Halloween Playlist

It is that happy time of year again when everything dies and all the spirits come out to lurk. I too have been lurking, and I've come up with a few gems. The following are tracks that I'll be using as the soundtrack for this, the season of death and renewal, and are the result of Googling "Halloween." Play close attention especially to my new Audiogasm track, which would be from the LA trio Halloween Swim Team. Also, note the prevalence of Danny E:lfman tracks, because after all he is IS the mayor of Halloweentown!

02 Pitch Black.mp3


01 Grey Matter.m4a

A little Kills:

03 Pull A U.mp3

More Danny Elfman:
Beetlejuice Theme (Kamei Halloween Edit).mp3

Punks do Halloween best (Misfits and Dead Kennedys)

Halloween.mp3

07 Halloween.mp3

Bmore Hearts Sticky!

Although this IS NOT A FOODIE BLOG by any means, I feel cheerfully obligated to announce that Sticky B'more is off the proverbial chain. By which I mean that the Baltimorian newcomers are coming to understand what it is to be truly Sticky in the sense that you know how to work hard/play hard and keep it classy. The Examiner concurs.

The new opening marks the third in a Northerly-encroaching creep up the East Coast, from RVA to DC to Bmore...will we one day add NYC to these charming abbreves? One can only hope...

We've been graced with the presence of DJs the likes of Dave Nada and Kom-Toki every weekend, and we've enjoyed cutting rugs with the back of house. The space is significant for many Baltimore natives who recall when it was a bar called Friends. A spacious room with booth/tables and the original grand ol' divey bar lead back to a little offshoot enclosed room with three small tables and stained glass reminiscent of cathedral decor is called the Church, and the Boom-Boom room has its own backroom-near-kitchen charm. Rickety warped stairs lead up past the beautiful stickycoyfish mural by House Party Dave to our office floor with dry storage, etc. The upper levels are currently being occupied by a few of the owners during extended workweeks, in addition to some surly brothel/addict hauntings, no doubt. This was the enduring charm of the bar Friends, which apparently everyone was sad to see go out, though not surprised (I've heard they gave away the bar). During the first few weeks we were open, our sandwich board read "Sticky Rice...We Can Be Your 'Friends' Too!"

So far we've enjoyed GREAT reviews on Yelp, and the LivingSocial promotion has brought out a lot of sushi lovers and curious casual diners. Dinner is delicious, but you really want to stay late and drink with us. I hear the staff gets kind of nuts. You might even get to bang on a gong.

Art in Death's Capital

Sometimes I get that weird little feeling as if the universe is conspiring in my favor...and today's events have definitely left me buzzing with pronoia...

I was eating a delicious portabella sandwich today at Liquid Earth on Aliceanna (basically next door to Sticky Rice), and picked up a copy of the Urbanite , my new favorite Baltimore rag to read a couple articles on local graf art. Naturally that put me in a sweat, but I was a total mess by the end of the second article where it so casually referenced an XTC song from the early eighties that has been adopted by local great Cuba. (Song would be "Living Through Another Cuba," and yes you would be correct in the assumption that it's brilliant)

But let me back up. Looks like there's a dude calls himself Gaia who has been throwing up beautiful drawings matted onto sagging overhangs and derelict building fronts. He's twenty-two and goes to MICA, where I just interviewed for a position at the Writing Studio. There's one of his grandfather on Park and Franklin, but other than that the are mostly figures with animal heads and human bodies and hands, usually wrenched in some sort of anguish, presumably because what was once a human head has gone animal. My plan is to become infatuated with spotting these around town now. My next stop is at W. North Ave. and Pennsylvania, but I'll have to take some breed of large male with me. The images, according to the article, are affixed with wheat paste and glue, and go up in a matter of seconds, (obviously he couldn't do the drawing on the buildings themselves for reasons of bad medium and the small legal issue), the way graffiti artists choose names that are short and sweet and go up fast under the cover of night before anyone can hear the tell-tale rattlerattlerattle, ch-shhhhhhhhh.

The next article was about this guy Cuba, an older head who also went to MICA, and was a good friend of the author's until he faded into legendary obscurity. The author, Charles Cohen, said last he'd heard of his boy, he'd O-Ded on heroin in like '82. Not only false, but a direct quote I'll take the liberty of snagging from the article went like this:

"Doing drugs was a way to do myself in and still enjoy it until I got close [to death]. Then I realize I ain't going out like that. I'll take a bullet in the head. No I won't. Fuck it, I'm never going to die."

...which I think really eloquently sums up the impetus these artists have for doing what they're doing. While the one motto goes, "nothing is sacred," in that most people who actually notice street art are liable to erase it, the other one is about marking out your space, the art making you immortal. In an environment particularly like Baltimore's where death marks just about everything (see R.I.P art), there are those who know their days are numbered. So what do you do? Write up your will, spit in the ocean, become a makeout bandit, make a baby, make a song, or imprint your soul on a slab of concrete that couldn't care less how you make it?

Even if you're not involved in a gang war, this is probably the most relatable existential fear, of the Nothing eating you alive, wiping you out forever with nothing to show for it. A professor from Pratt and a kind of friend of mine told me he started smoking cigarettes as a way to kill himself as slowly as possible, all the while

dutifully scribbling, etching the mirror of beauty he encounters for whomever will care about it later. When I think about the kind of writer I'll be known as, I know I won't be a Stephen King, who will survive the eons perhaps as a cultural icon, a genre writer who gave words to some of our darkest nightmares which necessarily illuminate our assumptions and attachments to the things we care about most. He's experimented with writing under a pseudonym to test out whether his success has been valid or just a clever marketing scheme. The essays still sold really well. So, props to him. He's no literary giant, just a guy with a great thing going. I've toyed with the idea of writing some great erotic trash to make my millions before The Cicada Killers breathes life of publication, but I can't see myself doing it. Nope, I'm going to fiddle and fuck around and produce some terrible trash until finally, on my deathbed, I produce my life-affirming work, only to be appreciated by a handful of maladjusted teenage art students decades after I die. And what's really sick about it all is that I've resigned myself only in hopes of the opposite actually happening.

