I always feel a bit woeful at the idea of year end lists, maybe it's the way they seem to stand out to remedy time or that old occult crack and boom about the stars measuring the entire aura of human existence in the bottom barrel of a salt shaker. But, game on.
I can't say that I followed the popular trends that well this year. Something like a slug in a jar of molasses, truth be told. So, I'll suppose I'll start with a quick hint: 'my obsessions are your possessions/every piece that i can get.'
10.
The Serial: Ever since my first confession in 1989 to a dark mass at St. John Bosco's Catholic Church, I've been obsessed with any creative idea in a multiple of parts. There is something of 'heart-beat' to those things, legacy building for the narrative thread. My whole search as a poet is finding every nuance in a series. Tonight, it's Indiana Jones. I'm unemployed, so the value of time gets to speed up with enough television. He's been my favorite since I found a canteen and my grandfather's 'i'm not a cheap reporter but i look it' hat. It's the rise and fall of our cute Olson projective. Full Series I've invaded this year: Bond, Indiana Jones, The 11 volume Illuminatus books by Robert Anton Wilson, Red Night Trilogy, thinking about Duluoz Legend, my 1988 McDonald's 'Bambi' figurine collectibles, then listening to a random amount of British Invasion groups by day of album release for 48 pages, the disparate family tree left by Polish & Dutch pallbearers (thus how genetic make-up restricts and free choice, generation to generation)... This goes on, like I'm terrified of boredom.
9.
Leaving Philadelphia: This was one of those 'I ran out of money things'. I had planned on getting out to the Eastern Shore of Maryland for PDN (Potlatch Discordian Network), but the lackluster savings I had created, a string of tiring relationships & a boss who carried on like a sour unsexed Buddhist Psychoanalyst kept me under my own thumb. I like it here. Just a matter of sticking around long enough to break your hands against the wall a couple of times.
8.
John Michael Greer's The Blood of the Earth and Atlantis: The first deals with how magick can respond to the situation of peak oil, but through 'countering the tyranny of dualistic thinking...(as) part of the fusion of deep ecology and deep paganism' instead of some advertising blitz gone awry via the 18,000 mile + drilling campaigns from BP Amoco. The second dates back to an obsession started with a big box of Legos and watching 'The Abyss'. It's just like, a taste tester's choice of Plato through the rejected-knowledge movement and I can't get enough of it.
7.
Poetry: It's the well and good in me that plays. Dana Ward's
This Can't Be Life constantly upped the anty as did Ariana Reines
Mercury, and in some ways, those two books kind of operate as my shoulder blades these days. Rob Halpern's new
Music for Porn was out of sight, as was the new Dottie Lasky
Thunderbird. I mean, without falling into the camp where I knock off the names of friends, my year in poetry was short-lived, out of a penchant to be broke. I really dig Renee Gladman's
The Activist and read it again this year. It's funny, it's 423am here and the air is just the same as when I was 18. (TANGENT:
I had woken up when my face smacked the top of the dashboard. I had totaled my grandmother's
inheritance in the back of an off-duty police officer's cruiser. I was sober, on Route 30, outside the
Southlake Mall. I just hadn't slept in three days. Keef can do 9 straight. What's wrong with me? Fiona
Apple's 'On the Bound' skipping in the CD player.
6.
Sigil Magick: So about two years ago, I got all up and armed with the remnants of the Temple of Psychick Youth and 'The Grey Book' and how it correlated to building elements into the subconscious file headers to kind of stave off the proceeding emotional patterns and dedicate some of the residual feeds of the mind into 'your own will'. It's pretty easy, you take a piece of paper, and you write out what you want. Next you nix all the duplicate letters and create a glyph to represent the 'desire stipulated'. You anoint the paper with blood, spit and cum to 'charge it' and the focus on the glyph registers it in deep. Burn up the paper the next day and forget you ever did it. Boom. Game.
5.
How People Died: I spend a copious amount of time on Wikipedia. Part of it is 'cheap research' or 'starter series' for poems or what have you, but what really goes down the old pipe is that 'hit the death head' knock up. If I find out your dead, good luck, cause I'm going to find out everything I can. Was it bad? How old were you? Where did you start and end, how many miles away? Did you see it coming, how long did you see it? It's bloody awful and thanks to the 'goo-gobs' of information, it gets worse for the hypochondriac in me. The hallmark of a 31-year-old Scorpio is the non-existent health-scares. 'Hey, my health ain't the same it was 10 yrs back.' I've been a two pack a day man for a long time, cutting back as time went by. I got so obsessed with my death that I transitioned into the e-cigarette. Yeah, haha, make a battery cancer joke, go ahead. Product of early 20s nihilistic rage that was a cool factor mixed with slow suicide found his dirty 30s playing astrology and WebMD bingo. Yeah, thank Christ for the e-cigarette. Worse case scenario, it's cheaper and cool?
