Howdy,

The Francis Bacon exhibit opened at the Albright Knox in early May and I was so ridiculously excited to see it. But the heavy burden of careless weekend possibilities would keep my Fridays sacrosanct. Monday would come along and I would drive to work past the gallery and slap myself on the forehead for missing it yet again. But today I got lucky.

If you doubt the relevance or power of painting, waltz on over to the gallery and take a look. My stomach turned, I felt incredible anxiety, I laughed out loud. It was one of the most emotional experiences at an exhibit I had felt in a long time. Even if you don't like art, check it out, you may be a convert.

Another treat though was I got to see my first Albert Ryder. I have been to the gallery a dozen times in my scant three years here and if it is in their collection I have never seen it. The man was insane. He would fire off a painting and be off onto the next thing, never finishing his paintings with a sealant (or whatever it is they use). He was a very prolific man but very few of his paintings remain. The ones that do are all cracked and chipped, having been posthumously finished. Even through cells of paint could be smushed together to form a seamless painting, the quality it lends his work is outstanding. You can see Winslow Homer in his dark, sparse seascapes with waves like overturned storm clouds. Marsden Heartly's landscapes are almost derivative of Ryder.

Please, stop by and see Bacon and the Ryder. You will be glad you did.

What to do, what to do.

The owners of most of the homes on my block live on those homes. They aren't sleazy slum lords who live on Long Island and rent until the house burns down in a bong-bloomed blaze. There are just a couple of houses filled with obnoxious college students.

Now, I may not be a spring chicken (I am an human worm android infact) but I remember those college days of carefree parties and a foolhardy sense of immortality. Loud parties with Jock-Jams soundtracks are understandable. They are the very stuff of youthful indiscretions we laugh at when older and wiser.

But for the love of dog anus, must you break beer bottles all over the place?

I don't know? Who cleans up broken glass infront of your house. Well, it is close to the curb so the garbage men must pick it up, right? Maybe our slumlords who last visited Buffalo when steel plants were open and 'talkies' were the wonder of motion pictures.

I mean, do you notice that your frat paradise is right next door to a home full of children? Too bad little billy fell off his skateboard and shredded his face on your sidewalk.

Well, accidents happen. They do. But clean it up.


Soon, very soon. There will come a time when I will pick up glass and beer bottles. And it will go to a place you never knew you loved so dearly.

You know what I find super cool about our Independence day?

Other nations celebrate their independence with the day they stormed a Bastille, or lopped off some head, or won some battle. But here in America, it is the day we signed a document a year after the fighting had begun.

Our independence is linked not to the comings and goings of power and the nation state, rather it is indelibly linked to a set of ideas. Ideas that even the founding generations found contentious and are even debated to this day. Women, for example, are not constitutionally made equal to men and an amendment to such has been debated in congress nearly every session since the 1920's. In a sense, this revolution is still going on. Not being made of armies and generals there is not point of 'mission accomplished'.

In terms of how we recognize our nationhood we are a nation of ideas; other nations are those of wars.

So why in the name of fuck's ugly grand daughter are drunken men throwing little colorful explosives in the air?

Or, more importantly, why are they doing it before it is dark out? You can hardly see them and are scaring the neighbors dog.

Have a few more beers, wait a few more hours, and when your alcohol thined blood is dripping on the floor of the local emergency room remember, those bullets fired and lives sacrificed do not make our nation. But the freedom to blow up your beer bottle in your hand does.

Good night, and Hern bless America.

A clip from the movie Groove Tube



goodnight

Apparently New York state health insurance sucks!

They covered my hospital trip minus $50 no problem. But the ambulance ride which cost more than the ER and resulted in a mis-diagnoses is not covered by it. Ya, apparently the unconscious diabetic with low blood sugar is having a bit of a drug overdose... When there are no drugs to be found.

What annoys me is that the insurance is for low income people, such as myself. I guess if taking the bus to work is good enough so is taking it to the hospital for a gun shot wound.

My medicine costs less than my monthly bill. The total I will spend this year on medicine, doctors visits, and my one hospitalization will all cost less than what I pay them, and I am an expensive guy to insure. So, well, I guess they would loose too much money paying for ambulance services. After all, if they are still making money off someone expensive like me imagine how much they are pulling in on perfectly healthy specimens.

