Plugged in. Tuned out.

I got talking to a friend recently, about music and what it's meant to us, individually.

As we talked I realized I've been plugged in since I was maybe 9-10. That's a little more than 20 years. Aside from family, that would qualify as the longest relationship I've ever had. The Walkman to the Discman to the Ipod; more than half my life plugged on earphones.

It's different when you're listening to music over speakers and the world around you hears what you hear. It's a whole other thing when the music inside your head is yours alone. It becomes the voice in your head, your best friend, your therapist, your muse, your drug, your tourniquet, your happy pill and your bleeding heart.

You constantly have a soundtrack to your reality. Or maybe it's the subtitles. Every experience gets filtered and processed through the vocabulary of your playlist. It becomes a time capsule for your emotional development. If social archaeologists were to excavate my psyche, they'd find my musical influences stratified, compressed like minerals in the folds of my brain.

Listen to this - "The expression you wear on your face to keep the world out becomes the shape of the person you are." I read that somewhere. I wonder if that's true of the music you listen to as well? The music is my force-field - It keeps me in, it keeps you out. But I can't tell if I listen to what I do because it fits the grooves in my brain or I wonder, did the music engineer those grooves and orchestrate the person I've become? No answer. No matter.

What matters is that it has been with you, everywhere. On mountaintops with the wind slapping high-fives against your open palms; in the rush-hour hell of seething cars; holding your hand on a lonely night walk, watching blue lights winking at the dark; in the slow baked sunshine of a construction set, tuning out the sweat and paint and assholes; on overnight flights and bus-rides, flickering in that hazy, surreal half-life between awakenings and sleep. It has been there.

Music has been the one constant. The one solid thing. People come, go, change, wilt, take, give, drift away, move on, fuck off and fade out, but the music is always there. Always the same. Your time machine, your escape hatch, your weapon, your warm embrace, your festering gall.

Instruction Manual Humour

IMHO (I have learned that that's geekspeek for 'According to the only opinion that truly matters, i.e. - MINE'), a genre of literature that hasn't yet been given it's due is User Instruction Manuals for cheap electronic goods made in places like Taiwan or Malaysia or Timbuktoo.

When you think about it there's many reasons to reccomend them:

* They're generally always good for a laugh.
* They're informative enough to be almost useful.
* Sometimes they're even weirdly profound. (Most sound like they were written by Yoda.)
* Best of all...they're free!(well, you've already shelled out cash worth three times your entire paycheck for the widescreen t.v./dishwasher/ ice-cream maker/completely-useless-and-doomed-to-spend-the-rest-of-it's-life-as-a-receptacle-for-dirty-laundry-but-you-just-had-to-have-it-at-the-store-thingamajig that they came with!!)

So here's a little sampler. Enjoy.

INSTRUCTIONS: For results that can be the finest, it is our advising
that: NEVER to hold these buttons two times!! Except the battery.
Next taking the (something) earth section may cause a large
occurrence! However. If this is not a trouble, such rotation is a
very maintainence action, as a kindly (something) virepoint from
Drawing B.

Tower of Babble

This is a Protest. This is a Rant.
A railing, flailing, hissing, pissing, flipping-you-off-with-all-10-digits-while-spitting-in-your-eye RANT.
What we're protesting here is the sheer, incomprehensible ABSURDITY that is corporate jargon.

Who thinks this shit up for chrissake!!

Tell me, corporate world? Do you have a guy -a thin bony nervous guy, someone who's always feared his ears were too big for his face and his voice too damp for his paper mouth; sitting in a drafty little cubbyhole in a spike-jonze-being-john-malkovich inspired half-cap stunted ceilinged attic somewhere, squished between mountainous stacks of yellow legal pads, pencils sharpened to deathly gleaming points, channeling the angst and humiliation of so many brown bag lunches stolen and stomped on by schoolyard bullies into vague, incoherent, self-inflating phrases designed to set the average human being's teeth on edge?

I mean, come on! When did it become normal to talk like this - verbs as nouns, nouns as adjectives or god alone knows what and of course, the arbitrary stringing together of random alphabets that makes it sound like the entire corporate world suddenly, unanimously decided to speak Czech.

Now if you buy that whole 'the geeks shall inherit the earth', then I suppose you've got to believe that this is the devil's pay-off and in that respect, somewhat overdue. Allow me to illustrate by means of this shining example of the savage little ironies and bipolar belly-flops of fortune's favour.

See, I imagine that on a battlefield of another kind i.e. the schoolyard, spouting phrases like, 'interface systems architecture' or 'synergize intuitive paradigms' would have guaranteed you an ass whuppin' of major proportions. Now say stuff like that in a board room full of hypercaffienated, hypoglycemic, middle aged, middle management types in too tight neckties and there's a pretty good chance they're going to see you as some kind of business Demi-God.
And get this...pay you a buttload of money to churn out more crap like that!

