I was cruising along this Sunday  morning (c. 9am, the crack of dawn in Berlin) and the word “hum” popped into my head.  I was listening to the raw demo of a song I wrote a few months ago and the word “hum” was the final puzzle piece of the song. The song, I felt, became perfect when the word “hum” fell into place on it while I was cruising along in the early morning sun. I love the song, I love the song and my demo performance of it (the first take, the best take, it will never … Continue reading EVERY WORD A SINGER

I MADE THIS as people often preface some post or other, with,  on the dreaded Reddit. I did Reddit for a month as an experiment. I’m still shedding dread.  DREDDIT?  What a perfectly-engineered CONSENSUS/ PROPAGANDA MACHINE (one’s “karma” is the running total of one’s awarded likes from which are subtracted the running total of one’s awarded dislikes, behooving anyone amassing that meaningless LIKES PILE to learn very quickly what the BORGHIVE likes to “hear” and to stick with that shtick: excellent training for anyone planning on fitting into a crypto-Fascist clusterfuck):  Laugh.  But that’s for another post to deal with… … Continue reading RANTS, QUIBBLES & CRIS-DE-COEUR BUT MOSTLY MUSIC

I’m doing it again. Running a band.  My songs. Ace players. Beautiful singer of exotic provenance. Copyrightably-identifiable voice she has. Oh but this takes up so much of my time! The Blog cries out to be tended. Everyday I walk by this untended patch and its weeds and pests and I avert my eyes whistling one of the tunes from the band I’m producing with my engineeer. I went and got myself a young engineer.  Well, you have to.  My young engineer saves me time but not enough time to have enough time to tend the little farm of this … Continue reading THE SENSITIVE HET MALE MINORITY

A few weeks ago I picked up Beloved Wife at the main train station. I was early, watched the clock, the minute-hand seemed frozen in the cold. Fifteen minutes took an hour.  The clock of the human face behaves in quite the opposite fashion; always in such a rush. While waiting for Beloved Wife’s train to roll in (it was 11:12 pm and very cold) a dissolute-looking, fat-lipped blonde in a frazzled (but real) fur coat approached me and gestured, by pointing at it,  that I should lift one of my headphone cups and engage with her. She could have … Continue reading BUK (YUCK!) and BUDDHA BULL or: CLOCK-WATCHING IN A ROOM OF GENTLY-RISING FLOOD WATER

(originally published on February 24th–2021) new preface (March 1, 2023) Sometimes it seems as if I’m trapped in a Surreal Horror film in which Powerful Psychopaths are carelessly (at best) poisoning (in some cases killing) some of my oldest friends and only I, and a few others, are aware of this blatantly obvious fact. This, below,  came as quite a shock,  today, as I read this, as the person mentioned was my best friend for much of the 1980s: . “On April 16th, my spouse, L—–, was at the start line of a 5k run. He was skiing in Banff, … Continue reading TACTICAL PESSIMISM: TERMS for a POSSIBLE DISCUSSION

1 I met a wiry Belgian musician (late ’30s)  in a recording studio 5 or 6 years ago and, as a result, I’m on his mailing list. This is an excerpt from what his business (?) sent me today: “With French composer Sylvain Chauveau, we‘re now launching an impossible label : Zero Carbon Records. “The beauty of the Zero Carbon for a label founder is that it makes recording and record manufacturing impossible. “Fortunately, our born-failure label already found a reconversion in sport and scout guitars. “We will now deliver you those impossible to record new music as 100% acustic … Continue reading TERPSICHORE, YOU B*TCH!

