Fans of bizarre rap already know and love hyphy, a micro-genre from the Bay Area which is… well, bizarre. Suffice to say, hyphy is fun music. Think high-pitched noises. The 1990s. Artists like Keak Da Sneak, Mac Dre, E-40 (musically, if not categorically), and New York’s own DJ Eleven of the Rub.

Perhaps a clear introduction to the form is a song created from chopped-up sections of the Ghost Busters theme. Gentle reader, I present via hyperlink and heartily endorse “Ghost Ride The Whip” by Mistah Fab, a song about driving slowly while standing on your car, looking fly, wearing unexpected vestment, maxing/relaxing, &c.

Importantly, hyphy, a word Keak coined, is pronounced “high-fee,” not “hi-fi.” I hope an intrepid etymologist, philologist, or linguist (preferably Language Log’s Geoff Pullum) can one day trace in full the evolution of hyphy’s pronunciation. Until then, I classify it a minor, enjoyably diverting mysterium. Oakland’s version of my own hometown’s crunk.

MEANWHILE: The Sci Fi Channel needed a new look, a new steez, if you will. Some branding genius was banging his head against the wall. How could he ever possibly hope to make sci fi less, well, sci fi?

(Tangent: Fantasy got Peter Jackson, hot elves, lovably queer hobbitses, and a Halo-worthy final bodycount of about 90 million orcs dead, 1 Vigo scuffed. But the genre of speculative or science fiction has had to endure an endless parade of movie or television franchises resurrected in hideous zombie form. In fact, the only growth area in science fiction, at least in terms of massively popular culture, has been that of the zombie—though near-future vampires seem due for a New Orleans-inspired/tween-financed comeback.)

What was Sci Fi (the channel) to do? The answer, according to our hypothetical branding whiz, was to change its name to something unpronounceable and enigmatical: SyFy. I saw this word, this neoloogyism, in brilliant largeness on a poster at a bus stop and read it “sigh-fee,” because of hyphy. I read the copy around the word and found out that it is pronounced “sigh-fi,” as in “sci-fi” the genre, as in “Sci Fi” the channel. I shook my head and thought immediately of Mac Dre (RIP) and the other under-sung exponents of innovation and, yes, speculation in hip hop.

Zombies are all well and good. Sci Fi getting a metaphorical haircut to attract a new demographic is all well and good. But companies seeking to foster innovation in that strange zone between future-reading and art, between astrology and entertainment need to do more than simply repackage old concepts.

What Sci Fi et al need is the sort of willing-to-defy-popular-trends spirit that inspired Firefly, that inspired hyphy, that inspired crunk, that inspired the first rap records, and before that the first jazz jams in some broke dude’s basement in some hood I’ve never heard of, and before that Debussy, and Shelley, and so on, and so forth, back to the first cave-nerd to draw a Cubist bison fucking a waterfall.

I’ve been reading a lot of the Atlas Obscura of late, thinking about the job of cataloging the irretrievable, unmanageable past. This morning, my daily email from the New York Times included the headline “A Historian Is On A Quest To Locate Lost Events,” which piqued my inner amateur historian quite a bit.

Unfortunately, the questing soul featured in the article, Andrew Carroll, runs only a spartan website on which there’s little actual lost-event locating to be found. He mentions a blog but doesn’t link to it. Weird.

Weirder, perhaps, is Carroll’s URL, “hereiswhere.org/Here_Is_Where/Here_Is_Where.” Why the deuce, the rhizomatist wonders, would you not forge ahead simply with “hereiswhere.org,” an elegant, koan-like URL? Or even “hereiswhere.org/home,” or a nod to convention? Or might I suggest “hereiswhere.org/whereishere/hereiam,” or some other act of play?