So, since you're the only one who actually understands what you're saying...for once in your life, YOU'RE COOL. You are THE MAN.
Sure enough, before long, you're hooked. You're actually believing that bullshit you're spouting.

Welcome to the Danger Zone.

Because where does it end?

Or imagine this - IT DOESN'T!!!

It crosses over into civilian life. Soon it'll be an epidemic - girlfriends all over will want to have 'THE INTERFACE'

The Sunday morning drone of ESPN will be shattered by wives intoning "Honey, you need to reprioritise your KRA's and deploy real-time deliverables"

And meet the future of sexual harassment: street corner studs hooting,"Baby, I'd like to mesh synergistic architectures with you"

Be afraid. Be VERY afraid.

Monsoon Memory

This is one of those days: reality is a blur and the portal to that magic rain life can briefly be traversed.

Everything is pregnant with moistness; swollen with rain.
Outside is a tropical rainforest.
Dripping. Oozing. Bursting.
Emerald sparkles on winter gray sky.
Inside is a papery forest hut, dry and cool and clean.
My feet in dry socks. But the wet is already in my bones.
Birds twittering and squawking and fluttering, and
the fat wet wind whistling past.
Snatches of songs I long forgot tuning in to my frequency on the moist crackling air.
Songs about perfect days and a distant past life I probably never lived. Or maybe I did.

Who knows the lives I've lived in that alternate universe of my monsoon memory.
Maybe, in another life, I was a leaf riding the swell of the Amazon.
Maybe I was a stone skipped on the surface of a pond in Kerela, or a paper boat rushing out of the Suez canal, eager to meet the sea.

They say the magnetism of the Moon makes people crazy, the way it pulls and pushes the tides and harnesses the ebb and flow of blood in the vein.
If you ask me, the Moon has nothing on the Rain.

If I Had A Boat...

If I had a boat
I'd go out on the ocean.

And if I had a pony
I'd ride him on my boat.

But if I had a BIG FAT LEAR JET,
I wouldn't need a Pony or a Boat.


OK - no, this post was not meant to be a paean to materialism. I just like this picture for the composition and the nostalgia value. The ditty came along cause my mind is frequently out to lunch.

Situation Normal - ALL FUCKED UP!!!

So here we go again...the city's exploding...again. All I can think of to say is, FUCKERS, You're killing the wrong people!!! If you are going to systematically target groups of people for random extermination in the name of terrorism, can you at least be fair about it and allow the common people to send up viable candidates...people we'd actually like to see killed.

I mean that's win-win. You get cannon fodder and an upgrade in your international terrorist profile, we get rid of people that make our time on earth particularly unpleasant.

Par example, I'd like to nominate, as my first candidates, the people that promised but never quite managed to bring to book the people responsible for the first serial bombings in '93.

Next, I'd like to nominate the politicians that went around hugging the widows and holding the babies of victims and vowing never to forget the carnage...at least not until 7 p.m. that evening when it was time for drinks at the club.

Finally, I'd like to nominate the idiot who, come tomorrow, will shake his head with practised bemusement, marvelling at the Takes-a-Lickin-Keeps-on-Tickin 'spirit' of Bombay and will then, with ill-concealed smugness, actually applaud the dysfunction and apathy...wait hold on, I think I'd like him to go first.

BTW, this just occured to me...they'll be calling this one 7/11, won't they? Perfect! The Americans have a terror incident, the date is numeric code for 'emergency'. The Indians have a terror incident, the date is numeric code for 'convenience store'...go figure!

Hard Talk : The Universe and Me. Part I.

The universe has some explaining to do.

Seriously...I would like some answers.
The way I figure it: as rational, sentient beings, creation has deprived human beings of the pleasures of an insensible, uncomplicated, rationale-free existence. So I'm here with my 'Right to Information' form filled out in triplicate and duly notarised because Goddamn it, I have questions and I WANT answers!!

What I'd like is for the universe to explain if not account for certain realities. There are big questions of course, such as the need for the holocaust,
the purpose of global warming, the mechanics of Donald Trump's Hairdo, etc., but there are smaller, more personal queries also.
So come on in universe. Take your shoes off. Smoke a cigarette. Make a sandwich. Get comfortable....this may take a while.

Now in no particular order, here goes:

*Explain how it is that I, as a common individual not related by blood or bond to anybody vaguely powerful or popular or influential or even remotely good-looking, can hope to get a fair shot anywhwere in this cosmos...where can I, an unaffiliated nobody, get my redressal? Where can I get justice? Where can I get my lunch money back?

