Sunday, November 30, 2008

time travel... again!!!

Tonight on KCRW I heard that old 90's song by the Primitive Radio Gods. I think the track was called... well actually I have no idea what it's called. But regardless, if you're over 25 you probably remember the song. It's the one that had the sample of, I believe, Martin Luther King, Jr. 'I've been down hearted'.

We on the same page? Cool.

Remember this song? I do. It amazes me how the simple keyboard tones of something like this can overwhelm me with a nostalgia that hits on every sense at once; in fact I believe this to be a kind of sixth sense itself – when touch and smell and taste all seem to meet in the middle of some big, soft swirling feeling in the middle of your head, and you’re standing in the rain ten years before, walking out of a place you used to work surrounded by people you used to know – it’s something else. I’ve talked here before about my belief in time travel through the senses and I take this to be a pretty good example of it. Back then I might have been looking forward in time to this exact moment now where I write this, but I hadn’t touched it before with any of my regular senses, so my brain couldn’t decode it yet. Now, I’m looking down the opposite end of that corridor and even though my ass is still firmly planted in this chair in my kitchen I’m also there in the Bedford Park UnderPaidSlaves parking lot.

I can smell the fucking place.

All that from a song I don’t even particularly give a shit about. Wow.

It's a common problem and one, I think, that is probably not really that difficult to overcome in the grand scheme of things, this inability we 21st century humans exhibit in not being able to Remember forward. Time is a loop, obviously, so why are we restricted to one side of the curvature? Or are we? This is all so 4:00AM-stoned-as-hell (guilty as charged) but really, how do we know the future if we haven't seen it yet? Maybe I had visions of this exact room ten years ago while working the sort at UPS, zoning out with the trance of repetitive labor. How would I have recognized it then, having not been in it or known any of the stuff that would be in it yet?

These are the questions that keep me going...

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Thanksgiving...

... I am thankful for the fact that it's not too much longer now until GWB leaves our lives forever. Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out. Well, actually now that I think of it, let it hit you in the fucking head a couple times maybe, not that there's that much to damage up there...

David Foster Wallace's INFINTE JEST is, academically speaking, kicking my ass. This is the hardest book I've ever read, regardless of how enjoyable it is (mostly). I've been working on it for probably about a month now, off and on, and I'm just about to crack page 300.

300 of 981 (1079 if you count the footnotes).

One of the things about the book that is difficult while also being extremely cool, is the fact that the tone of the prose changes constantly, as if several different writers were all working on it together. Some is light and breezy. Some, ie the crack-addicts, are ten pages of (literally) one or two run-on sentences. Then there's the academic parts, where I don't understand half of what is written on the page. This is because Mr. Wallace uses technical and medical terminology and jargon, as well as abbreviations, as if everyone reading will understand them. Not that I'm complaining, it just slows the flow.

But the book is definitely good. As in I'm enjoying it. As in I feel it is 'good' for me to read something like this. As my friend Walter has pointed out, some things are just 'good' for you to ingest - he said this in a conversation comparing Goodfellas with The Godfather movies, the latter of which I dislike immensely even though I've not seen them in well over 10 years. Goodfellas is a good time, like listening to a Pixies album, while The Godfather is more stoic and not s easily rewarding, like listening to Puccini. Now apply that comparison to Infinite Jest vs. say, Stephen King. King is going to have more hooky-choruses and toe-tapping drive, like the Pixies, and Infinite Jest is going to reveal itself in layers, making you work for it's rewards.

...................

Not sure why, maybe just because I feel I tend to neglect this blog since starting the CHUD.com one, but I feel compelled to prattle on today about nothing really at all, just enjoying the feeling of my fingers dancing and jabbing over the keyboard for now. So prattle I shall, you've been warned.

