(obligatory pre-election chatter. sorry. can’t be helped.)

Mail to my old pal, Harvey, who claims he is voting McCain and asked for ten reasons why he should go Obama:

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From: Jarett Kobek
To: His Pal Harvey
Date: Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 3:38 PM
Subject: obama vs mccain ten reasons you stupid bastard

(IN NO ORDER OF IMPORTANCE)

#10. mccain is jacked up crazy. this statement in no way dishonors his service. dude was a jerk before he went into pow camp and came out a jerk with ptsd. search your feelings. you know it to be true.

#9. obama is an exceptionally effective communicator– lawyer, college professor– and we often forget that the roots of democracy are in the public advocacy of athens. there is a direct link between good government and effective communication.

#8. obama has a very specific kind of african-american cool; not in the sense of cool as a popularity contest, but cool like cool jazz. charlie parker, john coltrane kind of cool. this is why he never freaks out. totally useful.

#7. palin.

#6. health care. obama’s plan is weak but I suspect that with huge democractic wins in the congress, an obama presidency will push through a radical health care initiative. this will serve as a smokescreen to distract us from the fact that we are never, ever leaving iraq. it’s time that america joined the civilized world. this may upset you re: taxes, but sorry, the one thing you should your national government should do is protect you from disaster and foreign invasion. a/k/a keep you safe. health care is a big part of this and the lack of universal coverage is a huge, massive problem for US competitiveness in the global market.

#5. foreign policy. mccain’s is a 20th century vision of the cold war world– look at everything he talked about in the debates. nicuragua, panama, russia. these problems were solved poorly 30 years ago. That the war on terror is a disaster is due precisely to rumsfeld and cheney being 20th century cold warriors who could not understand a new enemy. the only way that the MAJOR ISSUES, including israel (which you know I support those jews like no other) will ever be solved is via an entirely new set of faces. cold warriors, with their skewed realpolitik, must go. asap.

#4. likelihood of full examination of bush era war crimes increases inordinately. seriously, cheney + co f’d us in the a with massive illegal tortures. abu ghraib only scratches the surface. mccain’s cowardice re: the base ensures he will be unable to facilitate appropriate reviews of the previous administration.

#3. afghanistan. this could fall under #5, but fuck off, it’s important. obama seems to understand the need for afghanistan to succeed as an independent state and also seems interested in killing bin laden. A refreshing change.

#2. obama is smart. I know that it’s a time honored american tradition to pull down our betters and be suspicious of any natural ability not connected to sports, but whatever. dude is smart and a writer. When was the last time we had a real writer in the white house? Teddy Roosevelt? (Kennedy’s shit was mad ghost written.)

#1. leaving aside the pedantic and goofy questions of whether or not obama is BLACK ENOUGH, his wife is straight up descended from slaves and his babies got that blood in their bodies. I can not think of anything better for America than to have to see and live with a normal, beautiful black family in the white house for eight years. if nothing else, this will go incredibly far towards the normalizaton of race relations. it’s almost impossible to express its full impact. I saw michelle holding hands with dude’s lily white uncle during Kerry’s speech at the convention and the most shocking thing was not that it was happening but that it was so totally, utterly normal. welcome to the 21st century.

okay. vote obama, jerk.

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BONUS FOR CALI CALI: Vote no on Prop 8. Duh.

But don’t do it solely because of hoity-toit arguments about equality or any of the scare-mongering associated with the hideously inept anti-8 campaigns. Arguments about fairness have merit, but opponents of 8 have been hella squeamish and thus operating on the same wave length as the dirrrty west Mormon-funded pro-8 ads. No one is stating a basic truth: gay marriages, individually and socially, are hugely positive and should be celebrated.

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(last politics post pre-election. promise.)

Hollywood provides endless fodder for one of my worst habits: collecting street ephemera. There is something not present in Los Angeles, a missing piece of the urban environment, that makes it the place par excellence for crazies communicating via light posts. It lacks the self-consciousness of a small town, and it is without the presumed superiority of aesthetic skill of other big cities. It is the epicenter.

