I’m sitting in an abandoned department store on a Thursday night and listening to the Bee Gees and Danny Elfman and feeling the future is rolling around and around in front of me. The future is a snake trying to walk backwards. And in the eye of this storm of second sight, I can see so clearly how I will be married and go back to school, and my wife and I will have children, but will I become a warlord in the Middle East at some point in my later years? This has yet to be determined.

Because I am not more than a grown child myself, and so I need you to tell me. What is happening here? Can I see this thing through or am I just going to continue falling away from the earth until there is nothing but nothing everywhere I look?

Sounds kind of nice, and maybe we all got to go for a dip into the stratosphere, because when you fall into yourself it is very much like falling into the sky, because just as the sky keeps going past our atmosphere and into the endless reaches of the starry abyss, my mind also will keep on going for as long as I am willing to fall. It will unravel into stranger and more magical and more alien realms for as long as I am willing to fall away from my grounding in the everyday, but to do this right, you got to let go everything, and allow yourself to fall down the rabbit hole, and it’s also not always the case that down is the new up. Sometimes down is really down and there is no rabbit hole, but just the ground, and you are splattered on it.

I’ve always been a proponent of the downward daytrip. Half of you is falling towards the sea and half of you is flying up into the air. It’s your spirit half that’s flying up when you move into the anarchist compound or go off to process fish in Alaska. Anything that feels like death to you and leads to your friends talking about you as this person who’s so lost, but while you sit there sorting through a pile of fish guts, inside yourself you can feel that you’re finding something out. This method of internal journeying is great fun if you pull up at the last moment so your toes just brush the surface of the ocean, but if you go crashing under the waves, your bones cracking upon impact, then there will be no Nietzchean moment, but just a deflating sound as the day leaves the sky and the long night is filled with drinking.

Because a lot of us think like the times of our lives have come and gone and now we’re sitting here staring into the vortex with only a tallboy and a pocket calculator. Trying to figure something out. What happened and where this vortex came from. Of course it was always there, but you were having too much fun at your little dance party to notice the ever-growing vortex in the corner by the spider plant. And so now it’s gotten truly enormous, eaten up the spider plant, takes up an entire wall of your apartment, and you’re just sitting there on the couch staring at it as the various belongings of your mind are being sucked in one after the other, the coasters and end tables of your thoughts, and so of course you are looking for answers, but what you don’t know is that these answers are everywhere. But where are the questions?

They hide themselves well. Sometimes a question pretends to be a person, or a person pretends to be a question. There are so many questions that aren’t questions at all. Like, Why? Is that a question you can answer? Are there answers to questions that aren’t actually questions? Is that what makes a question a question? That it has an answer?

I don’t know much about the nature of questions. I know they exist. I know we have them. I know that they can drive you into corners or out of corners. Questions become brighter the more we focus on them. They grow like fires do when you feed it more fuel. Our attention on a thing gives it the reality it has. This is true, inside and outside. And the questions that drive our lives are like miniature suns inside of us, and we are growing in the direction of this question or questions. The more questions we have the more spastic our thinking. Those of us who just ask the one question become either mystics or fanatics or mad.

Think of it like this. You want to know how to be a better person. You start out working at a soup kitchen, but for the true servant of humanity, working at a soup kitchen every Sunday is a little like going to the dayspa for your average everyday hedonist. Just as a real hedonist isn’t happy till he’s knee-deep in a crackwhore orgy, a true saint is not content until she’s eating the feces of the poor. So you keep going further and further until you’re just like St. Catherine of Sienna drinking her bowl of pus. That’s just one example of a question of goodness leading to an honestly disgusting outcome.

But what do I know? I live in a basement, and am very much a he who needs to learn a little more about his inherent she-ness, so that this little man I claim to be can lay down with this little woman who lives inside my head and make a little screaming baby in my heart. This is an example of a thought growing wild.

And also that I’ve been called a selfish person. Most often by my bride-to-be. And am pretty poor myself. Perhaps I am hoping that someone will read this and decide to eat my feces. But. Let’s keep the feces in the toilet bowl, shall we? And instead bring the vortex into our daily lives.

Tallboys and calculators are all good and everything, but there IS an open space. I can believe in this open space. The open space is the place I go when nothing works anymore. It is also where I go when I’ve run out of rooms to hide in. It’s this thing that is not a thing that I’m running through even when I’m not running, or even working at all actually, but just a pile of limbs on the sofa, and I can’t help but hope that someone somewhere has figured this all out by now, that maybe we should turn to this good person and they’ll give us the many answers to the questions we aren’t asking or don’t know how to ask, but it is also very possible, that there are no answers and are also no questions and just a general buzzing sound that everyone can hear but no one is listening to. My spirit and my brain aren’t on speaking terms, you see.

Like you got to go through your days, but you also are more than just a person who goes through their days. “I am neither God nor Creature,” Meister Eckhart said, and I tend to believe him. But who are you? Are you something other than anything I could possibly imagine? Are you an eternal being? Are you something extraterrestrial housed in human disguise? Do you walk in ways I cannot comprehend? Are all things comprehensible? It’s time to look through someone else’s eyes. Those are my eyes, you bastard! Apologies.

Because there’s a time and a place for everything, and maybe that time and place was yesterday at three in the afternoon while standing on a windswept corner in Chicago’s South Side, and maybe it’s all about tomorrow and up above the world. Do you believe we’ll meet there? Is that what you think? I wish I could agree with you, but I suspect this place you are describing is full of two-dimensional plants, and that these plants snake their way into intersecting lines that can then fill the mind’s eye like an inky spot and blot out our tiny internal sun. I mean, fear. I mean a fear of the abyss and emptiness and the possibility that the abyss is not empty. Which. It’s not. We’re all there right now.

I’m sorry. Weren’t you aware that I was going to unleash this half-assed mystical outburst on you when you started to read? Weren’t you aware at the very beginning of this that we would be talking about empty spaces and how to find them? And here. Look. What? Oh. How thoughtful. Thank you very much. It looks lovely. Then. Will you please stop pretending to be two people all the time, and instead just look around and look back? Because there really is a place in here somewhere.

