Verb.

To peregrinate. Verb. To travel or wander from place to place.

Untitled

Such synthesis of sense and nonsense!

Monstrous, and divine

finding (I hope) hope

in this mundane mythology of inside-out kisses.

Improvisational pancakes

Peanut Butter and Molasses pancakes:

Some 100% peanuts peanut butter

Some molasses

1 egg

a couple big pinches of baking soda

milk

Flour

sugar

vanilla extract

a bit of salt

some vegetable oil

---

Put all the stuff in a bowl. Add more or less according to your whims. If its thick, add milk. If its thin, add more flour. Trust to fate. Mix it until it looks smooth and tasty. Fry it. Hope you lucked out. Eat it. Orgasm.

Never mind the why and wherefore...

Still working on that Evelyn Evelyn article. It's gonna be heavy on the pretentious, a little lighter on the whimsy, but we'll see what goes.

I wanted someone to bounce ideas off of, so I went online looking for some kind of pop culture geek forum where geeks who are into culture studies go to geek out to each other. Alas, no such place seems to exist (an internet full of geeks with varying geeky tendencies, and I can't even find a single haven for my particular geekery of choice? And yet, somehow one can find porn for just about any obscure and stigmatized fetish out there?)

I've mentioned it to a couple of people, and met with little interest. I find that when you start to analyze anything (from pop culture to music to literature) people get very standoffish with you. There's always a sense that if you analyze something, you take away some of its value; a fear that if you break the delicate surface of the illusion, you will look beneath and see that it was smoke and mirrors the whole time.

Which makes me a bit sad, really, because hidden in that assumption is the belief that the inner workings of things are inherently either dull, incomprehensible, corrupt, or all three. It's a view that I see as both naive and cynical at once. Why is it so hard to believe that beneath what is beautiful and fascinating lies an even more beautiful and fascinating clockwork machine to make it go?

When I listen to Evelyn Evelyn, I am unsettled, saddened, fascinated, and entertained all at once. I don't automatically know why, but the answer lies in a complex web of nature and nurture. If I take my thinking a little deeper, I can find all sorts of things; anxieties about the body, about the media, about ideas of normalcy and identity, all kinds of comfort zones regarding what is and what is not, and what labels we assign to both. Understand why a song effects you and you understand more about yourself, and about the people and ideas surrounding you at all times.

I don't listen to the song and go, "Aha! Here's the metaphor! Puzzle solved!". I listen to songs that tinker and play with my own inner clockwork, which makes me want to find out why, and look at the cogs and springs of the song itself. It enriches the song, teases out more questions that will haunt you in different ways, and inspires a kind of awe in just how wild and unfathomable this bizarre little existence really is.

And I promise, no matter how much you find out about things, there will always be more to find out.

Evelyn Evelyn

Holy shit, you guys. I found something really special today while I was procrastinating.

Amanda Palmer tweeted something a while back about how she was producing an album for another artist, a band called "Evelyn Evelyn". I remember thinking, "That's cool, I'll look into that at some point, but... being produced by Amanda Palmer doesn't mean its necessarily awesome."

And oh, how wrong I was.

After listening to and loving their first song, I read this bio from their myspace:

Evelyn and Evelyn Neville are a songwriting duo performing original compositions on piano, ukulele, guitar and accordion. The sisters are parapagus tripus dibrachius twins, sharing three legs, two arms, three lungs, two hearts and a single liver.

"No way," I thought. "Seriously?"

I poked around the interwebs a bit more. Sources supported the story. My beloved Palmer and co-producer Jason Webley supposedly discovered the pair, who were working as circus performers prior to their musical career. I was starting to fall for it when I discovered an article somewhere ruining the fun of the hoax: Evelyn and Evelyn are (SPOILER) Palmer and Webley with one hand tied behind their backs, in a giant dress.

The full album can be streamed from the myspace (although I want to buy one cause I totally support this weird project). It's a concept album, telling a gruesome, creepy, and at times very funny story of this duo's wildly eventful and fantastical upbringing, all leading up to the day they discovered how to upload songs to myspace.

The songs are eclectic, spanning all kinds of genres and moods, sampling many bizarre flavours of music, but always with that twisted vibe in the background that accompanies Palmer's work. (I can't vouch for Webley, I hadn't heard anything of his prior to this, but he seems incredibly talented in his own right) Some I like a lot more than others (which is inevitable when your album crosses so many stylistic borders) but what fascinates me the most is the viral hoax used to publicize it, and how it involves the reader in the story. This album wickedly and perceptively manipulates our modern brains and entrenches itself in the smoke and mirrors of our digitized, media-centric world.