I’ve collected a lot of crap off these mean streets, but none of my previous finds had prepared me for my discovery of some weeks past.

Picture this: I’m walking down Sunset near Guitar Center. Possessing a trained eye for such matters, I notice a bundle of papers sitting atop a mailbox. Writing is visible; instantly, I recognize that the letter forms bear the trace of a lunatic. A quick glance around establishes that the author is nowhere present. I grab the packet and go on my merry way.

Later at home, I find this:

Intrigued by the high craziness, I googled on the names of the women to whom the letters were addressed, and discovered that they were individuals who’d written into Vogue on the topic of racism in fashion. Their letters appeared in the July 2008 issue:

Moving along, we come to drawings of a highly sexualized nature, the first of which poses the eternal question: “Paula,… do you masturbate?”

Next, we approach matters automotive:

For the curious, here are pages 7 and the left side of 7 1/2 merged. Together, they form the full Chack-Chack Roadster:

The final two pages are an address on current affairs. Typical of most post-9/11 street writing, these pages include a denunciation of George Bush and Dick Cheney. Most street writing, however, doesn’t suggest that either man associates with crack-cocaine using bordello prostitutes, nor does it typically involve convoluted fantasies of an imaginary bank:

Thus concludes this installment of literature from the streets.

You might be interested in knowing on what sort of paper such a series of thoughts and illustrations would be written. I have helpfully scanned the back of one of the pages. The reader will note that this is a mileage reimbursement form for an employee of the Los Angeles Public Libraries. This is true of all 10 sheets of paper, which in some form or another relate to mileage reimbursement. They date from 2002 through to 2007. Many of them include the name of said employee. (Omitted here, obviously.) The page I’ve scanned appears to be a fax from or to the Goldwyn Hollywood Library; but, again, thanks to Google, I was able to trace the forms to the Will & Ariel Durant Library.

This branch sits a few blocks away from where I found the papers. I imagine the whole thing somehow started there; after all, they probably keep Vogue on the racks. Anyway:

I was going to run three dense, separate posts of analysis on this election & its aftermath, entitled “WHO LOST: OLD WHITE FOLKS,” “WHO LOST: THE GAYS,” “WHO WON: EVERYBODY ELSE” but then, like a long-time friend of the blog, I heard the Voyce of the Lord, and He spaketh unto me: “No.”

So instead I’ll say this: fuck you, California, fuck you to the idiots running the anti-Prop 8 campaign, unable to grasp basic truths of American politics, and fuck you to all the big-toothed Dirrrty West Mormons who funded the pro campaign. And fuck you to Barack Obama for his political calculus, giving as much as he could to remain a Good Democrat without alienating the rest of the country, a phenomenon marked by his refusal to support gay marriage or speak out forcefully against Prop-8, and the voicing of his tepid support for civil unions in as few syllables as possible and only when prompted. And fuck you to the Clintons, the DLC, Al Gore, John Kerry and every other limp-dicked Democrat of the last sixteen years. You were the worst of all.

NOW. If there is one thing which my life has taught me, it is this: the smallest minority in America has got to be the children of single mother households who were sired by secular Muslim immigrants. The only other person with that convoluted parental history whom I even know of, let alone know, is our boy Barack Hussein Obama. So I’ve given his ascent an enormous amount of thought and have not, really, been able to suss it out as much as I’d like– but one can’t help lose the feeling that this background either produces the god damned President of the United States or, well, me.

Anyway: fuck yes.

Los Angeles voters approved Measure R to increase sales taxes to fund transportation projects, but some projects could take a while to get off the ground. The proposed subway line along Wilshire Boulevard could start by 2013 or 2015 at the earliest, but the mayor of Los Angeles hailed the victory. “The commuters of L.A. were fed up with traffic and gas prices, and they responded by making a historic investment that will change the face of transportation in the region forever,” said Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Thursday, 3pm, November 6th, 2008. Santa Monica and Vermont Metro Stop.

