Hench!

So the other day I’m walking down sixth avenue when I sort of edge by this guy with a limp. We were walking in the same direction and I was travelling faster than he was, that’s just the way it went. I didn’t jostle him or anything like that, but it was pretty obvious that I was squeezing between him and rapidly approaching pedestrian traffic. He was one of those guys that you kind of think is homeless but you’re not sure.

“Hey Caesar!” he yells after me. I figure I must not have heard him right, but I did.

“Caesar! Hey Caesar in the black jacket! Shaggy head Caesar! Hail Caesar!”

I kind of turn, and I see this guy who looks a little Micky Rourke limping really fast after me. I pick up the pace for a few blocks until I finally have to stop for traffic to pass. Good thing he has a limp, I think to myself, proud that I was unable to outdistance him.

Two minutes later, I’m walking down 23rd street toward the train entrance when this out of breath voice yells, from what couldn’t be more than ten feet behind me:

“Haiiiiillllll CAESAR! Hey Caesar, whattaya think of the redcoats? The British Redcoats! Quite an in-ter-es-ting history, right? Huh? Hey answer me!”

I book it down the stairs of the station and pause: I don’t wanna be on the train with this guy. So I run up the other set of stairs, cross 23rd against the light, and try to blend in with a herd of young Japanese folks whose clothes marked them as FIT students. Waiting for the light to change, I kept one nervous eye on the subway. Sure enough, Limpy comes up the stairs like a fucking Morlock, shaking his fist and yelling.

“You deceitful fuck! Shit Caesar! Render SHIT unto Caesar!” The light changed, and the chase was on again. I made as if I was trying to lose a private eye, not stopping until the West 4th F stop. I’ve got to remember to keep my wits about me from now on.

So, the weekend before last I went upstate to visit Todd and Rowan, who had just returned from Poland. Lousy timing, because it meant that I missed the No Fun Fest, a 3 day marathon of noise bands that played at the Hook, a club which is a stone’s throw from my apartment. I was really looking forward to going to it, too. Oh, bitter disappointment.

So when I got back to work I spent most of the day looking up the bands online and getting mp3s to listen to. Stuff from Whitehouse, Lee Ranoldo, Wolf Eyes, all sorts of cool stuff. But the band which I was really after was this group called the Hair Police. Brilliant name, right? I’d heard good stuff about them so I commenced a web search and up came a site for the Hair Police. So far so good.

Well, the site was laid out like a typical band site: you navigated by links like Home, History, Biography, Contact, etc. There was a lot of photos of people with funny haircuts. The bio section said that the two people who made up the Hair Police met and started cutting hair in 1996, and it was so clever that I was laughing out loud. To think that a noise band would keep talking about hair! There was a link that said “make an appointment with the Hair Police,” and I started laughing harder, figuring that that was how you contacted their booking agent. I must have spent twenty minutes going around the site, marvelling how fucking clever they were, presenting their site as if they were stylists.

Well, it finally sunk in that the site was actually for a team of stylists called the “Hair Police,” and the link to the noise band “Hair Police” was the second one that Google came up with. Christ, I’m such a fucking idiot. You know that you’ve seen too much conceptual art when you can somehow mistake two hairdressers with a sick, primal noise band.

I was always afraid that this was going to happen to me. I’ve known people, some of them college professors, many of them ex-hippies, most of them past forty, who had accepted so much wacky art shit that the barriers between what was art and what wasn’t was forever obliterated. The approach they took towards the creative process was much like the approach a Buddhist monk or Indian yogi might take towards life and death or existance and non-existance. These were the people who, when teaching a drawing class, would enthuse over a dead bee you’d bring into the classroom for them in lieu of a pile of sketches.

“I just love the way that you’ve chose to deliniate the concept of “line” and do away with “sketch.” It’s just fabulous, the way that the eye is free to rome over your piece’s fragile pose and actually manipulate it. The emotions are of course affected by the fact that it is impermanent, and will dry up and fall apart or rot, and the queer sensation that even in death it may still be able to sting you. Very poignant.”

You know the type, the terminally art damaged. The kind of creeps who will spend half an hour looking at a giant pyramid of Cheer laundry detergent in K-Mart.

I have to protect my neck. From now on I will be completely objective at all times, lest I mistake a pile of dogshit for an Andy Goldworthy sculpture or something. Jesus!

Eel for lunch today, along with a side of tofu an broccoli rabe. Now, I’m basically a vegetarian for a number of reasons that are pretty boring, but I can’t seem to stop eating the fish. At the end of the day, I kind of have to say fuck it, especially about eels. Eels aren’t really being farmed to extinction, because no one wants to eat them.

I should point out that, after about a decade of smoking, my sense of taste is on its way to being completely shot. For instance, when I go out for Indian food I always order it vindaloo, and my “cooking” consists of me taking some base ingredients—usually onions and beans—and dumping a shitload of curry sauce on them.

So I really can’t tell eel from a number of other seafood products, but I like eating it because it’s an eel. Like crustaceans, shellfish, and insects, eels are uniformly unpleasant little beasts that just happen to be edible. I sort of feel proud whenever I can bring myself to eat those things.

Lord, I hate Tuesday. Today is lousy as usual. Really busy at work, really busy at home, and I’m still trying to kill that fucking mouse in my kitchen. I’ve been cleaning like a madman so I don’t know what it’s been eating, but it must take thirteen shits a day. I’ll be happy when its dead.

The only interesting news is that I’m nearly done with my review for the new John Doe album, which sounds pretty 90s; e.g. dull and old sounding. AOR alt country, which is a kind of music that I tend to shy away from. I guess some of it’s all right, but it’s mostly emo dressed up with cowboy hats and trembling chins. Someday they’re going to find out that being mornful causes blood parasites and all of these guys will die together in a hospice, strumming their guitars and watching Northern Exposure on the tiny day room television. The monument built over their mass grave will be a giant granite mitten with the words “Here Lie the Sad Eyed Troubadours,” and weepy men in denim shirts will leave gardenias and cantelopes for them. (The John Doe album actually pretty good, by the way, it was mostly the production that sucked. But that’s another story entirely.)

In other news, still fighting my way through Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. So far, so good, and really interesting in the way that things I don’t agree with are interesting. Listening to a lot of free/improvised/noise things. Peter Brotzmann and the like. I wonder if people would make music with so little structure if it hadn’t been for the advent of modern recording/playback devices. I think that part of the reason why I’m listening to this stuff is that, after over a decade of dedicated music consumption, I’m just getting fucking bored with structured things. Oh, dischord. Oh, satisfaction.