Marcie does that thing where you put twice as many pillows as you need on your bed one to put your head on when you sleep and one to throw on the floor when you’re ready to go to bed. Like the Brady parents had, not that she’d know what that is ‘cause she’s not a TV kid. The reason I was thinking about that was that my head was on the pillow that you would sleep on and I was thinking about all the cat hair and stuff on her hardwood floors that gets on the other pillows when you throw them on the floor and that I’m allergic to cat stuff and that I maybe should be concerned about that but I wasn’t feeling sniffely so maybe not.

Now I’m using both pillows to prop my head up and type. I found a laptop by her bed and I un-suspended it and started typing in Word 97. The words that were coming to my head resting on her clean pillow were too tasty to let go of. I know after all these years that where you think of something nifty as you’re drifting off to sleep it’s gone fer sure when you fall asleep. Fight that urge to fall asleep and get them down. Type them in.

There’s some Boards of Canada playing and the remains of our dinner party are riding out the last of their ecstasy buzz and chatting in the living room. Nathan, who’s room the living room is, is curled up in front of the fire in the backyard like the cute little cowpoke he is. I’m resting on Marcie’s bed. I don’t think they know that I have a computer on my lap. Man, her screen must be eight hundred by six hundred. Everything looks big and clunky to me. I’m used to sixteen hundred by twelve hundred.

Well, that’s about it. Starting up her laptop and typing ended my sleepy reverie and now I’m just punching keys so I’ll say a “save, exit, close.”

Don’t get me wrong. I think Marcie and her bed are the greatest. It’s an “aw, shucks, aint that sweet” kind of thing.

Later.

davep

This was a mistake. I was using my Holga. That's my friend Squash floating above the valley.

This is for the last 4 or 5 days:

Marcie White light white heat. Oooo it tickles
me
down
to
my
toes.
Lord have mercy now, goodness knows.

I'm thinking about moving to Los Angeles. First it was Eben who mentioned that he's leaving Seattle for either Oakland or LA and then it was Davemaze musing that his life might not suck so much down there. Last week we were supposed to take a little road trip down there. LA is strangely alluring to me right now.

Dave called me on Friday and said something to the effect of "You can't stop us, YES, we will prevail. They cannot beat Tom Hanks and Bruce Springsteen. They're culture-carpet-bombing the earth. Turn on the TV! Oh my God, Stevie Wonder. We cannot lose with these guys on our side. I see it all now and I'm not afraid." Or something like that. He's right of course. There's a beam of bright white light shooting into the sky out of Hollywood and splintering into an umbrella of 5 billion stars. We have reach that no terrorist could ever dream of. It is the closest thing we have on the earth to "The Force".

Not only do we have more media, not only more sophisticated media, we have BETTER media. The Oscars is the most important global cultural event of our times. For sheer concentrated planetary focus, it kills the Olympics. I saw people drooling over the Oscars in India that spoke no English and never went to anything but Bollywood films. I'm sure to be accused of cultural elitism, slanting the story to make it look like an Indian kid is going to choose Michael Jordan as a hero over Sachin Tendulkar. No, calm down, these things are incremental. But I do know that even though the kid has never shot a basketball, he still wants a Chicago Bulls jersey.

This is what makes me want to go down there. As my man Eben said today, "LA is where the rubber meets the road. People in SF, yeah they make art but people go to LA if they want to get their stuff out there. That's where you go to get seen and heard. That's what I'm in it for and I want to be surrounded by people who are going for it." Fuck the pseudo-integrity of obscurity.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I always associated moving there with the countless duffs across America that pack it up and try to make it in show business. I always thought LA was shallow. I always thought it would be too much driving. None of that shit seems to matter to me any more. I've already made it. I embrace my surface qualities, revel in them even. I'm going down there to be with the other stars and lend my bit of light to the force. I'm gonna test drive a '73 Porsche 911 Targa tomorrow.

This is a video of Psyche's Windows by Stephen Chaparro. I was sooo goddamn high on ecstasy when I shot this. I think we're listening to the Rachmaninoff "Vespers" chorale. Right in mid-vid, the music swells just has our raver-boy faces into the wind and the glowing blue sheets billow. You can kill me now. This sculpture was featured in two of the finest moments I had at Burning Man. Here's a photo of the outside.