Except that I’m so many people, it once made me want to stick my tongue down your throat, until I realized that your throat and my throat are the same throat and so I gave up on attempting to communicate in this manner. What’s happening to me? Good question. I try and be a person, but I fail daily.

It’s like the flowers in my head are blooming, but when they do, they smell like baloney. Or if you could take a person and turn them round and round until their face has become smeared and runny. Now this person has faces all over themselves and all their faces have runny noses. Gross. Is this what it’s like to be an everyday walking-around human? That’s what I think. Because flowers are blooming everywhere, even when I’m breaking under the strain of so many questions, like a doll that you left out in the doghouse all night, and I just sit there staring into the dark in the office at my friend’s store at two in the morning, listening to distant street sounds. Especially then.

But there are other things we could be talking about. Like Walmart sightings. Or awful Star Trek props. Or the blaring sounds of someone practicing the highest decibel of music possible in the practice space by the wall of two-by-fours is the only barrier between you and them, and here you are thinking about prisoners being forced to stay up all night because their captors are blaring Metallica, and thinking, Accept. Accept. Accept. Accept, and all the while gnashing your teeth. Because we here in America for the most part think Buddhism is largely about coming to accept all the little inconveniences in our mostly pretty cozy little lives.

Which is why Zizek hates Buddhists. This I can also accept. Supposedly he just hates a “type of pop-buddhism” which underscores the “Star Wars’ ideological framework [of] the New Age pagan universe”. Basically, that Darth Vader becomes who he is because he gets attached to things. He calls the proponents of Western Buddhism “passive” nihilists. Which is exactly what I have always wanted to be, but this perspective seems an impossible one to actually carry out. It’s called depression, and when you’re in it, you don’t give a shit about Buddhism or Darth Vader or Zizek, because you don’t give a shit about anything.

Watch the world unraveling. Go out and actively engage the world. That’s when things fall away. That’s when you start to see things, and you don’t need other people’s eyes to do it.

But also that there’s a moment I found when I was out in the world. It was a good moment, but when it’s over, it wasn’t there in the first place. There’s only this moment, which is why I’m so obsessed with you and what you’re all about. Because the less moments are really anything but this on-going mobius strip conveyor belt of light and shadows, the more people stand out like sound in a vacuum. And if we’re really going to be Buddhist, we have to admit that most of these people aren’t actual human being and that the vacuum’s about as crowded as a brothel after lent. To use yet another religiously-loaded term I just made up.

Because thing of it is that of the dichotomies of our times, the ones that stand out for me, are alive/dead and abyss/life, that the emptiness of space is a metaphorical and physical death that we are all floating in, and everyone’s buying up real estate in their favorite gated community of the afterlife, and we’re all singing our little hymns, but why is life now and death then? What if the lives we live are our afterlife? What if afterlife and life are the same thing? What if out and in are the same thing? What people are the single unifying principle that links the two ideologies of quantum mechanics and Einsteinian relativity? What if we are part of the fabric of the physical laws that comprise the universe? And those intersecting lines and those two-dimensional plants that we hope to keep on the windowsill of our apartment in heaven are actually the two-dimensional plants we have now, except that we don’t realize that they’re two-dimensional, and that all things weave together like a mess of lines, and all thoughts obscure a singular sentience which is the foundation of physical space.

But really all of that’s just something I read in books. I do know that grasshoppers have a very soft touch and I do talk to cats, but I can’t see the faces of insects and I think of cats as lesser citizens. In fact, I’m a pretty self-involved person. Which is why I like Buddhism, because actually I’m such a hateful person that when I try to embrace the ideology of Buddhism it just helps me to be medium-level hateful as opposed to my normal off-the-charts supervillain-in-training level hateful. Sort of person spent his younger years sitting in corners and eyeing other party-goers while muttering a steady stream of obscenities. Especially when this was a coke party and there’s a dj and it’s eight in the morning and I just want to go to sleep and the entrance to my room has been sealed shut with drywall to keep the ravers out and I can’t find a power-drill anywhere.

Which reminds me. There are some caterpillars in South America who live entirely on coca leaves. Their frass, which is insect-speak for shit, is entirely cocaine. One hundred percent cocaine out of a caterpillar’s ass. Why am I so obsessed with excrement? Don’t ask.

Or do. Please. I want you to ask. Ask me everything and anything. I am waiting for you to ask as many questions as possible. Are you people really there? Do you believe that I am actually here? I want to be the center of your universe, but is it true that for me to be the center of your universe, you have to be the center of mine? Is it possible that through having children we learn a little bit about how to die? Do you believe in anything? Is there something to believe in? Did the sky just open up and suck all the republicans into space so they could have their little post-rapture pizza party in heaven and leave the rest of us to actually get things done or am I dreaming? What’s a religion anyway?

I’ve been obsessed with this idea of a “Space Bible” for a few years now. To make a bible that would be a general survey of what it means to be human that could be sent out to space with whoever ends up going. There would be a Book of Philip, which would be a reprinting of VALIS by PKD. And a Book of Germans, which would be a summary of German Philosophy from Kant onwards. As well as selections from all the major religions. I think a Book of Graham is in order, which would be a reprint of The Power and the Glory. You get the idea. A Book of Tribes cataloging the stories and wisdom of various tribal cultures. One book that sums up people. What would be in it? Obviously I’m biased.

So this is another silly thought I’ve been thinking in among all the other silly thoughts. And I keep wishing I could drink, but these days I get maybe one beer a week and then it’s back to looking for jobs in China, or caring for an old man, or writing these many silly little things, or concocting ways to keep the love alive between me and my significant other on the other side of the world.

And the last time I had too much whisky it was in a cave on the Oregon coast, and we were telling stories by the fire until I had the bright idea to run out on the rocks and hop from one to another as the waves crashed against them. Quite a night. We ate muscles my brother’d found in a tide pool for breakfast. Then what? On the couch? Stumbling through the sunshine? Making out with every passing pedestrian? Why not? Well, for starters, I got to get out of here and back to pollution central. I’m just here to make a few friends and then make a run for it. Try to keep love alive. As I said before. This is honestly the most important thing right now. Trying to keep love alive.

