carry an umbrella like Horse Badortes, but he’s definitely a Dude with a Stick, going places and doing stuff – that’s his and Speedy’s whole philosophy, on the search for other Intelligent Life in the Universe, even smoking strange substances in the process, though that explanation might have scalded us for sure.

Who knows what peculiar conventions lurk in the hearts of the older generations, how they’d react to real larger-than-life characters boiling off the pages into their children’s lives and bedrooms.

(previous: 1.3.5) (next 1.3.7)

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Under the Dual Moons of Murakami’s 1Q84

Monday, January 16, 2012

I’ve been reading Haruki Murakami’s surreal novels for years now, starting with his what is often considered his best novel, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. It took me almost as long, though, to feel that I fully appreciated what Murakami is doing; the non-ordinary events were often a little too peculiar, the emotional tenor a little too flat, the use of history a little too irrelevant. But then Murakami wrote an even more masterful novel, 1Q84.

A reply to Orwell’s infamous dystopia, 1984, 1Q84 tells the story of two characters who get sucked into an alternate version of the year 1984 in Tokyo – a world, as the novel puts it, with a question. Tengo is an aspiring novelist who ghostwrites a magical work of fiction written by a mysterious teenage girl, a work of fiction that increasingly becomes real. Aomame is a gym trainer who secretly avenges the deaths of abused women. Together they shake a religious cult to its foundations and seek each others’ love beneath the light of two moons.

Up through the first half of the novel, I was convinced that this is Murakami’s best work so far, doing many of the things I’d always longed for Murakami to do in his fiction. Most predominately are his use of the fantastic and his leading woman.

Murakami’s novels and their use of surreal elements often fall into what could be the genre of magical realism; even when strange, non-ordinary events occur, the characters accept them without question and the reader is offered little explanation as to what is going on, or why. In contrast, 1Q84 falls more firmly into the genre of the fantastic, where there is a hesitation toward non-ordinary events, as well as an attempt to rationalize them, for instance when Aomame begins to suspect that she’s no longer in the real world. This is most displayed in the various characters’ reactions to the second moon: it is unsettling, inexplicable, and demands an answer (though it still evades giving up its secrets). This use of the fantastic seems necessary for the story to work; how is the reader to believe that these characters have entered into another world if they don’t react in a realistic manner?

The other highly effective aspect of 1Q84, for me, was Aomame. I’ve often felt that Murakami’s novels often fail at presenting strong, complex female characters. When women do appear, they are most often doll-like sex objects for the male protagonists. Not so here. Aomame is tough, complicated, and a moral killer. In fact, it is possible to read her in light of the amazon archetype of warrior women that is fortunately creeping into the market these days. I like to think of this book as Murakami’s take on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Or at least I wanted to think that up through the first half of the novel. Unlike many of Murakami’s works, the plots of which move through a murky haze of memory and uncertainty, the first half of 1Q84 barrels ahead with a controlled pace and action that draws the reader along every step of the way to the climax. Except the climax happens too soon.

The second half of the book revolves around the protagonists seeking each other and running from the cult, except they do this by hiding in their apartments, alone, uncertain how to act. While this might be fine (and realistic) if it was kept to a chapter or two, this goes on for a dozen or so solid chapters without the plot moving forward one inch until the last ten pages. Which means that, in a book over 900 pages long, there’s about 450 pages of waiting around while nothing much happens. Even more aggravating, all the tightly woven plot lines from which the first half of the novel is constructed – the mystery of the writer Fuka-Eri; the secret and history of the cult; the explanation of the Little People, the air chrysalises, and the two moons – all these elements dissipate as if they were an irrelevant ruse the whole time, constructed from tissue paper. But then again, as the novel suggests, the world of 1Q84 is only a paper moon, a fiction struggling to be real, lurching along as it unravels around the edges, and finally falling apart when the protagonists leave for some other reality.

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Staring at the Sun from Underwater (1.3.5)

Sunday, January 15, 2012

I was so paranoid I couldn’t leave my house for days. Gods, so few want to be rebels anymore, and of those, most, like myself, scare so easily.