 

Psyche's Windows :30 seconds or download 1.8 megs

Here's some internet searches that sent people to primco.org. I think this is the best thing about having a website.

Apparently I'm a flashpoint for people typing random threatening messages into the input box of a search engine.

This is good....writing about the day my mother died earns me the number one ranking on Google for people looking for oakies having sex.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop in Tampa Bay. Actually, Eastern Sikkim.

Sneaking up and preying on a bunch of schoolgirls. Colaba, Bombay.

I'm going camping for a couple of days so this is it. Since I'll be gone I figured I'd put up two pictures today. It's against the rules and they're not even that different but each is special in it's own way I think.

I have two pictures of a guy looking into the sun setting on Chowpatty Beach in Bombay. I don't know which of them I like better. I think the top one because you can see his shirt and you gotta be able to see an Indian man's shirt. But then, the bottom one has a classic, no bullshit, punk rock kinda feel. He's looks a little bored or upset in the top one but in the bottom one it looks like he just farted. Heck. I don't know.

Hughes Road, Bombay. Merge carefully dad.

This isn't something that's exactly in the forefront of my life right now, (having had my rather fanatical stage burn down slightly), but just last night I had my friend Dave listen to "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" by Neutral Milk Hotel and he went ape-shit over it. "Genius, fucking incredible, hey, lemme see the CD case, why hasn't this sold billions?"

This thing came out 3 or 4 years ago, it's obscure and that can be a problem, but so is this web page. I don't know, I guessing that at this point if you haven't loved it you probably don't care, but I couldn't care less if you don't care, I'm going to write about it. Because it's important. This is music criticism....yawn...but I'm going to try to make it worth your while -- even if you decide not to devote your life to Neutral Milk Hotel.

This disc brings music critics (who, remember, are professional music appreciators) to their knees, not just in admiration of it but in humility. I can hear in their voice the naked insignificance and impotence before the task of describing this work of art. Is it possible to say that it's the most important popular music recording of the last 10 years? Probably. 20? 30 years? Important because of the responsibility one feels upon hearing it. For what it means to each person -- what it can do to you; not what it stands for, or how many teenage hair-dye jobs it inspired.

Sometimes critics rave about the rare vocal talent or how he blends distant musical styles or they quote a chunk of his lyrics in an attempt to give you flavor. They cannot give you're the shock to the system that hearing this music will. They, (well maybe they can) will not be able to make you cry like this music can. You cannot resist it. The music will nuzzle up against your fear and enchant your confused postmodern brain.

You have to be a seeker. If you're not looking for it you won't find it. Seekers know that they may not know they've found it when they do. Most people think they're seekers but they're waiters, waiting to be shown things. I think I can tell the difference between people (it has nothing to do with how many CD's you buy). Can you recognize when art is affecting you (even in the tiniest way) and harness that interest and let it drag you into a deeper appreciation? It's a rookie mistake to judge people by whether they like a piece of art. Gotta watch that, but it's hard not to judge a person by their reaction to Neutral Milk Hotel -- really hard.

Do you have to be a college educated upper-class artistic white person to like this music? I don't know many people that aren't like that. But I would like to know the demographics. One thing's for sure, it's not a big seller. And I'm not prepared to dismiss it if it turns out that it has no reach beyond that class of people.

Know this: if you think it's all hopeless and everything that our culture is trying to shove down your throat is vomitous; this thing remains. It's there. I can tell you that there is a sustained piece of genius, a marker that you can point to, that came out in the late 90's proving that it can still happen. This one thing is all I need to keep hope alive. No, it's not even hope, it's assuredness. (Pretentiousness needle entering the red zone)

The Zen Guerrilla show at the Bottom of the Hill last night taught me that we need to rejoice. If you have no hope the first step is to rejoice and be thankful for what you do have. You have Neutral Milk Hotel. Take a little bit and rejoice that you have that.

I just love Hindu men streetsleeping in the 96 degree Bombay heat

The wall of my room at Mehta Hostpital for Women Care, Bombay.

Don't know where this is but I think it's in front of Dave Farsan near Babulnath Chowk. Bombay.