And so you chuckle and say, Oh, how foolish of you. Really? This? This really is what you believe to be the most important thing right now? Really? Honestly? And I hang my head in my sheepish way. Yes. Indeed. But then you take on a concerned look. What kind of, um, excuse me, but what kind of love are we talking about here? Are we talking about when the cat licks you, you got to lick back? Is that what we’re on about here?

And all I can say is, my spirit and my brain aren’t on speaking terms. Which is exactly how I lose sight of people and places and become very thinglike in my thinking. And leaving me to just go bumble along to the best of my ability. There are hands everywhere if you just reach out and take hold of them. That seems pretty standard. A standard thing to say. It’s the standard anti-Hieronymus-Bosch utopian animistic vision.

How about this one? If art is really just that which the artist chooses, that by putting a frame around an ordinary object, the artist then causes this object to crystallize into a thing we call art, then vomit produces the opposite effect. An ordinary object, when placed in vomit, is just disgusting.

Because, really, who cares? Another question that’s not a question.

Then it’s all coffee-colored lampshades and hipsters with oily twisting hair, and I’m having my one beer this week at the Rainbo Club on a Friday. I am studying my Chinese and occasionally dipping into a little Arthur C. Clarke at the bar, when I stop because I want to revel in the suffering of others, and in the early evening of a Friday Night, the Rainbo Club is a temple to the sort of pain we love to revel in here in America, of the feeding-on-feces and crackwhore-orgy variety. Of the work-a-day world drilling new holes in our soul variety. For here in the western world we believe our pain is very serious business, unlike the rest of you out there in your other non-western worlds, whose pain threshold is known to be so much higher than ours and so it’s alright that we ignore you so much of the time, and when we’re not ignoring you? For example, North Korea is like a nephew with multiple sclerosis whose attending your disastrous birthday party. The party is indeed a disaster, but what about the other boy? And your mother’s looking at you and saying, Now aren’t you ashamed of yourself?

There are dayglo paintings everywhere. I’d be eyeing the women in a predatorial manner if I wasn’t so in love that I can’t take it. Which. I know. I can’t stop. It’s just terrible, but also very true that I would be holding my girl’s hand right now if I could and looking deeply into her eyes to assure her as to my true and deep feelings, but unfortunately right now I can only hold her hand in my brain. Do you hold hands with your brain? Can I hold hands with your brain? I want your brain to sing like a chorus girl. And I want to be singing too. Until we’re all just vibrating in rhythm to the same heart-shaped melody.

If all of our brains were vibrating to the same rhythm do you think we could create world peace? Is this what David Lynch is on about? Don’t get me wrong, I love that he’s teaching kids in troubled neighborhoods how to meditate, but I think vibrating brains are a little scary, actually. Zen horror movie type of scary. But then, my own ideas of how the brain works are equally scary. Muti-dimensional carnivorous vegetation? Also known as squids? Like your psyche is shooting off in every direction through the extra-dimensional mess surrounding to reach in here and go through there? Talk about an ideological framework of the New Age pagan universe, right? Am I right?

But right now, the jukebox is jumping from Bollywood to country to Motown. The place is filling up quickly. And there’s a sound coming from the back of the room. Is that you? Is there a heart in there somewhere? I’m a little preoccupied with hearts in case you hadn’t noticed. And questions. Hearts and questions are brothers and sisters. Because when my heart is open it’s like a question, and a good question helps you open your heart. Now that sounds like Western Buddhism to me. Yes. I will vomit into your heart. Then it will be a work of art.

As well as the hot sweaty palm of the hand. My girl’s hand. While our lives continue to rotate around the same black hole they always are. Of course, some people say a black hole is just a worm hole. Some people say it’s just full of worms. You decide!

When we fall into the afterstory of our days, when everything opens up to the amusing underbelly and its many problems and inherent authenticity. When we break down all over again because love is in the air and it’s everywhere. When the twisting contours of the afternoon unwinds in a matter of moments. When the moments congeal around our many questions. That are not questions. Because we do not know how to properly ask them. When we’re asleep. When we start over all over again. When we end.

[Gabriel Chad Boyer is a writer and musician living in Chicago. His collection of seven full-length books, A Survey of My Failures This Far, has been published by Mutable as well as several records. To sample more of Boyer's Asinine Life, go here.]

It is an eerie and a horrible experience to be in attendance on a stand at a Flower Show, day after day, and to watch the staring faces that come to rest before my exhibits and then move on. From right to left, from left to right they pass, these faces, propelled with hesitating pace and starkly turned towards me. I watch them, because I cannot help but do so, and in the day’s reckoning I have looked into perhaps five, perhaps ten thousand human faces.

I do not watch, I search these faces, for mask-like as they are, they are not masks, but sensitive flesh in which the secrets of humanity are deeply chiselled for him who can to read. I am continuously searching the faces, and this close attention, and the repeated stimulation of one kind of cerebral activity, brings on sleep. I struggle with a great sleep that yawns to engulf me. What I see in the faces is incommunicable; but it promotes the release of ideas, with which I play, and by which I manage to hold myself awake.

To observe faces, as I am doing from the interior of this stand, is like observing birds from a hide. No one notices the quiet regard of my eyes, nor even, latterly, the tiny lens of the camera, behind a hole in the staging, with which from time to time I honour these faces with a record, when they stop transfixed before my bait—a model of a caterpillar feeding on a leaf. They do not know, these victims of mine, that that smirk or that intentness, that silly giggle, or that affected horror with which they respond to my stimuli, will emerge later, in the bowels of my cellar, ectoplastically, as a permanent image in silver. There is a streak of cruelty in Science.

I am no anthropologist, but it seems very strange to me that anthropologists should always be hiking away to the Caucasus, Mongolia, or the Polynesian Islands to look for material, when for the smallest of fees, anyone of them could come here and share my hide. Perhaps anthropologists do not work here for precisely the same reason that not one of my victims has so far seen the little lens of my camera; they do not see things which are immediately in front of their noses. They need red or yellow skins, or decorative weals on the bodies of savages to advertise to them the presence of their material. No one will see my camera unless I hang a notice, ‘This is a Camera’ beside it, and even so not one in a hundred would twig for what private purpose it is being used. That is my first observation about these faces, and they have eyes which do not observe unadvertised phenomena.

