The Third and a Haircut

Just because you're nobody, it doesn't mean that you're no good.
Just because there's a reason, it doesn't mean it's understood.
It doesn't make it alright. It doesn't make it alright.
It's the worst excuse in the world, and it doesn't make it alright.

-The Specials

So when one of my students found out about my grandmother passing, she said

"Professor Michael! First the car crash, and now your grandma...you know bad things happen in threes...watch out!"

And I put my hand over my head like something was going to drop on me. Got a chuckle from the kiddos. But secretly I'm thinking, gosh...doesn't she know that a superstitous Sicilian catholic ...IS GOING TO GET FREAKED OUT.

Something did fall on my head. The third bad thing was just an acceptance of a kind of distance between two people who have been quite close, on various important levels, at various junctures...for a nice bit of time. It wasn't the deafening roar of steel bending, or the deafening silence of a six year old contemplating death for the first time whilst holding your hand. It wasn't like the first two. It was simply the ending of a musical refrain whose resolution pales in comparison to the beauty of its finest flourishes. Friendship though, is resilient, and resurrection, a divine aspect of Love. So I go into winter with my chin up...but with the top button of my coat fastened.

My hair is long. I like it when it gets a little Bringing It All Back Home...But I need to buzz it. Buzzing it always helps me simplify, re-focus. Like a monk.

Actually its ironic, because when I first went 'suede', I was at a really low point, the first of two valleys I crawled into in my twenties, a little kid flirting with violence and fascism...playing with its aesthetic power, the discipline and wholeness it can seem to enforce on a weak soul. It was brief, but I look back upon it with bewildering shame. I don't mean to overstate it, I was merely playing on the sidelines of a few troubled skinhead souls in a shit-hole of a Long Island town for half a year. But I do remember in my neutral way, having a kind of asinine admiration for there ignorance and brutality. '17 Berlin' was sort of me accepting my complicity...by just throwing in with them at all...but also recognizing that 'desire' it's various forms was as dangerous as it was compelling. It's a song without a real thesis. Me just struggling to reconcile 'love' with 'violence'....something I would do in a much wiser way years later with 'burning hearts'.

So now when I shave my head a bit, its with a humbleness, a nod towards a discipline of the spirit. I do try to retain a kind of working-class pride and courage from the earnest, leftist skins, suedes and punks I met later on, when I would wander around NYC, going from record shop to reggae show in my parka that smelt like the fisherman who owned it before me. A part of me will always be with them, in a perpetual meloncholia of the 1970s, where nothing seems possible. We haven't come that far...but if I'm going to fight now, it will be only for love & justice.

Putting my boots on,
Michael Peter

Living Ends

No one I think is in my tree, I mean it must be high or low. That is you can't you know tune in but it's all right, that is I think it's not too bad.
-Strawberry Fields Forever

Some years are just harder than others. The transformative effect of said challenges upon one's spirit is rarely understood until a small ocean of time has passed. I have always had a typically catholic superstition about this year, as I would be age that Christ was when he died. My superstition was not that I too would die (though I gave it a shot with the accident last month), but rather that it would be a time of change, of endings and beginnings and renewal. I think in the end it will have been. But at this moment I am just a bit weary and sad.

My grandmother passed away last week (please don't feel the need to comment your condolencesces, its understood) and I trekked back across that grey highway to Long Island for the wake and service. Without writing too much about a situation which is obviously quite private, I do want to say that she was a special woman. At times, the one person in the family who didn't seem see my wandering troubled sojourn to adulthood as a mystifying disappointment. When Andrea and I split after a decade of being together, she was a real calming, wise influence. So if I may be a bit 'grown up' and boring, may I respectfully suggest that you dear reader...take a moment or two soon to connect and share something with the elders in your life who care for you. The importance of said connection has a difficult time penetrating our adolescences (or our artificially prolonged adolescences), but it is profoundly important. The fact that I could write and read a eulogy for her, made me prouder of my gifts than the writing of any song has.

