here

don't take it personally

when i was in new orleans i got some moleskines, which are like notebooks except for the rich yuppie bourgeoisie. they basically made up a bunch of bullshit about it being the notebooks hemingway and faulkner used so they could charge $10 a notebook in private liberal arts college bookstores. here's a sample of that bullshit, i like how it's in all caps:

MOLESKINE IS THE LEGENDARY NOTEBOOK,
USED BY EUROPEAN ARTISTS AND THINKERS
FOR THE PAST TWO CENTURIES.

THIS SILENT AND DISCREET KEEPER
OF AN EXTRAORDINARY TRADITION, WHICH
HAS BEEN MISSING FOR YEARS, HAS BEEN
REPRODUCED BY THE ITALIAN COMPANY MODO
& MODO SINCE 1998. WITH ITS VARIOUS
DIFFERENT PAGE STYLES IT ACCOMPANIES
THE CREATIVE PROFESSIONS AND HAS BECOME
A SYMBOL OF CONTEMPORARY NOMADISM.

MOLESKINE IS A FAMILY OF NOTEBOOKS
FOR DIFFERENT FUNCTIONS, ACCORDING
WITH A FREE MINDSTYLE, BOTH BASIC
AND EMOTIONAL.

haha right. so i got some of these because i have a FREE EMOTIONAL MINDSTYLE and i thought it would be cool to keep a journal of drawings of things that happened to me and ideas and shit and i need to draw more anyway because i'm gonna be a tattoo artist and all, did i mention i was gonna be a tattoo artist?

it turned out to not be a really good idea, the picturelog, the plogging, because i don't really enjoy drawing right before bed, and i feel like you're supposed to write/draw in journals right before bed. but i figured i'd post these cause ryan asked where i'd been and i figure maybe it can soothe the hearts of this torn nation with all of this shit going on...

...astronauts pissing their pants on the way to attempt murder, anna nicole dying of a rotten soul, hillary clinton comparing her 'husband' to saddam hussein... the world used to seem so big and bad when i was little, but it's turning out to be this giant hilarious joke. except it's not hilarious because we all have this feeling in the back of our minds that something important should be happening right now but somehow the entirety of humankind lost its to-do list and we're running late and still can't find our car keys





bring me your flesh



so i can practice

I just posted a new blog up at Zambooie, and you can also check out my video interviews with Killswitch Engage, Evergreen Terrace, and Maylene and the Sons of Disaster in the interviews section while you're there.

Thanks for supporting my ridiculousness.

This went really terribly. Thought I'd go ahead and post it seeing as Killswitch is on the Myspace featured-music-home-page thing and apparently is doing some secret shows. Enjoy.

I decided to write a blog in Super Ohio Style! Ohio: where air goes to die!

I am in love with Lady Sovereign. Lady Sov wears her keys on a chain around her neck.



If Lady Sov was from the US, those would be the keys to a trailer. I don't think they have trailer parks in the UK, though, just government-funded housing. From what I can tell on Wikipedia, UK "council houses" are more or less like American "projects" except instead of being filled with black people, UK projects are filled with chavs. Sov described the projects she lived in as "gritty and stuff."



"Chavs" is apparently a loaded term in the UK. You can't just throw it around, or you'll be berated for being "classist." Apparently in countries outside the United States, it's not "right" to "look down" on "poor people."



"Chavs" are, basically, what we in America would call "wiggers," except with more Garage music. Imagine a cross between a wigger and a raver that the entire country looks down upon.


(The name of that image is "stupid-chav-twat.jpg")

Now, England has black people just like the United States, but they're not as angry because they've had 30 more years to cool off about the whole slavery thing. Plus I'm pretty sure there wasn't a British system of government-imposed apartheid like we had 40 years ago. Despite the many cultural differences, British black people dress as horribly as American black people do:



Lately there's been lots of buzz about UK "Grime," which is basically like if you took dancehall, hip-hop, and jungle/D&B and produced it entirely on a Commodore 64.



