POSR: To New York, Day 1

POSR sullen in the Subway

I took stock; two guitars, one rolling bag, one little backpack.  I was ready. With luggage stuffed with electronics, I thought it would be would be wise to have myself dropped off at the airport a good two hours prior in case security wanted to give me more than a once-over.

On the way to the airport I noticed the day. It was grey and drizzly all Thursday morning but no longer; at that point the clouds had left, the sun was bright, and the air was clear and cool. I felt a twinge of regret for having to leave such a beautiful day, and a bit of apprehension as to whether I had everything I needed. Then I remembered that I can be resourceful when necessary and that I have  always figured out a way to get by. ‘We are built to survive.’  It was going to be alright; I was leaving a beautiful day but I’m off to another adventure in one of my favorite cities – New York – and in one of my favorite boroughs – Brooklyn.

I just had to get through security.

We get to the airport and I say goodbye to my friend, who gave a heart-felt good luck before driving off. I went to face Continental Airlines.

Austin, Texas has one of my favorite airports. If you give yourself enough time, you realize what a breeze it is to get to your gate. There were but two obstacles; a suit cuts in front of me in the line, and I get charged $50 for my luggage and my guitar. I gave up all the money my friend lent me and some of my own, hand them my bag, take the guitar to the oversize luggage person and head for the security line. They scrutinize my battered I.D. for a hot minute and wave me through. Aside from having to cough up what little money I had, it was a pretty painless trip to the gate.

I had two hours to kill. I found myself a seat facing the tarmac and began my weekend project; picking the best tracks from The Beatles stereo remasters. I started listening to the albums that I felt bridged the gap between their merseybeat roots and their later pop experiments – Revolver and Rubber Soul. Time drifted by on their backbeat. Eventually I got a tap on my shoulder. Jake, his girl Jessica, Adam and Chris have arrived.

The first words out of Adams’ mouth wre, ‘wanna get a drink?’ Despite my budget, I said ‘yes’ without hesitation.  “There’s a bar down there called Campbell’s. I’ll tell them I’m a relation,” Adam said. I gathered my things, hoisted my bass onto my shoulders and we trudged down to the bar. The small bar was completely full. Adam had a bloody mary, I had an over-priced beer. Adam tells me that he barely woke up when his phone rings with Jake on the other line, telling him that he was there to pick him up.

”’Five minutes’ – I threw some dirty clothes in my backpack, and I hopped into his car.”

I noticed that Adam was still wearing the same clothes from the past night’s rehearsal. Impressed, I moved the topic to how slim my budget was. I ordered another beer. He said he was on a slim budget, too, and that he’ll have to figure out a way to find more money in New York. Halfway through our second round of drinks we get the text from Chris that the plane was boarding. We attempted to get halfway through my beer, and failing, we ran for the gate. Success – we were on time and tipsy and merry.

Chris and I are instructed to put our basses in an overhead bin. We found one with space and placed them on top of each other, joking that we might end up with another bass in about nine months. We found our seats – the very last ones on the plane. The stewardesses were sullen and misshapen, and slurred into the microphone like drunks. The pilot sounded like he had laryngitis.

We achieved cruising altitude, settled in, and reached for our respective audio devices – an old iPod nano for me, an iPhone for Chris, and a 15 inch Macbook for Adam. He ordered a double bloody mary.

We were served with ‘Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian,’ a movie Roger Ebert described as ‘like ectoplasm from a medium, it is the visible extrusion of a marketing campaign.’

We were served a salad and a hamburger, which reminded me of the New York Times headline, ‘Woman’s Life Shattered by Hamburger‘ – an expose on the ground beef industry. I scarfed it down anyways, E. Coli be damned.

Adam instructed me to get another tiny vodka bottle. Then he instructed me to get another cup of ice. Then he was happy.

The iPod and the flight lulled me in and out of sleep, to be nudged awake by the passage of large posteriors in the aisles.

Fairly soon we arrived in Newark. As always, people inexplicably rose from their seats when we arrived at the gate, despite the cabin door being closed.