When I got up the courage on Wednesday, I was followed by cops all the way from my doorstep, one parked right across the street when I woke up and another checking me out every five minutes it seemed like, so when I got to the Coop I was thankful to hide in the back.

I’m surprised I wasn’t stopped for my appearance alone, like I was back in Dead City, smoking a cigarette on the street corner waiting for Phoebe to get out of classes. Two officers approached, claiming they smelled marijuana, probably just saw my dreadlocks, and though I knew my rights I still let them search me out of pure contrariness. I wasn’t carrying anything illegal and had the last laugh when they slunk away, probably thinking too bad he wasn’t black, we’d have jailed him for sure.

But now they have all the probable cause they could want or need, all the thought police closing in, even in my sleep. My boss showed me, almost with pride, that a photo of me at the march had made it onto the front page of the Post-Gazette, my dark glasses and clenched bearded jaw making me look like the Terminator, as he put it. And though I know I was pushing the maypole the viewers don’t; the banner unfurling over my head proclaims in black blood letters a grisly Death to Capitalism, not the message any of us intended.

Thankfully you couldn’t see my dreadlocks in the photo, but when I got home I immediately shaved off my beard and put on some pants not covered with patches. Probably shouldn’t write any more political organizings in this journal either; as Flip Rogers says, loose lips sink ships, and we’re already taking on water fast.

I still refused to plug in my phone and call Phoebe or Emma, and it finally took Flip to rescue me, barging into the apartment with the key I gave him to come jam for our Musician’s Collective. He wanted to pick up the master tapes TBA recorded for their demo last week.

I was still sleeping and he gave me a start, leaping up for the nearest weapon except there was nothing at hand but a mannequin leg, which I brandished like a sword until he convinced me it was really him, and I should get out and come down for Food Not Bombs at his place, never mind my nicked chin, at the new hole he and TBA are renting on Cobbleston since they’ve all dropped out of school (except for Speedy, still trying to finish his philosophy degree, though as Flip says, there’s no use left for loving knowledge in this world).

It turned out that while being processed, the May Day detainees were interrogated by actual FBI agents who were looking for our leaders, by name, Flip and Emma particularly. He didn’t think they’d heard of me, yet.

“Good gods, what are you going to do?”

“Me?” Flip scoffed, “just ignore them. My name is fake, and not on any official documents, it’s like looking for a ghost. I’ll just change it, to Fred maybe, like my childhood hero Mr. Rogers.” He went off on some story while we were baking tofu, about one day finding a hole that led him into the puppeteer’s studio, as if that Neighborhood of Make-believe lies behind every store-front’s false back wall.

I couldn’t believe he was taking a warrant so lightly.

“The thing you have to understand, god, is that they want you to be afraid, that’s what gives them their power. It’s like the singer from Zegota said in his zine, we each have a cop-in-the-head, like a malignant jack-in-the box or more accurately Freud’s super-ego, and the more you listen to what the mores tell you, the less you can live the way you choose. It’s why you have to always listen to music: good tunes counter the internal police. Hell, even the police are paranoid; so’s this whole damned future. Now help me pack this salad so the kids can leave us alone to smoke.”

All the younger, less criminally-inclined punks were taking the food we’d cooked back to Market Square to give to the homeless, and after they drove off Flip put on a record and lit one of his monstrous blunts, ignoring the stack of dirty dishes.

“Check these cats out: driving guitars into jazz-timed breakdowns with a bit of electronica in the mix. It’s the Shape of Punk to Come, as if these Swedes saw the future or were set to bring it about themselves (before their band broke up sadly), and dig it, when we were jamming the other day,” – Flip came over to practice with Phoebe and Trinity, working on a cover of VU’s After Hours, except his bass playing was all over the fret board for such a simple tune –

“I thought we needed to have a band of our own, take some ‘80s hardcore, bop-era jazz, a little funk and showtunes thrown in for amusement. We will continue the legend! You say you want a revolution, well let’s write some songs that will crush the corporations with a mild touch. This is total anarchy and can’t nobody stop us. You in?”

“Can I scream,” I asked?

“Yeah! All we lack now is a drumbeat to move the new motion.”