I feel like I am paying a mob boss protection money. Only, he isn't threatening to break my legs. He is letting me know that on the off chance that I do break my leg, saw off a finger, get hit by a car, I am shit out of luck if I don't pay him.

Well, to put it as succinctly and poignantly as possible, fuck you.

I love dinner parties.

The crushing weight of social awkwardness which keeps me up at night pondering if it was rude to say hello to a neighbor two houses down while on his porch. Is there some sort of neighborly veil that separates the world of men and the world of porch dwellers? But at dinner parties. I can hold a glass and make a joke about Sri Lankin foreign policy in poetic form.

So, last night we had our landlords up for dinner. Not quite enough to make it a dinner party. Which reminds me, having my computer and only speakers in the office does no good for dinner music three rooms away. A good time was had by all.

I wanted to document a few things I was cooking. Most of the pictures I have taken lately are odd little abstractions, and I honestly needed the practice of... you know, making sure my subject was in focus. It is a lot easier to take an arty picture when no one has any idea what the heck it is you are photographing.

But, it must have been a sign from above that I am to continue snapping away the schmaltz I love so because our guests arived early. So I had to put the camera down and get all hard core kitchen wife on dinner.

The braised onions would have looked really cool. But they are all eaten now. The pork roast was a giant hunk of meat with rosemary and bit of garlic poking out of a crevice, so it wasn't that photogenic (it did look a bit like my uncle Pete though, no offense uncle, just after dropping it on the floor it had a mustache and a sexist joke).

So, here are a couple money shots of the asparagus before it was roasted.

goodnight.

Howdy,


I was planning on editing my Theremin post down to just facts, after all it was just a crudely constructed fiction around little snippets of vaguely related fact. And then I found this video.



Enjoy children

I have to giggle,

When the National Review, the conservative magazine who gave a national voice to conservatives back when it was considered a social disease, sells out its founder William F Buckley, jr. you just know it is going to be a fun day for the media. (And for those who have opinions on such things, how awesome would a Bill Buckley/Gore Vidal fighting video game be?)

But chiming throughout the news of the hour on NPR this morning was talk of Al Quada. Not the warm fluffy Al Quada who is hiding meekly in caves licking their wounds, no, but the scary let's-take-Iraq-from-these-Democracy-lovers Al Quada.

You see, the term used by everyone until recently was insurgents. Insurgents. A nice term. A neutral term upon which we can afix our own private fears and expectations. But, as the war becomes less popular than a Three's Company spin off it is necessary to wag the dog in a different sort of way, a handjob from your grandmother that is so good you have to pretend it isn't your grandmother sort of way.

So bam, suddenly the insurgents are all gone and the White House has been using the term Al Quada to replace it. Just like magic. It is such a bold faced lie, so factless that surly respected media outlets wouldn't use it, right?

No... please back away from the kool-aid

But hey, to make it up to me they ran a story about how an evangelical Christian magically turned himself from gay to straight. As if he found the philosophers stone and poosh! Went from glitter to gold.

That isn't news folks. Any more than it would be if I convinced myself I was no longer human but unicorn.

Well, if your childhood was as reclusive and dull as mine was you probably know that unicorns have the ability to sense virgins (no, really). And NPR, your doe-eyed wonder today indicates you are in a painful need to get your cherry obliterated. May I suggest Sylvia Pajolie and Nina Totenberg in a rub full of My*T*Fine pudding?

No, Vanilla would do nicely, but thank you NPR for the suggestion.

Properly titled: Everything I know about the Theremin without the use of reference material.


Already, I have told you a lie. For this post does not contain everything I know about the Theremin. For complete knowledge of this musical instrument require secrets learned in hermetic chambers of occult brotherhoods, like the free masons, or cub scouts. Furthermore, a mind is a leaky sieve. Which is to say, it forgets things, only more so. For a sieve is leaky to begin with, but a leaky sieve is practically useless. So if you were shooting to get a C on your term paper on the Theremin, allow me to suggest wikipedia. If you were hoping on getting a C on your masters thesis, allow me to suggest Little Tikes My First Encyclopedia.

First, meaningless anecdote.