Thanksgiving '08 playlist thus far: Let's see, Frank Black and the Catholics, Pistolero; The Bronx (all three are eponymously titled so it was #2, #3 and #1); Soundgarden, Superunknown; Sugar, Copper Blue and that makes us current. Next up will be Luscious Jackson's Fever In Fever Out and later, when company arrives Tom Waits' The Heart of a Saturday Night, Tom Waits' Mule Variations, Tom Waits' Swordfish Trombone and finally of course Mr. Waits' masterpiece, Rain Dogs. As you can tell I'm hip-deep in a big Waits jag. I've always loved the guy but sometimes it seems the later period (83-present) tends to repeat itself a bit. But then I'm starting to wonder if I'm not seriously wrong about that, being that I've somehow made that judgement while owning just a small portion of his prolific (to say the least) career.

We Sail Tonight For Singapore...

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Whoops...

I had a rather shocking moment of realization today. I was thinking about writing, as I almost always am, and my thoughts turned to my only 'finished' attempt at a novel thus far, The Subtle War.

Recently I began sending chunks of this to a friend to read and this spurred me to pull out the hard copy Sara printed and had bound for me. I've been trying to avoid doing this for a awhile simply because I am immersed in writing a new novel and to start delving back into the depths of TSW, I knew, would spark me to want to begin re-writing or editing it again*.

But yesterday dive back into it I did, albeit very briefly.

This brings us up almost to the present. In driving to get coffee this morning (read: afternoon) a thought suddenly came to me.

I have become one of my characters.

Now before you take this merely at face value, please, read my previous post. It pertains, among other things, to the strange phenomenon I've discovered as a writer: the world of your story can be used to manifest changes in the world in which you live.

I knew when I began writing TSW that I was writing it to try and trigger something, I just wasn't sure what. I had a head recently pumped full of all kinds of esoteric ideas, I was single, I was in a band, etc. Lots of different angles. The story has several 'main' characters, none of which were directly me, but of course there were little bits of me in most of them. They are all moving through imperfect versions of themselves, trying to become something else. Jake, arguably the 'main' main character is a stylized version of my long ago best friend of the same name. Really I split him in half via the other character, Corey, who is sort of the evil doppleganger of Jake. I think these characters are the least 'me' because the were my attempt to revitalize the soul of my friend who died - I wanted to make him a hero, and conquer some of the demons that haunted him while he was alive.

Quinten Alpha Haley however is the character that somehow, and I didn't realize how well it worked until today, I became, or predicted, or whatever.

Since moving to Cali over two years ago I have indeed turned into this character. Quinten stays in his apartment, does not leave.

This is me.

Aside from work, and the very occasional outing with Sara and friends, I don't leave our place. What's more, Quinten sits with a computer as his only real window to the world, head full of Occult knowledge which has essentially become useless to him, writing journal entries. He stares out a window and longs to make the connections he needs to reinstate himself in the world in a way that will make him meaningful - again, everything right down to the fact that the window in front of the desk where I sit now typing this, is an almost exact replica of what I originally had in mind.

It's funny how these microcosm/macrocosm things work, funnier still that the joke has so totally been on me. For one thing, right after moving out here and receiving a slew of rejection letters for the novel, I went in and took out almost all of the first person technique on the major characters except for Quinten, as the journal entries are the initial introduction and developement device of his character. In thinking about all this now I'm wondering if it was this final, definitive definition of writing as Quinten that did it. 'I' became the 'I' in the book.

Whatever the reason, this is just too perfect of a fit to be anything other than Magick. I too sit at the computer, my window into the outside world, writing journal entries (you're reading one now) and longing to make the connections (agent, publisher) that will reinstall me back into the world in a meaningful fashion as the person I want to be. I had a guidance councilor in high school who told me I was extremely insightful of myself, and that strikes me now as I analyze this bizarre transfiguration into a character I've created. Quinten removed himself from the world he knew in order to reemerge as something better. This was the underlying motivation for me, personally, in our move across country. Sure, the move was for Sara and her chance to advance, but it was also for me to try and redefine myself as a writer after spending ten years trying to make band after band work. I removed myself from 'the world' (read: everything I knew) with the intent of reemerging as something new.

How do I control this? How do I use this to my advantage? How do I use this to put myself in a position to do what I want with my life instead of continuing to waste it working in a job that has nothing to do or offer the 'real' me?

I'll have to think about this more and get back to you if I come up with anything...

...........

