Well, perhaps that's a bit of an exaggeration... this blog is definitely on hiatus, though. K & I depart for South America tomorrow at noon, and return in five months. I won't be updating Mayhem Onward! during that time. But, you can follow our adventures in Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina by visiting our travel blog: Viaje del Sueño / Dream Trip. See you in September!
by Karla Mancero and Brian E. Langston
sand, wind
drops of rain
a peeking sun
surprises the clouds
somewhere distant
gears churn into motion
machines evacuate the earth
a photo, black and white
a texture of color
lost on a day
spiritual waves
he shoots a gun, his silver teeth
a tin star, desert bronco
eight cylinders churning, gasoline
a story begins
and ends with
the sunset
the machines die
without learning anything
the grain has no direction
birds fly against the wind
sand in the teeth
sapphire Atlantic, rumble
and ivory foam
he gains a
compass as
she breaks the
distance, the
fires are seen
before recognized
wildflowers, yellow and red and orange
the color of autumn's flames
smelting two hearts into one golden sun
to the beach they
go regardless of
floating time
hourglasses left over
the machines decay in saltwater
are ground smooth and timeless
become corral reefs
or are worn into sand
if brothers and sisters
cross drowning land
and parches waters
then the worn down
machines can grow
over with flesh
he pawns his silver teeth and empty gun
buys himself some driftwood and a mizzenmast
ties an anchor to his leg
and sets sail, out to sea
30 years later she holds
the hand of an old
man and turns up the
volume on his teeth
on his teeth ... he has no
solid ground to walk on, takes
her by the arm and they
gray haired amble past machines
springing forth with flowers
and the timeless sun, textures
of waves, and a day in which wind
surprises the clouds, brothers and sisters
grains slipping past
like hour-sand, quick-sand
an anchor washes ashore
bound to driftwood, an old sail
the sun setting in a photograph
To fulfill some narcissistic desire or other, I just Googled my first name, the keyword "Brian". Alas, I didn't find myself on the first page of results. I guess my Blog hasn't propelled me to the world of single name only celebrity status, like Madonna, or Cher, or, um, those other people that just go by one name.
The results that turned up, however, were quite interesting.
One thirty eight am, Sunday, April 19, 2009 - I am delirious from lack of sleep and still I am not ready for bed. Two movies have run their course in the background on TNT - the tail end of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and it blurred into The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which then blurred into The Chronicles of Riddick. Now The Matrix has begun. Images and words and sounds blurring into the background so that I can avoid the absence of noise in the middle of the night quietude of Hampden in an old house and Karla in NYC.
I have been transcribing poems from two notebooks into the series "The Traveler Poems", equal parts travelogue, mysticism, and physics. I am not sure it makes any sense. I'm not sure anything makes any sense this late at night.
Meanwhile, Neo is about to meet Mr. Smith for the first time. He's going to go out on a ledge, but he's not going to make it to the scaffold.
Simultaneously, I have been revising various other poems and attempting to group them into submissions. It's harder than it sounds, finding poems that somehow seem to fit together in a nice little package, and then figuring out where that package should go to when you're done.
After being stranded in Denver and unable to fly into Seattle or Portland, we finally made it to San Francisco, stayed with our friends Diane and Jasson overnight, and drove up the California coast, spending the night in Arcata. Yesterday we completed the journey, crossing the Siskyous on 199 from Crescent City to Grants Pass and finally up I-5. Just in time for Christmas Eve. Without our luggage, of course, which is lost in transit somewhere, trying to find us :) Woke up today to a completely white Christmas and snow falling all morning... Beautiful and peaceful. K and I are together, and with family, and that's all that truly matters. Peace.
Yesterday, Baltimore saw her first snow of the season coming down in big fluffy crystals. Most of it melted right away, and there certainly wasn't enough to stick to the ground, but a few cars parked all day did get a light dusting. Of course, I didn't manage to take a photo, not even on my cell phone.
Fortunately, Karl Merton Ferron, a Baltimore Sun photographer, did manage to get this shot in.
