You wake up from Christmas booze and a week of fever, chilling everyone
in the melting streets. After a week of snow and a few plane rides
all the people you care about seem to be sick of themselves,
ready for a new year. So you clean your apartment, put on your new shoes,
and go out for a drink. The nightworld takes a break for family vacation,
but drug addicts and hustlers sit jittery. Students get out of school,
and read ridiculous books. My father takes a few days off work, and planes
still crash all over the world. For my Birthday, he offered me a glass of scotch
and we sat and looked at the Christmas tree, and I remember
all the nights he spends on his boat in the islands.
Our glasses have beautiful old sailboats etched into them.
LATEST PROJECTS
See Me In The Streets Bitch
- Brandon Gorrell 'one time thing' and from SEA
- BUY Menthol's "OMG Pleasure" 'perfect fit' tee shirt $55
- BUY Menthol's Erik Stinson (direct shipping from printer, early price $6)
- BUY Menthol's Kevin Akstin (writer E. Bay, PoMo Gothic)
- CAVE AGENCY
- David Fishkind (budding writer NYC)
- DIS (webzine NYC)
- Erik on Tumblr
- Erik on Twitter
- Erik on Vimeo
- HTML GIANT
- Jimmy Chen (writer SF)
- MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. WAY film microsite
- Miles Ross (writer NYC)
- pop serial
- Shannon and the Clams (band E. Bay)
- Stefan Moore (director/artist NYC/SEA)
- Street Carnage
- Tao Lin (inspirational, rejuvenating author, NYC)
- Tom Moody (blogger OG net artist NYC)
- Zachary German (writer NYC seems 'same as me' somehow)
12.23.2008
MIX local and national tallents
Some of the production kinks have been worked out, so this mix sounds really smooth.
1. PA intro featuring the Ramones
2. Sally Shapiro - Time To Let Go (CFCF Remix)
3. Sébastien Tellier - Divine
4. Starfucker - German Love
5. Lake - Without Devotion
6. Mount Eerie - Wooly Mammoth's Absence
7. Generifus - Baby Drawing
8. Deerhunter - Never Stops
9. Talbot Tagora - Morning Secrets
10. Masters and Johnson - Winter Sucks
DOWNLOAD
1. PA intro featuring the Ramones
2. Sally Shapiro - Time To Let Go (CFCF Remix)
3. Sébastien Tellier - Divine
4. Starfucker - German Love
5. Lake - Without Devotion
6. Mount Eerie - Wooly Mammoth's Absence
7. Generifus - Baby Drawing
8. Deerhunter - Never Stops
9. Talbot Tagora - Morning Secrets
10. Masters and Johnson - Winter Sucks
DOWNLOAD
12.14.2008
"Alternative Like Me"
I can't remember the first time I was alternative. Of course, I must have been aware of it. That's a big part of being alternative. I mean, being aware. But, I think, memory might not be such a big part of it. Nostalgia is much more important. And nostalgia has nothing to do-- well, not much to do with memory. The point is, I don't remember the first time. It's not like the first time I dropped acid, or the first time I had sex, or the first time I DJed a party. I just don't remember the beginning.
The first thing I do remember was growing up in Seattle during the 1990s. I guess there were plenty of alternative people around way back then, but I didn't know any of them. Back then, I wasn't even a part of any scene, really, unless you count the teen center, which maybe you would. The teen center was pretty chill. We used to go to the loading dock behind the QFC across the street and skate and smoke cigs and talk about Joy Division. But that just seems stupid now. I'm getting super sentimental aready. Which is fucking mainstream as shit.
Actually, I didn't even grow up in Seattle. I grew up in a suburb called Kent. Wild, woolly, evergreen, and completely authentic, I now have very mixed feelings about that place. In those days, Kent was a beautiful, wet-desert of a town, just beginning to deteriorate under the stress of housing developments and meth dens. I wend to High School at Kent Ridge. But I'll write more about that later.
For me, being alternative is something that I can define. But I don't want to. You see, if I define it, then it takes away quite a bit of the magic. Honestly speaking, my defininition might not make sense to you. Everyone has to figure it out on their own, like anything else. There is a kind of intimate inside to the whole alternative thing, that is always getting glossed over. I mean, plenty of fucking bros think they have it nailed down, but it's never quite right. Alternative is always escaping, always changing. Fifty years ago alternative was probably something else with a different name.