So restarting one's bohemian life back in New York after and emotional week back in the homeland is difficult, and I would have no adjustment time since I had a birthday party to attend Saturday night for my dear friend Jennifer (seen in a cameo carrying a dog and giving me a smooch in the 'happiest days' video) which centered around a bit of risque burlesque at a show called 'Le Scandall'. So whether or not I was ready for barely concealed nipples, barely concealed nipples was what I got.

The show was actually quite entertaining, with old fashion burlesque girls and contortionists and magicians Here's a photo of the lovely Jennifer sitting in my lap in an innocent fashion.

The other interesting thing I saw was one of those mainstreamTV news magazine shows about Mark David Chapman, the man (boy) who killed John Lennon. Returning to superstition, I've also always had a weird connection to this story. First because like Chapman, Lennon was an important figure in the young Michael's artistic development; from sniffing glue while listening to Black Sabbath as 13 year old...to using glue to make collages of pictures of The Beatles as a 14 year old (the fact that one of the commentors to this diary is a deeply intelligent 14 year old girl really makes me smile, since at fourteen I was barely able to tie my shoes). Lennon was a really important transitional artist for me, and I still enjoy many of his songs. The superstition is also because he was killed on December 8, and I was born on December 9...though not of the same year. Anyway I am rambling a bit. Chapman is a really interesting and deeply pathetic figure, who I have trouble condemning as deeply as I'd like to because much of his adolescent narcissism...I can sadly relate to having suffered. It was likely the influence of a kind of mild schitzophrenia which allowed him to complete his 'masterpiece'...as opposed to I...who thank the Lord....left it unfinished.

Chapman was obsessed with Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye just as I was for a period, carrying it around like a crimson bible. He saw in the newly 'metropolitan' Lennon of 1980 a phony figure who had sold out the ideals of his youth. When in the grips of this sort of 'young idea', all growing up is a sell out.

A kid who tells on another kid, is a dead kid -Huggy bear

On the night table of the hotel room he left behind to murder John Lennon, he set up an altar of images and then opened up a bible to the Gospel of John, and wrote "Lennon" by hand after the word John. That sent a chill down my spine, as that was the same sort of dark, jarring, creative gesture I marked my universe up with as a teenager. Each action was a kind of insecure act of pollution. Sending a kind of black smoke of 'self' into the space that surrounds you, so you can stare at your own darkness, and not see the beauty of the universe. Narcissus at least had a clear blue pool, but we, in the grips of modernity have only this smoke.

Chapman wanted to become art, and for us all to choke and tremble in that smoke. I don't think he has ever come to understand that creativity in its divine nature Illuminates. It took me sooo long to understand that. And I almost murdered all that was good in me, before I did. But I am here, and alive, and consoled. Lennon is dead, and Chapman was never really alive. But we're alive.

That's why I don't fear this year, despite all it has taken from me. That absence will be filled with something like light.

Shine on,
Michael

Darkness at noon

In my head you are suffering...

-"A miracle" The Hidden Cameras

I am feeling better incrementally, day by day, and am more or less ready to resume leaving the house twice a week in the evenings and drinking two Newcastles with various drifters, low-lifes, and editorial assistants.

It was scary having these dizzy spells every evening. It makes you realize just how much of our lives depend on a certain amount of health and vitality. You feel all the more grateful for having it. When I think about just how hard it was to regain my equilibrium after my accident, my thoughts turn the 19 year olds returning from Iraq. If they are lucky enough to return at all, or return with all their limbs, what shape are their nerves in after watching and hearing and feeling bombs go off all around them for two years? It's a brutal world, and has been...I suppose since the beginning.

So I watched the following films in convalescence:

I Heart Huckabees: Enjoyed it a decent amount, but really enjoyed the directors commentary! Kind of like taking a refresher philosophy course. The two pretty people were better actors than I expected. Painted in slightly bold strokes, but I mean how can one not appreciate a rare Hollywood movie concerning with the meaning of things, and our connections to each other.