Last night around 1 AM before I went to bed I looked out the second story window of our rowhouse at the thermometer mounted outside. It read 25 degrees Fahrenheit. As in seven degrees below freezing. That's cold, for this time of year, around these parts.
The average low for the 21st of November is a nice warm 41 degrees. Of course, the record low was 22 degrees, set back in 1987. [ More details on this and other useless weather trivia here. ]
Looks like winter's coming early this year, or at least she's teasing us. More bone-chilling weather on the way. Hopefully big bushels of snow falling from the sky. Enough to bring the city to a standstill. Enough to bring the city to a hush. Enough for everyone to spend a few moments standing on their porches resplendent in the clean, frozen winter light.
This weekend (October 3-5, 2008), the clothing chain Old Navy is celebrating Columbus Day early with its "Party Like It's 1492" sale. Apparently, Old Navy, and the creative directors that created this misguided advertising campaign, and the suburban White Americans who have bought into it, only learned the sanitized, white-washed version of Christopher Columbus' arrival to the Americas.
Lest we all think that the arrival of the Spanish in 1492 and the subsequent colonization of the West was a gay old time when the Spanish and Natives partied it up with brotherly love, consider this:
What, therefore, are Old Navy and the producers of this campaign thinking? Are they so naive that they have accepted the white-washed version of Columbus' arrival to the West Indies? Or have they bought into colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism so completely that the commoditization of genocide is something to be made light of?
Of course, it's not that surprising that a bourgeois chain like Old Navy that caters to mostly suburban upper-middle class White people would so mangle the truth for their own commercial gain. Truth goes out the window when there's a quick buck to make.
And the consumers that buy into this system, those currently shopping at Old Navy during this sale, who have forgotten the real events of 1492, those slaves to fashion - perhaps they should stop to consider truly what slavery means, their slavery to consumerism, and the barbaric slavery of the Natives of the Americas (and also, later, our brothers and sisters in Africa). It was and is this very slavery that built the foundation of the consumerist world in which we live today.
Some advice: stop buying overpriced designer goods, unnecessary clothingthat will just be thrown out within a season or two, from stores large chain stores that really only care about enslaving a person to their fashion in order to acquire their "gold" (money). Boycott Old Navy, Gap, Banana Republic, and the like, where most of the clothing is produced in third-world sweatshops powered by virtual slave labor.
Instead, make do with what you have. Buy second hand. Buy fair-trade. Buy recycled. Make your own. Do something to break free of the vicious cycle of consumerism in which we all seem to be trapped.
And get educated. Learn the real truth - whatever that may be - by seeking it out yourself. What you're told by any one person, any one book, any one blog entry, does not and cannot encompass the entire story, even when the author is attempting to tell it as accurately as possible. There are always more sides. Learn how to learn, how to sift through the noise and find the fragments of truth, how to assemble those into a coherent and informed narrative. Otherwise, you always be a slaved to what you are told; your mind will never be free.
You know that an album has to be good when you can't get it out of your mind. I mean the whole album, not just one song off of it. Seriously. That's what's been going on for the last few weeks with album Heretic Pride released on 2/19/2008 by The Mountain Goats on the 4AD label.
Every time I catch myself listening to John Darnielle and Peter Hughes in my head performing "Autoclave", I try to change the channel, but just end up with them doing "Lovecraft in Brooklyn" instead. Then they'll switch it up on me and skip to "Sept 15 1983", or bounce to the albums title track! When they aren't playing in my head, they're streaming through my headphones - every day at work I pull up iTunes and listen to the album, all the way through, sometimes twice. Hell, I'm listening to it right now - I can't stop! (Maybe I should listen to some mariachi music to break the The Mountain Goats feedback loop I seem to be trapped in.)
In all seriousness, this album is incredible on many levels. From the well-crafted music, heavily featuring acoustic guitar and piano, with some light-weight drums in the background and some other sounds mixed in for good measure, to the extremely literary lyrics. In fact, it's those lyrics that have cemented the brilliance of this album in my mind. Where else can you find references to the works of Sax Rohmer and H.P. Lovecraft, along with a song that imagines the last moments of Michael James Williams, and even a piece for the fictional Michael Myers (from the Halloween movie franchise)? Of course, thrown into the middle of this are various songs about the Lake Tianchi Monster and swamp creatures, and even a beautifully intimate ballad or two.
