A Separate Blue

 

Taking in more and shutting out less. That was the mandate for Blue. Because trouble soon arrived wherever Blue had carved out a modest little bit of space to occupy, it had become rare to be a ‘body at rest,’ and some standby onlookers were secretly realizing they were starting to feel that way themselves…robbed of rest. Alas, to lean inward led to unaired grievances ungainly of aspect and to lean out meant you were at risk of a physical accident or ritualistic social humiliation. The mandate is to take in more information so that morbid interiority won’t swallow you whole. Can’t hurt to keep your hands fairly busy at various tasks. Drink of the Pool of Memory and not that of Forgetfulness. Blue would rather identify with rather than put an identity to. Identification is an activity of the generous imagination. Did you know that birds are up there in the trees and on the eavestroughs and fence posts mercilessly heckling all of life?

If your criticism of Blue begins with the words who the hell in their right mind?…you can go ahead and stop yourself right there. What kind of right mind do we think we’re talking about anyway? Excuse my mind, please, something isn’t right with it. I think I can see what the problem is here. These are the plain results of standardized testing. The mind is its own topography and also a circuit board. You try not to spill anything caustic on the console. That is the first rule. You also need to understand that on a daily basis any individual mind releases at least twice as much methane gas as a full-sized adult cow. Whenever there is a situation in which two tough guys in similar suits who look like they could sort of be related come in and start roughing up some cowering underworld geek…Blue always thinks of Kafka. Forever the blushing bride if you slide a little something extra on the side. A short poem about the hulking machines that clean the city streets in the early hours. These are the hours when Blue is most active at the typewriter, practically chain-smoking Camels. Do not be despondent if you wear the green Nehru jacket of the urban vagabond. Writhe not in anguish and abandon ye who are in no immediate peril. Death arrives at the loping pace of an overextended plague doctor robbed of rest. In the hustle and bustle of the stimulated mind, caffeinated for good measure, binary logic is reduced to dancing atoms in freefall. Excited and mobbed, Blue will canalize the district as a virtuality. The mind, having arrived on time, locks down its load and has itself a gander. The collectivized mind is the citizenry of this outpost and the individual mind an intercept. Blue walks the unknown streets of some new city until they are known.

 

Stopping at the Starbucks drive-thru for breakfast because running a little late for work, a person waiting in their automobile to retrieve that breakfast might begin to feel outright hounded by the clock. There is nothing quite so chilling to Blue as the barking of attack dogs. The web of communications must be a net that catches us, Blue presumes, because in some obliterated urban jungle with no electricity or running water…very few could be expected to find their footing. The rat is the patron saint of infrastructure, chewing its way through. Ask not for whom the cat lady tolls, the cat lady tolls for thee. People meet and fall in love like two shopping carts colliding. If the lovers have chemistry, they’ll know it first. As though it were all a board game in Isaac Newton’s Imaginarium. Blue wants the full spectrum of colours from the squatting position and all the birds chortling their commentary. It would be obscene to block off day from night and sleep in cycles. 

Do we even actually know exactly what it is we have gotten ourselves into? There are no smooth contours to attract the attention of our touch. The prismatic mindscape runs the gamut of colours. When we lean into the horizon with our base suspicions…can we expect any result except one even worse than we’d originally expected? To properly ponder and sit a smidgeon longer. For Blue, danger is what you get when you provoke the tempest. On earth everything is at sea, so the speak, and that’s where the trouble lurks. Those who rush about with too much insistency shall be carried off by strong winds. Poseidon. Blue is aware of the difficulties the situation continues to face, behind enemy lines with a bad map. Why do espresso and cigarettes—both stimulants—steady the nerves taken in moderation? It’s one of life’s mysteries. Robotic chatter fills the air. The hollow where you’ve stored your most cherished memories is the first one they ransack. Trilingual girl ups the ante. Blue is not likely to sit up all night with you so that you can get caught up, however many languages you may fluently speak. The only real adventures are misadventure. You cannot keep pacing the chiaroscuro-lit docks your whole life. The only mercy the divinity ever handed us was but a few feet of slack. Blue is the blue of horseshoes or cracked safes…nothing need be added to self-modifying nature. 