That's a C64 tracking program. Trackers are what I was using in the late 90s to make electronic music. It's usually safe to assume that anything considered "cutting edge" is directly ripped off from what I was doing in the late 90s. Let's contrast and compare something I did in 1998 to Lady Sovereign's "Blah Blah."

Click me

Yup, about the same. Anyway, so Lady Sovereign is the object of a massive amount of debate in the internets blogosphere:



The debate being more or less centered around whether or not Lady Sovereign deserves all the attention she's getting. Oddly, the only reason she's getting all this attention is because of the debate about whether or not she deserves attention. It's like this amazing circular mindfuck, and Lady Sov is riding it all the way to the top.

Fans of grime are worried that Lady Sovereign will become the "face of grime," overshadowing more talented artists who have been working in the scene for years without getting signed to major labels. This picture illustrates the situation perfectly:



The so-called "problem" is that Lady Sov isn't really that good of an emcee, and her tracks aren't the best grime tracks out there. Furthermore, long-time fans of grime (okay, not too long, cause it's only been around for 5 years) take issue with the fact that she's irritating, ridiculous, and essentially white trash.

HOWEVER, and it's a big however, every criticism of Lady Sovereign turns into a powerful strength, if you put it in italics and put "dude" or "Oh my god" in front of it:

The bad news:	The good news:
She's 19	Dude, she's 19
She wears a side ponytail	Dude, she wears a fucking side ponytail
She makes really awkward movements	Oh my god, she makes really awkward movements
She's a trashy brit	She's a trashy brit!
She wears baggy tracksuits	Dude, she wears baggy tracksuits
She's 5'1" tall and calls herself "The Biggest Midget In The Game"	Oh my god, she's 5'1" tall and calls herself "The Biggest Midget In The Game"
I can't stop watching her videos	I can't stop watching her videos

Lady Sovereign reminds me strongly of Leslie and the LY's but the important difference is that Lady Sovereign is not a joke. Lady Sov is a tiny little British 19-year-old who takes herself very seriously as an MC. It's the fact that she takes herself seriously that makes her so ungodly hilarious. The track suits, the keys on a chain around her neck, the sovereign ring, the half-cornrows-sideways-ponytail haircut, the ridiculous facial expressions she makes (a very transparent teenage attempt to look cool whenever the camera points at her), the way she's apparently sponsored by Stussy... and the lyrics... oh god, the lyrics.



I got a fanbase
( We Love You Soveriegn )
Cuz its enough teens, to mid 20's mid 20's to thirtys
none of your words can hurt me
live and say dirty
live and say flirty (anyways)
let me move on and say
sand-a-witch hes eat a sandwitch
Thats ESS-O V Speech
You cant handle This
The white midget the riddim vandalist
(O- NO)
my dad had slept on an Old Matress
Bangoda dont smell like cats piss
Cuz i dont have a cat it died
Understandably i just cried
Mewmewmewmewmewmew
I Sounded like one of those female m-c's that dont have a clue
Mewmewmewmewmewmew
Now that i neva do!

What?

If that's not enough to convince you, go to my profile and check out the video interview. It's an amazing, amazing thing.



So will Lady Sov blow up in the states? I kinda think she will. Not because she represents (poorly) UK grime, one of the freshest things to come out of the hip-hop scene in years. Not because she has any sort of talent, cause I don't think she really has anything with a super-catchy hook. Her lyrics aren't too much of a liability because no American can understand what she's saying, and I think Snow has faded in our consciousness enough that very few people will say that Lady Sov is a female "Informer."

I personally find her compelling. She's cute enough to make me wonder what's under the track suit, and she's got a tough sort of posturing that's admirable by all, yet too fake to be threatening. If that's not enough, she's a teenage white female British rapper, which is novel enough to at least get some attention, assuming we didn't get burnt out on that Reggae Dancehall Jew Rapper from a few months back. Ha, remember him? I sure don't.


