A short improvised song on a small improvised instrument.

   Thou art a Silly Puddy, thou doest bend
   and stretch to take on every form I like
   a lowly lass, a worker in the field
   by day, a bawdy mistress by the night.
   I reach into your substance, and it yields,
   and yet resists and breaks at the same time.
   Synthetic tho your origin may be,
   Your bounciness is something very fine
   By squeezing you I temper all my rage,
   you pick up pictures from the comics page.

Write more sonnets! It’s fun and sexy.

This one is called “Island of Electric Eels.” It’s stingin’

Island of Electric Eels

My reply, which was not said aloud: “Well, you know – it could be yours, after we get married. I’ll give you a wedding night you’ ll never forget.

Which is good, because you’ll probably be testifying about it in court.”

And people say I’m a cynic.

Look.

Look at us. Look at who we are. Don’t ask CNN who we are, don’t ask Fox News who we are, don’t ask the New York Times who we are, just look. We’re holding up signs telling you who we are, and what we think. Read them. Think about what you just read. Really think.

Look at us, look at  yourself. Don’t look for liberals, or hippies, or tea partiers, or libertarians, or socialists or welfare bums. Just look. Are there differences? Are there similarities? Look at these people we’re pointing at. Are there differences? Are there similarities? Look around you.

How are things? Good? Bad? Don’t listen to what the news says, or whether the Dow is up or down. Look. Ask your friends and neighbors. How are they doing? OWS wants change. Do you? What kind of change? Why do you want it?

That’s the message. Look. Think. What then? Don’t ask OWS, ask yourself. It’s your country.

to take a new bride every evening, chosen by his advisers from among the young women of his people, to enjoy his carnal rights with her that evening, and to release her from his service in the morning. If the woman pleased him, he would favor her with a gift. Because of this, the women chosen would try to beguile the sultan with all of the charms they had, and they would play the part of coy ingenue, or sultry seductress, or wanton harlot, depending on their inclination and experience, and try to tickle the jaded palate of the Sultan’s lust.

But one night, the woman chosen as his bride displayed an attitude unknown to him. She did not show fear or shyness, nor did she fawn and flatter, nor did she strut and pose. She did not resist when he led her to his bed, and she followed his commands to take off her clothing, and to wash his feet and stroke his beard, but she did not speak, and she showed no sign of either pleasure or happiness. She did not gaze down, as if weary or ashamed, but looked forward with no expression. Her touch had neither tenderness or hesitation.

The Sultan was disturbed by this. He enjoyed the game of courting, of responding to his bride’s chosen pose with one of his own, answering coyness with firm authority, a vulgar comment with paternalistic indulgence, a whispered request with a vigorous thrust.

He asked her if she was ready to make love, and she replied yes, as one might answer a shopkeeper who asked if you would like an orange. He made love to her three times, both tenderly and fiercely, using all of the arts of pleasure he knew to try to make her gasp, or cry out, or swoon, but she was as passive as a stone. She yielded freely, and moved her body as directed, but she made no sound, did not breathe hard, or flush, or squirm. When the Sultan was finally exhausted, he lay on his back, and she lay on her back beside him, and they slept lightly and briefly, for it was nearly morning.

When the dawn came, the Sultan’s mind was like a boiling kettle. He felt that the woman had bested him, but he could not say how, and this was not a feeling he was used to. He sat up and turned to the woman lying next to him on the bed.

“I suppose you’ll want some trinket of appreciation, like the others of your kind before you” he said.

“No, I want nothing” she said, her voice still calm.

The Sultan’s rage exploded like a bomb. “Then nothing you shall have!” he shouted, and he called for his guard, and told them to take the woman away and have her beheaded.

The next night, the Sultan did not take a woman to his bed for the first time in a long time. He lay in his bed all night, thinking about the woman and her impassive face, her torpid limbs, and he shook with rage, then was quiet and brooding again. He lay like this til dawn.

The next night, he took a woman as usual, aware that his advisers were whispering to each other about the disturbance in his routine and the execution. He made only the most perfunctory love to his latest bride that night, thinking instead about the silent woman, her uncaring body taunting him, the exaggerated sighs and coos of the woman beneath him drowned out by the memory of her slow, untroubled breathing and faraway gaze. In the morning, he waved the woman away without asking her what gift she wanted. He sat in his bed for a long time afterward.

The next night was much the same. The woman chosen for him was strong-willed and seductive. She fluttered her eyelashes, and flaunted her body, but he was still under the spell of the silent woman and these temptations meant nothing to him. As the woman, who was very beautiful, danced and swooned for him, he found himself growing angry rather than lustful, and he pushed the woman onto his bed and took her, frightening her into quiet submission with his roughness. Her quiet compliance made him think of the other woman even more, and he climaxed, he thought to himself, perhaps I should have this one beheaded too. In the morning, he sent her away without speaking, like before.

