I built a house for you
I built it room by room
Color by color, line by line
One sensation at a time
The carpet was that rich red you wanted
The second-hand curtains hung just right
To proscribe the way that particles played
In the slanting shaft of light
I offered up the house to you
Describing its details with great care
All you had to do was look away from me
And the house vanished back into the air
The house was ever only
Ever only empty air
And all I have to offer you
Is sound and light
All I have to give to you
Are words
Come to me with empty hands
You'll go away the same
My own hands are empty
I have nothing to put into yours
I made a man for you
Take him as he is
Take him as a rival, a lover
Take him as a hero, a brother
Just please take him
Just please
Take
Him
And all I have to offer you
Is sound and light
All I have to give to you
Are words
Come to me with empty hands
You'll go away the same
My own hands are empty
I have nothing to put into yours
Rarefied until I am become
A living ghost
My hands go right through
You
I made a world for you
I built it word by word
I tried to make it like you wanted
Based on all I'd seen and heard
Based on all I'd experienced and learned
I opened the gates for you and invited you in
You took a look around and moved right on
You moved right on
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Sunday, June 20, 2010
The City of Gods
It was one of the cities where no one ever died. It was a city defined by yellow and brown, dirty yellow; sunlight and dead grass and bare earth and the uncured, rough-cut human leather hanging in flaps and in skeins of empty fingers from the sun-kilned flesh of those who were whole. Or mostly whole, for the purposes of that particular moment, at least.
A newcomer walked among them, among the howling barbarians that were the grandchildren of high civilization. Though the cannibal savages danced mad dances around him, shouting and stamping and lashing with their fists in foreplay for an orgy of violence, they did not touch him. They accepted him readily, and did not visit the violence on him that they readily visited on one another, breaking out into meaningless brawls on all sides of him, tumbling into fights at his feet. The ones with unregenerate limbs sought each other out, clasping the gaps in their flesh stump to stump, jabbing bone against bone and knotting shreds of flesh together, wrestling as screaming cripples.
He took a place on one of the worn grey-wooden benches, shaded by an overhanging canvas that snapped in the wind. He folded his hands in front of him. He was, distinctly, Chinese-American. The people around him were too sunburned and interbred to be much of anything.
Black specks like flies that were in fact human ash skittered in the wind around the tables. There were no actual flies, for the ashes had eaten them. Flecks of ash would land on the Chinese-American man’s clothes and exposed skin (only at his face and the backs of his hands) and stick, shooting out small tendrils as soon as they landed and start to bloat like ticks with the intake of organic mass. He brushed them away when he could, when he could feel them, but there were too many, and any effort to repel them was only temporary, as was the effort to sleep away the hunger by means of immolation. But they knew that, and they burned themselves anyway, just as the Chinese-American man knew it was pointless to pick at the ashes, but he did it anyway.
Gobbets of tendriled human flesh scampered or oozed beneath the stamping feet of the table, seeking scraps. People crushed them when they saw them, stomping on a potential brother’s shinbone or perhaps the tip of their own mother’s brown nipple. This too, was pointless. This too, was necessary.
A vendor approached the Chinese-American man who, in clothes of rough-spun cotton rather than skin, seemed like someone with something to trade. The vendor
Opened up the cold chest that hung around his neck to show his wares. “Shaved brains?” he asked, paring away at one of the grey-white lumps in the cold chest and putting the shavings into a conical paper cup before applying a spot of redolent barbecue sauce to the cone that suffused the cold shaved brains with a rich red-brown color. The vendor kicked away a half-human mass that crawled up at him, moaning with hunger.
“No thanks,” said the Chinese-American man. “I’m a naturalist. I had my brains shaved a long time ago.” The vendor moved on.