My next is that these faces all appear set to confront something that is not, in fact, before them. Their expressions are those of reticence, defiance, assumed indifference or bravado, they are all up against something that just is not there. It is not only the necessity to keeping awake by conscious effort, which comes over everybody in museums and shows, it is, I suppose, some one or other of the multitudinous aspects of the Devil, projected in their souls, and appearing to them, beyond sight, as an evil that retreats before them. These faces of clever jacks set to say ‘You can’t teach me’; the phlegmatic dials of heavy middle-aged men, the decorated features of would-be coquettes in garish hats; the sharp suspicious ferret eyes of small middle-aged ladies; the fat smirks of salesmen—’My bubble won’t burst’; the set composure of married women; the critical poise of the intelligent, who allow themselves sometimes to be amused—confident that no harm can come of it; the tusky insolence of elderly clerks … these faces, these anxious, ingenuous, vapid, independent, shy, belligerent, clever-pained, smirking, bitter, brave or hateful faces, they have all one thing in common, they are advancing in face of a phantom enemy.

I feel no sympathy, liking or dislike for these faces. I am aware that my own is but another of them, that my own melancholy and resentful countenance is surely enough repulsing its own phantom Devil; but because of that I do not experience any sentiment of kindred with the faces, or with the people of whom they are part. I assume that I shall never see them again, and they might be made of papier maché for all I care. It is true that now and then somebody steps up and shakes me warmly by the hand, remembering some conversation at another Show, but I have invariably forgotten his face. He talks for a while and then bears off to right or left and vanishes.

Of course I have business to do. All these faces are of prospective customers. I am here and the whole stand is designed for the one purpose of associating the names of our stuff with their ideas about the maladies of plants. We want to make them think of us. So it is my duty to seem pleasant, and to give away information, to empty out a bottomless cornucopia of information, sugared with every kind of helpfulness and inducement to buy. Heaven knows I do my duty. But all this smiling and talking is but a movement in the bass, a running accompaniment to the horrible procession of faces.

When there is a lull, and for a minute or two a gap in the stream of people, their faces do not desert me; memories and anticipations of them move across my mind, provoking questions, endless questions, but not questions of mycology. I wonder what worlds, or what strange refractions of perhaps but one world, exist beyond those thousands of pairs of eyes. Even in this little pursuit of horticulture, which seems so petty and so truncated to me, I am convinced that there is to be found much pleasure, that these people or many of them enjoy: delights to which I am numb. They see beauty in the colourful reproductive organs of plants, cut off and massed leaflessly on seedsmen’s stands. For them, gardens populated with vegetative abortions, with all the awful results of plant surgery, isolation and goose-liver fattening with heat and fertilizers, have a kind of dream beauty. No! not dream beauty, I will not misuse words. They have for the horticulturalists the particular beauty of their particular heaven. A very different thing. I do not sympathize, I do not understand. I can in some measure perceive the functional beauty of plant growth, the beautiful unity of a plant organism, and also, shall we say, Goethe’s concept of a plant. I like the cow parsley: that grows in our hedges, and am sorry to see it cut down with a scythe. I have greatly enjoyed making little ecological surveys on heaths and meadows, lying in the sun and counting the many kinds of plants enclosed within my square of tape, speculating on their struggle for space and sunshine. But these people, these horticulturalists, for whom I make chemicals, take pleasure in grass lawns, and their nice green is a bleeding shambles of crippled and stunted plants. These people and I are wide as the stars apart. I see only the surface of their faces.

This lady to whom I have last been speaking, if I told her what I have just written, she would not think it could be true, she would stare at me in amazement or think me insane. And yet she has solemnly informed me that caterpillars lay eggs, she is proud of herself for having cut down a hazel copse to make a garden with herbaceous borders, and at this moment she is over at the stand opposite buying herself the latest novelty in chromium plated spades. I do not say she is insane, I do not even think so, I am just sorry I do not understand. They are remote, these faces, remote from me as the whole meaning and reason of the Horticulture at which they come to stare.

– © Estate of E.C. Large, 1937, 2008

[This essay was first published in New English Weekly, vol. 12, no. 1, 14 October 1937, and reprinted in God's amateur: the writing of E.C. Large, released from Hyphen Press in 2008. Large was also the author of two novels, Sugar in the Air and
Asleep in the Afternoon, also available from Hyphen.]

We’re dropping the price on Survey of My Failures this Far from $20 dollars to TWELVE, and for the rest of Spring (until June 21st), when you buy any Mutable product, you get our ENTIRE DIGITAL DISCOGRAPHY for FREE! Check out these deals! Love the Mutable Sound! And if you’re down on the corner of Chicago Ave and Wood St and can find the free box with our books in it, you can have one of those for free as well!

[Over the course of the next few months, Mutable will be publishing a sampling from Dagmar Ottenham's brilliant blog! To start at the beginning go here.]

Ingredients for this My Time: an elk horn, a whale abalone, 3 shaken vodka martinis, super glue, a hammer, shells (pref abalone).

Every elegant lady knows how to make a lot out of a little, but it’s finding that time to show such class in one’s home that is hard to learn how to do. This is why multitasking was invented in the 1970s (along with a widespread use of cocaine combined with a pre-AIDS/post-BirthControl era; indeed, there was much multitasking).

One of a lady’s secrets is how she manages to reveal her body to the world with nay a hair on her body below the eyelashes, and this takes time. However, the time is more sitting with items on one’s face/body or recovering from ripping items from one’s face/body, and thus is a perfect time for crafting, or what I like to call, for Gothic flair, “cocktail hour with dead parts of the earth”. First, brutalize your body with a hair removal method that leaves a part of your skin so red that you can’t go out in public, like the space between your eyes. This will ensure that you’re in the mood to get crafty with death!

Then, pour yourself martini number one. Look, it’s a vertebrae! Let’s do something with it!

