Friday, February 16, 2007






Quoth Ms. Ciccone:


"I want to be like Gandhi and Martin Luther King and John Lennon -- but I want to stay alive."



Wow, Madonna is so inspirational. Can’t wait for the day they tear down that silly Gandhi statue by the zoo in Waikiki and put up one of her dancing on stage in that Vision Quest movie, hopefully in the lucky star outfit with torn up fishets, and then with that wink in her eye, when you know her shakra is so true, and as she waxes in monosyllabic britishistic elegance, now that’s honesty, that’s just, wow, the jenny say kwah of all existence. And fuck John Lennon, what about Paul’s one-legged ex wife? Yet another pinnacle of the outward horizons of humanity, right up there with Mr. Zsa Zsa. She could swing that plastic leg around and take out some non believers. We need to expose the real enemy, all those who would attempt to utilize logic, round em up, and why not, like Larry David said, get the hairpiece wearers in there too while we’re at it. Can’t be too careful.



Thursday, February 15, 2007


I don’t think I’ve linked it here before (I know I have at least once at clipper), but Tightwad Hill is just an unbelievably good cal bear sports blog. This guy’s like an Oski Brittanica, and I’ve been reading him off & on for a while, but it was this post, about a random college basketball game from thirty years ago, between cal & Oregon, that ended up becoming the longest pac10 game ever (5 overtimes). Just the detail, the obvious love, the knowledge; the essence of sports, I really believe, is in the transcendent moments in the seemingly mundane. The true moments lie not just in the championships, the playoffs, the tournaments, but also, and sometimes with so much more truth, in the Thursday night games that aren’t on television, that are sparsely attended, that don’t seem before tip off to mean anything, therein can appear moments, that rise above all the things like records, stats, and banners, therein can flourish moments in which athletes battle each other, fans scream, the whole building feels they are suddenly a part of something that was wholely unexpected. When two teams that have had otherwise not amazingly remarkable years combine to create something that is bigger than all the individuals on the floor combined, when everyone walks out thinking “damn,” when you have that feeling of “I was there for that,” yet no one that was on the floor will be someone you’ll see on the cover of sport illustrated (though one of the ducks in that game went on to a nice pro career). Yup, the apparently inconsequential, that’s where the manja is. Now just don’t ask me what manja is. And no, Randy Duck (pictured) was not involved, way ahead of his time, but you know, Duck, Quack, Oregon, and Randy, you know, like weren’t those ducks randy? No? well, that’s ok. It’s ok. Really. My era, my joke, even though at the time can’t remember it existing anyway. I’ll be in my room. Gratzi.



My daughter lies in her crib, not wanting to sleep. Well actually, she lies down in her crib, I guess, grammatically correctly? But she doesn’t lie down, she lies back and throws her legs up and grabs them and coos and oohs and decides it’s not sleepy time, it’s wakey time, even though it’s 1:30 in the morning. And strange sounds are coming from somewhere in the house or out. Not sure which. And I turned on this computer to try and type down something artistic or meaningful, in honor of the Bukowski documentary I was watching tonite, and in general beatude of the written form and my wherewithal as to my theoretical place in its history, and, sigh, that sound.

Ok, it’s out of the house. It’s next door. A phone, from the sounds of it, that is ringing perpetually. No one to answer it, no one on the calling end that is willing to give up. Maybe a computer calling a computer? The machines call each other now, and they don’t give a shit if they get an answer or not. It’s just a statistic to them, something to register in their mainframes. A small piece of codexed information to process and utilize for some other function.

Well, it seems that my daughter has, well, I was going to say fallen asleep, but now I hear her clapping. Love that sound. Can’t get enough of it. Can’t get enough of being a father, the most incredible amazing thing in the world. I won’t say to not let anyone tell you different, but that’s just my experience. I’ve learned as the world spins that my viewpoint is so often radically different from that of the man on the street as well as the woman on the rooftop. All three of us are at a place at a time and with some sort of function, even if that function is to do nothing at all. A purpose of holding that place, that spot, at that moment, in order so that something that should not have occurred there and then will thereby be prevented.



I was pondering art. Why we make it, why we view it, what it is. Literature is art, is a magazine art, any magazine? Is a basketball game, whether we play in it or view it, art? Football? Hockey? Badminton? There has to be a resounding yes to this question, in my mind, because the body in motion, whether hitting a ball with a racket or making love to an another individual (or making simple whoopee with mindless automotan efficiency) is a tool of art, an expression of something, even, or maybe, especially, if the artist has no idea what that something is. Why do writers write, why do players play, and don’t just say for money, although that’s part of it. The true artists, obviously (or maybe not so) cannot be just motivated by money. But, hmmm, pistol pete maravich, from what I have read, was mainly motivated in his quest to be the first basketball million dollar man, and by all accounts he was the most accomplished artist with a basketball, well, ever.

