Fishbone and the English Beat played last night, and H.R. got on stage and did a number, nervously, timidly, even, and the nostalgia got everyone jumping, but I kept thinking: What does time do to musicians? Why don't they innovate? Is it like any craft, where the need to make a living blunts the urge to take risks? A song steels itself from a spark, but why is it easier to be aflame when you are broke and desperate, rather than comfy and tricked out with 16g of RAM? It's great to see Robert Plant do something he could never have imagined 35 years ago, but can the Who write a new song anyone can remember within minutes of listening to it? Did Fishbone imagine, 20 years ago, they'd be in the same club, sleeping in a bigger bus, clearing $373 for the night? Would they have continued to do what they do if they did know? It's unsettling to see so much talent, floating rather than swimming . . .

Stefan Sagmeister likes hotel rooms as engines of inspiration. Especially when he just checks in to a new one, when he's away from the studio and has an uncluttered mind. But I love his insistence that good designers should schedule "regular" "non-client-driven" experimental projects. He keys in on the word "regular" to emphasize that such projects, which do not bring in income and may actually lose cash, should not be bumped from the work flow to make room for profitable corporate or paying projects. You can't really experiment on a client's time, and without experiment you cannot grow your creative skills; intuition and insight depend on repeated failure in laboratory-like thought processes. I'm very fortunate that I haven't had many corporate clients or paying gigs in the past ten years, so each of my projects results to some degree in outright failure. Does this mean that I am getting "better" as a producer and creator? I certainly have more inspiration and insight than ever before, and these elements in my thinking and spirit seem to grow markedly not on a calendar or clock but by each attempt at expression and by each abandonment of an expression to follow a new muse or moment.

The first 30 minutes of Gloria Rowlands in John Cassavettes' "Woman Under the Influence" is a role any actress would kill for, but few could play. She's mesmerizing in a trip to a bar, looking for a drink, while her husband works for the water department late one night; after a languid five minute sequence getting chatted up by a lonely loser at the bar, she is being groped in her own house and suddenly awakens to start fighting herself out of a near rape. She is distracted, swollen by the drink as all drunks are, pink and burpy, but she's also losing her marbles, losing her connection to the world that miraculously clings to her as mother, wife and neighbor. Why isn't this movie made today? Everythign is too slick, now, too seamless and perfect except when the nuts and bolts of perfection get in the way. Cassavettes gives you ten seconds at a time to establish his mood and directions, but then gives Rowlands all the time she needs to vex and vent. His hand is heavy to make a point, and a whisper when he lets you listen on your own terms, as a detached witness to disaster. And this accident isn't something you can say you saw coming; its effect is to leave you continually looking at the victims at the scene after the collision has happened, always a few seconds late. Masterful, beautiful, slowly contagious.

"Loose Girl" is the story of Kerry Cohen's life, wherein she evolves from confused loose teenage cannon to confident psychologist and human sexuality expert. Book is utter bullshit. It might sell only to readers with prurient inclinations toward both dirty sex and confession. Why can't female sexuality ever be portrayed properly at bookstores? Is Hell paved with notches showing every boy a girl ever allowed into her pants? Even this book, which purports to be of a journey from anxiety to confidence, can't help but degrade promiscuous behavior. Probably because society's bookstores are run by men, assisted by women who want things to be run by men. Well, almost everyone goes from teenage angst to a sense of midage mediocrity, and Cohen's story is just more proof. Anecdote after anecdote reveals Cohen's current apprehension about her past behavior, when every tryst underscored her neurotic personality, but to Cohen this is a shocking scientific evolution, and she fails to see the other side of the equation: the millions of men who buy porn every month on their business stays in the local Hilton who are looking for a glance at the good girl next door who has the guts to do something naughty even if people are looking. Rent the movie Belle du Jour instead of buying or borrowing this tripe from Kerry Cohen. Or you can read an excerpt from my own treatise on sexual power, my forever-unfinished but still-expanding Burn & Scar.

