He's a cat and a pirate. How can you not love him?

On Freedom

Freedom is simple; so simple, in fact, that it may be compared to the work of Lou Reed, which is canonical in the halls of noise music. You may spend a length of time trying to decipher the simplistic chord progression, the very skeletal structure of the songs; but in itself, each song is oh so simple.

In the last 48 hours I have slept a sum total of 4 hours, and eaten what in most cultures would pass off as warm-up for a real meal. Why? In the pursuit of freedom.

When a Thursday is over, I take a moment to reflect upon the week. And I see ahead of me the only breathing room I'll have, fleeting as it may be, for what will seem like an eternity when it comes. And the drive for freedom, a drive that we are not versed in, a drive we are not made to exercise, a drive we have embedded in us, lurches. To be hungry, young and foolish; to grab the bull by its colossal testicles.

But where has that left me? What freedom can I possibly salvage from these walls of poor, peeling paint. The only freedom has a proximity extending till my skin. And that is good enough. That is enough to make life amazing.

To not worship reason, to abandon and neglect, to be the dense, sporadic erst of bees-- random, flowing and killer, is to be that free. To simply misremember norm at will is to be that free.

48 hours later, my skin needs changing. Hello world. Good day to you.

I've been in the wind, for a while. But I'm also the person that will spew a million rhetoric than offer a single straight explanation. That's because I can never do without illusion and poetry. But in explanation, I've been absent because I had better things to do.
With better things gone life is gradually shifting back to its former disharmony. I believe it's time I start writing here again and preserve the little order my life has. I do not believe it is time yet to have a shave. This means that the time is somewhere in between, where the touch of things long gone linger and caress my fingertips and the high expectations, apprehensions, hopes for the next chapter beckons. But I am not ready for the next chapter yet.
For now I need to continue my stupor my crazed tear binge my loneliness. I need to remain in the footer. I think I'll blog soon. About music. Pretentious music.
I've been in the wind enjoying my lover and now I'm left with the company of John Zorn and Sun Ra; criticizing Roman Polanski and rediscovering SM Sultan.

The above picture was taken by my favourite photographer, Vera. (find more of her amazing work here: http://cupids-trick.deviantart.com/ )

The photograph itself is old; I'm revisiting it after a considerable length of time. Father's day went by a few days ago, and so many people were excited about it. I saw this wee little girl at the mall wearing a white t-shirt declaring her father number 1 in the world.

I indeed have always wanted to be number 1; but what could possibly mean more than being number 1 to your own daughter? There is no substitute for that kind of success and happiness. I've always wanted children but lately it's almost as if the entire world is conspiring into making me want it more.

It's out of the question now. I'm in university and I don't make enough money to support even myself. More importantly, one needs more than a 20 year old male to make a baby, but that's another issue. I guess it just won't happen for me anytime soon. And it's good, I'm sure I'm not ready no matter how ready I may feel.


A friend once told me that my children would fall over backwards trying to look up to me. Nothing ever sounds as nice as someone saying I'd make a good father. But I'll have to put the desire to put my children to bed and to take them to school and to make them lunch and to teach them world history on hold. I have to put it all on hold. Classes beckon. And once I'm done, work will beckon. It'll be years before I'm beckoned by an infantile shriek at a torturous hour.

To my unborn son,

Experiment with drugs; drink yourself to within an inch of death and back on a random Tuesday; try all the weird things in bed and film it. Swear often but defend your lover's honour with your fists and not your words.

Understand the value of having good work ethics and the importance of material things for happiness. Spend at least some part of your life swamped with so much work that you need therapy. Miss your therapy sessions. Self-prescribe often and tell yourself no one could possibly know your body better than you.

Be as self-destructive as society tells you you shouldn't be, and a destructive force for everyone around you. Treat no one any better than they deserve and dole out judgment as you see fit. Son, someday they'll read out your accomplishments at your funeral and it better include "Drank, snorted, worked, ate and fucked his way into a heart attack."

Your proud and loving father,

On love and struggle

Chekhov’s grave, encountered unexpectedly in a Moscow cemetery. The frost shines like the gleam of his damp pince-nez. - Anna Kamienska

The problem with Chekhov

if you must

was too much love.

He wrote his characters

with a love and kindness

uncharacteristic

of class struggle

and politics.

From the mortar of patronage,

from the serfs and bosses,

from the trade stench,

fie to live without religion, live without love

with revised slave morality

Chekhov was irrelevant.

There isn’t as much love.

Ian's infirmities as a man were absolved by his genius in our minds. But were they ever, for his wife? This is a man who got married before he was 20, intentionally had a child knowing he couldn't commit, suffered from clinical depression and made his small family suffer, cheated on his wife, lied about ending it once he was caught, told his wife 'But what does she have to do with us?' when asked about the woman, and eventually killed himself because the world was too much.
It's apparent that this world is not for people like Ian. I literally put the man up on a pedestal, as did thousands of people like me. But that wouldn't have changed anything for him, he was stuck in his own world. And that made me incompatible with the rest of the world. People who are stuck any which way are simply incapable of surviving. Ian hung himself. With all manners of prescribed drugs at his disposal, the man chose a painful way to go.
He watched a movie the night before. He talked with friends. Maybe he even called Genesis as he often did during sleepless nights, and sang Weeping to him. The next morning, his wife who was about to leave him, came into the living room to find him hanging.
As a man Ian Curtis was a lying bastard. An asshole who never understood why he was one in the first place. He hurt a lot of people. He hurt his own daughter. But he never enjoyed any of it. Throughout his life he tried to be normal. He tried to start a family. He tried to be a husband and a father. His music should have changed the world, but maybe the world got to him first. They were always at each others' throats.
There are thousands like Ian throughout popular history. An excerpt from Larkin's poem 'The Literary World' isn't so kind on Lord Tennyson.

Mrs Alfred Tennyson
Answered
begging letters
admiring letters
insulting letters
enquiring letters
business letters
and publishers' letters.
She also
looked after his clothes
saw to his food and drink
entertained visitors
protected him from gossip and criticism
And finally
(apart from running the household)
Brought up and educated the children.

While all this was going on
Mister Alfred Tennyson sat like a baby
Doing his poetic business.

I am not comparing Ian and Tennyson at all. I would never. But one sees the pattern after reading a fair bit about Tennyson's life. I'm sure we as fans will worship them for all the right reasons, one wrote great poetry and another made amazing music. That's all that should matter for us. The lovers of geniuses are simply unlucky.
Einstein, Time's man of the century, the first to postulate the theory of relativity, the one to convince FDR to build the atomic bomb, a man offered the chance to be the first president of Israel and considered the father of modern physics... married twice (once to his cousin), cheated on both of his wives with about 10 different women, and told his first wife to "expect neither intimacy nor fidelity." In his defense, he was honest. The fact that he had sex with his cousins, years and years younger than him, and even used his stepdaughter to deliver letters to ladies he wanted to have sex with changes little about the man in our eyes.
You have a musician, a poet and a scientist in this article, stripped of everything. You basically have three men who couldn't reconcile with the world.