(Sorry for the photo quality.)

Darcy Clay, Ten Years On — New Zealand Sunday Star Times, April 23 2008:

Darcy Clay was the outsized alter ego unleashed on the music industry by 24-year-old unknown Daniel Robert Bolton, when he emerged from the bedroom of his Clarence St, Ponsonby flat having home-recorded the Great New Zealand Single.

Jesus I Was Evil - a raucous, playful and strikingly original ode to hedonism - was the strongest of a clutch of raw-boned songs he wrote and recorded on a four-track in late 1996. It got in your head like an earworm. It bulged with killer lines. “I used to crash parties and Maseratis and-uh / I was evil,” Clay howled. The maverick, transgressive spirit celebrated in the title helped win over many before they had even heard the opening power chords. “Just to write a song called Jesus I Was Evil is awesome,” says actor Joel Tobeck, who was drafted in as Clay’s guitarist for a couple of the few live shows he ever played…

…Then, on March 15, 1998… Clay’s girlfriend returned home from an exhibition in Christchurch and found him dead in her Grey Lynn flat. There was no note, no drugs found in his system. He was 25.

A nice overview of our man Darcy Clay’s brief, short career with previously unavailable biographical detail, plus some sad moments with Clay’s Pa. Like everything re: Clay, the article focuses on “Jesus I Was Evil,” the freak single, but I, for one, am a firm adherent of the other five tracks on Clay’s only studio release. (I write studio, but this is a misnomer– in this case, the studio was dude’s bedroom.)

Like countless other musical discoveries, I heard about Clay from the mouth of my old pal Andrew Harrison. This is dude’s radio show. This is the blog of dude’s show, which he never ever updates.

\

Typically, such photos are offered without comment, but in the interest of Fortean accuracy, it is noted that the many, many so-called ghost orbs appearing therein are due not to any super/supra natural entity, but rather the happenstance that Los Angeles is a city ringed by fire. Copious amounts of foul smelling smoke have polluted the last several days; this flash photography documents, inadvertantly, what passes in and out of our lungs. Even still.

Behind the Ennis-Brown House. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. An Aztec Temple of shoddily mixed concrete rising up over Los Feliz. A new type of nightmare for an old fashioned sort of girl.

There are some writers who are all wrong, individuals with stylized approaches that routinely violate the dictums of Good Writing, and yet somehow remain utterly right. These rareties, usually male, never achieve a wide appeal– the best they will manage is the odd occurrence of independent bookstores, in an attempt to deter theft, stocking the writer’s books close to the cash register. But even these relative successes– those who earn the dubious distinction of cult authorship– have a certain quality, a likability and a willingness to be understood that emulate the principles of Good Writing.

The remainder are too purely of themselves. The golden standard is (our hero) Howard Phillips Lovecraft– the old boy of Providence with a body of work centered around a perverse way of seeing, and his purple prose, his long winded paragraphs and his barely one-dimensional characters are all tools employed in support of this literal vision. I’m not sure whether or not sf/horror people even exist anymore, but back in my school-boy days, the note sounded most constantly about Lovecraft was that he was a “bad writer,” a man whose work succeeded despite itself.

This is, of course, an inversion of the truth.

Newsflash: HPL is dead. Death removes the most complicated part of the literary equation: the living, breathing writer who often subverts his or her own best interests, and who insists, consistently, that his or her work has meanings that are missed by most readers. Lovecraft’s way of seeing was a bottom-up personal cosmography that began with the creeping decay of Olde New England, expanded ever outwards into different corners of society, then the world, and finally embraced the essential insignificance of man in an indifferent universe, a place in which anything at any time can and will destroy the whole wretched human race. The underlining point is that sum total of this destruction will be precisely nothing, that all of human endeavor has been as insignificant as dust gathering on a bookshelf.