Ghostland Observatory is supercool. Desert head talks funny and looks funny and grows up wanting to be a comedian because everyone laughs at him. He's on a farm hours away from San Antonio, stuck in nowhere. But he makes it to Austin, gets discovered by a socially inept peer who happens to play a little piano, and the rest is history. Ghostland Observatory is the bomb. Not for the music, which sucks, but for the dancing and the vibe, which is utterly original.And the band does not allow itself to be marketed. This is the direction I need to be moving in.

Check out Ghostland Observatory's video "Vibrate" and ask yourself if you can really do a similar routine with your butt and hips.

There might actually be two on this ridiculous album called "Under the Blacklight." Sheryl Crow light, with more tinkle and twitter. And a massive song, just beautiful: "Are We Breaking Up." Heard it in Iceland and been obssessed with her ever since, until I got the album in my hands and listened to it; total embarrassment. A song partly sung in Spanish tells you all you need toknow, that Rilo knows nobody who speaks Spanish, coz they never would let her leave the gate with such comical pronunications. (And this comes from somebody who sounds like Maurice Chevalier singing Zank Evan for Little Gurlzzz.) Ignore this album. (But then the update: Anne McGinn tells me to give the album a second listen, and that I'll find something better, and I do, and I do. There are three good songs on the disc. I'll admit. But still, there is dross.)

 

I don't feel good. Gotta go in for some more tests. Drag.

And i can't stop dreaming a disturbing dream. About saying goodbye to somebody who loves me too much. What will i say? There is no meeting on the other side, and all i can hope for is the delusion of forever as I check out in the chemicals that can rescue me from pain. For somebody stuck in the moment like me, sudden death is not an option: modern physics can wipe me out in less than a second, and this is not long enough for the chemicals to fill my brain. Endorphins need how long to work? How long to give me my vision of endless horizons, with Sandra waving at me every sunset and every carousel ride, How are you Seanie, when will I see you again, as she floats away into someplace i will never visit? There is a question of terrible semnantics here: Does she say goodbye to me, or do I leave her crushed with my memory? What a fucking nightmare.

So I look for signals of survival, rhythms or swirls that take me out of my thoughts and into a trip of joy or anticipation, and one comes to me today, in the midst of nonstop doomy tears and swollen pains: a band so smart it spills wit and spreads wishes, and thak you so so so much for your lift. I walk out of the door, laughing, I hope. Vampire Weekend gets me going on a Friday, appropriately, with a sound I've never heard before, thank goodness.

 

My pal Omar wants to change the world through art. I am not sure I more comfortable in anyone's presence than Omar's and Sandie Black's, and even Sandie will admit that she is often her own herd of cats. Omar is a tide in my life; when I am about to become wreckage, he floods whatever ocean I am traveling with hope and energy. I've been rescued several times by his interests and respect for my arty-farty efforts, so when he writes me and links me to something in the world that affects him profoundly, I feel the hit directly, and today he has discovered Zach Condon, the barely twenty genius behind the group Beirut. Omar sends me an email and says for a guy like this at his age to be producing music like this is fucking incredible. This is what Omar sends me:

My nephew is 19, sculpting himself with a chisel made of psychology from clay made of philosophy. It is a thrill to see. I tell him tonight I have enjoyed connecting with him, and his family, and my family, after years of disconnect, but if I walk out of Oregon tomorrow and disappear for another half decade I will not look back with a shred of guilt; my absence is proof of my interest or concentration on something beyond my self. He gets it. The signposts are everywhere, I say, of directions to take in becoming something other than yourself. To prove it, we grab four movies which I claim as watershed markers in my own personality: Aguirre Wrath of God, Turtles Can Fly, Wings of Desire and Tzametti 13. We put on Wings of Desire, which I have not seen for more than fifteen years. It is slower, more poetic, than I remember, and there are some beautiful lines couched in sharp and memorable images. I have grown to dislike the director, Wim Wenders, for many of his movies since, and as I watch this again I understand why: This is a written gem, and Wenders did not write Wings of Desire. I remember Julia the balet dancer in Berlin telling me this was not a movie by Wenders, even if his name was on the masthead, and I ignored her warnings since I was older and knew better. I was wrong to do so. One line jumps out at me: the subtitles read "absence of pleasure," and I think what a great name for a book, and my nephew laughs out loud and says the line in German to the effect of lustlessness. We are on the same page, he and I, responding to the same line. We switch off after 45 minutes and I ask him if he's seen another movie like it. No, he says, it's very sophisticated, the lines, the images, original. I leave him to sleep and at 2:30 am come home here to write more, to write something lovely and sophisticated.

