My girlfriend and I both do freelance work as translators for the same international company. I won’t mention it here, but you’ve probably heard of it. I specialize in Italian and she in Spanish. This weekend we carpooled together with our supervisor to a mandatory seminar a few hours away. After it was over, we spent most of the drive home trying to remember one very specific word that we all know but just could not recall. It is the Spanish word for a private, family courtyard and by all means please comment if you know it. Patio is not the word we are looking for, by the way.

As we approached our car in the parking lot where we’d met for the carpool, I noticed something amiss. There was a man doubled over halfway through the passenger window, his legs sticking out from the waist down and still touching the ground. I jumped out of the car and ran forward, yelling at him, but he would not move. As I rushed to open the driver’s side door, the expected blast of locked car heat carried something else with it – something more powerful and unbreathable. The man was dead – his hand still stuck in the glove compartment. It must have happened soon after we’d left our car there two days before. He had been baking in the sun the entire time.

We carefully opened the door and rolled the man out onto the asphalt. His pale, parched skin broke and cracked like a jigsaw puzzle – revealing the bright pink, sun-cured meat underneath. Each time we moved him the slightest amount, more cracks appeared with the most sickening, meaty pop. His swollen tongue protruded through his clenched teeth, dried in an expression of eternal disgust.

We drove home with the windows open and decided to keep driving because it was warm and the fresh air was nice. What was that goddamn word?

I’m in a huge mansion with elaborate pools everywhere. A famous TV lawyer is swimming and talking about selling his soul to the devil. A colleague is trying to talk him out of it. Then the water starts swirling and turning into a gigantic dark form. The form becomes the giant body of the devil with a pretty young girl’s face.

Standing on a balcony watching this is a group of mourning family members. My father and I are there, observing. All their daughters are dead because of this somehow. They point to some large wooden form and poke at it with a tool. The inside of the form falls apart like it was eaten out by termites. “They all rotted from the inside” someone says.

I realize this is all my father’s fault. The mob of families lunge for him. He runs from them and gets in his car. I’m in the back seat as a teenager again. He starts driving very fast through the city as if he’s trying to kill himself. I ask to get out. He lets me off and speeds away. There is some voice over narration that explains the connection between all this and a silent menacing space ship that looks like a toad. The toad is hunting my father. I become my father running for my life as the creature gets closer above me. I run into a small refrigerator with glass doors, hoping that I can hide. The monster has a hand that looks very much like that of a robotic skeletal humanoid. I watch the giant toad hand begin to crush the refrigerator around me.

The world goes dark.

I was taken to Castle Maldoror in Uruguay by what looked like a gang of death metal warriors. I distincly remember we approached the castle and it was epic. Like a scene from a blockbuster movie but real. The castle was on top of a sharp narrow mountain. It was evil, ancient looking and was surrounded by giant statues. They appeared to be tormented souls in water. There was an enormous river and waterfall around the castle.

Inside I was working on the crew of a movie starring Hollywood’s biggest female lead. The director was “rehearsing” with her understudy in order to get laid. They were in his office but it was made into part of the set. He was a butcher grinding meat. He took a big slab of beef and put it in a moldy tub before grinding. The understudy pointed out the mold and he said the grinder would take care of it.

There was some kind of huge metal skeleton being constructed by the crew. The director said “look at that beautiful monster, Pike. Get over there and help.” As I walked over I tried to focus on this intimidating set piece.

My field of vision became a blur and faded to darkness.

Hello Everyone,

I am happy to announce that I am out of prison and ready to complete “How to Fail and Die Trying.” I will be revising previous parts of this piece and adding the final sections very soon.

Thank you for all your cards and letters.

Sincerely. – M. Londus Pike

The New York Times has a piece running on an ”academic” symposium that took place recently on Black Metal Theory. I wasn’t going to post about this because people more engaged than myself  will no doubt address it.

It does however kick the dirt off an issue that consistently irks me: The imposition of meaning on art irregardless of the artists intent.

People take their own personal impressions away from a piece of art or literature, music or film. Metaphor, allegory and archetypes all speak beyond the concrete elements of a work. That’s the power of art, that’s good.

When institutions, critics and theorists start declaring meaning and intent without the input of the artist it is pure bluster. Academia can create a consensus on the meaning of a piece of art and not take the artists intent into consideration. It’s a speculative house of cards.

There are those that believe once the art falls from the nest and into the public view the artist becomes irrelevant.  However, when you are documenting a piece of art for the ages and making declarations about its soul, it’s irresponsible and dishonest to ignore the intentions behind it.

The Corvidae Cabal site has been online for a year now. I’m surprised by the number of hits we’ve gotten, largely from tags and searches, since there hasn’t been any real promotion at all. I hope the people who’ve passed by got something out of it. It’s hard to gauge such things.

The coming year should be more active, at least from my end. Perhaps I can get another voice or two in here as well so the updates are more frequent. It seems the most viewed topic was one regarding Bill Shields and his white knuckle poetic reflections on Vietnam. That pleases me to no end.

I want to thank M. Londus Pike  for the nightmare puzzles and Golden Knuckles as well for their contributions.

Feel free to leave a comment.

“Thou Shalt Not partake of decaf… Thou Shall Not allow anything to deter you in your quest for all.” – Descendents

the eulogist

“There are hundreds of challenges to books in schools and libraries in the United States every year. According to the American Library Association (ALA), there were at least 513 in 2008. But the total is far larger. 70 to 80 percent are never reported.”

I found this back during Banned Books Week and neglected to post it then. It’s a map of banned or challenged books in the US.

Overlay this with the traditional Red/Blue map, and there are a few surprises.

I watched a dark parade. I saw a rolling machine among the floats with a giant conveyor belt mechanism on it. People ran on the belt, trying to escape from two rotating spiked cylinders. It was just like a huge wood chipper. These people were all ground up alive. As this happened the parade spectators cheered as if it were a T.V. game show.

I saw every detail. Three people nearly escaped. They were caught by the death machine and a giant trip-hammer slammed down and splattered their heads. The crowd roared.

I felt dizzy. The world turned black.

I opened my eyes inside a skyscraper in Denver. I was surrounded by terrorists that looked like stock brokers. They doused the offices and themselves with flammable liquid and walked outside. The parking lot was full of news crews and onlookers. The terrorists lit themselves on fire and ran into the crowd. I came out with them and looked into the sky. A cluster of missiles shot out of the top of the building and shot towards the parking lot and myself. I tried to get away but some kind of acid began flooding out of the bottom of the building. It dissolved the cars and anything else in it’s path. I ran into a loading dock next to the parking lot and waited to die from the fumes. My cats were dying with me. The parking lot turned into a wall of fire. That wall of fire pulsed.

The world turned black again.

The ticking time bomb is a well worn trope of action drama… One of the primary arguments for torture was the ticking time bomb “Jack Bauer’s 24 scenario.” If there was a dirty bomb ticking down, poised to to incinerate your grandmother and everything she ever loved, wouldn’t you want to wire a car battery to the nearest person of interest and save the world? The “intelligence community” has universally said this scenario is a load of bunk.  However,  it provides a simple and compelling illustration for those who have been drawn into the FOX drama on television…

Now from the Discovery Channel we have “The Colony” which has just recently launched.

“For 10 weeks, a group of 10 volunteers, whose backgrounds and expertise represent a cross-section of modern society, are isolated in an urban environment outside Los Angeles and tasked with creating a livable society… Experts from the fields of homeland security, engineering and psychology have helped design the world of The Colony to reflect elements from both real-life disasters and models of what the future could look like after a global viral outbreak.”

 ”If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot, stamping on a human face forever.” – George Orwell