I’m moving this blog to a new location – http://conquestofanera.nfshost.com. By tomorrow morning, it should also be available at http://www.brycewarnes.com (so inventive!). This won’t really matter for anyone reading through Facebook, because I’ll change the import settings there; but new posts won’t be showing up on Livejournal any longer, or (obviously) at this location.
It is a new year!
Did you have a merry Christmas? Good.
I was listening to a song a while back, and I had one of those flashback moments. It’s almost creepy, the way certain stimuli can summon memories so quickly to mind that you feel like you’ve slipped back into the past. Smells do it most effectively, I think. Fresh cut grass brings me back to every summer evening of my childhood, and the smoke from some brands of cigarettes remind me of family reunions. Songs are a little more hit-and-miss, I think – but when they work, they work well. Certain songs by Pixies, Fugazi, and the Dead Kennedys make it seem like I’m just about to graduate from high school. Most of Johnny Cash’s hits remind me of that same summer, sweating in the kitchen where I washed dishes and dreaming of cold beer. If you keep listening to a memory-song, its connections change or grow, so it doesn’t tug you back to the exact same place it did before, although echoes of that time may remain.
Okay! Basically I just wanted to say that I put together an end-of-year mix. I’ll call it “The 2007 Afterparty.” I know this is pretty self-indulgent; but I doubt I’m the only one who gets the urge to look back on the previous twelve months every time the new year looms. For me, the drama is reinforced by the fact that my birthday’s less than a week after New Years Day – so really, when I think about 2007, I’m also thinking about all the time I spent as a 19-year-old. Some folks do memes recounting major events of the past year, others send out electromail circulars listing their favourite memories. This is basically the same thing, only more long-winded, and set to music.
The playlist is behind the cut below. Because of upload size restrictions, I had to do individual songs. This probably works better, anyway, since most of them are by fairly well-known artists, and any of the three people who read this will be familiar with at least a handful of them. It’s not necessarily a list of the music I “discovered” this year, or even the stuff that I listened to most – just the songs which will always, when I listen to them, toss me back to 2007.
I just had a brilliant idea for a product: Pre-printed price tags that consumers can buy and affix to their items after they’ve purchased them. Imagine buying someone a shirt for 19.99, then sticking a 79.99 price tag on top of the old one. “Oops – I left the tag on.” Suddenly, you care 300% more for that person than you did before. (I assume all affection can be expressed in dollar amounts.) Merry Christmas!
I got Salvia divinorum extract in the mail recently. It’s trumpeted as a special “Crystal Leaf” variety, which somehow makes it better than any other reasonably potent extract on the market. I won’t dispute the manufacturer’s claims here, as the service and product provided were exemplary – regardless of any “special process” that supposedly upped the salvinorin A content of the extract. I’m not one to question these things.
I thought it would be a good idea to test some of this extract, and get a handle on just how strong it really was. I’m familiar with salvia, and comfortable with roughly estimating appropriate doses. For this extract, which was stronger than any I’d used before, I figured it would be best to play it safe. Carefully, I chopped the powdered leaf (which really does have visible crystals on it, if you must know) into separate little piles, and pushed them around, trying to calculate how much would be ideal, based on body weight, mood, air pressure, position of Scorpio, etc. These things are important, I thought to myself, as I prepared an astrological chart and referred to a slim volume on phrenology. You’re dealing with a psychoactive substance. Everything needs to be measured carefully.
Then I thought, Fuck it, and pinched roughly a tenth of a gram into my pipe bowl. Patience is a virtue I’ve never had time for.
Very quickly, I lost self-awareness and descended into a telescoping series of fractured dream-worlds, each one composed of brightly coloured and transient shapes and angles. I suspect these were examples of the “non-Euclidean geometry” that Lovecraft talked about, that extra-dimensional space that, should you dare to look upon it, drives you mad. (I failed, however, to detect the monotonous piping of Yog Sothoth or the mad gibbering of Great Cthulhu). I walked around a bit without actually moving from my bed, and interacted with people who weren’t there. I kept forgetting that I existed.
