Seeing the world differently gets me all hot and bothered, so I was proper “psyched” when I read “Above the Past” in the New York Times and learned about NYCityMap, a Google Maps-esque wonder-function for seeing what New York City looked like, from overhead, in 2008, 2006, or 1924 (click the camera icon).  It surprises me how similar the older City is to the city of today.  Still, the site is worth some serious minutes of sepia-tone playing around.

Likewise, Phantom City takes the whole “seeing the familiar urban blahscape with new eyes” in the other direction, allowing users to imagine a New York of the near future. The phantom of possibility—a multiple ghost, mutating with each Apple press conference and MTA fail—courses unobserved beneath each skyscraper, each yard of pizza-spattered concrete.

It’s an appealing thesis. I read Warren Ellis and William Gibson and listen to Chromeo and watched Firefly and Bionic Six. I want a flying vespa inside a flying car, an Aibo that can floss my teeth for me… And yet I know these things will not be mine…

Both sites finally present not images of the past or future, but of alternate presents. 1924 is, relatively speaking, yesterday, less than the first twitch of a cosmic blink. And tomorrow approaches faster the more time we spend writing about it and trying to codify. We sometimes focus on far-off mirage-goals (nanorobots, peace, Aibo that can floss our teeths for us) while failing to take in the changes, more massive, brought on by the hyperwebnetz.

Where geography once took dumb European peasants in search of mangos and delicious syphilis during the Enlightenment, some new, hideous geography now takes America’s adventurers—not farther afield, to vast floating cities full of jaguar-gods and the beautiful Christ-less Passion of the potlatch, but inside, to the brains of the new anonymous ur-person, the mirrored hive-mind that circumscribes whatever future we elect.

Old geography presents the world as apprehendable as illustration, reduction, miniaturizaiton, visualization; new geography reduces an unpresentable pleroma-world of possibilities (194,000 results for “spondulix”) to a few hyperlinks, each of which concatenates to a few more; to a few more; to over 9000; to nigh-infinities, indexed and flattened by reduction (geography) to a few hyperlinks…  It’s a fugue, and it’s a new way of moving through time and space, and, hey, we’re all incredibly used to it, half a generation in…

Or maybe I’ve just had too much coffee today!

Back to how songs I like function as texts, read on the screen or page, sans instrumentation…

Consider this pre-hip hop jam by the unsane Bob Dylan/Robert Zimmerman:

Subterranean Homesick Blues

Johnny’s in the basement
Mixing up the medicine,
I’m on the pavement
Thinking about the government,
The man in the trench coat,
Badge out, laid off,
Says he’s got a bad cough,
Wants to get it paid off—
Look out kid,
It’s somethin you did—
God knows when
But you’re doin’ it again—
You better duck down the alley way,
Lookin for a new friend,
The man in the coon-skin cap
In the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills,
You only got ten—

[Two more verses...]

Ah get born, keep warm,
Short pants, romance, learn to dance,
Get dressed, get blessed,
Try to be a success,
Please her, please him, buy gifts,
Don’t steal, don’t lift—
Twenty years of schoolin
And they put you on the day shift—
Look out kid,
They keep it all hid—
Better jump down a manhole,
Light yourself a candle,
Don’t wear sandals,
Try to avoid the scandals,
Don’t wanna be a bum,
You better chew gum—
The pump don’t work
Cause the vandals took the handles…

Here, the line breaks hardly matter, and the rhyme and meter are so irregular that it’s hard to say in what way they matter (though they certainly do).

Reading the song on the page or screen, I come away with a general sing-song-iness, and I am dazed, battered into accepting the stream of signs. It’s a very medial song, prefiguring McCarthy: The poor Kid gets told a dozen things by a dozen interlopers, none of whom has his interests at heart. The world consumes him, even taking the fucking handles off the pump. (And what does the pump pump? Water? Gas? I’ve always wondered.)

The next song I’d like to explicate is Lupe Fiasco’s “Daydream,” which deserves a vast, vast space.