But we rocked out anyway, getting stoned and taking notes on the notes, when we discovered we were not alone.

One of the teens was left behind in the crapper, a skinny kid named Timmy Pazliano, with an impressive afro, who it turned out dropped out of high school to pursue a professional jazz drumming career, just the man we needed for our trio. We were so enamored by the New Noise that we hadn’t heard him singing along at first, “How can we expect anyone to listen if we’re using the same old voice?” I thought the echo was the cops invading our punk records.

But we caught him drumming in quarter-timed triplets on a metal hotel pan, which gave us a start until he stuck his bushy head out the kitchen door and said, “I’m done with the dishes, now, when’s our first practice?”

(previous: 1.3.4) (next: 1.3.6)

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Staring at the Sun from Underwater (1.3.4)

Saturday, January 14, 2012

The finished invitations, sent out to artists and activists across the nation, asked them to all converge at the Wall – a stone façade where the students hang out across from the Original Hot Dog shop – where they should look for the man with the red flower.

Arriving in the morning, they were surprised to find – not some subtle noir agent in a swank suit, a carnation in his buttonhole – but Flip Rogers, blond mohawk charged to full height, bearing aloft a six-foot papier-mâché tulip. “A Russian symbol,” he explained, “for the madness inherent in Capitalism, the citizens growing insane when the demand for some arbitrary fad runs out.”

I went along to help shuttle the out-of-towners by public bus, wearing my jester’s cap and a gaudily painted vest, all of us a motley spectacle at best, stopping by Emma’s for the props and then cruising downtown to Freedom Plaza, where the parade would begin. My brother Alex came up to take pictures, the two of us banging on the mobile drum kit, while Cantsin in his zipper suit handed out proclamations, punks and children dancing, juggling, spinning some of those whirring bright plastic noise makers, all intended to draw the widest audience.

And this time they came, cheering and clapping or just curious, until it seemed they might follow us anywhere (including a police presence on the edges, much larger than we planned for but still courteous). And then we set out, flaming out in the streets with flames in our eyes, dancing and cheering and causing quite the excitement.

“Hooray hooray for the month of May, international workers holiday!”

The handbills explained that one May Day at the Hay Market in Chicago, several anarchists were executed, merely campaigning for workers rights everywhere (the excuse: one of them threw a bomb).

But the only thing we’re throwing was a party, no black block protest but colorful costumes, puppet shows, I pushing the maypole while kids danced around with ribbons – because this is a holy day – Flip leading the whole fandango with his flower raised like a whimsical baton. Every office we passed, drones and suits poked out their eyes, grinning at the unexpected pageantry, occasionally clapping along with palms to briefcases. Some of them even joined us, in sore need of a vacation on this beautiful spring morning.

From the high window of one concrete citadel, confetti rained down, shredded paperwork from
some cubicled Rapunzel who we already rescued from boredom.

“Oh workers, let down your fears and sing!”

The police kept trying to block our route, insisting – still politely – that we get on the sidewalk. But we had no route, and at each intersection a cruiser swung to barricade us we turned the corner and paraded off in some other direction.

Finally we reached the red brick crossroads of Market Square, approaching from the back right through the fountain, under wet arching parabolas rainbowing off the glass and steel and high-spirited sunlight. F. Markatos – an agent of that secretive anarchist organization Crimethinc, who’s responsible for their more occult inventions and think tanks – had come up from the shack on the Christmas tree farm where he winters and quickly set to assembling his latest contraption, a bundle of plastic tarps stitched together and attached to a nearby air vent, so that it inflated, upwards and outwards, into an expansive translucent teddy bear, wavering on the stage like a liberated Macy’s parade float.

Emma Goldman climbed up on a wall in her black wedding dress, striped stockings rumpled down her army boots from all the marching, almost dwarfed by the preposterous ursine but still larger than life, like a leader (except we have no leaders), but still in command of the surging upraised faces, raising her trusty bullhorn to deliver in this moment of triumph the speech I’d been helping her edit, everyone expectant, in sheer jubilation.

