"Potential" is such a troublesome thing. If you're still hearing friends or co-workers talking about your potential well into your 26th year, there's a good chance you never had all that much potential - you just gave off just the right mixture of perception, ambition, perspicacity, and guile that tricked people into thinking beyond whatever you are capable of -- not maliciously, exactly, just...
This is what I'm realizing now, that all that positive reinforcement I got in late adolescence calcified and poisoned me. All that praise heaped upon my "humor columns" the Sunset Scroll (my high school newspaper of record) does not make me a writer any more than your driver's license makes you Paul Newman. I don't get to act like a Method actor as seriously intense as Daniel Day Lewis just because I did an okay job in my 8th grade drama club rehearsal of the Dumb Waiter. At an International School in the Netherlands. As the only native English speaker.
To assess your personhood forthrightly, you have to contextualize all the things your supportive family members and faculty advisers and cognitive therapists have taught you to believe about yourself. They aren't wrong, exactly, but they aren't privy to the abject horror your brain is capable of summoning up when left to its own devices. Listen closely to those internal monologues drone like Metal Machine Music when you enter that twilight between sleep and confusion. Embrace it - not always, but accept it.
There's rough honesty in that brutal self flagellation. You are telling yourself important things. There was never a greatness struggling against your worst, most mediocre tendencies and habits. You are merely the aggregate of the experiences you've accrued so far in your life -- something value neutral, essentially. Value, greatness, moral turpitude, merit -- these are legacy concerns, and while one might find the allure of veneration throughout history tempting... sometimes you have to spend a summer recording a concept album about The Bio Force Ape.
Sometimes you have to have an idea so profoundly stupid it excites you. Everyone can be dumb; it takes a little more je ne se quoi than that to make a The Bio Force Ape thing. These are the important things: be dumb; get excited at how dumb you are; spend dozens of hours painstakingly crafting a monument to that dumbness; and share that monument to the world.
So "The Life & Death of the Bio Force Ape," is an answer to a question no one ever wanted answered: What if someone took Emerson Lake & Palmer's "Tarkus" - the concept album about a tank that happens to also be an armadillo... an armadillo that hates nuclear war - as some sort of challenge to make an even more ludicrous concept record? What if the Protomen wrote rock operas not about one of the most iconic videogame creations in the nascent medium's history, but about the star of a never finished, unreleased NES game? Hell, these aren't the questions no one wanted answered -- these are the questions NO ONE EVER ASKED.
Here is "The Life & Death of the Bio Force Ape," presented to you free of charge.
You see why no one should have ever encouraged me to pursue any aspect of the creative arts. Or you will see. (Or maybe you won't. I'm not making you. But I'll be super jazzed if you did!)
Look. Not every magazine profile can be "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." Not every short story can be "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Not every opera can be "Parsifal."And not every transcendentally foolish idea can blossom into "The Life & Death of the Bio Force Ape".
[Self-evaluations always bring out the worst in me.]
Monday, October 11, 2010
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
What We Have Now We Are Unlikely To Have Again, or A New Way to Sell A White Kid Some Crack
Making my way from the Powell's technical bookstore on Broadway to Ground Kontrol (the locale hosting the celebration of Brian's 29th birthday) I feel the unexpected pressure of an arm across my shoulders. The arm belongs to someone I have never seen before, someone who must have slipped behind me while I was absentmindedly dreaming of places where lovers have wings, and as I remove the earbuds blasting white hot krautrock into my skullspace, this gentleman casually forces a tinfoil packet into my unoccupied hand.
Keep in mind that I had not said a single word to this individual. I hadn't even noticed him until his arm was on my person. Something about my obliviousness or my manner of dress attracted this fellow to me, and perhaps he believed that while I'd intended all along to score some rock that evening, I was too timid to approach a dealer myself. Surely, he'd note to himself, once the drugs were in my possession I'd be eternally thankful for his forthrightness in the matter.
Still a little befuddled, I look at my new friend and say something like "uh, hey there?"
Arm coiled 'round my body, he says (these ar "it's premium fucking shit, man. That's gonna fucking send you to the fucking moon, ya know?"
The best I muster is a monotone "Ok." There had been some doubt before that moment as to what, exactly, was going on, but I was now certain the tinfoil in my hand was not holstering some Orbitz gum. Still, I was unclear as to what illicit substance was being forcefully sold to me -- not marijuana, I'd surmised, so most likely bogus LSD?
"30, man, just 30 for that," he says, grinning like a machine designed only to grin and sling rock.
At this moment, he half takes the package out of my hand and begins to unwrap it, making sure the shit's still partially in my possession so I can't just bolt from his presence. Inside, three slightly yellow, misshapen objects of varying sizes gleam underneath streetlamp light.