The Brown Bunny: Each individual who admits to watching this film must deal with the paranoia that the person he tells will immediately visualize him leering and foaming at Chloe Sevigny's famous bj scene. Yet I soldier on. I thought Vincent Gallo's Buffalo 66 was a special little movie, and kept an open mind about this one, despite Gallo's strange smug championing of right-wing politicians. The movie does have about 14 beautiful minutes of 'on the road' footage with Gordon Lightfoot playing. The rest is kind of The Sixth Senseless. But having said that, he has made a really really depressing movie, and the 17 year old nihilistic goth in me almost admires him for it. Either the best student film ever made, or the worst piece of cinema.

Batman Begins: Ok, after the, ahem, Brown Bunny I was ready for a popcorn flick. This was a fair choice. Nothing amazing, or truly dark about it...but for this old comic book fan, it managed to be remotely satisfying in parts. Mainly though I always feel ripped off after one of these blockbusters which just aren't very good. I'll exclude (for the most part) The Lord of The Rings from that...

Last Days: The Van Zant pic about the last days of Kurt Cobain. I had a friend tell me she needed all her will not to fall asleep when she saw it the darkness of the Sunshine Theatre in NYC. But at home while eating some pasta carbonara alla Grazia...I found it really beautiful and opiate-like...which was obviously appropriate considering the subject. Barely any dialogue, a lot of blue early morning wandering. Not a classic, but well worth watching. Bressonian in it's sparse shots and quietness.

Au Hasard Balthazar: after Van Zant's mildly Bressonian pleasure....I finally got around to buying the much discussed but seldom screened Bresson masterpiece Au Hasard Balthazar which has just been released on DVD. After finally seeing it myself...I can honestly say...it may be the most affecting, efficient, and transcendent work of cinema ever made. I can't even describe it, but to say its a movie starring a donkey. It functions both as a deeply affecting work of Christian allegory, and a probing existential analysis of man's distance from love. It is a reservoir of meaning and feeling, and it gives to you based on what of your soul you bring to it.

After all this I made the mistake of finally watching the criterion dvd for Hiroshima Mon Amour which a friend had gotten me last year. I haven't watched the movie since I rented it on Long Island 5 years ago while living with Andrea, and wrote Burning Hearts shortly after. Sigh. Tears. Sigh. Toblerone.

But it gave me an idea for an art/memory project called 'The Confrontations' which I will talk more about soon. I promise.

What does it say about me that these are the images a friend sends to cheer me up while I'm recovering?

Of course this is the friend...so what else should I expect?

Thank you Per! Thanks everyone for wishing me well after my accident. More from me soon.

xo

Mick Grace

Jayne Mansfield's third cousin twice removed

Shadow that stood by the side of the road, always reminds me of you
- "Komakino" Joy Division

So I am afraid to report that I've been suffering a bit over the last week with some of the delayed effects of my car crash. A bit of dizziness, and weakness and overall malaise. And while the dizziness may explain my treatise on Prussian Blue...i've produced little else, and feel quite down...which is a predictable result when one feels as though his flesh is not currently suitable for his spirit. I have rented a bunch of movies in my state of convelescence...and I'll give you some recommendations when I'm feeling a bit better.

-Michael

Golem's gold

One minute she says, she's gone to get the cat in. The next thing I know, she's mumbling in Latin. She cut the stars out of the sky and baked them in a pie. That's how I know...she's got a new spell. She stole the scene and scenery, the script and the machinery.
That's how I know she's got a new spell.

-Billy Bragg


So thanks for indulging my 'woe is me moment'...as the days pass I feel better and better about what we accomplished with My Favorite, and how we accomplished it. And even more importantly I am feeling inspired and passionate about making more music for the right reasons...and things are progressing well with our new incarnation...but I don't want to tease until there is more to report.

