Space and melody.
This band continually astonishes me.
Their album “Hidden” is one of my favorites of the last decade.
In that it they expand upon preconceived notions of composed music, resisting the need to immediately satisfy with an easily identifiable hook.
An elastic expression of sound. Music for music.
In my estimation, TNP are beyond the outer reaches, demolishing expectations.
I’ll do a cheap Music Journo thing here and hyperbolize: TNP be doing Radiohead better than Radiohead.
Post Shock and Awesome: Lust for Life Marketing Presentation (PDF) has found a new place to dwell over at http://beuyscouts.com as part of their Virtual Field Warp series (check out the Anal Acrobatics piece by writer, Harold Jaffe while you’re there). The Illustrations for the piece were done by troop leader, Norman Conquest.
This insurgent text, guerilla prose piece re-imagines (re-images) life as an IED and a Drone.
Here’s a screen cap.
Click on image to read full PDF text of Post Shock and Awesome
I also received my lifetime membership in the Beuy Scouts. Check out this nifty membership card!
Take some time and point your browser at http://beuyscouts.com/.
About Beuyscouts:
Beuyscouts of Amerika is an international activist art collective founded in New York City in 1989 by artist Norman Conquest. It was initially a response to the Republican attack on the National Endowment for the Arts—spearheaded by the late right-wing Senator and reprobate from North Carolina, Jesse Helms.
You too can look ten years younger – in 60 minutes no less! Tha’s righ’, REDUCE wrinkles, REDUCE crow’s feet, REDUCE laugh lines! Your gun turret mounted Toyota Yaris can get something like 40 miles per gallon in the city AND with its 50 caliber machine gun, trips to the drive thru have never been FASTER…As if all the static on the net and snow of television weren’t enough…Condoleezza warns against Armenia Bill, a bill that declares the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians to be genocide…Turkey, of course disputes the claim [like 1.5 million Armenians just dropped dead from the ‘chaos and confusion’ of the collapsing Ottoman Empire during WWI] and the guys in System of A Down must be tugging furiously at their elaborate goatees and cursing Rice for not being more granular. What could you expect from a country named after a bird that drowns in the rain from looking up during a storm?
Just another example of imperialism and the power of the military industrial complex sweeping unsightly ‘dust’ under the atrocity carpet, where ghosts of Darfur await release, 800,000 dead Iraqi civilians from the illegal invasion await justice and Americans prep for the x-mas buying season. This little capitalist piggy laments; It’ll be a tight year dear…might not be able to get Jimmy that new X-Box 360…poor little Sally won’t be getting that iPod Touch…we’ve got this foreclosure that is inevitable and it looks like the guys down in the factory are going to walk off the job again cause all of our parts that were made in China have been recalled…it’s a rough existence to be middle class and brown/black/yellow/mostly white Dear, yes – rough indeed. The new Radiohead will be in my inbox this morning…tha’s nice honey, burn a couple copies for the carpool group….
A friend sent me this link. It is a video of Tory Amos doing a cringe-worthy cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It reminded me of my slightly irrational dislike for all things TORI!!! I’ve got a wide taste in music. I like just about everything. Even the Oscar Meyer Weiner song gets my toes tapping but I’ll never get the whole Tori Amos thing. My opinion is that she does schlock high school coffee shop poetry music, while using a piano like a bludgeon. Her fans always struck me as the type who read and relish every Anne Rice novel and think that vampires are totally ‘sensual’ creatures, collect crystals, have Nightmare Before X-Mas theme parties and are most likely clove smokers. 
An air raid siren echoing off of glass and concrete as dust and debris filter from between the buildings to the streets below. So much skin. So much skin. Where does the mind end and the body begin? You are on perpetual display my dear. Your white skin and your blond hair and your long legs and trim figure are attractively relative. But not because you are the best choice for breeding. Your hips are much too small. You don’t eat enough. Or you must eat just enough to get by. What are you drinking? Vodka Tonic? No way! Vodka Cranberry. I can see from here when the tender lips touch the reddish-purple concentrate of the glass, filled with ice, garnish with lime. That guy over there is leering at your breasts. You’d call him a ‘creepy bastard’ if you caught him but you don’t notice and he zero’s in on another couple. I believe he enjoys their shape. But those aren’t real are they? They could pass but they don’t move quite right and your 5’4″ frame wouldn’t naturally support those shapes: that weight and its implications of alterations. Those strange looking objects that bring men pleasure because of their shape and their muscle memory in meaning. You can feed a child. But not really. Cause they’re full of saline and not the apparatus to sustain the life of your offspring.
Is this merely observation?
Is this social commentary?
Does it affect me?
Is it effective?
Grinderman Says, “I must above all things love myself.”
Thirty years ago today I came tumbling out of my Mother screaming and covered in goop, the doctor spanked air into my lungs, a nurse snipped off a piece of my foreskin, my father handed out cigars in the waiting room and my mom smiled in exhaustion. It was done. It was the same year and the same month Elvis Presley died, Jaws and Star Wars were released and Sam the dog told David Berkowitz to go on a shooting spree with a Dirty Harry-style revolver in a sweltering New York City.
I was born during the Dog Days of summer.
The hottest point in the season.
Every year during this time something truly remarkable and vile happens in various parts of the world. Hurricane Katrina. Wild Fires in Greece. Cholera outbreak in India. Hundreds of miners drown in China flood. Massive roadside explosion in Northern Iraq kills hundreds.
