Alter-Egotism

When I met my roommate Michael's friend Dana, she was helping to hold up a quarter-mile long sign. The sign had the names of all the US soldiers that had died in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was the day of the Peace Rally on the Mall and Dana and her friends had driven all the way from West Virginia with a nun, the sign, and hand-made drums.

Later I found out that she edits a zine.

This is my contribution.

Yours Truly,

The Mighty Snork, Mistress or Frippery who's Aegis is Whipped Topping

Super Secret Alter-Ego

Yes, we all have one lurking within. Some of us may be more in-touch with this declarative-sentence-making, large-object-scaling, bizarre-spandex-wearing side of our personally. Others may need a little more help. To find the Super Secret Alter-Ego that's right for you, I suggest this handy, semi-mystical method.

Simply put yourself into a light trance. Take the index finger of one hand (Warning: left-pointing may skew your Alter-Ego towards the sinister). Close your eyes and run your finger up and down each column in turn until the power within bids you stop. Do this three times, until you have three separate names (one Title, Provenance, and Aegis). Then combine them using the formula below. And Viola!

Please remember to use your Alter-Ego for good (non destructive evil is probably acceptable too).


Title + Master/Mistress/Protector/Bane of + Provenance -- Aegis


Title:
Potentia/Potentior
Rapscallion
Absentia/or
Flagrentia/or
The Masticator
Formidable Fiend
Malevolentia/or
Anachronistia/or
Randamonia/or
The Great Doodler
Cranium
The Mighty Snork

Provenance:
Cruciferous Edibles
Biodegradable Cleaning Products
Those Who fear To Speak In Math Class
Lords of Hopscotch
Arcane Vocabulary
Pulchritudinous Sofas
The Six-Fingered
Tax Attorneys
Pahoehoe (Ropy Lava)
Lovers of B-Grade Action Flicks
Kitten Kissers
Cheese Mold
Daring-Do
Differentiating Homonyms
Frippery
Baubles

Aegis:
Giant Herring
Wombat
Magic Marker
Chiffon
Eraser
Whipped Topping
Bucket
Elbow Grease
String
Leeks
Lichen
Man-hole Cover

Mockery is the greatest form of flattery

We are brilliant shining gods.

Mon coeur est une grenouille

Hello, blue, blue, blue. The skirt people are flapping their petals today but hey ho I am sunburnt, and stay-at-home and throaty. There's an amphibian working its way up from some subterranean hidey-hole and I don't think he wants to make friends. Go flip in the sun like a banana pancake was the advice and bake, bake out the ill like so many batter bubbles rising up to the surface until at last...go to. I am done.

Froglegs are for a summer day, all crispidy and tender. Were it not for unfortunate associations with class hegemony, I'd gobble them up right quick.

Suspiciously delicious (a suspect novelty)

Let it be known.

I require many bananas.

Resident New Yorkers take note.

Reading with the ears

It's been a few days since The Books took the stage here in DC but I still have flashbacks in vivid color and gyrating shapes. But maybe that's because I'm still trying to get my head around the experience. To see them live was more surreal than I imaged: notes struck, voices spoke from the corners of the room and in the center two men with a cello and guitar seemed to hold completely still, the center of some sort of muti-media tableau vivant.

It helped too the the audience was completely mesmerized by the beautiful, odd videos broadcast in counterpoint to the music (these were unpolished footage, most often straight out of arcane training video, home movies and cable public access, rearranged into careful collages) I remembered to glance down at the stage all too seldom and I could easily imagine that the musicians sneaked in their playing between beats, waiting for all heads to turn away before they moved their fingers.

This isn't to say that the concert wasn't amazing; it most certainly was. Listening to The Books comes in fits and starts for me and I hadn't had such a fit for a while. Revisiting the songs again re-awakened my wonderment that such artifacts of strange audiophiliac creation exist at all. I genuflected to their delicacy and to the painstaking hours that have gone into their construction. I hope to one day make sometime half so lovely.

Musee du printemps

The sky is opening here and things are beginning to die. The store mannequins, realizing that theirs is a sedentary lot, take leucadian leaps into vats of soup. It might have been delicious but their decapitated plastic corpses didn't harmonize, you see, neither with the oregano, nor the savory and thyme. They only floated aloof and greasy, a meal for the millers and the gobblers, oblivious, maybe, to all beauty.

And I wonder about the nonsensical connections between things. Why Auden means a bread with cranberries, and what Lincoln has to do with feeling flesh ripe, coarse, and unhomogenized under your fingers.

And then again.

Romance has stumbled its way out the door after a long and painful hangover --it was that party the summer before I reckon--- but not in the way that you'd think. Climbing over Lust, Hopeless Sensuality and the D-grade action flicks on the threshold, it takes one shuddering breath and then promptly goes back to bed.

Walking with my weekly onus of garlic, fish and courgettes I find the time to a form a passing crush. Yes, you with the worn shoes and well brushed greatcoat. What do you know about all this?

Up chin, down chin (an extra-literary exercise)

Small tasks are comforting. They are quiet in their forgetability and their ability to offer a correct answer in a mode of life that most often demands interpretive dance, conundrums and all of the above. The small task can be closed, can be right, can be a perfect quatrain and still leave room for the interliners of thought and the vagueries of intertextuality.

Thackery, Gorey, Satrapi, Powers.

She had written down the date in her pocket-book of the day when she dispatched it. To her son's guardian, the good Major at Madras, she had not communicated any of her grief and perplexities.

In the small task you can meditate on a glance. Shift eyes your to the left, close and then open and send out semaphore that takes the slow train (the one that delivers the mail to Fossil, Medina and Mist along the way) before arriving at the recipient's back and crumpling to the floor. Oh well, here comes the next creased dollar, the next Naugahyde bag and pulpy codex. Ad infinatum circulation. Closed system. Plastic and tape. Close the pages. Tuck it in. It will keep until tomorrow.