Notes From The Ant Empire

Recently I drove up to San Francisco, zipping up the Central Valley as fast as I could, escaping LA for a night to visit a friend. Cemeteries. Gun Ranges. Oil Refineries. Fast Food Restaurants. Trucks and Truckers. Shredded tires baking on the asphalt. The road itself is a tale of two cities, but with the same plot: man, buildings, and money.

I love to drive. It’s what I do. Some people dance, some swim. I take road trips.

I once drove straight to Missoula from LA in about twenty hours, saw a lot of bountiful country and hardly a town, it was beautiful. There is something reassuring about being nowhere. Being off the map. Being amidst so much, much nothing. Being somewhere even Google can’t find you.

But lately I’ve been amazed how fast nothing can change. How one year it is a dusty field and the next year it’s a Carl’s Jr, a web of roads and stoplights, a whole town with a name, complete with disillusioned youths and shopping centers.

I’ve done this trip so many times I can tell distance by the roadside landmarks. Harris Ranch. Pea Soup Anderson’s. So I notice what’s changed. What part of the valley has filled in. The familiar attractions allow me to know just how much further it is till San Francisco, or how close I am to home, like Magic Mountain – which breaks my heart to pass knowing it’s closing soon and the best roller coasters I’ve ever been on are shutting down.

At 80 mph, paradoxically, the world comes at you a bit more gently, in slow motion.

Fenceposts stabbed into the earth keep time heading north, as the sun descends to your left, and in both directions rows of alfalfa spread to the horizon like a lake. It’s easy to lose yourself in the momentum as the hours tick down and you get closer to your destination.

Right next to every gas station is a fast food joint, it was only a matter of time before someone put them together where they belong. Now the Subway is in the Texaco and the Arby’s is in the 76 station. I park outside and watch fat people going in and out and decide to enter too.

I order something tasteless, fatty, and that will probably kill me one day. I eat it quickly, nervously. I can’t wait to get back on the road, back to my car, my turtle shell, upon which is stacked all the cars in the universe, and we’re all holding the world aloft.

Out on the road, it’s obvious that the power lines strangle us all.

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The bad thing about the Internet is that there is no individuality in the text itself, the font withstanding. You can’t take a handwriting sample, for instance.

You can’t tell that someone was angry by how hard they pushed on the pen.

For someone to really notice, you’d have to write like this:

I’M REALLY MAD, DAMMIT!!!! I WANT TO HURT SOMEONE………

I was living in Boston during the 2000 elections with my brother. We stayed up late awaiting the results but he went to sleep and told me to leave him a note who won. When they gave it to Bush I scribbled BUSH FUCKING WON! on a piece of paper and left it there on the coffee table.

The next night we noticed that I had written so hard it scratched the words BUSH FUCKING WON into the coffee table. Double bummer.

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I bet from space we really do look like an ant empire.

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Since Day Light Savings was moved up I’ve been thrown off by the sun setting so late. It’s getting dark now as I type this and it’s almost 8 o’clock. I look around my apartment, wonder if the plants notice the time change and that reminds me to remember to remind myself later to water them when I get around to it, and I exhale and let out carbon dioxide and watch it fly out the window.

I’m pretty sure the plants don’t think about time.

But we do. Obsessively.

I read this article about a man who works in Mexico, which chose not to move up their date, so he has to leave home an extra hour earlier for work, since 8am here is still 7am just twenty miles south of him. This proves time is an illusion.

And so is breakfast and its propaganda, with its fascist lies that it’s the most important meal of the day. The egg cartel needs to be broken.

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What will we ever do if we run out of things to sell? Offer dinner in the dark?

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This afternoon I was driving to a friend’s in Highland Park and passed by the so-called “Hollywood Fire”. I snapped some pics of it with my phone. Probably should have been watching the road but I couldn’t help staring at it. I felt like some kinda arsonist.

Later on I watched the news and the talking heads were all excited about the possibility of the fire possibly being able to, hypothetically, burn down the Hollywood sign.

If conditions were worse they asked the fireman in front of the microphone, with lust in their throats and high drama in their voices, it could have posed a danger to the sign, right?!

That’s all anyone really seemed to care about.

The sign.

The news of the small brush fire, a rather common occurrence in this dry county full of hills and brush and fuel for that sort of thing, beamed all over the world because the pictures of the smoke behind the sign were so compelling.

Drudge had it blasted on the top of his page like it was signs of the apocalypse.