*Explain to me why the government thinks that somehow by cosmetically altering the name of a city, they will have given all the inherent problems of that city a facelift too...like "Ooh ze crap et ze crud on ze streets of Mumbai, she ees charmant, n'est pas? Bombay?? Mias non...she ees ugly"

*Explain to me how it is that my watch, my microwave, my airconditioner, my dvd player... basically every piece of electronic equipment ever owned by me manages to break down precisely a day and a half after the stipulated warranty expires. I sense an electromagnetic conspiracy...

*Explain the need for cellulite again....like seriously, who thought that was a good idea.

*Explain why Creed?(the rock band, not the ideological construct.) Pearl Jam and Live weren't enough for you?? Ok given, Live were a little karma-obsessed and Ed Kowalczyk wasn't nearly as cute as Eddie Vedder. Still,we forgave...kinda. But Creed?? Scott Stapp?? Seriously!!

*Explain to me how Religion, this universally accepted conduit meant to teleport humanity straight into the bosom of divinity, has been and continues to be the reason for 90% of the goriest, most savage, most pointless bloodletting to have occured through the ages.

*Explain this Japanese hair straightening epidemic that has struck not just vain, upper middle class housefraus and frauleins(oh woe, if that were all) but oddly, an alarming majority of testosterone-heavy muscle monkeys. All of a sudden, there's a rash of people, male and female, running around wearing what can only be described as a bad throwback to the glam rock frightwigs of the 80's. What next? Crimping?

*Explain how it is that my sexlife consists entirely of being screwed over - by my phone company, my bank, my landlord, tax collectors, creditcard companies, my clients, expensive chain restaurants, evil cabbies, freebies with fine print, murphy's law,basically anyone that figures they have an appetite for fresh sucker today...HOW, Universe HOW?

*Explain the teeth of the English...how is it that this pea-sized nation, which colonised nearly half the globe, couldn't get itself a half-decent dental plan? Unless of course, dental-envy was their primary motivation for conquest: the subjugation of aboriginal peoples possessing healthy, aesthetically pleasant teeth. Hmmm...now that you think about it: India - originally a nation of good strong shiny white teeth, Africa - good strong shiny white teeth, The Americas - good strong shiny white teeth.

Ok, now in the name of bandwidth and brevity, we shall adjourn. But by no means am I through with you, Universe. So unless you're sending another monster asteroid my way, this is 'To be continued...'

I came. I saw. I procrastinated.

I figure I'm just the laziest motherfucker on this planet.

That's what brings me here at 3:45 a.m. on a Thursday morning gwaping at a computer screen while subjecting my neighbours to my most recent John Mayer compilation. (Ironically featuring 'Midnight' a track dedicated to insomnia and urban alienation. Good theme.)Now the thought swirling around in my brain, mystifying the fuck out of me is: Where do all my good intentions go?

Today was supposed to be about creative exploration. Today I was supposed to turn a slowly moulting mountain of gateway paper representing 8 years worth of doodles and ideas and rough drafts into at least one actual artwork.

Instead I took a nap that lasted 6 hours.

The narcolepsy is just a reaction. The real problem is writer's block, or my version of it, anyway. This is an abject, paralysing fear of commencing, of committing, of eventually fucking up SO badly in SO many ways that they'd need a whole new decimal system to quantify it.
It's like stepping off a cliff...once you 're airborne, you don't know how far you're going to drop and what shape you'll be in when you land. The average person tends to put it off for as long as he or she can.

The good news (I'm guessing)is that I'm not alone! We are a generation of procrastinators and lazy motherfuckers!!(how else do you explain the grammar in text messages and the tomaguchi phenomenon?) To avoid doing any real work we have all perfected a whole host of ingenious evasive strategy.

I know people who, everytime they need to begin a new project, will defer the inevitable by attempting to re-organize their entire CD collection - alphabetically, or chronologically, or based on favourites, or based on which bands had members who had maternal aunts named Gertie.

Spending an hour plucking your eyebrows(with toe-nail clippers),scraping the grunge off the grouting in the kitchen tiles with a toothpick, trying to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes (even though you don't smoke), volunteering to make absurd market runs (you've just discovered that there are no spark plugs in the house - horror of horrors), meditating upon the whorls and lines on the soles of your feet to see if you can find any hidden alphabets spelling 'Paul is dead', these are all acceptable evasion tactics.

Now the question is, has Humanity always been such a bunch of putter-offers, of procrastinators, of slackers or is it just our generation?
Like, I wonder if Plato had to play 249 games of solitaire before he sat himself down to write the Republic.
Or if Einstein would spend an hour combing his facial hiar into animal shapes to add to his bag of party tricks before he went to work on the theory of relativity.
Can you imagine Jesus before the Sermon on the Mount: "Water. Wine. Water. Wine...no, water. hic!! hee hee no, th-hass wine."
It's a wonder anything got done!

Notice by the way, how in true diabolical fashion, I have managed to defer my start up problems by making them yours...What? do you see any finished artwork lying around the place?