7/29/05

Yesterday I got more recording done. I am working on layering vocal harmonies on Mickey Mouse World. It�s very time consuming.

Last night I went to the movie The Wedding Crashers. A dopey movie, but kind of funny at times. It had a theme of �taming the wild man.� Another variation on the embrace of family motif.

Afterwards I drove to Manhattan and parked near St. Mark�s. It was a beautiful cool night. The heat wave finally broke. I was going to go to the Continental, but I didn�t want to hear a metal band and the group on the marquee was called Metal Church.

I walked down and tried to go to the Remote Lounge but it was closed. I walked down to CB�s but couldn�t stomach that scene.

It�s funny walking in NYC, with every step you float past a new sub-culture. Punks here, yuppies there. The village seems to have been taken over by rich little Asian girls.

Walking with no direction made me feel so lonely. But it�s the best thing I can feel. The most alive I am capable of. I wanted to sit at an outdoor caf� and write, but I didn�t have my notebook.

On the way home I stopped at a little bar on Franklin that was having an open mic night. I had a vodka and 7 and listened to a lame folk singer and a rapper while keeping an eye on the barmaid who was an amazingly thin African girl with a pretty face. She was fun to look at.

7/28/05 A Truck Drivin' Man

When I was a kid my father was a truck driver. Sometimes he would be gone for days on end and I would be raised by my mother and two older sisters. Sometime I think that it why I get along with women so well.

When I was in third grade my father was off work for a day and I refused to go to school. When my mother told the school why I wasn’t in school for the day, they gave me a legal holiday for the day.

My father liked to tell a story about me when I was very young. Not even in school yet. He said that he came home from the road and was very tired. I ask him to talk to me and he said he had to sleep. I told him, “That’s OK, I’ll wait until you’re done,’ and then I sat on the edge of the bed waiting. When he saw that I was serious he got and talked to me awhile.

When he got older the truck driving wore him down. He was always in and out of jobs. Sometimes he would be off work for months. During these times he would sleep on the couch for days at a time. I sometimes wonder if he suffered from depression. A subject people didn’t talk about much in those days.

By the times I was a teenager he was swallowing handfuls of amphetamine so he could drive all week without sleeping. He would take 20 or 30 pills at one time. That amount would kill most people. He would go from doctor to doctor asking for ‘diet pills.’

Then after driving all week without sleep he would drink all weekend so he could sleep. Sometimes he would go so long without sleep that he would fall asleep in restaurants. More than once my mother had to pull his face out of his plate of food after a crash landing. The combination of uppers and downers made him a little crazy. He was never physically abusive, but he could sure make a lot of noise. It seemed like he would yell for days on end. Often he said things that were completely ridiculous.

“Goddamnit, Louis I haven’t eaten in three days. Can’t a man get a fucking thing to eat around here?”

My poor mother would reply, “I just made you breakfast an hour ago.”

His bellowing was enough to make life miserable. As a teen I swore I would never be like him when I grew up. After he died my sister told me a story that my mother told her. Apparently my grandfather (whom I never met) was very mean and physical violent. When my oldest sister was born my father was afraid to hold the baby because he feared that he would be like his father and hurt the child. Finally my mother placed the baby in his arms to forced him to face his fears. Because of my grandfather’s violence my father swore he would never hit his own children, and he never did.

I look at this as a project of decreasing generational violence. My grandfather was Polish. I live in an old Polish community in Brooklyn and those Polish guys are nuts. If you go into their bars all they want to do is pick a fight with you. I try to void them altogether.

My real family name was Woytjna. They changed it to avoid prejudice.

My father never said much to me about his own father, but he did mention that he shot his and his brother’s dogs, just for fun. He also once told me that his father took the family cat and hurled it against the wall.

When I was small one of my first memories is of my father telling me that one of the worst things you could do was hurt an animal.
I never put the pieces together until after he died.