I wonder how many of the theatre-goers have actually read Krakauer? Or will read Krakauer?

I was pole-axed by the book while watching over an injured companion in Chomro, a three-building village on the way up to the Annapurna Sanctuary in the Himalayas. The book certainly resonated with me in a way that Sean Penn will never be able to accomplish. The movie celebrates but does not analyze the actions of Alex in the wild, and concentrates way too much on the "why" and "how" the kid got into the wilderness; Krakauer's story is very specific in its attempt to accuse the kid of being an idiot and then coming full circle to admire his ability to survive. I cannot remember the exact language he uses, but Krakauer basically says the kid pulls off an amazing feat of survival while succumbing to a mistake many experienced outdoorsmen make, regarding the poisonous plant he ingests. Krakauer makes his admiration very, very clear, and suggests that what the kid does is something every human being wishes to do but hasn't the guts to attempt. I think the real idiots are the busy bees who cannot and will not get out of the city into unregulated nature. Not the paved roads of Yosemite or Joshua Tree, but into days or weeks of no available social infrastructure. Maybe Penn's retelling of the story is idiotic, and perhaps an idiotic audience needs a paint-by-numbers guide to getting into the "wild" (and I thought the biggest weakness of the movie was the actual depiction of its tame landscapes, all 37 or whatever actual locations visited by Alex), but the actual kid dropping out of society's harness to answer the urge to escape is another matter altogether. Perhaps Alex was an idiot, and he did some idiotic things, to be sure, but his willingness to cross that river was a step of genius. Surrendering to nature, the tactile one you walk in, and the instinctive one you act on, is an essential part of being human.

Whenever I walk into a 7-Eleven, the elephants and sea lions and lemurs I have met in the wild, and all their cousins, wail a single encouragement into my ears: "Blow this ****ing place up!"

The "Wild" movie, Hollywood, and Sean Penn, cannot touch "Touching the Void," Joe Simpson's amazing story, or Carroll Ballard's "Never Cry Wolf," or even the sometimes-unbelievable Alastair Fothergill doc "Planet Earth." In the latter, fat cat David Attenborough laments in the finale that our choice is to "destroy or cherish" our planet; maybe Penn's "directorly" vanity should be destroyed, but the kid who wandered into the wild should most definitely be cherished.

Most readers of the book would be mildly let down by the movie, but still associate a good vibe with Alex running away from traffic lights and parking meters, and therefore let Penn off the hook. I was expecting an epic, something along the lines of "Walkabout" or "Picnic at Hanging Rock," but these sorts of movies have fallen out of favor compared to flicks where people's heads are blown to smithereens and other gimmicky fantasy. So Penn gives light rumination, hardly surprising. The shame is anybody seeing the movie will not be bothered to read the book, or will be prejudiced against its main character because of the movie.

Have you read Simpson's "Touching the Void"? Or, even better, Apsley Cherry-Garrard's "Worst Journey In the World"? Those two books are freaking bombs: mankind in nature, and the nature of mankind.

It is 60 degrees outside with a blue sky, but I cannot leave the bed and the five new books I've found in my sister's house in Portland. One of the books is Orhan Pamuk's memories of Istanbul which I tear through this morning, surprised to find the biography of that great city so nicely disguised as stories about his family. Since today is the 100th birthday of my own father -- officialized by a call from my sister from Oaxaca to tell my niece to lgiht a small candle in the kitchen to stoke our memories -- the personal reflections are especially pricking me to write my own extravagant childhood into existence and out of folklore. I carry this expectation of eventual industry like a stone in the suitcase of my dreams. When will I write this tiny opus? So Pamuk's descripions of his upbringing in a scandalized family in Istanbul which slowly loses its money and standing in a mirror of Turkey's own decline provides me an example of how easily I can craft my own childhood story, since his book is full of pictures and digressions. There is a fabulous section on the engravings of Istanbul by the German artist Melling, for example, but also precise observations such as this:

"When, in the tones ordinarily reserved for the discussing the foundation of a nation, my grandmother spoke of my grandfather, who had died so young, and pointed at the pictures on the tables and walls, it seemed that she -- like me -- was pulled in two directions, wanting to get on with life but also longing to capture the moment of perfection, savoring the ordinary but still honoring the ideal." 