At the bottom of a mineshaft in the far north lies an emerald heart. There won’t be any chance left us to plead our cases once the vines start creeping in. Compensatory sense activities waylay our fears and citizens are encouraged to overcompensate. Confucius believed that we should hold loyalty to the world, principles, and others above all other considerations in terms of the consideration of an ethics. Everything would seem to hinge on Blue getting to the point. Who doesn’t find themselves feeling the effects of zero gravity now and then? Don’t you know that critters produce litters? When you find yourself on the offence…try to buy yourself some room to maneuver. 

An altercation between two actual people is always a sloppy, embarrassing mess. Did we ever know what precisely to do with our physical selves? What did we ever do to be forced to coincide with ourselves? Once upon a time, there was an empty courtyard at night. Blue likes it when it gets a little colder because there are no more flies to get in. A cigarette and a mug of black tea…now we can begin. What Blue is trying to bring across is that we can be stronger together as opposed to separate. It’s like that whole Pool of Memory and Pool of Forgetfulness routine. You commit to a choice as to which thing you are going to drink out of…in that moment. Do we have to throw down? Does it have to go down? This would appear to be a good moment to shut up and slow down. 

A short poem about the sound of an audience emptying the auditorium at the close of a performance…

Pauline Oliveros, The Well

Tempter

Ever since I first heard it, Refried Ectoplasm [Switched On Volume 2], a collection of singles and rarities by Stereolab, has been my favourite album by that band. On all their many great recordings of space station lounge English/French rock ’n’ roll jammers, Stereolab routinely cover that terrain like no other or others before or since. Highlights from Refried Ectoplasm include “Harmonium,” “French Disko,” and “John Cage Bubblegum,” but the big, stunning showstopper is “Tempter,” the closing track. I think it is the best song in the whole of the Stereolob repertoire. In season four of Better Call Saul the powers that be decided to use “Tempter” in an episode called “Coushatta.” I don’t think I watched Better Call Saul as far as season four, but that’s pretty cool all the same!    

Stereolab, "Tempter"

Five Great 21st Century Punk Records [in Chronological Order]

 

Punk rock music almost universally involves about three chords and rapid repetition. It’s the musical genre that taught me for good that uptempo music is the most fun kind, great for parties and dances. Since it is only working with a few chords and conducting its basic business around cascading riffs, punk rock wants to be loud, visceral, and ever on the verge of ecstatic collapse. The personal imprint of the individual players becomes important and noticeable. For the guitarists and bassists, sometimes even better results can be achieved with an amplifier that has been damaged in some way. 

Without further ado...

Bassholes, Bassholes, 2005

The Intelligence, Deuteronomy, 2007

King Khan and the Shrines, The Supreme Genius of King Khan and the Shrines, 2008

Iceage, You’re Nothing, 2013

Tyvek, Origin of What, 2016

The Intelligence, "Block of Ice"

King Khan & the Shrines, "Land of the Freak" 
[Official Video]

Iceage, "Morals" 
[Live from a studio in Copenhagen]

Alexander

 

Bob le flambeur (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1956)

The Criminal (Joseph Losey, 1960)

My name is Alexander Andreevich Alexandrov and I am, like my father before me, a confirmed sinner. This is hardly merely a matter of a shared ardour for vodka, though that is assuredly part of it. I’m a good guy and I’m a bad guy, but the face of evil I am not. I think my father believed that the balance of power was always somehow, somewhere out of whack. He grew cockeyed and dyspeptic. My sinful expenditures, usually fully conscious, are related to confidence connivances in which I artfully fleece everyday people of their hard-earned money and also a tendency to get habitually drunk, surly, and avoidant in my relationships with women, who are sometimes with some justification referred to as the fairer sex, these in my case tending to consist of exotic dancers, low-rent fashion models, and weary, crooked realtors or lawyers of sturdy stock. The case I want to make at the outset relates to the God of the Big Three Monotheisms. What monotheisms, you ask? Judaism, the Big Daddy, which began over three thousand years ago; Christianity, which began with rebellious itinerant Jews in Judea in the 1rst century CE (obviously); and good ol’ fanatical Islam, which began around 610 CE in Arabia after the Prophet Muhammad had visions and started telling folks about them. What we know about the God of the Big Three Monotheisms is  that He in His wily Omnipotence has a wild sense of humour while at the same time being a confirmed sadist of great vehemence  Which is to say: God is a good guy and a bad guy. This God does not hate sinners—the Christian version especially!—he hates evil (corporations, governments…serial killers), but at the same time He must to some extent sort of at least passively enjoy evil as a spectator sport—in His Omnipotence—or else how come He hasn’t vanquished it yet? I believe we can largely chalk it up to a strain of divine sadism.