I just watched Gandhi for the first time since 1985. It was very moving and relevant. Gandhi was killed by a Hindu extremist who thought he was giving too much away to the Muslims during the shaping of independent India.

Indians today know almost nothing of Gandhi nor do they care. They learn about his political role and his philosophy is brushed aside as naiveté or extremism. While I was in India, I was very curious about this mass amnesia of the ideas of the father of their country. I lived on his street for a while. It's something similar to our society still playing the music of the late sixties on the radio all the time but the ideas that went along with it are derided old "hippy daydreams" -- naked, dirty failures of the "Age of Aquarius". They will say, "Gandhi is ours" but he is not theirs any more. I will not let them have him. They just want him, so when it's convenient, they can flash a cardboard cut-out of him to the world and say, "this is our great father, our ancient culture deserves your respect". This is the most disingenuous crap I can imagine. I could go on forever about all the conflicting and countercultural ideas that got Gandhi killed but I won't.

I felt really bad yesterday. I'm sure everyone did. I watched too much TV. You shouldn't watch too much TV I think. I say that as Peter Jennings streams live on my laptop.

I tried to get a handle on why I was feeling so bad. I felt the immediate pain of the scene -- imagining falling 1000 feet inside a crumbling, flaming office building. But my own brand of fear was not a feeling of vulnerability -- that it could happen to me, but hopelessness that the attack would not further polarize the earth. I was in India when the nuclear standoff with Pakistan was at its most insane. Many people who've been to Israel have witnessed the brand of intolerance that I saw all over India. Hindus and Muslims have been killing each other for a thousand years there. Actively and enthusiastically killing, stopping only for brief periods when they faced a greater enemy, such as the British Raj.

These two groups were so similar to me (at least relative to a westerner). They were all Indian and I was confounded by their hatred of each other. The differences between Hindus and Muslims are not as great as their difference from the west and Christianity but the hatred and fighting is more intense because of proximity. While I've never been to a purely Muslim country, the northern region of India is very traditional and has had less multicultural and modern influence than the south. To my untrained eye, the Hindu areas of the north resembled traditional Islam more than they resembled the Hindu areas of the south.

Sure, for a thousand years Muslim conquerors had swept down from the north into the Indian Subcontinent. Temple desecration is a favorite sport of both groups. They have different views of God, Islam is more exclusive and Hindus are supposed to think that every God is holy, but so many other things are similar. Some of the cultural differences that make Muslims hate the west so much -- the debasing sexually explicit conduct, personal selfishness and independence, the secularism, moral relativism, equal rights for women -- all are equally opposed by traditional Hindu culture. These are things that worry all Indians as the west begins to erode their culture. "MTV is ruining my daughter."

Their society cannot battle the new temptations that the media imports. Commercials make people ashamed that they don't have sparkling white smiles but nobody can buy toothpaste. Why the ads? It seems like a most cruel form of punishment and I don't blame them for the rage that boils out of their helplessness. They want to fight but they don't even have the skills to combat the media. We fight media with more media but what do you do if you don't want more media and aren't very good at making it in the first place?

Most Indians, Muslim and Hindu distrust the west and its "we're superior, so of course you want to be like us" smugness. (Although I must admit that, naturally, most of the people I spoke to were enthusiastic about becoming "westernized and modernized". They were businessmen and convent-educated upper-class urbanites, but these people were a very small minority.) Living in that climate has made me feel that I understand the mindset of our "enemy" in a way that is not possible if you've never been to that region. It made me feel the pain more. This is my home but I know what people are like over there. I know a little bit of what they respect and respond to. And I think I know why they did it. It was more painful because it wasn't so random to me. It was as if I'd seen threats made into reality.

This was very hard for me to take but even harder was the thought of what we would do. I know that subtlety will be completely lost on these people. We watch in-depth coverage for 10 hours a day but they get at most a sound byte from the President. I'm afraid that we can do nothing short of annihilate them to achieve the kind of safety we want. Completely spiritually breaking these people, so that they do not raise all their young to one day become suicide bombers, is a gruesome task. The American people are ready for carnage I'm sure, but snapping the backs of every country in the region until they all become happy democratic capitalist outposts is going to require a lot more killing than we did in WW2. I'm very pessimistic.

