Cabiria, Cabiria. I just saw you, Cabiria.

I saw you walking, wreathed in music and smiling faces.

The stark thin trees on either side.

Your mouth making that funny, smirky smile.

Guided where? How does your night end?

Shepherded by laughing kids on bikes

To what boat, what river?

A final water?

Or soft folds of wave

To help ferry you

To where we start again?

Essay by C. Way - Copyright © 2008 SnailCrow.com
   

   

(10 more like him here)
   

19th century thinkers like William Paley argued for the existence of God based on brilliant, beautiful, complex designs in nature — flowers, trees, bird plumage.

You might as well argue for the existence of God based on the ten astonishingly repulsive submarine lives in the link above: Alien forms so ugly they resist all aesthetic valuation. With walleyed gill-flutter they shatter the mirror and slither into the soft void beyond, where symmetry, harmony, color, line & beauty all become meaningless. They’re defiantly themselves, in silent, weird, ultra-pressurized pitch — Holy fuck, look at these critters.

My throat catches when I scan them all. The glutinous blobfish. The estuarine rockfish, severe & implacable as an Olmec head. The wheezing porcine lumpfish.

Why do I start to feel this way? Is it because I catch myself finding them wretched and laughable, ridiculously abhorrent, and then become ashamed with myself, knowing they can’t help how they were made?

Is it because I feel humbled in their presence, their ancient miles-removed presence, so coldly distant from mine that they might as well be martians wriggling among asteroids?

Is it because I feel smaller and uglier & more pathetic compared to their spiny, encrusted, cartilaginoid, mucoused, jellied but unselfconscious & heedless & glaring faces? More purely themselves in all their horrorshow gristle than all of us with our dissembling and meta-shit and second-guessing?

There they are, these deeptrench lives, captured in shock at the foot of ours, drinking all our drainage, our oldest and strangest cohabiters, blinking and mouthing in black while we feed them more plastic.

C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

   

Of all the Cabrales pictures I found while scouring Google Images, this seemed most to communicate the forbidding-ass, hoary, curmudgeonly flavor of this most formidable blue cheese.

Cabrales is a Spanish blue, usually from cow, but in the case of the piece I bought, a blend of sheep’s, goat’s and cow’s milk. Like other blues, it’s aged in caves until it’s pretty damn raw.

I bought mine at the Whole Foods in New York at Columbus Circle. I had no idea what I was in store for. I only picked it because it looked the most grumpy. It was sitting there on the far end of the blues, hunkered down, surly, like a grizzled, feral cat.

Anyhow, I got home, unwrapped it, tried it, and was stunned. This cheese is a troll grandfather whose savage breath makes you shut your eyes but whose zyklon war stories & randy secret-wife asides open them right the fuck back up.

In non-troll terms — it’s a tough cheese to love. It’s surprisingly acid, not very tender, sort of molar-sticky. But the flavor once you get past the bouncer is incredibly complex: woodsy-nutty, tangy, forceful, rich. It takes 5 or 10 seconds to really settle in. Language lets me down (or vice versa), and I don’t have the ready stock of adjectives/jargot that wine-nuts do — “vegetal”, “notes”, “tannins”, etc etc — so I’ll just say simply that the flavor is unlike that of any other blue I’ve tried, and is much stronger, more stubborn, and less cheese-like than I thought I could care for.

In this regard, it’s more like a hard red wine than a cheese. It makes your mouth sort of freak out and huddle (4th quarter time-out style) before rallying and realizing there was nothing to be afraid of after all — JUST STANKY BLUE LUV.

Lists.

LISTS.

SWEET JESUS POTATO GUNS we love our lists.

Can I please have a day of Internets without another godforsaken Authoritative Top Ten List of important shit befouling my screen?

I remember seeing High Fidelity years ago and thinking: damn. People love lists. An entire film based around a man’s list-rank organization of his love life’s vicissitudes. & I remember simultaneously liking and feeling odd about that. It tapped into the geeky anal organizer in me, but it also felt cheap, easy, hydrogenated, canola-oiled, sort of throwaway and disrespectful of the experiences under discussion in the film.

Since then it’s only gotten worse, in media, art, blogs, & I’ve become increasingly alarmed at everyone’s insistence on reducing history & day-to-day experience to a tidy assortment of ratings, rankings — everything crammed through this OCD quantitative sieve.

It’s as if we don’t trust experiences unless we can package them & stamp them with a tag/number — so much anxiety in every step of that machine-like categorization. You can feel it pulsing behind the numbers, a teeth-chattering, skittery little ghost-droid, antennae frantically waving, robo-tentacles eager to seize more data parcels to slot & secure. Hell, I’ll be doing it at the end of this post.

The uninterrupted modern brain/eye-fuck of data datadatadadtaddtatdtatdata must make us this way. So much info hailing down upon us from every source that all we can do is try to make ourselves bots in the face of it: analyze, arrange, parse, order, next data set please.

My mother called me yesterday to hear my voice.

I said: “Mother, what are the top five reasons you love me?” She responded readily, with a tagged data set including supplemental links to her & my amazon wishlists.

I felt 6.5 EU (emotional units) of love at that instant, and we exchanged relational signifiers before disengaging our info-relay.
   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

   

The following are excerpts from an interview with Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1995, where he weighs in on his career and the works of modern artists influenced in part by him (Aphex Twin among them). Interview is found here:

http://www.stockhausen.org/ksadvice.html

“I heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James carefully: I think it would be
very helpful if he listens to my work Song Of The Youth, which is electronic
music, and a young boy’s voice singing with himself. Because he would then
immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look
for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat
any rhythm if it were varied to some extent and if it did not have a
direction in its sequence of variations.”

“The beginning of every art music development, in China, or in India or in European monasteries was always to relate the art of shaping composing sounds with the art [by which] the stars are shaped and composed. Astronomy, mathematics and music were the highest disciplines throughout the centuries since the beginning of European art music in the monasteries, let’s say in the tenth until the 14th, 15th century… I have studied all music of Europe as a student - I had to - and I at a very early age became aware, also naturally, [that] certain music, like the Art Of The Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach or the Musikalishe Opfer, [has] always known about this relationship between the laws of the universe, astronomical laws, and the laws of the music of this Earth. “

I absolutely love the premise — have an establishment-throned, grumpy old-guard composer address the works of his progenitors (Aphex Twin, Scanner, etc). And I doubly love that the ‘children’ of the article got the chance to weigh in on old Stocky’s recommendations afterwards — famously Aphex Twin’s flippant (but unquestionably disappointed) rejoinder where he basically says “Stock, fuck off, you ain’t got no SOUL.”

So right after reading the interview I checked out some of the Stocker’s music, the first time I’d heard him since college. With all due respects to the now-deceased composer — I didn’t care much for him then (though I think as an idealistic 20-something it was easier for me to feel I wasn’t ‘up to’ the lofty sublime peaks of his craft) — & I realized quickly that I sure as hell don’t care for him now.
 (Read More . . .)