The Blythe Archives:
The Emperor X Online Journal
|20100727
||Proper Roughage: July 2010
There's no theme for this mix. It's just a collection of tracks I've been loving this month, with a focus on things that came out recently or things that are old and tragically slept on. An obvious exception is the Missing Persons track that leads off the mix, which was just too good to leave off even though lots of people already know how crucial it is. Enjoy!
Missing Persons - "Walking in L.A."
Pollution - "Signal Control"
Marnie Stern - "For Ash"
Gramophonedzie - "Brazilian"
Guerre - "Hey Light"
MC Marcinho - "Glamurosa"
Jorge Ben - "Berenice"
Nas and Damien Marley - "As We Enter"
Embarrassing Fruits - "Long Distance Breakup Summer"
Frightened Rabbit - "Man/Bag of Sand"
The Roots feat. Joanna Newsom - "Right On"
Download
This mix owes a heavy debt to Hype Machine and the taste of my new friends Elia and Chad Hartigan. Thanks, y'all!
|20100721
||How to Win a Fight Without Throwing a Punch
I was waiting for my order from Burrito King in Echo Park, seated at the aluminum counter and killing time by making tomorrow's to-do list, when two teenagers walked up and stared at me. The shorter and more muscular of the two put his face about six inches from mine. I could smell the booze on his breath as he slurred, "What you writing there, some white people sh*t?"
"It's my to-do list for tomorrow. Why do you care?" I replied. I met his gaze and moved my face towards his, closing the already narrow gap between our noses. We were almost touching.
"Don't get all up in my FACE," he shouted.
"You're the one who's up in my-" I started, but was interrupted by the owner of the burrito place, who leaned out of the pick-up window and yelled at the kids in Spanish: "What's going on here?!?"
"Nada," the pair shouted back, defiant, backing away and glowering at me.
"Estan me molestando," I said, equally defiant, munching on a piece of bread, glowering back. "They're bothering me."
The next thing I saw was his right hook headed for my left eye. It was too late to duck it completely, but I flinched and turned away from the blow. It landed on my jaw just where it connects to the skull. The sound it made when it landed was pretty awesome -- a few quick crackles and a deep, fleshy "WHAP!"
The attack caught me off guard, but my assailant seemed more surprised than I was. Probably drunk and overconfident, he'd expected me to crumble to the ground or run away crying. Instead, I got up calmly from my seat, moved towards him with raised fists, and said something to the effect of, "What was that, a little p*ssy punch? You thought that was going to drop me? Come on, try and take me down, you little f*cker."
My ridiculous, adrenaline-fueled false bravado really got to him. His eyes, which before my taunting showed the satisfied cruel humor of an unchallenged bully, turned to blazing black beads of hatred and panic. He might have charged me, but his friend, a large, gentle-seeming kid, held him back. As they backed away I walked slowly towards them, fists raised and filthy curses flying out of my mouth. He made an effort to look like he was struggling to break free, but it was all for show. He could have come at me again had he really wanted to. I followed them from a distance for a few feet as they retreated to the other side of the street. We glared at each other as they walked away. I made sure they broke eye contact first.
Once they'd gone, I sat back down, munched on some more bread, and continued to wait for my order. My jaw was a little sore, but the burrito was hot and delicious.
|20100703
||Bus Purgatory Has a Dance Team
It was 2:30 a.m. at the packed L.A. Greyhound terminal. No one was having a good time. No one, that is, except for this guy:
While the exhausted passengers slumped and shuffled around, waiting in docile misery for their connections to Bakersfield and Stockton and Detroit, the gentleman pictured above was rocking out to Lady Gaga and Destiny's Child. His poor little cellphone speaker was so shredded I could hardly recognize the songs through all the tinny distortion, but that didn't stop him from busting out with smooth seated dance moves, clapping, and off-key backup vocals. Check out the look in the lady's face in the last image to get an idea of the crowd's reaction. He kept it up all night, too. I checked in on him and took these pictures at 7:30 and he was clearly still going strong.
It's time to get out of here.
|20100613
||New Century Bus Station Bathroom
Chinatown in Philadelphia is partly covered by the SEPTA Market East transfer station and an attached shopping mall. It's dark on 11th St. no matter the time of day. On my way to tonight's concert in Charlottesville I found myself in the New Century bus station bathroom, staring blankly above the urinal I was using. Scrawled over a dense web of gang signs and crude comic drawings on one of the filthiest walls I've ever seen, I saw this:
"What are you waiting for to give up?"