Now I certainly did not intent for this journal to become a weekly survey of sensationalist Daily News articles...but this following bit on the pop stylings of Prussian Blue requires a bit of contemplation, especially with the Anti-Bush protest that happened yesterday. (www.worldcantwait.com)


Pop twerps from heil can't carry tune

By TRACY CONNORDAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Are these the new faces of Hitler youth?
Thirteen-year-old twins with braces and blond hair who call themselves Prussian Blue are making a name for themselves with white-power anthems about Nazis.
Lynx and Lamb Gaede's songs are painful to listen to - and not just because the girls are off-key.
They praise Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy; William Pierce, who wrote the book that inspired the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and Robert Matthews, a white supremacist who was killed in a shootout with cops in 1984. They make snide comments about blacks.
They count former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke among their fans, perform at white supremacy rallies and sport T-shirts with a smiley face tweaked to look like Hitler's.
And it's not just an act.
The girls are the daughters of notorious white separatist April Gaede. At home, they play a video game titled "Ethnic Cleansing" and refer to minorities as "muds."
Neither flinched when asked about Hitler in a recent interview on ABC's "Primetime Live."
"I think he wanted to preserve his race," Lamb said admiringly.
Quizzed about Hitler's henchmen killing 6 million Jews, Lynx called the number "an exaggeration."
"I hardly believe there were even that many Jews alive back then," she said.
With their innocent-looking freckled faces and matching tartan miniskirts, the Gaede girls have become the poster children for hatemongers.
But groups that monitor white nationalist groups aren't concerned.
"If they weren't so terrible musically, they would probably be more dangerous," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. "Not to dis the poor little girls, but they can't play their instruments and they can't carry a tune."
The real villain, Potok said, is stage-mom-from-hell April Gaede, an activist in the National Vanguard, who acknowledges she's taught the twins everything they preach.
"If we were Christians, they would be maybe singing Christian rock songs," she said. "But we're not. We're white nationalists ... and I share that part of my life with my children."
Edgar Steele, a spokesman for the twins, said, "They don't sing about hatred. What they sing about is white racial pride. After this blows over, they aim to pick up right where they left off. These are 13-year-old girls who are twins and cute as buttons," Steele said. "They've got a career ahead of them."
The twins were surprised but undeterred by the furor, he added.
Yet they've stopped giving interviews because they didn't like how they were portrayed on ABC. And they are keeping a low profile in their hometown of Bakersfield, Calif., Steele said, because of threats. Originally published on October 30, 2005

So the appearance of Prussian Blue seems somehow inevitable, yet it still shocked me. But I suppose it won't next time. The right-wing fundamentalist preacher whose cable access program I watch from time to time (with a mixture of disgust and fascination) says Satan works through 'gradualism.' That is to say that he looks to slowly erode our sense of right and wrong through seemingly innocuous or even ridiculous gestures which prime the pump for real evil. Now this cable access preacher (whose attire could best be described as a futuristic Klansmen's boxing robe) uses this concept as justification for boycotting Will & Grace, (which would ruin my early evening suppers infront of the TV) but I can't help but at least be reminded of it when I see something like PB.

I spent a good portion of my 20s studying semiotic theory for beginners, as part of my graduate degree in art. You trace the way various forms of communication signify meaning, from language to advertising to painting, and the interplay between them. It's the study of signs. Its dense, but interesting stuff. Plus it's written by a lot of French guys, which only makes it cooler.

For last few years I've been more involved with seeking meaning in an understanding of faith, and metaphysics. From people as "McSpiritual" as Wayne Dyer, to the work of Joseph Cambell, there is a lot explore in spiritual semiotics and myth.

The real strength came however for me, in recognizing a kind of sacred "significance" and it's immutable covenant with the seekers. To have it go from concept, to something that moves the whole of your being, brings the universe into focus in a new, beautiful and indeed terrifying way. And with that you begin to understand that although meaning in art and media and in fact all human discourse is an unstable construct of contextual relativity, Goodness is a stable intuition of an individuals spirit. And so I go a' slogging through the wilderness of signs towards my Signifier.