Most of what I do for money is inherently criminal and touch-and-go, but I have always liked to team up for easy no-fuss jobs with lawyers, especially lady lawyers. What most people maybe don’t know or just casually forget is that lawyers act as intermediaries between power brokers from different strata of public life. They hear an awful lot and work at a cool veneer, intent to keep transactions active and ongoing. Even when everything is falling apart in front of you, you need to look like you know what you’re doing.    

Trudy is a certified attorney-at-law. Trudy is not her real name and she is from some hazy distant place that ain’t none of your business. I met her at a card table and she’s the kind of person who takes endless passing amusement at odd little details. I enjoy her recounting of any number of odd details; she’s good company and she’s savvy. Believe it or not, last night in my small apartment with the electrical air conditioner, Trudy said she’d been thinking of odd things pertaining to the Roman God Mercury. Not only was Mercury the God of commerce, eloquence, epistolary letters, travellers, sleight of hand, and thieves, she argued, he was also the God of the 24/7, unstinting flow of electronic capital and of network glitches too. I was in several senses compelled by this idea. I immediately had a picture in my imagination of the Milky Way Galaxy with all kinds of money flying around at the speed of light and small amounts of it disappearing now and then into obscured parcels of negative space. To Trudy I simply observed that the path from point A to point B hasn’t ever been straight. Maybe a letter gets intercepted, maybe your whole battalion does. On the way to the concrete realization of an idea we face the obstructions inherent to the idea itself. In trying to sell an idea to some other party—as though ourselves convinced—we face the basic roadblock of human communication. Travellers can find themselves in a predicament very quickly. People focus on the task and the goal, and their pockets are hanging there for the picking. 

Sometimes when I’ve had a good bit more to drink than could be considered reasonable and am therefore sloppy of demeanour, it is actually easier to run a sleight of hand trick on bar staff, like getting change back for a larger bill than I end up slipping them, because they simply are not expecting such hijinks from somebody in as unseemly a state as myself. It sounds simple and it is: sometimes the best way to avoid being noticed is to look like someone from whom your average person would be likely to avert their eyes. That’s right, just keep moving along. If you want to skim a little something extra off the surface it'll help if there isn’t anybody really looking. I guess it is toxic pride that makes me want to outsmart people, but deeper down within my fundamental character runs an enthusiast’s penchant for amateur playacting. Sometimes we amateur players can be reckless by nature or momentary inspiration, but it is always best to keep to those jobs you know you’ve got licked. It’s how one butters one’s bread.

In response to my recent musings on the liaison role played by attorneys, above board or not so much, Trudy pointed me to a quote from crime novelist and grift maven Jim Thompson’s autobiographical novel Bad Boy, which I confess I have not as yet had the opportunity to read in its entirety. Quoting at some length: “It was the bellboy who was always in closest contact with this hurly-burly world, a world always populated by strangers of unknown background and unpredictable behaviour. Alone and on his own, with no one to turn to for advice or help, he had to please and appease those strangers: the eccentric, the belligerent, the morbidly depressed. He had to spot the potential suicide and soothe the fighting drunk and satisfy the whims of those who were determined not to be satisfied. And always, no matter how he felt, he had to do those things swiftly and unobtrusively.” Jim Thompson was a hardcore drunk with lifelong emotional instability issues, often unproductive for long periods, but notably in 1953 and 1954 he published twelve of his best novels, a run the likes of which tawdry, angry, and cerebral paperback genre fiction won’t ever see again, you can count on that. If you pulled something like that in Vegas you’d be set for at least one lifetime. You would probably also be so stymied by righteous awe that you’d be too afraid to ever gamble again. As an old man Jim Thompson could mostly be found holding court at the legendary Musso & Frank on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. He can also be seen as the cuckolded older husband in the 1975 film version of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely starring Robert Mitchum.