    THE WORLD OF TOMORROW will belong to level-headed people who can separate facts from fantasy and who mature at a relatively young age, enabling them NOT to fall for shallow, ugly, decadently wasteful and narcissistic kitsch like “Burning Man,” which is a Last Gasp of the self-deluded Vampire Consumerism that inspired it. What is this BURNING MAN  ritual, in the end, but a messy montage of meaningless visuals decorating a dark hunger for New Sensations and Special Powers and Elite Significance? One of the first symptoms of Fascist Contagion is one of Scale: inhuman, post-industrial, resource-commandeering scale. Q: … Continue reading INTRODUCING THE KEVORKO 3000

    So-called “Philosophy”  (the loving of wisdom, literally translated) is more accurately described as “PHILOSOPHOSOPHY”… the love of, or reverence for,  Sophisticated Sophists. A patriarchal cult of personality in which the latest leading figures borrow authority by citing the leading figures preceding them. There’s not a (useful) notion,  or suggested practise, in the entire canon that hasn’t already been come up with by  reasonably-intelligent 50-year-olds with plenty of Life Experience. Where material in the canon diverges from that common sense standard, it is merely trivially arcane, absurd or terribly dangerous (cf Heidegger or Fukuyama). Questing young men read volumes … Continue reading PHILOSOPHOSOPHY

1 We live in the most murderously colonialist and Totalitarian Empire in the history of the world and all anyone can talk about are their feelings. 2 OCTOBER 3rd (German unification Day)  2022, near the Zoo Station,  at c. 13:30, a short fat woman,  with multi-colored (pied) hair, saved my life as I was crossing the street. I was wearing headphones, listening loudly to Elvis Costello’s A BOY CALLED IF, not looking, not seeing a cop car speeding toward, and through, the red light the green side of which was cajoling me to cross blithely. Had the little fat woman … Continue reading COME PANOPLY WITH ME or SPYING on EXES

1(t)READING BETWEEN THE LINES IN THE BOOK BIZ . David Marchese: Let me ask about something that’s not in The Silence, at least not anymore. In the first galley copy I read, there’s a scene in which a character is reciting disastrous events and mentions Covid-19. Then I was told there were changes to the book and was sent a second galley. Covid-19 was gone. Why did you take it out? . Don DeLillo: I didn’t put Covid-19 in there. Somebody else had. Somebody else could have decided that it made it more contemporary. But I said, “There’s no reason … Continue reading PARAPOLITICONS: ADVANCED READINGS for the CLUED-UP, FED UP, EFFED UP and RELATIVELY UNCORRUPT

Please picture an auditorium best suited to a motivational speaker’s emotions-manipulating presentation. You are seated in this auditorium. The lighting is calming, muted. The Consort of Musicke’s 2007 issue of John Dowland’s collected works plays softly, nearly subliminally, from invisible speakers above you. The stage curtains are drawn and dark. People are filling the auditorium. The ambient chit chat, coughing, throat-clearings and occasional barks, or tinkles, of laughter,  are gradually rising in density and volume. You have arrived early to take your excellent seats. Your tickets for the evening cost you no money: you solved riddles, on a website,  for … Continue reading WE ARE FUCKSTUFF MADE OF STARJUNK

  —LIFE IN WARTIME   Saturday I went through the second phase of auditioning a new guitarist (phase one was exchanging links to material): meeting him in person at my favorite meet-a-new-musician café. I’ve been using this café for that function for ten years, at least. It’s big, never crowded during the day, with very high ceilings and weird Art on the walls and the ambient music is low key enough to chat over. Anyway, the guy showed up right on time, looking like he’ll look great on stage (I’m six feet tall and he’s maybe six feet four, with … Continue reading LIFE IN PARLOUS WARTIME (WITH BREAKS FOR MUSIC)

1 everything: a distraction “I really don’t care about the Depp/Heard case. I want to see the Epstein/ Maxwell client list released.” I think the Depp/Heard trial and verdict were severe blows to the “Men Are Scum” project that gained maximum momentum with “MeToo” and went beyond fairness, logic and evidence to paint all men as Perps (guilty until proven innocent) and all women as saints and victims. If it was a distraction, I think it was an opportunistic one. I don’t think it was planned by TFIC*, though Big Media has tried to spin it in the Master Narrative’s … Continue reading a million new seeds of grief

