Don’t you monkey with the monkey
Peter Gabriel – Shock The Monkey
Gabriel’s “Shock The Money” is a thick crust – the kind I save for last – riding bareback on the complete desertion of normalcy and popular tenderness that so usually accompanies POP!, wafting in the cool breeze of the keenest of tendencies, on course towards engorged intricacies and colourful palettes. Ah, it’s a song! Oh, it’s so pleasant. And so are the occasional splutters of coughed “Shock!” that stick out like the suckable sore thumbs of “Monkey”’s gut bass. At best your ears will propel outwards from reality, impelled towards these fresh and lush surroundings of rapacious layers of sound. At its worst the experience of listening is still very much unlikely to leave you aghast, writhing with melancholy for lost minutes. After all, it’s just a song. You, “You throw your pearls before the swine.” [Art by Julien Pacaud. PG4.]
What’s your dick like, homie?
T-shirt slogans seen recently in Penang, Malaysia:
“Live stinks”
“I (heart) girls on top”
“Nothing is as fun as sex!”
Motorcycle diaries
1. In full acceleration, Maggie, my motorbike, lags a jolt. Then another, like someone yanking a ponytail from behind. The dash doesn’t light up so I can’t check until I pass under a street light. Yep. Out of gas. The backwards jolts become more frequent as Maggie gasps for gasoline.
I think. Where is the nearest gas station? Can I make it? I cannot. She sputters and coasts quietly through the thick night. I’ve never run out of gas with Maggie. I run my hand down the frame looking for a reserve switch. All I find are greasy fingers.
Welp. It happens. I take off my helmet, resting it on the right mirror, and begin pushing. I figure the station can’t be more than a kilometer ahead and I have my headphones, so I’ll be alright. I pass in front of Gurney, mostly closed. Two taxi drivers watch me quizzically then go back to chatting.
A man on a scooter pulls up next to me. “What’s wrong?” he asks. Oh, just out of gas, I say, taking out one earbud. Is it much farther ahead? He says not far and tells me to get back on. I’m curious. Slowly, with one hand on the Maggie’s back bar, he starts us off. Eventually we pick up pace. I’ve never done this before. He asks me where I’m from — they all want to know where I’m from — so I ask him too, as we coast at 40 km/h, his head slightly behind mine and to the left. He’s from here. Where else would he be from?
At the gas station, he gives me one last shove so that the momentum will carry me to the pump and the accelerates away. Wait, I think. “Thanks,” I yell out into the night. He doesn’t hear me. He’s gone.
2. I’m at a stall. Or rather, it’s a collection of hawker stalls with a tin roof haphazardly thrown over top. The char kway teow is soupy, wet. Char kway teow should be dry. The thing about tin roofs is that you can hear the rain immediately. The first few drops.
There’s nothing to do about it. I walk to where I parked Maggie and bring my helmet back to the wobbly table. I make myself eat half of the plate and then I light a cig.
An older man walks by. He stops. He looks at my helmet and then over to where the motorbikes are parked, all of them wet by now. “You cannot go,” he tells me. “Yeah,” I say. “I’m stuck alright.” He jabs a finger into my shoulder. “You cannot go. When the rain stops, then can go. Until then, cannot.” I nod. That is indeed my plight.
I leave during a lull in the downpour, but it still manages to soak me before I get home.
3. My favorite image in Asia: a man, cig in lips, driving a motorbike casually down the street, puffing away out of the corner of his mouth. For some reason these guys always have their feet pointed outward on the rubber stumps that serve as footrests, making minimal contact on their heels. There’s no rush. They’ll get there when they get there. [Conatus.]
a tunetheproletariat guide to
HALLUCINATIONS
(drug free!)
Inspired and the Sleep – While We’re Young
INGREDIENTS
(1) table tennis ball.
(1) pair of headphones to a device capable of MP3 playback.
(1) device capable of MP3 playback.
(1) strobe-light – or an iPhone that has a flashlight/strobe light app installed.
Optional: (6) bottles of beer* – the convenience being that beer often comes sold in packs of six.
METHOD
1. Plug headphones into MP3 device. (It’s not essential that you use an MP3 device per se, but this is more enjoyable overall when you can later align it with a particular song, or band, that accompanied you during the process.)
2. Plug headphones into ears. Left into left and right into right, if possible.
3. Prepare that strobe-light/strobe-light app. Slide your fingers across your oil-greased screen and watch the glass casing smear outlines of your thumb across it’s meticulous display.
4. Start drinking. To open bottles, standard definition ‘bottle-opener’ is preferred. Also suitable: a roommate’s army knife (why would you have an army knife?), a neat kitchen counter (ha!), a sturdy set of canines (though the idea of pulling an aluminum cap from the confines of a long-neck’s tip is frightening), a computer desk, the corner of the wall, or a rippling set of abs still centered by a hairy bellybutton.
5. Slice, with the silent to-a-hair precision of a caffeinated Samurai, the table tennis ball into (preferably) even halves, though thinking back this is probably not altogether important.
6. Tape the tennis ball halves over your eyes. Seriously.
7. I probably should have mentioned that you will need to have the strobe-light appropriately positioned in front of your eyes before you tape over them. I figured it was obvious. If it wasn’t, I’m sorry, but still quietly amused by your situation.
8. Listen to music. Watch flashing lights. Drink warm beer.**
*
Alcohol isn’t essential. You could get this done without alcohol but hey, drinking makes activities like going to a nightclub bearable, so god knows what it could do for interesting afternoon time-wasters! I tried this once, situating myself under a coffee table in the apartment’s living room, and though I did not hallucinate, I went somewhere. I went somewhere for a little while. Until my roommate – and his friends – walked in holding three boxes of pizza and found me under the coffee table with table-tennis shells taped over my eyes.
**
Inspired and the Sleep’s While We’re Young is not the song I would listen to when doing this, no. It is the song I would listen to afterwards. The song that clicks along the tiled kitchen floors, that clacks while you bashfully help with the pizzas, that smiles when you’re bearing the cuckoo-grin of somebody with an afternoon free to themselves. If, as things do, this doesn’t work, then this song will render that sadness inconsequential. It will remind you, in both your best-dressed candor and your fuck-off bleariness, that an afternoon free of expectation, an afternoon unreserved and ripe for shenanigans, is a good thing, is always a good thing. [Listen.]
(illustration clara terne)
I ain’t no hero in the night
Wolf Parade – You Are A Runner And I Am My Father’s Son
We named our motorbikes. Maggie and Ruby and Banshee and Ole Betsy. We named our dogs and cats and aloe plants – Spots and Mrs. Whiskers and Chloe. We gave our children three names each, then bequeathed them nicknames – Tike and Junior and Son – and then let their classmates nickname them again – Crusty and Stud Muffin and Fishy.
But we have yet to name the feeling of sitting on the balcony, cigarette ash dripping onto our laps, swelling with emotions like love-sickness and loneliness and peace and patience all at once, with roommates downstairs hunched over the dimly flickering lights of their laptops, and friends on the way to go to a movie but knowing we’ll only talk blandly using the languages of sex and snark, and the people we love scattered in isolated pockets around the globe living separate lives. [Norman soundtrack.]