Officially, all word-hijinks aside, I salute Carroll and his ilk for wandering down that hallway of the past. My only admonition, I borrow from novelist Andrei Bitov, who writes in Pushkin House:

He expresses the evasively simple idea that it is equally false, if not more so, to infer a historical picture of a given age solely from data that are few and extremely meager. The contemporary of an age and his historian move toward each other in darkness, but this is a bizarre simultaneity, for the contemporary exists no more, and the historian not yet. The few things that the historian sees when he looks back are too clear to him; to the contemporary, they are engulfed by life. Why, one might ask, if a scholar succeeds in establishing something with precision, does it seem to have become more obvious and better known in the past? The scholar, more often than the dramatist, succumbs to the delusion that every gun fires.

• Book From The Sky, Xu Bing
• The Lottery Man, Benno von Archimboldi
• Margites, Homer
• Black Batman of the North, Part II, Henry Chettle & Robert Wilson, according to Philip Henslowe
• Ur-Hamlet, Thomas Kyd (?)
• Book Of The Wars Of The Lord, ? (a biblical writer insanely good at titling books/just plain insane)
• Quipu, the [according to some, telepathic] Incans

I’ve missed out on opportunities to announce readings and publications via this site; amends will be made shortly.

For now, suffice to announce: “The Death of Our Hair,” illustrated by Mr. Ethan Gould, impeccable artist and mind-warper, has been published in the lovely 26th issue of the Brooklyn Review, whose site is still being turned forward into 2009.

“T.D.o.O.H.” is a low comedy about hair, the Crusades, the hair of the Crusades, history, how we write about history, indecision, cities, and other subjects of interest to a wide variety of readers. Mr. Ethan Gould’s drawings of curious rock-like/twine-bound stone figures add vim and spice to an otherwise desert-solemn typographical experience.

Also available is issue no. 5 of Pomp & Circumstance, the Brooklyn arts & culture glossy I help edit. I am now the “Technology & Faith” section editor, meaning I solicit nonfiction about wires and beliefs and their intersections. Issue no. 6 concerns survival and survivalism and promises to be an extra-hoot, assuming my writers deliver on their goods. Otherwise, I’ll be a nutless squirrel in winter…

Ahem. Shop for P&C at local Barnes & Nobles, newsstands in the greater New York City supra-urb, and my house, where cat-ravaged copies of the previous four issues are slowly leaking onto the floor as I prepare to move to Ditmas Park.

Thirdly, Electric Literature no.1 is now available for popular consumption via print-on-demand (from Ingram, no less), epub, Kindle, Sony Reader, and probably smoke-signal, steam-punk vacu-helmet mind-transfer, &c.

Electric is a bi-monthly journal/e-journal of new fiction by (often famous, generally amazing) authors including Michael Cunningham, Jim Shepard, and T. Cooper. Rick Moody endorses it. I might be involved with it in some capacity; stay tuned.

Also available for gawking-at is the Atlas Obscura of Mr. D. T., Mz. M. E., and Mr. J. F., all noble and competent author-explorers. I am not involved with the Atlas but plan to be soon, via their moderated wiki-curiosities-posting system. If you read Curious Expeditions or once read the Kircher Society’s blog, check out A.O.

Also hell of dope is this guy’s site, which I just found randomly.

At which show one may enjoy five-dollar all-thee-can-imbibe sangria and beer.

This event will be all ~10 kinds of fun (+/- 1 standard margin of error of fun), not to mention the first Heavy Jamal show in a year, featuring songs never before heard by the public.

Sangria Dance Party ft. the Mangoose and Heavy Jamal
Friday, April 24 at 8:30 p.m.
293 Monroe St. #3, Brooklyn

PS - the HJ show starts after the Pomp & Circumstance party, if you are going to that (as I am).

PS2 - The penguins are coming to destroy us. Be warned.

From “Taxing, a Ritual to Save the Species” in the New York Times:

The more closely knit an animal society is, and the more interdependent its members, the higher the rate of taxation. Among bell miner birds of Australia, for example, pairs of breeding adults are assisted at the nest by several youthful helpers, usually male. The helpers provision the couple’s fledglings with a steady supply of lerp, sugary casings secreted by plant-sucking insects.

