Teddybears STHLM - Fresh

It's Friday, 10:15 pm. We're in the town of Cusco, walking the darkened alleys and streets. We step inside the Cucuy restraunt. We sit at the bar and order a couple of pisco sours. The owner, a middle-aged gentleman, he walks up to us. He leans in -- I mean gets right in our faces -- and he says:

"Hey, you guys are Americans, right? You wanna party? You guys wanna do some coca?"

He's grinning from ear to ear. Stained, gold-capped teeth, breath smelling of pizza.

***

The year is 1981. Jack Slauson is a janitor; he works at the local elementary school. He goes to work at night. His job is to mop up kid vomit, wax the floors, clean the chalkboards, vacuum the carpet. He is single. During the day he watches The People's Court, drinks Bud Light, fixes the Trans-Am, naps.

The school is located in a sunny, suburban district of southern California. Track houses -- identical, orthodox -- line the streets near the school. A chain-link fence separates the playground from the street. During the day, children can be seen running in circles on the blacktop, hitting the tetherball, jumping off the swings near the sandbox.

Now it's 8 pm. Jack drives into the lot, parks his car. He turns off the stereo. He sits for a moment, feels the night air, leans forward, rolls up the window. Forearms bare and tan, plain Hanes short-sleeve tee covering his thin torso.

It's a warm evening; summer is just around the corner.

He walks across the parking lot. He turns down the exterior hallway, arrives at the janitorial closet. He faces the anonymous door. Opens it. Naked lightbulb overhead illuminating grimy cleaning supplies. Cobwebs in the darkened corners. The room has the thick smell of dust and wet rags.

He fills the bucket with soapy water, grabs the mop, and walks back down the hallway. This is his ritual.

He stops at door 102, the cafeteria. He always begins here. He flips through his keys.

This is the best part, the moment he looks forward to every day.

Jack opens his Walkman. He pops in a cassette. It's Michael Jackson's Off the Wall.

***

My name is Jimmy Bass. Every day I wake up at 5 AM, feel the first rays of light on my face, stare from my apartment at the appalling wasteland that is Cite Soleil, Haiti.

The radio buzzes. "U.N. troops are fighting a block-by-block gun battle with Port-Au-Prince gangs today, in the force's largest offensive since being deployed here in 2004."

Cracks of assault rifle fire in the distance. I call the boss, Evens.

"Evens, where you want de ammo?"

"Deliver it to Little Knife. 1800 Du Quai road."

My cousin Ralph straps into the bus. Battered AR-10 on his lap. Lightweight, air-cooled, autoloading. He releases the safety. Terse click of the magazine snapping into place. A pigeon coos from a nearby ledge.

***

It's Sunday. We climb the steep hill with the man, the man from the restaurant, passing cobblestone alleyways and whitewashed homes. We turn left into an unmarked courtyard, and there, sitting in the sun, are a group of men playing a game of sapo. An old lady, dressed in black, head covered by a scarf, sits in the shade near the wall and chews some leaves.

We play the game, trying our best to toss the coins into the metal toad's mouth. We are served cloudy glasses of chicha. It is summer. The day passes.

Ulrich Schnauss - Far Away Trains Passing By

Monument Valley, Arizona. A vast desert landscape, desolate, sweeping, abandoned. I am sitting at the butte's edge, admiring red plateaus that rise sharply from the valley floor.

Above, arcing sky, impossibly blue.

The wind blows, a cold presence from the east.

I understand there are empty places such as this, landscapes filled with brutal silence, whose drama unfolds daily to an audience of none. This place existed before the Navajo settled here, and will exist long after the last human footprint has been wiped away by the incessant wind.

Even now, in the thousand square miles before me, the only movement is twitching sagebrush and slow-rolling clouds, wispy, fibrous, gathering on the horizon. By day's end they will have become majestic thunderheads, ash-colored, wrathful.