After years of taking pills (‘bennies’ as he called them) and not sleeping, it began to get the best of him. For awhile his life got tangled up in the teamster’s union and all its craziness. He took part in many of their strikes and protests. One method of protest they took part in was to stand on the highway and force trucks to stop who were not supporting the strike. It was a nutty business to begin with. The one thing that was illegal was to stop a U.S. Mail truck. Of course, dear ole’ dad had to be the hot-shot to stop a mail truck, which landed him in jail for the night.

Later, after endless strikes he found himself on the other side, by driving during a strike. On one occasion he come home with his windshield broken. It turned out that a striker had dropped a cement block off of an overpass onto his truck.

Around the time Hoffa disappeared things got increasingly dangerous. The terminal of the trucking company he worked for was blown to the ground when someone placed a bomb inside.

At another time he told me that the same company had a side business selling dope. It seems they were growing their own pot outside of Pittsburgh. They got word that they were going to be busted the next morning so they got their people to plow up all the pot fields before morning came.

Near the end of his trucking days he came down with a bad case of pneumonia, but kept driving without sleep until he became delirious and began hallucinating. Between the unions involved with organized crimes and the companies involved with criminal activities and the Feds trying to bring them down, rumors of undercover agents were rampant. In his delirium he began to see people looking in the windows of our house he became so paranoid. In this state he was ready to go out on another road trip until my mother finally put her foot down and took him to the hospital.

Eventually he got completely entangled in the web of confusion created by the unions, organized crime, the government, and the trucking companies. When his trucking company wanted to fire some longtime employees they gave him two separate places he had to be at the same time. When he was only in one they fired him. The union took the case to court, but the judge refused to let his lawyer provide any evidence in his defense and the case was lost. He claimed the judge had been paid off. That pretty much ended his trucking career.

After he quit trucking he was still addicted to the amphetamines. Later the drugs brought on a new obsession. He became convinced that there were splinters or pieces of metal in his hands. He would stay up all night picking at his hands with a needle until they were raw and bloody when the morning light came. When he finally got his hands X-rayed it turned out there were calcium build-ups in his hands, but there was nothing the doctors could do about it. After that, he seemed to forget the whole thing.

Years later he and my mother were having severe financial problems and had to move in with Leona and I in our house in the woods. It must have been horrible for them. I am sure they didn’t feel at home there. My father must have felt like a failure for not being able to stand on his own.

My father was an alcoholic most of his life. Usually he drank Iron City Beer. When he drank hard liquor he completely lost it. One autumn day during that period a couple of his younger trucking buddies took him out and got him drunk on whiskey. Then they gave him a double barrel shotgun and tried to get him to shoot the owner of a trucking company they had it in for. Luckily he didn’t do that. When he didn’t return home for hours I went looking for him. I found him sitting in the woods with the end of the shotgun in his mouth. I begged him not to do it and he collapsed into the leaves sobbing, “I don’t want to live anymore.”

After that he finally stopped taking the pills and mellowed out a bit.
Despite all the negative stories I relate, when he died none of his children held any anger towards him. Whatever demons he wrestled with, you could see the struggle of the war he was waging within himself.

Both of my parent’s were depression era children who dropped out of school in the eighth grade and seemed unprepared to deal with the changing world we live in. They did the best they knew how in a world they didn’t understand. Both gave everything they had to their kids. We had a strong sense of family, we always knew we had their support and had a home to go to. We always felt loved.


My father had another side that was childlike and playful. He knew everyone in town and always had a joke on his tongue. He was outgoing to embarrassing extents. In a restaurant he would be teasing the waitresses and yelling across the room to people he knew.

He was energetic and surreal. Sort-of a living performance artist – who had no idea what a performance artist was. He was usually the butt of his own bizarre jokes, in a manner similar to Andy Kauffman. Often acting the idiot or saying something totally absurd.

He liked to choose a bad joke and tell it again and again for years on end. Often two or three times a day to the same person. He wore you down until you laughed at the absurdity of his behavior.

A favorite prank was to wait until my mother was doing the dishes and then yell at her, “Louise I told you to do those dishes! Now get out here and do them right now.”

She would respond, “Are you blind? I’m standing right here doing them.”

Then we would turn to me with a surprised look on his face as if to say ‘can you believe she fell for that?’