What any 6,000 count cotton sheets need is a sharp accent to arouse one from a state of “deep sleep”. In fact, sometimes a “sleep” can be so “deep” with dreams of blue pills, no more bills, and avoiding window sills that you should probably put a larger “accent” on the bed. Look, an elk horn!

Now we’re really crafting here. Pour martini number two and grab your hammer, ladies. This is a great time to get some light cardio in as you craft, and also to weed out some pesky anger that is not comfortable for the world to see on women’s faces as they wander the streets at night, alone, AGAIN. Smash some things. I happened to have a bunch of shells, so I smashed them. Now, here’s where the crafting magic comes in. You can make *broken things* become *fixed things* in a snap. While a lady wishes she could fix so many of the more important issues in life, like the fashion industry, Ron Paul, kalishnokavs, men’s behavior, and irony (I’ve heard this thing is most important in the Pacific Northwest, where irony and sincerity suddenly cancel each other out in a single phrase: put a bird on it). Alas, you can’t fix that stuff, Honey. But you can put back together the pieces of everything you’ve broken WITH SUPER GLUE. Look, it’s a whole new high fashion shelf!

You’ve done so well putting your life back together. I mean, your items–your items–back together. You deserve a drink. So, instead of putting a horn on it, let’s put it in a horn and drink it! Crafting and drinking multitasking madness!

Pour martini number 3. Or 4. Whatever. Now, it has been a festive couple of hours of hair removal and crafting, and you didn’t even have to go to one of those knitting circles that women of the Pacific Northwest attend as ever-single-yet-still-boring-housewives-just-sexless-too-that’s-a-shame but with cute Anthropologie ideas and short hair, IRONICALLY, that they claim to fight against! I believe they are called Stitch N Bitches, and my Hungarian oracle, Sverkienk, told me they were originally created by straight men who began something called “dot com careers” and made a bunch of money, but still couldn’t talk to women, thus created such venues to herd them together like knitting cattle.

Now, what good craft is complete without testing out its effectiveness and craftiness? Since the asprin isn’t helping the place where you ripped the hair from your body, take something stronger, delicately pour the last of your drink down your little bird throat, and let the crafting do its work. You are so crafty, Honey. You can break and fix anything, and you will.

The Hungry Brain is supposedly the best bar in America and it is getting further and further away with every step I take. Later my brother will tell his friends how he had been psychically dragging me the whole way, whatever that means. Then we’ve been walking for I don’t know how long and we’re standing in another bar called the Burlington. It’s got just enough lighting to allow a person to maneuver from one end of the bar to the other without hurting themselves, but not enough lighting for anyone’s acne to be noticeable, and Jules and I are discussing walking BACK to The Hungry Brain, and the show is about to begin. Which, in the end, we just slipped in the back and I ordered a beer in a stupid little plastic cup, and there was this awkward-seeming guy with an acoustic guitar on stage. I thought, “Oh God.” The man with the acoustic guitar began to play.

John Bellows is a screamer. Hence the name. He belts it out. I can still recreate that sensation of a loosening inside of me, as in, for a few moments I was listening to a man with an acoustic guitar and thinking about how many times have I listened to a man with an acoustic guitar, and then I was listening more intently, and then I had moved to the front of the room, and then I was hanging on every note like each one was a different answer to this particularly tricky question I had been asking myself for so long that I’d forgotten it’s a question and had instead got to thinking of it as just a fixture of my internal horizon. I exaggerate, but I exaggerate only because this is what I felt at the time, and I have always had a melodramatic heart.

Thing that lured me in was the way he vocalized what would have been the other instruments’ parts. That first song is the one at the top of this post. It is a good introduction to his musical aesthetic. But this song turns out to actually be a cover of Thunderstorm by Gen Orange.

It’s only with the second song in the set do we start to hear his voice as a songwriter, and this feels more like a grittier yodeling psychedelic Michael Hurley or John Prine. People have described Bellows as writing adult kids’ songs, and there is certainly this playfulness to both his songwriting and performance as well. His voice sometimes sounds like Daniel Smith of the Danielson Famile, or even like a more heartfelt Tiny Tim, but it can also have this deeper register. Sometimes He switches within a song from almost talking-singing to this higher volume higher pitch stuff, which reminds me of the hard-soft-hard thing my artrock post-punk friends used to do. Simple and effective. But he also plays with rhythm in an interesting way, allowing the song to get awkward and uncertain at points. It can feels like he’s just telling you something, and the guitar is just there so he can fully explain this unfortunate thing to you in his halting English.

Outsider musicians like Daniel Johnston, Larry Fischer, and Wesley Willis have become the driving force behind a whole subset of underground folk and hip-hop. Oh, and let’s not forget Roky Erickson’s post-institutionalization solo work. Each is certainly his own person and weird in his own way, but I would argue what draws fans in to the music of each is a very similar sort of thing. A love of schizophrenic authenticity, laughing at and with the sheer weirdness of it all, perhaps even embracing this sincere weirdness as a true expression of our own not-as-fully-actualized weirdness. At it’s best, what drives us towards these artists is the same thing that drove us towards punk — a lack of trust in the authenticity of mainstream music and culture — at its worst, the careers of these artists can be like what Will Sheff wrote concerning Wesley Willis: “[P]eriodic appearances for crowds of jeering white fratboys evoke an uncomfortable combination of minstrel act and traveling freak show.” [Full disclosure. Mutable has its own outsider musician release.] Perhaps what drew me to Bellows was his similar kooky-ness and sincere awkwardness. He seemed very drunk.

He seemed like a comic who has been doing the strip club circuit for so many years and is spiraling towards the gutter, but he also wasn’t. He wasn’t bitter. He was missionary style jovial. He was belting out a few bars of billboard favorites with a hilarious over-the-topness in between his own songs, and telling bad jokes that somehow were really great bad jokes, like the sorts of bad jokes the comedian in The Dark Backwards would tell. The Dark Backwards being a comedy that isn’t funny about an alternate universe that is literally drowning in trash, in which this very unfunny comedian played by Judd Nelson wakes up one morning with a third arm growing out of his back, and about his friendship to accordian-playing garbageman Bill Paxton and talent agent Wayne Newton. My favorite joke in that movie involves a barber cutting off a bald man’s ear because there is no hair to cut.