Our basses survived the trip; Chris and I grabbed them and headed out the plane, making sure that Adam was close behind us. We took a trek to the luggage carousels, I found the proper one and we retrieved our bags quickly. Headed to the oversize luggage, crossed my fingers, and got the guitar. It felt intact. To the taxi kiosk. A long line. An old, cheerful black lady attended us. A bit of a struggle to find a cab that will take all five of us, and finally someone did. The long ride from Newark to … The Roosevelt Hotel midtown.

It seemed our manager Traey was in the middle of a musical about Fela Kuti and couldn’t greet us, so he asked two friends to host us until he got out of the theater. The two friends were Mary and Ann, two Asian girls from Toronto. They were incredibly bubbly and friendly. We piled into their little two-bed room and got acquainted.

We plotted drinks and food for Chris; I escaped for a cigarette with Adam downstairs. A door man accosted us and asked us if we were in a band. We groped our way through a conversation about how to go about success, then he invited us to go to the bar on the roof. We went back usptairs to join the others and are convinced by Mary and Ann to join them for one drink. I suggest the roof top bar. We gather and then we make our way there, which required taking a service elevator and having three large men unnecessarily guide us in its use. We got to the roof, stepped out into a dark hallway and onto the balcony. Suits abound. There was actually an Asian American group meeting, so I was surrounded by my expensively dressed brothers and sisters. We were given a low table by a loudspeaker and seated. The air was cool, and we were surrounded by skyscrapers and the successful. It was a bit disorienting, but again we settled in and talked to Mary and Ann. Mutual friends were discovered. The drinks sunk in, and we enjoyed each others’ company.

The time came to feed Chris, who hasn’t seen food since the morning. I suggested stepping out onto the street and seeing what we found. We huddled for a smoke and another Asian American, this time in hard-hat and yellow vest, came to bum one. We asked him where we could find food, and he pointed the way. His eyes were merry. We followed his directions. We found a busy street and I spied a corner market. I suggested that we go in and check it out, and luckily they had the obligatory little deli. Hefty bagels go around. A large plate of fries. A Foster’s lager the size of my head appeared in Adam’s hand.

We learned that people were converging onto our location and so we got beers, brown bags, and waited on the street. An old friend of Adam’s arrived, and more mutual friends were discovered. Traey arrived from his show, with a somewhat lukewarm review. We decided to head to Traey’s loft and said goodbye to Adam’s friend.

Back to the Roosevelt, and Mary and Ann, to retrieve our luggage. Promises to catch up with each other in our respective cities were exchanged and we parted. We cabbed it to Traey’s loft in the Upper West Side – that part of New York unknown to me. I took care of the fare and it tapped me out. We piled out and admired the building, walked in and admired the foyer, and took the elevator to the 14th floor. There were two lofts available to us and so found room for everyone. One of the lofts overlooked the river and the George Washington bridge – a beautiful sight. I sat down with Adam as the rest went out for groceries. We briefly discussed getting into some trouble before the night ended, thought the better of it (at least I did), and decided to rest before the next days’ business meeting. Sleep came to me on the couch, dreams putting three periods after my first days’ sentence.

Back to the Beauty Bar – and So Far

Beauty Bar

Next week we’re headed back to the Beauty Bar, where POSR had its second show ever. This made me reflect a bit on the ride so far. On that first Beauty Bar show, Jake played his DJ set and then slipped in the two formative POSR songs at the end of his set. The band members were three, and one was a girl. The rest of the night’s entertainment were DJ’s, many of whom were our friends. We had a good response – especially to the girl. I thought, ‘hmm – this could work.’

Nowadays we find ourselves playing with other bands. There are five members now, and all of them guys. Two bass players instead of one, and Jake uses a microphone and a megaphone instead of a laptop. We have someone handling the programs, and someone else handling the house sound. We have a good set of fully fleshed songs; we have many promising songs in the works. We’re working with some top flight producers – people we’ve admired and respected and are now collaborating with.