I close my eyes, and I too am suspended above the land. Floating, I'm suddenly and powerfully connected to a network of places, times, and events. Bahia de Los Angeles, Baja California Norte, 1999. Ollantaytambo, Peru, 2001. Mattole Road, Cape Mendocino, CA, 2003. Grey's peak, Colorado, 2006. Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland, 2011. The Pacific Ocean, somewhere near Bouvetøya, 2023.

I think of a road, not far from here, where we drove a dilapidated truck into the desert wasteland, up through New Mexico and into Santa Fe. It was winter, February. The air was crystalline in our lungs as we walked the cobbled streets that frigid night, past the concealed gaze of Catholic saints and through the boisterous wash of revelers' noise.

I am awakened by the cold rain against my face. The storm is coalescing. I watch as it sweeps in, thinking: may my body be pulverized here atop this monument, smashed into dust, scattered into the wind, and allowed to freely roam the evanescent, cascading, unfolding catalogue.

Spinvis - Goochelaars & Geesten

Three fourteen a.m. A man walks barefoot into the kitchen; the crumbs on the tile floor stick to his soles. He shivers, but can't bring himself to walk all the way over to the thermostat. Instead, he turns on the oven. In the next room, his wife of many years and her two cats sleep soundly.

Three nineteen a.m. The oven has finished pre-heating. From a plasteen wrapper he removes a frozen cajun sausage, and places it neatly upon a badly marred baking sheet. Opening the oven door, a blast of heat envelops him and makes him squint. He places the baking sheet onto the lower rack, closes the door, and sets the timer for ten minutes.

Three twenty nine a.m. The timer expires, letting off a simple, unintrusive beep. The man has been kneeling in front of the oven, examining his reflection in the glass. He sees a pretty ordinary person there: just an anonymous, working-class man, eagerly looking forward to a midnight snack. He knows he probably shouldn't be doing this -- his waistline is starting to look a little pudgy -- but, what the hell.

Using decorative holiday towels completely unsuited for the job, he removes the hot baking sheet and puts it on the cold stovetop. The sausage sizzles beckoningly -- its savory scent causes the man to grin with anticipation. He opens the silverware drawer and removes one fork: it is unclean. He removes a second fork and stabs the sausage with it. Juices dribble down its side. "Sausage, you're all mine," he says.

"Not today, buddy," utters a voice from behind, and a mysterious third fork whisks away the sausage right before his eyes. He turns to see his wife, smiling wryly as she takes a bite of the kidnapped wienerwurst.

"What?!" the man barks.

"Damn, so good," she mumbles, the mouthful stifling her words.

"Your stealth is useless against me, wife," he replies sharply, and in a surprising feat of dexterity, he snatches the bite of sausage right out of her mouth. Then, staring at her with a sour, bleary stare, he grabs the rest of the link from her hand and slaps her forehead with it.

The End.

Nick Warren - Global Underground 28: Shanghai

For those of you who take your salvation in liquid form, allow me to say this: the Elixir of Life is a crystalline concoction, served over ice, often arriving in a tall cylindrical container. It can be ordered from the old man at the Guang Hua Duong ginseng house, an establishment of ill-repute in Beijing’s Xiang Do district. It has been known to exist at the club Extinction, in West Hollywood, but you must ask for it by an alias that won’t be repeated here. In Tunis, it’s used to ward off the evil eye; in San Cristobal, it’s administered by Gnostics. And Camus consumed it in the tiny Bar Le Chiropractic, in Paris’ grimy Arabic quarter, about halfway down an alley named Rue Kerouac.

Here’s what you must do if you come across it: you must cradle it. You must feel its coldness. You must consider the drink’s infinitesimal bubbles as they helix their way up, slipping past the ice as they ascend. And when the moment of inspiration arrives: drink. You will instantly feel every fiber of your body repaired, the zest of your spirit restored. You will be more refreshed than you’ve been in years.

