i will tell you.

i'll be what i have to be.
i love you.
"ha! banishment! be merciful, say 'death;'"
"there is no world without Verona walls."

i will never be you.
in rain and in god's form, a faith unspoken and unpracticed.
i found you in soil undisturbed. silence was what you spoke.

the sun exhales.






mediums.





miles.
i'll
be
i'll be what i have to be.
i love you.

wilderness, jim morrisson.

i had heard that someone was surprised i hadn't been at all interested in jim morrisson's writing, seeing that i myself mess around here and there. i mean, i tried listening to the doors a couple times, and wasn't into them at all. for a band that was supposed to be so edgy and pushing the boundaries, it sounded way too safe for me. all that mysticism rubbish, gone by the wayside. but i decided to check out a book of specifically jim morrisson's, after hearing a few tracks from AN AMERICAN PRAYER, which was meant to be his spoken word. it was actually somewhat convincing. after noticing that there was a fairly clear line drawn between jim himself and the band the doors, i was definitely swayed in a new direction. i'm not passionately in love with the man or his work, but he definitely says some good stuff and had a talent and a drive that is certainly rare.

"
' have you ever seen god?'
-- a mandala, a symmetrical angel' "

"drugs are a bet with your mind."

"mouth fills with taste of copper.
chinese paper. foreign money. old posters."

"(panic in a horse's eye
that can spread & fill
an entire sky.)"

"she's selling news in the market
time in the hall
the girls of the factory
rolling cigars
they haven't invented musak yet
so i read to them
from THE BOOK OF DAYS
a horror story from the gothic age
a gruesome romance
from the LA
plague.

i have a vision of america
seen from the air:
28,000 ft. and going fast.


a one-armed man in a texas
parking labyrinth
a burnt tree like a giant primeval bird
in an empty lot in fresno
miles & miles of hotel corridors
& elevators, filled with citizens.

motel money murder madness
change the mood from glad to sadness.

play the ghost song baby."

"forgive me father for i know
what i do.
i want to hear the last poem
of the last poet."

the road, cormac mccarthy.

the road by cormac mccarthy was a trip. i noticed when i added it to my facebook CURRENTLY READING tab, that it was a winner of some oprah award, or that it was an oprah recommendation. nearly crushed my world. but cormac mccarthy wrote no country for old men, and i'll be damned if i don't fish out all that i can from the creator of that genius. the road follows a boy and a man through the wasteland of a post-apocalyptic somewhere. the people you see, the places you explore, and the skies you duck under all scream disastermath. i love the way that these two lived and the fashion in which it was narrated. a great book, and a quick read. i took no lesson from it, and i hope that it wasn't a form of metaphor for weight loss, jesus, finance, or love. i hope it was just a dark passage to continue carrying the fire.
-
"a blackness to hurt your ears with listening."

"an old chronicle. to seek out the upright."

"and the dreams so rich in color. how else would death call you? waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to day."

"in those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators."

"the color of it moved something in him long forgotten. make a list. recite a litany. remember."

"where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them."

"golden chalice, good to house a god. please don't tell me how the story ends."

"the world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell."

"when your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. do you understand? and you can't give up. i won't let you."

"he wanted to be able to see. look around you, he said. there is no prophet in earth's long chronicle who is not honored here today. whatever form you spoke of you were right."

the cardinal rule.

smoke made entirely of unravelled cassette tape. i become dark and ugly, covered in the age of rust. i fear the art of missing days, one less sequential than the last. there are no such things as ghosts, not since the insects moved in. headless body erupting hair. roses of dangling raw meat, hiding on the side of a rolling hill. they'll smell the poppies and move on.

i am properly introduced to morning.

altered states. +

i just signed up for netflix yesterday, something i've wanted to do since xb360 made it an option. i set up my instant play, and added a ton of movies to my queue and have sort of gotten addicted to rating and browsing the library. i watched my first movie today, starring william hurt called altered states. it followed a man deeply interested in the human mind's reaction to different stimulus, starting with sensory deprivation which then built into hallucinogenic drugs and things like that. the biggest of them all became a form of mushroom found amongst an indigenous mexican tribe who made a tea or beverage out of a form of mushroom which created a unified experience amongst all who drank the substance. amongst other things, one chemical found in the drink was scopolamine, a drug which i posted about more than a year ago on this blog. it was more or less an exhibition of the unborn soul. sounded pretty intense. we follow jessup (the professor) as he starts to experiment with sensory deprivation after this drug he's taken and how it's slowly devolving him each time he enters the chamber. it was made in 1980 so a lot of the special camera work necessary to exhibit some of the more psychedelic experiences felt a little corny, but i still appreciated everything they did with the movie. i think when directors have to be a little bit more creative and resourceful with what they have to work with, it tends to lend itself to some interesting results. see the difference between the original trilogy and the newer trilogy in star wars. overall, i thought the movie was great, definitely worth checking out if you're into hallucinogens or drug culture at all as well as more visually experimental film making.

in fact, i have actually been looking around for more experimental or just overtly visual films to play either on my computer or tv while listening to album. i'm not saying i want a full psychedelic trip or anything, but just something to have on that's NOT a "visualizer" on itunes or something of that nature. something with real imagery. sigur ros' HEIMA dvd comes to mind, though just the one isn't enough. i tried looking for silent films and things like that, though nothing really interesting came up. i know i've seen a few industrial bands and more experimental bands do things with films playing behind them as they're on stage. nine inch nails have done the same thing, on a huge scale... manson has too i think. something of that nature. i feel a little odd sitting around with headphones on staring at nothing. i'll be working on that. i just downloaded the battleship potemkin, and while it's not entirely visually stunning or anything, this was one of the earliest films that really was intentionally avant garde. i really liked watching it in a film appreciation class. i'll see if it translates.