* The novel is really only finished in terms of having a (mostly) cohesive start, a lot of work on tense and just generally better sentence structure must be devised.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Experiments in Creativity

I have been undergoing a grueling experiment with my creative energies. Let me tell you about it.

About a month ago I re-read Bret Easton Ellis’ AMERICAN PSYCHO. Originally my dear departed friend Brian had lent me this in the late 90’s and upon reaching what has become infamously known to people who have read the book as ‘The rat scene’ I closed the book, put it in my car and returned it to him the next day, leaving explicit instructions to never have it brought out in my presence again.

I blogged more specifically about this book on CHUD here:

http://chud.com/articles/blogs/1053/Brett-Easton-Ellis-and-the-Psychotic-Stock-Broker.html

A decade later it had begun to occur to me just how amazing Ellis' style is and I decided to re-read the infamous volume. After finishing Psycho my appetite for his wonderful prose was set and I immediately turned to the E's of our store’s Literature section and decided on GLAMORAMA as my next. Only my boss intervened, promising me a galley’s copy if I waited until she could find it amidst her books and so I went this, the thrifty route, and chose the next book there on the shelf that caught my eye: LUNAR PARK. This, now this was just a fluke then that I read Lunar Park immediately after Psycho and I will forever be grateful that circumstance dictated I did. They are, in a sense, companion pieces and I would implore anyone who reads Psycho to do so with the undiluted intention of following it immediately with Lunar Park.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic THE GREAT GATSBY has long been my favorite novel, but now it has close competition for that accolade. Lunar Park is pretty fucking close. I don’t want to get to into what this book is, except that while continuing to be a wonderful example of Ellis’ style, the story itself is not what it first appears. Ellis himself is the main character and I’ll leave it at that – if you plan to read it please do not wikipedia it or anything like that – I thank beer that whoever did the blurbs on the jacket did so tastefully, giving away nothing of the twists and turns this book takes.

I’m talking about all this here as a precursor to telling you about this experiment. It’s no secret that those of us who are writers or artists or musicians or whatever have other such artists who are our inspirations. Sure, life and consciousness are inspirations in and of themselves, but there are occasionally those other souls on this floating orbital garden that put their blood sweat and tears into creative projects that trigger something of a shared experience in ourselves and give us the momentum to create our own little worlds of sound and glass and steel and words.

This one-two punch of American Psycho and Lunar Park have been my most recent.

For more than a year I have been writing screenplays and have in that time had many thoughts that returning to prose fiction, where my writing began, had possibly become impossible. Ellis helped me get there.

Originally everything I wrote was first person. This started in first grade or so when I began writing stories. As I grew older it was perhaps solidified by my love of H.P. Lovecraft’s megnomanical first person tales of humanity’s otherworldly encounters with forces they could not hope to understand, much less control. My first (and thus far only) completed novel, The Subtle War was originally written in many first person salvo’s, the main character Jake being a thinly-veiled tribute to another dearly departed friend of mine, my best friend after the deterioration of my first long term ‘romance’ Jake Owen Ostrowski. Only after finishing TSW and preparing to shop it, I found a lot of agents and publishers hated first person fiction, some even going so far as to say they would not even consider it. Feeling terrible about it now, I went back in and rewired a lot of that novel to be third person, in hopes it would facilitate it's sale.

Hasn't worked yet. And now I see Ellis, who almost always writes first person, as a glaring example of how to do it. I'm reminded that I should do what I do how I want to read it and say 'Go Fuck Yourself' to anyone that doesn't like it.

But why first person?