I read on Wikipedia that Black Like Me included a series of journal entries that explained, in intimate detail, the personal history of fractured American race relations. Therefore, I will include the following entries from my personal journal, which I kept between the years of 1997 and 2001. I won't stay to long with this form, but I need a place to start that isn't too contrived.
7 April 1997 -
Fuck you Stephan. I gave you fifty bucks for that guitar and it doesn't even tune. Is that the way you are suposed to start a journal? I'm so depressed. I need a girlfriend. At least I get to see Radiohead with my mom next week.
The first thing I do remember was growing up in Seattle during the 1990s. I guess there were plenty of alternative people around way back then, but I didn't know any of them. Back then, I wasn't even a part of any scene, really, unless you count the teen center, which maybe you would. The teen center was pretty chill. We used to go to the loading dock behind the QFC across the street and skate and smoke cigs and talk about Joy Division. But that just seems stupid now. I'm getting super sentimental aready. Which is fucking mainstream as shit.
Actually, I didn't even grow up in Seattle. I grew up in a suburb called Kent. Wild, woolly, evergreen, and completely authentic, I now have very mixed feelings about that place. In those days, Kent was a beautiful, wet-desert of a town, just beginning to deteriorate under the stress of housing developments and meth dens. I wend to High School at Kent Ridge. But I'll write more about that later.
For me, being alternative is something that I can define. But I don't want to. You see, if I define it, then it takes away quite a bit of the magic. Honestly speaking, my defininition might not make sense to you. Everyone has to figure it out on their own, like anything else. There is a kind of intimate inside to the whole alternative thing, that is always getting glossed over. I mean, plenty of fucking bros think they have it nailed down, but it's never quite right. Alternative is always escaping, always changing. Fifty years ago alternative was probably something else with a different name.
I read on Wikipedia that Black Like Me included a series of journal entries that explained, in intimate detail, the personal history of fractured American race relations. Therefore, I will include the following entries from my personal journal, which I kept between the years of 1997 and 2001. I won't stay to long with this form, but I need a place to start that isn't too contrived.
7 April 1997 -
Fuck you Stephan. I gave you fifty bucks for that guitar and it doesn't even tune. Is that the way you are suposed to start a journal? I'm so depressed. I need a girlfriend. At least I get to see Radiohead with my mom next week.
12.12.2008
12.09.2008
12.08.2008
Excellent Greenfields
Prologue
Good writing combines various proportions of honesty and cleverness. I am my writing lacks both elements, but not to a degree which will inhibit the story I am about to relate. For, as much as writing matters in telling a story, the specific content of this tale is so fantastic, so romantic, so intimate, so violent, and so important, that my telling will only disrupt the narrative occasionally. Essentially, it is the fall of one young man, from a place of great power and promise, to a place of deprivation, desperation, and sensual oblivion. It is a story of decadence and a story of the puritanical Western American. It is a story of death and sexuality and addiction. Most of all, it is the story, particularity irrelevant, of one young man's disappearing life.
1. High School Magic
I met a wonderful human being, some years ago, when he was still a child. Fresh, full of the crispness of a ripe affluent life, this boy found himself in one of the most beautiful places on earth. In his family life he had good company. The part of the United States of America that he grew up was surely the most vibrant cities the world will ever see, home to many cultures and businesses. There are so many stories that have come from the place our hero comes from. He is, at least literarelly, in famous company.
This story begins on a back road winding through rural Washington state. On a glistening lawn of several acres a few couples pose for photographs. In the night, the flashes illuminate the eminent darkness, showing glimpses into the vast canopies of elder evergreen trees. Imagine the incredible anticipation, like Christmas morning for patient lovers.
This particular evening in May, quiet with anticipation, happens to be the Senior prom of one Gerald Greenfields. Young, well dressed in purchased striped gray suit and a tie his father had given him, Gerald exuded success. He grasped his date firmly, touching the small of her back with conviction. This was the night, for sure.
No less anxious, she had been trying to hold his gaze all evening. Stephanie Moore, a girl who's name he would barley be able to recall only a few years later, was his date. He remembers how she came to him that night, from across his parents lawn, swishing in her green gown, childish and evocative, intoxicated by swollen circumstance and wine coolers, stolen. Three years later, she now takes photographs of herself, letting go of life on the little campus of an East Coast liberal arts school, with boys who are functionally illiterate, notably employed, perfectly deformed by time and television. Their sex flashes in the cool darkness of booze-soaked Saturday night. Husky men play echoing beer pong, even how, in carpeted rentals near the quad. I seek nothing more than to be different from them.