Graffiti with a serious tone really, really sobers me up, and it doesn't get much more serious than that. When someone with intelligence chooses to communicate through barbarism, they trigger a specific and very powerful emotional reaction. That's why Osama bin Laden terrifies the Western world so much: he's one of us, trained in our schools, raised in privilege.
I don't know who the person was who wrote that note or why he wanted to encourage me and anyone else who needed to piss in that urinal to give up, but I'm imagining an affluent, 40-something off-the-grid dropout genius with a messiah complex, clean and bearded with piercing eyes and a wild grin. I don't think he and I would be friends. But I do respect the gesture. Sort of. If only it hadn't brought me down so hard...
I went next door to get some badly-needed Chinese comfort food. The girls behind the counter were unusually kind, held unusually long eye contact, and smiled with genuine warmth. Their gazes and their steamed spicy tofu and vegetables over rice made me feel human again.
|20100126
||DFW
Other than the unidentified man who smeared an eviscerated bird carcass across their mailbox and left it there to rot, Mom and Dad didn't seem to have much contact with people from the outside world -- at least not that year. They were seven months in to an eleven-month try at living in Plano, Texas, on the outskirts of Dallas's prairie exurbs, and they seemed to be more or less alone in their attempt. They had neighbors, of course, but the other families in the cul-de-sac kept fiercely to themselves, so there was little contact with anyone outside of work or the string of mini-mall churches they attended. Even the bird mangler, we later learned, was a former coworker with an ax to grind, so I guess even he doesn't count.
They'd recently followed jobs out west, and had set up camp in a new, unfinished development that was more of a suburban microchip than a neighborhood. Its roads were arranged in a fastidious grid, its open spaces dominated by power lines and a fleet of behemoth water towers, its alleys infested with bands of coyotes hoping to score easy meals by preying on penned-in yard pets. Their house was large and made of yellowish gray bricks, built in the nostalgic, pseudo-Main Street style then in fashion. Its interior was white and sterile, the sanded pine fencing that surrounded it high and claustrophobic. They were sealed off from the world just like thousands of other families in the half-dozen half-finished subdivisions within a half-mile radius. They were more alone than I'd ever seen them, and I couldn't help but feel bad for them or for anyone else who found themselves stuck there for too long, especially with the sneering coyotes and the animal sacrifices and the yawning prairie darkness to get lonely in.
But that very darkness was also Plano's sole charm. Their house was at the edge of urbanization, where perpendicular two-lane streets divided the land at regular intervals with little in between. The roads were extensions of existing thoroughfares, infrastructural vine runners built to cultivate affluent squalor -- shells of shopping centers in small tan deserts, dunes of engineering-grade dirt clods, skeletal wooden frames for next year's batch of mini-mansions, trenches for fiber-optic cable, rows of segmented concrete waterworks conduit awaiting installation beneath the dry brown grass, horse-sized spools of coiled high voltage cables. Wild plants thrived incongruously near useless fences and dimmed street lamps just like they would have in a post-industrial Rust Belt ruin. But Plano was no ruin. It was a blueprint, with weeds.
Night on the gridded plains was a muted tumult. Instead of a breeze and the drone of insects, the former grasslands offered the distant, steady roar of the freeway and the Doppler-shifting song of trucks and sirens and bass-heavy car stereos. Instead of the random glory of the heavens, the sky cast a sodium-yellow halo, warm and diffuse. A constant stream of airliners queued in neat, stepped rows, twinkling like purposeful starships on westbound approach to DFW. Outer Plano, and maybe all of exurban Dallas, played host to a pervasive, subtle, and terrifying grandeur.
I loved my parents, but I was not well prepared for that particular kind of sublime shock Plano delivered. I spent as little time there as my conscience would allow.
* * *
I returned to Texas two weeks ago to get some work done and to spend time with a good friend. I arrived in the morning on an overnight bus from El Paso, and got off rattled and refreshed from a night of contorted, chilly sleep in the bus's front row, next to the driver's blaring boom box. The Dallas terminal, run by a consortium of Mexican bus lines, was about the size of a large high school classroom, the floor cluttered with misaligned chairs and couches and luggage, the walls plastered with hand-made Spanish-language signs announcing trip times and ticket prices for destinations in Texas, Chihuahua, Sonora, and Guanajuato. I brushed my teeth, did a little bit of remote work for my company, got my bearings with a map, and set out for the nearest rail station, about a twenty minute walk through a run-down, nondescript light industrial zone near the city zoo.
