Saturday, September 26, 2009

STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING

Do yourself a favor and navigate over to the Beach Fossils page and listen to their new song "Sometimes."

I am not very good (STILL) at the internet so I don't know how to take the song from myspace and put on here.

But, I can make it a little easier for ya. Just click the words below and select "Sometimes" and you can hear what is like the best song I have heard in two days.

KILLER JAM








Brown County, Indiana.
You might know the view. Right off SR-47, just before Nashville.


I thought I would miss the fall. There is nothing like a midwestern fall. And while I miss those leaves, the air here has that same autumn crispness that brings blush in a nighttime bike ride, a slight tight chill in the lungs.

Covet it, wherever you are.

Monday, September 21, 2009

creature features



I think it is weird that my first clear thought after becoming stoked on this picture was "I want to have a baby."
Which I don't. At all. Even as I was thinking it I knew that it wasn't true. And when the thing that makes me want to have a baby is photograph of an eroticized pregnant freak with a skeleton mask on in a hippie lake, it makes it less about my desires and more of a sign that under no circumstances should that happen. Ever.



photo via the very very cool Acid Sweat Lodge.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

The Symbolical Head





Phrenology is my favorite quack science. Brains mapped and personalities felt as physical bumps. Heads and persons laid bare.

Austrian physician Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) invented 'craniology' which became 'organology' which was renamed by Johann Christoph Spurzheim as "PHRENOLOGY." Essentially, phrenology assumes that different traits and functions are located in different parts of the brain. Because the distribution of the features across the brain are so regular, they can be mapped on models and conversely, read on actual human heads.

Four things should be considered true according to Gall,as outlined in The Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General, and of the Brain in Particular
1. Human moral and intellectual faculties are innate;
2. their function depends on organic structures;
3. the brain is the organ of “all faculties, of all tendencies, of all feelings”;
4. “the brain is composed of as many organs as there are faculties, tendencies, and feelings.” (quoted in Samuel H. Greenblatt, “Phrenology in the Science and Culture of the 19th Century” Neurosurgery, 37:4 (1995) 790-805.)

While it may no longer be quite scientific to treat the shape of the cranium as the cause of behavior, feeling, and temperament, phrenologists were some of the first to declare that the mind was located entirely in the brain, now a scientific given. They also suggested a fragmented model where different areas of the brain were responsible for certain tasks or sensations -a simplified, but not inaccurate understanding according to modern neuroscience.


So here I am eating some trader joe O's this morning, reading about phrenology when I noticed something about the chart...



Besides the demanding directive to "know thyself," under the right eye of the model, there is the word "language" written in the well of the socket. It is precisely where I have charcoal gray scars from running into a copcar going fullspeed on my bicycle on mushrooms.

See?




What does it mean that I have blackened scars on the exact portion of my face that corresponds directly to my strength, my medium and mode? Is it as simple as saying that the mangled region is the cause of my anxieties about writing? I was fascinated by language long before the accident. My obsession with words and their function is as old as those large dark circles under my eyes. What change can a tear in the most precious phenological nerve cause? Is it causal or a facial manifestation of a preexisting tension? I've already gotten over the melodramatic allusion of having a black facial scar but now this?? Phrenology and scars both carry the weight of being irreversible.


Where is Orson Squire Fowler when I need him?

Probably in some heaven of octagonal building somewhere or perhaps in his Golgotha of Gothem? He and Henry Ward Beecher ran phrenology offices, examination room and a museum known as “the Golgatha of Gothem” known for its massive display of over 1000 human and animal skulls, and casts from the heads of “the most distinguished men that ever lived” out of a building on 27 E. 21st St in New York.

Old Orson could probably answer a lot of my questions right now. Just check out his fantastic architectural plans for the Octagonal house.



He wanted to build in globular or cycldrical forms as he saw in nature, but saw the costs of building as too high. Octagons were better than squares, it seems. They are incredibly efficient structures. Easy and cheap to heat and cool, as they have less surface area.

And this one was out in Hayward until it was torn down for a highway annex.




A utopian model taken up by Southern grandeur, in Natchez, Mississippi.

Plus he was a vegetarian and advocated for health reform.




Can I get a head massage and a diagnosis please?

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

life choices

I am going to move to Ukiah so I can live in this house.



It was built by this man, Sunray Kelly.


“My ideal is to try to help people reconnect to nature through my architecture.” -s.k.

Ukiah is also home to the International Latitude Observatory. While it looks like a nosy neighbor's ideal house, this slitted structure is apparently to study the hypothetical changes in latitude.





Aren't they just imaginary lines anyway? Could they change without our willing redrawing of them?

I guess I could ponder it over my morning coffee at Ellie's Mutt Hut and Vegetarian, which would be my local diner.

Ukiah seems like a drier, trashier Mendocino with a drastically wide range of weird architecture, which I think I could get into. And, according to Mother Earth News, more than half of Ukiah's electricity comes from renewable resources.

Plus, when I was google searching it, all these ads for "marijuana lawyers" came up. I wonder if Amber will become a weed lawyer; more I wonder if you can pay weed lawyers in weed.