I have never been one to engage in violent crime, I am not myself especially sadistic, but I’ll break up a fight if I have to. I don’t want to confront a living thing in pain. I went hunting with my father once and it was more than enough. The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov famously wrote that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. He wrote that not too terribly long before Jim Thompson had his otherworldly run. That aphorism speaks loud and clear through the fog and blarney, requiring no fluff or finessing. The world is forever kneecapped by lobbyists acting on behalf of the munitions industry. When the American military blows off a whole hell of a lot of ordinance in some foreign land for no real tactical or strategic reason, just as a blind show of force, they call it a million dollar minute. Hardy har har. I couldn’t spend a million in a minute if I had a team of professionals at the ready. My grandparents fled atrocities and there is no end to my contempt for atrocities. Sometimes I think everyday life is an atrocity, but when I sober up I remember that this sort of thinking stems from self-pity, which nobody I’d want anything to do with finds attractive. I know I don’t. I never had to flee anywhere in a panic when it wasn’t my own fault. Once the bombardment starts you duck and cover, and that’s about the size of it. It might not be fair but if it’s real you have to deal with it anyway.

Earlier this evening Trudy and I were watching a 1080p porno clip on the Samsung LCD television in the bedroom. It featured three young women and a Slavic-looking guy posing in the role of lucky photographer. They shot it well and it was basically tasteful. At some point I realized that the three young women and the Slavic-looking guy all resembled different people I had known over the years, stretching back a long ways. I felt old in that moment. I think I see why those who have died briefly or come glancingly close report seeing their lives flash before their eyes. It’s like a backed-up drain. We are each of us for our contracted time in this baffling, plein air purgatory positively inundated with life.

Joseph Vitarelli, The Last Seduction [Film Score]

Farewell, My Lovely (Dick Richards, 1975)

* Jazz connoisseurs will note that in his wonderful and a propos score for The Last Seduction, a film in which Linda Fiorentino gives one of the strongest and most self-possessed performances I've ever seen anywhere, Joseph Vitarelli takes a good deal of direct inspiration from Miles Davis. You can go ahead and throw on Kind of Blue if you remain doubtful.

 

Eternity Jam: Dream Baby Dream

terre inconnue

A large part of who each of us is has been etched piecemeal by popular song and such remains the case whether any given one of us likes it that way or not. In the early days of popular recorded music, songs meant to be released on 78rpm shellac to a mass buying public seldom came in at over three minutes, as with the slammin’ bangers of our current times, whether we’re talking about the Carter Family warbling away at “Keep on the Sunny Side” or Robert Johnson running the devil’s own extended technique on “Hell Hound on My Trail.” A popular tune is finessed real slick so that is can be palatable to the majority even if its every last detail has been fussed over by ace players and technicians. An earworm can crawl inside the whole wide world and eat its damn brains. When it dropped as though hot in the year 2000, “Who Let the Dogs Out” by Baha Men seemed to be playing in every public place I happened to visit, including in the infamously snooty town of Montreal, and that raucous and idiotic tune never ceased to amuse and delight me even though I sure as fuck wasn’t about to go buy anything by Baha Men. This may be a controversial sentiment, but I believe, having grown up in the golden age of music videos, that commercial music that has been packaged adroitly can be very, very special. As a kid, I had no interest in the music-qua-music of King of Pop Michael Jackson, and yet the legendary videos for both “Thriller” and “Bad” revamped everything I believed and indeed was quite comprehensively. (It was only later that I would properly discover and go all gaga over the unimpeachable musical genius of the Jackson 5.) People who act like they are above popular music are like grumpy naysayers at a party. They have all the charm of Jordan Peterson with his endless whiny Kermit the Frog-sounding lamentations. I would pick “Hey Ya!” by Outkast over this year’s Booker Prize winner any day of the week…even if it is almost four minutes long. When I was young people were always trash-talking Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys and I was always like: Oh yeah? Then why am I tapping my foot, fool? Backstreet's back, alright?  

Neneh Cherry & The Thing
"Dream Baby Dream"
Live in Ljubljana

Ramones, "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?"
[Creedence Clearwater Revival Cover]

Top-Shelf Soul Jazz Gold Sounds

Soul Jazz is a London, England-based record label whose longstanding curatorial vision remains second to none.

Gipsy Rhumba:
The Original Rhythm of Gipsy Rhumba in Spain 1965-74
[Full Album]

First of the Month Physical Media Roundup

It’s all design and opportunity with me, as it is with you.
- James Ellroy, Widespread Panic

With the Ellroy and the Whitehead, both summer 2026 hardback releases, the two best literary crime series in living memory hit third gear! No doubt they'll leave permanent tread marks! Jazzed to finally have my copies!

Blu-ray satori! If you can't take my word for it just ask Wyatt Fuckin' Earp!

Keeping a record of EVERY DAMN THING! [L'amour fou.]

The Animals, "Bo Diddly"

[Live at Club A-Go-Go, 1963]