If I ate with him in a restaurant with a group of people he liked to offer his used tea bag to me and say, “Do you want this? Are you still collecting these?”

You had to think twice about everything he said to figure out if it was serious or a joke.

I got news that my father had cancer on the day of The Imperial Orgy Masquerade Ball. The ball was one of the biggest achievements of my life, so getting the news on that day seemed particularly poignant.

He tried a few chemo sessions, but it didn’t seem to help so he decided to just accept his fate. He lasted about four months. He didn’t want to die in the hospital. Luckily my sister and aunt are both burses and stayed with him during his final weeks.

My sister related that the cancer caused gastric problems for him. In the last days he went into a mild coma. She said he came out of the coma long enough to utter his last words, “Who shit?”

In the moments before he died he sat up and held his arms out towards the ceiling and moved his hands as if reaching for something.

He had prepared everything for his funeral and burial. A few years before he had purchased life insurance from a television ad aimed at elderly people. Unfortunately when it came time to pay out the benefits it turned out to be a rip-off. This meant there was no money for the funeral expenses.

It seemed an all-too-fitting postscript on a working class life.

7/25/05 Creative Spaces

It’s a gray windy day in NYC. A beautiful day. It fits my mood perfectly.

When I was in the third grade I became a drummer. I don’t know how my parents put up with the racket. I practiced for hours each day. Finally they built a music room in the basement for my budding musician friends and I to practice in. I’m sure it was still loud for them, but perhaps a little less.

The basement room became the center of our social circle. My best friend was learning to play bass and sing. We would jam for hours while the neighborhood kids hung out. I was in the sixth grade and he was in the eighth. Some of the girls were beginning to mature and the first whiffs of sexual excitement were in the air.

The room was decorated with a black light and psychedelic posters. The old house we lived in was heated by a coal stove that sat in the far end of the basement. At on point my father hooked up a ‘panic button’ to use as a practical joke. A button hidden under a carpet connected to a car battery would sound a truck horn that was hidden behind a wall. Once when our friend Mark Tate came in we kept stepping on the button and then looking at him questioningly. “Mike what are you doing? How are you making that noise.”

“I’m not doing it,” he would protest. We went on and on until he broke down in a laughing fit. After looking around outside the house for the source of the sound he eventually became a bit distressed so we let him in on the joke.

It was a pretty happy time. I think many of my happiest times have been associated with creative spaces that created a sense of community.

When I was very young, before I became a musician I was interested in science. Mainly geology and archeology. I collected Indian relics and mineral samples. At that time I had a small play room where I displayed my collection that I called ‘the lab.’ That too was a center of activities for the gang of boys in my neighborhood. (in those days it was ‘no girls allowed’)


My family moved around a lot. Not from town to town, just from house to house. Whenever possible I sat up a music room in the basement or attic that became the local hang out.

When I graduated from high school I got a huge space in an old warehouse in the center of town. By this time life centered around sex, drugs and rock and roll. The space became an ongoing art installation. There were square-boxed shelves on the left walls that once held hardware supplies that now became art frames. Each square held a separate art installation. I can’t recall what they were, except one that held a bunch of antique dolls posed with WWII bayonets in their hands.

The ceiling was decorated with a complex sculpture in tin foil, like a silver cave with smaller sculptures hidden within the ridges and crevices. The sculpture wound down a pillar to reach the floor in the center of room where it evolved into a mountain with little water ponds that glowed in fluorescent yellow, green and pink.

When lit by blacklight and colored lights it was a dazzling drug den. Most nights I slept on the floor after an evening of partying. It was furnished with old car seats and a tattered couch. All day and all night random people would wander in and out. It was non-stop drinking, smoking dope, and tripping on acid.

I worked the evening shift at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken and at the end of each shift I would bring back a bucket of leftover chicken. The bucket would set on the table and we would eat cold chicken for days. Aaah..it was a wonderful life.

The oddball characters who would wander in and out could fill a three ring circus, or maybe a David Lynch movie. People I never met would knock on the door in the middle of the night. Everyone was searching for something. Everyone seemed slightly off-kilter.