This way of seeing was misunderstood upon publication, with the Weird Tales confederateship focusing on the number of appendages attached to dumb monsters. As enjoyable as Lovecraft’s collected letters are– and for my money, there’s hardly any more pleasurable reading– they invoke a sadness as missive after missive finds HPL explaining his cosmography to people interested in the number of teats found on Shub Niggurath and acquiring a copy of The Necronomicon. The Cthulhu Mythos subculture can be seen as a prolonged misinterpretation of the most salient aspects of Lovecraft’s work for the sake of its worst.

This has a long pedigree. Before the plushy toys and ugly t-shirts, there were written pastiches, many authored while Lovecraft was alive and often by his less talented friends. (For the record, we note that the Mythos stories of Robert E. Howard are the exception.) Sad to say, the monsters were a necessary evil. HPL was a genre writer playing a genre game: cloaking perceived truth in nonsense. Despite his own assertions to the contrary, until late in his life he possessed the writer’s ugliest quality: the desire to be heard. He did what he must. As do we all.

Having recently finished Thomas Liggoti’s Teatro Grottesco, a new collection of shortish fiction, my thoughts have been wandering in this direction. The book has been a revelation– I had a Liggoti kick at the tail end of the go-go ’90s, squirreled away in my Thomspon-street basement apartment with a bad case of the crazies and a copy of The Nightmate Factory, but somehow my interest faded. I tried reading more from Ligotti but each subsequent book seemed less and less interesting. The newer work seemed too dry, too mannered.

But let’s not forget: back in those days, I was more than a little insane. About halfway through Teatro Grottesco, the truth hit me square. Thomas Ligotti is the real deal, a genuine master. Best book I’ve read in months.

Liggoti has been called a horror writer and I guess the designation is vaguely accurate, but I doubt there’s another writer in the ghetto-genres doing work that comes close. His early career designation as a proto-HPL has proven to be surprisingly apt. Having shed his early anxiety of influence, Ligotti has developed his own absolute way of seeing. It is as equally compelling as Lovecraft’s, and, in truth, rather bleaker. HPL was about indifference– the world might kill you, but there was nothing malign in its intentions. You got in the way of something bigger than you.

Ligotti is different. A malign element pervades his work. All of his reoccuring images– abandoned factories, intestinal disorders, faceless corporations, burned out warehouses, hack artists, marionettes and falling darkness– are in an active conspiracy against man. Totally paranoid and amazing.

When I first read Ligotti, I had yet to set foot within southeastern Michigan. A short biographical note mentions Ligotti’s deep Detroit origins and decades within the city. Having whittled away my share of the years in the reigion– a place where it’s overcast ninety percent of the time and everything is falling apart– allowed a special insight into Ligotti as a regional, Michigan writer. The stories never name any fixed locale, no actual locations are given, but they are very clearly set in a nightmare version of a pseudo-American and make frequent references to bleakness over a northern border. This is Detroit, however transformed. Trust me.

Finally, to return to our major theme: there is no reason why Ligotti’s stories should work. By any standard of Good Writing, his labyrinthine sentences, his endless paragraphs and his zero-dimensional characters should spell disaster; but the work has a transfixing and hypnotic quality, a poetic repetition of  key phrases and ideas. Let me reiterate: people will call anything hypnotic, but this stuff is genuinely hypnotic, and there is a deliberate method of prose construction producing this effect. Ligotti achieves the perfect approach for his subject matter– a blank tableau of interchangable paranoia– and though the book is a collection of shortish stories, its many repetitions leave the reader feeling as though they’ve read a sustained and complete work.

In other words: the real deal. A brilliant writer.

Buy.

Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 02:59:01 -0500
Subject: Dude Chinese Democracy
From: Arafat Kazi
To: Jarett Kobek

I’m really fuckin’ rocking out here.

