The Consul is Dead

Or, my reflection on Malcolm Lowry's masterpiece, Under the Volcano

The Consul is dead. He will not be returning. Take him out into the breathing jungle. Let the vines tangle and take him back into the soil. And when the sun rises in the morn, let no light find poor Geoffrey. Beneath the Cuernavaca canopy, in shadow, under the volcano.

Lesson: Heed its message. Do not go to Mexico. You shall not return. At the end of a sticky bar in the santo candle lit cantina, drowning beneath pours of cloudy mescal. You are advancing the finality of fate at dangerous speeds. Drink yourself to death in Mexico. Roasted and perspiring oblong beads of alcohol, rejected from from your pasty skin, through your white collared shirt. There is no beauty left in life for you.

Do you like this garden? It is yours. Do not let your children destroy it. We are born to destroy all that we are meant to enjoy. We are born to enjoy all that we are meant to destroy. The earth sits on its axis, at its angle, we all slide down its slippery slopes, pulled by gravity into the pits of our own making. Our scripted slide. Like lava down a volcano.

Fighting the forces of fate, or else, giving up to bits inevitable pull. The earth spins on its axis. Its angle forces the lava down the sides of the volcano. To your end, poor Geoffrey.

In Honor of Oscars Sunday,

because, this time of year makes me extra curmudgeonly-critic

I love movies. But I hate actors. Of what purpose do they serve in society? They are merely our escape artists.

The Oscar acceptance speech is worthless, bloated air pouring out of puffed up lungs. Fake and pretentious...

Inflating the ready to burst egos of these gaseous masses who parade atop crushed red velvet carpets. Celestial stars of gratuitous camera flashes and blue applause. The sound of 10,000 hands striking 10,000 hands. Fake validation for these vulnerable monoliths, these sensitive actors. People who make their entire existence as a detachment from reality. Living high up in the hills, up in the sky, to confrim they are indeed stars. In the heavens we have made for them.

Jack Describes Eterntiy

Or, a confusing dialogue I had with Jack Kerouac in my mind while eating apple pie in Julian the day after Christmas.

“Did I create that sky? Yes, for if it was

anything other than a conception in my mind

I wouldn’t have said ‘Sky’ – That is why I am the

golden eternity. There are not two of us here,

reader and writer, but one, one golden eternity,

One-Which-It-Is, That-Which-Everything-Is.”

                                    Jack Kerouac, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity

He dances around the near empty dining room shouting psalms and sutras, twirling round and round with his invisible dance partner, surrounded by invisible music. Each boot stomp, a kick of a bass drum, echoes to the walls and back. Shaking my coffee, it slips over the white rim of the mug. Stains the sides brown, grandmother’s teeth. Each line, singular, statements, lighter than air. Twisting towards the exposed wooden roofbeams, circa 1919, like cigarette smoke.

He is not making any sense. He enunciates Buddhist lyrics as Catholic creeds. He sings of eternity and nothingness. Mortality and infinity. I am not following along anymore. My eyes read words on the page, but without content to comprehend, they only sound pleasant together. I know I will forget them. Soon. Same as when I first endeavored to devour everything he wrote, when I was younger and much more impressionable.

Stop making no sense! I shout, between his boot beats.

“The cause of the world’s woe is birth, the cure of the world’s woe is a bent stick,” He answers and leans into me, spilling the Frangelico and coffee between the grooves of the worn, wooden floor. The Golden Eternity is everything and nothing.

So it is a paradox?

He smiles, a smile ten times the size of Jupiter, raises his finger to make a point, but instead shovels a forkful of apple pie into his mouth. Raises one eyebrow. The difference in distance between me and you and the Golden Eternity is a foot and it is a mile. The years are blinks of an eye that pass like seven hundred lifetimes stacked one on top of each other. Pancakes! You should be thrilled that you get blue. Blue proves the existence of happiness. Blue like a bodhisattva riding the rails from Montana to Mexico City. Blue like Michelangelo, like Rimbaud, like Nietzsche, like Robert Johnson, like Bird. Bird is gone, sadness is eternal. Sadness is golden. Eternity is golden. Golden smiles, old golden teeth of the ancient man.

I feel nothing but an eternal distance between Jack Kerouac and me.   

It seems like a tired line – there is peace and joy through oneness with the universe. I’m afraid I will never digest this Buddhist thinking. I am too pre-programmed to look for beginnings and ends. To search out causes and effects. It is the consumer of history in me that seeks out straight lines. An album has a start and a finish. There is no eternity there. Not even when you press repeat.

Jack ends with a joke –

“This is the first teaching from

the golden eternity.

The second teaching from the golden eternity

is that there never was a first teaching

from the golden eternity. So be sure.”

Positively Ludlow Street

Or, a brief vision I had while walking around the Lower East Side last July.

Lou Reed walks down Ludlow Street, shuffling a deck of 51 cards. Here he comes, dressed all in black. Black jeans tucked into high black leather boots. Black leather jacket. Black sunglasses. Thin lips pressed against the fist of the Lower east Side gusts and exhaust. He is on his way to the Factory. To rehearse Venus in Furs. Exploding. Plastic. Inevitable.

45 years later, on an iron door, somewhere on Ludlow Street, a conversation is scrawled in permanent marker.
 
