Howling Hex - gsmoss

Precambrian netting/Dinosaur skies

gsmoss — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:20:24 GMT

...woke up to Ricky Nelson's "Lonesome Town" running not so much through my head, as through my chest and stomach - not looping soundtrack but prognostication, a temporary organ, astrological forecast for the day...makes sense perhaps, as I'm back in the city by the sea I grew up in, not the same house, so none of those ghosts show up, but still, fall coming, hurricane coming, poisonous Indian Summer, and (as always, maybe) feeling far far away from the thing I should be doing, while knowing being far far away is the only way to get the thing done. (That's the Orphic moment, the Orphic jukebox playing- "I heard her call my name" thru "I hear you knockin' but you can't come in" - Eurydice was just a song he couldn't write.)

Nearby is this pizza place, it's regular greasy Friday night hang-out spot ambience eliminated cause people in this particular city don't congregate publically so much anymore. They had Battlezone when no one else did. Battlezone was better to me than Donkey Kong or Pac Man because a) you looked through a one person viewfinder so the whole thing felt intimate, special and private; and b) cause Battlezone had mountains ahead and a moon above. There was a legend, or else I made it up, that if you drove your tank out far enough, into the right part of the screen, into those mountains, that there were whole other places inside the game. A city maybe, or a different kind of landscape, but that the world inside the game extended, perhaps of its own accord, ad infinitum.

Early video games were the closest a young person could get to going west or going to sea. There was the hope there would be adventure at the border. You could later join a band and maybe that would scratch the itch. As with all colonial endeavors, the unknown fell quickly, the adventure got used up (the internet being the strip-mined remains of that place-beyond-the-mountains in Battlezone). Takes 200 hundred years to devour the unknown. Takes 50 years to re-create it again in sculpted plastic. Frontier to Frontierland.

Also there's supposed to be a hurricane coming ashore today.

Speaking of vision...

gsmoss — Wed, 12 May 2010 03:56:38 GMT

Frank Frazetta dies at 82; renowned fantasy illustrator
His covers for "Conan" paperbacks and others in the 1960s set the standard for sword-and-sorcery-genre artwork.

By Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times
May 11, 2010
Frank Frazetta, the fantasy painter and illustrator whose images of sinewy warriors and lush vixens graced paperback novels, album covers and comic books for decades and became something close to the contemporary visual definition of the sword-and-sorcery genres, died Monday after suffering a stroke the night before. He was 82. Read more...

my entire response to the "Write an Essay on one of your senses" assignment

gsmoss — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 23:01:48 GMT

From the vision of two doves
in the hands of Donny Osmond,

to the fleeting (ominous) glimpse
of a cellmate's bush,

we can all agree that sight has been pretty much

a mixed bag.

Like Derek Paravicini

gsmoss — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 22:07:59 GMT

There are some people we meet in our "60 Minutes" stories who we just can't let go, whose next chapter we're almost compelled to follow.

Like Derek Paravicini, a masterful musician who is blind, with disabilities so severe he can't tell his right hand from his left or hold anything but the simplest of conversations.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

"60 Minutes" and correspondent Lesley Stahl started following Derek because of his gift at the piano, but it's what he has taught us about relationships, communication and what music is really all about that has kept us coming back.

When Derek is playing the piano, it's hard to believe there is anything he can't do, and yet when you meet him away from the keyboard, as we first did in London six years ago, the contrast is shocking.

Derek is a musical savant, blessed with an island of extreme talent in a sea of profound disability.

"Do you know how long you've been playing the piano?" Stahl asked.

"Was it about a year, wasn't it?" Derek asked. "No it wasn't."

Asked if he knows how old he is now, Derek said, "I don't know how old I am, no."

Today Derek is 30. He grew up in an upper class British family, the nephew of Camilla Parker-Bowles, now the Duchess of Cornwall. But none of that matters much to Derek.

"You gonna have pizza tonight?" Stahl asked.

"Yes, pepperoni!" Derek excitedly replied. "In New York, what do they have? If I come next year, what do they have there?"

Derek was excited to show us the skills that make him so exceptional, the ability to instantly call up any piece of music he's ever heard. Like the Village People's "YMCA" or the show tune "My Favorite Things."

But it isn't just that Derek remembers them: he can transform them effortlessly and seamlessly into the styles of different musicians, like jazz greats.

Asked to change to the style of Oscar Peterson, Derek changed style mid-song, playing "My Favorite Things" Oscar Peterson-style.

He also wowed Stahl by playing the tune in the style of Dave Brubeck.

"It's like he's got libraries of pieces and styles in his head," Adam Ockelford, Derek's teacher, told Stahl. "And he can just whip out a piece book and a style book and just bring them together. It just kind of explodes."