But there was this question I mentioned earlier. You remember. The one I had come to believe was just a ceiling fixture of my mind. This question was and is a question of songs, sounds, and finding new corners of your cavernous interior through the exploration of unknown sounds — the idea that through listening to unfamiliar things a person might discover the unexplored portions of their inner depths. It is the search for the alien within. The difference within the familiar. The familiar within that which is so different. Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form.

However, Daniel Johnston is not an alien within America. He is the outsider in our midst. We embrace him as the symbol of all that is marginalized in 21st Century America. What makes him wonderful is that he plays the part of everyman on stage. His awkward and unrhyming ballads. His religiosity is part of this, as well as his sincerity, and his persona as the reviled geek. He represents the downtrodden. But there is also this “jeering white fratboys” element to the crowd at a Daniel Johnston show.

Or is it the punk aesthetic? Like audience members putting their cigarettes out on Henry Rollins’ legs?

These subtleties in audience disdain are not for the weak-minded, and unfortunately I think I qualify as the weak-minded in my efforts to clarify this particular subtlety. But I can say this, when hipsters are mouthing punk disdain it sounds like frat-boy jeers to my virgin ears. When bohemian yuppies are playing that part, it is just plain obnoxious. I have seen footage of a Daniel Johnston show that was like this. They’re cheering sure, but the same way the jocks would cheer the class geek to take his pants off in front of the prettiest girl in school. Which is exactly why this sort of disdain has become questionable. On the other end of the spectrum, Justin Timberlake may be the nicest guy in the room, but he will always stand out as the patron saint of assholes in my mind. Both due to the style of his song-writing and his public persona in general, and regardless of his private life, the man exists to make assholes feel better about themselves.

Thing of it is, we’re never falling in love with a celebrity because of “who they are”, but because of what this person represents. Mainstream musicians are loved by the mainstream for their mainstream-ness. Outsider musicians are loved by the outsider for their outsider-ness. When I love a mainstream musician it is with the hatred of the outsider, and when the mainstream loves an outsider, it is with the hatred of the mainstream. John Bellows fits into neither of these categories.

Which is also why John Bellows and The Imaginations are so interesting. In the same way that the artists on Flying Nun are interesting. Because it’s neither/nor. Neither pop nor punk. Neither outsider nor insider. Bellows exists somewhere between Daniel Johnston and Justin Timberlake. He is the sincere class clown who just wants you to see the world in a playful way while also perhaps becoming maybe a little bit of a better person while you’re at it. He has taken on the persona of the reviled geek, not as a mask, but because this is genuinely who he is, and his particular brand of endearing sincerity is the genuine offspring of the punk aesthetic. Punk disdain has evolved into its opposite as things are wont to do. At least according to Hegel with his whole thesis antithesis synthesis bag. The alien has just gotten a whole shitload more familiar.

I should perhaps mention here that John Bellows is not just one man. I’ve been lying to you. At one point during the set, The Imaginations got on stage with him. Playing flute and omnichord, the Imaginations added another element to the songs, and the solo stuff blossomed into something entirely other. Suddenly this man who had seemed like a comedian spiraling towards the bottom has turned into a cult leader with a following of two. It was a lovely transition.

John’s solo stuff always has this kid’s music alt-country feel, but once the other members of the band joined him onstage they immediately started exploring genres while all the while putting their own peculiar stamp on them. Flute and omnichord R&B and RockNRoll is a delicious thing, and with the Sha-la-la-la’s coming out of nowhere, or the Do-hoo-hoo’s sounding very self-mocking and parodies of whatever the creators of this particular musical form’d had in mind when it was they created it in the back alleys of the world. The whole group was genre-hopping and instrument-hopping like the stage was their very own clown car and they were just loving this chinese fire drill routine. All of which only added to the intentional amateurishness and the endearing cult quality of the set.

But the messages are very powerful stuff, concerning compassion, and love, and hope, and hopelessness. The usual stuff. Ultimately, John Bellows and the Imaginations are a live band and should be seen live. Because this is our folk music. This is a tradition in the making.

For with the rise of digital media and our ability to download and explore vast amounts of media easily and quickly, underground music appears to be going in two directions. One is a privately-produced art, in which the mp3′s may be free to download, but the cd itself, the cassette itself, the lp itself is a small-run artistic product. High-brow DIY. On the other is the folk tradition, the band that is a live experience, which could mean some ritualistic black metal bullshit, old-timey tiddley-winks, or it could mean John Bellows. The underground music of the now is a physical thing. It means physical copies, usually analog, or a physical show. In our digital age, underground music is the analog within. The opposite of waiting in line for the newest iphone.

Furthermore, if you consider music as a language, as Leonard Bernstein did in his Harvard Lecture series, “The Unanswered Question“, and look at western ways of music-making, our circles of fifths and tempered instruments, and compare these with the instruments and scales of the santur or the guqin, say, both harp-like string instruments, the first Arabic and the second Chinese — to most music listeners this sort of stuff is the truly alien stuff of sound. The maqams and ragas and various other styles of music from other parts of the world, but there are those others who would argue that we are the ones who have mutilated music. We are the ones who bound the feet of sound by tempering our klaviers and twisting octaves into twelve note systems with all the major and minor derivations within, very pretty and nice, and easy, but far removed from the actual physics of harmony, or further removed than the santur in any case. There are those who make this argument.

One of whom being my roommate, who recently took me to hear some maqam music up at the Old Town School of Music, and specifically a four-hundred year old style of maqam special to Iraq as performed by Hamid Al-Saadi. This was his first-ever US appearance, and we were surrounded by old women in burkas, and twiddling our toes and thrumming our fingers while we waited. At first the singer himself was absent from the scene, and instead it was just the three instrumentalists, a young iraqi-american on the santur, a much older man on the jowza, and a very thick-set man playing percussion with various hand drums. I remember thinking the jowza-player must be somebody’s father. He didn’t seem as proficient as the other two and he was much louder, like maybe during sound check he’d demanded that they turn up his mic, being the senior of the three. They were all wearing dark suits with black hats that look sort of like fedoras without the brim.