Today, right now, I suggest writers of songs consider how their words are read, even as an exercise, and readers of words begin to read aloud, breath to breath, sign to sign, feeling the ideas glued to the instruments’ sounds separate and present themselves, one by one, in time.

The news is generally frightening. I learned a few days ago that, in the Lone Star State, one Debra Medina is fighting to become the Republican candidate for governor. Her platform is staunchly conservative, and she’s so bat-shit crazy that even Glenn Beck isn’t amused. Quoth the New York Times:

Ms. Medina also appeals to state’s rights advocates who long to shift power from Washington to state legislatures. A leitmotif in her speeches is the idea that the federal government has usurped power from the states and that Texas should be able to nullify federal laws and regulations it deems unconstitutional. Her first target would be the Environmental Protection Agency, she says.

“We will tell the E.P.A., ‘You have no authority here,’ ” she told the Fort Bend County Chamber of Commerce on Thursday.

Thanks, Debbie. I can picture the freedom now: Those goodfernuthin E.P.A. pansies will quake as they’re forced by the noble Texas rangers to unlock Emperor Obama’s hidden oil-filled mega-caves off the coast of Corpus Cristi!

(Then they’ll have to free the animals, sending the august turtles-o-th’-sea to their native breaker islands, the ones used by our proud military to broadcast sub rosa numbers stations, thus preventing the start of Secret World War IV.) [Lol.]

In other news, liberals continue to drift farther from liberty. In the same Times that gives us that lovely snippet about the E.P.A., we have Paul Krugman shouting:

…The real story behind the euromess lies not in the profligacy of politicians but in the arrogance of elites — specifically, the policy elites who pushed Europe into adopting a single currency well before the continent was ready for such an experiment.

Firstly, shouldn’t we capitalize “Euromess?” I have a hunch that “Amerimess” (shudder at the fugliness) would get the cap. Or is this a reference to the currency, the euro (€); in which case, why doesn’t Krugman write “euro mess” or “euro-mess?”

Secondly, what the fuck? The problem with Europe is “elitism?” Sayeth an elite, in a country whose numero uno problema is that most of the country thinks there’s a problem with elitism (and intellectualism, and Darwinism, and most any -ism, even the ones that work pretty dern well) and is thus resistant to reform of any kind?

I mean, a) is this true? Did Jozef-the-Plombier, the average European citizen, really let himself get “duped” into supporting a strong currency? And, even if this is true, b) is the lesson that we Americans should learn from Greece’s financial woes that we should never, ever “trust the elites?”

The problem is probably semantic. I think the word “elite” is skunked (along with “postmodern,” to name just one), meaning it’s so often debated, so hotly, that no one even knows what it means any more. It’s a word everyone runs from and accuses everyone else of running into.

I wonder who these Euro-elites are, for example. Do they represent a powerful, self-interested business class that actually exists? On one level, I’m sure Krugman knows his economics and knows what and who helped fuel poor Hellas’ rapid decline.

But, simply by calling these avaricious policy makers “elites,” Krugman muddles an already complex issue. Thanks to that word, they become the same bogeymen feared in America (slick-talking Obama-analogs, the intellectuals against whom Palin bravely speaks, when she’s not distracted by the reminders scribbled on her hand). [Double lol.]

The problem with the idea that “elites” can’t be trusted is that they in fact can be. George Washington was an elite, in terms of class, money, education, military decoration, political ambition and achievement, and hair-style (mega-wig).

Even hardcore Marxists must admit that not all silver-spooned, Hahvahd-educated elites are wrong all the time. In the postmodern world, ideas are judged pragmatically (usually by professional hard-ass and British person Simon Cromwell, an online vote, or some combination of those two).

Of course, just to make the world wend round weirder, David Brooks posted an essay today arguing that we should trust the elites, though Brooks can’t resist telling us that the elites of the Olden Days were luckier and happier, and that our cold, autistic world is through.

If only the problems of the failing hyperintellecutal micromanagerial nouveau oligarchs here were simply their lack of empathy and their reliance on Blackberries—and not, say, their lack of Empire, their lack of money, &c. Then we really could have elected an Obama and known that our Obama would use his oligarchy’s surplus of cash and emotional equity and military trust around the world to affect positive change.