"Next time try not killing my only begotten son," said YHWH.

Yesterday I saw a cellphone commercial with the new Lady Sov track playing on the phone, so I assume she's about to get really big here or be a big flop. I guess Lady Sovereign put it best in her own words:

"I just say what I am saying and if people get it they get it and if they dont then they cant really complain as I am just speaking how I am speaking."



And done.

As we teeter on the precipice of adulthood, horrifying mundane straight-faced and straight-laced adulthood, don't we all catch ourselves missing that younger version of ourselves?

That younger, wide-eyed, naive, in-love, stupid and oh-so-smart version of ourselves? Shining glorious in all-knowing ignorance, reveling in blissful innocence and fleeting opinions, feeling the depth and breadth and crushing mass of the tiniest things! Small and insignificant and effete, yet beating furious passionate fists against the ancient monoliths! Pummeling the foundations of stone-wrought mountains, yet moved to tears by ethereal gossamer wisps! Youth!

I'm not as old as some people. I see their dead eyes deadly screaming after its ghost, that ghostly youth! Eyes jealous and spiteful, wise yet wishing for the wisdom that fluttered and taunted and sparkled across sophomore synapses -- and then the beat-dog look of resigned dreams and euphemised failure:

"I was like that once."

"I used to think like that."

"I used to have fun. And dream. I used to dream."

I'm not there yet. I can still grasp the tail of youth as it slithers through the grass. I can still remember, if I try hard enough, what it felt like. An exploding heart and lungs gasping for more air than they deserve, and ideas like electricity arcing across tumbling limitless sky. I can still remember, if I try hard enough. I can still see how important it is...

But I can see how unimportant it is, now. I can see the folly and the fumbling and the futility. I'm old enough now to see how fearsome the potential of success is. I'm old enough to think about success.

I'm old enough now to envy young people.

Stupid, foolish, vulnerable, brilliant youth! You don't care about success. Success for you is fame, or fun, or friendship, or fucking. Success for them -- old, withered them -- is safety, security, stagnancy, silence. When I was young, I didn't appreciate things like a clean shower with good water pressure. I didn't appreciate the absence of violent crime.

How can you? How can you possibly care about a broken window and a stolen car stereo when you're busy creating a new movement in visual art? How can you possibly care about your lawn when you're caring about music, the kind of music that activates and vibrates every molecule of everything within and without you? And how could you possibly care about it slipping away when you have it woven between your fingers and throughout your heart and brain?

Oh, but it can slip away. It can become a dismal shadow, cast by the light spilling out of youth, spilling and oozing out of every orifice of youth, and you are there staring at the street.

Maybe we're still in the phase of having phases. Maybe the natural progression of maturity first embraces anything, then rejects everything, then returns to the light all the wiser. Maybe we must reject everything in order to see what we truly desire to embrace.

As an artist one is constantly motivated to create. It is the undeniable lust, the deepest irrefutable drive to make something out of nothing. We are always spurred by something, or draw upon something, whatever 'something' that emerges from this vast mist of essence -- but is that true inspiration?

I'm starting to understand what true inspiration is, and must confront its absence. It's not mere muse, mere stimulus, but something in the spirit of stumbling saccharine youth; true inspiration is hopelessly entwined with that feeling of being in love with the awful, beautiful, horrifying, lovely world, that world that is so easy to shut out, so hard to let permeate our miserably glorious souls.

Will I sit back and idly envy these kids, these little rumpled balls of energy and vitality, and pine after their spirit in a ruminating gloom -- or will I face the terrifying, brilliant light that waits for me on the opposite side of a chasm of sedentary procrastination and daydreams?

Can anything be blamed on age? Is that so-called "maturity" simply an increasing fear to act? What consequence could be so dire, to make us welcome inconsequentiality?