The smoke was billowing high in the sky and it did make a bizarrely spectacular panorama. I guess I don’t totally blame the news anchors for being somewhat breathless about it. Pass Burbank, a large orange cloud of smoke passed overhead and darkened the freeway a pumpkin hue, it felt like Mars in Total Recall.

Reminds me, I haven’t heard lately, does Bush want to go to Mars still?

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If wildfires increase due to the earth heating up there may just come a day when the poor people will be living in the hills and by the rising ocean and the rich people will all live in the valley and the east.

Bel Air will become a flammable ghetto. Sun Valley home to movie stars.

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Also today in LA, the LAPD announced the use of new 5-inch flashlights instead of their old skull-crushing Maglites they used to roll with. This is all in response to a beating they gave some guy three years ago, 11 blows to the head, all caught on tape.

LOS ANGELES – Police will soon be outfitted with a cutting edge flashlight that is not only brighter than others, but too small to be used as a weapon.

The idea for the 7060 LED flashlight was conceived just days after news cameras broadcast images of LAPD officers beating car-theft suspect Stanley Miller with a two-pound, two-foot long standard issue police flashlight.

That’s bad PR, ya’ know.

So instead of teaching their officers restraint they made it so they couldn’t use their flashlight as bludgeons anymore. Am I missing something? Don’t they still have batons? And guns? Your child crashes the truck so you buy them a car.

Isn’t the point to just apprehend the suspect instead of pummeling him?

I wonder if cops lament the new lights and think they make them look girly.

Or if they’re generally relieved not to have to carry those old, heavy suckers from their belt anymore.

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Some people collect their thoughts in a journal.
I collect mine online.

Dreams of Dreams

Social Darwinism and That Dick Tucker Carlson

So I’m watching Tucker. Why? Because it was on.

Tucker may have lost the bow tie but he’s still a Republican. He had resident Democrat Bill Press on and that crazy Pat Robertson who’s recently has been made to look sane in comparison to this neo-con administration. So in a way it was a balanced table.

The topic changed to Obama’s use of the phrase “social Darwinism” at a Union rally. They all laughed together and agreed it was a foolish mistake on Obama’s part.

Funny thing is when I went to look for the exact quote I could only come up with a blurb that referenced the phrase here:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama told a union forum Tuesday the Bush administration is pursuing a policy of “Social Darwinism” that leaves every man and woman struggling.

The same stupid paragraph here, and here.

Why did no one use the quote where he actually says “social darwinism”?

Is this how news is done?

Personally, I’m glad that he is speaking to the heart of the matter, identifying the core of conservative’s beliefs. If there’s any doubt that they believe in, and wish to practice social darwinism, one need only peruse right-wing blogs following Katrina. Tax Cuts for the rich, Higher Tuitions for the poor. Might = Right. And, of course, Privatized Health Care. Republicans are Biological Creationists, Social Darwinists, and Lilliputian, self-righteous Viagra Swallowers, at least Rush Limbaugh.

So Tucker, Pat, and even Bill were having a good laugh at Obama’s supposed faux-pas and I was sitting on the couch ten feet from the screen wondering what was so funny. After Tucker joked that Union members are too ignorant to know what that phrase even meant, Bill Press upped him by joking that union members probably don’t even know who Darwin is.

Nice one, Bill.

This is what the media thinks of the working man. Not only are we not up to the task of having a politician speak about the truth, and in a philosophical sense, but we are too stupid to understand the words coming out of his mouth, like Jackie Chan in Rush Hour.

What hope is there when the gatekeepers to the political discourse are a bunch 5-Cent comedians who think we’re baboons to be mocked and ridiculed and when a public figure dares to respect his audience by speaking from the heart, they sit in the seats and blather at the cameras about what a mistake it was.

Things started to click.

The other night I clicked on a link to watch a clip from the 60 Minutes interview with John Edwards and his wife. While it was loading a cheesy car commercial played — and then straight into the heaviness of a discussion about his wife’s unavoidable, imminent death.

It struck me hard.

The sudden change of emotion. The utter heartless, illogic of running that commercial while one was waiting to view such a clip. While waiting to witness a woman and her husband discuss the enormity of cancer, who is going to be persuaded to buy a new Ford? It dawned on me that our culture, the way we receive information, is structured this way. Commercials ALWAYS, by design, interupt your emotional stream of being. You’re watching a documentary on children born with autism and five seconds later Ronald McDonald is singing to a dancing tree while children slide down rainbows. Huh!? You’re drunk, up late watching Blind Date and a commercial comes on for starving children in Africa, South America, somewhere in the world where children live in landfills. Bummer.