Let me pause here to appreciate not only lerp itself—a most vivid and terrifying substance, “secreted by plant-sucking insects,” as opposed to, say, plant-tickling or plant-massaging insects—but also the men and women of Noblest Science who venture forth to learn of the lerp, to love the lerp.

Our article continues:

And though some scientists had wondered whether lerp wasn’t basically a junk food, offered up to the young bell miners as much for show as for substance, researchers report in the March issue of Animal Behaviour that lerp is, in fact, as important to the fledglings’ growth as is the meatier arthropod prey supplied by their parents. By all evidence, the helper birds are honestly “paying to stay,” trading a valuable currency for the right to remain within the aggressively guarded precincts of a bell miner breeding colony, with the hope of better times and personal propagation opportunities ahead.

The only response I have upon reading of colonies of lerpers is:

FUCK yeah, cilantro. You know how humans do.

We may or may not pay taxes because our ancestors shared the mammalian equivalent of lerp, but we definitely share salsa now (in part) because of you, cilantro. You and your leafy green cool refreshing mintacular steez.

Today, friends, is a glorious day, because despite all the petty and noble terrors of the earth, there is the internet, and it yields forth so many fructifants, some mango-like (lusty, wet), some pomegranate (jeweled, secret), some fig (sweet, gritty, leathern), others jerky (turkeyfied) or ape-brain (clay-y, monosodium glutamate-ish).

Here I have tallied only a small portion of the multiple lode:

• Vin Diesel loves Dungeons & Dragons. (Thanks to Julianne Smolinski, writer and professional genius, for the heads-up.)
• Billy Bob Thronton hates both Canada and acting. And isn’t all that into music, either. Which is strange when you think about the guy’s life, spent acting, playing music, and (at times) touring Canada. (Why do we do the things we loathe? Baudelaire couldn’t help us there; I’m not even going to try, je regrette.)
• My sometimes hero/sometimes nemesis Nicholas Kristof is bored by words, which I long suspected.
• Finally, I now know the joys of RSS (”really simple syndication”/”rich site summary”/”read sexy snippets”), thanks to (who else) Google. I feel like all the previous RSS readers were working too hard to promote themselves and not hard enough to show me the multiple Infinities of web content.

Of course, speaking of infinity, it’s gotta be nice to be Google: Like Dan Flavin, John Cage, Sam Beckett, you’ve got your discourse’s version of Minimalism on lock. You never have to do more work than [white page, Logo], as long as you back up said Minimal steez with un-fuckable-with functionality.

And with the help of said functionality, what day is not full of wondrous charm, here in the internet?

I write “in the internet” but can just as well write “through, via, by way of, thanks to, courtesy, all over, throughout the internet,” or any prepositional phrase that does not imply “through the internet,” since there is no mystic Other Side, no transcendent meaning, no final answer, no wizard behind the curtain (unless Vin Diesel is hanging out behind a curtain; that dude loves spellcasting).

The internet, without center, without king or tyrannical convention of democrats, may be the first true rhizome, the first deterritorializing machine, that which consumes and strips of transcendent meaning, applying all meanings to all surfaces to produce (more) all meanings (again, different). (And I am far from the first to suggest as much.)

The other night my brother G and I caught up with some ex-coworkers whom we hadn’t seen in a long time. One, M, is a development officer at a major theater. Her husband, J, is a lawyer. M and J could ask about my job—”How is your writing going? Are you writing?”—but I found it impossible to ask the reverse without resorting to instant jargon: “How is your developmenting? Are you still lawyering?”

True, M could be said to be “developing” something, but that’s not really what a development officer does, I think. She probably raises money, markets theater, supervises benefits, mails donors, &c. Likewise, a lawyer might teach law, practice law, write law, argue law—but he doesn’t just law, nakedly. He don’t be “lawing around,” like some knucklehead.

