GRABBINGSAND

sometimes they come in groups.

fall is actually here. i can feel it now. time to keep the coat handy and anticipate the cooler mornings that will turn into colder mornings. time to go home for a weekend, just to see the leaves change a week before they turn here. time for apples from ellijay and considerations about carving a pumpkin through which i will never follow. time to populate the car with fall music. radiohead, for one. sisters of mercy, for another. cowboy junkies. morphine.

certain celebrities need to shut up. barbra streisand. jesse jackson. courtney love. harry knowles. jack valenti. (reasons? they’ll come later.)

the man is coming, so i suppose i need a ticket. anyone ever ask you that question about your have-to-go concerts? the performer that you would just have to see, should they blow through your town? well, for the longest time, my answer has been peter gabriel. the man’s a genius, really. everyone knows this. and now he has decided to bless atlanta with his presence. philips arena, november 5 — guy fawkes day. so i guess i better get on the phone. get my seat. call the master of tickets. do you have a “have-to-go-see?”

i have forgotten how to draw. my dad taught me. he started with simple profiles of people, a trick involving an upside down ice cream cone to make the forehead and the eyebrow. then we went on to boats. gold miners for a grade school project. i even did one thing for social studies where i drew portraits of every president up to reagan. i would draw my own comic books, something that took up much of my should’ve-been-paying-attention time in high school. and now i am trying to draw simple things — figures, faces, eyes — and the ease is gone. i am so far out of practice, removed from the craft.

perhaps that last one is not as inconsequential as i thought.

that whole iraq thing? yes, i know about the u.n. resolutions, about the threat of nuclear and chemical and biological warfare, about the over ten years of defiance to the free world at-large. these are all viable reasons, and enough evidence will get the coalition support needed to do what needs to be done. but you know what? it is personal. blood personal. shall i quote?

“After all, this is the guy who tried to kill my dad.“

okay, so i don’t know about buddha, but according to today’s bbc article, miss spears is taking issue with online file sharing in a series of public service announcements. seeing that the day is foggy and my mind is a bit restless, i tried to imagine just how this commercial shoot might’ve went down:

Brittney: “So, like, ya’ll don’t need t’ be doin’ all that stealin’ now.”
Director: “Say something about peer to peer networks…”
Brittney: “What? I appear to appear nekkid, huh?”
Director: “No! Peer to peer! Like Napster!”
Brittney: “They look like a pair of pears in a wrapper?!?”
Director: “No! File sharing! P2P software!”
Brittney: “Wife swappin’ and peein’ in my underwear?!?”
Director: “Cut!”

of course, i might be wrong. she might be incredibly intelligent and someday eligible for the noble prize for her pioneering work in … er … oh, forget it.

1. saviors of rock and roll

every week brings a new one. the white stripes. the strokes. the vines. the hives. whatever. we all know that rock is in a sorry state right about now. the landscape is now strewn with slinky girl-divas, choreographed boy bands, carbon copy rap stars and screaming nu-metal bands, so anybody that shows up bearing little more than a fender strat and a marshall amp is instantly branded the new moses. the messiah. this band will save us all from what we have become. the band will bring the rock back down from the gilded mountain of popularity and share it with the humble people of earth.

wrong.

we continue to blame the popularity of this band or that diva on the machines of marketing, acting like britney is being fed to us intravenously or that n’sync is being slipped into the water supply. but all the marketers do is put it out there. they set it out on the table. and what do we do? we belly up and consume. for every bubblehead pop star, there is a whole state’s worth (if you consider rhode island) of fans that love them, adore them and would walk 500 miles just to be the ones to fall down at their concert. they weren’t drugged or brainwashed, they just heard and liked and bought. simple as that.

and so what does it mean when rolling stone puts the latest and fuzziest barebones band on their front cover, calling them the new kings of true rock? they are simply setting them on the table, moving them out from the obscure corner of the pantry like a forgotten can of chick peas. effectively, they are being marketed right out of obscurity, marketed right out of that you’ve-never-heard-ness that caught the eye of an opprtunistic music mag editor in the first place.

you know what else it means? it is supposed to mean that you’re not cool if you don’t instantly dig this new band. and not just dig this band, but disparage all of the others as if you were suddenly entering a commune and forsaking worldly goods. and it is amazing that so many still fall for that, even though nobody really leaves their former tastes behind, not completely. wouldn’t it be great if everybody just owned up to the things they still kept in the back of their music box? just because i love radiohead now, that doesn’t mean that i need to be ashamed that my first ever album purchase (with my own money) was a styx cassette. kilroy was here. domo, domo.

rock & roll does not need saving. rock & roll survives as it always has, even through the disco era, the millis and vanillis, the billy oceans, the terry jacks (i hate “seasons in the sun” – sue me). where is it hiding? you know it when you hear it. and what is rock to you may not be rock to me. jeff buckley rocked. marvin gaye rocked. stevie wonder rocked up until about 1975. elvis presley rocked until he went into the army. rock changes and adapts to its contents. rock reflects its surroundings.

much like we do. like we have.

mozart rocked. as did shakespeare. galileo.