There’s no continuity, no contemplation. It drives me crazy. The see-saw of modern life.

I think it’s why, as a society, we’re so anxious, why all the kids in the playground swinging on the monkey bars have ADD, why we end up voting more for the next American Idol than the next American President. Why we don’t sit and reflect and deal with our lives. Why we’re always running from them.

The emotional signals we receive are constantly being interrupted, overwhelmed, or jumbled. We don’t think about one thing for too long. The cultural and media participant is so overloaded with conflicting signals and ideas that our attention spans are constantly diverted, and our emotional maturity is evermore stunted. 50 year-old women with juicy on the ass of their sweatpants. When things gets heavy, we’re easily consoled by other thoughts.

This is what Tucker, Pat, and Bill were doing. When Obama got too serious they distracted us with a joke and the inference that speaking truth like this is something not to be done.

And then they moved on.

Assuming we would too.

Modest Mouse is Number #1

Modest Mouse is number one.

Now it’s not just a fanboy chant from yours truly, but a goddamn honest-to-god fact. In a sign that the apocalypse is right around the corner Modest Mouse entered the Billboard 200 this week as numero uno. King of the hill. Top dog. Er, top Mouse I guess.

Of course, they won’t be up there long, I’m sure some crappy pop singer will come along and sell out every Best Buy in Des Moines pretty soon, but for now I’m relishing this moment. There was a time when I was walking around the snows and boozy salloons of Boston with The Moon and Antartica in my headphones, feeling like the world was the coldest and loneliest planet in the universe, and I swear that Issac saved my life that year by agreeing with me.

Even though I own a free copy of We Were Dead Before We Even Knew It already, I owe it to him to head down to Freaky Beat records and pick up a copy, hopefully helping keep them on top of the charts.

You know, Dashboard is even growing on me. It might be one of my favorite Modest Mouse tunes of all time believe it or not – anytime you can dance to lyrics like these it’s gotta be a damn good time:

Hard-wired to concieve, so much we’d have to stow it
Even needs have needs, tiny giants made of tinier giants.
Don’t wear eyelids so I don’t miss the last laugh of this show.

The wife and I have tickets for the Greek, we’re geeked for it.

So what has changed in the world since no one knew what the hell I was talking about to now, when Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen claim them as one of their favorite band?

I think the world is finally as fed up with the circumstances and institutions of our existence, (God, Government, Stupid people) as I was around 2000. As Issac was when he wrote:

I wanna live in a city with no friends or family
I’m gonna look out the window of my color T.V.
I wanna remember to remember to forget you forgot me

S o Issac can probably thank two people for this success.

1. Johnny Mar, of course.
2. George Bush.

I’ll leave you with my favorite verse on the album and encourage you to pick up a copy.

Oh, well lesson dance
And shoot to god
A storm-suffered owl
You’re not invisible inside your car
No matter what stupid sort of mission you’re on
Well, you’re not invisible inside your car

I go absolutely mental
Good ramblin’ George
Well, you’re not invisible inside your car
No matter, you could breathe it like your flies in a jar
Yeah, you’re not invisible

Now you know where a line like “life looks aflame from afar, but close up it’s just fireflies in a jar”.

ArtofStarving, bitch!!!

Ode to Radiohead: Happiness and Other Rare Happenings

“Life in the 21st Century has become a factory of living.”

The window was open and the noise from the city seemed to drift into my room and manipulate the sentence as I stared at the screen. The words took on various meanings and the letters twisted like the limbs of the Devil’s Tree.

“Modernity is a balloon made of paradox.”

Yes. Yes. Yes! I trilled.

But what does that mean?

I’m no economist. In fact the first thing a dollar does when meeting me is melt. But the problem I see with how we function economically is that it is all predicated on so much shit. Literally. The endless production, marketing, and transfer of crap is what fuels the world market. Remove the basics: food, shelter, water, clothing (although I don’t think we need runways and Tyra Bank’s Top Model) and what you have left is everything. 99.9999%.

Personally, everyday I haul a bag of trash out to the dumpster. Everyday I buy something I don’t really need. Although tonight’s pinot is certainly an exception. I believe I even write it off as a business expense – what writer doesn’t drink?

I came across an article in alternet that shined some light on what I have been feeling as of late. This idea that the modern world is a drag and everybody is running around feeling much heavier than we should. Why in a world of such plenty are people constantly disappointed?