With TSW, the tale worked better when I used Jake as a fiction suit; a character-vehicle I could climb inside and maneuver around inside the microcosmic world I had devised for the story, a setting but also a sort of Voodoo-doll of the ‘real’ world my flesh and blood body inhabited on a daily basis. The idea was very much inspired by another writer I love, Grant Morrison, and it went something like this: the microcosm reflects the macrocosm – insert yourself into the world of your story and write things there that would effect the characterized version of you and then conversely echo up into the real world. This worked almost immediately, both invigorating and kind of frightening me when a scene I wrote (that was subsequently cut) where Jake has to look through a junkyard for some hidden message and finds it in the form of a tattered old comic book in the trunk of a junked car. The comic was an adaptation of a Lovecraft tale. Several days after writing this my car broke down and in anger I put my fist through the plastic sheet over the dashboard. Fearing my father would find out I dragged my friend Two into a junkyard and low and behold, I found the piece I needed but I also found a bridge between worlds – a tattered comic book in the trunk of a junked auto. The comic was, of course, an adaptation of a Lovecraft tale…

This method unfortunately has proven, as all scientists will attest when queried about dabbling with the mechanisms behind the consensual world, unpredictable. Of course soon after the comic book incident I overtly tried to write a story where I won the lottery. Hahah I laugh now at my ignorance at the way the Universe works.

Anyway, I’m sidetracking. But that’s okay, because this is all illustrative of the creative process and how I’ve learned to move through my own version of it, and my new approach was the impetus of this post to begin with. After the Ellis-combo inspired me to return to fiction I began writing a novel. This time however, I decided to adhere very strictly to the stimuli which had inspired it to begin with. Although I have a thousand fucking books to read, I would read only Ellis, now moving on to GLAMORAMA at last, the wonderfully original galley indeed coming my way soon after it was promised (thanks Jodi). I would listen only to that music which fit into what I now considered my ‘Ellis mood’, and I guess that will require a bit of an explanation.

Ellis reminded me a lot of my late, aforementioned friend Brian, who was also very influenced by his writing. He also reminded me of Brian’s brother and my long time good friend and on again off again roommate Two. Brian was also an enormous fan of Greg Dulli’s band The Afghan Whigs, and this too was another thing first recommended to me by Brian, which I ignored or couldn’t get into at the time, only to receive one of his copies of the classic album ‘Gentleman’ after his death via Two and fall immediately in love with it and everything Dulli did with the Whigs and after (Twilight Singers, The Gutter Twins).

Here then was the foundation of the music that fit my ‘Ellis mood’ and thus would provide the background and sonic fuel for my new novel.

Dulli and Ellis reminded me so much of Brian because they all craft their art out of and about similar things: drugs, sex, and the things we hide from everyone in our daily lives. Lunar Park, with Ellis as the main character and told first person, begins very much about about the secret life he leads behind the back of those people he loves and who try to help him. This includes drugs, but also intuitions that drive him to see the world in a very different light than most folks would admit they might see too. Dulli’s music always seems to have a vibe to it that accompanies scenes of nighttime debauchery in a young, urban setting. Frat boys scoring coke in a seedy nightclub, fucking questionable women in a bathroom stalls, snorting and drinking until the sun comes up and the blinds just won’t defend them against the return to the mores and expectations that daylight brings with it. There is such an explicit tapestry here, woven similarly between Ellis and Dulli’s art, and joined together through a lost friend who himself influenced me constantly to write just by being so into the craft himself.

So now his influences have become mine, and here I am writing a novel playing with some of these atmospheres but also working through my own violent reaction to fighting like hell to do something that propels me into doing what I truly want to do for a living, leaving the 9to5 world behind and making my world a better place, for me and the love of my life and all of our friends.

So it’s Ellis, Dulli, a lot of dark jazz, dark electronica, and all the music that to me at least, sprung from the minds of people who knew what it truly is to move through the night and experience it for all its epic, otherworldly glory.

90 pages in a month. I’ll let you know how the rest goes. The influence ban is starting to change, one thing bleeding into another, Gutter Twins leading me back into second frontman Mark Lanegan’s (formerly of QOTSA and Screaming Trees) unbelievable solo effort BUBBLEGUM, bleeding me into guest vocalist there PJ HARVEY’s masterpieces TO BRING YOU MY LOVE and STORIES FROM THE CITY STORIES FROM THE SEA leading me to this, to that. Aphex Twin's nighttime salute I CARE BECAUSE YOU DO leading to Roni Size’s NEW FORMS, and a trip home to Chicago to interact with a lot of other friends who influence me just by having been there on so many infamous nocturnal adventures leading me to the music I associate with them and those times, CAT RAPES DOG from Chris W. and New Radicals for the bar where I spent many of my nights pickling my liver with Leine's red, Hacker-Pschorr and great conversation. Of course then there's UNDERWORLD, which not only is the ultimate nighttime music but also a reminder of my one salvation, Sara, the person I am closest to and who keeps me from actually delving into the depths of the real life 'Ellis mood'. Better to craft that microcosm, move in with a character and explore entirely different worlds.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Something wicked this way comes...