Now, I've listened to a whole lot of Raekown's "Only Built For Cuban Linx," both parts I and II. The brothers Clipse have told me that, after you've added the Pyrex and watched it gel with the cocaine, a kitchen counter top can remind you of the first Noel. But now I am confronted with real crack cocaine outside the rap milieu, and I feel rather perturbed by it. I gently push the packet towards my pusher, but he's having none of that.
"C'mon, you want this. Just hold it. Hold it and tell me you don't want it." The drugs are fully in my possession now. The fight-or-flight response kicks in, along with a patently batshit crazy idea to run like hell with the dope, because, hey, free drugs. I didn't really want to use them myself (although I'm deluding myself to think I wouldn't have smoked that rock, having no willpower and a great enjoyment of cocaine), but surely I could use this fellow's aggressive technique on another sucker. That's 100% profit. This crack could be the Troubled Assets bit in a personal TARP fund.
Luckily, I notice a phalanx of my pusher's companions nearby - running now would surely result in a ruthless ass kicking, at the very least. Still, I wasn't going to buy fucking crack cocaine on the goddamn street. If nothing else, Street Fighter III Third Strike needs my money more than this dope slinger, and I have exactly 15 dollars in my wallet.
"You know what?" I say. "I'm not spending 30 bucks for drugs tonight." The words are too ambivalent and I deliver them sheepishly into my chest. This is taken not as an outright rejection, but rather an opportunity to barter. The price drops to 15. It dawns on me that I cannot expurgate myself from this without parting with something, be it money, cigarettes, or my "getting hit in the face by strangers" virginity, so I take out the three loose dollars in my jacket pocket and hand them over.
So that was weird.
Keep in mind that I had not said a single word to this individual. I hadn't even noticed him until his arm was on my person. Something about my obliviousness or my manner of dress attracted this fellow to me, and perhaps he believed that while I'd intended all along to score some rock that evening, I was too timid to approach a dealer myself. Surely, he'd note to himself, once the drugs were in my possession I'd be eternally thankful for his forthrightness in the matter.
Still a little befuddled, I look at my new friend and say something like "uh, hey there?"
Arm coiled 'round my body, he says (these ar "it's premium fucking shit, man. That's gonna fucking send you to the fucking moon, ya know?"
The best I muster is a monotone "Ok." There had been some doubt before that moment as to what, exactly, was going on, but I was now certain the tinfoil in my hand was not holstering some Orbitz gum. Still, I was unclear as to what illicit substance was being forcefully sold to me -- not marijuana, I'd surmised, so most likely bogus LSD?
"30, man, just 30 for that," he says, grinning like a machine designed only to grin and sling rock.
At this moment, he half takes the package out of my hand and begins to unwrap it, making sure the shit's still partially in my possession so I can't just bolt from his presence. Inside, three slightly yellow, misshapen objects of varying sizes gleam underneath streetlamp light.
Now, I've listened to a whole lot of Raekown's "Only Built For Cuban Linx," both parts I and II. The brothers Clipse have told me that, after you've added the Pyrex and watched it gel with the cocaine, a kitchen counter top can remind you of the first Noel. But now I am confronted with real crack cocaine outside the rap milieu, and I feel rather perturbed by it. I gently push the packet towards my pusher, but he's having none of that.
"C'mon, you want this. Just hold it. Hold it and tell me you don't want it." The drugs are fully in my possession now. The fight-or-flight response kicks in, along with a patently batshit crazy idea to run like hell with the dope, because, hey, free drugs. I didn't really want to use them myself (although I'm deluding myself to think I wouldn't have smoked that rock, having no willpower and a great enjoyment of cocaine), but surely I could use this fellow's aggressive technique on another sucker. That's 100% profit. This crack could be the Troubled Assets bit in a personal TARP fund.
Luckily, I notice a phalanx of my pusher's companions nearby - running now would surely result in a ruthless ass kicking, at the very least. Still, I wasn't going to buy fucking crack cocaine on the goddamn street. If nothing else, Street Fighter III Third Strike needs my money more than this dope slinger, and I have exactly 15 dollars in my wallet.
"You know what?" I say. "I'm not spending 30 bucks for drugs tonight." The words are too ambivalent and I deliver them sheepishly into my chest. This is taken not as an outright rejection, but rather an opportunity to barter. The price drops to 15. It dawns on me that I cannot expurgate myself from this without parting with something, be it money, cigarettes, or my "getting hit in the face by strangers" virginity, so I take out the three loose dollars in my jacket pocket and hand them over.
So that was weird.
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