But before she got a word out the cops suddenly started raging, dousing the Square in pepper spray, just wailing with clubs on anyone in arm’s reach. The chaos… it was terrible. What could have provoked this? When the riot calmed down the bear was deflated, and without a mascot we all dispersed, Alex and Phoebe and I trekking back to my neighborhood in silence, defeated.

It turned out six people were arrested, one a journalist and two only bystanders. “I have pictures of the brutality,” Alex offered, “in case you all press lawsuits.” Emma and the rest who’d managed to evade arrest marched right down to the jail to hold solidarity out front, and conduct interviews with the news stations we’d invited to cover the parade, but only now showed up, like vultures for the aftermath, violence always more sensational, as if they’d known it was going to happen… or were warned not to glamorize us.

After Alex left for the bus station I waited, the day not over yet. Our drummer had been arrested so we couldn’t practice, and after making us sandwiches Phoebe also departed. I still had a task to perform though, a contingency in case of the now inevitable.

Emma called, on one of those new cellular phones this bubble-hippy named Bernice owns, with the names of those in the real cells inside (like it’s the phone that locks us up), and the numbers of their families, friends, or lawyers. I was to act as a phone tree, relaying the said sad news to any who might help expedite what was bound to be a long and arduous evening for those in the jailhouse. For all of us.

Emma was speculating who might have started the disturbance, probably the more insurgent punks again, when I heard a strange clicking noise on the line. Emma’s voice grew hollow, and then she stopped talking because she must have heard it too. That telltale signal, our phones were being tapped! Is that even legal in this country?

We sat there in silence, uncertain, until I mumbled, “Um, I don’t know how you got this number, but please don’t call here again,” and then hung up and disconnected the fucker, hoping Emma had reached the same conclusion, not sure it would do any good, hoping things will still be okay for them down at the station, hoping – as I flushed the last of my pot down the toilet and sat in the silent empty apartment, peeking out the windows for the rest of the night, just as jailed feeling – that this doesn’t mean we are all in for some real totalitarian-style persecution.

If only there were someone here I could talk to, to tell me not to give into these fears, but I don’t dare plug back in the phone or step outside until all this blows over.

If it ever will again.

That chill, it feels like a storm’s gathering outside.

(previous: 1.3.3) (next: 1.3.5)

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Staring at the Sun from Underwater (1.3.3)

Friday, January 13, 2012

Today was a fucked up beautiful day, it took forever but at least we got to jam.

There’s so much to do to get ready for the street party, and celebrate today’s holiday, except I’ve been at work the last seven hours, waking up at dawn to unload pyramidal palettes from the truck and spend the rest of the beautiful day slowly unpacking them inside, sorting boxes onto shelves, pricing and stocking in the near-gloom stockroom.

All of which has very little glamour and next to nothing to do with the life I want to be leading, except for the half-priced vegetarian cuisine that after months of eating is getting rather predictable, the same Tofu Masala every Friday, time measured in repetitious recipes and how soon till my next smoke break, hiding on one of the towering shelves in the stockroom to write, or read the Castaneda book I took from my father’s old library, taking breaks from my break to climb the ladder to the stereo, changing the CD from Annette Peacock to Ornette Coleman to the Dog Faced Hermans and back again, until the break extends longer than the time I’ve actually been working, and I wonder just what us lazy punks are being paid for.

Warm bodies are not machines that can only make money. I can’t even pretend I’m one of Don Juan’s warrior-shamans; work is an entirely separate reality from the one I want to live in my imagination. A warrior chooses a path with heart, any path with heart, and follows it to the ends of the Earth, instead of shirking in circles. Plus the benefits are barely worth it, only so many dented cans and half-bad ears of organic corn I can pilfer for my second dinner, and I don’t work anywhere near the registers, though probably that’s a good thing.

My first job, back in high school, was at the local Baskin Robbins; Martin and our punk friends had all but taken over the place (all but the management), serving endless lines of sunscreen-slathered children, drinking malted milkshakes, scoops plunged into deep sticky vats so melted that you’d come home with arms reeking like a cow’s udder… no wonder I went vegan.