We can do nothing also. I saw how Hindus and Muslims can coexist. The week I spent in Ajmer is an example. Ajmer is predominantly Islamic. I was taken by Hindus to one of the most holy Islamic shrines and was welcomed there. I was shocked that my Hindu friends acted like it was their own church. They knew the rules and they were devoted worshippers. What happened to me in the Dargah was the most profound religious moment of my stay in India. It was religious for me because of the tolerance I witnessed.

This was an example of the pacifying aspects of religion. I think there are too few of these to sustain the people. I saw a lot of prejudice (prejudice like we Americans are not allowed to express). Our country was founded on religious freedom and even though people generally don't want to behave, those rules do have some restraining properties. Hindus and Muslims trash talk each other and think nothing of it. "They're dirty" or "They cannot be trusted" are common asides whispered by a new confidant. Almost every person I met tried to win me over to their side. I was shocked to see very caring and rational doctors say stupid racial things as a matter of fact. This is where I noticed the caste system kicking in. It's perfectly "holy" to act as if someone else is genetically inferior to you.

If we do nothing we will look like fools to half the world. I'll bet dollars to donuts that Indian Muslims will not pull out the words of Gandhi, (There is no way to peace, peace is the only way), who once was their protector -- and died for it, and praise us. They will mock us as incompetents. There is no great leader to pour higher meaning on this situation and have it penetrate into Islam. Gandhi could do it but what have we got? George Bush? Fer crissakes. He keeps saying "good" and "evil". Those words suck so bad. George, Mr Christian, listen to what Gandhi has to say about Christianity in the West:

It is my firm opinion that Europe today represents not the spirit of God or Christianity, but the spirit of Satan. And Satan's successes are the greatest when he appears with the name of God on his lips. Europe is today not nominally Christian. In reality it is worshipping Mammon. "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom." Thus really spoke Jesus Christ. His so-called followers measure their moral progress by their material possessions.

It is a very curious commentary on the West that although it professes Christianity, there is no Christianity or Christ in the West, or there should have been no war. That is how I understand the message of Jesus.

Consider this when you strike back in the name of God. And also consider what Gandhi said on avoidance of anger:

I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.

I spare neither friend nor foe when it is a question of departing from the code of honor.

It is not that I do not get angry. I do not give vent to anger. I cultivate the quality of patience as angerlessness, and, generally speaking, I succeed. But I only control my anger when it comes. How I find it possible to control it would be a useless question, for it is a habit that everyone must cultivate and must succeed in forming by constant practice.

 

I just posted a picture of myself on hotornot.com. This site is really fun. It's what I would call a True Internet Classic. I'm putting this little rating graphic in my blog before I've had any votes. I went totally non-anonymous with my photo. Maybe that's stupid. Hellifino. Even if it was stupid, I'm pretty sure the results will be interesting.

HOT or NOT Official Rating ? Not enough votes to calculate a rating Check out my picture! My raw votes: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 How HOT are you? - www.hotornot.com

I found this on my way home one morning. It was across the street from us.

Creaky Flag :27 seconds or download 700 kb

I just watched "Not One Less" and I have to admit to being pretty ambivalent to the thing going in but...WOW. I figured it would be one of those touching independent cinema, make me wanna get out my checkbook, kinda old-yellers but I wasn't prepared for the spontaneous beauty of those kids or the frustration with the coldness of the adults. 'Cause I'd seen "Raise the Red Lantern" and that was pretty good and the ad for this one made me think it was some manipulative, over-sentimental crap but I was stunned by this film. It never let me have what I wanted, holding back and staying true then only letting me witness redemption when it was finally due. Then, watching the credits I find out that this was a true story, played by non-professional actors and my admiration grows. Where else are you going to see 26 thirsty third graders share two cans of coke? They've never tasted the shit before! Brilliant! Sure it's hokey, with a Bad-News-Bears sort of turnaround at the end, but goddamn it, I needed that.

Watch as David Maltz, gentleman and scholar, gets down and gets pixelated.

Blue Feet :37 seconds or download 677 kb

Nothin to say about this. Just a toy in the dirt. But notice the flash falloff following the inverse square law: Light output is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.

