Shambles.

Flaming Lips' Soft Bulletin - a revisitation. (not a word)








I am not one who finds Wayne Coyne tiresome, really ever, until and unless I find myself tiresome. Coyne's interviews and general persona in the Lips docudrama evoke a sense of the kind of soft hippie adulation of possibility of which it is easy, but not mandatory, to disparage. I find myself tiresome retroactively, mostly, when it's clear that a certain dismissal was made out of hand and in service of that basic seen-it-all-done-it-all presumptiveness that, when identified, produces a shudder.

Coyne seems to be aware of this tiresomeness of things that starts with tiresomeness of one's own circumstances, and he's averse to it without being contemptuous of it. I like that - it comes off as acknowledging that it's possible to be willfully sullen but not really desirable. But it's not really that, either, this thing Coyne has going on, or not just that. "being open to possibility," for what that's worth as a description of a kind of stance toward the world Coyne urges, isn't such a bad notion to keep out in front of you in terms of negotiating the ephemeral happenstance stuff that contributes to one-day-and-the-next. It may be easier or more habitual to sort of assimilate the new into the old and keep it contained within the previous understanding - easier or more natural or more likely to be the response beaten into you by sheer repetition - but it can't be more fun or even more stimulating.

It's not clear how to weave together the way Coyne and the other Lips come off in self-representation with the music they make, nor is it necessarily something worth doing. I guess it's inviting in that the music (and I can only talk about the Soft Bulletin, which still confounds my understanding and digs its hooks into me without even trying, now, six or seven years after first coming to it) makes you wonder what its makers think about the process that led to it. After seeing the docudrama - I write that as if I know what it may connote, which I really don't, but it seems right - the thing that stuck is the absolute investment that Coyne makes in making music mean more than just making music. Not to get all Spin magazine or anything, but it is somehow easier to succumb to something when you know that part of what that thing is, is meant for you, expressly and without reservation or stinting pre-formulated idea about what that moment of contact may consist of. And the other slightly out of reach part of it, a dimension of it that is necessarily a product of conjecture, is - to me, here, about this album at least - a recognition that the creators' only assurance of what they make is to be wholly invested in the making of it and an invitation to contemplate what that investment was like at the time the thing was created.

If this doesn't make sense or relies on too much hazy pronoun antecedent confusion, where "it" could be seven things - well, that's part of the thing - and there may be an object lesson here about successful concept albums and the way they manage to elicit a fairly comprehensive engagement with the different possible concepts to which they may be pointing. And obviously if something is successful enough in what you take it to try to be accomplishing to make you wonder if what you take it to accomplish is what was intended to be accomplished, there's even more to think about.
So do it, if it charms you, is what I mean and what I've been doing.

Something or other

1.
It's a strange thing to hear your downstairs neighbor throwing up at 12:50 am in the morning - late nights are ammunition for reflection unto themselves without that thrown into the mix - and but I don't want to think about the probable sequence of events that led her to the porcelain and led me to be sitting up in bed, pouring over page 388 of a novel that I began at 7 and that I suspect I will not sleep until it is read all the way, right down to the last sentence. And so, wonder of wonders, I hit a key on the minimalist white computer, the screen flashes, and I bear this little snippet, a single word in the vast self-sustaining manuscript of sensations and perceptions that make up the last minute or so of my life, out into the public domain.


2.
In my dissertation and my other early studies, I told people short stories in which a person does something disgusting or disrespectful that was perfectly harmless (for example, a family cooks and eats its dog, after the dog was killed by a car). I was trying to pit the emotion of disgust against reasoning about harm and individual rights.

I found that disgust won in nearly all groups I studied (in Brazil, India, and the United States), except for groups of politically liberal college students, particularly Americans, who overrode their disgust and said that people have a right to do whatever they want, as long as they don't hurt anyone else.

Paralytic disturbances on the order of like nuclear winter

I am in the Roman Empire of my mind, urging ever more elaborate engineering projects and allocating ever increasing numbers of plebes to combat the fires. Large fires make their own weather systems; everyone out there better stay hydrated.

The eunuchs in the courtyard of the Roman Empire of my mind eat grapes leisurely and rehearse the Latinate dirges until all the echoes become self-sustaining. All is well in their world; it must be a strange one, structured around the idea of being put under the knife.

I leave the Roman Empire of my mind because this phrasing reminds me of Last of the Mohicans and Michael Mann’s cinematography. Collateral was kind of a motherfucker, wasn’t it? That scene when Jamie Foxx’s character has to play the part of the assassin, and he acts all hard and threatening - a convincing portrait of Vincent, really - reminds me of the scene in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive when Naomi Watts tries out for a part and shows - surprisingly, to me at least - that her character Betty really can act and is not just a raw bundle of affected Hollywood fantasy.

Associative matrices, from here: Naomi Watts - > Australia - > Great white sharks.























Infinite Jest related notions:

1) Initial set of aesthetic and ethical/moral concerns laid down here continue to haunt, yes haunt, later work.
2) This is an essentially conservative book; the formal innovations tend to obscure this.
3) Some rooms have five walls.
4) Currently on page 317.
5) I wonder if he took notes when he went to the meetings or if he spoke or what exactly.

Night sweats

Something sounding like foghorn came in on 2 and 3 with a delayed swing beat beneath it; all the kids in the lunch line wearing yellow backpacks from Target were swaying from left to right, all languid-like, and they kept chanting:

Break down k’s into dimes and sell ‘em like gobstoppers