pictures.

Octavio had a birthday, and we had a party, and it looked like this.


There he is, looking strangely like one of those laughing Buddha statues.



A whole slew of folks showed up, including some beers and a couple bongo drums.


Kendra's mussed locks are humbled by Octavio, God of Hair.


Sunday mornin' brought the dawn in.

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food for a gestating album.

1.

The Manticore (Mantichora) as illustrated in Edward Topsell's History of Four Footed Beastes

"A triple row of teeth meeting like the teeth of a comb, the face and ears of a human being, grey eyes, a blood-red color, a lion's body, inflicting stings with its tail like a scorpion...with a special appetite for human flesh." -Pliny the Elder

"The manticore was also attributed with having a voice that was the mixture of pipes and a trumpet. The beast is very swift and makes very powerful leaps. The manticore is reputed to roam in the jungles of India, and is known to have an appetite for humans. Like its cousin, the Sphinx, it would often challenge its prey with riddles before killing."
-quoted from www.monstrous.com

2. Butoh

Butoh performers being creepy, yet chic

"We are between sanity and insanity, beauty and ugliness. Good and evil don't matter; emotion lurshes from serenity to rage without warning. East and West, too, have merged: Leering Japanese ghosts waltz to Edith Piaf; a forest hag dressed for a Versailles ball strikes wild kabuki poses. Fear turns frolicksome at a soiree deep inside a nuclear-fallout shelter." -quoted from Eric Prideaux, www.pripix.com

"It was a short piece, without music, and it raised a scandal. In the piece a young boy (Yoshito Ohno) enacted sex with a chicken by strangling it between his thighs. In the darkness that followed a man - Tatsumi Hijikata - approached the boy. Since then butoh is called shocking, provocative, physical, spiritual, erotic, grotesque, violent, cosmic, nihilistic, cathartic, mysterious." -quoted from Dance of Darkness, by Harmen Sikkenga, www.butoh.net




more later.
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commercial break.

And now, a word from Timothy Leuers: Super Psychologist

"Most Americans think that they are in the top quartile of social intelligence and creativity. Americans will make false claims of self consistency as in the "I told you so" bias. Americans will tell you that they have knowledge that could not possibly exist (since it is knowledge about non existent events) and get angry when this fact is pointed out to them. In short Americans have a selective attention - they will ignore negative information about the self and concentrate on their positive, socially desirable aspects. Indeed, the only Americans that have given neutral self appraisals are undergoing treatment for depression. From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, there is nothing surprising about this. This selective attention, editing, ignoring, and creating a positive self image is nothing other than the ego at work. However, all the above measures of self enhancement show neutrality or even self depreciation when applied to the Japanese.

"My own work on "visual self enhancement" suggests however that the Japanese do have a positive self regard when it is confined, literally, to the regard or the gaze. I claim that they enhance their self-image, or the imaginary representation that they maintain of themselves. Give a Japanese a piece of paper and ask him to write about himself and he will portray himself as the same as the next guy. Give him a camera and he will suddenly become appealing, positive and upright. There would seem to be a much greater importance placed on the visual sign rather than the phonetic. From this data I have suggested the existence of a mature "specular self" in Japan."
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neu songs & spectral locomotives.

First of all, if you haven't yet, you gotta check out that last link I put up. It's one of those shining stars of the internet.

Now that I have my neu apartment and my DIY studio set up again, I'm working on a neu album, and I have a brand neu song up on my Caws Pobi page. The title I pulled from an old Elton John lyric (though my song isn't about Sir Elton). The samples I use in the song are from Ennio Morricone's soundtrack for Dedicated to the Aegean Sea, a mildly sexploitative Italian-Japanese 1979 film. I haven't seen the movie, but the music sure is funky.

A vanguard of innovative production methods, Morricone incorporated a lot of electronics into his soundtracks as his career progressed. He said this: "In my opinion, the use of electronic music and synthesizers should serve to change the concept of the music itself. One is dealing with a different kind of music here, something that is born from the instrument itself, full of new sounds and colors." I like that.


(No naked women were squished in the making of this music.)
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I found it.

It's A Trap!

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chitlin circuit style of humor.


Robert A. Pruitt, Just Do It!, 2004

More about Pruitt here.
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