Hands stuffed into pockets, I waited impatiently for the others to arrive. On the stone steps of the subway stop we stood, watching the rain splosh around on the street, forming brown puddles of muck and slicking the stone under our feet.
People came and went, mostly in groups, some munching away open mouthed, spittle flying, chomping and grinding sausages on sticks, candied fruit on sticks, stinky tofu on sticks.
I moved into the rain to peer into the wave of people ascending with the escalator and flowing out on to the street to try to spot my friends. The speed of time distorted as I lost myself in the nauseating flow of bodies.
The feeling became intolerable and I was just about to turn away when I made eye contact with two eyes, one very special eye, the All-Seeing Eye.
With the calm intent of gunslingers, we sized each other up from distance. Predator and Predator. I sought to break eye contact but felt my vision, already melted into sugary purple syrup from the flow of hot human forms with waving locomotive limbs, unable to disengage.
His face turned and I realized why I found him. His second eye was frozen in still panic, a sort of violent frustration he struggled to mask in public. He inhaled and exhaled and I felt my throat constrict. Me-Mania.
We at Permalean have had an explosive month, with one of us moving to Beijing (and losing access to blogger) and one of us working 12 hours a day. Rest assured, as purple crystals accumulate in our midst like snowflakes consecutively land lightly, delicate-inhalingly next to each other, forming snow pack that forms the basis for snow glut that forms the basis for an avalanche that buries Small Town America, so too shall we be compelled to post again.
Who knows maybe I'll post something tomorrow for now just watch every Tubesteak video you have time for:
In a statement Wednesday, Cornwell says the proposal insults women who have legitimately suffered from sexual misconduct.
[excerpted from the AP viewed here 9/9 on nfl.com]
Roethlisberger and his lawyers deny the woman's allegations. They demanded in an Aug. 19 settlement letter that she drop the lawsuit and write a letter of apology to the quarterback [Ed.]. In return, Roethlisberger would release both the woman and Dunlap from any legal liability stemming from the "conspiracy to extort and defame" him.
So it’s Friday night and my last night in town before jettin out to the East side to face the final stretch of my academic stint at the illustrious, reputable and seriously scrapey Wellesley College. The moon’s full and shiny and the stars are not only aligned but a-leaned: I’m kickin it at my homegirl’s, with a fresh homemade mojito in one hand, a cupful of magic in the other, and in my pocket, freeee tickets to see an apparently bangin Brazilian psychedeli-rock band known as Os Mutantes---The Mutants. PREPARE yoself.
With the bevies in our bellies, we wander our way down to The Night Light, a cozy Bellingham nightlife hot spot notable for its rustic all-wood motif and its universal appeal to the young and the not so young. The crowd ranged from various twenty-somethings—the awkwardly swaying hipster, the double-jointed raver kid Gumby-bot-ing all over the place, and the 6’5” gangly guy hastily supporting his totally plastered 5 foot-tall girlfriend as they shift side-to-side only kind of with the beat—to various forty-, fifty-, even sixty-somethings behaving no less and probably more indecently than us kids, bumping and grinding with pot-bellies very much involved, and every so often thrusting a violent “ROCK ON!” hand gesture into the air.
And I haven’t even talked about the band yet. Os Mutantes at first appeared to me to be a family affair, both in form and in purpose—like an aging Brazilian counterpart to The Partridge Family, now past their prime and so relegated to down-home performances at family restaurants or bars in big small towns like Bellingham. Ohh no sir. Their late ‘60s/early ‘70s peace-love-WAY too much LSD driven lyrics, combined with a later ‘70s funky disco sound, some oh-so ‘80s power ballad harmonic moments, and random-ass insertions of catastrophic avant-garde mayhem (a la Animal Collective meets Amazon warrior)…all somehow taking root in Brazilian traditional rhythms—go seriously, SERIOUSLY, dumb.
With no point of reference in this sea of thizz, I leaned myself back and let the waves take me. After 2 encores all parties dispersed and I took a second to unlean and process what I’d witnessed. I said to my friend: “All that’s left to do is add a club beat and dress em up like mutant space cadets.”
I later found out, with a little research, that they’d already done close to that, minus the club beat part.In the ‘60s when the band was young and vital, they rebelled against the oppressive Brazilian military government with rampant psychadelic behavior, appearing, for example, on a weekly TV program disguised as aliens, witches, or conquistadors performing surreal hymns to such bizarre figures as Don Quixote, Genghis Khan, and Lucifer, while tossing massive nets and giant rubber caterpillars across their audience.
Need I say more?Just a bit and then I’ll leave it. Lead guitarist, Sergio Dias Baptista, is the only continuing member of the original trio, which also included his brother Arnaldo, who left the band in 1973 for thizzing too hard on liquid love (he was subsequently institutionalized and jumped from the building's window, causing a six-week coma), and Rita Lee, who peaced out in 1972 to pursue a solo career (yawn). On hiatus until 2006, Os Mutantes inspired the likes of Kurt Cobain, Beck, David Byrne, and Of Montreal. Now a 7-member crew, the band will release their first album in 35 years this Tuesday.Search Haih Or Amortecedor for the deets.
Hard to find a good vid, but this one gives a good taste of the original sound and the pic seems to capture some of their essence.
telemarketing phone calls can become extremely complicated. I inadvertently caused a young man to thizz uncontrollably in an existential haze for a hot second when I answered the phone. His attempted self-introduction failed to convince me that he either was, or was not a telemarketer. After a moment's pause, I presented him with his sentence: "Is this a marketing phone call?"
My indistinct verbiage and failure to effectively construct a proper identifigatory question puzzled him terribly. His initiation of our constructed relationship had been a haphazardly hot potato'd bowl of Thizzy Flakes passed to an unsuspecting stranger. My judo reversal caught him completely off guard.
Time. Space. Distortions and threads, stretching from one origin to multiple endpoints. Where is history? Who is time? How did we find society? These are some of the questions this blog will explore. Posted items are singular but ultimately interwoven pieces of the larger, multidimensional jigsaw puzzle that these questions present.
The idea of "lean," as I see it, is this. Lean is an verb. Anything can lean. You or I may find ourselves "leaned," from time to time.
That stop sign on your morning walk may someday strike you in a particular way - does it seem to lean?
Lean is both affiliated with and disassociated from the idea of some geometric distance from 0 degrees. Being physically leaned over to one side is not a prerequisite to experience leaning in the sense that i use it. Items such as the sign may not be physically leaned, but believe me, that stop sign at Latin Way, on particular times in the morning, in a particular light, I do find it to lean quite hard.
