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July 12, 2003
Volume 29: And We All Stole Dan Aykroyd's Water
I changed my mind. I hate you. I hate all of you. I'm so tired. Please kill me now. I've had enough. Decapitation, shotgun, arsenic on spikes, it's all the same, just do it now. It needn't even be quick as long as I know it's irrevocable.
July 12, 2003 21:20 PM
I was shooting right up at Dan Aykroyd and Jim Belushi at the edge of the stage and my Nikon crashed and I rebooted it and shot shot shot and it started to rain and I was soaked and my camera was soaked and I shot until the water was streaming off it and I thought, if I were well, this would be the greatest fucking job in the world. Then that was enough, I was cold, and the speakers made me shake so badly that most of my photos are worthless and they hurt my sinuses, so I got Puddy and we crawled under the stage with the other photographers, who were complaining about being attacked by audience members, as were the security guards (and myself, some idiot was hitting me in the back and calling me a bitch), but "a photographer never moves!" And we saw a woman in soaked white pants with a black thong and listened to the music for a while and then I went home, and my bus driver very efficiently forgot half his route so I didn't get very far into Norman Rush's Mating but what I have read so far was splendid and recommendable if rambling, rambling. And I love you, and I'm so tired now.
July 10, 2003 20:56 PM
I was shopping for garlic in a Safeway grocery store in Santa Barbara where they had Joni Mitchell muzak-- but I had to attach the words before I realized what it was. How undignified for me and Joni-- who went to the trouble of writing the damn things! Can't they stick to mashed Vivaldi? The insidiousness-- the corrosive desensitising depravity-- of muzak, is that it summons a pastel shadow of our most darkly burned memories in a commercial context. You're standing by the broccoli and a deliberately sexless synthesis of Ain't No Cure for Love inserts itself partway into your ear and makes you feel so wistful and heartsick over that one person you needed so abjectly that you would have done anything, even yes, bought an entire flat of imported Swiss organic cabbage heads, and suddenly wham, then there you are, in the parking lot, tears running into your socks while you wonder if you can freeze the stuff or if you have to have a vegetarian barbeque. It cuts right-- or left-- down the middle of your brain, disrupting and disconnecting until you're a bundle of seething organs dripping money. Baby, you cannot help yourself, just let me-- Yes, that's better.
Imitation flavour is a ubiquitous sign of the apocalypse but it is usually suffered voluntarily. When did somebody smear you with imitation strawberry pie just for walking in the door? Smell and music are broadcast. Music operates on deep brain structures -- in fact, when we get old and forgetful, music is the last thing to go.
I am not even talking about the deliberate dumbification of mass producted music-- there've always been pop crap soporifics. Where tofu is shaped like a sausage to give a vegetarian a guiltless hot dog experience, muzak is shaped like music to achieve a gutless emotional effect. Even boy bands have actual boys; muzak is untouched by human hands. Sterility is fine when one wants uniformity, but we probably do not want a machine in a supermarket to uniformly be able to draw upon our love of sperm to make us buy bleach. Love, love, love, it's love that's being exploited, love is our most easily exploited emotion, the thing that makes us dumbest and most credulous and relentlessly optimistic-- most vulnerable to a new product.
It is one thing for Mick to sell Bill a song for eight million pounds-- at least Bill used the song directly, in however peculiar and entertaining a fashion. Whatever associations you have are genuine and the problem is how happy you are, as a consumer, about associating Diana Krall or Sting with cars or conversely, thinking of Michael Jackson's shrunken face whenever you (and I mean you, since I don't) drink Pepsi. But there's nowhere to take revenge when Tostitos makes the football team sing "Groovin'"-- what can you to do the Young Rascals that time and gravity haven't already?
Posted by cd at July 12, 2003 10:53 PM
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