My pal Glen Phillips has a new album coming out soon. If you got to his site you'll see he's also recenty recorded a live CD at Largo in LA. There is a free download of our song "Back Up on My Feet" on his site right now. Go see Glen when he comes to your town. Kiss him on the lips.
http://www.glenphillips.com
I’ve seen it in a series of self portraits. I cross my right leg over my left if sitting or standing. In repose. On a hotel bed. In a dentist's waiting room. Never left leg over right. The body develops habits and then nothing is symmetrical. There is bilateral symmetry in that we have two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears but none of these pairs are identical twins. One trick knee. One short leg. One narrow foot. One overdeveloped calf. One crooked spine. Each body broken in like a ball glove to fit the parameters of an undisclosed game. Try looking at a close friend’s face in the mirror. It seems so wrong. Freakishly distorted and off balance. Familiarity is built on face to face contact. Their right is on your left. In the mirror their right is on your right. A close approximation of your friend, but somehow sinister and off balance, leers from the mirror. One throwing arm. Crooked smiles. The cocked eyebrow has its favourite side. We think of the answer to the Jeopardy question and roll our eyes up and to the right. Never the other way. One testicle larger than the other. One breast lower. Formed by our lopsided habits we curve our way through the biosphere. A world built, apparently. for right handed people. Left handed people are more accident prone as a result. Try opening all doors with your left hand all day. We are curved and formed and full of habits that favour one side over the other. I have a right handed face.
The edges of the great salt lake scrawl, wind and stretch as if formed by something other than nature. Even from the air this massive thing appears shallow. It’s edges stretch in wide, undefined layers laid down in the same way that, after soaking up hours of sweat, a white line appears later in the translucent white band on the outside of a blue ball cap. Thirty games later there are several lines tracing the perimeter of the original line. The ball cap becomes a dirty brown thing of beauty. Blue becomes gray becomes umber. Salt has a way of describing the swirl of elements past. It is a dry and tired voice. The whole scene speaks of energy spent rather than potential energy. People gravitate here not to be on the cutting edge but to connect to a stolid and ancient universe. Where else would aliens bring the sacred Mormon tablets? Where else would immortal commandments of morality be issued. The Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea live these parallel lives. Stranded by the oceans that once sat atop their plains are the million acre fossils of a green and smiling sea. This is the middle east on the flanks of the mid-west. A testing ground for aggression and praetorian doctrine. The chopper squadron’s of Boise might travel all the way here to simulate the retrieval of refugees along the northern shore. The trace elements of bomb blasts have laid quietly in wispy saline ridges and now softly crunch under the soles of sand coloured boots. From “the four corners” and out into the deserts fan the random craters of marginal military experiments -- opportunistic drilling and digging. Futility. To Utah and her sisters Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada these are routine yet laughable violations. Attacking the tiger with a toothbrush.They will effortlessly endure and outlive these dumbass fire ants. We will be burnt, drenched, evaporated, dried up, distilled and washed away again in one breath of their lifetimes. Ancient conflicts in the deserts are perpetuated by something in this salt and sand. The salt and sand needs company. By what’s happening in modern history I can see we are accelerating to our destinies. There are many who are born in countries without deserts. The plumping water in their bodies is not pulled by the same moon. They may be closer to the pull of magnetic north than to the boney finger that beckons a shaman out under circling buzzards. Moisture will, however, move toward the vacuum and those juicy morsels clinging to the edges of the wet world will one day end up as quiet sand and salt and dust on the edges of a great salt lake.
Cutting the lawn. Ornamental agrarians. Unless we’re talking soccer pitch, golf course or rural landing strip this just seems like a frivolous task. It does, at least, serve to satisfy vestigial cravings brought on by suburban life. Dad comes home from a hard day on the stock market floor to get out the Toro and return to the land. He might as well grow a tail and suckle a baby on his teet. I understand the draw of the “ride-em” mower but next to a real farmer, and his/her combine harvester, you’d be operating the "Kenner Easy-Bake Oven" next to Wolfgang Puck in the kitchen at Spago.
With a push mower the lawn can be good exercise but this is rare. Lawn mowing is, more significantly, one more ridiculous attempt at imposing some imperial white order on the natural world. Gardening is art but I’m not sure about lawns. They are like the large expanse of uniform green ink in a giant tattoo of the Minnesota Wild logo emblazoned across a “neo” biker’s chest. Neo. No established biker would pick that team. The outline of the tattoo tells the whole story and doesn’t cause much pain. After its done you can understand the full intent. All the “colouring in” is 98% of the pain and only serves to decorate the actual premise. The outline is the garden. The painful decoration is the lawn. The hair that later grows to obscure the tattoo is a bed of dandelions? My uncle asks, “what good are the English if they gave us the dandelion and the sparrow” -- someone apparently missed their dandelion wine and imported it. We sent back the Canada goose to Buckingham palace to shit their putting greens silly. They sent the most obnoxious of the small birds and the natural yellow post-it note that reminds us we will never live up to our neighbour’s example. Suburbanites have lawn manicuring competitions involving intense chemical treatment and at the expense of our water supply. Folks struggle to maintain lush and green tracts in a climate that asks for burnt and brown. When the earth asks for moss we deny it. Eradicating the dandelion is way up there on the mandate. I choose the dandelion. It makes strange booze and shows up to rock the suburban world. It is the ultimate house wrecking party plant. “Dandelion” is a great name: a gad about town crossed with a a ferocious predator ruling the grasslands. Makes complete sense. I must now go out and water my dandelion crop. Countercultural irony abounds.
Eric Webster's snowboarding documentary is now available in the movie gallery.
Lots of nothing in this posting but lots behind the dam in my head. I'm adding up receipts in the mad dash to make a tax deadline that has already passed. Going away takes the momentum out of anything else you are doing. This is not always compatible with the "achiever" personality. This I must reconcile. Cat has pissed in all the hockey bags ...again. This is the very attention seeking behaviour you expect of a cat. It worked. He got me back for going away . . .again. Cat's can be assholes. My cat is an asshole. I cleaned and scrubbed all day. I still love him but I don't always agree with how he gets things done. Screw "the natural order of things" HE CAN CHANGE! I will get him counselling.
Some new hotel rooms in the "Kids in the Hotel" gallery. More road pics & movies to come as I get time to put them up. Very excited about Eric Webster's upcoming snowboarding flick (shot in Banff) entitled, "Jesus Christ!".