1 Once I was arguing with a crypto-conservative (who thinks of himself as a Radical Commie, despite the fact that most of his old friends and close family are Wealthy) and he riposted a statement of mine with the classic evasion, “It’s more complicated than that.” As I always do, I responded to that with: “I have time. I’m a quick learner. Explain the complexities.” Ah, but he couldn’t. I have dedicated my social life to stamping out that particular rhetorical flourish (by putting a prohibitive price on it). 2 “Commenting, or not commenting, on an injustice or an atrocity, … Continue reading OEDIPUSES, OPHELIAS and OPPs in the AGE of OBJECT ORIENTED ONTOLOGY (notes, shorts, proclamations)

1ON THE RIM of a BOG-STANDARD GALAXY It has come to my attention that there are people out there who accept (even believe in) the concept of a Bearded, Vaguely-Levantine, Anus-Free Sky Giant… …who sent His only Son (who was simultaneously He, Himself, btw) to be nailed to a cross-beam and torture-murdered in a loincloth as a representative of a negligible Bronze-Age tribe on a tiny speck of a planet in an unremarkable Solar System on the rim of a bog-standard Galaxy… in a deal to “cleanse” the Tribe (and its general Species) of its Design Flaws (called “sins“)… though … Continue reading A FEW MORE SPURTS of LOGIC’S HOLY WATER (to Exorcise your Social Media)

CONVERSATIONS WITH A FELLOW WRITER I ONLY REALIZED WAS IRREPLACABLE AS A FRIEND THE DAY AFTER HE DIED (when my need to joke with him about the situation was extremely frustrated), INCLUDING THOUGHTS ON HIS UNDERGROUND MONUMENT OF A NOVEL [caveat: these exchanges bounced between email, Facebook messenger and the surface level of Facebook: only the Facebook messenger version of these particular exchanges remain] [more conversations with Edmond, and others, from the same era, here] . Edmond sent December 11, 2011 How come FB can’t design a conversation thread in which one can respond to separate comments? 1) Yes, the … Continue reading VIRTUAL CONVERSATIONS WITH THE WRITER EDMOND CALDWELL (NOW A GHOST)

1trivial/not-trivial Like most people in this Empire, I had to wait until the next day to discover that a Black celebrity male had raped and beheaded a smaller Black celebrity male, onstage, during The Oscars. The instigating incident was a “joke” the smaller Black celebrity male made about the larger Black celebrity male’s wife’s appearance… specifically,  her hair… despite knowing that Black females are, in general,  particularly vulnerable / self-conscious about that specific aspect of their physical presentation, given the culture’s longstanding Standards of Desirability.  The larger Black celebrity male’s response to the joke was described by many as “riveting” … Continue reading trivial/ not trivial

1MACRO WHAT DO I SMELL? ANOTHER PIG ON THE SPIT ROAST, RIGHT NEXT TO DADDY BUSH’S  FLAMING CARCASS, IN HADES’  ALL STAR BARBECUE ROOM!  But first, a correction, of sorts. Let’s get this straight. “The Gubmint” does not “hate” The Right. TFIC* don’t “hate” Right Wingers at all, though  TFIC’s Big Media appear to demonize The Right during this tumultuous transitional moment. TFIC don’t “hate” Right Wingers, though, of course, many of their pseudo-Lefty, Useful Idiot minion-administrators do, which lends verisimilitude to The Great Pantomime . This minion layer of Useful Idiots is not in the loop. They really believe … Continue reading MACRO/MICRO

1GLARE The male gaze vs the blue-haired gender-studies graduate’s glare: which can take rightful credit for your Existence on Earth? 2PHOTOSHOP Audio Photoshop is what I am most comfortable calling Modern Pop. Narrative  Photoshop is probably the best term for “the news”. What do you call the Photoshop of your Conscience? 3HOLOSISM HOLOSISM: conceptualizing The Whole as being the Universe from side to side, top to bottom, beginning to end, The Whole can therefore be construed as an omniscient Intelligence that “knows” everything by containing everything: to that extent,  predestination describes the condition and path of every constituent element of … Continue reading NOBODADDY NOETICS in your NOOSPHERE (plus sundry Blasphememes in a randomized hierarchy of possible offence)