She tried to help him with the pasta, but spilled. Was this a good sign for a young, sexually ambitious man? Gerald had not been drinking. He didn't know the other boys in his group well enough. The last time he's been drunk was at his parents summer home in Italy. From the summer before, under the shining Tuscan cloud layers, he remembered the taste of wine in the back of his throat. Tonight was too important to be drinking. He wanted to remember his Senior Prom.
The lights of downtown, a luminous ballroom, an apathetic DJ from another class, all quite typical. Nobody remembers it, if they were with who they wanted to be.
Finally they were all heading to the afterparty in a mansion overlooking the city. Someone's uncle, a very nice guy, bought beer and more wine coolers. I remember the wine coolers tasting like shit.
The couples, by this time, had entered a heightened state of awareness, though the only thing Gerald could focus on was Stephanie's bustline, moving slightly as she finished another wine cooler. Also, Gerald was angry because Stephanie complained, more than once, that the coke she had done right before leaving for the formal dance was beginning to become a less pleasant sheen on reality, an insipid buzzing. Gerald doubted Stephanie had found anyone to buy cocaine from, let alone done it in his parent's bathroom. What a troubling, titillating thought. His wishful mind refocused again.
Now he was sitting on the back porch, listening to music with the other kids, glancing up at the sky to see stars. Stephanie was indoors. He was paralyzed. Where would then go? This was the night, but nothing was happening. They had been getting along well enough, and then she had gone upstairs with some of the other girls in their class. They stars seemed to move slightly. Could he see the stars spin away from him as the Earth moved? No, he felt certain it was all too slow.
From a second story window a light flashed on, then off.
He decided he wanted to sleep with someone else, and forget the last few months. What did it matter? There were other girls, especially (he assumed) in college, and Seattle tonight was so remote and sexual, it whispered to him a thousand things in a language he didn't understand. Promises.
Stephan finally came downstairs and sat beside him. She reached for his hand and took it in hers. He didn't resist.
A few months later he found out that they had gotten pregnant that night. From Cape Cod, e flew back to Seattle to see things through. He told me later that it had to be done. They were on again and off again all of freshmen year.
As he flew to Princeton, these kinds of impossible thoughts were in his mind. Still, the their errant fertility gave Gerald something he could not have found in the pages of schoolbooks. He was becoming someone different. Even as he stepped on to the jetway, his hands shook with a new kind of terror. He was occasionally aware of time passing in a way it never had and a desperation seemed to be coming into his perfectly formed heart.
Truthfully, Gerald and I attended the same high school and our paths crossed many times. I would meet him again much later in life and he would tell me about the life he began after he left our quiet city forever.
2. He Still Has Not Met Friends Like These
On the plane to Princeton Gerald read all of This Side of Paradise by Fitzgerald. It bored him, but he had already finished his suggested reading for the summer. Plane flights were a terrible waste of time, even in first class.
In college, Gerald was at a loss about what to do. He wanted to go into business, so he thought that he should start out with some economics classes. The dreary science bored him, but at least reading the texts would give him an edge on the other meatheads drying to do some kind of business track. He was constantly optimistic.
He focused on making new friends. Through his parents he already knew several boys of his class. Most of them were uninteresting. Camden, a boys who's father own a seaplane company based out of Lake Washingson, was his roommate in the Freshmen dorms. They got along well until Gerald realized that Camden was good with women. On their second night in the dorms the young ace bedded two sophomores in their little room sharded room, leaving Gerald, locked out until three am, to read his economics textbook in the floor lounge. Apparently the three had met at a mixer for children who's parents owned private transportation companies.
That night was won of the first Gerald spent obsessing over his future success in academia, then in business. He imagined himself attending and giving lectures, manage grad students, a being higher out of college to run a small investment division at a wall street bank. Gerald was not a creative person, and his sense of work and play was quite conservative compared with other students his age, who often dreamed of becoming a part of the second Obama administration, or designing green energy infrastructure for as-of-yet-unoccupied bits of Africa and the Middle East. He was a practical person, because he knew that money and power had to be taken forcefully, had to be grasped for and then completely locked away from the harsh, liquid-neon, world of retail sales, hourly pay, fast food chains, and commodities trading.
Finally, a few weeks into the term, Gerald made friends with two boys living on his floor.