The Chinese-American man, the naturalist, returned his attention to his hands folded on the table. He began to watch—as they all began to watch, somehow—a woman. She was moving through a field somewhere at the edge of the city, for all that it seemed as though the city consumed the whole of the world. Buildings were visible only in the background behind her. She moved through a swatch of dead grass that the ash-flies and flesh-rats, for all their trillions, had not yet found. She approached the grass and produced a woven basket from behind her back. She gathered up a handful of the dried yellow stalks and began to rattle them out over the basket. Slivers of yellow seed fell into the basket.
The noise and motion drew attention. One of the starving rose up from behind the thin screen of grass. Crumbs of dirt fell from his mouth. He had been eating earth in hopes of straining out some scrap of worm-flesh. Seeing and smelling the lush flesh of the woman he charged at her, his hands outstretched. She dropped the basket, the seeds lost to the wind, and shifted her body into a spring. When the starving man screamed and lunged she put a kick into his throat. He staggered back, choking. She pulled a long knife from her belt and slashed out at his neck. Blood bloomed. He fell, she continued to cut, sawing away at the tough nerves connecting the vertebrae until she had severed the head completely, killing him temporarily. She wiped the knife and its complement of starving blood on his skin and holstered it again.
Already his hungry blood was seeping out, seeking, a red amoeba. The machines that made his blood hungry, the machines small as atoms, would not let him die. They would never let anybody die anymore. And for the first five years, among those elites who could afford them, that had been a blessing. But when the nanomachines began to transmit from person to person like a virus until all in the world were made deathless, and all the appetites for energy and organified matter that had already been straining the planet to its breaking point only amplified with time, people began to recognize that it was a curse in disguise.
She picked up her basket. She moved among the plants and collected the seeds of grass. She collected the seeds of amaranth, here called pigweed, when it was called anything at all and not eaten whole and raw.
She searched for a cure to hunger. Or she searched for a cure to life, the Pure Poison.
The naturalist leaned back his head, exposing his throat. She had been a colleague. He closed his eyes. He blew his breath out through fixed teeth. The savages screamed around him.
A newcomer walked among them, among the howling barbarians that were the grandchildren of high civilization. Though the cannibal savages danced mad dances around him, shouting and stamping and lashing with their fists in foreplay for an orgy of violence, they did not touch him. They accepted him readily, and did not visit the violence on him that they readily visited on one another, breaking out into meaningless brawls on all sides of him, tumbling into fights at his feet. The ones with unregenerate limbs sought each other out, clasping the gaps in their flesh stump to stump, jabbing bone against bone and knotting shreds of flesh together, wrestling as screaming cripples.
He took a place on one of the worn grey-wooden benches, shaded by an overhanging canvas that snapped in the wind. He folded his hands in front of him. He was, distinctly, Chinese-American. The people around him were too sunburned and interbred to be much of anything.
Black specks like flies that were in fact human ash skittered in the wind around the tables. There were no actual flies, for the ashes had eaten them. Flecks of ash would land on the Chinese-American man’s clothes and exposed skin (only at his face and the backs of his hands) and stick, shooting out small tendrils as soon as they landed and start to bloat like ticks with the intake of organic mass. He brushed them away when he could, when he could feel them, but there were too many, and any effort to repel them was only temporary, as was the effort to sleep away the hunger by means of immolation. But they knew that, and they burned themselves anyway, just as the Chinese-American man knew it was pointless to pick at the ashes, but he did it anyway.
Gobbets of tendriled human flesh scampered or oozed beneath the stamping feet of the table, seeking scraps. People crushed them when they saw them, stomping on a potential brother’s shinbone or perhaps the tip of their own mother’s brown nipple. This too, was pointless. This too, was necessary.
A vendor approached the Chinese-American man who, in clothes of rough-spun cotton rather than skin, seemed like someone with something to trade. The vendor
Opened up the cold chest that hung around his neck to show his wares. “Shaved brains?” he asked, paring away at one of the grey-white lumps in the cold chest and putting the shavings into a conical paper cup before applying a spot of redolent barbecue sauce to the cone that suffused the cold shaved brains with a rich red-brown color. The vendor kicked away a half-human mass that crawled up at him, moaning with hunger.
