Big Moe

From crush to crash (or I'll bring you flowers if we don't make it)

2006-01-29T11:18:00.000-08:00

We crashed. Nothing seemed to make any sense. Nothing but talking unhurriedly. Nothing but fever, she said. Nothing but some hair seems wasted. I'll do it for the sake of poets and songs. I'll make it rime.

She smells like the flowers.
She looks like she's groing.
She looks like she has wings.
She can't leave the ground.
She wants it to rain now.

Just playing the Sun

2006-01-25T10:10:00.000-08:00

So you wanna go where the wind don't blow. Forgetting that you keep it from stopping as you breathe. You make it windy. Only you make it better than God does. 'Cause you breathe it in and let it out warm.
Fear not the wind, Lady Kate.

Big Moe. Who is this man?

2005-11-02T23:38:00.000-08:00

2005-10-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

As my true talents developed, they left me completely incapable of life, as becomes a true artist, capable only of thoughts and feelings; of thoughts because I felt, and of feelings because I thought. In fact, under the illusion of creating myself, I created only what I felt and was able to believe.

Luigi Pirandello

Blue like Yves

2005-10-08T08:10:00.000-07:00

I keep on tumblin' but the ground won't take me. All dirty, head to toes and toes to soul. And it better rain wine. 'Cause water won´t wash me. It better snow love, 'cause ice won't cool me.

And you better come up, 'cause I can´t digg any deeper. You better make it soon before you find out it's already too late.

Blue like Yves, red as wine, cold as you. My heart. And my burning blood won't melt it. I've seen it all but only my eyes got their pockets full. 'Cause the ones around my hips are empty.

Around your hips should I be, and maybe it could be over. As it should.

2005-10-06T18:16:00.000-07:00

Help me Lord like I helped her. May she rest in peace. May she rest, 'cause the rest of us won't. May time teach her that the only thing that time does is go away and take it all with him. And he never got his rest. Never he had stopped untill now.

2005-10-05T09:59:00.000-07:00

Destiny? Little you know about that. And little you will. I don't believe in destiny as I don't believe in lies. As I don't believe. You can't have death being the judge of life. As you can't make it sweeter with salt. As you can't wash your hands with destiny. And if you try to, there's no water in the deepest sea gonna ever wash them again.
You must learn to walk your own feet. 'Cause the road won't.
You will learn that death is being lost, not knowing the strange place where you are is the familiar place where you've allways been. The place you never left.
'Cause you paid your ticket to the road and ended up robbed by the driver that was never there.

Wanted

2005-10-02T15:00:00.000-07:00

You got my conviction to hard love labour. Well, I'm workin' on it. I'm workin' on it. And I may be the one who's locked up in here, but it's your face saying "wanted" on the street. 'Cause I want you. I want you...

getting nervous about you

2005-10-02T14:40:00.000-07:00

A dancing skeleton on a drunken body.
That's me. It's alright.
And you lash the rhythm to my melody. So right.

You know my gritty dalliance with the absurd.
Well, you said you like it; I'll take your word.
You know I got the soul of one truly possessed.
I'm digging such a big hole. Won't you clean this mess?
Girl have mercy. I'm a wild-eyed hell raiser.
And your wild eyes will bring me joy and aggravation.
That's alright with me if it's alright with you.
I'm just a mortal man that don't mind dying with you.

Girl, I'm getting nervous about you.

So be the jailer to this killer.
Be the preacher to this devil.
Try and kiss me in the morning.
Walk your high heels on my gravel.

I've been closing my eyes while driving.
I've been going nowhere 100 miles an hour.
Girl won't you run me out of gas?
Just fill me up with your kind of power.
I've been watching you from the bottom of my glass.
Laidback, crawling and falling apart.
You've heard me sing. You'll hear me cry.
I said, please pretty baby, won't you grab my running heart?

Girl, I'm getting nervous about you.

So be the jailer to this killer.
Be the preacher to this devil.
Try and kiss me in the morning.
Walk your high heels on my gravel.