That’s just a smattering of headlines over the past few weeks. The ones that leak in through the television snow. The little pieces of information that make August an auspicious month during the year. If I was a betting man I’d say that I’m incredibly lucky to have been able to survive the apocalypse, which was supposed to happen 10 years ago, according to Sarah Connor. There is the thought of predestination paradox where had Skynet not sent a terminator back to kill Sarah, John would not have sent Reese back to protect her and of course conceive John. Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” had that initial idea that a super computer becomes self-aware and triggers the end of humanity or at least 98% it. The Wachowski brothers tried the same thing with the Matrix and of course there is always Our Trusty Asimov and his I, Robot stories. None can forget the implications of Phillip K Dicks dreaming androids drawing comparisons to our homogenized brave new world where more money is spent on physical augmentation such as breast implants than is spent on Alzheimers research.
Do the years get better?
Or do my tits get better?
I reference these things because there are a million scenarios that play themselves out in my head every minute of the day. Choices that I made that directly affected my future. Now with thirty years under my belt I’m looking forward to making more choices. What will I have for lunch today? Maybe some Quik powdered chocolate in a glass of milk with a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich and some Oreos to finish it off. Those little creature comforts cut through the noise. They can stop the outrage fatigue I’ve had since Sept. 11th and quell the squall of rage I’ve held in my ever blackening liver since Nov. 3rd 2000 when I wished a category 5 hurricane swept across Florida and silenced all those fucking voting machines. I reference these things because I’m hardwired to question everything. I’m hardwired to expect more from people than they may be willing to admit they have in them. It is a philosophy of expectation I learned from my father.
So do all these seemingly random pop culture references and political musings have a point in this piece?
You who read this want your information in bite sized morsels. You are most likely reading this because you want to see what I have to say. The same could be said for the reason I’m writing. I want to see what I’m going to say too! I’m surprised what comes out. It’s a form of therapy. It’s the equilibrium I need.
There are lines that you can draw from disparate sources such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and society’s current obsession with celebrity and appearance – there is no amount of shaming our society can do to make someone like P Hilton drift off into obscurity. We’ve moved from adoration of success to the obsession of failure. We want to wallow in squalor and bathe in the idea that some starlet who had everything laid out for her; money, success and fame, is dumping it all down the drain while staring at a palm mirror through reddened and glassy eyes with a rolled up twenty in her hand. Is it the ultimate form of rebellion to just give up to vices and pour yourself out of your celebrity skin in front of a million flashing bulbs and video cameras? No. Methinks it is just slow suicide.
I want to feel validated. I want to feel like that vote I handed to Nader in 2000 wasn’t about winning the election or giving it to Bush or taking another informed voter from Gore but that it was about doing what I felt was right at the time and wishing that everyone could make their own educated and informed decision as to who to vote for. Alas, most people are robots, self-aware enough to eat, sleep, shit and fuck occasionally without ever asking why, who or what as long as it feels good then it must be good.
We’re animals. Robot animals. And we’re living in the nightmare that writers like Aldous Huxley, Ellison, Dick and Stephenson have been imagining. The violence that we live with daily is magnified during the dog days. It’s the heat of the Northern Hemisphere working on our subconscious where eons ago our ancestors rode across vast landscapes with truncheon and spear and sword to conquer and bleed into submission those that would alter or change the status quo.
Do not fear. Fear. Do not fear. Fear.
We are at war because war is profit. It is an industry that can be perpetually fed. Trillions of dollars into the effort and there will always be someone with a job and a big white house to eat Kobe steaks and caviar in.
We’ve had hope shoved up our ass. Just words of hope. No real sign of it. No large group or government making an effort. No miracles. No second coming. This is the realization age. We will realize that in our species infancy we are destined to rot in quotidian suburban malaise, buying groceries, driving cars, going to church, making lists and standing in line.
There is a silver lining and each of us has to look just hard enough to see it.
This is my beautiful wife.
This is my beautiful rented duplex.
This is my family.
These are my amazing friends.
This is the hyperlocal network of hope.
These are the inspirations for a million more songs and stories.
This is something I wrote when I turned 30.
‘Why don’t you shut the fuck up!’ he throws words, she throws plates
We all recoil, huddled, humbled in our blankets of, ‘is that what we sound like?’
These people cannot conceptualize the terror of open ears.
Between the two-by-four studs and drywall springs some secret language…
Languished and emptied that pool of decent lines that are always crossed,
To let the gulls and albatross nibble at the heart of consequence…S
trike variance while supple islands of attachment rot under proximity.
We cuddle and fuck, hoping our voices carry through at the same intensity,
This sound acceptance shared, beating heads against bed boards.
No more arguments, its just gender posturing.
Overhear the money question, through the din of our panting,
raised voices…
MONEY – that bastion of relationship doom,
like evil comes at midnight when the silence is broken by anguish, tears and stupidity.
our neighborly silence
a vigil set for broken dishes
we need to move dear…
I’m in a crowded room drenched in red, drowning in glare
Where every whispered assumption and every silent condemnation
Is testament to the bomb strapped to my chest.
One might say, “he commands the attention of a room.”
As the nitroglycerin is kissed by cellular trigger.
Ring, ring, ring.
Thanks to the one-man on the bar stool,
You’ve given me a fresh supply of not being able to.
Its not bad or great,
Just a laundry list of what the fuck?
And whose to blame?
I can always hit mutate,
Replicate like bacteria and facilitate those situations
Where it feels like gravity is another investor in my demise.
Unwilling to let the overhead float above the margins.
We’re drinking the error
And I’m oh-so-consolable
By the amount of hope that has been shoved up my ass
Words as accidents
Covered by the assurance
They will be repeated,
Used as blunt objects,
Or surgical tools,
To reopen old wounds
How many stitches does it take,
To close up that hurt?
Does your indemnity plan
cover failure of internal editing?
Metastasized in the middle of an argument.
Better take out another policy
Once this is done.
A Coat of Red Paint In Hell 