“No thanks,” said the Chinese-American man. “I’m a naturalist. I had my brains shaved a long time ago.” The vendor moved on.
The Chinese-American man, the naturalist, returned his attention to his hands folded on the table. He began to watch—as they all began to watch, somehow—a woman. She was moving through a field somewhere at the edge of the city, for all that it seemed as though the city consumed the whole of the world. Buildings were visible only in the background behind her. She moved through a swatch of dead grass that the ash-flies and flesh-rats, for all their trillions, had not yet found. She approached the grass and produced a woven basket from behind her back. She gathered up a handful of the dried yellow stalks and began to rattle them out over the basket. Slivers of yellow seed fell into the basket.
The noise and motion drew attention. One of the starving rose up from behind the thin screen of grass. Crumbs of dirt fell from his mouth. He had been eating earth in hopes of straining out some scrap of worm-flesh. Seeing and smelling the lush flesh of the woman he charged at her, his hands outstretched. She dropped the basket, the seeds lost to the wind, and shifted her body into a spring. When the starving man screamed and lunged she put a kick into his throat. He staggered back, choking. She pulled a long knife from her belt and slashed out at his neck. Blood bloomed. He fell, she continued to cut, sawing away at the tough nerves connecting the vertebrae until she had severed the head completely, killing him temporarily. She wiped the knife and its complement of starving blood on his skin and holstered it again.
Already his hungry blood was seeping out, seeking, a red amoeba. The machines that made his blood hungry, the machines small as atoms, would not let him die. They would never let anybody die anymore. And for the first five years, among those elites who could afford them, that had been a blessing. But when the nanomachines began to transmit from person to person like a virus until all in the world were made deathless, and all the appetites for energy and organified matter that had already been straining the planet to its breaking point only amplified with time, people began to recognize that it was a curse in disguise.
She picked up her basket. She moved among the plants and collected the seeds of grass. She collected the seeds of amaranth, here called pigweed, when it was called anything at all and not eaten whole and raw.
She searched for a cure to hunger. Or she searched for a cure to life, the Pure Poison.
The naturalist leaned back his head, exposing his throat. She had been a colleague. He closed his eyes. He blew his breath out through fixed teeth. The savages screamed around him.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Embrace
Look at these lines and curves, these letters and words, these black absences of light against a background of white. They suggest sounds, and the sounds suggest a meaning, and the meaning refers to an action: embracing. And when you think of this action, it brings memories to mind; associations with hugs you have received before. If you allow these associations to fill your mind, you will recall the feeling of being hugged. Think about it long enough, and your skin will remember, and your blood will remember, and the very core of you will remember what it is to be enfolded.
I cannot now embrace you. I cannot hug you, I cannot hold you. I am too far away. I cannot comfort you, although your sadness is real to me, here. The transmission of your sadness suffers from no noise. All I can send to you is light, mere light,. That light suggests sounds, which suggest an action, that might evoke a memory, that might make you feel loved. Through all this abstraction, all these removes, it is all I can do.
It is all I can do, and it is what I must do.
I cannot now embrace you. I cannot hug you, I cannot hold you. I am too far away. I cannot comfort you, although your sadness is real to me, here. The transmission of your sadness suffers from no noise. All I can send to you is light, mere light,. That light suggests sounds, which suggest an action, that might evoke a memory, that might make you feel loved. Through all this abstraction, all these removes, it is all I can do.