The response has been mostly good, except for the odds shows where significant details beyond our control derailed us a bit. The one show at midnight on a Sunday, after playing the night before in another city – where we followed a pair of metal bands. The show in the plush, cavernous Houston bar where the P.A. system was disastrous. The good shows, however … well, I think you had to be there. You can look at the photos, or watch the videos, but its best to be there. Even I had fun – and I wasn’t even in the parties!

Its been a small adventure for me. I’ve relearned my string instruments; dealt with a record company; played in a gay bar in San Antonio. I’ve heard some great young bands, turned new band-mates into friends, and tried to find band-mates lost in the chaos of the night.

I’ve learned to try and be graceful in the face of disaster – and to enjoy the good moments when they come.

This week we’re headed to the Beauty Bar. It’s been quite a trip on our way back. I can’t wait to see what will happen now.

listening to:

Velvet Underground: Fully Loaded

“I Found A Reason (Demo)”

“Sad Song (Demo)”

There is a secret world concealed within this one.

(i’ve taken this from one of my favorite sites, and I pass it on to you…)

The lives we lead, and the lives we wish we led.

This world, the so-called “real world,” is just a front. Pull back the curtain and you’ll see the libraries are all filled with runaways writing novels, the highways are humming with escapees and sympathizers, all the receptionists and sensible mothers are straining at the leash for a chance to show how alive they still are. . . and all that talk of practicality and responsibility is just threats and bluffing to keep us from reaching out our hands to find that heaven lies in reach before us.

You can taste it in the shock and roar of a first, unexpected kiss, or in the blood in your mouth that instant after an accident when you realize you’re still alive. It blows in the wind you feel on the rooftops of a really reckless night of adventure. You hear it in the magic of your favorite songs, how they lift and transport you in ways that no science or psychology could ever account for. It might be you’ve seen evidence of it scratched into bathroom walls in a code without a key, or you’ve been able to make out a pale reflection of it in the movies they make to keep us entertained. It’s in between the words when we speak of our desires and aspirations, still lurking somewhere beneath the limitations of being “practical” and “realistic.”

When poets and radicals stay up until sunrise, wracking their brains for the perfect sequence of words or deeds to fill hearts (or cities) with fire, they’re trying to find a hidden entrance to it. When children escape out the window to go wandering late at night, or freedom fighters search for a weakness in government fortifications, they’re trying to sneak into it—for they know better than us where the doors are hidden. When teenagers vandalize a billboard to provoke all-night chases with the police, or anarchists interrupt an orderly demonstration to smash the windows of a corporate chain store, they’re trying to storm its gates.

When you’re making love and you discover a new sensation or region of your lover’s body, and the two of you feel like explorers discovering a new part of the world on a par with a desert oasis or the coast of an unknown continent, as if you are the first ones to reach the north pole or the moon, you are charting its frontiers.

It’s not a safer place than this one—on the contrary, it is the sensation of danger there that brings us back to life: the feeling that for once, for one moment that seems to eclipse the past and future, there is something real at stake.

Maybe you stumbled into it by accident, once, amazed at what you found. The old world splintered behind and inside you, and no physician or metaphysician could put it back together again. Everything before became trivial, irrelevant, ridiculous as the horizons suddenly telescoped out around you and undreamt-of new paths offered themselves. And perhaps you swore that you would never return, that you would live out the rest of your life electrified by that urgency, in the thrill of discovery and transformation—but return you did.

Common sense dictates that this world can only be experienced temporarily, that it is just the shock of transition, and no more; but the myths we share around our fires tell a different story: we hear of women and men who stayed there for weeks, years, who never returned, who lived and died there as heroes. We know, because we feel it in that atavistic chamber of our hearts that holds the memory of freedom from a time before time, that this secret world is near, waiting for us. You can see it in the flash in our eyes, in the abandon of our dances and love affairs, in the protest or party that gets out of hand.

You’re not the only one trying to find it. We’re out here, too . . . some of us are even waiting there for you. And you should know that anything you’ve ever done or considered doing to get there is not crazy, but beautiful, noble, necessary.

