Parable

Montgomery, child of Ishmael, native of Arizona, three stones weight and one-half score of age, throws a boomerang into the with a swift and hard thrust. The boomerang leaves his hand, travels upward and away, and curls around. Montgomery loses sight of the boomerang and thusly does not see it arch behind him, out of his field of vision. Suddenly, with a sharp pang, the boomerang hits him in the back of the head. He falls to the ground, touches his raw skull, and pulls his hand away. Blood runs down his neck. He, through furious tears, picks up the boomerang with his blood-stained hand and hurls it into the air and flees before the boomerang returns.



Years later, Montgomery, son of Ishmael, native of New York, eight stones weight and two and a half score, is walking down a busy sidewalk. His tie is vermilion; his suit pin-striped. Suddenly, he feels a sharp pain in the back of his head. He falters in his gate and falls to the ground. He hears a clatter. He touches his head and feels warm blood running down his neck. Through teary eyes he sees a boomerang lying idly on the sidewalk. He hurries away in nervous confusion.

A few blocks later he walks into a haberdashery and goes immediately to a trio of full length mirrors. The tailor smiles at him and then, seeing the look of worry in Montgomery's eyes, drops his smile. Montgomery turns his head to look at the wound reflection off the juxtaposed mirrors and he sees blood running down his neck and staining his suit. But he also sees much dried blood on his suit, faded and much older than the blood gushing from his new wound. He sees that he has been bleeding down the back of his neck and staining his suits for years. He sees that, from the time he was a child, he has never stopped bleeding.

How You Know You Need More Friends

I am so bored that, for want of anything else to do, I have been staring at the dust under my radiator for several minutes now, wondering how many different types of dust there are.

What's that in my ear?

It's an earwig. It's an ear of corn. It's an inner ear infection.

No, it's none of the above, it's just simply a list of which albums I've been listening to recently, along with some randomly strewn together words that somehow, by divine grammatical coincidence, coincide with a picture of the CD and the central themes of the music contained therein. Really, none of this was planned, it's all, like I said, random strings of words guided by divine coincidence to make some semblance of sense. Funny how entropy works that way.


The Standard: Albatross

Nobody knows who the Standard is. Do you? I didn't think so. Even the members of the Standard, until a few days ago when they all received checks from their label Yep Roc, didn't know they were in the band. It's funny how four guys who had no idea they were talented musicians could come up with such an amazing album. Emotional wailing, fine licks, clickety-clackity drums, synthesizers with more robo-drive than the Terminator and Teddy Ruxbin combined...this album is a must for anybody who claims to be interested in where music is headed. The Standard, unwittingly, has proved that rock-n-roll is not just about anger and drugs and sex, it's also about crying like you just ordered a slurpee and the only available flavor was sorrow-berry.
Rating: Truffle-quality. Weeping truffle.


Loose Fur: Born Again in the U.S.A.

For the title of this album simultaneously being an obvious shout-out to Bruce Springsteen and an attack on the religious right, it's interesting how there's no mentioning of either of these annoyances on any of the disc's ten tracks (though there are plenty of religious attacks, just not directly on crazy, Bible-thumping, blue-in-face street preachers). That's right, I said it. Bruce Sprinsgteen is annoying. And he can't sing. And he hasn't washed his blue jeans since the Streets of Philadelphia video.

When you get Jeff Tweed and Glen Kotche from Wilco and put them in a yellow submarine with Jim O'Rourke from Jim O'Rourke and, most recently, Sonic Youth, what comes out sounds like aural pablum but is really much deeper, deeper than Traci Lords' throat. So far this album is not quite as invigorating as their self-titled EP, but the whistle riff on The Ruling Class and the mathematics of Thou Shalt Wilt hav already left a (post)-impression on me.
Rating: Not quite on the level Lacan's Symbolic Order but equal to Foucault's "The Order of Things"


No Use for a Name: Keep Them Confused

As some punks age the holes in their face get stretched, their tattoos fade, their teeth fall out, and yet they don't shut up. They talk louder even though they have nothing left to say. Johnny Rotten, aka Johnny Lydon, aka Mr. Never-had-any-talent-to-begin-with is a perfect example of how some punks, and all wrinkly rock stars for that matter, should retire permanently, from work, life, from everything. Euthanize the rockers over 60 who think they're still sexy, icons. Icons, like bread, get moldy if left in the sun too long.