(She says)
I’ll be the jailer to you killer,
I’ll be the preacher to you devil.
I’ll try and kiss you in the morning.
I’ll walk my high heels on your gravel.

tHe bLoody latTe

2005-06-01T18:15:00.000-07:00

The penchant for a culture to imbibe drinks and drugs en masse, in a collective-ritual orgy, is a phenomenon that transcends mere fashion. This, in itself, is unworthy of remark. The quest for transcendence through intoxication is as old as history itself. The cultural particularity of the proclivity is what is striking the strange uniformity of every epoch's beverage cult. Personal taste amounts for little. Instead, for each era, there's a distinctive mass hysteria for the imbibing of a particular beverage or substance. The drinks at this juncture in American history are indisputably coffee from Starbucks and the Vodka of Absolut. The popularity of these drinks stems from their value as symbolic war booty from recent conquests. A culture's adopted beverage represents the blood of their vanquished foe. Drink is transubstantiation ala the catholic cannibalism of Christ's blood and body. The smell of coffee is the odor of the Sandinista hospital, maimed by contra bombs. Ice-cold Vodka is the blood of the Russians, raped and murdered by capitalism.
And so it has been through history. Each imperial culture imports a liquid memento from their vanquished foe to serve as a totem of their power and glory. Tea, the Englishman's beverage, is falling out of favour as their neo-colonial hold on the sub continent wavers. For two centuries the English supped on their well-steeped leaves and tasted the sweat of the slaves in the Empire. Now, tea is for old mums, while beer swilling "lads" form the visible majority. The British love their beer, a cold pint brings fond memories of dead Germans, falling out of the sky in the battle of Britain. Beer first attained great popularity in America immediately after the First World War, when the US had tipped the scale against the Kaiser in the last days of the conflict. That war had been highly unpopular to a then isolationist nation, with American involvement cynically contrived by Anglophiles in government. The war transformed the country profoundly, much to the consternation of its activists. The women who had raged for abolition and suffrage now turned their eyes to alcohol, successfully banishing it in 1920. Prohibition, then, was unconsciously a moral crusade against imperialism and the blood sucking, chest beating which followed the Treaty of Versailles. Of course, beer made a comeback, especially after the Depression hit and veterans needed to boost self-esteem by slurping the entrails of the wretched Kraut. A cold beer in a bar with one's buddies brought one's thoughts to the bread lines in Berlin, with all its one-legged soldiers.
Beer was big in Germany first, from 1000 years before, when Charlemagne had pushed back the Hun and Cossack interlopers from the East. For the German, it is essentially the blood of the Slav. Its popularity was reinforced when Bismarck struck into the breadbasket of Poland, expanding Prussia and then creating Deutschland. Years later, to invoke the German's blood lust, an Austrian man named Hitler held meetings in Munich beer halls, and cited the loss of those wheat fields, now occupied by Slavs. When Hitler rose to power, after the "Beer hall Putsch", he allied himself with the Italian dictator Mussolini, who dreamed of imperial glory in Africa. The Italian conquest of Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, resulted in the espresso craze in Italy. During the Second World War, each Italian soldier carried an espresso maker in his mess kit. The Starbucks aesthetic garish, fascistic murals combined with Futurist mechanization of the work force and absurdist shouting can be traced to Mussolini.
America's love of coffee has always been tied to the affection for conquest. Coffee fuelled the "winning of the West" and the usurpation of the former colonies of Spain at the turn of the century. Guatemala, Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia etc. have all been virtual colonies since then, with frequent US armed interventions etc to ensure servitude. These nations constitute the mainstay of our coffee supply, and much blood has been spilled to maintain it. Coffee was the blood of the Indian, and gave one the adrenal rush needed to achieve "manifest destiny". Coffee was "Joe", as in Joe Nobody or John Doe, as the racist dehumanisation of the native people's refuted any necessity for their identification. This name was changed to "Java" in the 60's, when the US helped install the Dictator Suharto in Indonesia, who murdered so many of his subjects at the behest of insecure multi-nationals. Although this was a proxy war, not directly fought by us, coffee's taste still reflects the power imparted by the struggle. Its flavour was enriched and it grew in popularity. Whether Indian or Indonesian, coffee was the blood of the vanquished, and it tasted good.