So what does this have to do with Prussian Blue?

Well there was just something in this article & pictures which seemed to unify both my pursuits of the last ten years. And if one is inclined to consider 'satanic' thinking...well there is a lot there to mess around with. Thus if you will indulge this adjunct professor, clumsy theorist, and super clumsy theologist a quasi-provocative reading of Prussian Blue, here it goes:

*satanic logic as the re-arranging, the misdirecting of sacred impulses towards their opposites through the use of partially analogous coding.

1. The impulse towards the adoration of the innocent, the gentle the wholesome...is, I believe, a product of our good spiritual intuition. The two blonde sisters of Prussian Blue probably tap into that impulse on some level whether or not we want them to. And that is certainly the impulse they hope to engage with images like these; The girls frolicking in the meadows of Narnia. One twin reading to an even purer more innocent incarnation of herself (that is until you find out that the baby is named Dresden after the German City 'martyred' by the brits in WWII). The girls playing in the playground as though the apple had never been eaten. Now aside from this impulse being corrupted by association (the despicable and evil practice of racism & neo-fascism), I believe it is corrupted even more so by being paired with it's inverted intuition, that of a sexual desire for closeness with children. If one is willing to take some giant leaps with me, all three of these 'innocent' images could also have a less innocent reading, particularly in context alongside the more 'adult' images which I will revisit in a moment. The 'meadow' image, if one reads in the 'garden of Eden' sense proposes the twins as archetypical original lovers. Which is ironic because I am certain this group demonizes homosexuals, but will in its most subconscious approaches, perhaps play with this kind of titillation. The bed image, as disgusting as it is to conceive of, propose a kind of 'pillow talk' scenario...which again places children incongruously in a situation where we most often see lovers depicted...under the covers in bed reading side by side. The final photo on the slide requires a kind of sequential extrapolation, that is to say, that we see the two girls a moment before presumably they would tumble on top of each other in the dirt. The potential for binarily opposed readings is reinforced by the noise created by a purposeful fluidity of signs. That is to say that the innocent pictures can be unstable because the overall approach to showing the girls is unstable. Like little Bowies. We see them in the garden but we also see them in the first two pictures in the article, dressed closer to little Lindsey Lohan's with cute "delia's" style 'Hitler' tees, and once again touching or embracing with a kind of naturalness and melancholy usually associated with lovers. We also see them here in the more contemporary context of pop 'bad girls', in 'come hither' Avril Levine style;

2. The impulse towards the adoration of the outsider. Again I think this impulse is a product of a deep spiritual intuition. From the New Testament to Shakespeare, to all sorts of texts from other traditions (and philosophies...Camus' The Stranger to pick an obvious one) show this empathy clearly. Christ embraces (and indeed insures his initial demise by doing so) the humanity, the poetry of suffering, of exile. In the context of the temple priests, Christ himself is profoundly an outsider. And I think 'the outsider' has a spiritual resonance with us because the outsider exists in a kind of spiritual reality. That is to say a state which is apart from the artificial salvation of 'culture', or 'economics', or even sadly 'community', but yet is still apart from God...which during our time in a land called Wandering, is the frequent, and real State That We are In . James Dean (explicitly in East of Eden) represents this to us, but so does the profoundly troubled Joe Hawkins character in the dubious Skinhead/Suedehead novels of the 1970s. The Anti-Hero is not the Anti-Christ, but there is static and camoflage in these spaces, room to move in all directions. We connect to a spiritual or philosophical truth in being apart. It moves us. Prussian Blue inverts that sacred impulse by directing it towards an inverted impulse to be part of a 'mob' or 'legion' of outsiders, which in turn makes a true individual experience with the divine nearly impossible. For true 'outside-ness' is does not occur in a socio-political, eugenic context...or any group context. It is a true state of individual discourse with the universe. PB's confluence of signs; be a guitar playing rebel/put on your red armband... is hard to swallow. Stand infront of a graffiti covered wall/ promote a cleansing of the very inner-city realities which created that sign. It is madness, but a seductive one. I am actually in awe of the brilliantly multilayered image of the 'two white pieces' which won't fit into the sea of darkness in the puzzle image below. It's heady stuff for people whom we would prefer to imagine being morons. In a political sense, this reinvention of the white Euro-American as threatened underclass is also, obviously a perversion of this impulse that we see frequently in this country

