unmovable blocks

I think I need another Arabica Night because I haven't attempted to write anything in a couple weeks and an optional deadline is looming at the end of the month. I've been reading and trying to get inspired, haunted by the literary ghosts/muses of Pekar, Balzac, Austen, and Joyce, by the flowers growing through the weeds of the house next door with the twisted yellow siding ripped by wind and burned by arson, melted into clanking curlicues of vinyl. If it had been metal, it would have been long gone by now.

I'm not as dead-crackerific as my creative compadre, but I struggle to evoke worlds on paper and on the laptop. I started writing on here to attempt to process musings about city and life and people, to keep writing even if I don't always have much to say that makes sense or is of any remote interest to the world outside of yours truly, learning how to see better, learning this whole life thing in general.

I really don't have much patience with either the chroniclers of Bright Young Things on either coast or the wannabe Bukowskis or the Jonathan Franzens rehashing the tired trope of literary DesperateHousewifery of outer-ring suburbia. It's boring. Hearing about New York and California all the time gets old, but those who dare to write about the Midwest or the Rust Belt post-1950 don't bring it to life for me for the most part.

I don't want to read crime novels or lurid tales of Scumbags Doing Scumbag Things to Each Other or Depressed Self-Absorbed TwentySomethings Just Like The Author, or First World White Girl Problems or Remember The Good Old Days That Never Existed. I don't want utter bleakness or sentimentality, and I know there has to be a middle ground here somewhere, it's just hard to find.

I know I will never be as good as those whose strings of words I love, but I'm hoping that I can string together the literary equivalent of beach glass, thrift store beads, and rock crystal into something interesting since I doubt it will be priceless.

frustrated subgenius

The snow drifts outside my window are several feet tall and sculpted beautifully. People in my fair city like to complain about the winter months as if we haven't gotten snow before ever, but there is a beauty and lightness to it that alleviates the early darkness.

I ventured out last night to get my art fix, having fallen in love with crystalline glazes and wondering what the combination of kiwi green, deep Starry night Van Gogh blue starred with white, and yellow with orange sunbursts will look like on a bowl as the oldies station played on the boombox in the corner and I wonder why I always hear "Lean on Me" and "Light My Fire" every single week in between ads for knockoff Viagra. Damn boomers.

Coming home is wonderful even with the foot of slush at the bottom of the street, the grind of snow plows, and the hookers who still go out at sunset in fishnets and short skirts even with the temperature is firmly in the teens. Every year I wish I bought that Subaru that probably would have died because four-wheel drive in this would be nice.

A friend of mine dropped off her key, since she's escaping for the weekend to celebrate a friend's matrimony in warmer climes. I'll be feeding their fabulous felines (who will pretend that they are not lonely) and make use of their Netflix account and back issues of National Geographic. It's sad that the majority of what feels like vacations are spent at friends' houses a block over, but it comes with the perks of pecuniary compensation and animal companionship.

Working in a place that was once a place for expanding one's knowledge and now is a costly step up a ladder full of buzzwords and networking, I long to take what I've learned and what I see and turn it into something that I'd actually like to read in hopes that there are other starving souls who need something that's got a little more substance than Nicholas Sparks and is better written than Dan Brown and is not written by smug McSweeney's acolytes.

I suppose that the document on my computer is too regional and pedestrian, but I want to capture what I see here, the corner stores and garage bands and awkward dynamics of class, geography of culture that converge in strange way.

I don't think I could write anything thrilling or romantic if I tried, but I'd love to do something that would be funny, heartbreaking, and full of enough details that even if you've never seen the stegosaurus hulks of rusty bridges and broken industry in the valley under a hazy summer sky, the certain ethnics at State Road park swearing and listening to eurotechno next to their tricked out Hondas, or the way that the sun sets over a beach covered with driftwood and stubs from Black and Milds, where kids play in the sewage and men walk their pet crocodiles on the shoreline, you'd see it for yourself the way you visualize places in New York or Los Angeles.

Ambitious yes? Doomed to fail? Probably. Will it ever be accomplished? Maybe. Total Slack is a second religion of this city so we shall see, inshallah.

everything old is new again, or my year in music 2008

Unlike the previous post, this has nothing to do with Autotune or bad holiday music.

I don't really have a year-end favorites of 2008 because I hardly listened to any new stuff this year and overdosed on obscure Numero Group discoveries, old favorites doing new things, and a lot of trip-hop and African pop.

So, here's a very limited sample...

The Gutter Twins - Bete Noire
(As if there hasn't already been enough Lanegan/Dulli love here)


Funkadelic - I'll Stay
(favorite Funkadelic with Eddie Hazel cut outside of 'Maggot Brain')


The Dirtbombs - various live
I used a really bad comparison to describe the awesomeness of their live show like seeing Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana at the same time.


Cafe Tacuba - Encantamiento Inutil
(video is lame but the song is gorgeous)


Digable Planets - black ego
(this was the soundtrack to several lazy sunny Saturdays driving around Cleveland in search of graffiti and adventure)


The Roots - Rising Up
(favorite cut off the new record)


Randy Watson Experience - Morning Bell
(awesome chilled Radiohead cover, thanks to ?uestlove & friends)


Diplo - Sara
(don't know why I didn't get this earlier)