Now, in the global economy, coffee is grown across the entire subjugated third world. When Starbucks sell a bag of beans it's always marked with the region from where it sprang, making the consumer an imperial cannibal connoisseur.
Coca-Cola is another toast of imperial conquest; it initially drew its flavour from the coca plant from Central America, but switched to another regional flavour (Tamarin root) when this was outlawed. Coca-Cola's ascendancy coincided with the Spanish American war and the annexation of Puerto Rico, Cuba etc. It was often mixed with Rum, the sugar-based flavour of those very islands. Coke was provided to all American soldiers during the Second World War as a way to "blood" the army. Coke plants in Germany changed their trade name to FANTA, so as to deflect charges of corporate two-timing in the war effort. FANTA was orange, a flavour homage to the smashed Republican army in Spain, where the German Army had first honed their killing skills. When a German drank an orange pop, he was gnawing the jugular of an Anarcho-syndicalist in Valencia.
Vodka is the refined fruit of the peasant's potato. Under the Stars, Russia's border relentlessly expanded, from the Baltic to the Black Sea and then on to the Pacific. Conquered people, impressed into serfdom, were manifest in the Vodka drink favoured by the Russian ruling class, both before the execution of the Tsar and then later with Stalin. Vodka can actually be made from a variety of grains and fruits, appropriate to the vast and varied lands of Muscovite conquest. For the Russians, this drink, the blood of Swedes, Finns, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Uzbeks and Khazars, became suddenly, under the creed of Communist internationalism, the celebration of fratricide. This accounts for the existential mania and depression that famously accompanies modern Russian drunkenness. With the conclusion of the cold war, and Russia under the yoke of exploitative Capitalism, vodka is more and more beloved by Americans, who gulp it smugly as proof positive of their power to sculpt the earth. Sweden, the traditional nemesis of Tsarist Russia, is the producer par excellent of the trophy drink.
As we can see, the cultural specificity of the blood represented by a drink is contingent on the race or nationality of the person drinking. So, while a German drinking a beer would be enjoying the life force of the Slav, an American popping a Bud would be eating the guts of that same German man. Similarly, the toast of expatriate brand 'Bacardi' rum is a celebration of the assassination of Che in Bolivia, while a splash of 'Habana Club', the Cuban National brand, is the bloody froth from the surf at the Bay of Pigs.
And so it goes; Tequila's worm is the dead Yankee at the Alamo, as 'Gusano' or 'worm' is the Latin revolutionaries name for the Yankee imperialist. Even the introduction of Perrier to America coincided with the death of the Nationalist DeGaulle and the subsequent compliance of France with NATO. Wine was championed by the Gauls upon the disintegration of its drinkers, the Imperial Roman occupiers. The Romans had snatched it from their Greek nemesis, whose empire they had eclipsed, while the Greek slave states begot their wine from the stamping feet of their war-captives, and so on, ad infinitum to the pre-historic dawn of life on the planet.
Food rituals have always been centred on hierarchy and power. The cow is ingested because he is essentially defenceless against us. We assert our primacy over nature by ingesting it in a gory ceremony of flesh chewing. The animals that are admired are felines and canines, bears and eagles; predators like us. This is an ancient warrior's ethic, echoed in the American craze for Nazi memorabilia. The milk of the breast is the first liquid imbibed by the newborn child. The baby learns that his mewing automatically summons the mother, whereupon she administers the juice of subjugation from her teat. Therefore, the taste of liquid is psychically paralleled with subjugation and enslavement even in the semi-conscious baby-state. The myth of Vampirism has, for centuries, been a folk favourite. Dracula, as literal embodiment of the blood-sucking sexual-conquistador, has proved perennially popular, due to his bold enactment of the usually symbolic sucking action. The vampire is nominally cast as villain, though his character is one which everyone envies and desires to inhabit. With this revelation regarding the meaning of our beverage proclivities, we see that we are not so far from our vampiric heroes.

by iAn sSVen/oniuS