4.
Naked Lunch. In May of 2004, John Courie (a founding member of PDN) informed me of the Kerouac line to Burroughs about seeing everything on someone's fork as they eat, a kind of 'formatting' that still oversees my reaction and hope for conversation. How one could act in the world. It's an obsessive honesty, one that gets me into more trouble than it's worth. Where a lie would do, I end up coming out with the real thing and my errs seem to come and go like this winter Philadelphia rain-storm. Just at night and without remorse. I still love life at my age. I hope I can do that for a long time. I mean, the real hint is this. Either you confront the demons right up against your chin or you bury it into your fucking skin. Talk to people, break the fast, crack those grudges. Find a way to say your desires with sincerity and care for your fellow time travelers. It's in your hands, and I want to love each other. Cause 2013 don't need your bullshit son.
3.
Thoth Tarot Deck. What don't it got? It's the tree of life, intermixed with the obsessive territory of Aleister Crowley. The deck is the way it centers me. Like, I started off doing these full readings and then was informed at a stop gap and went all 'one a day' on it, and then it was a very different kind of inhabitation, like the god-form personality started to be seen inside the day, like a fullness brought up inside the chest and so forth. It reminded me of that caught off guard breath of fresh air. Have you ever seen Mick Jagger's cock in the outtakes from Performance? I've looked a lot for it, but never able to find it. I've looked a lot at his crotch in the few early 70s pictures. I imagine a blush head and healthy girth. Today I got the Ace of Wands. Flames of Yod, Energy of the Divine en route but 'not yet definitely formulating as Will'. Well, it's a good start, blind forces and all. Lightning in every direction sprung out as a set of clips that gave me the energy to write this today.
2.
Stand Up Comedy: Last December, I was in the middle of two failing relationships. I had done a stand up gig in the Midwest, all obsessed with my elicit sexual hang-ups and 'doubting thomas' tit-for-tat with trust. A kind of promiscuous nobility, a recoiling, snake all lost out the skin of it. It's not easy to describe or even publicly talk about the unkempt hiccup that has been my sex drive. I mean, it's not odd for a human these days to be all bees knees about sex, but I've somehow always ended up with a terrible amount of stories, situations that no one in their right mind would conjure up. Here's the bit, all NSFW. So, alright, like six months ago, in the middle of June, I carried off a second date with this woman. Now, the first date had existed within 12 beers between the two of us, and a lackluster performance by both of us. I too drunk to execute demands and demands needed for her to find any pay off. There shouldn't be a second date, but there it is, laid out at another bar, and whispered hints and forthright knowledge of incompatibility. Quarter to 200am, we head back to her place. A recently re-done Fishtown house with an aura of heaving charged psychic energy. Like the second half hour drinking Absinthe.
“How long has this house been haunted?”
“How did you know this house was haunted?”
“How couldn't you know this house was haunted, was it a kid?”
And YES it was a kid. 10 yrs earlier, a 12 yr old kid had lived on the third floor. He had been murdered, stoned to death by his friends down at the docks after his first job had elicited $300 bucks. So, we get up there. And I can feel that kid like the way my mother's early 90s hair-spray burned the hairs in my nose. On the wall nearest the door, a framing nail sat empty and to the far right of it, not in front of it, not directly below it, but to the fucking right of it, with a broken picture of a single purple iris in bloom. The 'get out of my room' shit started panicking up inside me. Though, the girl's fear had already re-registered that she had been living here for over a year and knew I was right.
But we're drunk. And she wants to go. When it runs out, it runs out. I wasn't going to stay hard and I knew I wasn't going to cum. I also knew, from our earlier meeting, that she needed a multitude of toys to get off. I had been told a 'drawer full' and found about 16 pieces of bullet vibrators, a smooth stone dildo, a decent sized strap on and the best rabbit vibrator I've ever seen. Think super thick vein, ass, clit, vaginal action. DP be damned. The guilt of the earlier performance, made me give it my all. Conservative estimates said a solid hour, and you know it's bad when you catch the eye and no twinkle. No glimmer of excitement, just randy annoyance. The 'just get me off son-of-a-bitch' look, and it's the most reasonable thing, given to the illusion of male ejaculation we both grew up with. The moment you give-up, both party wise, it directs traffic to 'guilt cuddle'. No one succeeded, no one triumphed, capitalism still wins, desire is a pain in the ass and the absence is all too tedious.
Forty minutes later, I'm walking home on the phone to a Chicago comrade, laughing. Not nervous laughter, drunken boot steps and 'so this is just how human life works on planet earth' kind of politics. I'm watching Anita Pallenberg in Performance (Brian Jones ex) stroking a fur coat that is gratefully placed over her pussy. 'Don't you think there's a place for you in between the sheets?'