It strikes me as strange that we English-speakers face a paucity of verbs for what we do, despite our cultural preoccupation with trade and class. At least, for all its loneliness, eye-strain, and half-mad symbolizing, “writing” is a straightforward, verby sort of thing to do. (”Signing” and “texting” are fun as well.)

I guess the only other verbing I’d put on the same plane as writing (which needs neither adverb—”singing clearly“—nor object—”drinking wine“) is an ur-simple, ubiquitous jargon-artifact of the early, Wild West days of online gaming:

“How’s your pwning been recently?”

(”Oh, same old. Many newbs 2 pwn, never enuff thyme.”)

Actually, I didn’t meant to fool anyone, but I had Personal Crises going on last Wednesday which prevented me from reading with Mac “The Man” Wellman and others. I have apologized profusely to the Turnstyle coordinator and hope to still be allowed into the CUNY Graduate Center on occasion.

Reasons I highly respect the CUNY GC:

• Survived a mind-blowing Ph.D. history class there on the rise of Arab nationalism after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Now all I read are history books.
• Bought some wonderful outdated travel guides to the Middle East at a GC Library booksale.
• Saw Francisco Goldman and Junot Diaz interview each other in the GC theater. Hilarious, inspiring, death-defying, etc. Ran out and read all their books.
• Spartan website.
• Tried McDonald’s coffee once near the GC; could not endure said coffee; pondered long/hard about how coffee could possibly taste that much like burning tire. Found out the GC has pretty decent coffee.

&c.

Next Wednesday at 6:30, I’m reading in with hyper-inventive playwright Mac Wellman, Fiction co-founder and Edge.org contributor Mark Mirsky, and fellow MFA students Anna Marrian, Kerry Carnahan, Diana Redman, Tejas Desai, Michelle Brule, JP Howard, and Laurel Kallen.

Your mission, should you choose to venture to Midtown after work for a dose of (possible) culture and (probable) humor:

Wed., 1 April, 6:30 p.m.
Martin E. Segal Theatre
The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Ave at 34th
Free

The Turnstyle reading series “features the faculty and students of four CUNY graduate creative writing programs.” Performers “will read a mix of non-fiction, plays, fiction, and poems.”

More info at www.centerforthehumanitiesgc.org.

• Codex Seraphinianus, Luigi Serafini
• The Rohonc Codex, ?
• The Voynich Manuscript, ?
• Rongo-Rongo, the Rapanui (the native people of Easter Island)
• The Garden of Forking Paths, Ts’ui Pen

It is not too difficult to discern the shadows of an Oedipal drama swimming below the surface. Here is the baffling, autocratic father represented most powerfully by the image of Andre the Giant (whose positive counterpart is the Good Father Obama). There is the beguiling, possibly dangerous mother embodied in many images of nameless, alluring female warriors. And the son is portrayed in pictures of Joey Ramone, Sid Vicious and other young rebels who would stand in for Mr. Fairey himself and who would depose and replace the Bad Father.

—Ken Johnson, New York Times, 17 Mar., 2009.

Joey Ramone gets a hyperlink while Oedipus, Freud, Bush, and Obama get nada. Also hyperlinked, earlier in the article, are Led Zeppelin and Andy Warhol. I’m seeing a potential trend. Mr. Johnson equates Shepard Fairey with pop, populism, canned “rebellion,” fading and faded fads, and the acquisitive-capitalistic urge to sell la Revolution to the rebels.

This is perhaps a good way to enter into Fairey’s world of late. Andre the Giant, now a motif for thousand-dollar handbags. Like Murakami Takashi, Fairey is enjoying post-indie/post-rebel popularity. He’s spreading his ideas and probably saving a few bucks.

But Mr. Johnson also dismisses Fairey’s art as impersonal and predictable, as if these characteristics are not found throughout the annals of art. The impersonal aside, what is Warhol, what Roy Lichtenstein, if not a little predictable?