It is all I can do, and it is what I must do.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
The Body Bourgeois
You know that billboard at the end of the 55? The one that's always rented out by Banana Republic, and always features some ultra-thin model in a pastoral setting? The image changes every month or so, but even so, you can always grass in it, usually sunlight. I commented to Bonny that it seemed to me that Banana Republic was consciously trying to court an upper-class clientele. I was thinking about how the urban poor would feel alienated by images of a carefully cultivated nature that only exists at country clubs and in the expansive yards of those who own fine houses. I was thinking also about how class implies a certain body type, how economic class actually fundamentally affects one's flesh--and that rich folks with their fad diets and personal trainers and yoga classes and plastic surgeons are probably model thin a lot more often than poor folks who are too busy dealing with economic stressors to spend time cultivating the perfect body and who, for lack of education or lack of options, eat shitty fast food and pre-packaged food and basically spend most of their lives awash in high-fructose corn syrup. Funny how the cheapest foods are often the highest in calories, meaning that you pay less for more energy (in an absolute sense), while more expensive foods involve things like garlic and herbs, using flavoring agents other than sugar and fat to be appealing. Health as a luxury item, health as conspicuous consumption; the fat cats are thin now while the workers are fat. It makes me hate my own conceptualization of beauty, seeing it as a contrived imposition from the top-down and reinforced by the heavily-edited images I see every day in advertising, as much as I fail in my struggle to subvert it. It makes me loathe my self-loathing, seeing my hatred of my own body as being a piece with that self-hatred that depressed ethnic groups experience when they measure themselves by the metrics of the ruling class and inevitably find themselves wanting. So yeah, this shot reeked of richness.
She informed that yes, this was true. Banana Republic is for rich people, while Old Navy and the Gap, which were owned by the same parent company, appealed to the lower and middle classes, respectively. I was a bit stunned. I was not aware that class distinctions in this country were so concrete. I would not have thought that a corporation would be so obvious in its efforts to say "Yes, this is for poor people" and "Yes, this is for the rich." Or rather, I might've assumed that a company like BMW would make a product that is the best it can possibly be and charge as much as possible for that product, but then, after achieving that threshold, I wouldn't think that company would pull back on its efforts and make a product that's just okay for the the rest of us (or a product that's really kind of crappy for those who can't even afford that)
I don't know why I wouldn't have thought that; I guess, being a person who wants options and experiences to transcend boundaries of ethnicity and class, I don't want to think about such boundaries as being rigid and clearly defined. Clearly price is a huge determinant, and as a member of the upper-lower-middle class I recognize that more than most, but it was still strange to me to think of the aesthetics of women's clothing--which I figured were all more or less decadent and an expression of conspicuous consumption--were actually graded along class lines. Is Banana Republic clothing the ideal to which Gap and Old Navy clothing aspires but falls short--and is this falling short a calculated thing intended to make Old Navy and Gap shoppers feel inferior? Or does each clothing store promote a distinct aesthetic, making the most of the styles and materials (and traditions?) within that set price range--"We're here, we're poor, get used to it!"
I don't know. I think it's all ugly, and when I say that I'm not really talking about the clothes themselves. Which is why I will persist in spending as little on my clothes as I possibly can, and in buying clothing that does not compromise comfort for the sake of class vanity, and is otherwise as non-descript as possible.
Not that I think that Banana Republic would have anything that would fit me, anyway.
She informed that yes, this was true. Banana Republic is for rich people, while Old Navy and the Gap, which were owned by the same parent company, appealed to the lower and middle classes, respectively. I was a bit stunned. I was not aware that class distinctions in this country were so concrete. I would not have thought that a corporation would be so obvious in its efforts to say "Yes, this is for poor people" and "Yes, this is for the rich." Or rather, I might've assumed that a company like BMW would make a product that is the best it can possibly be and charge as much as possible for that product, but then, after achieving that threshold, I wouldn't think that company would pull back on its efforts and make a product that's just okay for the the rest of us (or a product that's really kind of crappy for those who can't even afford that)
I don't know why I wouldn't have thought that; I guess, being a person who wants options and experiences to transcend boundaries of ethnicity and class, I don't want to think about such boundaries as being rigid and clearly defined. Clearly price is a huge determinant, and as a member of the upper-lower-middle class I recognize that more than most, but it was still strange to me to think of the aesthetics of women's clothing--which I figured were all more or less decadent and an expression of conspicuous consumption--were actually graded along class lines. Is Banana Republic clothing the ideal to which Gap and Old Navy clothing aspires but falls short--and is this falling short a calculated thing intended to make Old Navy and Gap shoppers feel inferior? Or does each clothing store promote a distinct aesthetic, making the most of the styles and materials (and traditions?) within that set price range--"We're here, we're poor, get used to it!"