How Derek's fingers can do this but can't button a button or zip a zipper remains a mystery. There are lots of theories about savants, but few real answers.

Now if only I could find a mimeograph machine and ten thousand empty lampposts

gsmoss — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:44:40 GMT

Fact: Ernest Borgnine wrote the scripts of a number of Harvey brand comic books during the late 1970s. He strongest themes were self-deprecating race car drivers and the barbed wisecracks of a tiny cherub-like devil who constantly got in the way.

Fact: During the baseball game, I turned to look closely into my sister's morphing, fluid face and said, "You're like a third parent to me. I try to please you; I try and I can't."

Fact: My niece and nephew had filled up an entire notebook full of drawings of sideways horses and ponies, rendered in a balloon-like, bulging style.

These and other facts originate in dreams I had in the year 2010 AD. The truths they reveal will be made manifest in the air among people to come circulating on the internet and in televisions across the globe. Be prepared for the Celestial Change circa 2014 AD not 2012 as the Mayans erroneously predicted. Never trust a Mayan.

excerpt from a Playboy Interview, November 1974 (torn page found in a ditch nothin dirty on it)

gsmoss — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 23:15:58 GMT

A
How much money have I got, is that what you're trying to ask?

(Laughter)

Q
Well...

A
Well let's put it this way: I am wealthy enough to - late last year I had synthetic dragon heads surgically fixed over the heads of the heads of all of my children.

Q
Wow!

A
Yeah. They were beggin and beggin and - and they're really fantastic, these heads. Like masks, but on there for good!, and the skin - you should feel the skin - the scales feel real!

Q
Wow.

A
Yeah. And. You know the expense, the expense is great but. But you know, it would have killed me, KILLED me not to be able to give those kids their way. They were asking me but -

Q
How many -

A
But my wife of course she heh?

Q
How many kids have you got?

A
Me? I got five. Five beautiful...and the littlest one, Minton? He was sitting next to me at breakfast this morning, and it's so cute cause he's got this, like this speech impediment thing, you know like kids have, it'll go away, not like he's gonna talk this way forever, but for now, for now it's so goddamn cute I could cry every time he - and so we're at breakfast, and I see his little face shining out from between the jaws of that surgically attached synthetic dragon head, in the shadow of the teeth his little round eyes shining in there, and he says to me, he says, "Daddy? Can you pass me the bwuttah?"

(pause)

Can you believe that? The - the - the unprecedented adorability of him and - and you know the dragon heads, when they talk, the kids? a little puff a smoke comes out too. With their words. "Daddy, can you pass the bwuttah?" and smoke in the nostrils. Cause that's how he talks. So yeah. Yeah. No. Not for nothing am I a wealthy man.

Why I Hate Celtic Music

gsmoss — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:20:52 GMT

"We met last night down in the bar.

I was at a disadvantage, in an unknown sector of an unknown town. I usually stick to myself. I was just passing through.

In the light coming through the Venetian blinds she looked eerie, only half-corporeal, like a strong breeze would disperse her.

She is a beautiful woman, I think, watching her sleep in the shadows, in disreputable hotel sheets. She is a beautiful woman, but she is every bit of the forty-five years she will actually cop to. You can see that when the various restraints and fasteners come unhooked, when you are close enough to see the faint bars of silver just cresting the skin of her scalp.

She blinks in the half-light. I stub out my cigarette. Did I wake you I ask No I had this dream she says. What was it? I say. I was a rabbit she says, being chased by a hunter; I was a rabbit in my favorite book. Which one is that I ask. Watership Down she says. I never read Watership Down I say. Come back to bed she says.

And for the third time that night I make love to former governor of Alaska Sarah Louise Palin."

"Didja Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind?"

gsmoss — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 06:41:34 GMT

A half cashew, split length ways, lying flat against the brick tile in the corner by the first urinal (first from the entrance) in the men's room in Barnes & Noble, Portsmouth NH. I see it only after I've sidled up and begun my work at the porcelain. In the corner. Under no circumstances, no normal circumstances, would I ever consider eating the thing. Of course. It looks like it was placed there intentionally: a question made nut-flesh, like a living rebus, or perhaps the first step in some public humiliation procedure, a social experiment from the school of Funt, the cruel set-up for a high school joke, and the next day everyone in town knows you as "Piss Nut."

I wouldn't want to eat it, wouldn't entertain the idea even, except that seeing it sitting there - not a meal, not even a snack - I sense that someone has placed it there, deliberately, a temptation, a question of where your boundaries lie, that someone, somewhere wants me, or wants someone, to eat this nut, to consider eating this nut on the floor of the corner of the bathroom, wants someone to be at least tempted by the question of eating it.