What I thought was the most direct route turned out to be an overpass that flew over the zoo to another neighborhood. It put me directly over the train station, with no obvious way to get down to it. I hated the idea of wasting time by retracing my steps, so I leaped over the guardrail and off the overpass, chased by faint sounds of excited mammals from the pens below. I scrambled down a thorny garbage-strewn hill, skirting the property line of a small manufacturing warehouse, and made it to the station platform a few minutes later, scratched and dusty and on schedule.
The train ride through Dallas's southern reaches ran parallel with aging columns that used to support the elevated track of an abandoned freight railroad. Several fragile-looking bridges, disused and overgrown, still spanned a few creeks the old line crossed. Downtown Dallas loomed ahead, jumbled and apparently translucent, the thousands of mirrors on its facades reflecting and blending with the drab sky. The line dipped underground at Cityplace, a fluorescent island built beneath a skyscraper along the Central Expressway, and then continued at grade or on a series of elevated tracks and proud, tan viaducts through the city's northern districts, past megachurches and malls and box retail outlets and trailer homes, then through rolling hilly false-forest parks and the converted farmland surrounding the headquarters of Texas Instruments. By the time I got off the train it was full of people, northbound to Plano and to whatever busy vital denseness has replaced the proto-wasteland I remembered.
My stop was a few yards south of the interchange between the LBJ and Central freeways, and the snaking ribbonous knot of reinforced concrete and asphalt loomed against the mottled overcast, radiating white noise and the thick, intermittent wail of wet semi tires. I met my friend, and we walked towards the apartment complex I'd be staying in for awhile. Past a graffiti-covered concrete-lined creek, past a plant that manufactured semiconductor wafers, past a keyed-entry fence, two meandering rows of three-story apartment buildings enclosed an unkempt but park-like linear courtyard with two pools and a gym. A large woodcut sign by the gate of this white collar proletarian paradise announced its name in rounded bubble letters: "REFLECTIONS."
And that's where I am now, a few miles south of the coyote-patrolled frontier between the city proper and the cybernetic prairie, every now and then taking long runs and exploratory train rides along the concrete canyon of the Central.
|20100117
||TORNADO LIMOUSINE! GREYHOUND IS ON ITS WAY DOWN.
The first thing you should know about the Greyhound bus terminal in El Paso, TX is that it's located next to a massive reinforced concrete egg, and that's also the last thing you should know about it. Under absolutely no circumstance should you use Greyhound to enter or leave the city by choice. There are just too many other fun options, with names like Tres Estrellas, Los Limousines, and Tornado -- small-scale Mexican-run bus operations with express service to anywhere Spanish is spoken.
Their buses are hand-me-down charter coaches or Greyhound leftovers that announce the name of their company in blazing neon Comic Sans letters. Their terminals and ticket kiosks sprout in squat buildings of cinderblock and corrugated tin that often double as a swap meet full of pawn shops, import retailers, taquerias and courier dispatchers. Some say the Mexican lines are illegal fronts run by dangerous gang interests, which is mostly laughable and entirely irrelevant: if the cheerful children and kindly grandmas and honest-looking workaday men who rode with me to El Paso are criminals. they're the friendliest evil-doers you could ever hope to share a twelve-hour red-eye bus ride with.
It's Sunday morning, and I'm in the El Paso Tornado terminal, a grey tiled room in a building of indecipherable origin. White plastic lawn furniture sits arranged neatly in a small cluster towards the center of the cold room. The only sound comes in a steady buzz from a dozen fluorescent tubes hanging from the black metal ceiling. Across the street, a bar in a crumbly building blares narcotraficante ballads. It was open for its sad, rowdy business when I passed by a few minutes ago. At 10am. On a Sunday. Two dangling transparent plastic strips served as a door, through which I could hear a woman on the crackling PA inside, singing overdriven Spanish praises to the Lord. "O God, they're drunks, and they're good people," I heard her declare in confident, accented English as I walked past.
Based on what I saw out of my windows when we stopped to pick up passengers, it's like this all over North America. All night, every night, just out of sight of the heavily-trafficked parts of town, buses with garish livery and packed with beleaguered, docile travelers stop at unpredictable hours next to gas stations, abandoned mall parking lots, and the offices of bail bonds vendors. It's a little overwhelming to a non-initiate like myself. Many companies lack web presence, and since these operations change frequently, internet searches often deliver out-of-date information. There are only two reliable ways to figure out when and from where a bus leaves: word of mouth and the phone book. People must find out, though, because every bus is packed. In fact, many routes are double-served by competing lines, who jockey for business with fierce discounts and impressive schedule improvements.