There is money to be made in art, but there is no art in making money. But that’s too simple, there’s art in everything, and at this point I have to stop using the word “art” because I’ve taken away its power. I’ve taken away the influence of an idea of creating things, movements, images, what have you, regardless of the medium, for the sake of its simple beauty, or its lack of beauty, or the fact that it is interesting, or so resoundingly boring that it becomes fascinating in its resounding rejection of what society tells us is appealing. In any event, it’s something that people strive for, across the globe every day, to make something that no one has made, to affect people, to reach into people’s hearts and minds and present the world in a way that has not been achieved, or has been achieved but not to the degree and proficiency and craftsmanship of what is being portrayed by the perpetrator of said endeavor. It is the sum and disparate pieces of our existence, our main motivation, well, one of the major ones, love and lust and fear and anger and hatred and all the myriad emotions playing a major part, but only the expression of these emotions in concrete symbiologies and representations that are possibly entirely unsymbolistic, only the evidence of what we put forward, and can thereby become something totally new, inspiring in us thoughts and feelings that we never knew were there, this distillatory of our emotions into entirely new entities, that is the core, the essence, the juice, the overlying principle, the thing that keeps us going when it would be so easy to sit in our easy chairs and turn off the brain and turn up the static of the world, but no, we absorb it and make something new. Sometimes. And other times we sit and let it soak our bloody bones and infect our eardrums, saturate ourselves with its soiled essence with no regard to how we can contribute to the airwaves of the planet earth. And other times, like this, we sit, half asleep, in front of a keyboard, and pound away on the keys trying to vainly find some form, function, facility, by which to say, ok, yep, this is why, this is where, this is something, I have created something, and then it’s gone, like a leaf blowing through the wind of a loud machine carried by a man wrapped in layers of shoufas for protection from his own scattering of the city’s garbage into new piles and arrangements, and the cycle goes on, unrelenting and unwitting.

And then the power mongers of the world wake up from their short naps and laugh at me in lighthearted yet mildly disdainful disgust, my naivete both uplifting their spirits and sharpening their fangs.





Wednesday, February 14, 2007


Batman and robin were swinging around the city, taking in the scene. Suddenly they saw the jokermobile rambling down main street. Batman was like “the fuck?” and so they swung down and jumped on top of the roof of the aptly named auto and started banging their fists against it, but to no avail, cuz it’s metal. The joker, meanwhile, was inside cackling with glee at these two dipshits and their idiotic ways & wares. “hey you fucks, this is a car made of metal, you dig? Who you think you are, superman and captain marvel? Deusche bags.” And his pronunciation, as well as the spelling, was wrong, and then he turned a really tight corner at like 90 miles an hour, and batman & robin were flinged off of the top of the car and into this cement wall of a really seedy liquor store and they got totally smashed. (not in the drunken way, but as in their bones became broken and in some parts came through their skin.) They then were taken to an experimental medical laboratory and given new plastic hearts and noses and I’m pretty sure it worked out in the end; they even threw in some Metamucil injections for Aunt Harriet. Hello, goodbye, etc.



Monday, February 12, 2007




Sometimes I get stuck between wanting this space to be an out & out basketball blog, and then wanting it to be an out & out whatever blog and then an in & in comic book blog and then over & over a white spotted owl anthology blog and then I remember jesu christe, who gives half a log, and then I querize myself, oh yeah, I do, and then I wonder why in the name of marmaduke would I ever do something so inanely silly (care how this here espacio is categorized) and then my mind starts like doing the antithesis of melting and I cognizate, wait, bloggelagio is like big beeswax now, da biz, and people are making dinero on cognizating on all kinds of topics, but you have to be specific, you have to limit yourself to one area, to one thing, you have to concentrate Daniel san, and then I cognizate, like, but fuck it, who gives a crud, I’m not a good enuff writer (ok, yeah I am, or maybe I’m not, it’s not a matter of that, really) to actually make a living blapping blogs (posts, sigh) on the clippers, or on the nature of batman versus thanagarian warrior mentality, not that I couldn’t, but I just wouldn’t, never nunca, I mean, I could and would for like one or two days, and then suddenly I’d be on to something else, like the airspeed of an unladen swallow, and that’s good, that’s something that needs to be done, and no one taking in my viewage points is something that needs to be sacrificed for the good of the herd, the herd being all the various nodules of my brain that zap and zip and shoot ray beams of sunlight at one another just to keep the whole hemisphere alive and baking. Now that’s science, even though it’s not, and the importance lying therein is that it continues and it exists and me and this inebriated widower named spockstein in Saskatchewan read it every day and twice on Sunday, meaning it’s like peanut better for your soul, well, not your soul, your heart, ok, not really your heart, your brain, but not, actually your medulla oblongata, just don’t tell anyone. Ok.