It’s easy to write salvia off because it’s legal. If the law lets us use a substance, how crazy can it be? My younger sister earned serious Cool Points that night. She was the only one awake, and she listened calmly as I explained to her that I was hallucinating because of “herbal medicine,” and didn’t know which way was up. She even guided me back to my room. I might not have made it otherwise.
The good thing about Diviner’s Sage (hippie-ass terminology – to be used sparingly) is that even in large doses, it has a short half life. Once I remembered where I was and why the fabric of space and time were broken into little pieces, things got easier. To help myself come down, I tried drawing how I felt, doing my best to illustrate the true nature of reality with a lottery pencil.
It made a lot of sense at the time.
I was talking to Shane, and he said this one guy told him that a friend of a friend of his said Gogol Bordello might be playing in Victoria at some point in the foreseeable future. The tour schedule on the website only goes up to the 18th of December, and there’s no evidence of anything being scheduled after that. Also, it’s possible the original friend was a paranoid schizophrenic who was high on drugs, and that the guy who told Shane the rumour was actually a towel. It’s still something to go on, though. There’s hope there.
If a newborn child was holding tickets to said concert, I would probably slap it in the face and steal them – without remorse. I would do so involuntary, as a reflex. Do you understand? I need you to understand. I was brushing my teeth last night, and I found a souvenir from the mosh pit at Gogol Bordello’s concert in Vancouver: A piece of glass, stuck in the back of my mouth. Just a sliver, wedged between molars. I still can’t wear the shirt I had on at the concert, because it is damp with sweat and blood from that happy occasion, three months ago, when I lost my individual identity and walked the Shining Path to a merger with the Great Spirit. I was essentially in a state of super-heightened intoxication for two weeks following the show. Do you understand now?
What I’m saying is, regardless of whether you love the band or you hate them, you have to admit: They put on a pretty good live show.
I mean, fairly good. You know.
“Dude! Oh, shit. Dude, you got to help me. We were playing a show, and I was doing my guitar thing, right? It was really getting, y’know, good… And then, somehow, I impregnated two hundred women.
“No, I swear I didn’t mean to. It just happened all of a sudden. I mean, I’ve been warned before about the sheer, soul-crushing phallic power of my raw, down-home licks. I’ve – we’ve both – been aware of that from the start. I was playing guitar for Jimmy Page once, and it gave him a boner. He tried to hide it by putting his hands in his pockets, but I saw. He ended up having to leave the room. I know, man. I know it’s dangerous. But how could I have expected this?
“Nothing would have ever lead me to suspect that one of my distortion-laden riffs might actually climb off the stage and make physical love with members of the audience. Even with Hendrix, that only happened once or twice. Okay, three times, at most. But still, I never would have thought… And now I have two hundred women who expect me to attend Lamaze classes with them, and pay child support later. Fuck! Why didn’t I stick to piano lessons?
“Thank God I’m not HIV positive or anything.”
It’s true. He don’t.
(Made from an actual cigarette ad circa the Good Old Days.)
“People don’t understand that, during the 1940s, the only legal sexual position was Missionary. If you even attempted, say, a Reverse Cowgirl – or, God forbid, Southern Exposure – you were committing a felony. Those were different times, all right. If word got out you were letting your lady on top, folks felt compelled to take justice into their own hands. They’d form a mob and drag you down to the docks, where twelve burly Russian sailors would rape you to death. Some of those boys could rape for a good five, six hours straight. Afterwards, children would fight over scraps of your pulverized rectum. I got most of my marble collection as a kid by trading rectum during lunch hour. Different times, alright.
“There wasn’t no pornography back then, neither. Government wouldn’t let anything in the theaters that might be Communist – and that included vulvas. In fact, the only really interesting experiences folks had back then was through records. I used to make a steady dime in the old days recording gramophone porn. There was always a limited budget, so we had to get creative. I remember once when we couldn’t find a girl for one scene, so my pal Buck volunteered to do it. He just put on a falsetto voice, like. On the final 78 recording, you can’t even tell he was a man. Ever since that particular scene, me and Buck never really felt comfortable around one another.
“Here’s one of my best pieces from the good ol’ days. This would have been just a few weeks after we finished recording Robust American Lads VI. Boy, wasn’t that a lark. Sort of a side project, y’know. Last one I did before I got the clap.”