I first became interested in the Theremin when, as a child, my father told me that the Theremin was like a woman. That is, it makes a lot of noise without you even touching it. I didn't know what he meant, but some years later when I thought I figured it out it turned me gay. Which is a shame as I had a promising career in cunilingus ahead of me.

Many people will say that America won the cold war. This is only partially true, and therefor mostly wrong. For yes, we won the space race and the arms race, and yes we broke them with the Berlin airlift but we lost the war on several other fronts. We lost the propaganda war. The Russian version of Leave it to Beaver, called Glorious Praise to the Technological Wonder of the Peoples Progress by Comrade Beavervitch, not only won audiences over with greater canned laughter exposures, but also indoctrinated household pets in the same room at their masters' television set.

The war was also lost on the musical front. While the west invented jazz, rock and roll, and the power ballad, the Soviets had developed the Theremin: an instrument part technological wonder, part war machine, and capable of emitting high power waves capable of disrupting karaoke machines.

The inventor, Leon Theremin had invented several other important modern instruments; including the acordiolla, the electric timpani, and the canon which would be later added into the 1812 overture by Americans conscious of the musical race.

After this, his most important invention Leon toured Europe and eventually came to New York (a colony of the United States) where he set up a lab to work on unpractical applications of the Theremin. A decade later he would mysteriously disappear. He was brought back to Russia by secret agents and sent to a laboratory gulag to work on military applications of the Theremin. It was from these labors that we know have the heat seeking missile and the swiss army knife.

Decades later, the Soviet government realized they had left Leon in the work prison. This was their official position on the mater however. While at the labor camp Leon had devised used his Theremin as a teleportation device and let his fellow prisoners escape but remained behind to operate the machine and ensure that guards could not pursue the prisoners through the devise.

None of the prisoners were ever to be seen again though. Leon had opened up a portal, not to the safety of the west, but rather to the surface of Mars in the hopes that by winning the space race for Russia Leon would be let free and exalted as a hero. The prisoners grandchildren are still on Mars, waiting for the Glorious Space Rockets of the Proletarian will come to rescue them. Mars is temperate, but dull they will report.

Leon's fate was not so pleasant. His final gulag meal would be three weeks later where he choked to death on the bit of pork fat in a plate of beans. This would not be what killed him however. Seeking to use his Theremin as a teleporter once again an explosion occurred when pork fat came into the instruments radiation field. This is why all Theremin players today are strict Jews or Muslims and refuse to play in slaughter houses.

The secrets of the instrument unlocked by Leon would die with him. The soviet government wished to destroy his lab and his many notes. The resulting bonfire would be the chief cause of the Chernobyl melt down. Many people would say that then Leon had his revenge, but they don't know this to be true so they do not say it.

As for the Theremin's future, well, like many technologies modern man has received from lost civilizations, we may never fully understand it; but we may gaze in wonder and fear.

Oh ya, this election season is going to fricken rock!

First off, the GOP has the worst field of candidates possible. Which makes me giggle. But then, what is this? Quinipiac has a poll that shows Guiliani beating the snot out of Hilly, Obama, Edwards, and Richardson in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. But can't win against Al Gore. Guiliani moderate image (and let's face it, he is putting on a show for his party, he is pretty fly for a GOP guy on abortion, GLBT rights, etc) tugs at the heart strings of swing stators.

But then what happens?


Michael Bloomberg tonight filed with the board of elections to change his party from Republican to non-affiliated. The man has an approval rating of 75% in NYC, and can steel the thunder from Edwards (poverty and education) Gore (environment, holy shit his green city plan is awesome) and Hilly (New Yorkers love him).

His announced plans are to finish his term in office until 2009 and then spend the rest of his days in philanthropy.


But yesterday he was in California speaking at the Google campus. It was not officially part of the series of stumping that presidential candidates have been doing (Clinton, Edwards, McCain, and Richardson). He spoke on Presidential topics like Iraq and Immigration. And in announcing his resignation from the Republican party he sited that two distant and entrenched parties are hurting America, Michael Bloomberg is sounding like the anti-partisan answer to the most pervasive problem in contemporary American politics.

It sounds like we may have a third party candidate who can pull some major support from both parties.

Watch out Bull Moose party, I think Bloomberg is out to topple your record.

My apologies to Leon Theremin for postponing my post about him.