Halfway through what may have been the third song this man walks out and sits at the far right. He starts to belt out this music that is like the sound of crying, this broken up-down sound, like when children go, “And… you… said… you’d… take… me… to… the… ice… cream… shop,” with a little tug at the end of each word, this high-pitched tug that is meant also to be a tug at your heart-strings. This is what Hamid Al-Saadi was doing, but like John Coltrane might do it. It was awesome.

Like I said before, I got this melodramatic heart, and so it maybe isn’t wise for me to go see music that’s too emotional? But, I go. Cause I’m the kind of ecstasy-junky who keeps going back for more even after he’s already damaged his dopamine receptors.

But. The maqam is an improvisational music form. And although I could certainly appreciate this man’s vocal stylings, there were many points when it was obvious that it’s specifically the ideas he was expressing that were so powerful. This particular phrase he’s just come up with on the fly that causes the entire audience to burst out laughing. Or the old women surrounding us to start doing the tongue ululation thing, the, “Aiyaiaiaiai,” in their appreciation. But oddly enough, my feeling as I allowed these sounds to wash over me was not that I was immersed in an ancient tradition, but that this is the future of sound.

Which may have something to do with the book I was reading at the time. Dune, by Frank Herbert, is itself full of arabic words and ideas, and could largely be viewed as an allegory for western involvement in the Middle East. This book that was published in 1965, in which the main character, Paul Atreides, is continually having flashes of a coming jihad that will overwhelm the universe and himself at the head of it. He uses this exact word and is spending the whole book trying to curb this eventuality. I can almost imagine Herbert hoping to psychically curb the crescendoing violence in the Middle East through the writing of Dune. I especially liked his comparison of Paul’s vision of the future to a handkerchief blowing in the wind. And I love the idea of spice as a stand-in for both the hashish and oil of our world. Gets you high and it’s how you power your space craft. Once again, can’t help thinking of John Coltrane and of course Sun Ra. Not to mention, the campy brilliance of Lynch’s film version.

Of course the whole glamorizing of the exotic near east as unknowable and by implication inhuman is just as offensive as the ideas of those who say that there must be something inherently wrong with a religion that has as part of its ideology the concept of the holy war, or “crusade”, when the political truth is that we just happen to live in a world where the offspring of the former christian nations hold all the power and the offspring of the moslem nations hold all the oil, and the christian-offspring want that moslem oil, all of which means the people in the moslem nations are suffering more than a people should, and are understandably angry because of it.

But be that as it may, maqam is the music of the future, because this is the music of space. This is the music of the infinity within and between the notes. This is the sound of a person lost in the reaches of the on-going abyss. It should be the music of the new Mars colony, whoever it is that gets there first. Whether it’s paypal co-founder Elon Musk with his space shuttle company Spacex or Mars One with their reality TV show on Mars idea. This is a planet with water, yes, but far more uninhabitable than Dune, and a perfect place for maqam’s beautiful weeping improvisational sound to flourish, as well as possibly psychedelic drugs and Second Life, and extremist ideologies. But the point is some extremist ideologies are simply extremely beautiful. Think zen-sufi space religion. “God created [Dune] to train the faithful.” Could so easily be the mindset on Mars in a hundred years!

John Bellows is not the sound of future space exploration, however, but more the sound of the forgotten proles of the here and now back on planet America. His is not the music of Mars, but those unfortunate enough to linger in the basements of the foremost military power on our earth. The dispossessed living in the cracks among the elites.

This is the place I’ve always felt at home. The on-going universe of house shows and the on-going underground of beatnik to hippie to punk to hipster to just hateful. Because I never wanted to be a part of their club, and although I’m not one of those who believe the reptilians are running the show and have been for five thousand years, I do truck with the absolute power corrupts absolutely idea, and furthermore that power mishandled can absolutely destroy a person’s psyche. Think of GW Bush and his bathtub paintings. The man is cracked.

As well as the idea that there is a mystery and we’re all working to figure it out, and that this is the why and the how of living. This is also part of that question that’s always bothering me, and why mystical texts have such funny names, like The Shape of Light, or The Cloud of Unknowing. Because we feel that light SHOULD have a shape, and the truth IS to not know. Because this question I keep asking is ultimately a religious question. I am always looking for new ways of asking the same question to see how my brain reacts to it when the question is asked this way or that way. Group Inerane was one such discovery.

You see, for several years I have been obsessed with this label, Sublime Frequencies, and its various products. Its samplings of radio in North Korea, Vietnam, and Algiers, and its many field recordings, of the streets of Lhasa or Bali, but also specific groups, and videos of various musicians in Jakarta for example. My favorite stuff coming out of Sublime Frequencies, however, isn’t the straight world music, like Smithsonian Folkways would do, although some of their stuff is like this. What I like most coming out of Sublime Frequencies are the fusions of western instruments and musical ideas with ideas local to that region. Just as multinationals are interested in localizing their products, local peoples are embracing now globally known genres like rocknroll and techno to express themselves.

But my favorite stuff turned out to be the Tuareg Blues, which perhaps you have heard of this genre of music. It seems to be growing in popularity. It’s like a bedouin blues, and Group Inerane was my introduction. A video of this group performing can be found below. This is another example of the alien within. The use of electric guitar and drums in a way that we in the west are unfamiliar with. Or the dance music of Omar Souleyman. It sounds exotic. It sounds different, but not wholly different. Or more different because it cannot be easily classified as “ethnic music”. So we are drawn to this sound more. The alien within stands out here in the same manner as a blue note. In the case of a blue note the dissonance works to heighten the musical flavor. So it is with Tuareg and the cultural dissonance within what is otherwise a known musical artform.

Of course, this could be described as a kind of ethnic tourism. And that perhaps instead we should be searching out and creating our own culture of weird. Which is exactly what bands like The Residents and Negativland are doing. Theirs is the blatant weirdness of the surrealists, for the work of both these bands is very consciously surreal. Searching out weirdness for its own sake, as if that which were weird by its very nature must be true. Like the conspiracy theorist who follows all conspiracies even when they conflict with each other.