These articles found me just a week after I bought Style Wars about the early hip hop/graf art scene in NYC, and two days after British street artist Banksy was commissioned to draft a new couch gag for this Sunday's episodes of The Simpsons.

I for one am impressed that no heads have rolled over this. Impressed and hopeful. We are fortunate to be so immersed in The Great Recession that (IMHO) the highest art forms like satire and street art have room and audience to thrive. I'm becoming very excited about living in Baltimore, where there are more gravestones than citizens, and there is an urgency to the art being produced. Live live urbania!

Spotlit on Tim Winton

I realize the lit portion of my blog has been somewhat lacking due to the influx of better and better jams, and the relative absence of good fiction out there. When I was down under, my sister turned me onto an Aussie writer Tim Winton, and his novels Breath (Penguin, 2008) and Cloudstreet (Penguin 1991). Two very different novels in almost every angle, but somewhat familiar in their apparent disconnect.

The character in Breath is a middle-aged paramedic who encounters a ghost from his adolescence in the form of a teen thrill gone wrong. Readers are transported back to the beginning of Bruce's friendship with insatiable risk-taking Loonie and the old surfer hero Sando who takes both young surfers under his wing. The language is brief, tragically clear. It's a quick read, and offers a lot of those "surprises" for which space and expectation is made early on. Specifically the story spoke to me on the levels of youth and the addiction to risk, the fear of mediocrity and the threat of being lost to the eons of ordinary. And to these extents it's very sexually driven, the danger, the bliss, the life pulsing through a skull and crossbones.

(excerpt)

Shoulder to shoulder in the cab, Loonie and I exchanged furtive looks. There was something of the classroom about Sando, the stink of chalk on him when he got going, but my mind was racing. I'd already begun to pose those questions to myself and feel the undertow of their logic. Was I serious? Could I do something gnarly, or was I just ordinary? I'll bet my life that despite his scorn Loonie was doing likewise. We didn't know it yet, but we'd already imagined ourselves into a different life, another society, a state for which no raw boy has either words or experience to describe. Our minds had already gone out to meet it and we'd left the ordinary in our wake.

(p. 94)

I'm only about halfway through Cloudstreet, but already it's as if it were written by an entirely different writer.

The cheeky Aussie humor is abounding, but for starters, it's concerned with about ten major characters, all

of whom get POV in the third...except one, the boy named Fish whose heart stopped when he fell overboard

the fishing boat and got caught in the net. He survives, albeit with scrambled eggs for brains. His sections (the novel

is divided amongst the characters and the two families living together by small headed vignettes) are by far the most

beautiful and the most wrenching. They are written in second person, as a conversation across some great divide and always

addressed to Fish. Is "I" the author? I tend to doubt, as it would be tremendously risky with all the other characters

involved, to suddenly spring some sort of authorial involvement and crowd the novel.

At the risk of total literary blasphemy (and giddy is the thought!), I say these two juxtaposed works remind me

of none other than Joyce's Dubliners and Ulysses. Think about it. If I were to introduce Winton to a classroom, I would

most likely give them Breath to cut their teeth before they jump into a dual-family historical epic like Cloudstreet.

The stories in Dubliners mirror the close scope and developed private interiors of the Bruce character. (I think

Bruce and the boy from Arabia would have a fine time bitching about girls and sexual competence.) The

sheer breadth, volume, involvement and elevated-low-brow wash of language in Cloudstreet is an instant

likeness to the one-day spectacle that is Ulysses, the novel which Joyce claimed contained not a single extraneous

word. Deliberate is the word we're looking for, and we're sticking to the one, thanks J.J. I've stumbled

across some effortless beauty on page 164:

(excerpt)

Across the planes all things still play themselves out, all fun and fear, all the silliness and quaking effort,

all the bickering and twitching, all the people going about the relentless limited endeavour of human

business, and the sight of your body rolling like that, bursting with voice and doubleness, reminds you that the

worlds are still connected, the lives are still related and the Here still feels the pangs of history.

Obsessed as I am with "relentless limited endeavours" and of course the "pangs of history,"

this passage was meant just for me...and Fish, apparently. It's worthy of note that in spite of the grand

scope and the way the family names (Pickles and Lamb) are difficult at first to assign to the characters'

first names, one becomes very quickly entangled in the matters of the two trying to live under the same

roof during a time of great economic depression in Australia.

Oh, and flipping over my copy here, I notice Elizabeth Ward of the Washington Post, no less, has

already paid tribute to my undergraduate mentor: "Cloudstreet gets you inside the very skin of post-war working-class Australians the way Joyce makes you feel

like a turn-of-the-century Dubliner..."

She's right, but not as right as I am, of course, about the two novels back-to-back. And then there's

the wordplay...

I'll decide when I get to the end of this one if anyone else should bother reading it. I highly recommend

the first half, however, and it is up to you whether you'd like to continue on, asphyxiate your breath with the

witching rhythm of Winton's phrasing and the quivering potential for tragedy.