No Use for a Name have aged well. Their newest album Keep them Confused is, unlike their other albums, political. I think the main point here is social commentary, and while songs like Apparition and It's Tragic ("How can millions be so stupid...this country is not what you know.") do a great job describing the current Capitol Hill climate, the title of the album itself is the shrewdest sentiment: How does the Bush administration keep getting away with all the bullshit they pull? By never backing down and never stopping. Every time they get in trouble they out-do themselves with an even more outrageous stunt. (Transcription of Bush's inner monolgue: "If they think I fucked up with the war, wait until they see these prison photos. Then I tell the Americans I've been spying on them for years, and after that I'll have Dick shoot somebody. And before they know what hit 'em, I'll sell our ports to the Arabs! Their heads will be spinning like a carousel!") And instead of punishing the Bush administration for all this malfeasance, we just scratch our heads and say, "How do they keep getting away with everything?" Well, they keep getting away with it because we're too busy scratching out heads. So long as they keep us confused we'll never stop being stupefied. And until we wake up our own stupefaction will keep us too flustered to revolt.
Rating: Seven red, white and blue mohawks


What I'm Not Listening to

The Flaming Lips: At War With the Mystics

The Flaming Lips have apparently been spitting so much they put out the fire. And this new album, AWWTM, is a lot of spit and dribble. We're talking sleep-with-your-mouth-open, River Ganges drooling.

Apparently the members of the Flaming Lips forgot that they're a psychedelic band and just like you don't take political advice from the stark raving lunatic who wonders down Main Street mumbling to himself because he dropped 40 hits of acid in the '80s, nobody wants to hear America's favorite modern psychedelic band dropping notes about the president and Hollywood irony and abuses of global power. Hey Lips! We liked it better when you were singing about vaseline as a condiment and the futuristic robot wars. Stop being so realistic, it's depressing. You're making this a very, very bad trip.
Rating: Flaming pile of dog doo


Magic Head says: "When determining which candidate to cast your vote for, it's imperative to cogitate on the idiosyncratic differences of the individual party members rather than your simple and limited blanket ideological stereotypes. Gauge the algebraic strength of your vote on whether you believe each candidates' responses to polemic issues and the legislation they are likely to ratify will tilt the political scales in your favour not only during the incumbent's elected term, but also in the years that follow."

FAULT!

I've always forced myself to be athletic, and my both nervously alert, having moderate balance and a low center of gravity have allowed me to decent at a few sports without ever really being great. As the years pass, I become more and more comfortable in my body, and therefore more aware at what it can do. This means that I know there are some sports I can succeed at (billiards, soapbox derby, pie eating) while there are others I shouldn't even attempt (basketball, gladiator battles, hog wrastling).

There was a time when I considered myself less athletic than a quadriplegic in an iron lung. I blame this period of my life on milk and cheese. Growing up in Minnesota and Wisconsin, milk and cheese were my bread and butter. I may as well have slept on an aging pile of Gouda and bathed in pure, unhomogenized streams of 2%.

As an adolescent, I had a porcine belly and less endurance than a computer scientist in the company of a disrobed woman. During this time in my life, there were only a few things I dreaded: onions, mushrooms, and the bi-annual physical education assessment exam, which consisted of sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups and up-chucks, a.k.a. the mile run. A pack of students, with me at the very back, would run around a large field and when I finished, roughly 12 minutes after I'd started, I would be so out of breath, my lungs burning so badly, I would swear there was mustard gas in the air or that I had asthma. Forget that other students were unphased, I was convinced that a trick was being played on me. My pain may have been assuaged had someone ever taught me about "pacing." Instead, I would run full throttle for 30 yards, wonder why I was suddenly so winded, and walk for 60 yards. This processed looped until the run was over.