I don't know. I think it's all ugly, and when I say that I'm not really talking about the clothes themselves. Which is why I will persist in spending as little on my clothes as I possibly can, and in buying clothing that does not compromise comfort for the sake of class vanity, and is otherwise as non-descript as possible.
Not that I think that Banana Republic would have anything that would fit me, anyway.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Tresasure Seekers
Treasure seekers
With their metal detectors
Sifting the sand
For gum wrappers
Pennies
And pull-tabs
I wonder
If they ever
Make enough
To recoup
Their initial
Investment
Somebody
Should do
A Study
(These city workers in their yellow vests have the right of it; scavenging the sand for the evidence of last night's debaucheries to put into the proper receptacles before someone steps on it and shreds a foot. I think these weekend adventurers would be hard pressed to earn the equivalent of minimum wage with their pathetic treasure seeking. But I'm sure it's more exciting to find a fallen quarter than it is to pick up the ten-thousandth Coors light bottle tossed away by some drunk and selfish fuck, even if it is far more useless.)
With their metal detectors
Sifting the sand
For gum wrappers
Pennies
And pull-tabs
I wonder
If they ever
Make enough
To recoup
Their initial
Investment
Somebody
Should do
A Study
(These city workers in their yellow vests have the right of it; scavenging the sand for the evidence of last night's debaucheries to put into the proper receptacles before someone steps on it and shreds a foot. I think these weekend adventurers would be hard pressed to earn the equivalent of minimum wage with their pathetic treasure seeking. But I'm sure it's more exciting to find a fallen quarter than it is to pick up the ten-thousandth Coors light bottle tossed away by some drunk and selfish fuck, even if it is far more useless.)
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Orange Fail
A few years back I went to the farmer's market across from U.C.I. for the first time. I bought some navel oranges there from a vendor who no longer comes to that market. These redefined my conceptualization of the navel orange. These were the Platonic ideal of the navel orange. Sweet and so full of juice that they soaked your shirt when you peeled them. The vendor has stopped coming to the U.C.I. Farmer's market for whatever reason, and I've been trying to find suitable replacement oranges ever since with mixed success. While my farmer's market produce purchases are usually superior to chemically-ripened waxy desiccated things at the super market that bear only a passing resemblance to fruit, I've yet to find a consistent grower who can deliver fruit that good.
If my hands stay dry after peeling your navel orange, you fail at growing navel oranges. I'm so tired of dried-up oranges with flesh that is the taste and consistency of packing material. Juice content, people, juice content.
Navel oranges are sterile hybrids, which means they can only be grown by grafting, which means that all navel oranges are genetically identical. Barring any delicious mutations like the Cara-Cara navel (which is the best kind of navel), all navel orange trees are genetically the same. So the pronounced difference in quality between an orange like a ball of uncooked rice and an orange that is dripping with sweetness must all be in the application of agricultural techniques. Nurture over nature. Something to think about.
If my hands stay dry after peeling your navel orange, you fail at growing navel oranges. I'm so tired of dried-up oranges with flesh that is the taste and consistency of packing material. Juice content, people, juice content.
Navel oranges are sterile hybrids, which means they can only be grown by grafting, which means that all navel oranges are genetically identical. Barring any delicious mutations like the Cara-Cara navel (which is the best kind of navel), all navel orange trees are genetically the same. So the pronounced difference in quality between an orange like a ball of uncooked rice and an orange that is dripping with sweetness must all be in the application of agricultural techniques. Nurture over nature. Something to think about.
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