I was not raised bi-platform. I’ve been an Apple user since the day my Aunt left her family’s IIe with us while they went on vacation. I was five or six. The next holiday season, one of our very own materialized in Dad’s studio. The hulking gray console now sits in the corner of my room on top of a closet. In the intervening decades, my family shared a IIc and two desktops. In high school, I got a desktop of my own, and am now on my fourth laptop. Just as I can only effectively communicate in English, I can only really function on Macs. I’m an ugly American and a brutish Apple rube.
With the death of my third iPod in three weeks by unprovoked harddrive failure, I think my faith in Apple’s hardware has been irrevocably scarred. There’s nowhere I can go, and — from now on — there will be a half-second of near-panic every time I turn anything on: Will it work? Am I about to get all stressed and shit or am I going to get that demonically sad icon again? Is my computer about to die on me? (Holy shit: did my back-up jump drive actually just die on me? What the fuck?)
Fuck you, technology. I’m going to bed.
Features:
“Nobody Suspects The Cricket,” profile of Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche, Signal To Noise via GlennKotche.com
“17 Other Things To Do With $226 (Besides Spending Them on Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young),” Times Herald-Record (see if you can guess which Dylan comment was added by my editor)
Song reviews:
“Two Sheep Asleep” – Dirty Projecters (I’m reviewing songs for PaperThinWalls.com, with a bunch more already in the can)
“Freckle Wars” – Ecstatic Sunshine
“Wait For You” – The Mountain Goats
“Bat Macumba” – Os Mutantes
“UMA” – OOIOO
Album reviews:
High and Mighty – Gov’t Mule
Radiodread – Easy Star Dub All-Stars
Columns and misc.:
The Island, wunderkammern27.com micro-fiction
BRAIN TUBA: How I’ve Been Spending My Summer
Only in print:
o August Relix (Pearl Jam cover): “Plugging the A-Hole,” feature on Digital Rights Management; album reviews of Phish, The Sadies, and Thom Yorke; book review of Ben Fong-Torres.
o Paste #23 (Thom Yorke cover): album reviews of Sufjan Stevens, The Mountain Goats, Danielson, Elf Power, Yo La Tengo, Guillemots, The Ditty Bops, and Robert Fripp.
“Freckle Wars” – Ecstatic Sunshine (download here)
from Freckle Wars (2006)
released by Car Park (buy)
(file expires August 28th)
Maybe my favorite moment on Sonic Youth’s Murray Street is at the very end of “Rain On Tin,” when the drums and the bass drop out, leaving only Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, and Jim O’Rourke’s guitars. For about 30 seconds, transcendent electric guitar arpeggios wrap around one another. The Baltimore duo Ecstatic Sunshine — just two dudes with axes, man — take that moment and derive an entire sound. Their MySpace page declares them to be “Black Metal / Trance / Jam Band,” which isn’t too far from the truth, either. .
The delirious two minute title track from their joyously slim debut, Freckle Wars is probably all one need know about Ecstatic Sunshine. From the first beat, it’s busy and chiming, like the Allman Brothers without all the extraneous drummers, bassists, organists, and predilections towards sounding soulful. Notes scamper and dive, chase one another through the air, and drop into rhythm parts when necessary, all while forging a sense of movement. Mixing the psychedelic punk jams of Television and Sonic Youth with post-White Stripes minimalism and hippie goodness, Freckle Wars is one of the most refreshing debuts of the year.
Sometimes, when I think of the vastness of the internets — that faith that nearly any piece of information I could ever want can be found behind some URL, some combination of letters, numbers, slashes, and tildes — I think of Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel” (available in Collected Fictions):
When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist — somewhere in some hexagon. The universe was justified; the universe suddenly became congruent with the unlimited width and breadth of humankind’s hope. At that period there was much talk of The Vindications — books of apologiœ and prophecies that would vindicate for all time the actions of every person in the universe and that held wondrous arcana for men’s futures. Thousands of greedy individuals abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed downstairs, upstairs, spurred by the vain desire to find their Vindication. These pilgrims squabbled in the narrow corridors, muttered dark imprecations, strangled one another on the divine staircases, threw deceiving volumes down ventilation shafts, were themselves hurled to their deaths by men of distant regions. Others went insane… The Vindications do exist (I have seen two of them, which refer to persons in the future, persons perhaps not imaginary), but those who went in quest of them failed to recall that the chance of a man’s finding his own Vindication, or some perfidious version of his own, can be calculated to zero.
Borges was obviously not a Googler.
(Short fiction in even shorter increments.)
The Island: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11
I do not know where the island went after it left our harbor. The next time I knew of its presence was many years later. I was sitting in my father’s old desk chair. It was a momentary vision — Caribbean waters, crescent moon, stars — and then the house’s radiators were singing again.
“That island?” Elizabeth asked. We were in bed. My parents’ old bed, in my parents’ old room, on the third floor. The hot water rushed through the pipes below us. “You’re just daydreaming about a nice island,” she told me, stroking my chest. “I think about nice islands all the time.”
It took some months for David Mallis’s wound to fall away to its resultant scar. I watched the process with silent fascination. That is what I thought of when Elizabeth told me to think of nice islands. David Mallis’s scar was crescent shaped, the same moon I saw over the island.
He lives in Florida now, David Mallis does. Our town is no place for him. Even the hotel, once a proud center of commerce, now sits almost decrepit. The wallpaper peels, and still Jimmy Cavins, the day manager, demands payment a week in advance. It is likely Florida, where David Mallis lives, though it might be Atlanta. Even though he never felt the island, I will find him. Enough time has passed. I have some time yet, and I will have a boat. [/END]
(Short fiction in even shorter increments.)