Revolution is simply the idea we could enter that secret world and never return; or, better, that we could burn away this one, to reveal the one beneath entirely.

Still a Crime: “Housed While Black”

Saw a clip of congresspeople fleeing journalists after being confronted with their Birther beliefs. To those living under rocks and inside cheap bars, a ‘birther’ is someone who doesn’t believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States – and is therefore not the President (to those who are really, REALLY hung over, only people born in the U.S. can become president).

Here’s my two cents:

What it is, tragically, is latent racism – the real issue that is being politely tiptoed around. Precisely the kind of thing that is being unearthed – and confronted – during Obama’s administration. There is a relevant article from a N.Y. Times columnist regarding the “birthers,” and Henry Louis Gates (the professor arrested in his own home):

“The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it’s the White House. Just as some in Durham and Cambridge couldn’t believe that Gates belonged in the neighborhood, so does a vocal minority find it hard to believe that an African-American could possibly be the real president of the United States. ”

Grab your pint glass and read the whole column here

By the way: if you’re a ‘birther,’ then go fuck yourself. The fact is that American or not, Barack Obama is a welcome change in a White House that for the past eight years has sunk beyond the Middle Ages right into the Dark Ages, gladly. I was creating a new identity, sharpening spears, learning how to make fire from ostrich dung, and getting ready to sail to New Zealand if Mcain and Palin rolled into the White House, for gosh sakes!# Now I can stay and drink on Red River! If you’re questioning the legitimacy of a slightly ( he still hasn’t rolled back the CIA rampage on civilians under the guise of a war on terror) more HUMAN president, then I’m afraid I have to take out the race card – and stuff its blackened end into your liver.

peace & love, illson

#note: said plans above are all true. does anyone want to buy a large raft? its pink and rat-proof, and can almost make it across any river. guaranteed to get you survivalist chicks.

illson the late-night radio ho

Got on the Mutant Hardcore Radio Hour last night. It’s a long-running radio show on KTRU, Rice University’s FM station. I used to have a monthly with one of their DJ’s, Rosa, who is one of my favorite vinyl collectors. She was kind enough to let me trade tracks with her and promote the upcoming shows on the air. A small sound-board, manned by one of my favorite djs, in a small room full of records and cd’s; heaven! Here’s our set list:

01:00 AM- pere ubu / final solution [7"] on the hearthan label.
————————————————————————————————————-
12:54 AM- pagans / angela [the pink album] on the crypt label.
12:50 AM- guitar wolf / roaring blood [jet generation] on the matador label.
12:48 AM- the brood / why don’t you call me [in spite of it all] on the skyclad label.
12:45 AM- the dickies / you drive me ape [the dickies 10"] on the a&m label.
12:44 AM- the mirrors / you me love [something that would never do] on the violet times label.
————————————————————————————————————-
12:39 AM- locksley / she does [locksley] on the light brigade label.
12:36 AM- new fugitives / that’s queer [v/a back from the grave] on the crypt label.
12:33 AM- the sonics / have love will travel [here are the sonics!!!] on the etiquette label.
12:32 AM- benders / can’t tame me [v/a back from the graveq] on the crypt label.
12:29 AM- the strange boys / poem party [strange boys and girls club] on the in the red label.
————————————————————————————————————-
12:25 AM- the nomads / real gone lover [outburst] on the homestead records label.
12:23 AM- the tuff darts / fun city [the tuff darts] on the sire recordes label.
12:20 AM- silver cocks / holiday in auschwitz [7"] on the zodiac killer label.
12:17 AM- kitty daisy and lewis / going up the country [7"] on the sunday best label.
————————————————————————————————————-
12:11 AM- rusted shut / shot in the head [dead] on the load records label.
12:08 AM- the reigning sound / you’re so strange [time bomb highschool] on the in the red label.
12:07 AM- sweet / the six teens [desolation blvd] on the sony label.

It was a raunchy set of tunes. Thanks, KTRU & Rosa!