This morning I experienced my first California Earthquake. Sara had just left for work and I was sitting at the desk writing when suddenly something notably changed in the atmosphere around me. It wasn't the Earth moving in at first. No, more like some kind of emmanation reached me a few moments just before the actual force waves did. The problem with trying to encapsulate or explain, to yourself or others, this type of thing is it happens so fast and appears without warning, that you can't really prepare yourself to itemize the insights when it occurs. But something definitely precluded it.

Then the Earth shook.

Now that sounds awful dramatic, and where we were it was anything but. It welled up and I was able to recognize it for what it was. I continued to sit and consciously experience (ie pay attention to) it for a few fleeting moments before it left as quickly as it came. However, and this was hard to discern where it stopped and I started, but an almost vertiginous (if that's not a word it is now, deal with it) feeling remained to play over my body and senses for a few minutes afterward.

All in all, interesting. Very interesting.

Now, it had already been a strange morning. Not 'Squid dressed as Nuns and throwing fish around the neighborhood' weird, nor 'Stranger walks up and addresses you by name' weird.

Subtle weird.

It is the kind of weird I have begun associating with my brain's snap over to what writer's like Grant Morrison or William S. Burroughs call 'Magickal Consciousness'* or Carlos Castenada's friend, the Yaqui Indian sorcerer Don Juan called 'Second Attention'. Essentially, this is a kind of consciousness that, while not drastically different than normal everyday consciousness is enhanced with a subtle layer of, well, for lack of a laymantic (again, another new word!) word to encapsulate it, something different. Different as in, there's extra sense operating. Think of when your in a room with someone you know is mad at you but hasn't yet said so. You FEEL it. That's what this is like, except you don't have as direct an area to pinpoint what is causing the strange sensation in your brain, back and balls.

To me it manifests similarly to a good buzz - it comes on and lingers for a while, making you curl your toes and perk your eyes and ears up, your attenae primed for reception at any wavelength. Only problem is, just like the onset of an Earthquake, it's impossible to pinpoint what frequencies that signal is going to come in on. However, the interesting thing for a novice like myself is, even though I don't have the skills to tune into it accurately, once you have those antennae up, you're not only getting the signal, now the signal is aware of you. It is in this way that strange things often happen in this state of consciousness.

So, beside the Earthquake, what strange things happened this morning?

Again, I don't know. At one point however I felt an awful lot of power in my body and used it to try and affect some change for the better in my life. We'll see.

..........

* I think Morrison goes into a more in depth description here:

http://www.grantmorrison.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=195&Itemid=83

Friday, June 13, 2008

In case You've ever wondered...

... or might need it, the 1999 revised Catholic church's Rite of Exorcism

I've always thought the whole heaven/hell god/devil thing was hokey at best, but I do think 'demonic' possession or encounters occurs. My take on it though is some people wallow in so much negativity and hatred that they anchor aspects of their personality or psyche here after they die, and that's what us live folk are encountering when things like this pops up.

Having spent a pretty decent amount of time at Bachlor's Grove cemetary I have had some experience with what may very well have been 'If you've convinced yourself, that's great' but sure as hell felt like something strange and possibly malevolent. Because of this I have had a pretty voracious interest in this type of thing for sometime. However, having spent the last 48 hrs. relaxing at my in-laws house in beautiful, lush Defiance, Ohio I've just caught my yearly share of cable tv and what I noticed was that shows about 'hauntings' and exorcisms must currently be all the rage. This may very well have to do with the fact that horror in general has been popularized as the 80's generation that grew up sneaking to watch 'Howling', 'Halloween' and 'Friday the 13th' have become the foundation of the consumer force. Icons like Ozzy Ozbourne do not freak them out, and the things their kids are exposed to do not have to be so squeaky clean. Thus, Mick Harris can jump from the popular HBO series Masters of Horror to NBC with a prime time series, horror movies gain a massive standing as viable box office lures for all ages and things like the stale and cheesy 'Ghost Hunters' and the just plain awful 'A Haunting' litter the daily line-ups of up and coming cable stations. This kind of pop culture exposure steals legitimacy left and right from investigation or conversation of the probably hundreds of possibly legitimate claims of paranormal happening throughout the country and the world. Ten years ago if you punched words or phrases like 'ghost hunters' or 'Haunted places' into a search engine you received links to some pretty voluminous articles. Now its all links to products and shows.