The environmentalist Alan Durning found that in 1991 the average American family owned twice as many cars as it did in 1950, drove 2.5 times as far, used 21 times as much plastic, and traveled 25 times farther by air. Gross national product per capita tripled during that period. Our houses are bigger than ever and stuffed to the rafters with belongings (which is why the storage-locker industry has doubled in size in the past decade). We have all sorts of other new delights and powers — we can send email from our cars, watch 200 channels, consume food from every corner of the world. Some people have taken much more than their share, but on average, all of us in the West are living lives materially more abundant than most people a generation ago.

What’s odd is, none of it appears to have made us happier. Throughout the postwar years, even as the gnp curve has steadily climbed, the “life satisfaction” index has stayed exactly the same. Since 1972, the National Opinion Research Center has surveyed Americans on the question: “Taking all things together, how would you say things are these days — would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” (This must be a somewhat unsettling interview.) The “very happy” number peaked at 38 percent in the 1974 poll, amid oil shock and economic malaise; it now hovers right around 33 percent.

Could it be that capitalism needs a sisyphean population to continue, one intent on creating and accepting ever more unreachable wants and desires? In other words, consumers that will perpetually chase the American dream till they’re in debt and overworked and enslaved to their creditors.

Yet, year by year people are realizing the futileness of such consumption and are growing tired of pushing that boulder up the hill.

The most poignant statement of all is that of our president, shortly after 9-11, when he told us all to go shopping again.

It shows who is really in charge around here.

At the Mall of America, you can rent walkie-talkies when you enter so you don’t get lost. There’s a water park in the middle of it. Bars and movie theaters on the top floor. It has its own post office.

Even as someone who tries to live by a small code of minimalism I find myself itching to shop when I have an extra bit of cash sitting in my pocket. It’s one of the quickest (legal) things we can do in this country to make ourselves feel instantly better. A new shirt. New lamp. New sneakers. A new you. You hope.

Problem is, all this economic activity comes at a cost. The environment has been quietly taking the abuse for a while now but old mother earth is cranky and she’s hot and she’s letting us know that she won’t put up with our shennanigans much longer.

The median predictions of the world’s climatologists — by no means the worst-case scenario — show that unless we take truly enormous steps to rein in our use of fossil fuels, we can expect average temperatures to rise another four or five degrees before the century is out, making the globe warmer than it’s been since long before primates appeared. We might as well stop calling it earth and have a contest to pick some new name, because it will be a different planet. Humans have never done anything more profound, not even when we invented nuclear weapons.

So not only are we overworked, disconnected, and overall unsatisfied with our lives, turns out we’re making the earth inhospitable for mankind’s survival.

Ain’t that just a kick in the pants!

It’s no wonder people are bummed. And no surprise when up to a couple of years ago Radiohead was arguably the biggest band on the planet. Increasingly we are a society of scream paintings driving long commutes to the suburbs and exurbs, to plop down with the family for a night of Deal or No Deal and Middle East bombings. We are robots complete with identification numbers, branding on our clothes, and the ability to communicate on the telephone and the Internet with other robots.

We bottle water from thousands of miles away and ship them here, burning barrels and barrels of oil, so that a company can basically sell you a plastic bottle with a label – because it’s essentially the same as tap water. You’re paying for transportation and packaging.

To step back is to see the insanity. What is the difference if you drink water from North America or Fiji? Just because a company can make money from the absurdity, and people will buy it, doesn’t make it right. A free market is not always a wise market.

Just as a rich country is not necessarily a happy one.

In fact, once basic needs are met, the “satisfaction” data scrambles in mindlblowing ways. A sampling of Forbes magazine’s “richest Americans” have identical happiness scores with Pennsylvania Amish, and are only a whisker above Swedes taken as a whole, not to mention the Masai. The “life satisfaction” of pavement dwellers — homeless people — in Calcutta is among the lowest recorded, but it almost doubles when they move into a slum, at which point they are basically as satisfied with their lives as a sample of college students drawn from 47 nations. And so on.

Next time you hear someone in college moan about how tough it is for them feel free to inform of this this fact. Calcutta slum dwellers are as pleased with their lives as them. Sad fact is most working Americans look back fondly on their college days as the most carefree and enriching time of their life.

Again. What does this mean?

You can’t reverse time, you can’t make us go back to the ox and plow.

We won’t go back.

We’re stuck with insanity. With modernity. With paradox. We’re stuck with the balloon and the uneasy hope, as it drifts over our heads like the blimp at the Rose Bowl, that it doesn’t burst into flames.