Below the space was an underage disco with which we shared a bathroom. I would slip in the backdoor and watch the teenage girls shimmy and shake to the latest disco hits while dressed in their finest white-trash slut-wear. It was enough to make a young man lose his mind.

When I joined the punk band Friction the warehouse became our practice space. Soon the parties would cram in hundreds of people. Most were kids under legal drinking age who were nonetheless wasted out of their minds. The morning after a party the floor would be so sticky with spilled beer and cigarette butts that your shoes would stick the floor and come right off your feet.

The space had one closed off room they had a sign on the door that read ‘Anti-social Room.” It was a place to escape from the crowd when things got to be too much for your drug-addled mind.

There was a top 40 band that practiced in the next room. After a few months of us being around they evacuated the place. Their abandoned room was left open and empty. Soon we took over that as well. There was an old mattress in their room that became a sex room. Soon it was littered with wine bottles and old condom wrappers.

Eventually a new owner bought the warehouse and immediately gave us the boot. I don’t think I experienced that kind of creative environment again until I was in college in the editing rooms of the film department.

Last year I attempted to get a space in Brooklyn that was to be the center of Imperial Orgy and Arete Living Arts activities, but it didn’t work out. Instead a temporary space was created during the computer classes in Lewistown, but there really wasn’t enough space to work in.

I feel like one of my goals for the near future is to find enough money to get a space. Creative projects need space and people.

7/23/05 Terrorism and Gandhi

It’s a beautiful sunny day in Brooklyn. I am eating a late breakfast at the Greenpoint Café. I began actively writing about a month ago. My goal was to try to pry loose my stifled soul. To get my mind working, and to dig around in the inner depths.

I guess it has worked because the numbness of day-to-day life has given way to depression. Depression is no fun, but at least it’s a sign of life. A recognition that my life needs to change.

My life isn’t bad. It’s comfortable and easy. But it’s not what I want. It feels like failure. And it’s incredibly boring. My life used to feel extraordinary. Now it feels all too ordinary.

This morning reading the news it seems the terrorist really have the whole world on edge. What do they hope to achieve with random acts of violence? In 50 years it hasn’t helped the Palestinians. It’s just brought more violence, poverty and injustice. Do the Al Queda people believe they can take over the world and force us all to obey Muslim law? Or are they just plain stupid?

Once when The Imperial Orgy was doing a street theatre project a Muslim man came up to me to tell me we were wasting out time. He argued that change can only come through violence and power. He seemed unable to think beyond that simple idea.

He, and I believe it is also true for the Muslim terrorists, don’t seem to see the power of public opinion. Terrorizing the world with indiscriminate violence has turned most of humanity against them. Around the world Muslim extremists are at war with Christians, Jews, Hindus, and I suppose Buddhists in Indonesia.

I, and many other people around the world are very sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. (Let me be clear that I think Al Queda’s war is not concerned with the Palestinians)

It occurs to me that if the Palestinians used the techniques of Gandhi and King they would have achieved the goal of having their own state a long time ago. Bring in the news cameras, defy the Jewish occupations in a non-violence display, and stand helplessly as they a brutalized. No guns, bomb or throwing stones. No defending themselves in any way. If that happened public opinion would force the change in no time. The Middle East needs a hero like King or Gandhi.

Al Queda is a different story. Their goals as well as they tactics are evil.

7/22/05 Apology and Movie Motifs

Last night I watched the film I Love Huckabees. A pretty unusual film. A comedy that deals with some of the metaphysical concepts behind eastern religions. (although in a fairly simplistic manner)

I have been attempting to study mainstream films to discover mythological motifs that underlie them. Perhaps 30 to 40 per cent of mainstream movies have a theme that embraces family as the greatest good. Recent examples that come to mind are Charlie & The Chocolate Factory and The Incredibles. (Although The Incredibles had another almost Nietchian theme of conformity of the extraordinary.)