The Island: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11 “Stop that,” my father said one morning several days
after the occurrence of the island. He had shaved. “Take those down,” he instructed, pointing at charts he’d made. The maps remain, organized and intact, in the attic of the house. I am unable to consult them.
He died just after the New Year. With the trees barren, I could just see the water from the second floor windows. It was a muted gray little different from anything else in the landscape. The wind rattled the glass. I thought of the effort it would take to disassemble his office.
“Just what the hell is wrong with you?” he asked me, the night of the tantrum, the last night of the island.
“Me?” I said. I was taken aback.
“I asked you to get me a goddamn boat,” he told me.
“When?”
“Three weeks ago, for God’s sake.” My father had asked me to get him a boat three weeks previous, but I had taken it for dementia. I was ready to acquiesce to Elizabeth and my brother’s hypothesis. It was an opinion I held for many years. Its inaccurate truth formed the core belief of the household into which Lauren was born.
(Short fiction in even shorter increments.)
The Island: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11
The words David Mallis used to describe the sky over the island during the time it disappeared from the mainland’s view were twisted into numerous variations. “Blood red!” was one account. “Chalk black and starless,” another. I was not present for any of the interrogations that day. Elizabeth and I spent the afternoon pulling her trunks up Oak Street to the house on a red wagon. Between trips, we drank cold beers on the front porch, enjoying the chill.
That day’s utterances remained David Mallis’s final public thoughts on the matter until the day he moved from town, several years later, after the lobsters disappeared. “I knew what was coming,” he said on that occasion, as we watched the fire destroy the bulkhead. The water shimmered and distorted behind the heat. “After all, the whole sky looked like that,” he noted.
Elizabeth and I were on our final trip to the house when my father erupted. We were on the lawn. The floor lamp in his room flickered, as objects fluttered and fell in front of it. It was his worst tantrum yet. It would be three days before I could reorganize the maps for him. “It’s not you,” I promised Elizabeth, though I couldn’t be sure.
“I didn’t think it was,” she said.
(Short fiction in even shorter increments.)
The Island: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, , no. 11
The death of Andy Byers came as a result of his exposure to Carlos Dias. The two never spoke, Andy Byers’ sister Mimi told me, just sat facing one another under the pennants in Carlos Dias’s room. “He did not tell anybody what happened,” she said, “but Andy Byers knew.” It was said that they were lovers, but a lot is said.
David Mallis, for his part, knew the swiftness of rumor, and distributed his images like currency: jungle, storms, drums. In the end, though, it was clear that David Mallis did not know what he saw, either, or could not describe it. “Make it sound like air,” he told me in high school, as I crafted a letter to Suzanne Camer for him. “Like–” and he made the sound of an exhalation.
Harold Brown at the Ledger compiled David Mallis’s bits into a narrative. He printed it, two columns wide, on the front page. I read it aloud to my father. “This man is steeped in bullshit,” my father said, when the account reached the part about the attack. “Any man can see he does not know what he is talking about.”
“The island, though,” I protested. “It was there.”
“No,” my father replied, perhaps mishearing. “I was not there.”
(Short fiction in even shorter increments.)
The Island: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11
It wasn’t until the rain died down, Tuesday morning, that anybody realized David Mallis and Carlos Dias had returned. Arnold Laning had looked through binoculars from his upstairs window at the island, and noticed smoke rising from the beach. Arriving at the dock, he discovered David Mallis’s lobster boat tied in its usual spot.
Carlos Dias never told anybody what he saw. It was said that the transition from a tropical climate back to our own was too great. Three days later, he was dead. David Mallis’s wounds were more obvious: the deep cut on his forehead, burns on both elbows, and an even series of puncture marks across his upper back. Whenever he spoke of his time on the island, he never once mentioned the injuries.
Several years after my father died, Elizabeth and I had David Mallis and Suzanne Camer — briefly reconciled — over for dinner. “We woke up in the sun,” he said suddenly, admiring my father’s sketch of a strange bird that then hung in the kitchen (and which I took with me). “The woods — the animals, I mean — were just crying,” he said, sipping his Scotch.
I had found the sketch in a portfolio in my father’s bag, which he refused to unpack for a week after the island disappeared. “Took me a whole goddamn day to get everything in there, and fuck if you’re going to empty it now,” he declared. My father was rarely an angry man.
(Short fiction in even shorter increments.)
The Island: no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11
Pastor Johnson mentioned nothing of the island’s continued absence on Sunday morning. Over the next decade, as the town went into a decline, many blamed it on the breakdown of the church, which was — in turn — attributed to the Pastor’s failure to explain the island.
“It was a crack in the egg,” Elizabeth confided to me a few weeks before Lauren was born. “I didn’t want to see what was going to hatch.” I was not in church that day.
For much of the morning, I sat outside my father’s door. Behind it, the radio played mournful music at unforgiving volumes: old standards about moons, lovers, trees. Occasionally, I could hear him moving around. “Soon,” is all he would say when I knocked, if that.
Only Elizabeth was there when he emerged. “Nails,” he said as he walked by her on the way to the bathroom. “Tell that son-of-a-bitch to get nails. It’s time to board the windows.” The storm that rolled in that night beat the eastern wall with such force that shingles I’d painted in the spring aged decades by morning.
Monday, the island was dimly visible among the clouds and whitecaps. Late Sunday night, an hour before the rain began, David Mallis and Carlos Dias rowed into the dock. No one was there to greet them.