and while we’re on the topic of saviors…

“your head’s like mine; like all our heads.
big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was.
big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars.
whole universes fit in there!
but what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet?
little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over.
the world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune’s all we are.”

grant morrison, the invisibles #3

or swag, if you will. the gimmes. the freebies. the loot. even, perhaps, the booty, in that good ol’ pirate’s treasure sense.

this is comdex. and the schwag is why i go. sure, i can learn about some new technology and possibly make a contact or two, but the honest truth is that the dot-com bust has taken all of the whiz-bang galmour out of such techno-shows. the loud presentations are few and far between, the occasional celebrity is off doing something else, the booth girls have gone back to … well … whatever else might pay the bills, and you’re left with a voluminous exhibit hall filled with too many vendors trying to sell too few variations on a product. every other one of them has this eager look in their eye, borne out of desperation instead of drive, all of them just wanting a chance to take down your name, get your information, send you some literature so that maybe you might decide to give their product a fighting chance in the real world. the two big ideas this year? security, the data kind, and wireless networking. oh, and a lot of people hawking secure wireless networking, just to cover the bases. sure, the big guns were there, the microsofts, the xeroxes, the hps, but they weren’t as extravagant as they were just a couple of years ago.

so it is all about the stuff. the dot-coms are gone, so the variety of the free-givings is rather slim, but out of about an hour-and-a-half’s wandering around, i ended up with a bag containing the following:

seven demo CDs of varying importance, none of note.
eight brochures of typical shape.
three brochures shaped like the objects they advertise.
one american flag lapel pin, affixed to an aforementioned brochure.
two mints, one affixed to an aforementioned brochure.
six whitepapers.
seven magazines.
one distribution of the freebsd operating system (from wasabi) – this i might use.
one purple and green owl with eyebrows like bert (from altiris).
one blue letter opener.
one big white button with a red flashy thing on it.
one gold box with a chocolate slot machine inside (from hp).
five ink pens of varying quality and functionality (best from proxim – a bic griproller).
two lanyards for my badge, one white, one black (both from cingular).
one matchbox-car sized porsche in a white box (from syskonnect – i have no idea what they make.)
one ticket to a 60-minute seminar of my choice, unused.
five stress balls – this is a sign of the times, certainly.
no frisbees.

no frisbees. none of the ping-pong-table-in-the-board-room flash of the oh-so-recent past. just a double-twice handful of stress-relieving spheroids. so you crush ‘em and release some tension, when the truth is, you’d rather just find someone to throw them at…

overcome. prevail. not in some national sense of “we shall prevail over [fill-in-the-blank].”

no. this is you. this is about you.
you woke up this morning. you are sitting there, coffee perhaps in hand, and you are alive.

so live. go.
is there somewhere you want to go? somewhere you’d rather be? then go.
tie your shoe laces. buy your plane ticket. pay your fare. and go. and don’t do it out of some sense of patriotic pride, not because your government tells you that you need to get out there and support the economy. do it because this is your life. whether we actively tell them or not, we are volumes of story after story after story, and the most precious literature we have is each other.

so live. do.
is it yellow? is it orange? leave these colors to the trees and the leaves that soon will turn. the only color that matters now is the red of the blood coursing through your living body, the blood that drives the muscles that enable you to get up, get going, get on with your life.

so live. think.
remember that wallowing is not the same as remembering, and there are just too many opportunities to do the former in place of the latter. especially today. this day decked with another crystal blue sky. perhaps the one day where nobody will have to ask the date when writing a letter or signing a check. reflect and learn and turn the calendar page.

so live. love.
not out of respect for some untimely holiday, but because you can. because respect and admiration and consideration can flow like water through a mill wheel. it is taken in, it invigorates and drives, then it is released in kind. be kind.

so live. this is your to-do list.

the weekend’s road-tripping took me to asheville for some rest, some relaxation, some roaming through the largest home in the united states and some wandering along the fairways of a mountain state fair. here are the photos i took, from the sublime to the ridiculous. and yes, the sky really was that blue.

two arrived today, were waiting for me when i got home. another arrived over the weekend. all products of postcardx. so here’s the new three, plus a welcome bonus.

really, i can. my office is very close to dobbins air reserve base. just two miles away, if even that much. this building is on the top of a high hill that overlooks the interstate and my desk is on the top floor. so when the jets go away, they pass closely. and when the jets return, the pass closely. the noise lingers heavilly, sounding like a giant lion leaning into these giant panes of glass and breathing heavy. like an aslan. add the sonic curvature of the approach and descent and departure, and your mind cannot help but mentally place the sound somewhere in your periphery, like tracing down a housefly from its buzz, only louder, much louder. the building might not even vibrate at all, but your imagination provides enough seismic energy that you swear you see radiating circles in your coffee mug.

and now this happens everyday. and we all now why. the local division of the national team is gearing up, practicing for the big game and wondering if they’ll be put out first or sent in for relief or simply left alone to warm a bench or two. and how strange it is that america has breathed a collective sigh of relief over the avoidance of one strike, only to remain rather apathetic or unconcerned about the repercussions of a strike of an entirely different color.

there goes another one. bulleting the blue sky.