String theory physicists have yet to explain the phenomenon. (Some of the more subversive ones have participated in it.) I happen to believe that the task of comprehending the Elixir’s nature is better undertaken by witch doctors and voodoo priests. But for someone like me -- a guy who doesn’t believe much in explication -- the Elixir is, quite simply, the sheet music to a rhythm tapped out by the liver.

This is the knowledge I impart to you.

Kindly,
Mr. Gavins

Feist - Let it Die

I stifle a chortle as I stare down. She mumbles adorably, eyes closed, lost in post-coital satisfaction. Feist, the universally-adopted antidote to human savagery, slurps softly from inside the stereo.

I pause to reflect, my jowls dripping. It's conclusive: I am the lion in the den of iniquity. Tonight, the lion's work is complete.

In the distance, a firey haze silhouettes the bridge magnificently. The haze unfolds slowly, a sustained atomic blast of orange. It perches mightily, cascading into the horizon, beautifully apocalyptic.

The inferno is looking rather prim, framed tidily in the white of my windowframe. "Neat," I think to myself. As I gaze out, I'm reclining, Buddha-like, in perfect opposition to the molten tableau.

The plucking of chintzy synth strings pulls me back. I recall something I heard somewhere -- a story about Amazonian shamans playing Feist to ward off violent spirits and cure all sorts of jungle maladies. There was another account, an article published in some anthropological journal, about Mongolian herdsmen using this strange Canadian chanteuse to calm their beasts. In fact, I can practically hear that inchoate voice, a vessel deprived of the slightest trace of vibrato, carried swiftly and coldly over the vast steppe.

Lightnin' Hopkins - Double Blues

My home is built upon 5,500 feet of superimpacted memories -- layer upon layer of sedimentary dreams and thoughts, one folded upon the other until the landscape emerges into the cold air in deeply-carved crinkles reminiscent of a discarded bedsheet.

My memories roll with the land in waves where the light casts long, dark shadows between rows of crests.

Memories... remember when we used to visit the old breakfast diner on 20th street in Denver? Eggs, bacon, hash browns and coffee -- all for less than six bucks. And I would sit there at the window and stare out at that windswept stretch of 20th, coffee steaming wide.

I remember the precise gleam of the Greyhound in autumn light as it passed, first moment's gleam of a long, lonely haul to Chicago, kicking dried leaves in its wake.

The 20th st. diner was a grimy joint, a real Lightnin' Hopkins sort of place. This was the place where arteries came to die. Ah, but what a death, child.

My landscape is mountains and dry brush; Hopkins sings of an altogether different emotional topography. His is a deep south of roads, shacks and shame that sizzles hard on the skillet.

Listen to me, son. Ol' Lightnin' is the voice of God. There is no disputing that.

Paolo Nutini - These Streets

Somewhere near the plaza, you'll see a set of crumbling stone steps. Here, the weary traveler may sit unmolested and enjoy the warm mountain sunlight. And if you visit in the autumn months, you'll see a man sitting there alone, peeling an orange. Sometimes he smokes a cigarette. He wears a straw fedora hat, brown trousers and a beat pair of sandals. His countenance – well, I’ll let you witness that for yourself. Suffice to say that I didn't believe in the saints until that moment...

There are days when the air crackles with energy. You savor that. For me, it happens in the fall, when the weather and leaves are crisp. Everything sparks at the touch. This is when I feel most alive – when the year is in the throes of death. This is when I saw him.

He too was entering the winter of his life. He’d achieved that magisterial calm, that unbreakable peace, that resignation. A distillation of decades of hardship. I stared at his wormwood hands, his fingernails splintering at the tips.

And this is what I ponder as I sit a little farther up those stairs, tucked in a desolate cafe. The old man is gone now, but I think: may we live to be as ripe, and if we do, may we be allowed to sit on the steps in peace; may we enjoy the sun as it warms our scraggly stubble and our craggy dispositions. And when the time comes, may I blow away and be forgotten, like so many brittle leaves in the season’s waning…