Looks like the spectacle will get us - even after we're dead.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

It's been a while but I'm back...

... shit, burning the fucking candle at both ends lately with all these blogs. It's cool though - more writing is a good thing. Didn't want to neglect my original too long though, so I'll start with some interesting things that have been occupying the interior of my melon of late...

It's funny. I go through these boughts where I pay next to no attention to the study of anything scientific or occult, then something triggers my interest again and I'm off - and once that happens there is no room for anything else. I'm still struggling through the last bit of Mervyn Peake's Gromenghast trilogy, 'Titus Alone' and I bought that new H.P. Lovecraft tome I mentioned on CHUD, and I started Stephen King's 'On Writing' for inspiration through my writer's block, but now all that is on hold as I've fallen 'Down the Rabbit Hole' again. What sparked it off this time is stress. Work for a major chain book retailer has been enough to make me a crotchety old bastard, and I've been manifesting some pretty freaky headaches, so I finally decided I needed to do something about it or develop a tumor. Breathing was the first thing to come to mind and on that path lay the inclintion to break out my old ass British Edition of Aleister Crowley's 'Magick in Theory and Practice' in search of the specifics on performing what is known as 'The Greater and Lesser Rituals of the Pentagram'. These are invoking/banishing rituals that consist largely of moving energy around through the body and into/out of the lungs, perfect for energizing and cleansing the residues stress leaves clinging in all kinds of areas in the body.

Once I open that book, the trigger is activated and I'm rifling through book after book, shunting down avenues of forgotten knowledge and looking for ways to take a little bit more charge of my short and tempetuous time on this beautiful old mudball of ours. The first place I usually land is the book that, after Grant Morrison's 'Invisibles', is Terence and Dennis McKenna's 'Invisible Landscape'. This is a book I have never been able to finish, as usually I only make it so far before I am forced to seek out accompanying texts on Quantum Physics and the like in order to be able to go back and understand what it was the McKennas were writing about.*

The funny thing is as I start reading and thinking about this stuff synchronicities and other strange things begin to arise in the rest of my life. For one I almost always start dreaming heavy again. Normally I do not remember my dreams, but once into this stuff again they become ludicriously dense and symbolic. This then goes hand in hand with daytime bouts of my special deja vu, where I begin to have episodes where I'm sure whatever it is I'm doing I've already experienced. Kind of like bending the time antenna backwards from the future.

Then there's things like how the same day I began reading the Crawley I discovered a friend of mine at work who I've known for almost two years now is well versed in the study of aspects such as the Masons and Templars, Rennes-le-Chateau** and the like. Never come up before and then out of the blue we have a hour-long conversation about everything from the Templars to Quantum Mechanics. This of course only served to fuel my own fire and its been escalating ever since.

Now this time I am going to try to stick with Invisible Landscape for the entire book. I'm hoping this in and of itself will act as a catalyst to drive up the frequency on novelty and synchronicity to points that will help me reach certain goals I have recently been lazy and angst-ridden about following.

We'll see.
...........

*This is where we get into what I call 'Wiki-vertigo' - When you're on wikipedia reading about one thing and before you know it you've followed so many of the links interlaced throughout the original article you no longer remember where you began.

**I'll definitely have to post a more in-depth on Rennes, but in the meantime you can go here:

http://www.toolband.com/index_frames.html

for a pretty good introduction (and yes, that is the band Tool's website - another reason why they're just so damn cool)