Snuff:
1. (Trans. Verb) To extinguish by or as if by the use of a candlesnuffer. First used in 1527.
2. (Adj) Characterized by the sensationalistic depiction of violence; especially : featuring a real rather than a staged murder. First used in 1971.
3. (Adj.) Relating to hyper-reality. First used in 2015.
[1]
Tiny Buddha Barracuda 1
Thus spake he,
Maybe when the bible says
sickness and sorrow upon the unfaithful,
it's like a buddha spirit who says
how ugly the world is
for those who don’t seek.
[2]
Tiny Buddha Barracuda 2
And if God consigns unbelievers to flames of woe,
it only means the world makes itself fowl
if one does not learn to see
the beauty of (it) all.
[3]
deus
sive
natura
[4]
Jacaranda (Las Mercedes)
Gesture without motion.
[5]
Paralyzed force,
shade without color.
[6]
(Damn dude,
poor fellar. I knew him well…
[7]
He made me laugh a couple of times, and so on.
What a funny man. A fellow of…
But then again, the thought of him now makes me sick.
[8]
The man was central to the play.
He taught me the most excellent subjects.
Comedy, for example. He was neither good or bad at it. But still, I listened to what he had to say.
Just take the goddamn picture, would you. Just make it funny.
Make it like he would've done it. Just...just don't fucking burn it. Don’t fuck it up.)
(Asuncion, 2017)
[9]
(A. Macke) the Knife. Red Propaganda Poster.
(To be read along with a Soviet hymn):
“The (Chernobyl) explosion awoke an unbreakable solidarity even i had stop believing in:
Only a great country could have birth such men with unquestionable abnegation to their own people.
But before the evacuation trains arrived, people were already falling ill to the radiation.
By the thousands, people volunteered to help, knowing they might encounter their own death in doing so.
It was 1941 all over again.
The same lack of preparation,
the same devastating force,
the same courage.”
[10]
Roll over, Bach. Your eyes and your fat gut.
Ein Gefährte des unendlicher Spaß...unendlicher Spaß.
[11]
Buh rock portrait
...unendlicher Spaß.
[12]
Meiner selbst.
Unendlicher Spaß.
[13]
Caravaggio (Detail)
[14]
Rainy summer night on this blessed day, december 30th, 2016. The Eeeks release their long overdue first album in the contained rooftop of Buenavista. The bartender is late as a sea of tropical shirts promenade and occupy the space. Delightfully familiar faces.
“Pet City”, inasmuch as it can be written about, is an album about people tazzered by life, capriciously overwhelmed, captured in their own skins, their ages, their own selves, stunned by what in a vision of truth they could understand. It is a charming and terrifying vision, born of a tarring fact, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and horrifying: that the human condition is built upon unlimited contradictions and paradoxes, and that the pains of creation and destruction are based on instinct. It is no Tibetan mysticism, no psychedelic vision of the great cerulean afterlife, nor is it some Whitman song on the trivial nature of the transcendent. Rather the album boils down to the honest admission of a moment’s mindful knowledge of the present, to their capacity to recognise unrequited love, the capacity to be hurt and also inflict the same hurt, to create surf rock amid the stifling heat of Asuncion’s stagnant summer asphalt.
Surf rock in a place with no surf, English in a place where nobody speaks it. It is clear that the band’s dreamy riffs comes from daydreaming about distant places, revisiting over and over past lovers, the bittersweet feeling of being forlorn. The lyrics for Party Motel, for example, reveal vertiginous glimpse into the pangs of homosexual love in a manner so sweet that one is assured no green eyes could ever resist such a love song. Pet City, the album’s namesake track, is a song about the condition that facilitates their daydreaming: the ironic relationship between disenchantment and creativity. It is a tribute to the band’s self contained vision of Asuncion, a stale city, putrid, but nonetheless the stage where they put on the greatest surf rock show in town.
Much can be said about the band’s antics during their live shows, but unfortunately I am a wayward man of few words. What I can say for certain is that their performances are a reminder of their true brilliance. Their affinity towards all that is irreverent and capricious is concomitant to their zany sense of humor. Their idea is not new, in fact it is almost cliché, but that is the point: they hint to the idea that all this art, and pop, and bob, this swing, and all that jazz, is all just a joke and a blunder, just a capricious whim. Some of the best aesthetes of our time, from Andy Kauffman to David Foster Wallace, enticed their audiences just this way, by exteriorising and amplifying their hidden core of disenchantment which is projected into the dreamy fantasies we devour in very much the same way that our best jokes and our best journal entries and our best art are all scripted by our deepest fears and prejudices. That is my ultimate vision for them. That they are honest and fearless when it comes to making music, because they recognise and face themselves and thus withdraw the heaviness of existence, not with a bang, but a whim. This is where the Eeeks become, both musically and artistically. But this awareness of things is secondary to their performance and the album; a real swell time is had by all, and in the end there is liberation.
[15]
Bye-ku:
The path to becoming
(wholesome) treads forth two steps back one.