Another popular theme in Woman’s movies is the taming of the wild man. A recent example of this is Something’s Gotta Give. This is actually just another form of the motif of embracing family. In Something’s Gotta Give Jack Nicholson’s character is a lifelong bachelor who dates young beautiful women. When he meets Diane Keaton’s character he suddenly realizes that he wants to change his ways and settle down with an older woman. The last shot of the movie finds Nicholson at the kitchen table holding a baby up in the air above his head adoringly.

Yesterday I discovered a packet of writing I did about ten years ago. It was scribbled on sheets of paper that were never transferred into the computer. The writing was meant to be the second half of the Apology writings that I did just before I came to New York. They sheets started at page 55 which leads me to believe there is another 50 pages floating around somewhere.


The Apology writings were done during a very trying time in my life. The Imperial Orgy has just had its first flush of local success and was now dissolving into chaos among the first band members, even as we planned to move to New York together.

I was living in poverty and was eventually homeless. At the worst times I was barely eating or sleeping and was under intense stress. I spent my time floating in public and my evenings drinking with the girls that followed the Orgy.

At the time I was physically ill and not doing so well mentally either. At the same time my mind was racing. I was more perceptive than at any time in my life. I was in some kind of zone where I could read people in an instant, and people seemed to open up to me as soon as we met. And by ‘open up,’ I mean pouring out their darkest secrets to me at first meeting.

I felt burdened by all this. As if I were carrying everyone’s pain. The air in those days was filled with emotional longing and sexual tension.

In the midst of this I was in an intense affair with an Indian woman from a wealthy family. In her parent’s eyes I was too white and too poor. As her mother said, “it would be different if he was a doctor or lawyer.”

She was 22 years old and the strain on her was more than she could handle. She was paralyzed by fear that her parents would disown her. Apparently this is a common threat in Indian families.

The last time we saw each other she had a breakdown while driving in my car. She liked to lay her head in my lap and sleep while I drove. On this night she stripped bare and began masturbating with her head in my lap. After she came she began to cry. “I don’t want to lose my mother,’ she sobbed. “Why do I have to be a woman? I pray every night I’ll get in a car wreck and end it all.”

A few days later I got a call that she was in a car wreck and broke her back. When I spoke to her I said, “Please don’t pray for anymore car wrecks.”

“What? I didn’t say that,” she responded. Then after a moment’s pause she said, “I can’t talk to you anymore.”

And she didn’t

All in all, the Apology writings chronicled a very dramatic time in my life. The writings were designed as a means of deconstructing myself, of annihilating the ego in the Buddhist sense. Due to this the writing process helped lead to my own psychological disintegration.

In total the writing might have come to about 200 pages without any real narrative ending. When I look back on them some of it is pretty good, some of it is awful. Some of the most interesting parts are literary flights in a stream-of-consciousness style influenced by the author Henry Miller.

I often try to figure out how to work the writing into something worthwhile to release in book form, but so far I have not found the time or energy to do so.

7/18/94 Glam Slam

By the meal's end we are all tipsy as we drive without direction in hopes of finding the Glam Slam, and dance club owned by the rock star Prince. When we find the club there is a long line of young MTV types waiting to enter. Inside I immediately ditch the others and head towards the edge of the dance floor. The place is packed with scantily clad women and athletic young men in muscle shirts. I pass an area with couches in a dark corner where couples lie together. It fills me with an urge for the decadence of opium dens and petting orgies. As I walk a small blonde woman punches me in the stomach for no reason and moves on before I can see her face. The place is thick with sexuality. The sound system blares an incessant dance beat and video screens project sensual abstract images. The room is so full of sweating bodies that I cannot take a step in any direction without bumping into someone. I stand by the edge of the dance floor peering hungrily at the writhing mob. A woman in front of me bends over pushing her buttocks against my crotch and grinds her hips from side to side. After a minute of this I wait to see if she speaks to me. Her friends smile at me naughtily, but she moves away from me without any hint of recognition. From an unseen source a burst of strawberry flavored fog covers the dance floor. Nearby four short, plump, black kids are doing a bouncing dance on hands and knees. They hump each other rhythmically and switch positions on the fourth measures. The women get behind the men and spank their fat bottoms in double time. I am part of a crowd that circles them as they carry out their blatantly suggestive display.

