antipopper

Nate used to be a client of mine at Microsoft. Now he’s busted out of the coop and let it be known he’s doing cool shit. Wow.

Arrived in the mail today: Vijay Prashad’s Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity, and Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Nice. Perhaps I’ll be able to pull myself out of this goddamn inertia.

Watching a White Stripes video. I’m into Hipster New Rock as much as the next person, but gawd, those guys have got nothing on that true original roots-punxter duo from the 1950s, The Collins Kids:

A brother-sister outfit that’ll raise the hair on the back of your neck. Lorrie and Larry Collins. They’d eat Meg and Jack, the Kills and whoever else for breakfast. Kill ‘em dead. (Perhaps I’m reading too much into their super-heavy, wholesome yelping — perceiving an edge that’s not there. But who cares?)

This is a conversation that my father recorded when I was about five years old, after I’d had a dream:

I fell down onto Hell. There was fire — it was all red.

Did you see any people?

I saw some skeletons.

Were the skeletons moving?

No… they were dead people.

Did you see anyone else?

Oh yes… I saw the Devil! He had blue lips.

Did he have any teeth?

Sharp teeth. He made a fence of a his teeth.

A what?

A fence. Well, I was lying down on Hell, and the Devil — he had sharp teeth. Then he took out his teeth, and made them into a fence, around me.

Amongst all the crap, at least some things cheer me up. This is my niece, Sarah. I think she knows that it’s endearing to refer to herself in the third person, but that’s perfectly okay with me.

Edward Said is dead.

Today I bought a DVD burner. (I bought my Mac about a month before the DVD-burning SuperDrive was introduced, and this really rankled.) Of course, this third-party consumer burner isn’t supported by Apple software, but all it took was editing a couple of characters in a device file, and boom, instant workage! The hardest thing was getting the old drive out of its enclosure — the power cable was stuck in its socket. I eventually had to use a door key to lever it out. Again: I used a fucking door key to unlock a blockage in my computer. How cool is that?

Are you the Gatekeeper? I am the Keymaster. Okay, okay, I’m going to bed now.

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Before I fall asleep: tomorrow I am going to buy some GUITAR STRINGS. This, of course, has NOTHING to do with any nonsense about a Christina Aguilera hardcore cover band. Not at all. (I’m just stringing you along, Shane. Or am I?)

Okay, okay, I’ve finally gotten around to supplying a free download of the “Magneto Was Right” t-shirt. The Omega Gang symbol on the back of the original is supplied separately. You can use these PDF files as the basis for a screenprint, or else print them on positive-reading iron-on-transfer paper (i.e. the stuff you don’t have to turn over to iron on). If you only have access to reverse-reading transfer paper and your printer driver doesn’t have the option to reverse your printouts, then download these here files. As so many people have noticed, if you’re going to iron it on, use a type of transfer paper that’s NOT billed as “appropriate for dark t-shirts”, otherwise you’ll be stuck with a white background.

Dream #1

Superhumans in captivity: a closed circuit television system watches a bunch of variously-powered people in caged enclosures. A zoo. Click. Some kind of fish-man. Click. An impossibly nimble Chinese woman does a reverse tumble along the top of a thin wall. Click. There’s an unspoken understanding that their biographies are like those of characters in a beat-em-up game like Streetfighter or Mortal Kombat. Suddenly I’ve become the Chinese woman, and all hell breaks loose as the captives all break through their individual enclosures and into each others’ habitats. I’m face to face with the fish man — his torso looks just like a salmon fillet — and I suddenly discover my Special Attack Move: like Mr Snow from Planetary, I extend my hands and freeze Salmon Fillet Man dead.

Dream #2

It’s Virginia in the 19th Century. An aristocratic Skeet Ulrich, in bumpy demon-face, strangles a 15-year-old boy, who slumps to the floor of the courtyard, lifeless. Blood sweating in a strange pattern from his palms, Ulrich places his hands on what seems to be some ornamental gothic masonry and pours energy into them, creating two Hellhounds. These slavering beasts, whose eyes are horribly black and round, are made to kill his wife. My party of men arrives, though, and somehow this changes Ulrich’s schedule, even though we appear familiar. His demon-face receding, he pronounces his Hellhounds imperfect and corrrupted, and hands me two droppers of poison. I stand nervously on an upholstered armchair as the Hellhounds snap upward at me, and I let small droplets of poison fall into their mouths…

          Hours later, in silhouette: the boy’s body lies on a wheeled stretcher in a morgue. Curtains part, and a woman leans into view. She whispers:

          ”Whore! Whoreboy! I need a piece of you.”

Still in silhouette, we see a pseudopod blossom out of his back and through the stretcher on which he lies, and it faces upwards, listening, flowering into some kind of sensory organ, like a huge orchid. It is here we realise that he is a kind of doubled being — his tentacled monster-half always on his back, but usually hidden. Perhaps we are all like this. The woman leaves. As she moves out of frame, more silhouetted tentacles extend from him like a plant growing at hyperspeed, tending toward her as young shoots do toward the sun, in a kind of inhuman desire.