So, how do these little companies compete with Greyhound's monopoly? Loyalty. I noticed few non-Hispanic passengers and zero non-Hispanic attendants or drivers. I'd bet research would show that immigrant loyalty to a Mexican business operating in the U.S., along with cheaper fares and faster service, attracts the itinerant immigrant client base, giving these anti-Greyhounds a built-in revenue stream. Only something as powerful as a mass migration has enough demographic inertia to take down a monopoly like Greyhound. This is a thrilling example of raw capitalism taking action like a mushroom, its spores carried in the current of a slow, unstoppable exodus, its stem taking root and growing on the rotten old organism, consuming it, improving it, putting it to new use. It's the closest an economic system comes to resembling life itself. It's beautiful and heartening to see this many-headed Latino bus hydra try to take down the 'hound. It's ironic that Republicans, the most enthusiastic pro-capitalism boosters in the States, tend also to be anti-immigration, since this particular capitalist success would have been impossible without a strong Mexican community in the U.S.
The Mexican bus lines lack Greyhound's central organization, but I have yet to see a downside to this other than the slightly-less-frequent service to some remote destinations and the eyebrow-raising building conditions in the impromptu bus terminals. The buses arrive at their destination faster. The drivers and attendants are far more friendly. Bureaucracy is used only when absolutely necessary, and then with fervor. Baggage claim tickets are checked to match those on the checked bags, for example, which Greyhound is too lazy to do in most cases. At the same time, Tornado was happy to hold my luggage while I walked around town during a layover, a simple courtesy Greyhound stopped years ago for paranoid and vaguely insurance-related reasons. Even though the facilities are run-down, the feeling in the terminals is one of familial concern, or at least a kindly tolerance. The panic and confused hostility in Greyhound's unbearable stations is shockingly, wonderfully absent.
Just outside of this little bus and bar district, whole city blocks teem with businesses specializing in cheap manufactured goods, either from Asia or the factories just across the border in Juarez. They didn't seem to have anything vital or valuable -- just a lot of cartoon character backpacks, beauty supplies, and false brand name electronics. Families playing hooky from mass strolled slowly, chatting and seeking bargains. The clear strong voice of an old man reminded them of what they were missing, though: "Ladies and gentlemen, please permit me to explain to you God's plan!" he declared, gallant and forceful and radiant.
My bus doesn't leave until late this evening, so I'll be walking across the border in a few minutes to see Juarez and maybe score some tacos or something.
|20100101
||Also...
http://www.kickstarter.com/
http://www.kiva.org/
||Feliz decenio nuevo!
Here's a list of links, all but three of which are Wikipedia articles, that I'm not going to explain right now, since it's New Year's Eve and I'd like to go do something warm and celebratory.
http://jgmatheny.org/matheny_extinction_risk.htm
http://jgmatheny.org/
http://www.slate.com/id/2096491/entry/2096506/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscillatory_universe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_model
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arguments_for_eternity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WMAP_cold_spot#Parallel_universe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse_%28science%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arguments_for_eternity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_finitism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_event
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Carinae
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum#vacuum_metastability_event
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WMAP_cold_spot#Parallel_universe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey%27s_Law#Grey.27s_Law
|20091105
||Beneath Baptist Heliport
I spent several days last week visiting my grandfather at a hospital in Jacksonville with a bright, elegant design that would fit in perfectly hovering over Bespin. His room was right next to the heliport.
|20090116
||PHX/Borders and Cities/Freeway Awe
I'm typing from a commercially-zoned house in
Phoenix where my friends Preston and Ben put on
house shows and cook and take care of two grumpy
cats and study and read and discuss philosophy
and politics and record music. Ben and I are
working on a split-release album built around
our thoughts on borders and cities. If we're
able to record and mix as much as we think we
can over the next few days, I'll be able to post
it in late January.
The freeways here were built with the grandiose,
monumental qualities that many cities give only
on their airports or transit systems. The sound-
walls are thick, tan fortifications and they're
the first thing I'd run for if I knew a blast
wind was coming from the other direction. The
builders cut hard lines and pseudo-adobe
ornamental shapes into the concrete. I walked
over a pedestrian overpass last night and felt
the kind of awe I seldom feel outside of a
train station or a launch pad viewing zone.
It's cold at night.