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Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:29:54 -0800
From: Jarett Kobek
To: Arafat Kazi
Subject: Re: Dude Chinese Democracy

Dude, I am listening to it right now too!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s really weirdly good, isn’t it?

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Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 03:37:00 -0500
Subject: Re: Dude Chinese Democracy
From: Arafat Kazi
To: Jarett Kobek

Oh yes. It’s SO fucking good. It’s better than Use Your Illusion 1, as good as 2, and definitely better than Spaghetti Incident.

Did you get to check out any of the songs I sent you?

Also, I think “Shackler’s Revenge” is the only weak track in the album.

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Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:49:35 -0800
From: Jarett Kobek
To: Arafat Kazi
Subject: Re: Dude Chinese Democracy

You know that I have issues with Use Your illusion 1/2– I don’t like either as an album. But for all the fan worship of Slash, the member that I’m missing is Izzy Stradlin. All the songs that I like from the Illusions were written by Izzy, and his imprint is pretty much what defines Appetite. Unlike you, I’m not addicted to Axl’s early ’90s vision, so I can’t stand 2. I would argue till I’m blue in the face that what Use Your Illusion represents, in retrospect, is Axl trying to get to the sound that he has found on Chinese Democracy. It’s more a transition point than a destination. Too bad it’s a shitty transition.

I agree though, Chinese Democracy is definitely better than either, but we’ve more or less known this for 7 years, when the tracks started being performed live– and how can you even talk about the Spaghetti Incident as a real album? Also, you know what I find sad? That “Oh My God” wasn’t included in some form or another. Fuck the haters, that’s an amazingly weird song. Kind of astounding it’s nine years old.

The question is: how do you feel Chinese Democracy compares to Appetite? I feel that they are totally incomparable, like apples and oranges.

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Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 01:05:15 -0800
From: Jarett Kobek
To: Arafat Kazi
Subject: Re: Dude Chinese Democracy

Also, “Shackler’s Revenge” has grown on me. The only songs I can’t take are “Sorry” and “This I Love.” I’ll probably learn to like “Sorry” but I’ll never like “This I Love.”

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Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 04:10:21 -0500
Subject: Re: Dude Chinese Democracy
From: Arafat Kazi
To: Jarett Kobek

Oh I agree with pretty much everything you say here. See, I always value shit that I liked when I was thirteen. I think that both Illusion 1 and 2 have songs that we both like, for whatever reason—”Get in the Ring,” “Back Off Bitch,” “Garden of Eden,” “Dust N Bones,” “Right Next Door to Hell,” “The Garden”—and that’s just the first album. (Also I really love the video for “November Rain” but I don’t think I have a legitimate reason for it except for legs at 13.) Looking at the tracklists on Wikipedia: “14 Years,” “Get in the Ring,” “Pretty Tied Up,” “Locomotive,” “You Could be Mine.” That’s not so bad. I like “Civil War” for the same reason I like Meatloaf, so I’ll keep this out of this list. But that’s still a lot of good songs.

But you’re right, Izzy was absolutely fucking essential. I also agree that Chinese Democracy seems to be the final destination that’s only half-reached on the Illusion albums, and both those albums are only good as containers for five or six good songs as opposed to working like an album like Appetite does, even now.

You’re also right in that I don’t think we can compare Chinese Democracy to Appetite. But dude, fucking hell, Appetite was the work of super-talented young dudes, but Chinese Democracy is the work of a man who knows sorrow and who has felt love and has also felt it slip away. I love this album so fucking much.

Also, they covered Soundgarden and Nazareth in Spaghetti Incident, hence saving grace. NOW YOU’RE MESSING WITH A SON OF A BITCH. Allah I was just thinking of that fucking song a week ago I fucking swear, too cool.

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Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 04:13:15 -0500
Subject: Re: Dude Chinese Democracy
From: Arafat Kazi
To: Jarett Kobek

“This I Love” is what he sings to his wife after beating her. A low song, meant to show sorrow that was not felt. “Madagascar” is such a good song though. God, this album is so strangely worth it. I wonder what Axl will do now. Do you think he’ll be cool or an asshole? Also tell Elly I said happy birthday and sent love please. I will wish her on Facebook.