I later tried my hand at baseball and hockey with limited success. I was better at baseball than at hockey, but this is like saying I'm better at eating glass than I am at eating nails; I'm not really good at either one of them.

My biggest fault in baseball was that I had a weak swing and fancied myself a pitcher. Wanting to be a pitcher itself is not a shortcoming, but my only pitch was a fastball, right down the middle, knee-high. My pitches were what home run derby dreams are made of.

My fault in hockey though was bigger than both of my baseball faults combined: I could never master the art of stopping. I didn't have the strength in my legs to dig the double blades of my skates into the ice and send an impressive spray of ice shards everywhere. I remember during a parent-child hockey game my mother was the goalee, and as I skated toward her I successfully shot the puck into the net. And then, instead of stopping, I collided into her. I think I heard her kidneys pop and her liver crack and there might have been come collateral damage to her spleen. I would remorseful about causing my mother harm, but she's secretly been smoking cigarettes again and apparently enjoys having her inner organs damaged.

I would later master the hockey-stop on skis and spray snow all over groups of stagnant skiers, but as a preteen - pokey and weak - hockey-stopping was not for me. In terms of baseball, my saving grace was that I could throw the ball farther than most, which was a desirable skill for me to possess because the sooner I could get rid of the ball, the better I felt about the whole affair. Let me explain.

Coaches were always telling me, "Don't be afraid of the ball. If it hits you, it won't hurt for long." This never made sense to me, because I didn't want to get hit period!

But one time a baseball did hit me, and it hit me square in the nose. I was convinced, and somewhat impressed by the idea, that my nose had been broken. Even though the blood dripping down my chin made me feel emboldened, I was always wary of the ball after that, and my determination to get the ball away from me as fast as possible was only strengthened by a pint of blood I could never recover.

In high school I shaved about seven and a half minutes off my 12 minute mile. Track and cross country were where I shined. Or maybe the glimmer I made as a runner was just the sun reflecting off my chrome nipple ring. I wasn't a natural runner, but in track and cross country I made myself a competitor by putting my body through the ringer.

I enjoyed running because it's a sport without fear: no projectiles, no slashing sticks, no serial-killers in goalee masks who rise from the dead every Friday the 13th. It's a mental sport, and I was a mental person...er...an analytical person, so running seemed an appropriate match.

As a runner I grew lean and taut, and I made it to the state meet in both track and cross country every year I competed. My crowning moment was the complete inversion of the hated P.E. assessment exams of middle school. In 1999, I finished 10th in the mile at the State Meet with a time just under five minutes. I had to be carried off the field by my best friend and coach, my lungs burning the same way they had when I was a fat preteen with tube socks, an ALF lunchbox, and coke-bottle glasses. The difference between the two experiences was that at the state meet I didn't blame the burning in my lungs on toxins in the air, and neither did I curse my middle school gym teacher for making us run (editor's note: I always thought my P.E. teacher looked like an Oompa Loompa). At the state meet I relished the burn, I had earned it. It was the burn of victory.

My new sport combines some of the elements of sports I played in the past, and it seems that my because of all my failures in other sports I better the limits of my body, so I don't force it to do things I know it doesn't want to. I know I'm not the strongest hitter, so instead of walloping the ball, I aim it strategically, and I'm no longer afraid of getting hit. As an adult, my coaches' advice suddenly makes sense, I just had to grow up and suffer in different ways to understand why getting physically hurt is a preferable type of pain. It's preferable because its a transient pain. This is what my coaches had been trying to say, but lacked a level of sophistication and were never able to explain to somebody who'd never been heartbroken or poor or hungry or politically frustrated why physical pain was a fairly minor annoyance.

My new sport is like being trapped in a cardboard box with an angry wasp. It might make some claustrophobic, but I'm not one for phobias. It's a ball sport in an enclosed space, one in which the ball is rarely immobile. The permanent motion of the ball only increases the odds that you can, and will, get hit by it. In fact, I hit myself pretty regularly when my serves ricochet off the wall and come right back at me. But I laugh it off.