So, I'm going to write a proper analysis of it, something that I could have handed in in my pop culture class (although I'll probably swear more than I did for that class. Swearing is inevitable, unless I have a really, really good reason not to.) Just to avoid a monster blog, I'll use this one for backstory and save the essay for the next post.

Hey, remember when this blog was for poetry? I gotta get back to that at some point.

While you're waiting to pretend to read my pop-cultural analysis (which will be no doubt very long winded and of interest only to myself) why not check out the album here: http://www.myspace.com/evelynevelyn

(if you scroll down past the concert dates, to the second "play" box, you can listen to the whole album. The first one only has 3 songs)

Remain awesome until I see you next.

-L

A thought

It's curious to me just how many movies are made nowadays with the teen and young adult demographic in mind. I would think it easily lands in the 50-80% range.

It's curious because the teen and young adult audience is precisely the audience that is most proficient at piracy (online streaming/torrenting) these shows. I mean, a large percentage of our generation (myself included) doesn't even own TVs because it's so easy to get all your watchable media from the internet, and even some of those that do just hook their computers up to their TVs. This generation is so incredibly plugged in that, if it exists and it is mediatized, we can access it, almost without a second thought. This fact only increases in scope and impact as time goes on.

Maybe it's a mark of our youth-obsessed culture that an industry that is drowning fast and sinking its dwindling funds into marketing to come up with cheap gimmicks like 3D to draw us back in has never thought to simply adjust its focus to an audience that isn't as likely to pirate. Image is everything in the culture industry, and being seen as "old" and "out of touch" is apparently not an option for the production companies.

Of course, that would be a temporary solution, since people keep getting old and dying. Eventually, all us 20-somethings will become the next crop of 80 somethings, and the new 20-somethings will have magical psychic machines wired directly into their brains so they can access the 25th season of Glee instantly. But they haven't come up with any better solutions, besides gimmicks and fads, so as temporary fixes go, its cheap and harmless.

You know, for a complete and unapologetic atheist, I am pretty superstitious.

Well, maybe superstitious isn't the word. I tend to think of it more as literary. Narrative-driven. Plot-arc sensitive.

Maybe it's just 'cause I'm an english major, so I see it everywhere. When my apartment burned down, my most powerful reaction was. "Wow. So what does this symbolize in our protagonist's plot arc? And where are we in that arc?"

In general, I've had the building blocks of literature tinkered into my brain enough times that I kind of look at life as a series of poetic moments and images, with all the peaks and valleys of a good story. So even though I'm pretty atheist, and I view the impulse to find meaning in the randomness of this world as an essentially religious one, when I see something potentially symbolic I look at it as a hint to the moral of the story.

I went book shopping today. I haven't read a good book in too long. And I was meandering through the shelves, feeling pretty blah about what I saw (I couldn't figure out what I was hankering for), I saw a plain, tan book, with an ambiguous but pleasing title: "The Icarus Girl".

I have, once in my life, bought a book specifically because I knew nothing about it. It was at a used bookstore (not unlike Black Cat) and the dustjacket was missing (like with The Icarus Girl) so I couldn't read the blurb. And in a moment of poetic, narrative-driven hipsteriness, I bought it. It turns out my life author has good instincts, because it turned out to be one of my favorite books of all time ("The Devil's Larder", by Jim Crace, if you're interested). So when I saw that unassuming, mysterious beige tome, I felt compelled, out of a sense of poetic happenstance, to investigate it. I picked it up and flicked through the pages experimentally.

The very first page that I opened to, right in the centre of the book, clinched my decision. A bright little wink to my obnoxious poetry obsession, a deep red leaf had been flattened in between the pages by some previous reader. It had been preserved beautifully, and the moment of revelation was gorgeous.

So, obviously, I had to buy the book. If this completely random and flakey decision pays off, it will be two for two. I should start doing my book shopping blindfolded.

Wrote a new poem today, but I'm not gonna post it until I like it, and it still needs some editing.

Don't forget to be awesome!

A chemical revelation...

Taken from my portable notebook. Probably not as deep as it sounds.

Deep or not, it earned me a hug from Ben and a few appreciative "whoa"s from the group.

"I don't know if this was happening yesterday, or if it will continue to happen tomorrow..."