The impulse towards one-ness. This is the most difficult to wrap one's mind around, and it is the one most profoundly dangerous and sacred. The sad fact is that fascism can tap into, in a most insidious and tangential way, a good spiritual impulse to return to a kind of cosmic one-ness or sameness. Whether you see that in a Buddhist sense, or a Judeo-Christian sense of 'being with god' or even in an existential sense of 'shared human condition' I think a part of of us is always yearning for a kind of simplicity and connection to the source. Fascism plays with that, with a serpentine promise of a kind of power which nullifies the presence and possibility of the true one. One-ness here on earth, based on skin and hair, and national medieval legends is a deeply corrupted and tortured inversion of this impulse. It's a kind of tribalism. The inversion's power is again amplified by it's association with fluidly incongruous opposites. In many cases with Christianity itself., and also in the early days of Nazism, with socialism.

Consider if you will the girl's album cover for the outrageously post-structurally named Fragments Of The Future. The sacred impulse towards one-ness is mixed into a tainted combination of signs which lead you towards the corrupt impulse. Here the girls are shown younger, in a state of greater innocence, back in the garden, dressed in the medieval clothes of 'tribal' pre-Nazi Germany. And included in the image is the ultimate 'satanic' inversion; the Iron Cross. A symbol for a man of infinite love, who was broken naked on a piece of wood, turned into a sign of military strength... first for Crusaders and then famously for the Nazis. It is the ultimate corrupt recontextualization, for it retains power and seductiveness, but is emptied of true meaning. And from there its easy to see that the girl's naturalness, innocence, nostalgia is all emptied of the implied meaning. It's a milk carton filled with white latex paint. A poisonous delusion.

Ok, so why take this apart? Do these readings of mine reveal a talent for 'reading' or understanding evil in me? Probably yes, but it is not unique in me. The 'knowledge' of evil, the binary impulse towards it, is our living human history from Cain fowards. Being susceptible to evil, is our sad situation, but one which promises purpose in our struggle against it. It is powerful, it is seductive. It is even at times necessary to understand ourselves. But it is not what we are in the end. And we need to be vigilant as artists, as audience...in that wilderness...to be that eagle in the rye.

In a final image, a rare transparent and useful bit of poetry, Prussian Blue declares themselves to be 'shadows of the night'...which both semiotically and spiritually, more or less tells the whole story.

Most of what Prussian Blue is doing is stealing from Tatu, whom I actually liked from a conceptual point of view, because they revealed more than they concealed, and themselves were like a living sign (oh i am a living sign...I'm a living sign...) for the Frankenstien monster of pop, capitalism, desire and melancholy...more so because, than despite being prefabricated and manipulated. PB is in the process of concealing, and what they conceal is way darker than what Tatu might have been. Frankenstien is honest, a zombied schoolgirl is evil.

Obviously we don't blame the girls of Prussian Blue. They're just as saint Zimmy said 'pawns in the game.' I'm currently having Holden-like fantasies of rescuing them and giving them tambourines in The Secret History. Sadly this impulse, as was Holden's, is complex. Thus is our situation forever. I'm betting on our better nature.

In a final redemptive gesture. Here are images of the two true kid stars of pop; Michael Grace jr. and My Favorite guitarist Darren Amadio aged around seven, at Darren's birthday party where the Secret History began...

With love,

waiting for a sign

Michael.