"Did you ever notice that you go to the most disgusting places in the country?"

asked my friend, Helen.

She's right. Because I don't have time to do real writing, here are my notes on the Gigantic Downtown Wilmywood Country Nightclub that Dan and I visited in NC. After passing through the metal detectors AND paying the cover, I typed these notes on my phone:

Weaselstache, radioactive stumps, bowtie barefoot bulldrider, thong sluts on bars, employees on barrels, whites dressed as blacks, lumped puke on floor, militaires on bull now, country girls grinding shamelessly on c*cks, country gradually and then totally replaced by slick Rick and.... 50something lifted onto bar by military haircuts, dancing. like a blue.velvet prostitute but wearing a.sequined dress. daisy dukes vs hot pants. Ogres in suits.

"Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature"

Dan Barry forwarded me a Wired blog article by author Bruce Sterling entitled "Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature." I much appreciated that the article was written in bullet form (no sarcasm intended).

My response:

photography, music, and video are possible evolutionary sandbags against the destruction of the realm of the individual artist

but despite hybridization, technical evolution, network-generated texts, cultural-technical re-indexing of all human achievements, etc, people are still the same pieces of shit as before

I am completely fascinated by Salt Lake City.

More on this to come.

Many posts here

are actually Infrastructure songs.

The New Year

As I sit here preparing to head off to a gathering of friends, I feel the need to play out 2008 with a few more UP images. These desolate places really provided a lot of inspiration and momentum, not only for Meade and me but for others who heard about and saw them later. Infrastructure is kicking (we wrote a song about Republic, pictured above). The photo thing is going well, and I have some new equipment to help me further both efforts. I'm always kicking around ideas for writing projects that I don't start. No time for shit. I am unmarried, have no children, and I don't own a home or car, yet I don't have a spare minute. I'm supposed to be on vacation, but I feel insanely stressed. I am inhaling a Lean Cuisine® Thai-Style Chicken frozen dinner and downing a Harpoon IPA. My blood pressure must be incredibly high. Happy new year.

...and by inspired I mean focused.

I don't think I have enough (time for) vision. I've shot over 8,000 photos so far this year but cannot use the emergent themes to create a gallery-worthy print show. I've been working on a rock album with C. and E. since August 2007 but barely have five songs done. I turned on fiction, but that's fine with me for now.

Here's hoping for more "free" time in 2009. Art is work, and there's only so much work you can do before you fall asleep.

John Mayer?

If you're bored on this Friday afternoon, consider reading my interview of John Mayer from April 2002. I thought it was so cool that we both got into music the same way.

You Can't Copyright a Title, But You Shouldn't Steal One Anyway

Many of my gentle readers will recall that I ran a humor/satire website entitled Imaginary Sanitation from 1997-2001 (corresponding to ages 16 through 20). Today I find that the Livejournal user Sytaxia, apparently someone who once made me a vat of vanilla pudding in college, has written an "original novel" entitled Letters to the Department of Imaginary Sanitation.

From Sytaxia's profile:

Update: "Letters to the Department of Imaginary Sanitation," an original novel, has been sent to literary agents... No news is likely to come for at least two more months, five more months being likely...

I sure hope I didn't write any other parts of said manuscript.

STEINBECK

Quotes from The Wayward Bus.

On the American bourgeoisie:

Mr. Pritchard was a businessman, the president of a medium-sized corporation. He was never alone. His business was conducted by groups of men who worked alike, thought alike, and even looked alike. His lunches were with men like himself who joined together in clubs to so that no foreign element or idea could enter. His religious life was again his lodge and his church, both of which were screened and protected. One night a week he played poker with men so exactly like himself that the game was fairly even, and from this fact his group was convinced that they were very fine poker players. Wherever he went he was not one man but a unit in a corporation, a unit in a club, in a lodge, in a church, in a political party. His thoughts and ideas were never subjected to criticism since he willingly associated only with people like himself. He read a newspaper written by and for his group. The books that came into his house were chosen by a committee which deleted material that might irritate him. He hated foreign countries and foreigners because it was difficult to find his counterpart in them. He did not want to stand out from his group. He would like to have risen to the top of it and be admired by it; but it would not occur to him to leave it. At occasional stags where naked girls danced on the tables and sat in great glasses of wine, Mr. Pritchard howled with laughter and drank the wine, but five hundred Mr. Pritchards were there with him.

On the sexual imprisonment of the monogamous heterosexual male:

Her husband's beginning libido she had accepted and then gradually by faint but constant reluctance had first molded and then controlled and gradually strangled, so that his impulses for her became fewer and fewer until he himself believed that he was reaching an age when such things did not matter.

On roads:

The highway to San Juan de la Cruz was a black-top road. In the twenties hundreds of miles of concrete highway had been laid down in California, and people had sat back and said, "There, that's permanent. That will last as long as the Roman roads and longer, because no grass can grow up through the concrete to break it." But it wasn't so. The rubber-shod trucks, the pounding automobiles, beat the concrete, and after a while the life went out of it and it began to crumble. Then a side broke off and a hole crushed through and a crack developed and a little ice in the winter spread the crack, so the resisting concrete could not stand the beating of rubber and broke down.

Then the county maintenance crews poured tar in the cracks to keep the water out, and that didn't work, and finally they capped the roads with an asphalt and gravel mixture. That did survive, because it offered no stern face to the pounding tires. It gave a little and came back a little. It softened in the summer and hardened in the winter. And gradually all the roads were capped with shining black that looked silver in the distance.