I've only been playing two weeks and already I've been hit in the face with another player's racquet, I've careened into the wall, jumped up against the glass, lost my footing, foibled and ended up on the ground. But the pain is not intimidating to me anymore because the rush from my sport - racquetball - drowns out the pain. And I rather have a few bruises from an enjoyable activity than a few bed sores from a life bereft of sports.

Departing Decibels

After a long night of subdued conversation and audible pleasantries, why do guests and hosts alike feel the need to raise their voices upon parting, as though saying goodbye required more volume than saying hello?

A boisterous goodbye echoes, reminding others that we were there and, in the case of forgotten keys and overcoats, we shall return.

The Vanity is in the Veins...Eating Them, That Is

Having been mostly raised in a remote Northern New Mexican town, red and green chile were to me what matzoh is to the Mossad or potatoes are to the little carrot-topped rascals frolicking through the clover-laden hills of Eryn. If New Mexicans did not already bleed red, we would bleed green and we would bleed proudly.

Green and red chile are fixtures in New Mexican cuisine. Just as diabetics need insulin and hypochondriacs need pity, New Mexicans need chile in a way that most behavioral psychologists would classify addiction.

Physiologically, capsaicin - the oily compound found in peppers that creates the sensation of warmth on one's tongue and inner cheeks - creates an identical neural response to being burned. Scientists describe it as such:

"Capsaicin, as a member of the vanilloid family, binds to a receptor called the vanilloid receptor subtype 1 (VR1). VR1 is an ion channel-type receptor and can also be stimulated with heat and physical abrasion, permits positively-charged ions (i.e. cations) to pass through the cell membrane and into the cell from outside when activated. The resulting 'depolarization' of the neuron stimulates it to signal the brain. By binding to the VR1 receptor, the capsaicin molecule produces the same effect that excessive heat or abrasive damage would cause, explaining why the spiciness of capsaicin is described as a burning sensation."

Translation: the feeling one experiences when biting into a jalapeno, the feeling that is perceived and referred to as "hot," is in fact the simulated effect of fire without having the realization of any of the consequences of fire. Capsaicin is amazing in its ability to trick our neurons into believing that scorching heat is actually being applied to our tongue, even though all that's really being applied is a waxy, oily necklace of carbons. "Why is this amazing?" you ask. Well, I'll tell you.

Capsaicin is amazing as a compound because I can think of no other food that has the power to simulate a neural response in the actual absence of the initiating mechanism. Have you ever eaten cheese and feared that your tongue was going to get frostbitten? Or have you taken a spoonful of yogurt and felt that your tongue were being cut open by razor blades? Did the milk that you had at breakfast, the milk that you know to be silky and smooth to the touch, feel coarse when you slurped it up? Your response to all of these questions, of course, is no.

In general, foods do not invoke the sensation of being harmed, and if they do we tend to avoid them. Thistles and burrs may be nutritious indeed, but the act of eating them tends to be unpleasant, so we generally avoid putting them in our mouths (unless stranded in the woods with no nourishing alternatives). But this is not the case with chiles.

In this sense mentioned above, the sensation of eating chile is almost synthetic because it creates a response that is not actual in the objective sense of the word; we are not being burned, it only feels, subjectively so, that we are being scorched. We feel as though we're being burned when we eat chiles, but in reality, we are not being burned at all: our tongue does not blister, we do not apply medicinal balms to the inside of our mouth, and neither does a scar form where the chile touched our skin. And it is the fact that we are not being burned, this encapsulated and secure sense of safety, that causes many people to love chile so; like rollercoasters, we get the intense sensation - the "rush" - without the threat of the dangers.

However, it should be noted that, as we have not all mastered the art of mind over matter, certain doses of capsaicin can fool our body into having adverse responses. Even though we know eating a jalapeno, while oftentimes unpleasant, will not really singe us or cause bodily harm, if the chile is hot enough our body will react with startling alarm. We will begin to sweat profusely. Our eyes will water. Our brow will stipple with sweat. Our nose will run. Maybe we will get the hiccups. Maybe the pain will become so unbearable that we experience a loss of hearing, sense of direction, sense of self, ability to speak, or suffer the impairment of other faculties we take for granted.