I had a dream Friday night that my friend Mia and I were in downtown Nashville and a meteor hit the earth. It came down like a huge glowing ball of fire, and landed somewhere to the south. As we were running for shelter and higher ground, trying to get in touch with our friends, the first shockwave hit, causing buildings to explode into maelstroms of debris and shards of glass. Somehow we avoided the rain of projectiles and collapsing skyscrapers, but thousands of terrified people were dying all around us. Nevertheless, we pressed on in our mad dash to safety. We managed to get to one of the higher points in downtown and up a few floors in a sturdy parking garage or some such building that had withstood the blast, just as an enormous tidal wave loomed up from the south. It crashed into the city but flowed beneath us. The few groupings of people who survived looked around at each other and rejoiced, yet we knew that much more hardship would come.

Last night I was talking to Cheryl, who found a way to get fuzzy reception of channel 5 on her TV. She told me she was watching this movie that was about an asteroid, then the evening news came on and said an asteroid a mile wide was coming close to earth. I was mildly disturbed by this, in light of my dream the previous night. I got online today and researched, and it turns out that it's true. It will be at its closest to earth at approximately 11:25 pm tonight, central time.

It's amazing how little scientists know about this asteroid. I'm pretty sure it'll miss earth tonight, but swing back around and destroy the planet within the next month or two. I just wanted to write one last blog and let you all know that I love you a lot and it's been great spending time with you all, and I appreciate your readership. Also, I miss Mia.

Love, Greg

I had such high intentions for the blog recounting my 2,200-mile roadtrip. I composed such beautiful sentences in my head, when I was on the road. I'll try to make it as picturesque as possible.

We pushed our way through the writhing sidewalk crowds of Frenchmen street. New Orleans was twice as filthy as ever; my friend informed me that the garbage pickup schedule is almost back to normal. But is anything even close to being back to normal? It doesn't feel like it.

We selected a little dive that didn't seem too busy. A band was playing. The singer was a woman of indeterminable age with tangled, bottle-red hair and a wild look in her eye. She wore no shoes. Her feet were filthy. She sang the blues like it was a spiritual experience, plucking her guitar meekly in seemingly random patterns.

The lead guitarist was covered in sweat, oil, or both, and his Hawaiian shirt was unbuttoned to show off the sort of torso that can only be sculpted with years of drug abuse. The bass player stood behind an upright bass made of a car's fuel tank and other assorted junk. It was from a Geo Metro, or a Volvo. I can't recall what he told us.

After finishing the song they were playing when we walked in, the band went out to sit on the sidewalk and smoke pot while we bought our drinks. Looking at the bartenders and patrons I realized that when Katrina came through New Orleans, she blew away all the normal people, leaving only New Orleans "characters." Every person was some sort of bizarre caricature you'd expect to find in a tongue-in-cheek short story; years of living in the French Quarter had rocketed these individuals off onto some tangent of humanity that few aspire (or descend) to.

Being in New Orleans again reminded me how inspiring of a city it is for anyone involved in artistic pursuits. There's something about the people, and the architecture, and the history, and the mood of the city that just make you want to create. The bar we were in was as decrepit as any other in the city, and looking over at Jeremiah I knew this would be a great night for his first night in New Orleans.

The band filed in after a few minutes, and picked up their instruments. The redhead plucked her guitar absentmindedly. The rest of the band oozed in over the next few minutes, until I realized they were actually playing a blues song. The harmonica player jerked around wildly, his body out of his control and powerless against the rising tide of blues. They all took solos, one by one, and aside from the harmonica player's solo they were all fairly terrible.

A black man, who looked currently or recently homeless, ambled up to the bar's entrance. The singer had a brief, cryptic conversation with him, and he took a seat next to the djembe player and revealed a trombone and began to blow. He was a collection of angles both acute and obtuse, shifting the position of his trombone once every measure, and no member of the audience was safe from his piercing blasts as he shoved his trombone in our faces.

While he wasn't very good, he made up for it in intensity.