Another burst of fog obscures my vision and a new groove blasts from the sound system. I turn and lose myself in the throng at the head of the dance floor. The music is familiar to the crowd and they chant the refrain in unison. I dance among them with aloof, understated movements. I close my eyes and am aware only of my connection with the music. My skin is vibrating in the heat. Even in my internal darkness I am pulled towards the anonymous smorgasbord of flesh. I place my left hand on my stomach as I move. The warmth of my own touch brings moisture from my sweating pores. The bass drum is a primal summons to procreation. The beam of my consciousness explores my own flesh from within. Each limbs glows with sensitivity. Under its focus the warm light touches my lips and moves down my neck, chest and abdomen. My sex is not erect but lies heavily against my jeans. It throbs off-time against the music. I open my eyes to see two small black women and a beautiful Asian woman have taken the space in front of me. They seem to be preparing for an exhibition of some kind. All three wear extra short cut-off jeans. The two black women take a stance facing each other. In sync they break into dance with spastic motions, at times rolling their hips and caressing their own breasts and bellies. Their faces hold a cold hard expression. The taller of the two wears a loose white vest that reveals the curves of her medium sized breasts. She gets on her knees and leans her forehead against the abdomen of the other, who grinds slowly, heaving the kneeling women's head back and forth. The smaller woman has a darker, near black skin tone and wears white fishnet tights. She has begun sinking to the floor with her legs spread wide. Her hips thrust in frenetic jabs at a pace that seems in-humanly possible, while she arches her back in and out focusing attention on her jutting breasts. The motion of her hips hits me with a debilitating burst of testosterone. It is the most erotic display of dancing I have ever witnessed. The women pull a thin black man from the crowd and rub their bodies against him lasciviously. I want to be him. I am consumed with lust as I move backwards against the four-foot high stage upon which the sound system sets. I arch my back over the stage and lay my head flat against the huge speaker cabinets. I am immediately deafened. The electronic drums and bass swallow my mind with rhythms that hearken the jungle. I can actually feel the low frequencies of the bass drum vibrating through my chest. Before my eyes a thousand bodies move in pointless motion. Motion for pleasure itself.

I want contact. No names, no talk, no responsibility. Pure anonymous flesh. On the dance floor the shorter woman places her finger into the dark lips of the other. She sucks her finger while staring straight into her eyes. She moves to her, releasing her finger as she bring her lips close as they lock into a gentle kiss. Above the firm blows of the bass drum a dirty guitar screams frantically. I want to lose myself in pure fuck. Fuck which emanates from every living cell in the natural world. Fuck which echoes back through the annals of history, reaching back to the original thought in the mind of the Godhead.
In West Africa of times past, the tribal village would meet each spring for orgies in the ploughed fields to ensure fertility for the coming year's harvest. In ancient India a dark princess sucked the gigantic cock of a donkey until its brute jizm covered her naked body to bring about the prolific reign of the maharaja. In the Baltic states the rites of spring were celebrated by viciously slaughtering a virgin to keep the cycles of nature in motion. When Eskimo societies were gripped by tensions each man switched wives with his neighbor to confuse the evil spirits. From the homosexuality of Greek gymnasiums to Roman orgies, French postcards and English whores, even the American Indian women were described as 'generous to manhood'. It is rumored that Chairman Mao packed his swimming pool with naked teenage girls and rolled his fat body over the mattress of wet young flesh. This libidinous horde on the dance floor was willed into existence by the creator when the first spark shimmered in the primordial ooze, when the first cell split, when the first fish spawned. The whole of evolution led to this spectacle. As surely as nature bursts into green with the fertilizing rains of spring, this moment in time had to be.