Today at the 18th Annual Fiery Foods Festival I met my match. Even though I'm a transplant to the Southern Rockies, I consider myself a New Mexican: I like my chocolate better with a little chile in it, I've sampled green chile beer, I can find applications for chile for all three meals of the day and on every strata of the food pyramid, and I frequently complain of food that reddens others' faces as being "just not hot enough." Black pepper is bland to me, that's how New Mexican I am.

In general, I was disappointed with the Scoville Heat Unit (the scientific measurement of the quantity of capsaicin per volume) of 90% of the products I sampled at the FFF: peach salsa, mango salsa, wasabi green tea dipping sauce, smoky BBQ rubs, cabernet sauvignon jelly, chocolate and red chile coated pecans - they all tasted great, but none of them made me feel like I'd committed an unforgivable sin and was being given an afterlife sneak-preview. Even the Screaming Monkey Hot Sauce, which burned like a brand at first, eventually wavered. Another hot sauce, Defcon, didn't live up to the macabre sound of the title it was bestowed.

My friend Marky - who accompanied me to the FFF - and I ran into a trio of acquaintances, all three of whom were fanning their mouths after trying something called Montezuma's Revenge. I quickly jumped at the chance to sample what it was that was making these Native New Mexicans pant like Iditarod sled dogs. After sampling Montezuma's Revenge Marky found it to be unbearable and she quickly left my side to buy the $6 margarita she had only minutes earlier balked at. I tolerated the pain, not finding it unpleasant enough to shell out money for an overpriced mixed drink.

Another sauce, which was called XXXXXX, put Screaming Monkey to shame, but it still didn't put me over the edge. My friend Adrian, as evidenced through his perspiring, had a different opinion of XXXXXX. When he took a dose of XXXXXX, which he boasted he'd tried before and found not to be terribly unpleasant, a strange thing happened: within seconds he looked as though he'd been thrown into cauldron. He grimaced, his eyes began to tear, his face turned a deep red, and his tongue, too busy battling the bonfire XXXXXX had induced, could no longer form coherent syllables, let alone string them together as a sentence.

Continuing on my quest to find the hottest substance known to man, I was directed to a man at a nearby booth who used a pair of tongs to handle his chips and salsa. This intrigued me, as it gave the salsa a certain sense of dire toxicity. I asked the salseur for the hottest thing he had. He blasted some on a chip and handed it to me. I made sure to chew the chip for a good twenty seconds so the hot sauce could spread evenly across my tongue. Then I swallowed. Waited. And again was disappointed. Though it was the hottest thing I'd tried all day, though my tongue felt as though an Indy car had peeled out on it, I was unsatisfied. My eyes weren't watering, my face wasn't red, I didn't have the hiccups, and neither was I seeing stars.

The trio of panting acquaintances from earlier passed by again, this time bragging that they'd found the hottest fare in all the fair. With my tongue still burning from the ghost of XXXXXX and the tong thrashing, I followed them dutifully to a kiosk and was told to ask for "the Boost." I have to admit, The Boost was an intimidating ration: one whole tortilla chip is lathered in hot sauce and then the wetted chip is doused liberally in a chile powder rub. Simply for trying The Boost you're awarded a sticker in order to boast your feat. However, whether or not samplers of the notorious nosh survive to tell their friends about their XXXXXX-ploits was something I had yet to determine.

I again chewed the chip thoroughly and then swallowed. The Boost was hot, but I refused water and alcohol from friends who were obviously expecting me to lose my cool at any minute. It wasn't so much the pain in my mouth that bothered me after trying as the sense of dizziness and horrific stomach ache that followed. After some ice cream, lots of lemon-faced expressions, and twenty minutes in an air conditioned car, I finally felt normal again.

But I had done it. I'd taken a big bite right out of hell and though I won't put on airs and say I was unphased by XXXXXX, The Boost, or the litany of other conflagrating condiments I sampled, I will say that maybe capsaicin can lick my tongue, but I can kick its ass.