While he was intense, he didn't make up for his annoyingness as the night pressed on into the morning hours. During a 25-minute stoned blues jam session, we decided to head back to Chris's place. We stopped in the bar downstairs and had one more drink, and went upstairs.

Chris had some trundle beds set up for us in his office (which is apparently right next to the room where Faulkner wrote his first novel) and Jeremiah and I said goodbye to Chris and Aaron and went to sleep.

The next day we had some eggs at a "homey" little diner on Magazine, and hit the road for Texas.

---

Looks like I am keeping a blog on zambooie.com now. Go to the bottom left of the page and click on "Johnny Folklorique." One step closer to being an internet celebrity!

This is a drunken bulletin for all of my friends, who are all creative, independent, highly intelligent people. Bear with me, and please read this.

You may have noticed that more and more people are getting into ABC's television series "Lost." I noticed, and I dismissed it at first. I finally broke down and started renting the first season on Netflix. I got hooked immediately. I think it's a great show.

I know that a lot of my friends haven't gotten into it yet. You're probably like "Whatever, it's just a TV show." Well, my friends, it's not. The Lost story is probably the first execution of the future of entertainment.

The creators of Lost have ALREADY synthesized a huge universe of content on the television, internet, phone lines, and in printed material. This is the new frontier of entertainment. If you miss out now, you're missing out on much more than just a television show.

I'm impressed. And I'm not just impressed in some shallow fanboy sense. I'm impressed as an artist. It is way more than a TV show. I don't want to say too much because I don't want to spoil anything, but trust me, if you haven't seen Lost, you need to rent the DVD of the first season and watch it, and watch the second season on iTunes or wait until the DVD comes out, and start getting into it.

I feel like it's shallow to just say "Oh, I really like Lost, you should watch it." I'm writing this because I -KNOW- my friends and don't want them to miss out. Six hours ago I was telling my friend Sara about it and explaining how good the series was. It's like reading a good novel, because of the depth involved in the story arc, and subplots, and character development.

That was six hours ago. Since then, I've been researching on the internet and making phone calls and discovering the creators of Lost haven't just been writing an excellent TV show. They've been creating an alternate universe and leaving clues everywhere. This is the sort of artistic project that will go down in history as the first of its kind.

I can't say much more, aside from that you really, really, need to make efforts to get yourself up to date with this program so you can fully experience the amazing amount of thoroughness and creativity that have been invested in Lost. I apologize for being cryptic, but it's like a cult -- once you get to a certain level you can't expect acolytes to appreciate the full depth of what's going on.

If you like novels, mysteries, philosophy, theology, conspiracy theories, suspense, whatever... get the fuck into Lost. If you want to see what the future is in entertainment and immersive marketing, get into it. Because five years from now, this is how things are going to be. THE OLD WAYS ARE DEAD.

You know what capitalism will be like in the future? We'll actually enjoy being consumers. This is one of the ways it will be accomplished.

- Pistachios: Do I like them or not? After years of internal debate, I am still uncertain. I'm starting to lean towards "not." They always seem to be old, no matter how fresh of a bag you have. And come to think of it, no one uses pistachios in any recipes. That can't be a good sign. Peanuts, hell, you have peanut butter, peanut brittle, peanut butter cookies, peanut sauce... no one ever bakes a pistachio flavored cake.

sigh.

I just remembered that I recently wrote a blog about pistachio-flavored ice cream. I don't mean to be so pistachio-centric. The last thing I want is an online blog with a heavy pistachio bias. That's the last thing that anyone wants.

I have to go to bed, so I won't write out the self-loathing opus that I had planned on. Suffice it to say I am not a very good person. Or rather, I am a good person who's not very good at life.

Sorry.

Thermoplastics can't save us now--

Oh and I'd rather hear a song in spanish than hear people talk about "cracking down" on people who write songs in spanish. Remember when GW spoke spanish to get the latino vote? I don't remember the nation being outraged. I'd figure we would encourage more spanish-language projects like this. After all, the longer they take to learn english, the longer they can be subjugated in ghettos.