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Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 02:37:25 -0800
From: Jarett Kobek
To: Arafat Kazi
Subject: Re: Dude Chinese Democracy

One of my problems with Use Your Illusion 1/2 has very little to do with anything that the guns n roses boys could control– basically, every major studio recording from about 1990 through 1995 sounds like absolute fucking shit. I don’t know what the technical reasons are for this, but the sound from that period is awful and inorganic. The other album I think about in these terms is Nirvana’s Nevermind, which has some fairly shitty song writing made a thousand times worse by disgusting, ugly production. In Utero is a little better, but not by much.

There’s something about the studio sound on Use Your Illusion which taints even the songs that I love– take “Pretty Tied Up,” as good a song as they ever did, and I say this not simply because I live down on Melrose. Had it been recorded during the sessions for Appetite, or even Lies, it would be classic, but as it stands, it sounds sort of “bleh.” There’s a dynamism missing from the material. I think this is why the albums have become such retroactive jokes that no one can explain– how do you describe a missing sound range, really?

Chinese Democracy works, in part, because it was clearly built as a response to this artificiality of sound– so rather than have it be an artefact of the recording process, Axl has fully embraced it. This distinguishes Chinese Democracy from other recent rock– a band like Fall Out Boy comes to mind– where there is an overarching pretense of a room full of proletariat morons playing in time, when the actuality is individual sessions, overdubs and Protools. By shedding the rest of GNR and making a solo project, Axl has, pardon the pun, lost any illusion of the album being a live recording. The effect is freeing himself from a sound which must emulate that of a live band. Chinese Democracy is a totally artificial, constructed product and is open about its nature.

In many ways, I’m echoing a point that Chuck Klosterman made in an Onion review: the album is better for the lack of Slash or Duff. Had those dudes been in the picture, there is no way this sound could have been achieved. This is also probably true of Izzy Stradlin, but I hate to admit it.

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Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 14:44:58 -0800
From: Jarett Kobek
To: Arafat Kazi
Subject: Re: Dude Chinese Democracy

Also,

I think something should be said about the lyrics– I’ve read a few reviews suggesting that Axl is commenting on this and that, but no one has mentioned explicitly that these are the lyrics of a man who has spent about twenty years in constant therapy. There is a certain equivocation of feeling here– of trying to get to the root of why a person tells their self one thing and does another– and an acceptance of equal blame that I imagine can only be earned through couching surfing in the offices of therapists. Axl seems to have completely internalized the judgement-neutral vocabulary of the process. This is the best therapy album since Plastic Ono Band.

The only downside is that I have absolutely no idea what any of the songs are about, if one can speak to the meaning of songs in such concrete terms. But consider, oh, I dunno, “Mr. Brownstone.” I remember when you used to think that it was about an old man they liked to dance with– so did the Virginia Tech shooter, btw– but it was obviously about heroin. “Welcome to the Jungle,” “My Michelle”– each had a specific theme or subject. But what the hell is “Chinese Democracy” (the song) about? “Better”? “I.R.S.”? I couldn’t say.

My favorite example of Axl’s therapy speak is from “Shackler’s Revenge”:

“Don’t ever try to tell me how much you care for me
Don’t ever try to tell me how you were there for me”

This could be about anyone in particular– and I suspect it represents Axl attempting to express some of the primal anger associated with the G’N'F’N'R brand, but it’s been so filtered through the therapeutic process that it sounds more like someone in their 40s confronting their alcoholic parent about the role drink played in imbuing childhood inadequacy. This is remarkably different from the scum level lyrics of a dude who once sang, “You get nothin for nothin / if that’s what you do / turn around bitch / I got a use for you / and I’m bored.”

Just a thought, buddy!

“mistah kurtz– he dead!”