So what can we do?

What do I do?

I try to find happiness in smaller places. My plants growing on the balcony. An interesting article. Walking instead of driving to the store. My wife making me laugh.

I heard once: Happiness is the Absence of Misery.

It’s a pretty glum proposal, but accurate. That’s why I try to spend my time loving everything in my universe, because then when you do encounter misery you don’t feel it so much.

New Modest Mouse Meets With Approval: Mine

The masses have spoken. (In this cases masses being, well: me)

The new Modest Mouse CD doesn’t only not suck, it’s pretty damn good.

Check out their myspace, if you do the myspace thing.

I wasn’t a big fan of Good News For People Who Love Bad News and after a listen or two I had written this album off too, but I finally listened to it in the proper context for a Modest Mouse record, on a long road trip.

Lyrically, Issack Brock is not at the top of his game, but vocally he has it all working on this album. The yelping. The guttural moans. The mournful crooning. Once I got passed the idea that he’s not pushing his poetry to the points of The Moon and Antarctica, and that it’s more about the melody now, I really got into it.

The guitar does a lot of talking on this album.

For an excellent review of We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank, check out pitchfork.

In this recent spate of Indie Rock releases from high profile acts, Clap Your Hands, The Arcade Fire, The Shins, it makes me happy that the old champs came through and showed all these upstarts how to make powerful, entertaining, original rock and fucking roll.

They’re coming through town and playing the Greek Theater on my wife’s and I anniversary. Now that Issack has taken to self-mutiliation on stage it might make the perfect romantic evening for the two of us.

Here’s the brooding genius with a fan.

(note: I stole this from their Myspace page – it was just too adorable)

I’m excited to have another good Modest Mouse album to influence the next couple of months of my life. It makes me happy. They are one of those bands – If you like them, you fall in love with them. You obsess over the album and listen to it over and over, picking up new little gems like:

So we carry all the groceries in
while hauling out the trash
and if this doesn’t make us motionless
I do not know what can

Establishing themselves as a band for imaginative videos, this one doesn’t disappoint. It’s their new single Dashboard. Be a good mew-media participant and give it a listen, or, er, a watch… both actually.

Road Trip: 2007 years of scurrying

Pictures of The Owens Valley.

Coming down from Mammoth a couple of weeks ago we snapped some good shots of the snowstorm, the Sierras and the creepy town of Lone Pine.

Enjoy.

The clouds only hung around the mountains; once we were on the highway pass Bishop we were rolling through a desert.

This is the Owens Valley. This area used to be productive farmland until LA stole all the water.

We’ve all seen Chinatown. You know the story. The San Fernando Valley was born but the farms in this place all dried up.

During World War 2 they took the Japanese and held them in an internment camp called Manzanar, in the shadow of the mountains.

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

More of those stately mountaintops.

The town of Lone Pine is something out of a David Lynch flick.

To top off the big old heaping of Americana was the long rattling of a train passing through the Meth wasteland of California City.

These desperate nowhere-towns remind me of Jack Kerouac and Woody Guthrie, cold-blooded killers and mining accidents.

Artists, drifters, madmen, tragedy.

Only a truly brilliantly-unbalanced individual would think to say This Land is Made for You and Me.

A Happy Thought

We are ALL winners!!!!

Game show experts say the odds of that happening are 125 million to one.

Video here.

It was the first time in 23 years three people ever tied.

Cool…

Meanwhile.

San Francisco Or Los Angeles

I’m heading north to visit San Francisco for a night and thought I’d come up with a bunch of totally usless and irrelevant analogies.

Here we go:

San Francisco is jazz.

LA is hip hop.

Another completely meaningless comparison…

San Francisco is a heart.

LA is a penis.

And.

San Francsico is like a nice glass of wine over an expensive meal.

LA is like a beer on the boardwalk watching the sunset.

Moving on to more senseless utterances, the likes of which…

San Francisco is to Los Angeles, like the moon is to the earth.

San Francisco is a guitar riff, LA is a bass line.

If Los Angeles were a piece of fruit, San Francisco would be a leaf.

San Francisco is your soulmate, Los Angeles is a cheap one-night stand.

Or.

Los Angeles is your soulmate, San Francisco a cheap one-night stand.

You see: absolute nonsense comes into my brain and I create a false anology out of it.

San Francisco is a jihad, Los Angeles is holy war.

Los Angeles is a blog. San Francisco is a novel.

Feel free to add your own