Orhan Pamuk : "Istanbul: Memories & the City" 

The book is so well written it stands with '1491' and 'Seven Daughters of Eve' as one of the deepest wells of knowledge drilled into literature during the past two years. Here's a snippet:

Heidi Lyn recounted what happened the day that Sue Savage-Rumbaugh told the bonobo chimpanzee Kanzi to put water on a carrot. The ape threw the carrot outdoors. Thinking that Kanzi had misunderstood, Savage-Rumbaugh repeated the request. In response, Kanzi pointed vigorously outside. It was raining.

Fab book. Subtitled "The Search for the Origins of Language," the book manages the remarkable feat of portraying genius Chomsky as a bit of a philistine boor while making the reader grasp how miraculous language is, even if its provenance is so slightly understood.

Dig, the insight into the music industry showing the different approaches of the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre.

New York Doll, the movie I claimed showed evidence of a supreme being, but also very interesting because it shows how even a marginal act can exert immeasurable influence over the years.

Also your class should check out Radiohead's Meeting People is Easy, since this does such a good job of showing behind the scenes of fame.

And you must be aware of Tom Dowd's story, a marvelous documentary, and another doc by Don Was, producer, about Brian Wilson called I Guess I Just Wasn't Made for these Times.

For me personally, my perfect brew of music and cinema can be found in Godard's take on the Stones trying to record Sympathy for the Devil. Amazing movie, not for how it captures the times, but for how it captures the studio, that boring, soul-crunching place.

I will follow Rufus Wainwright anywhere, but into the arms of Leonard Cohen? I am reluctant, reticent, even repulsed, and the movie is shakey and oddly constructed; you're 15 minutes into it and it still seems like the placeholder visuals and audio from the intro to the disc is still going. Has the movie actually started? When did that happen?

But Rufus tells the brilliant song about Leonard getting head from Janis Joplin in her unmade bed while "the limos wait in the street," and then there is Mr. Cohen wondering how he could be so "ungallant" as to identify Joplin in public as he did, and what made him do it? Joplin says she only makes love to handsome men, but in Leonard's case is willing to make an exception, and these sorts of lyrics still stick in my head 48 hours later. And I've played over and over the scene of a nervous and twitchy Antony performing a majestic Cohen song; I feel moonstruck, in love, as though I am 12 years old, with a pudgy tortured mix of a man, a Liberace without the sequins mixed with the vim of Joe Cocker. I don't know anything about Antony, but my next stop here is to go buy all his discs. It's great when movies deliver so much more than they promise.

Especially to anyone to whom Leonard Cohen strikes a discordant reaction, I recommend this wonderful experience.
"Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man."

But I wanted to tell you two things: I went to great lengths to see Roger Waters and his performance of the whole Dark Side of the Moon, and then seeing Massive Attack in a small club in DC. The former was predictable, boring, classic perhaps but just not musically inventive compared to, say, Muse, and all I could think of was all the new bands that would blow these cats away. Still, this is the first music I smoked and shagged and stole to, so the nostalgia clawed at my brain for purchase; I resisted, but how can you forget sitting in a smoky dive with Ginger Baker in Torremolinos as he offers you a crumbling joint, and growls, "First time?" while Floyd is playing. Roger himself, still with his sexy shovel-shaped face, strutted around as only bass players do, accidentally included, and I guess the electricity he managed could be measured by the attention he got from the teenagers half as old as his work: which was total. If I was 16 watching Waters I would have been hustling and bustling for romance or cash, but these kids were hooked, nodding along to every predictable guitar riff. And then five days later, Massive Attack, and a worse joke, except I learned something about opportunity. Muddy mix, horrible sound, and unimaginative rhythms in oil-based smoke hell, but Brian L. of Toolbox graphics sees my Floyd pajama bottoms and asks "Is that Sean?" since we're in the VIP section together, and before you know it I'm gabbing with Dan Levine, underground artist supreme, who interrupts the action to give me a hug, and then Simone Sandinero, Brazilian roadie who collaborated on projects with me a decade ago but now we're on the outs over money, and she's moving to LA, and then weirdly it is just me and Rob G., the energetic half of Thievery, and he's Mexican from Nuevo Laredo and I lay a trip on him about the world's only matriarchy in the Isthmus, where the youngest boys are raised as girls, and I go on about the ethereal beauty of the Zapotecan singing which NOBODY has recorded for english-speakers, and his eyes are popping since of course he is doing something other than the X-drivel for Thievery, and just like that I'm yanked out of the proceedings by my producer Gary and we saunter off for Ethiopian and a review of my publishing schedule (ha ha) and I'm thinking, Why have I become a hermit?