My mind lecherously surveys the luscious crowd . I want them all stripped bare, skin and hair gleaming in the colored lights, bodies piled on each other, fucking, sucking, licking anonymous limbs, penetrating faceless cunts, assholes, mouths and armpits. The monstrous mound of flesh lubricated with a coat of glistening cum. The Asian woman who accompanied the two black girls dances a few feet in front of me. Her unseeing eyes peer past me as if in a daze. I am hypnotized by the bottomless black pools. In them I seek every sexual encounter of my life. Every fuck, every blow-job, every jerking hand. The lost encounters of my teen years. The hundreds of forgotten orgasms in Leona's all too familiar snatch. The sideways position she preferred for orgasm, her face pulled taut in one single wave of ecstasy. Jai's shrieks that would send the neighbor's dog howling for hours. Inserting the tiny vibrator into her anus as I plunged her tight vagina. Christine's conically shaped breasts and clinging behind. The nameless encounters in parked cars on city streets, in hidden corners in hometown parks, in front of friends in cheap hotels. And most of all Sasha's ever-moist abundance. Her endless, earth shattering convulsions; in my lap on the freeway as tractor trailers pass, on golf courses, in hot tubs, beds, hotels, and her parent's house.

The testosterone surge fills me with a desire to rule the world. To be crowned the ever-reigning god of fuck. To have pussy served on pristine trays to my bedside. Beautiful sleek bodies lining my chambers. Like the mad monk of Russia I want my cock cut off by a jealous wench and hurled across the room magnificently. Like Napoleon I want it auctioned at Southerby’s a hundred years hence when it is a dried shriveled sea horse. There can be no equality of the sexes because I see women only with desire. Every beautiful face I seek to possess. Every short skirt urges me to rape. My friendship is a deceit and this is your only warning; Ornelia I want to return your affliction by tearing your pussy into bloody shreds, pulling out your red locks from behind as I pound your white bottom dog style. Robin, object of desire for so long, why did I turn you down when I want to take my place among the multitudes that have released themselves in your ravaged hole. Sonja your thin black frame beguiles me. I still recall the taste of your bulging lips, the odor of your sweating body as I lie beside you in New Orleans. Mina I'll tear down your wall and wash away the sexual curse you complain of. Your small body will be putty in my grip. I will lift you into the air and pummel you while suspended in my embrace. Seanna and Jean - I long for those sensual moments on the dance floor. The stolen kisses as the music blared. Let me fuck you in unison, on jungle gyms, on swinging trapezes. The nameless bodies I touched while singing. Who are you? I want to make your bellies swell with my seed. My sweet friend Janis, drop the kid sister-act long enough so I may fill your mouth with cum. Angie those drunken kisses in my car after the Stoney's gig are haunting me now. Krista, Pocihontes, Wendy, how I loved those touches in the Beirhaus. The girl in the teddy on the floor of Cafe 210. "Thanks for the fuck", she said. I have forgotten your face but I remember your breasts as I lay atop you. Brenda, after a year of seduction why did I turn away when you finally offered yourself? I want you all before me naked, mute and craving my explosions. Lapping at my loins. I feel incapable of love. Except for the love of hedonistic decadence. I am alive and I want it all.

New Media and Tribalism

As I write this I am underneath a bridge in a small park in Lewistown. The park sits on the bank of the Juniata River. It is pouring rain. It would be quite nice except on of the park maintenance guys is taking refuge here as well and he doesn’t want to shut off the engine of his extra-big John Deere Lawn-mower tractor. Perhaps he just prefers the sound of a roaring engine to the sounds of nature. Or maybe he just wants to waste some gasoline on the township’s dime. Personally I hate the sound of engines. What a poison we brought into the world.

I sit at a wooden picnic table. Scrawled on it are the works KKK and “I hate niggers.” It makes me feel hopeless. I draw an arrow to the words and write “you are an idiot.”

I had lunch at the local McDonalds. I went inside to eat so it would be easier to put the food on my credit card since cash is in short supply. There are four TVs in the dining area and they are all tuned to Fox News. It’s the kind of thing you could expect in Lewistown.

I see this as social brainwashing. Many people actually see Fox news as ‘fair and balanced.’ After all that’s their slogan so it much be true. What’s funny about this is that Rupert Murdock, the man who founded Fox News, has always been out-in-open that it was designed to present a conservative point-of-view. If anyone needs evidence of this check out the documentary ‘Outfoxed.” http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0002HDXTQ/qid=1121869042/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-3107878-0649453?v=glance&s=dvd&n=507846


As I sat eating my quarter-pounder and sucking a coca-cola (Classic) I began to wonder what effect the wide range of new media will have on America. It used to be that a lot was said about the media causing homogeneity, but that was during the days when the three networks ruled television.

