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

The exhaustion snaked through his life like an old stone fence that divided the good days from the bad. Each lean night another misshapen stone tumbled to the field where his sickness grazed.  He’d learned to take the daily punch in the nose from the alarm clock like a back alley scrapper but the cumulative effect as the sunrises piled upon him was difficult to hide.

He watched the meat bob past the office window. Great ragged chunks dressed in spice and marinade swirled through the broth that raced along the gutters. Among the butchered lot of them there were riddles unspoken that he couldn’t understand, but he had riddles that he savored too. They were  encrypted in the artistry of the killing floor. Another world made of  all of the invisible things crafted beneath their darkened porches when the lights went out. Rare and bloody. Seasoned like raw game.

 He had his  purging rituals. Hobbies, the people he worked with called them. The disfigured world beyond his office window stormed his apartment in the wee hours. It never felt as quaint as a hobby when the ideas twisted his wrists  or squeezed his larynx. It was a struggle to convince himself there was catharsis in it, that it was the productive response. Catharsis wasn’t the right word though, distraction or obsession were more honest. Neither as cleansing as catharsis, rather, they were different types of frustrations. They were frustrations that meant something. Whatever the configuration a knot was a knot.

Those people beyond the window looked so gleeful in their insignificance. He interrogated their walk and posture and glazed eyes for anyone whom might be a co-conspirator. Someone with which to commiserate, caffeinate and adjudicate the world. Not that he’d have chased them down if one walked by, but one day someone finally responded to his questions with one of their own.

Beyond the bone and gristle of the streets, a lone fluorescent light glowed in a window of the building opposite.  Half its floors were empty. The parade of the newly unemployed shoved free of wheezing companies had been common place for awhile. At first it had humbled him to see the boxes under their arms and the stutter step of those caught beneath the sun of an utterly changed world. It humbled him until he realized there would be fewer people in line at the coffee shop.

A potato shaped silhouette fluttered about the vacant space on the 6th floor.  A ghost in the hive free to dance her silent, anxious waltz. This sliver of mystery in such a naked, vulgar world electrified him. Her arms flailed with graceful panic and the stumble of delirium radiated danger. He inched forward in his chair. She kicked at the cubicle walls and threw her head back to bay at the sole light source. He felt small behind his desk, almost naive.

She collapsed to the floor, and fell from sight. He waited for a moment for her to rise but she did not. The stillness of the moment skittered up the back of his neck and he decided he’d seen enough. For all the meat on the streets below it was his first glimpse of how the sausage was made.

I was in a cross between a gothic horror mansion and what was my house. I was being chased by some kind of menacing force. I ended up in the basement of the house where a giant beast was trying to kill me. I somehow pinned it to the wall and cut it’s head off with a shovel.

The body was still trying to to reach me on it’s own. The arms were groping but I was just out of reach of it’s clawed fingers. The head was still alive and gnashing it’s teeth at me as I smashed it in the face with the shovel. That stopped the head from threatening me so I used the shovel to try and cut off the monster’s jaw.

Once I finally stomped the blade through the jaw I saw that the beast was actually a giant puppet. I could tell the head was made up of material stretched over a cage. Inside was a tiny scared child who was still alive.

Confused, I left the basement and walked down a long hallway of mostly closed doors. I found that I was in some kind of medical institution. I looked around for someone that worked there. I opened a door to a room with two beds.

There were two little girls laying on cold white sheets. They both had red hair. They looked very sick and sad. I asked them where a nurse was. “We don’t like it when they come” one told me.

I quietly left the room and went further down the hall. I went into an old fashioned all tile hydrotherapy room. Two patients were chained together. One was in the water. They looked sick, insane and half dead from torture and neglect.

Suddenly I noticed a crazy looking girl bleeding out on the tile in the corner of the room. Apparently she was committing suicide. I recognized her. She was actually a big fan of my music. She used to write me letters I never answered. She would say things like “you’re my best friend.” I regretted not writing her back as I tried to find my way out of that place.

I see a pattern. The pattern looks like some kind of metal beast. My eyes focus to see it’s the door. Beyond it is only black.

According to their 990 form Greenpeace claimed $38,363, 322 dollars in direct public support for 2007. From May 8th to May 10th the new Star Trek Movie made $75,204,289 according to boxofficemojo.com. That is a difference of nearly 37 million dollars in favor of Star Trek/Paramount Pictures in 363 fewer days. I chose Greenpeace because they are a large non profit that most people have heard of, but I’m sure filling in the blank with another organisation would illustrate a similar or even more dramatic divide.

They say you can use statistics to prove just about anything, so… what does it prove?

 The serenity beyond the window juxtaposed with the fear beneath the news anchors make up was too great a puzzle to let go. I put on my shoes. In the hall, the televisions  from the other apartments bellowed like a choir out of time. A sterile requiem behind which people in suits debated when it would be appropriate to show commercials again. The war over those initial commercial spots were destined to become a thing of advertising legend. A thing that might never be transcribed if all were as bad as it looked.

I stood and watched the traffic light on the corner cycle twice. It was silent save for the mechanical click as the colors changed. With no traffic to regulate, it seemed an odd thing to have hung there above the street. The sun felt good. It was a still brisk out, but the makings of a perfect spring day were congealing. The birds in the city were loud when the din of humanity was gone. Was it always that way or  were calling out to each other that something black was going down?

I headed toward downtown on foot.  There was an organization that painted “chalk” outlines on the street when a pedestrian or bicyclist was killed by a car. You noticed them periodically out of the corner of your eye. Now though, with no traffic on the streets, it was remarkable just how many there were.  Every couple of blocks the outlines were there. Featureless ghosts on the asphalt, dated with stencils. Another death in the city. I looked past  the telephone wires, deep into the branches of nearby trees for the departed perched above their memorials but found only a pair of green boxer shorts camouflaged among the leaves.

The claustrophobic tenements that introduced the outer perimeter of downtown came into view. They were cheap, sweatbox apartments inhabited by immigrants, artists, dreamers and drug addicts.  An empty police cruiser blocked the street that carved a trench between the buildings toward the commercial district. The cruiser’s lights flashed dull blue and white in the bright sun of the day.  

I jogged across the street, hurried out of habit rather than necessity, and peered into the cop car as I passed. My attention was drawn overhead by an ill groan before I could catalog anything unique to the day inside the car. I looked to the sky to see a middle aged woman in a bath robe topple from the seventh floor. The navy blue sleeves of the police officers clutched at the air in her wake. She was a drift of limbs without resistance to the breeze that tore past her. The suspended moment deceived me. By the time I’d ducked into a doorway there was nothing left to fear from above. The birds were drowned out  for a moment by an invasive, dry pop when her head met the filthy concrete.  

“Shit. shit!” The clenched words followed her down and diffused in the slow fan of blood around the body.