In the Laemmle on Fairfax and Beverly in a brutal verbal fight with two Oscar heroes and one angry divorcee as a project of mine unravels the last 3% into zero, zilch, finito, when I see out of the corner of my eye an interesting movie poster. "The Proposition." To take a break from combat, I read the poster and see this is an Australian western, new literary territory, practically, notwithstanding Rabbit Fence, and I get all goosey over the idea of Danny Huston and John Hurt and Emily Watson in the same outback setting when I read

screenplay NICK CAVE

omigod, not this joker, also vomiting a screenplay? He was bad enough mooning around the set in Wings of Desire, and I've always regarded him as an absolute boring poseur. You want boffo attitude, give me Jo Jo Zep or Peter Garrett, not this silly Leonard Cohen crooner without a melody in his bones. I go back to my fight with the movie producers and we get kicked out of the lobby and I am furious and I go back up into the Hills resolving never to talk money with producers whenever movie posters are within sight, and this Nick Cave thing bothers me for four hours. The poster looked interesting. Is this movie going to be celebrated and win awards? Am I going to be made to feel ever more tiny and irrelevant than I already am? Is it a dog-eared mess from Nick Cave that will push me over some sort of creative edge into B-movie bliss?

I note with glee that the movie does less than $2-million and sinks out of sight. Ha ha Nick Cave.

Then I make the mistake of renting it last night. Huston and Hurt are brilliant, and Watson is Watson. Even Guy Pearce and Ray Winstone have their moviestar moments, and the bloody script is . . . almost . . . perfect. Hurt and Huston rant and i am not aware it is them ranting. Watson serves tea in the dust devils waiting for rape and murder and all of the Australian fixation of descent from murderers fills my head. The writing is . . . almost . . . superb. Spare when it needs to be, phat when it needs to be. Even when a few actors drop the ball, their lines are still sparkling. I cannot believe it.

Then on the special features there is Nick Cave in a sunset, droning on as only he can, admitting he had no idea how to write a screenplay, thinking it was just too BIG for him to do (as only a songwriter could think), and admitting his intimidation, until . . . he wrote scene one . . . and then scene two, and all of a sudden it was just bloody easy and it's one scene afer another and Nick Cave is too polite to snicker but you can tell it was easy as one two three. All the other Aussies claim the movie is aboout the great white-black unspoken conversation and of course it isn't at all about any of that, but just a western, typical crappy Clint Eastwood but with some shocking poetry and seven or eight or sixteen distinctly drawn characters. There is a line about misanthropes which comes out of nowhere and is almost brilliant, and I still can't believe it, the next day. The movie is brutally graphic, as in bad Hollywood, as befits a cinema which thinks its ancestors were murderers, when in reality 99% of Australians who can claim descent from the Transportation are related not to a killer but to somebody who stole a loaf of bread or some other such petty crime in 18th century England. So the poetry is there, that uncertain sense of self which makes movies like The Monkey Grip or The Year My Voice Broke or Lonely Hearts so compelling, and so adult.

Nick Cave writes a screenplay, and it is fantastic. Britney Spears will soon have a novel on the market. And I'm going to pitch a 'deal' at Art's Delicatessen next Tuesday, with nothing but a free lunch guaranteed. I'm not whining, though. Just remarking at the extremities of possibility stretching from this tiny moment in space to the boundaries of existence, from whence Nick Cave's scrrenplay improbably and probably inadvertently fell to Earth.