We here at Mutable could also be accused of this, but only because we so wanted you to listen with your ears fully cocked and to take all our preconceptions out back and shoot them. We wanted you to engage a song as if it were a part of your own psychical constitution, a bit of the continent of your brain that was lost once but has now returned to fly in from the outside in mp3 form and snuggle up to the rest of all that you consider you, for we are both nothing more than a pronoun dressed up in play-pretend clothes and pieces of culture pasted together with the adhesive of emotion and memory. Nothing more than that I love this person and that this person loves me. Negativland’s jarring sound collages may hurt to hear, but they hurt because they sound like a dead culture decaying.

Last time I saw Bellows and the Imaginations is at a house show, and I was manically drinking tea while simultaneously trying to talk to everyone and also avoid all eye contact with as many people as possible. Bellows was a little more haggard this time around, and these songs were a sound in the dark, like if Johnny Cash lived in the post-apocalyptic America of today, and was trying to cheer up the ones left behind after the blast with a few melodies that could only approximate the musical forms of that earlier unknown age we call the 20th Century.

[John Bellows' music can be found at moniker records.]

The Other Way Around is a local Chicago underground musical phenomenon comprising Jason Allen, Patrick van Slee, Dan Katayama, and Piotrek Wereszczyński. Among their current repertoire, this song stands out as a truly weird and wonderful thing. It is a cover of a traditional Japanese song. Pat, who knows no Japanese, transcribed the lyrics as best he could, and Dan, who knows a little more Japanese, says it’s fairly accurate. But we here at Mutable are not interested in cultural accuracy, but in psychedelic ridiculosity, and regardless of its truthful rendering of a wonderful folk song, this thing certainly cuts my brainstem a new peephole if you know what I’m saying.

It’s brisk with a Dublin-style mist in Chicago, and I’m loving the dampness that collects in my hair as I blare the bejesus out of the newly-leaked Deerhunter album, in my earbuds. Bradford Cox, in his never-ending quest to justify his celibacy through the creation of music so beautifully off-kilter that he doesn’t need anything else, has spirited me through so many angsty moments. And while this moment is so biographically different from all of those, it feels utterly the same.

It feels as though I never ended the long enigma of my loneliness, that I never found a beautiful, brilliant, and supporting lover, and as though I’m still stuck in the same pursuits as Bradford—assuming that sense will come to everything, to all of the dissonance of my sordid life, if I only burrow monomaniacally enough into one aesthetic hole.

Bradford, you see, he was there for me, in all of those moments I felt my agency crumbling under me. Denied over and over by publishers, losing many an ego battle, spurned by countless a vixen, ignored by so many salary-granting employers, living in a remote urban basement, incapable of hiding any of these problems in my pauper appearance, and conflating all of these things into a sense of anomie and existential failure so piercing that I couldn’t puff one puff of marijuana—and I puffed so, so many more—without shaking and crying and believing that none of it could ever change; Bradford, he was there for me in my earbuds. Saying: there is somewhere else, and it is here. There will always be here.

And here it is, still. Still, with my employment and monogamous love and incrementally encouraging literary pursuits, Deerhunter fills for me a void I didn’t even know existed. Dreamers of dreamers, Bradford and his subjugated gang are the only band I still listen to which seems to believe that life can be saved by so many musket-blasts of musical bibliophilia, put to use in the realization of albums so good that every nerd everywhere is put hard to the nails with the task of criticizing them, of not dancing their joyously nerdy dance to them.

And as I escape a group of happily ambling drunks the day after I acquire the album, outside of a Chicago Cubs game, I’m so thrilled to return to my earbuds, and turn off all of the non-Deerhunter world, anew. The hypnotic, lullaby-laden roars within are my only respite from completely losing my shit at Wrigley Field, and as Bradford’s croon threatens to break as his heart most certainly does—it always does—I’m lost in a mix of sublime appreciation, and the rage of a lifetime of despising the Cubs and their culture, and refusing to enter that stadium.

And just as Deerhunter revisits me, I find that I’m incapable of letting go—even with everything going so well. Content to absorb that mist through half of the game, I begin to fold to my history as the drinks go down, and the bodies about Wrigley start to dance their Cubby dance. I rediscover the terms of the chip I acquired onto my shoulder, through the decades of binary opposition my mother’s over-sized, Catholic, south-side family waged, evoking the Cubs in much grander terms than I’ve ever heard the devil mentioned.

The fans surrounding me—particularly one unfortunate fellow, a member of my makeshift crew—shape into demons representing everything I self-righteously hate. The unfortunate fellow tells me my own White Sox (who bathed my heart in triumphant gravy by winning the World Series, when I was nothing but a jumping ball of College Freshman puke and hormones, in 2005) are unloved, that their championship is all but null, and it feels to me like he’s kicking me with his bratty fraternity cleats as I wallow on the ground, loser of a class warfare that was tipped his way before either of us were born. The Cubs can lose and lose and lose, decades more beyond the century that’s passed since their last championship, and he’ll still be part of the smiling, privileged masses, and I still won’t be.

I tell my friends to keep him away from me, that I’ll gladly remove those glasses and grin from his face, that they should be wise enough to keep the two of us away from knives and nails and objects blunter than the shoe I think about taking off, to bludgeon him with. ‘I would love to watch his guts and blood flow,’ I pronounce, ‘He is the absolute worst brand of human,’ I elaborate.

And when I make my false amends with my friends—not that fellow, who should still be wise enough not to be near me—and leave, Bradford is there for me as my pace quickens in the rain, and my breaths elongate in my refuge. If it really is the endless, endless love of a maladjusted audience that he seeks, then I can promise to always find enough self-striking maelstrom to swim in, between the ports of rescue of his miraculous albums.

The above video is of Lesley Dixon reading from her most recent novel in progress. It was a revelation for us here at Mutable. And below you’ll find Mutable’s own John Wilmes reading from his own remarkable work.