what's up with this new TUMBLR blogging service? judging by the few that i've seen, it seems to be a little bit more aimed toward the twitter/flickr/facebook crowd which is more for the mass-sharing of information. that's great and all, but not really for me. it seems like it's going to get pretty large, i'd assume. it seems to tend to the bug that people get where they want to post an image or video to their myspace, but don't have anywhere to put it on their layout. i noticed that a big part of it, too, tends to be that you can openly reply and be replied to on that site and it will show up on your blog as well. there's a big blend of a lot of sites and ideas going on over there, and i think it's going to blow up if it already hasn't.

i picked up a bunch of books the other night at barnes and noble, one of which was superman: red son, a reimagining by mark millar (he wrote the original series wanted which the movie was based on, contributed to marvel civil war, etc.) in which Kal-L lands on earth 12 hours later, and in ukraine in the 1950s, and ends up in the hands of Stalin. a really good book, and while i'm not a fan of superman at all, i like what they did with the character, and there are a bunch of good cameos by other DC heroes. worth checking out.

miami in 6 days.

roomanitarian.

i just finished reading henry rollins' roomanitarian. it was enjoyable, but i think only if you know what rollins is about. it's not really written with any great style or skill, though it drives home what i know about the man, and his full-on hatred for republicans, yuppie white culture, drugs and abuse, and mostly himself, as a huge theme of his writing tends to reinforce complete and total isolation. here are some things:

"i have been dragging my past with me like it's a dying comrade and we're trying to make it back to the beach after a mission gone terribly wrong."

"when we fuck by the pool we bleed out of our mouths and can't finish. we are too toxic."

"came home and shot his wife and two small children. sat on the back porch with a beer. heard the sirens and put one through the roof of his mouth. what he couldn't control, he killed."

"i will admit this to you as long as you promise not to tell anyone. i do admit a sadness."

"he terrified them and they seemed dedicated to this fear."

"sad, mean brutal cycle. after awhile, if you want it bad enough, if you really need it -- anything will feel like love."

"feat of feast: don't drink the good stuff if you know you're gonna hurl. fear of famine: one more breath."

"i have felt it in the past. attraction to a woman. it always came with a certain measure of self-disgust. it happened recently. there i was with this woman. not letting anything show. not allowing one crippled display of vulnerability to register. years ago, fear of rejection and eventual, long burning humiliation kept my feelings in check. now it's different factors that keep my emotions stillborn. i have arrived at myself. i am beyond humiliation. failure falls off me. rejection is a given. the main thing that keeps me to myself is just knowing there's no way. there is just no way. at this point, what could my line possibly be? "hi, i'm dead. want to watch me sit silently in a small room? i can show you the parts of the ceiling my brains will most likely stick to." it is sad. to not need anyone."

"i know i am rusted metal scraping against sidewalks of forgotten cities, an unheard groan of a freezing pipe in a condemned building. i know, i know. believe me, i know. i know my words vaporize and lose all meaning as they evacuate my mouth. i know that all the years spent, all the miles traveled, all the sleep lost -- just time wasted. time wasted! like leaving a lamp burning in an unoccupied room. a waste! what a horrible thing, time wasted. the ravages of futility. inspiration's annihilating backhand. at the end of the trail, to find the pockets heavy with fool's gold, the ribs cracked from the last cheap shot and the heart helplessly empty... what a waste. and even though this is the cheaply woven fabric of my life, even though i am the hand that knocks unwelcome and uninvited on doors of empty houses, the cultivator of insufferable misery on hot endless nights of paranoia. ceaselessly unendurable and obsessive repetition. a life nailed to the ground by dulled cowardice and uninventive thought. in spite of all that, there was a time when i... when i thought something more than all this was in my grasp. there was a time when i could feel the ground underneath my feet and i walked forward into time isntead of standing still, stranded in semi-darkness with skewed memories of the past to keep me. i don't remember when i pulled back. i don't remember when i called it a day. i don't remember when i slipped underneath the surface of life and ended up here. i don't remember. i don't know."

"nothing can be recaptured. it can only be approximated and stood next to. it can only be lied into legend."

"still having the murder dreams?"

"their conversations rain down like hammers from a high place. their words jostle and crowd my brain. perhaps it's their thoughts i am thinking now. language is slavery. ...their sound all around me, this generic drone of collapse."

"it will never be love.... and it's not like your eyes aren't open arms. i am a ghost town with a ribcage, every abandoned car. i heard every word you said."

"after you were killed last june i quietly dismantled and disposed of my heart, parts of my nervous system and many of my thoughts."

"no one shoots the moon in the face."

"i used to be strong, but couldn't hold on to it. i hemorrhaged and bled out. now i'm just tough and weak, self=propelled into small rooms to endure time."

"casa to cairo. bangkok to paris. i got close to her in prague. but lost her for good. and found me for bad. and now i am a setting sun and closed road null."

"destruction will keep me alive for a few seasons yet."

"there is no shore. if i knew a name to call out, i would."

"when i talk to you, i turn to wood."

"walked past them all again. waited to sink with them. nothing happened. that's the fucked up thing. nothing happens until a nightmare erupts."

"i get used to throwing parts of myself away."

"we'll braid our secrets."