3. Certain Classes
4. Dark Places Inside America
5. When He Finds Himself Outside
6. It Always Comes In the Night
10. Going Back To The Places He Wanted To Hate
11. Into The Infinite Night, Warmer
12. Afterward In Another City
Good writing combines various proportions of honesty and cleverness. I am my writing lacks both elements, but not to a degree which will inhibit the story I am about to relate. For, as much as writing matters in telling a story, the specific content of this tale is so fantastic, so romantic, so intimate, so violent, and so important, that my telling will only disrupt the narrative occasionally. Essentially, it is the fall of one young man, from a place of great power and promise, to a place of deprivation, desperation, and sensual oblivion. It is a story of decadence and a story of the puritanical Western American. It is a story of death and sexuality and addiction. Most of all, it is the story, particularity irrelevant, of one young man's disappearing life.
1. High School Magic
I met a wonderful human being, some years ago, when he was still a child. Fresh, full of the crispness of a ripe affluent life, this boy found himself in one of the most beautiful places on earth. In his family life he had good company. The part of the United States of America that he grew up was surely the most vibrant cities the world will ever see, home to many cultures and businesses. There are so many stories that have come from the place our hero comes from. He is, at least literarelly, in famous company.
This story begins on a back road winding through rural Washington state. On a glistening lawn of several acres a few couples pose for photographs. In the night, the flashes illuminate the eminent darkness, showing glimpses into the vast canopies of elder evergreen trees. Imagine the incredible anticipation, like Christmas morning for patient lovers.
This particular evening in May, quiet with anticipation, happens to be the Senior prom of one Gerald Greenfields. Young, well dressed in purchased striped gray suit and a tie his father had given him, Gerald exuded success. He grasped his date firmly, touching the small of her back with conviction. This was the night, for sure.
No less anxious, she had been trying to hold his gaze all evening. Stephanie Moore, a girl who's name he would barley be able to recall only a few years later, was his date. He remembers how she came to him that night, from across his parents lawn, swishing in her green gown, childish and evocative, intoxicated by swollen circumstance and wine coolers, stolen. Three years later, she now takes photographs of herself, letting go of life on the little campus of an East Coast liberal arts school, with boys who are functionally illiterate, notably employed, perfectly deformed by time and television. Their sex flashes in the cool darkness of booze-soaked Saturday night. Husky men play echoing beer pong, even how, in carpeted rentals near the quad. I seek nothing more than to be different from them.
She tried to help him with the pasta, but spilled. Was this a good sign for a young, sexually ambitious man? Gerald had not been drinking. He didn't know the other boys in his group well enough. The last time he's been drunk was at his parents summer home in Italy. From the summer before, under the shining Tuscan cloud layers, he remembered the taste of wine in the back of his throat. Tonight was too important to be drinking. He wanted to remember his Senior Prom.
The lights of downtown, a luminous ballroom, an apathetic DJ from another class, all quite typical. Nobody remembers it, if they were with who they wanted to be.
Finally they were all heading to the afterparty in a mansion overlooking the city. Someone's uncle, a very nice guy, bought beer and more wine coolers. I remember the wine coolers tasting like shit.
The couples, by this time, had entered a heightened state of awareness, though the only thing Gerald could focus on was Stephanie's bustline, moving slightly as she finished another wine cooler. Also, Gerald was angry because Stephanie complained, more than once, that the coke she had done right before leaving for the formal dance was beginning to become a less pleasant sheen on reality, an insipid buzzing. Gerald doubted Stephanie had found anyone to buy cocaine from, let alone done it in his parent's bathroom. What a troubling, titillating thought. His wishful mind refocused again.
Now he was sitting on the back porch, listening to music with the other kids, glancing up at the sky to see stars. Stephanie was indoors. He was paralyzed. Where would then go? This was the night, but nothing was happening. They had been getting along well enough, and then she had gone upstairs with some of the other girls in their class. They stars seemed to move slightly. Could he see the stars spin away from him as the Earth moved? No, he felt certain it was all too slow.
From a second story window a light flashed on, then off.
He decided he wanted to sleep with someone else, and forget the last few months. What did it matter? There were other girls, especially (he assumed) in college, and Seattle tonight was so remote and sexual, it whispered to him a thousand things in a language he didn't understand. Promises.
Stephan finally came downstairs and sat beside him. She reached for his hand and took it in hers. He didn't resist.