Illson’s Manifesto

Friends, Lovers, Soldiers

It’s time to unleash the sound my cohorts DJ Jake Childs, DJ Chris Casual, DJ Adam Warped and yours truly DJ illson have been stewing and brewing and smoking and spicing, twisting and beating and basting, tasted and cooled off and DONE. We are here for your listening pleasure, to feed your ear mouths with the adventurous cuisine of our skittish sonics.

ON WHAT WE FEEL IS EMERGING
The new wave of techno – the sound of digital decay, of a primal scream, of dirty booming bass lines made by striking strings with skin, of snarling guitars inciting cynical singing, the struggle against the safety of comfort, luxury, familiarity – the new wave of techno is the sound of a scuffle between passion and mechanization, a struggle between flawed humans and relentlessly perfect machinery. The new wave will show that the future’s hope is  the broken machine – THE  HACKED FACTORY – where inputs are transformed, by mysterious and ambitious algorithms, patches authored and added by your console jockey friends from Iceland, Taiwan, The Philippines, Peoria, Detroit, and defectors from the Rand Corporation and MIT Artificial Intelligence lab, plugging in pipes and routing process in self-reflexive ways, make a mantra of impracticality, alert to the possibility of the mysterious, whose corporate culture is centered on leaping into spaces which have no numbers, astronauts in the digital cosmos, this spirit turned into THINGS that are then are disgorged into the undying assembly line, never stopping, never sleeping, metallic river of OBJECTS – the mechanized flow that makes a mockery of rivers and REAL flow – the relentless clack of the moving  line which carries the Children of this New Wave, the offspring of the Hacked Factory, whose souls are pretzels of mathematics, whose essence are undecipherable lists of Ones and Zeros – - designed infants, Frankenstein beauty pageant pre-schoolers running on buggy software, robotic dogs from Tokyo who want to eat their masters, wood chippers with dreams of bonsai, schoolteachers with unnameable hungers, blondes with big blue eyes and and sugar daddies,  men with minds that love blossoms of flames and the smell of fuel – The new wave of techno is the song of busted and hacked boxes and gadgets and the song of the discontented users of tech and of the instruments that make them strong, that help them truly LIVE – all spliced and soldered together into the binary switch called POSR. Faced with your new toy, do you switch it ON, or do you switch it OFF?

Help us test our device by throwing the switch. For light, or for darkness.

POSR – Digital Hardcore – the sound of recycled broken beat machines, of passionate bass players, of pissed off singers -
the sound of humans throwing their horrors to the flame of this newly birthed sound. We play the songs of the souls of machines, of their struggle with life, and their struggle with us.

POSR is the sound of the Uneasy Interface, of poor ergonomics. POSR is the sound of crude cyborgs, of hacks and improvised fixes, of synthetic celebrities and sampled melodies and chats gone bad.

POSR is a mountain song to the GreatCircuit, its disconnectedness, its cautious connections, its connections creations, its assemblies, and its annihilation of it all.

POSR is finally just a crude Metroelectronomic organic music interface – designed for human use,

The sigh of the ghost in the Machine. A tone. An alarm. A bleep.

10101010000101011{illson end transmission}1111111110000010100101001001110000010000101010010000101011011110101110

My Genius Blog of the Day

Below is a bulletin posted by a model/houston scenester acquaintance of mine, who will remain nameless. For those in doubt, get in touch and I’ll send you the direct link. Yes, it is real. Enjoy – I know I did!

“Don’t laugh, and it may sound stupid and all, but here it goes..

So has the sun really gotten stronger throughout the times? You know the global warming thing? Cause for years and years my ancestors in Africa never had to worry about sunscreen, but now that alot of us came to the US, I am doomed if I don’t wear it when I leave the house!!!

Let’s not forget how they keep raising SPF… they now have SPF 100!!! Being that I am a direct descendant from Africa, and Congo being so close to the equator and all, I kinda figured my skin was use to this Sun, but it’s not!?

I get sunspots, Tan, and freckly if I don’t wear sunscreen…What the hell? I don’t get it!!! Is it cause I use other girly products on my skin or have we evolved somehow or what?

