My bloodied valentine to the roaring 90′s

Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides, they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I’m so glad I’m a Beta. Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard.

Dear readers,

Those of you that missed the My Bloody Valentine show tonight, take heart: your brain is still a brain; my brain is jellied cranberry sauce. It has been thoroughly pureed, purified, pasteurized, dyed pink, canned and uncanned, put in the fridge – it sits quivery and geometric under plastic wrap, fit for use once a year, only by children and oldies with no teeth.

After the whatever-th minute of existential, metaphysical, extrasensory megafuzz, I decided on two facts: Kevin Shield’s guitar is powered by quantum uncertainty and I am officially a masochist. The latter is evident throughout the rest of this letter, as is my imprecise three-part conflation of masochism, fatalism, and the requisite despondence of a two a.m. diary entry.

It would be nice to talk to you about the most interesting part of the night – that after the most surreal, devastating, important week in any of our young lives, a week when we collectively identified the looming specter of our national insolvency, a thousand of us crowded in a room to seek refuge in music more than a decade old. We were evangelicals; we sought transcendence through nostalgia; we weren’t satisfied. Or rather, I (singular) wasn’t satisfied. It would be nice to try to talk about that, of course, but I don’t even have a passing grip on it. I am a cell phone camera; this essay is a pixelated concert photo taken from too far away; a Facebook note is a text message.

Consolation prize: turns out, rock concerts are worth their weight in carbon emissions. I would go so far to say that they are one of the few things that electricity was truly, ultimately, invented for. Too bad that in 2008 they’ve mostly been squandered on nostalgia or worse.

New York, NY – A string of robberies at the City’s most venerable art museums has security officials and police baffled. Pickpocketing, an already common crime affecting patrons of public galleries, has risen 600 percent this summer compared to last year, a spokesperson for the NYPD said in a press conference Thursday. The incidents at institutions like the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney do not appear to be connected, though the spokesperson cited a possible reason why art galleries make an attractive target. “People get distracted” he said. “They’re paying attention to what’s up on the wall, not what’s going on around them.”

Neighborhood info #1

Here is an article I wrote for the school newspaper.

Wisdumb teef, part 2

I lost the eBay auction for that Acrylic Badger Skeleton*. I was in it to win it until I realized “hey, I just bid eighty-five dollars on an acrylic badger skeleton”, which was a sad and enlightening moment for me. I wish I had a trillion dollars.

Nevertheless, I will find something to put these teeth in (that’s what she said). For the time being, though, they’re chillin’ in the fridge.

* See “Wisdom Teeth, part 1″

Worth a thousand blog posts

Dear Readers,

I just made a Flickr photo gallery. Most of the pictures are simple, opportunistic shots taken over the last few months of friends, enemies, buildings, trash, planes, boats, trite sunsets, et al.

Everything was shot on a Canon MC, a great little 35mm point-and-shoot from the 80s with a very distinctive vignette – thanks to Haystacks Calhoun for the hook-up.

There’s nothing in the way of touch-ups or color correction, and lousy scanning to boot … but you’ll get the idea. There are a few “sets” on the right part of the page: favorites, pictures of Bushwick, etc.

Some samples:

Word.

Wisdom Teeth, part 1

Early in June of this year, I had the neat experience at the behest of a paid, professional sadist whereby pieces of my skull were forcibly ripped out for no reason at all.* Luckily I was able to convince (by asking politely) the nurse to let me keep the fleshy things, tucked into a antiseptic doggie-bag of sorts, where they’ve stayed until just recently.

Flash forward to this afternoon when I was delighted to receive by special-order some extra-strength 5%(!) hydrogen peroxide solution; I could now take the first step in a grand scheme to clean, gold-plate (spraypaint), and eventually mount my four extracted teeth. Maybe in the eye-sockets of an acrylic badger skeleton, or something.**

So, as of the time of this blog, the teeth, which used to be inside of me, are now fizzin like a bitch in a pickle jar on my windowsill…

Gross.

*There was indeed a very good medical reason for this.

**Note to family: beware of my Christmas gifts this year.

General information #1: Apartment

And if you could smell it, you’d call it an “afartment” instead. Hi mom!

View from the window…

At my mother’s repeated request

I have decided to set up and (hopefully) maintain this weblog.

Will this thing provide for more engaging correspondence with my friends and far-flung loved ones, or will it spiral into a half-masochistic regurgitation of dire news clips and John McCain senile-isms? Time will tell…

—

[edit] It just occurred to me that the blog’s name might need a little bit of explanation. So. I might have named The Golden River after any one of three things:

1. The gorgeous novella by John Ruskin,
2. A Frog Eyes record, or
3. Pee-pee!

Or maybe some combination of the three. Three-pee. You figure it out. I almost certainly did not name it after this thing…