The only time I feel compelled to butt in on someone's picture taking and act like a know-it-all is when I see them shooting stuff that I know won't come out. It's kind of sad. They snap away and feel assured that they've freeze-dried the moment for posterity but all they did was waste film. A typical example is a nighttime flash shot of some distant object. I saw this at burning man a lot. Your basic disposable camera flash goes about 10-15 feet. Everything beyond that is enveloped in blackness -- even bright lights don't show up on film. Having the flash turned on actually prevents you from getting the ambient light because the camera tends to let less light in when the flash is used than when it's off. This picture of the toy was taken moments before sunrise and it was almost daylight out, but using a the flash made the background scene appear almost black. If you switch it off, (if you can), your camera will try to slow down and open up to let as much light in as possible. Things will get blurry if you don't steady the camera but at least you will get those nice city lights or that rock concert / baseball game or those lights on Niagara Falls.

Susannah in the snow. There was a big green lazer shooting out of the Emerald Castle and it wasn't really that dusty but my camera saw things differently.

I was reaching over to try to clean up the semen and I knocked my clock radio on the floor and it suddenly turned on the radio. I usually turn if off right away when this happens but I heard a voice coming from the little plastic box (that I got when I opened my first checking account here in SF) that made me lay back and put my head on my pillow and just stare at the red numbers.

Dr. Charles Stanley had me agape. What occurred to me as I listened to this excellent sermon on How To Handle Those Who Hurt You was how much the behavior he was describing was like what I experienced last week at Burning Man. That warm fuzzy. That unconditional love was such a powerful force out there in the desert that the very moment I started to sway under it, I checked myself. With it came a mild unease. Like something inside of me was telling me to run. I think it was my "cult alarm" going off. Reading the signs coming into camp (get over yourself, no spectators, pick up your counterculture utopian rhetoric guide at the gate) was a little like the orientation at Bible camp: "Here we offer love. If you refuse, you will be branded an evil troublemaker. We have not made up the rules. We only follow them."

As Dr. Stanley read "But I say unto you, that whosoever",-- the very words of Jesus -- I heard an echo in my head of William S. Burroughs' soggy recitation of The Sermon on the Mount from "Dead City Radio" and was comforted and conflicted. His was the voice of the devil. At the end you hear the old codger muttering: "Of course it's absolute, it's biological suicide. It's absolute madness, no, it's just ridiculous."

38 seconds into this RealAudio you hear, "Now, it's not easy to love an enemy, but it is possible, if we have the right attitude."

10 seconds into "Love Your Enemies", Mr. Burroughs says, "It isn't easy to love an enemy, as this goes against your most basic survival instinct. But it can be done, and, turned to an advantage."

And that, (thank you Bill), is the question of morality. What is our nature? And should we follow it or try to overcome our nature with willpower? Is there a Golden Rule encoded in our genes? I've got to know, can both Dr. Stanley and Dr. Benway be right? Is there an element of what Jesus says that is part of our nature? Because knowing what I know about emotions tells me that there must be. Namely, that humans are not moved by ideas, as much as we would like to believe. 90% of what moves us is playing on survival mechanisms developed early in evolution. I'm talking before there were even humans. My clock radio had pulled me into a morning reverie.

The sermon ended and the "DJ" came on to talk about what was coming up. This is part of a 5 part series. Other subjects include:

If it itches, but I don't scratch it, is it God?
How can there be Evil when there is so much god?
Straightening out the money crunch.
Why do good things happen to bad people?
What does God say when I pray? I can't hear him.

Right now there's some (undoubtedly fat and sweaty) southerner blathering on about the wrath of god and the wickedness of man. He has showmanship, yes, the ability to make one's heart race with his very words, but I hate him and long for the simpler teachings of Dr. Stanley. He's my Christianity. Whops, did I say hate? I meant, he's aesthetically unappealing to me.

This was written a week ago today so I thought I'd put it up. The scene is Nevada, on a dried up lakebed.

---

It's six twenty two in the morning and my left thumb is sticky from tangerine and tender from, no strike that, (I just looked), blistered, from a bout of unsafe fireworks play. A big white swollen blister. A little silver digital camera. An eight pound Dell laptop. God, in all its glory, revealed to me carnally.