Out of all these different people I know, I wish I had a friend who was some ecologist er something to tell me what the deal with this is… I have all these Science questions I want answered! I wish Darwin was still here… Anyways, just one of those thoughts of mine…

I’m off to bed!!! Goodnight…”

Bay Area, CA: Day One

I arrived in Oakland yesterday afternoon after a brief, uneventful, and suprisingly punctual flight which deposited us in the city 15 minutes early. My old friend Jordan the Janitor picked us up and took us to their warehouse, where I proceeded to down about three bottles of blonde ale, chased it with a quarter of a magical chocolate mushroom, sprinkled that with nitrous balloons through-out, and topped off with a bump of “bubba.”* I lost the rest of the afternoon after that, and found myself in our bunk bed. After a wee bit of convincing, Jordan took us to a local Mexican restaurant where I ordered nothing and proceeded to eat his pastor. I was still pretty disoriented at this point. Then, we drove to San Francisco to a warehouse full of large. home-made robots and machines of various functions. One speedily lifted an armchair, which you can sit in, about six feet in the air. Another crawled along a suspended line and dispensed shots of jameson whiskey. There was an active, four-legged stove which toasted bread and hot-dogs and shot flame. There were two hydraulic arms wrapped in clothes which could be controlled to swing their two-by-four planks against each other with satisfying slaps. There was a robotic human sitting on a workbench which you controlled with a wired vodoo doll; twist it one way to make the robot move accordingly, move its head to get a different view from the installed camera eye. Then there was the show-stopper, a flame-throwing percussion instrument that created beats through small, timed explosions in the air. You could hear and FEEL the shockwave across the room. We then headed to a bar whose name I can’t recall where we listened to live jazz and I listened to three women talk about the pros of having a midwife when you have a baby.

At this point I say I’m tired, we take the bridge over to Oakland, and I say my goodnights.

I’m pretty pleased with Day One. Today, a home-cooked meal and then an all night party at an adjacent warehouse. I’ll keep you all posted.

UPDATE

Here is the invitation to the Robot show and a link to pics of some of their machines.

5/08/09
Friday May 8,
8:00PM until Midnight
1043 Marin St., S.F., Ca. 94124

INTERACTIVE ROBOTICS/MACHINE PERFORMANCE
Live Audience Experiments with Machines and Robots

Audience operated machines and robots,
but you don’t have to, strictly volunteer, nothing virtual here!
Be a passive audience member no more!
WelI haven’t done one of these shows since, well, 2004?
Lots of new stuff!

WITH! Dj Big Daddy and DJ Ragi ‘da Lawyer
and
A screening of the LOADED WARRIOR, by Jason Broemmel

To see what we have been up to go to:
http://www.monkeyview.net/id/4/assorted_machines/assorted_machines_and_robots/index.vhtml

YOU VOLUNTARILY ASSUME THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH BY
ATTENDING THIS PERFORMANCE, Blah, blah, blah.
This is a fundraiser for me of sorts seeings how i have been
unemployed since Sept. 08…

OUCH: A Model’s Routine

OUCH: A Model’s Routine

Today I’m going to share Paul Coelho’s blog. My girlfriend and I often leave the TV on, and I’ve noticed that the airwaves have been taken over by reality shows peopled by – let me take it back a bit. I’m a little hard-pressed to call some of these characters people. I told my girlfriend that I miss the old shows, because bad acting is still an ACTION, while now the useless gestures of unimaginative, insubstantial pople are inflicted onto my retina. All that emptiness melts my brain.

In short, the Kardashians is torture. The Girls Next Door, MTV, etc – are  brain-blenders.

In order to write the book “The Winner is alone”, the main theme of which is the cult of celebrities, I had to do some interesting research into the routine of those women who inhabit the collective imagination: photographer’s models. However different they may be, what follows is an invariable pattern of behavior among them:

A] Before going to bed they use several creams to clean the pores and keep the skin hydrated – from an early age making the organism dependent on foreign elements. They wake up, drink a cup of black coffee without any sugar, and some fruit with fibers – so that the food that they ingest during the rest of the day passes quickly through the intestines. They climb on the scales three to four times a day and become depressed by each excessive gram denounced by the needle.