The change in the Sultan’s actions did not go unnoticed in the court or the town. And the Sultan could not fail to notice the whispering of those around him, although he thought nothing of the reaction of the people in the town to the sudden lack of gifts. The whispers did nothing to improve his mood, and he went on in the same way for weeks. He was unable to find any pleasure for himself in his nightly trysts, and because his new lack of generosity was known to all, his brides became less and less eager to please him, until most of them showed the same passive acceptance of their circumstance as the woman who had started the whole chain of events. This irony was lost on the Sultan, however. His nights had become a grim mission for him whose purpose he could no longer explain.

Then one morning, his bride for the night, upon being dismissed from his bed, screwed up her courage and said that her father had told her to ask the Sultan for a gift, as they were recently made quite poor and she had heard that gifts were sometimes presented to brides who had pleased him, and she hoped very much that she had pleased her majesty, if he would forgive her boldness.

“Forgive your boldness? No, I shall not” he said icily, and he called for his guard and had her taken away and beheaded.

That day, he found himself stirred as he had not been for quite some time, as if a great weight had been lifted off his mind. Everything seemed clearer and more meaningful, and he went about his duties and ordered about his advisers with more vigor than he had in quite some time. That night, he made love to his new bride with passion, seduced her and made her swoon and cry out with pleasure, and in the morning, he had her taken away and beheaded.

And this became the way of things in the kingdom, for as long as the kingdom endured. Which was not very much longer.

— I did?

— My dream of learning French, inventing a time machine, and becoming best friends with Napoleon. Maybe it was crazy – maybe it would never have worked, but now it’s too late and  I’ll never know. That’s why I’m a bitter, hollow shell of a man.

— Napoleon was kind of an asshole anyway.

Colophon: James Joyce hated quotation marks, preferring the initial dash style for spoken dialogue as used here. Publishers of first editions of his works sometimes refused to respect his wishes and used the standard style instead, leaving him a bitter, hollow shell of a man.

He always wondered why it wasn’t used, since the track was in pretty good shape, and why there would be a velodrome there anyway. When he asked older folks around the neighborhood about it, most of them had no idea it was there. One day, Greg went to go riding and found the door had been chained shut and padlocked. Three days later, it burned down late at night. He never did find out what that was all about.

Gary thought about that for a while and decided that, while she had a point, individual moral principles should determine what circumscribes people actions. Then they had sex.

The difference between intimacy and acquaintance is always smartly dressed, in an understated and practical way. Constantly in motion, and looks straight at you when you’re talking, but never looks at you for more than a second when you’re not. Smokes 5 or 6 cigarettes a day, and always crushes them out with great emphasis. Doesn’t h ave

a favorite movie, or TV show, or band or anything. Hasn’t traveled much except to visit relatives on holidays. Wears a small, plain, gold earring.

the exact phrase.
2) If one of the top results, or the only result, that is returned for the exact phrase, is the very Craigslist posting that you copied it from, congratulations! You have have found an exceptional example of BS.

Garage jazz.

I’ve been digging around in the archives. Turns out I suck at archiving, but here’s a tune from the electroclash period.

song for a hot day.

Haven’t broken out the Casio SK-1 in a while.

Here’s a pensive little work of faux musique concrete called “You set ‘em up, I’ll knock ‘em down (or back), your call.”

Did you know that this was a Eurovision Song Contest winner in the 1950′s? That thing has really gone downhill.

I recorded a bunch of lead parts after laying down the basic tracks, and wasn’t happy with any of them.

I decided the problem was that I’d recorded the chords too slow, and when I played it again faster, the lead part was much easier to nail. This is the first version with all of the lead parts that I played – I was just listening to the rhythm tracks for each runthru, so the parts are totally out of sync. It sounds kind of cool in a totally whack way.

back and forth..

Getting more and more excitable..

Another Freedonian Zombie Masters outtake.

This song is called “Mongolian Steve Miller was in a hurry that day”.

This one’ s kind of har

sh and anxious.

The names of these pieces, by the way, is based on whatever I was using to prop up the guitar.

I decided to try reproducing the original effect. Turns out to be tricky to reproduce anything exactly, but I’m going to keep practicing because th is

is really quite fun. I hereby dub this technique “Tabletronics.”

The first tabletronics song, produced completely by accident.

Slightly edited. (Can you hear it?)

The sudden appearance of pleasant weather in Chicago has caused the Zombie Masters to indulge in a fit of spontaneous bluesiness, in accordance with the principle of adopting native idioms for one’s own purposes.

Freedonian Zombie masters are back from vacation.

This song is called ‘Hastur on the Beach, and the unutterable floor show he saw.’

Decided to start posting some random musical output to FB. These are going to be songs I whipped up in the back room, they will tend to be somewhat light and ephemeral in nature.

Freedonian Zombie Masters is my exotica band, and this song is called “Flee, foolish mortals! Tharg has awoken!”

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