These days media might be leading society towards a new tribalism. There are hundreds of cable TV channels, internet communities uniting like-minded people around the globe, and radio that fragmented culturally with thousands of stations available on the internet and by satellite. Talk radio is divided between the radical right and with the success of Air America Radio, the far left. Politicians and religious leaders play to the cultural divide.

What concerns me about this is that these social ‘tribes’ seem to developing separate alternative realities that may or may not be completely divorced from the facts of empirical reality. Not only are facts being interpreted with a different slant at some media outlets, some invent facts and distort the truth so much that it truly creates a worldview that is based in a fantasy designed to support an ideology.

Rush Limbaugh tells outrageous lies and Bill O’Reilly invents facts to suit his needs at any moment. Fox News is a bit more subtle, yet still is loose with the facts when they want to be. A look at the talking points memo released by the Republican National Office concerning Carl Rove show that they are promoting statements that can easily be proven to be false.

It is a bit harder to find media controlled by the radical right, but if you search the obscure corners of the internet I feel confident you will find liberals who are just as unscrupulous with the facts as their right-wing counterparts.

It is becoming easier to only have contact with media that reflects one’s tribal bias, and some of these media outlets have a goal of brainwashing the public. This is leading to cults of ideology created through the mainstream media.

The more a person is ensconced in, and limited to media that promotes a particular ideology, the more they can live within their own reality, and perhaps be disconnected from empirical reality. It is like a cult that forces converts to avoid family and friends. Opposing views are always a danger.

Most entertainment appears inert on the surface. Most entertainment purposely avoids politics, religion, and philosophy. (It is my belief that by default inert entertainment upholds the status quo.) This makes it possible for someone to watch an evening of network television without it interfering in an ideology espoused by other more propagandistic media outlets.

Fundamentalism is the easiest ideology to look at because they are the most organizede and effective. Many TV evangelists and Christian radio stations aggressively promote the same ideology as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. Also missed by many, is that country music has become filled with right-wing politics. Lyrics often include attacks on the left and carry an attitude that rednecks are the salt-of-the-earth who are better people than those left-wing freaks. One popular song is titled “the Marines sticker on my SUV.” SUVs seem to be a popular issue in country music, as in… I like driving big gas guzzling cars. And I think most of us have heard the “America will kick your ass” brand of country music.

The fundamentalist ideology has a powerful weapon because it can accuse anything that conflicts with its beliefs of being anti-American. The fundamentalists have Christianity so entwined with patriotism that people have a hard time separating the two. The result being that anyone who questions right-wing political beliefs can be accused of immorality. This can be very effective for pressuring mainstream media to avoid criticism of the right.

Often if you talk about politics or social issues with people you find that they have beliefs that seem completely removed from reality. The new media outlets have made it possible for a lie to be told, and reinforced again and again until it is believed by millions of people as gospel truth.

A strange alliance between Christian fundamentalist who want to use the law to enforce their religious beliefs, and corporate leaders and the super-wealthy who want to change government policy to benefit their own kind, has formed an ideology that uses the media to brainwash people into accepting their propaganda.

The main force opposing this is the left-wing-liberals. Unfortunately they seem to be isolated within their own alternative version of reality making them ineffectual when trying to connect with most Americans. The more people tend to ignore media that does not reflect their ideology, the more likely they are to be dogmatic and limited in their understanding of other points-of-view.

Of course, media enhanced tribalism can be based on many things, from Goths to BDSM communities, to sports fans, pet owners, anything in the world. Most of these are not as large and powerful as the two sides of the culture war. But one wonders how large these divides can go thanks to the new media outlets and to what extent people might become brainwashed into believing a particular version of reality.

To some extent reality is something that can be created. Media is a tool to sway the hearts and minds that is more powerful than at any time in the history of humanity.