ITEM #1-THE CARBONIST: A SHORT STORY “There is an unfortunate and spreading subliminal misapprehension that the technical conformity,  required in engineering a functional technology,  is a parallel to, and justification of, conformity to the social theories advocated by the groups  the technologies are owned by at a given moment. The inflexible objectivities of science and engineering cannot, should not, be a model for the organization of the subjectivities at the heart of social experience. Technocrats will always make this category error and must always, therefore, be balanced, in power, by Advocates of the exclusively Human. Technology must always be the … Continue reading TURDUCKENS ALL THE WAY DOWN

It was drizzly and cold last Thursday but not too windy, so I slapped the headphones on and got another brisk walk out of the King Crimson album (Radical Action to Unseat the Hold of Monkey Mind) I acquired recently, released in 2016; the version in my possession is two hours and forty minutes of live workouts of some of my favorite King Crimson tracks. The album’s length allows me to shop at a grocery store that’s an hour and ten minutes away, by foot, bypassing all of the stores that are only a few blocks distant and not enough … Continue reading NIGHTWALKING and the PROUSTIAN NOSE-DIET

Xmas meant dazzling presents, to me, as a kid, in the 1960s, just as it meant snow and ancient (and not-so ancient) music and pretty lights and the annual return of cartoons I couldn’t otherwise watch. It also meant, for the last couple of weeks of December, movies at the Cinema,  designed to snare the Xmas audience. This screenplay (written in 2002 after I had already sold the option on another script, but right before the funding-system for indie films, in Germany, sort of collapsed in the wake of 9/11) is my idea of the kind of film I think … Continue reading AUGUSTINE’S VERSION OF A CHRISTMAS CAROL: THE SCREENPLAY

—2021: What a year… … the year I learned my biological  (in contrast to my legal, presumed, American) grandfather was Bengali;  yes, in the summer of this year I learned that my apparently pious and extremely literary grandmother  (who had review copies of Tropic of Cancer and Women in Love strewn about the bookcase when I was a kid)  was a sexy young adulterer for roughly fifteen years, starting in the 1930s with the conception of my mother a year before Sam Cooke’s birth.  The illicit lust without which I would not exist. She had short stories published in the … Continue reading ASYMPTOMATICALLY DEAD:  THE YEAR IN ANECDOTAL REVIEW (A GIBBERINGLY FUGUE-ISH MONOLOGUE)

(A reader was looking through this essay, today, and I remembered how much I liked it… so I’ve decided to bring it back) There are actually people out there who think that everything they do or feel is interesting and a little more correct and even, in a way, Saintly. They are convinced of the no-brainerness of their Goodness. They crave attention, they demand validation, they post images of their breakfasts for us to praise. They have unshakable faith in the concept of the given that their Belief Systems/ Political Party/ and Personal Roster of Icons are all tops and … Continue reading PORTRAITS OF THE LEFTY-RIGHT and RIGHTY-RIGHT and WHATEVER’S LEFT: A REPRINT

I was watching an old episode of Joe Rogan chatting with Bill Maher*  when the topic of monogamy bobbed up and Maher (who will probably die in a hooker’s disgusted arms) offered the classical anti-monogamy argument that chimps, our nearest primate cousins, don’t do monogamy (Hey, Bill, they don’t play piano, either) and that all that “territorial ownership bullshit” (I’m paraphrasing) is a mess. Which is the familiar line that we of the post-Bebop (Aquarian) Generation, were fed.  The dawn of the so-called Aquarian Age** coincided with the dawn of the Techno-Media Age, luckily, which meant that we late Boomers … Continue reading OWNING IT: POSSESSION IS NINE-TENTHS of the JOY