It's the genuine intimacy of all the songs, even when they're referencing obscure literary characters or monsters, that brings the album home. Many of the songs tell a story about a character as a snapshot of a day. Sax Rohmer's spies sneaking around alleyways as the sun rises. Conspirators (or they could be people hiding from someone) scared in a room with a single light when someone calls on a phone line that no one dares to answer. A guy wandering into a Brooklyn pawn shop to buy himself a switchblade. An incredibly intimate and heartbreaking scene that takes place in the mens restroom involving an East Berlin disco refugee.
And suddenly the song changes again. The Tianchi monster is staring into space, in my head, anyway, floating among sandalwood smoke and children sketching pictures...
Press photos by Mark Van S. from The Mountain Goats official web site.
Last night, my fiancée and I went out to dinner with her mother, who is visiting from the Philadelphia area. After an aborted mission to eat seafood at the Red Fish in Canton (closed, maybe for good (?) - their web site is now a random register.com search portal), we decided to head over to Ikaros Restaurant in Greektown as we'd been meaning to try some Baltimore Greek food.
It was a nice place, family-friendly, with a fairly extensive menu. Being ovo-lacto-pesco-vegetarians, we honed in on the seafood. K ordered the Shrimp Guvetsaki with Rice, a sure win. Her mother, who does not adhere to our blasphemous ways of avoiding the consumption of land-dwellers, ordered the Stuffed Grape Leaves appetizer, another sure win (except for that ground beef thing).
I, on the other hand, being of an adventurous culinary nature, and suddenly feeling like this could be my episode of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, decided to try one of the specials - Octopus With Rice and Feta.
Now, I thought I liked octopus - I've eaten it in seafood stews, I've eaten it as sushi, I've eaten it in random Spanish dishes I can't even remember the names of... But, I'd never had octopus like this before.
Here's the official description of my meal: "Fresh octopus cut in small pieces, seasoned w/ herbs and wine, cooked w/ rice pilaf, and topped w/ feta cheese."
When my dish arrived, I thought they'd made a mistake. That's octopus? It doesn't look like octopus, I thought. (Sorry, at the time I didn't think to snap a picture with my cell phone.) That doesn't taste like octopus. That doesn't have the texture of octopus. I even asked my waitress to make sure. She reassured me, but I was skeptical until I found one of the beast's briny tentacles lurking in the rice pilaf.
I quickly felt my episode of No Reservations transforming into an outtake from Bizarre Foods - Andrew Zimmern, you've got to try this dish... Apparently, when octopus is left to marinate in "herbs" and Greek white wine, then baked with rice pilaf and smothered in feta cheese, it transforms into something strange and, quite frankly, disturbing - the infamous OCTOPORK!
I swear, I thought I was eating pigs' ears and snouts. That texture totally reminded me of how I imagine pigs' feet. Waitress, are you sure that's not swine in my pilaf? Ah, well...
Imagine a creature straight out of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, not as cuddly as a rakunk, not as weird as a pigoon, and not quite as ferocious as a bobkitten, but even more disturbing - an amalgam of the dark briny depths and a wild boar. All tentacles and snout. It gives me the shivers.
Could be worse, I guess, like that time my mother snuck the chicken hearts into the mole... Or I ended up with soup from what used to be my favorite Thai restaurant that, literally, tasted like ass...
George Carlin. May 12, 1937 - June 22, 2008. Goodbye.
I was fortunate enough to see this man live twice - once in Las Vegas and once in Baltimore. Both times were incredible, irreverent, mind blowing, and life altering. Possibly one of the most intelligent comedians of all time - may you find yourself finally at peace in death, Mr. Carlin.
More to come on both adventures, once the shock's worn off, the coffee's kicked in, and I make it through a day of work...