Instead, we lose the EPA (no need for the hilarious supernumerary periods) and find more bogeymen, everywhere we look: It is our leaders’ elitism that dooms them, their lack of empathy—anything but their stupidity and hubris, their playing out a cycle on a stage that has seen the cycle played before.

The following is the first installment in a lengthy, madcap investigation of how songs I like function as texts, read on the screen or page, sans instrumentation. Prosodists, sharpen your metrical pencils.

She said, she said:
“Nothin’s wrong—and I belong on stage…”

—Ted Leo, “Hearts of Oak.”

Songs aren’t always satisfying poems when read on the page. Many songs lean heavily on the voices of their performers—how their performers breathe them forward into time, meter them into space, packet of sound-information by packet of sound-information, toward our ears. The signs of the song march along, one by one, and we assemble a meaning that is not purely textual (signal, verbal) but also sonic/phonic, playful, almost religious.

In some cases, however, the written song meanders back and forth between poetry (decent, if not mind-blasting) and something else entirely—prose that’s simply being fed to us at a certain clip.

This is one reason I like hip hop so much. It doesn’t try to achieve the lyricism of a great written or spoken poem. Let the rockers try to match Dante. Rappers ape another form entirely. Their songs are often political, usually essayistic, and almost never anything but prose, spoken in a quasi-meter, with a few forced rhymes to keep up the illusion of “song”-ness.

This isn’t a criticism of my favorite genre of music. Hip hop’s strategy of not having to be poetry pur sang is brilliant. It’s freeing. Hip hop sounds more powerful, not less, for giving back to the page the powers of the line, and giving back to the metric breathers the power of the rhyme and the accented/unaccented syllable.

What does hip hop retain? The ordered flow of signs.

Consider one favorite of mine—“Throw Your Hands Up” by 8Ball & MJG, featuring Outkast, an epic and wry anthem which steers an ostensible call-to-have-a-party back again and again into the political. Sure, the people should party, the song says, but they should also examine their roots, and how they’re allowed to communicate with/in the larger world… Leaving aside its grander themes, I like this song as a song. I wouldn’t want to read most of it in a book. But there are exceptions.

First, of course, there’s MJG’s immortal couplet: “Ham sammich in the driveway—drop top, / naked women in the den, playin—hopscotch.” Wow. Talk about an image that perfectly fuses effortless cool (eatin a sandwich, ignorin the party) with money (got my cool car, dropped its top, probably put some Ds on it) with sex (the women are naked, playin around) with jeu, the game, the perhaps unintended metaphor for hip hop (hopscotch—a jumping game, a game of metered movement, accompanied by sing-song, by proto-rap).

This couplet is strongly metered and so isn’t a great example of hip hop’s prosaic-poetic style of rhetoric, but it does strike at the heart of image control. It moves us sign by sign, image by image, toward a picture of MJG, a mosaic of the generic (post-jaded/post-carnival impresario, laid back southern rapper, sandwich aficionado) and the specific (MJG—who else rhymin about sandwiches?).

But the ruckus gets brought with André 3000’s verse:

You wouldn’t understand, if you stood under it—(Oooooh)
It’s like the more that I talk to you, the dumber that I get—
The closer that I walk to you, the further that we stand,
apart, distant. Nobody has the upper hand, but my body’s resistant—
So now, throw your phalanges in the ground.
I’m still abound. Unbelievers stay from hell around.
I found negatives n*ggas, they only keep you down.
Transmitting from Native American burial grounds,
I carry around the weight of all worlds on my shoulderpads.
I’m s’posed to blast space invaders: I’m somebody’s dad…

This is complex imagery laid out complexly, via enjambment (spilling over, line to line). There’s almost no song-like meter (meaning the meter of the song is the natural meter of English prose)—at least, so far as I read these words on the page or screen.

The rhyme scheme is simple, and it’s nicely buried by enjambment and echoes and the effect of the images, which concatenate, compiling future and past (video games and Native American burial practice), to create a moment-by-moment, modern consciousness—a fully realized portrait of a writer bound up in details and vexed by many of his listeners’ failure to reform their lives in full honor of his words.