1.
The Rolling Stones: Dude, this is so intense. What started as a reappraisal of
Exile ended up being, a down and out six month stare off (and an ongoing one at that) with Keith Richards and then after that a brief cock-up with Mick Jagger. The uniqueness that I'm registering here only comes from a 20 yr plus addiction to The Beatles and the other white-ass-man British Invasion groups. It's just a childhood enacted and broken by the 'lack of love' for oneself over that course that ticked up a rather playful hit with
Life in the start. What is remarkable about Richards, isn't his unabashed drug addiction (but yeah, it's awesome and hot, sorry), but his eager willingness to stand out (for at least himself) as a good guy and a general rebel rouser. Nothing special, really, yet somehow the old adage of 'The Stones are good music to do bad things to' which is probably from one of the 12 feature length films I sucked off in multiple viewings. The vantage point is odd. 5 (or 7 sort-of) Brits find R&B and just fuck it with earnest first time exposure to the Spectacle. With a truly brief moment in history, global currency was liquid enough that people were allowed to take and make creative peaks (in first-world-countries, obviously) that we don't today, because it's their image of the saturation model of 'you can do anything' that has (with the addition of home-recording equipment) taken a bite out of an artistic hierarchy that could seem valuable. No way around it, the 60s are containing a very overarching god-creation myth, and there is no doubt in my mind, that these dudes got a chance at being it.
I'm watching the 'Magnificent Ambersons' for the first time right now. I've seen and devoured every single Welles product available, except this one. I've read the daily's and I know the disappointment would be real, if I hadn't already destroyed it's 'lost' status in my early 20s, for sure. Philip Norman wrote a bio on Mick Jagger about a month ago. Not a bad tale for someone who is actually so hollowed out, that his sex drive has repeated so hard into a vacuum, that only air could pass out when he cums. I've now put on
Tattoo You from 1981 on over the film. It's hard to understand my media consumption. It's my model for society life. It's my life. I hate it. I want to kill it, but, like everyone else, it won't come until the lights go out and we smuggle the dumb-dumb plot lines into camp fire tales while evading death like it's 1620 and we don't belong here.
'You Make a Grown Man Cry' at the end becomes 'You Make a Dead Man Cum'. Yeah, I hear you. That's the emblem of our 200 yr activation of 'love' as immaterial wrapped in necessity shopping. Alright. So, here it is. The proper way to listen to the Stones and get hooked for life.
1972, Exile on Main Street: Listen for two months (rhythm guitar & dada-hardcore sex-word play)
1978, Some Girls: One month, disco then punk then country.
1971, Sticky Fingers: Find the Eric Clapton guitar version of Brown Sugar. Sax & Drum & Bass line matching it out on Bitch.
1969, Let It Bleed: Focus on title-track and transubstantiation, 'Lean On' to 'Bleed On'.
1968, Beggars Banquet: Street Fighting Man (bourgeois 'palace revolution' bullshit)/Jumpin' Jack Flash
cause we were all born in a crossfire hurricane. Seriously.
1973, Goats Head Soup: Star Star (originally titled Star Fucker). Dancing with Mr D is a crappy
late Bela Lugosi copy of Sympathy for the Devil. You still want to fuck to it.
1974, It's Only Rock 'n Roll: Ain't Too Proud to Beg is totally co-dependency on a scale of insanity.
1981, Tattoo You: 'She's My Little Rock 'n' Roll' for Little T&A. Dude, Keith just wants your
smack and to cuddle with you. Gimme.
With that order you can move anywhere:
Emotional Rescue (1980) disco-y.
Black and Blue (1976) jammy
Aftermath (1966) Paint It Black/Goth-Manic-Pixie Girl
Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967) Acid-Pretentious
I noticed here that you end up registering a career
Between the Buttons (1967) to Undercover (1983)
you actually have a near perfect creative model.
After those two you can listen to Voodoo Lounge (1994) & A Bigger Bang (2005) with kindness and affection.
Dirty Work (1986) is better than Steel Wheels (1989) and Bridges to Babylon (1997) has three amazing songs on it, which are You Don't Have to Mean It, Thief in the Night & How Can I Stop, that are on scale with Dylan's later career but crooned on with Keith Richards gravelly-delivery.
And all that's left is Out of Our Heads (1965) , The Rolling Stones, No. 2 (1965) & The Rolling Stones (1964).
I've actually watched the Doom and Gloom video more than once. Rooney Mara. Right. I already did the sex one.
Thanks. I've got some problems. But, I have faith that I'll be dead by 2131. Isn't that when Kirk gets born? Shit. Tiberius. Goodbye 2012.