My own favorites (Schiele, Dalí, Picasso, Kandinksy, Ernst, Tanguy, Giacometti) are perfectly predictable: If you’ve seen “The Persistence of Memory” (the drippy clocks painting), for example, you can probably identify other Dalís. (Look for ants, lions, clocks, vaginas, burning giraffes, furniture, transfiguring messianic depictions of his wife—all battling it out on the Catalonian waste at eventide.)

My point is simply that predictability is not necessarily the great enemy of art. All art, in a sense, is art-by-formula, even if that formula is “always do something different.” Most artists, as rebellious as they may be, want to be associated with their own work (predicted). They want to be identified with their own “artist”-ness.

Fairey—good or bad, pop sell-out or tru skreet innovator—has created certain memes. His Andre the Giant/Obey campaign has influenced thousands of other artists, whose work can be seen in some ways as Fairey-esque (again, regardless of whether that makes such devotees progressives or idiots).

Moreover, visual artists (like writers) “quarry out” genres and forms and themes. (This idea I got from Robert Alter’s Rogue’s Progress.) We only have X number of years on earth; we only have Z number of interests. Trying to cover too much ground inspires some artists, keeps them on their toes. Others find a single zahir/idea/theme/grail so intriguing that they never need to (never can) look away. (In the literary world, look at Thomas Bernhard. Or listen to the falling-apart rhythm-language of Beckett, from Watt to Molloy to How It Is.)

Look at Maya Lin or Richard Serra: Their geographic art is stunning, timeless, and open; it makes us look at our own world in a new way; waves of earth and mountains of steel remind us of our own inelegant smallness and mortality. And yet both Lin and Serra move in perfectly predictable patterns.

If Serra started painting miniatures of ponies and kittens (the way poet John Ashbery started making collages of pin-up girls and cacti), then he’d lose some predictability. He would not necessarily gain “innovation.” Innovation—adding some new tool to the box of art, expanding what art is, showing previous ideas in a new light, changing how we show anything at all—is not the opposite of predictability, which, while staid-sounding, is nonetheless bound up with the very idea of association-over-time and thus of identity. We are ourselves only when we are predictable. The more we defy patterns, prevent identification, escape meanings, the more we label ourselves “crazy” (or prophetic).

Not that a certain measure of unpredictability is isn’t necessary, especially in art. Perhaps surprising-the-self is good for the self; it adds options, clarifies past choices. Recently I cut my hair. Now I surprise myself when I look in the mirror. If the artist is a mirror held up the world and the societies of the world, then perhaps we do want to be surprised now and again by our own collective appearance. Someone has to cut our hair. Back in his Andre days, perhaps that barber was Fairey. In his handbag days (today), I’m not sure.

Of course, to spin the question of associations-with-self around yet another axis altogether, it’s always possible that someone co-opts your own “predictable” style, perhaps years after your death, for their own purposes. Check out the familiar painting styles of Dalí and Ernst, now selling cars. Or do as Mr. Johnson recommends and compare Fairey’s provocative anti-war prints with Maoist posters.

Either way, what is predictable today will be innovative tomorrow (”retro”); and what once seemed gloriously strange (Dalí, Andre’s mug telling me to OBEY) will soon seen worthy of the MoMA store, at best, or the collective catalogue of overly familiar “hip” T-shirts, at worst.  (Right next to “Cougar Hunter,” “Canada: America’s Hat,” and of course Che.)

Formula rex, formula mortis. *

(* Or something like that. I learned all my Latin from the names of dinosaurs, who I hear tell were both highly unpredictable and impersonal, like a bunch of gargantuan mesothermic clones of Rush Limbaugh, on acid.)

Always to shine,
to shine everywhere,
to the very deeps of the last days,
to shine—
and to hell with everything else!
That is my motto—
and the sun’s!

—Vladimir Mayakovski.

Courtesy writer and friend Jack Gendron. The sun’s motto. Jammin.