So with the sudden insight that I don't have to describe anything to you, I shot myself. But I shouldn't have wasted the flash on those pics of my dirty Vans. Batteries will be batteries, and thus, the frequency of beautiful events is inversely proportional to the amount of power in my cells. I struggled with the most beautiful images at their end: franticly swapping pairs of alkalines in an out (I had 8 extras) after my NiMH batts threw up the "no juice" sign.

I have a plastic martini glass filled with water (and powdered lightly with dust on lip). I have an apple (dust?, yes, dusty) and a tangerine. Not dusty -- at least not on the parts I'm eating. If I shift my head just a little to the left, I block the rising sun with the sheet hanging from the ladder that props this parachute up. Trying to type on an LCD screen when the morning sun is shining into your face is hard, because when you look around, you get spots in your eyes. Sitting on a plastic inflatable chair shaped like a phone is easy because my butt is in the part you talk into. And neither hard nor easy, but nearby, a snoring Japanese punk rocker is lying on an inflatable rolodex. The white fluffy stuff on my peeled tangerine dried to a crust in the time it took me to write that.

Time, and the events that it carries past me, are floating away like a boat undocking from a pier. I'm supposed to be seeing my lover off but I was late and I forgot my glasses. I just wave at the big boat and hope she sees me standing here, all dirty and tired and happy.

The whole fucking canopy is glowing gold and silver, gusts ripple through. It sounds like when your upstairs neighbors are walking around or doing something and you're like, "What was that? What are they doing up there?" The wind on this parachute is making noises like they're having a small mixer upstairs, just friends, you know, but who'd they invite? The wind doth protest and I am unable to release the idea that the sounds are like something else, instead of just what they are. Latent over-sensitivity to stimuli, yes, it's apparent to me, but nothing I can do about it.

Om Flambe Mothership Sunrise 1:04 minutes or download 6.5 megs

When you run a Nickel Metal Hydride battery down, unlike an alkaline, you get a "power bounce back" if you turn the device off for a few seconds and let it "rest" and then turn it back on. If you have no way to recharge, and if you're patient, you can milk NiMH batteries for what I would guess is an additional 10 percent of their capacity. I have other batteries, but in my camera, two double-A Energizers, fresh out of the package are good for about 2.3 seconds of video before they are completely drained. My Sanyo is the most efficient AA battery sucker I've ever seen. I put in another pair thinking that it was a fluke and the batteries were duds but the same thing happened. I've taken to aiming and holding my finger down on the shutter button as I close the battery compartment in hopes that the camera's reaction time is quicker than mine and it will get a shot off before the screen blanks.

I have no recharger and I have no patience. All I have is the sun rising and it has made me impatient -- not impatient with the sun but with the batteries. If you were dying of cancer and your daughter was about to win the Indianapolis 500, you'd want to get a picture of it. Even though you may die before they are developed and trying to operate your camera at this point may mean you miss seeing the finish. At least I'm guessing that's what you would do because that's what I feel like right now.

The tangerine was juicy and sweet, but the crust almost took the top of my mouth off. It turns out that I do have to tell you that. John is sleeping on my film cameras.

Well, time for you to go back in the ziplock, my son.

Saw my friend Dan Coffeen today. His nose stuck out and the shade from his baseball cap moved like bat-ray wings over it. When he contemplated something, the shade wrapped wings around it. But when he said something, the wings slid back to expose it.

We don't have jobs. I told him that he should boycott the liquor store next to Java Supreme and he thought that sounded like a fine idea. He told me that he'd abdicated his musical direction to the good folks at Aquarius Records years ago and I agreed that was a fine idea. I said that he was about to discover the best music that he had never heard and that I was going to tell him about it. He said he'd send a filmmaker my way.

I learned "Stupid Preoccupations" by Vic Chesnutt today and I also a devised a rigorous frequency analysis (after hours of mind-numbing specialized audio software piracy) of the internal noise generated by my vidcam in hopes that I can create Parametric EQ settings to cancel out the noise. I was fairly successful, finding really obnoxious screeching tones at 1350, 1780, 2081, and 2693 Hz. This technical shit allows me to bring you the sound of morning wind ruffling through the silk of a parachute.

However, today, I'm going to post a movie that has no sound. I think it's better that way.

Sunrise in the Parachute :03 seconds or download 288 kb