A few months later he found out that they had gotten pregnant that night. From Cape Cod, e flew back to Seattle to see things through. He told me later that it had to be done. They were on again and off again all of freshmen year.
As he flew to Princeton, these kinds of impossible thoughts were in his mind. Still, the their errant fertility gave Gerald something he could not have found in the pages of schoolbooks. He was becoming someone different. Even as he stepped on to the jetway, his hands shook with a new kind of terror. He was occasionally aware of time passing in a way it never had and a desperation seemed to be coming into his perfectly formed heart.
Truthfully, Gerald and I attended the same high school and our paths crossed many times. I would meet him again much later in life and he would tell me about the life he began after he left our quiet city forever.
2. He Still Has Not Met Friends Like These
On the plane to Princeton Gerald read all of This Side of Paradise by Fitzgerald. It bored him, but he had already finished his suggested reading for the summer. Plane flights were a terrible waste of time, even in first class.
In college, Gerald was at a loss about what to do. He wanted to go into business, so he thought that he should start out with some economics classes. The dreary science bored him, but at least reading the texts would give him an edge on the other meatheads drying to do some kind of business track. He was constantly optimistic.
He focused on making new friends. Through his parents he already knew several boys of his class. Most of them were uninteresting. Camden, a boys who's father own a seaplane company based out of Lake Washingson, was his roommate in the Freshmen dorms. They got along well until Gerald realized that Camden was good with women. On their second night in the dorms the young ace bedded two sophomores in their little room sharded room, leaving Gerald, locked out until three am, to read his economics textbook in the floor lounge. Apparently the three had met at a mixer for children who's parents owned private transportation companies.
That night was won of the first Gerald spent obsessing over his future success in academia, then in business. He imagined himself attending and giving lectures, manage grad students, a being higher out of college to run a small investment division at a wall street bank. Gerald was not a creative person, and his sense of work and play was quite conservative compared with other students his age, who often dreamed of becoming a part of the second Obama administration, or designing green energy infrastructure for as-of-yet-unoccupied bits of Africa and the Middle East. He was a practical person, because he knew that money and power had to be taken forcefully, had to be grasped for and then completely locked away from the harsh, liquid-neon, world of retail sales, hourly pay, fast food chains, and commodities trading.
Finally, a few weeks into the term, Gerald made friends with two boys living on his floor.
3. Certain Classes
4. Dark Places Inside America
5. When He Finds Himself Outside
6. It Always Comes In the Night
10. Going Back To The Places He Wanted To Hate
11. Into The Infinite Night, Warmer
12. Afterward In Another City
Sunday Night
At the end of the weekend I get to stretch out and take in some television before bed. I get that slimy feeling I get when I watch Fox for too many hours, tempered by my distracted state; I spend a while wandering around used guitar websites. Did you know that Fenders from the fifties invariably cost upwards of 30,000 dollars? I did not. Also, did you know that Goodwill has an online auction? It's a bargain if you are the only one who bids.
School's almost out and I'm completely out of it. What is someone in college supposed to do when on break? Get loose? Because I've been doing that. Almost too much drinking.
I think I need a winter hat from my closet, something dark and woolly, but I'm afraid of what I might find if I go looking.
Seriously, who wants to start a surf band?
STARFUCKER VIDEO
I'm a big fan of this song, ripe with Starfucker's stoner-pop melancholy, dripping with the snarky catatonics of musician-cool, and greening fallow fields of 60s rock, dance punk, and funk. Stupid, airy, adolescent vocals somehow sound justified behind the fattest baselines to come out of Portland... ever. They will play Seattle's Vera project on December 20th with Natalie Portman's Shaved head.
Starfucker - Rawnald Gregory Erickson The Second from epb21 on Vimeo.
Starfucker - Rawnald Gregory Erickson The Second from epb21 on Vimeo.
12.05.2008
12.03.2008
Wednesday Night
I'm at work. I'm sick; I have a runny nose and a dry throat and a headache. I want to go home. The place I work is a library and there is nobody here, which is good.
I'm writing a term paper on Romeo and Juliet. Pretty typical college bullshit/awesome challenge fun. Did you ever read that book? I should go home and work on the paper, but I might watch TV and then go to sleep. College is so easy and fun.
About an hour ago, while I was replacing the labels on periodicals I realized I really want to start a surf rock band. Who is in? Poshhill surf scene?
Miss you GF/meaningful world
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