Taste Test

New Rooms / Sweeping Generalizations

Los Angeles swallows you like a carnival ride. Revivals, rituals, silhouettes under the overpasses. An anthill of skyscrapers under the rippling sun. There are underground movements and tribes coalescing on rooftops, sand dunes, bridges and street corners. The cops are turning into meter maids, collection officers - part of a moneymaking harassment and fear apparatus designed to nullify cogent thinking and convert the human being into a knot of trivial pursuits and phobias. The media is sprawling and subjectless - an eye with no focus on beginnings, middles, or conclusions. An avalanche of death reports, hit singles, explosions, celebrity drug babies, wedged in between pureed commercial heavens. A helpless dynamo. It’s hard to say whether there is fault in any of it, whether meaning lies in something other than the reality of what’s happening, just like it’s hard to boil a kettle when you can hear the tsunami is coming your way. We are so awash that we can’t even tell what we’re washing in anymore. This gives meaning to refuge, to silence, to nothing at all happening.

Subjects that revert us to simplicity, to careless yet focused states of mind, to selflessness and righteous performance:

violin
When you take the chin rest off of a violin, you can press your ear to the sound chamber as you play the notes. You discover that a single tone has infinite textures. The sound chamber breathes, gains and loses humidity, expands and contracts like a lung. On the beach certain tones become harmonics that were not harmonics before. The marine layer coats your fingers. Slides become waterslides. The violin is hypnotizing. On Abbot Kinney there are people who walk by on the street when I play that are disguised cobras. They are swallowing the world whole with their wealth. But even they appreciate a soul as it pours into the street. Their interiors light up like pinball machines, racking up points while the quarter rolls in my case.

dance
What word makes you dance?
Dance is a confession and a surrender. Bananas in the blender. When you dance you show how you get your partner cookin’. And I’m not talkin skillets.

breakfast
There’s nothing better than eating breakfast with a beautiful girl in a busy diner. The girl is foreign, Guatemalan. She drinks four cups of coffee and tells you stories only a beautiful girl can tell you. Like a cat, she never ruins a good scene. You realize the people at the tables around you are eavesdropping on your conversation instead of having their own.

old spy films
You can always learn a thing or two from these.

Tags: insinuation, insomnia, jellatin