The imagery speaks prose-poetically to this frustration of the generator at his consumers: First, let’s ask ourselves what it means to be “abound.” Wiktionary gives us a hint: “To be plentiful; to be very prevalent; to overflow.” And: “To be copiously supplied; to be wealthy in; to teem with.” The example given, “Where sin abounded grace did much more abound” (Romans 5:20), is enlightening in that it situates the word in a religious context. André likewise compares himself to “unbelievers.”

We also have “abound” emanating out of “abounden,” from “abonder” (Fr.), “abundare” (Lat., “to overflow”), all the way back to “ab” + “unda“—the latter meaning “wave” (think of the water-spirits called the undine). We have the verb of abundance overflowing out of the simple sign of the wave. Then we have this ultra-abundant verb being frozen in noun form—indeed, in the form of a living dude—by the frustrated writer. He’s still abound. He’s vexed but still the generator, still the verb, made flesh.

Beyond the incarnate verb, we have the notion of the world’s weight, of Atlas’s burden (the mic—mediality—gripped by titanic phalanges), which speaks to the flipside of stardom: When not eating sandwiches with fine women, the rapper is a target, abandoned continually by his shifting, gadfly fanbase. He is, to boot, in the end, a father as well—a real man, as complex and human as he is simplistically in control, generator and “overstander.”

Throughout, the cadence of the words—long pauses devolving into fast runs, runs carried over into the next lines—guides us from thought to thought at such as speed that we can read the words any number of time without being able to settle on a center or focus.

This rap is flat, merging with what comes before and after it (the chorus—heavily metered, political, a chant, a beautiful thing to listen to but in a different sphere of art from this prose-poetic verse).

The words here merge seamlessly with the chorus even as the chorus demands that we throw our hands up in appreciation… appreciation of a verse about how we’re not getting it, we’re wrapped up in the wrong things, trapped by the wrong signs… Let’s give the guy an Honourable Badge Of Merit.

In the next 100% FREE future golden American ambitious installments of this pseudo-column, Reading The Song, we find: “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” indie rock, Lupe Fiasco’s “Daydream,” Iggy Pop, the early and impeccable Jigga, & much, much more…

…In which I imagine how ancient persons might have experienced the sort of wonder that we at the Atlas attempt to catalogue.

My column’s first, eponymical iteration concerns the Pharos, or great Lighthouse, of Alexandria. Read it today and let me know what you think.

The cowboy stories have taken up a fair chunk of time. Thus there have appeared here fewer posts on grammar and whatnot of late…

While awaiting more delicious words about words, please do enjoy this blog-post about a rum made from the ink of the legendary Kraken,—what killed Cpn. Thom “Ruckus” Marwallach back in 1905 (the only man to ever sail to the North Pole entirely in the nude),—not to mention the first of the Fumarole settlers in California in the early nineteenth century (who, it is said, summoned the beast by sacrificing to grim Triton a new breed of terrier which was never again seen to piss or heard to bark on this earth),—nor even to contemplate the whole township of Zollenkramshaftige, Deu., which disappeared into a tremendous black tentacle on Ash Wednesday, 1666, just as the monks were distributing festive steins of “salt-spiced” Zollenbier (the beer’s briny/umami flavour came from human bone-ash).

Entrepreneurs, take note: Assuming this rum sells even moderately well, consider launching rival brands such as:

• The Sweat of Ulysses. A foul but paradoxically aphrodisiacal ouzo distilled from 100% legendary Greek people (heroes, villains, hermaphrodites, lion-people, people-who-turn-into-trees-in-order-to-escape-horny-deities, &c.).
• Loup Grenache. The unsurprisingly delicious cherry-flavoured sweat of the vegan werewolf.
• “Thunder.” This mystery vodka comes to us from Hohoq, the Flying State, and we don’t know what’s in it, only that it sells for $7.99 at gas stations in the South and Midwest and tastes like battery acid. Rumored to have powered a “green” vehicle farther than expected. Rumored to blend well with grapefruit juice.

Further suggestions welcome.