But I had this system worked out: all the prices plus tax memorized, one scoop or two, the money passing from grubby little hands into the register as normal, except half the orders I only pretended to ring up, totaling the rest behind my frozen eyeballs to pocket at the end of the shift and spend on records and cigarettes, the cash reeking like a trail to my fingertips. Money is some sad shit. My theft was never noticed though; the twin manageresses too busy flirting with the cops who’d come in for sodas (which I spat in diligently).

But then one day, digging in a particularly frozen tub of yogurt, my scoop got stuck, and pull as I did I couldn’t release it, until pulling my arm back sharply I noticed that my hand was still frozen to the metal handle, my fingers stretched to an impossible length, like taffy or melting popsicles.

I clutched my fingers up in horror, sure it was a trap and I was caught for good. But it was only a sugar hallucination, and I never stole from there again.

But at the Coop we clock out, so I can’t even pad my paychecks, just steal these moments. Or when we’re ready to close, the older long-hair janitor and I get high behind the dumpsters or in the walk-in, clutching my bare tattooed shoulders while he rambles stories about his love affairs with Janis Joplin, each a burn-out’s flashback or prevarication more orgiastic than the last. It’s amusing, but I want more than this.

If only there was some way of pocketing more hours from the day. Time should not be measured monetarily…

“Well it all depends on what calendar you’re using,” Damien Thorn told me, “just look at how the Mayans rolled.”

Damien was rolling a number on a copy of First World, Ha Ha Ha! that Rocky lent me before traveling down to Ecuador and on to Chiapas – that activist vacation spot – to help the Zapatista anti-conquistadors rebuild their villages. Damien wanted to go too, except today’s his big payday, selling bags to all those who want to celebrate illegally, though I could have sworn we were followed by a police cruiser after work, and I kept glancing out the window, too nervous to attend to Damien’s words.

“The Mayans? I didn’t read anything about time in the Popul Vuh back in school.”

But it turns out their myth cycle is their calendar, all the stories of Hunahpu playing ball with the demon-lords of Xibalba are really constellations, detailing when to plant, harvest, sacrifice; the months based on moon-time memory instead of these arbitrary Gregorian divisions like even-tempered pie slices, a whole series of cycles, each with astrological significance, adding up the days, the years, the generations, into longer and longer counts.

“So they could predict with prescient and scientific precision not only the galactic alignment of Venus for the first time in thousands of years,” Damien said, “on December 21st 2012, but also tell you what it will mean.”

They don’t teach that date in school, or anything about the future come to think of it. The past is only important for where it will take us next.

“So what does it mean?” I exhaled through clouds of high-grade Peruvian reefer.

“Who knows,” Damien gruffed, “the Mayan Elders hid the correlations last century, though the anthropologist Terrence McKenna, trying to track down Don Juan or just some potent shrooms, came up with a theory. He mapped the I Ching onto the Mayan calendar to show that history is a timewave, man, moving toward increasing novelty, so that in eleven short years,” (assuming we make it that far and zombies don’t kill us first – Damien is rather paranoid about the zombie apocalypse), “mankind will experience events beyond anything we previously could account for. Truly the end of the world as we know it.”

“But that doesn’t help me get out of work tomorrow, or the next day,” I joked as he left.

I want those moments of unexpectedness now, on a continual basis, when the 4th dimension is a totally subjective affair; sunny afternoons and jam sessions and good conversations lasting longer than the clock-measure, though it’s always the work days that drag on forever, time indicated only by our perception of the rate of change, along with its application. It’s like we need to attend to the planets moving instead of these ancient Papal systems we’re all used to (for instance: Jesus was really born in July if there’s shepherds present in the story, except to indoctrinate the pagan holy days).

Time could be a folk religion again, our own stories marking the shift of seasons, everyone a chronometer, marking those instances when the greatest amount of change is possible and we enter into elliptical, square, or even star-shaped orbits instead of these Platonic circles. Escaping the 12, the 24, the 360, delta T approximating to infinity.

And what if it’s possible to stop time altogether?

Except no matter how fast or slow we pulse through the Universe, the sun is going to rise soon, with the regularity of when rent is next due, and I should probably get to bed before we rotate toward then, because there’s still so much to do for the parade.

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