Saturday, December 15, 2007

To the Teeth



































Hey-yo!
My 2nd wisdom tooth crowned today. Yippie!
My teeth are super late bloomers. This is a big
deal in my world. My mouth and teeth are a focal
point for me. When I feel a sharp twinge of emotion
it manifests itself as acute pain in my jaw, because
of this I have always been drawn to tooth imagery.
Many people experience dreams that involve tooth
imagery, teeth falling out, teeth crumbling, etc..
There are lots of different interpretations of these
types of dreams. These analyses usually point to
anxiety, stress, or a focus on mortality as the
instigators. I dig it. I love concepts that tie the
corpus to the psyche. It is a reminder that the
mind-body duality is a load of honkey. Honkey,
I say!

Book Club Plug: If you like magical realism and
tooth imagery I recommend Isabel Allende's
House of Spirits.
This book is the bomb.

(disclaimer: I do not actually have a book club.)

Friday, December 14, 2007

Here's a thought

















I downloaded audacity on to my computer recently
and I've been having a ball playing around. I am pretty
much addicted to the echo effect. I'll import anything
from my itunes and echo-it-up... It feels so good. So,
getting to the thought I had regarding this ... I don't
know if this is true for everyone but I get this neat
sensation when I listen to echo-y music. I've been
trying to think of a comparable sensations. I think
it's similar to when your body moves through space,
and you become highly aware of that space and its
boundaries. You know like when your doing some
freestyle/extreme walking or ninja moves in your
dojo or ballin' in the park. It's a really self-affirming
feeling to know that your body is moving in space.
I think that echoes in music produce a sense of
space in your mind's eye/ear. This is pleasurable
perhaps for the reasons that moving and feeling
yourself in space are pleasurable. Echoes add
depth, location, and space to music, which dovetails
nicely with the idea of "being in" a piece of music,
seeing or sensing its topography.
Mmmmm Mmmmm.... Synesthesia!

Once upon a time I started to read a book....
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man... The book opens with
the main character chillin' in his dank basement crib
(see above). I forget why, but he has mad light bulbs.
He smokes a doobie and then listens to a piece of music.
The reader is privy to his mind's eye as he experiences
the topography of this song. I think the images that the
song conjures in his mind speak to the history and plight
of African Americans. I remember enjoying this part of
the book, super trippy. I never finished this book. Boo!
I wish I could write like that, damn.





Sunday, December 9, 2007

cross-eyed and successful































This may or may not come as a surprise to you,
but I am dyslexic. Not severely dyslexic, but if
you want proof try giving me string of random
numbers orally. I will not be able to repeat the
numbers back to you after you hit a certain, critical
length (~8 digits). If you want to see me fail even more
miserably, try asking me to repeat those numbers
backwards. No matter how much concentration and
effort I put into this task it's impossible, and the sensation
of having crossed wires in my head is intense.

Dyslexic people often develop a lot of compensatory
skills that allow them to function in world. You may
or may not be familiar with my unique talents.
Dyslexic people excel in certain fields because of
their learned compensatory skills.
It's estimated
that 10% of adults in the US are dyslexic.

My older brother used to have a Tony Little work
out tape. If you don't know who Tony Little is, all you
really need to know is that he has no neck and his cardio
work-out of choice is "the Gazelle." He used to say
something like, "Variety is the spice of life." He was
of course referring to cross-training, but I like to
think that this statement is true in a more general
sense. Although conditions like dyslexia, autism,
etc. are medicalized and scientifically well defined
they are not pathological, in my opinion, with the
exception of extremely severe cases. One man's
crossed wires maybe be another man's great creative
thought process. Seriously... celebrate your snowflake
of a brain.


Friday, December 7, 2007

Sensual Seduction

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKz-RXSeIYA

I think everyone secretly desires to live like this.
Snoop Dogg is not afraid to show us the way.
(Note the black man mullet.)

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Monkeys at Typewriters


















You know that saying about a bunch of monkeys
in a room at typewriters. Something like, "If you
have enough monkeys and you let them type
for long enough, eventually, by chance, they will
write a novel." Kind of like if you have the right
elements sitting in a pool of sludge together randomly
getting struck by lightning, eventually, by chance,
life will emerge.

Something similar happens with spam these days I
think. You know those non-sense junk mails you get
that sometimes have attachments that you don't open
because there is 97% chance that they are a virus.
There must be some kind of program(s) that
automatically formulate non-sense text for these
emails so that they aren't recognized as spam by filters.
I think these programs grab text from somewhere on the
net and then cannibalize it and puke it out all scrambled.
Sometimes I take time out to read this non-sense text, and,
more often than one would think, it sounds like poetry.
Just like a novel from monkeys and life from sludge, spam
poetry is inevitable. I recently received this text in a
spam email.

Circumcision

A spam poem by "Orlando Baldwin"

martyrdom sicily sicily
shepherd
scull
infield impelled cabinetmake
hays riga arragon gullet quay
magic
dun formosa gullet
jerusalem heptane anemone calder
lair objectivity aforementioned sicily

I especially like the flow of the last line. I am kind of sad
that this might be a better poem than I will ever be able to
write, and it might as well have been written by a couple
monkeys on typewriters. This is why I love the internet,
it's like an organic microcosm, junk like this just
happens.

p.s. I think I'm going to start an Italian death metal band
called "Martyrdom Sicily Sicily". Large, bloody meatballs
will rain from the sky while we perform.