And I was in Philly, in the subway, with my girlfriend Saturday. It was pretty empty, maybe cause it was Saturday, but I got the impression that very few people use the Philly subways - they looked abandoned, Escape From New York'd. This one dude, wasted, street type individual, could've been 30 could've been 60, staggered over to the bench where my girlfriend and me and a fellow passenger, middle-aged African-American woman, sat waiting for a north-bound train. "Look what I'm drinking," he says, and holds out his bottle of mouth wash. "I'm fucked up," he says. "My father beat me. I'm gonna go find him and beat him back." Swings his limbs. No real physical threat, right, too looped, uncoordinated. But still. And we're frozen. Black woman says: "Why don't you go do that, then." He doesn't hear. Says: "My father told me - " racial slur something something - makes a lame fist and jerks it just a little in the direction of the black woman. She doesn't flinch - it's too far, too small - what is the nature of this threat? Is this a threat?

[Read The Rest Below The Fold...]
He locks onto my girlfriend, and isn't saying anything, just staring hard. She's still. I'm still. Black woman leaves the bench. We wait. Is this going to end. What am I supposed to be doing. We wait. For what?

"We gotta go," I say, and we walk away. Behind us, down the concrete of the empty subway platform, "Take care of her. You take care of her or I will." We move to the far end of the platform. The black woman from our bench is upstairs reporting the guy. Nothing'll happen though. I hear him at the other end of the platform: "What? WHAT?" Looking for reiteration, clarification of a response no one has given him.

When the train comes, we get on. I look out the window as we roll past the platform, but I can't see if he's still there.

On the bus back to New York I re-play the scene, indulging in the weak adolescent satisfaction and conclusiveness of imaginary violence.

Imagine a national defense system in the form of Tai Chi.

I've been listening to the greatest hits of The Lovin' Spoonful which are pretty great, if kind of pervy in retrospect ("...a younger girl keeps floating cross my mind...") and also I've been listening to Groovie Goolies, which was maybe one of the first LPs I ever had, and which I sometimes listened to before going to bed, and which if you don't know was a kid's cartoon from the 70s with a goofy Dracula and a goofy Frankenstein and a goofy Werewolf playing in a band kinda like the Archies, but actually better, I think. I would have liked to have lived in a time in which the pop music contained codes and slang that I could decipher, even if those codes only referred to getting high. Still. To feel on the inside of something like that.

(Was I supposed to HIT him? Is that what he wanted me to do? Is that what she wanted me to do? Is that what I should have done?)

But there's no way I'm eating that cashew in the corner.

have I the rabies? (found inside a fortune cookie)

gsmoss — Thu, 28 May 2009 02:51:23 GMT

"Why do I fear the shower? Stay away from running water? Why am I suddenly scared of canned meat and tinned soups? Have DEATH RACE 2000 on a constant loop on the tv set? Sleeping in another person's bed? I am allowed to be here, I have permission, but fear constantly someone is going to knock on the door and yell at me. Throw me out. Could happen any time. Don't have guests in. Get you in trouble. Bad tooth on the right side. Upside right. My right your left."

two short lists

gsmoss — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:48:57 GMT

From Florida:
1) Gainesville gators in heat (or whatever the equivalent term is for gators) - mouths open and moving about like tiny prehistoric joke-shop dinosaurs

2) my best friend from way back now a middle-aged property owner and I'm not entirely without envy

3) the irony of the Golden Corral buffet

4) right to life/death penalty

5) The American Family is an entirely hypothetical proposition

(two college girls covertly sharing ritalin at the table next to me - to help them study better...)
Books I never read:
1) How to Win Friends and Influence People
2) As I lay Dying
3) Mad Magazine anthologies 1990 - present
4) Death of A Saleman
5) Pussy King of the Pirates
BONUS - my mom's diary (at least not all of it) (I didn't even know she kept one!)

pseduo-psych sci-fi christianity

gsmoss — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 04:43:10 GMT

I thought this end of days thing had peaked and passed, but apocalypse keeps on cropping up in every pop cult corner...a certain stripe of American Christian loves to imagine him/her self as the prettiest girl at the prom...and it's ultimately a rationalization for inaction - this wicked world will burn either way, so carry on but pray a little harder...I love end of the world as much as anybody (I do I do), but hey: if the trumpets were to blow (just coincidentally, on a Thursday or Friday or any day of any week) and we were to all go down burning, well yes: we'd surely be guilty of any of number of sins, but no: not the ones we keep hearing we're guilty of.