An argument with a stranger on the internet

STRANGER: However, the curious thing about fallacies is that they're only actually fallacies if they're both illegitimate to the subject of the argument and included within its structure, rather than simply extraneous premises. (An argument, of course, being more or less a conditional conjunction of premises.) And your own argumentativety, which I've so astutely pointed out, has no bearing on any of the conditional conjunctions I've made. In fact, one well-known argumentative technique, "reducto ad absurdum," relies entirely on constructing an obviously fallacious sub-argument as part of the overall structure.

ME: I'm terribly sorry, I couldn't quite make out your point over the sound of you masturbating.

Three found poems

Guess what I found in my Gmail inbox? A few old poems, back from when I took a poetry class at OSU. These are about 3-4 years old (plus some minor edits I did just now). I used to send things to myself when I needed to print them off in the computer labs, and lucky for me now that I did, because I'm finding all kinds of backups from things on my old computer. The two that I think are worth anything, I'm posting here.

The first one's original title was, "Calliope Rising" which, in my now-aged wisdom, I realize is appallingly pretentious. Renamed it simply, "Talk", but I don't feel much one way or the other for a title like that. Any suggestions?

Talk

Sing, Muse, of the Urban Myth!

Of the swarming, of the syruped air

(Friend of a friend of a friend of a --)

I forgot I was a skeptic

We drank tequila and lime

Your tongue touched your teeth,

and told a story the length of my spine

Our eyes danced the tango,

Yours believed mine

It echoed, like a whale song

Once upon a time

a time

a time

-----

This one might be my favorite. It's what the teacher called a "Prose Poem". Basically, it's poetic ideas told through the medium of prose (no lineation, no rhythmic devices, alliteration, etc.)

Once again, the original title was pretentious, so I renamed it.

Blink

Sometimes, when I’m talking to people, I worry about my eyes. I think, am I blinking too much? Too little? Are they gaping like mouths or squinting like button holes? Are they telling all my secrets? Do they know that, behind them, I’m just mellowing, like a wet towel on the floor? Do they know I put cheap mascara on them, and that I never grew up past seven? Do they know? Do they know? Eventually, I just become one great set of eyes, trying to swallow the whole world. And everyone looks away. They play with their fingernails and whistle, because they’re too polite to point out these hungry, greedy eyes that are taking all the looking. Sometimes my eyes get angry. They stomp off and terrorize Tokyo/Manhattan/Salt Lake City. Little screaming people rush between the toes of my eyes. They look like beads in a kaleidoscope. I smash a few buildings. They scatter like ball bearings. The National Guard is called in, with little toy planes and little toy tanks and little toy soldiers. I beat my chest. The helicopters look like dandelion seeds. I look. You can see everything from the Empire State Building. I look and I look, and everyone screams and I look. Do they know?

Then the eyes get homesick. The kaleidoscope becomes people, the seeds are flying machines, the toy soldiers are scared kids, and I blink.

------

This last one I don't like so much as a whole, but as the sum of its parts its OK. It has some problematic bits, but there are a couple turns of phrase that I'd like to keep.

The Paper Child

You were sneaker-shod,

skinny-armed, and you

had just a little

madness

Two firefly eyes, and

One ragged smile,

all teeth.

Sneaker-slapping, shirt-tail flapping

Knuckles, fists, and dirty knees,

Like in those books you loved to read.

Books of big-armed men shod in leather, and

paper tongues, and

big black bugs, and

gears and wheels and chains, and

justice, and

fire, and

stuff.

And colours like no colours are in life.

You found a world made up for you

with just a little madness too.

Instructions

No.

You

may not

come back inside the house until

You've written me a good, wholesome,

poem.

Use the twine from the shed

and, little by little,

bind its delicate tendrils

into an earnest web

(you may use the duct tape if it is stubborn)

Be careful not to let the dog out!

And be the most careful,

(for I have seen your shoddy work before)

to spread the tender petals of its memories

Just so.

Do not allow it to seem constructed by a human hand

Nor let it imitate your

sweat-and-sunscreen smell.

Remember to wash your hands afterwards, though

And to wipe your feet

On the green mat

In the hall.

University drudge

Tongue-in-cheek tone inspired by Jeff.

-----

This coffee tastes like

the last goddamn time I wait this long to get started

(I mean it

this time)

Highlighter poised

Ripe and yellow, tart and barely harvested,

to let its jaundiced juices flow

over something significant.

I have banished myself from YouTube

but Times New Roman still crawls

at an unmedicated ADD kid's pace

(lets face it, poetry was not the assignment)

I stopped being smart around 2 am.

Goddamn it.