I want to be a singer like Lou Reed
I like Lou Reed
Lou Reed is dead.
No he's not!  

If I had a sharpie on me, I would have loved to enter this dialogue. Instead, I just smiled at the types of personal graffiti to be found in the LES.

2011, My Most Favorite 30 Tracks of the Year

30. "Kaputt" Destroyer

29. "Riding for the Feeling", Bill Callahan

28. "Thought Ballune", Unknown Mortal Orchestra

27. "Modern Art", Black Lips

26. "Same Mistake", Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

25. "County Line", Cass McCombs

24. "Speaking in Tongues", Arcade Fire

23. "Hits Me Like A Rock", CSS

22. "New Beat", Toro y Moi

21. "There is a Light That Never Goes Out", Dum Dum Girls

20. "Helplessness Blues", Fleet Foxes

19. "Should Have" Cloud Nothings

18. "Wake and be Fine", Okkervil River

17. "Tree by the River", Iron and Wine

16. "Damn These Vampires", The Mountain Goats

15. "Take Me Over", Cut Copy

14. "Soak it Up", Houses

13. "Holdin' On to Black Metal", My Morning Jacket

12. "Polish Girl", Neon Indian

11. "Forget That You're Young", The Raveonettes

10. "Santa Fe", Beirut

9. "Holing Out", Yuck

8. "Don't Play No Game That I Can't Win", Beastie Boys

7. "Eyes Be Closed", Washed Out

6. "Jesus Fever", Kurt Vile

5. "Other Side", Family Portrait

4. "All Die Young", Smith Westerns

3. "Holocene", Bon Iver

2. "Midnight City", M83

1. "Video Games", Lana Del Rey

2011, My Ten Most Favorite Albums of the Year

10. "Apocalypse", Bill Callahan
 Good ol' Bill does it again. Haunting, sweeping, pining, melancholy.














9. "I Am Very Far", Okkervil River
Will Scheff conjures up a different sounding batch of songs. No storyline evolving here. Just some complicated, yet straight-forward songwriting.













 











8. "Circuital", My Morning Jacket
(see here)















7. "Kiss Each Other Clean", Iron and Wine
There is much to like here. Except the cover art. Sorry, Sam.














 












6. "Yuck", Yuck
Do you like Dinosaur Jr, Galaxie 500, Pixies, and Built to Spill? Yeah, so do these kids.















5. "Within and Without", Washed Out
(see here)





























                                                                             4. "Arabia Mountain", Black Lips
How would you like to have a psychedelic party with a pack of outcasts from society? Play this album and party on.













3. "Dye it Blonde", The Smith Westerns
 This album is a swinging, rollicking good time. These Chicago boys craft catchy hooks, and some surprising well-placed changes in song structure. Think of a Beatles' final 8-bars, then listen to "All Die Young" or "Dance Away". You'll be reminded of the fabulous britpop of the early 1990s. In a good way.








 

2. "Smoke Ring For My Halo", Kurt Vile
This album is much cleaner than some of his lo-fi early work, but this added polish is friggin' magnificent! I just love the sound of this album. The acoustic guitars ring, pushing the EQ into the red, clean, angelic notes, above a dirty, mumbling voice. This is a set of songs that deserves to be played through your headphones, directly into your ears. On repeat. Give it a couple of spins, and tell me I'm wrong. I dare you.










1. "Bon Iver", Bon Iver

Hands down. Greatest album released this year. Mark my words. When this decade closes in nine years, we will all be a little older, but this album will still be among our favorites. Again, I will mention the sound  of this album. It creates a feeling, a feeling of wind sweeping across a frozen Minnesota meadow. Wind chimes echoing, hidden by the horizon. Of frozen lakes, breaking the early morning sun's light into a blinding prism.

I won't be surprised if this wins the Grammy (since Arcade Fire was recognized last year). But fuck the Grammys. I like that Justin Vernon agrees with me.
His awesome quote, “I don’t think the Bon Iver record is the kind of record that would get nominated for a Grammy — I would get up there and be like, ‘This is for my parents, because they supported me,’ because I know they would think it would be stupid of me not to go up there,” Vernon said. “But I kinda felt like going up there and being like: ‘Everyone should go home, this is ridiculous. You should not be doing this. We should not be gathering in a big room and looking at each other and pretending this is important.’"

Everyone deserves to treat their soul, just a little bit. Go ahead and spoil yourself. Get this album.  

2011, Best Debut Album of the Year

"Within and Without", Washed Out

Ernest Green burst onto the indie scene in 2009 with his EP, Life of Leisure. Literally, he burst onto the scene. Possibly single handedly creating his own sub-genre of indie electronic music, Chillwave. Others followed, such as Toro y Moi and Neon Indian, but Washed Out did it best.

The debut full length, Within and Without, pushes the flavor he first served us. It is a nine song sonic texture, built of layers of nostalgia for pop radio of the late 1980s and 1990s, filtered and condensed together in a tight synth space that is so easy to fall right into. This album is like a soft pillow on your favorite couch. It is the most sensual touch (see the album cover to feel it further). I'm not sure I know any lyrics on this album, but it does not matter. This album is a feeling. And I feel it all around.