B] They are all aware that they will soon be upstaged by new faces and new tendencies, and they need urgently to show that their talent goes beyond the catwalks. They are constantly pleading with their agents to arrange a test for them so that they can show that they are capable of working as actresses – which is their big dream.

C] Unlike what the legend claims, they pay for their expenses – travel, hotel, and all those salads. They are invited by fashion designers’ assistants to do what they call casting, to select those who will be picked to face the catwalk or pose for a photo session. At that moment they are in front of people who are invariably ill-humored and use the little power they have to pour out their daily frustrations and never say a nice or encouraging word: “horrible” is the comment most commonly heard.

D] Their parents are proud of the daughter that has begun so well, and regret having ever said they were against that career – after all, she is earning money and helping the family. Their boyfriends have fits of jealousy, but control themselves because it’s good for the ego to be with a fashion model. Their girlfriends envy them secretly (or openly).

E] They go to all the parties they are invited to, and behave as if they were far more important than they actually are, which is a symptom of insecurity. They always have a glass of champagne in their hand, but this is just part of the image that they want to send out. They know that alcohol contains elements that can affect their weight, so their favorite drink is mineral water (still – although the gas does not affect the weight, it does have immediate consequences for the contour of the stomach).

G] They sleep badly due to the pills. They hear stories about anorexia – the most common disease in the milieu, a kind of nervous disturbance caused by obsession with weight and appearance which eventually educates the organism and rejects any type of food. They say that this won’t happen to them. But they never notice when the first symptoms appear.

H] They go directly from childhood to the world of luxury and glamour without passing through adolescence and youth. When asked about their plans for the future, they always have the answer on the tip of their tongue: “I want to go to university and study philosophy. I’m just doing this to be able to pay for my studies”. They know that this isn’t true. They can’t afford to attend school: there’s always a test in the morning, a photo session in the afternoon, a party which they have to attend to be seen, admired and desired.

People think they lead a fairytale life. And they want to believe this. Until some more curious writer decides not to give up, and questions a bit further. After a great deal of hesitating, they eventually say: “I was born to be an actress. So I am capable of pretending that this miserable life is the most glamorous profession in the world”.

New Words from an Old Friend

by illson

A figure from my Rave days in L.A. recently found me on a social networking site and have gotten in touch. Tom was a New Yorker who made his way, Don Quixote stylee, all the way to the City of Angles. I remember my current girlfriend and I taking him home back to the house  on Carbon Canyon in Malibu, and hiking up the hill to the little one room cabin perched in the heart of it, sitting down on its ramshackle porch and trying to see the ocean through the drifting fog.  And talking. He talked about the nexus of spiritual forces concentrated in New Mexico. About the mathematical, geometric construction of reality. About hitchhiking to L.A.

We both were mad then, mad mad kids doing our hustles when we drifted into the city, making music, digging scenes, shaking people up and talking about ourselves and the future and what needs to get done and what we’re doing and what we’re hoping to do.

He headed back to New York at some point, and somehow we lost touch. After many many years, I got a message from him. He’s been trying to catch up since then, but somehow I haven’t made myself get around to it – a mystery.

This morning he sent me some words, and  memories of trading lines, rhymes and songs bubbled up from the shadows of the past. Here’s what he sent (with very slight editing). I’m glad we’re still doing it, Tom. Thanks.

I’ll girl you up, you boy me down
No limits when you are so bound
Softly subtle – Rough and tumble
The orbit shuttle on the ground

Rough me up with your submission
We’re imprisoned by ambitions
Whisper loudly when you’re lying
Manic laughter sounds like crying

We grew up without a father
Be the sister to my brother
It feels closer when you’re further
I’m your downfall, you’re my lover

In outer space when I’m inside
Reaching out to block the light
An exhibitionist who hides
her lust for blood/ for peace/ for fights

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