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Trans-Mongolian Express: 7,500 km by Train from Beijing to Moscow
A perfect four-minute escape
(via theatlantic)
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Imagine “Silver Linings Playbook” but with real people and more rock and roll.
That’s one way of thinking about “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” the heartbreaking and exquisitely told story of Roky Erickson and the Erickson family.
As frontman for the pioneering psychedelic rock outfit the 13th Floor Elevators, Roky Erickson grew famous in the 1960’s as the howling mastermind of trippy classics like You’re Gonna Miss Me and Kingdom of Heaven. Schizophrenia and heavy drug use (a newspaper article reported that Erickson had dropped acid more than 300 times) derailed his career and landed Roky in a Texas maximum-security mental institution next to rapists and murderers, where he was submitted to repeat electric shock treatments. Following his release in the early 1970’s, the arch of Roky’s life traced one long downward slope, away from fame, from music, from his wives, friends, and children, toward poverty, isolation, and madness.
Into the vacuum of Roky’s shattered life enters his mother, Evelyn, who takes on the role of caretaker, guardian, and, some say, enabler. It’s the complicated and heart-rending relationship between mother, son, and Roky’s siblings that forms the heart of the film.
In a story ripe with pathos and the potential for sensationalization, director Kevin McAlester does an admirable job of steering away from the sentimental or maudlin, leaving us instead with a breathtakingly intimate and surprisingly suspenseful portrait of a family that’s been blown apart but tries, however it can, to limp forward anyhow.
“You’re Gonna Miss Me” is streaming now on Netflix. Check it out.
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What could have been?
The first sentences to essays I’ve started and abandoned in the past year:
For the first time in nearly a decade I’m not participating in a fantasy baseball league.
Here’s Paul Scheerbart’s “The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention,” a wonderful little book with a half-accurate title.
We find ourselves in some kind of office. (Note: this was the beginning of a plot summary to a porn clip.)
It was a very big house.
The closest I ever came to having an actual fistfight was during recess in the fourth grade, when Parth Thakker tried to re-play a triple word score, and I body-slammed him onto the Scrabble board.
One night at dinner, I guess when I was 10 or 11, my dad started talking about the John Coltrane song “Giant Steps.”
This weekend, more than 60,000 people will begin their pilgrimage to Burning Man, the annual arts festival staged on an otherwise barren strip of land in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
Was Edvard Munch funny?
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We will travel to Mars
even as folks on Earth
are still ripping open potato chip
bags with their teeth.
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Every age manifests itself by some external evidence. In a period such as ours when only a comparatively few individuals seem to be given to religion, some form other than the Gothic cathedral must be found. Industry concerns the great numbers-it may be true, as has been said, that our factories are our substitute for religious expression.
— Charles Sheeler, via Joe Campbell
What’s the external manifestation of life in the 21st Century? Probably data centers — the dispersed homes of the Internet, these vast warehouses of our digital selves, repositories for memories, questions, fears, fetishes, etc.
Unlike factories or the cathedrals that came before them, data centers are often kept discreetly out of sight, belying little of their physical impact on the communities in which they exist. (Data centers are notorious for hogging up municipalities’ power and water supplies.) They’re felt, but not seen. In this way, they mirror the paradox of 21st Century life, in which people, equipped with the Internet, the most powerful communication tool ever conceived, lead increasingly inward lives.
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I’ve been consumed by a large (and exciting!) project, which has more or less precluded me from doing things like going outside or writing blog posts. But I’ll be back in 2013 with more profiles, observations, and hideous embarrassments.
Until then, I’m wishing you, dear reader, peace and happiness throughout this holiday season and beyond.
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Williamsburg, 10/29
Long stripes of oily color from the street lamps and stop lights stretched undisturbed across the wet, empty streets. A few downed trees. A screen door blown clear off its hinges. But that was it. Williamsburg was fine.
I walked toward the river, and found a few dozen people milling at the piers by the new towers on North 5th and 6th. I’d been in the same spot earlier in the afternoon, when it’d been an almost festive atmosphere. People had been posing for photos, trying to time their snaps to the breaking waves (waves?!) tumbling over the East River.
In the six or seven hours since, the water had pushed a good three hundred yards past the river’s banks, filling the trench of a construction site and lapping against the big windows of one building’s fitness center. Now everyone was lined up at the water line, gawking at the eerie, half-lit Williamsburg Bridge and the negative space of the darkened Manhattan skyline.
It was a surreal scene for sure, but there actually wasn’t much to see. The stray supernatural flash of a car’s headlamps provided the only light from across the river. Mostly it felt like things had been somehow displaced: the equilibrium between light, water, and sky now oddly misaligned. We were all having the same conversation —
“It’s so weird, I know…”
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Letters To People With Whom I Frequently Interact, But Whose Names I Do Not Know
Nice Lady On The Second Floor:
Thank you for killing all the horseflies in our building’s entranceway.
We bonded over those flies. I was coming in, and you were going out, or vice versa, and we both commented on the fly situation. The sheer, hideous number of them.
The next day I found you in the entranceway, unloading an entire can of Raid into the air. You’re a woman of action.
I hope you enjoyed your walk the other night.
Also:
Your dog: could you get it to stop barking so much?
And is Jose your brother? nephew? cousin? What’s going on there?
- Guy On The Third Floor, Who Did Nothing About The Flies
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If Musicians Ruled The World
This Election Day, voters will choose sides on a fundamental issue: Will America become a better place for poor people or rich people? Truly, we are living in the heyday of representative democracy.
Now, we already know the presidential candidates’ positions. But where do musicians stand? What’s their plan?
This is no trivial question. Musicians are some of our country’s most dedicated public servants, turning their lives outward in order to voice our unspoken wants, desires, and histories.
Fortunately, we needn’t wonder in vain. There is a long tradition of musicians outlining their visions for the world. Rarely are they realistic. I suppose that’s the point.
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Traveling through sound and space at San Francisco’s Audium
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