Tag: writing

Proxy Christs and Purple Spaghetti

~ Chris Cocca ~ 4 Comments

Three items tonight:

1) If Christ lives, why is it that so many Christians treat the Bible as his proxy?  If we have access to the Divine, why this divination?

2) My friend Nathan Key told me a joke long ago called “Purple Spaghetti.”  There are some versions on line, but none of them capture Nate’s sick 6th grade raconteur style.  If you know this joke, I want to see your best attempt at it.  The longer and more drawn-out, the better.

3) Dzanc has a new on-line journal up.  Check out The Collagist. Gordon Lish is in the house.

What The Future Used To Look Like

~ Chris Cocca ~ 5 Comments

spacePaleofuture.com is one of my all-time favorite blogs.  I’ll say more about that in a coming edition of Blog Love, but I spent some time today looking at pictures like this from EPCOT books and other places.

I was going to write an essay about toroidal space colonies and what makes a thing authentic and I’d probably get into terraforming as human duty.  I started doing that and what’s below came out instead.  So rather than edit and refine it and make it palatable to everyone or into something finally constructive, I thought I’d share it as a writing experiment/free association with the picture as a prompt.

 

I was a kid in the 80’s and got to go to EPCOT.  I used to read Popular Mechanics and try to make crap out of batteries and magnets and draw fighter jets and space stations and curvy future cars and build paper ammo wristbows from rubber bands and hangers.  I did The Jason Project.

I remember when the Challenger blew up because the lady teacher had a kid  my age and my family had an Aerostar the first summer they came out.  After it happened Ford pulled the commercials that showed how the nose of their new mini-van looked just like the Shuttle.  I broke the sliding door with my first GI Joe and burned my arm on an interior light and it scabbed and cracked and leaked all summer and I’d touch the the puss with the fat tips of my fingers to see if it would hurt.

My grandmother made me watch INF when I was 7 so I could say that I’d seen history.  She didn’t say it but in 1987 you had no way of being sure you’d see more big human moments.  Imagine living like that for 4o, 50 years, thinking about the button, building schools with fallout bunkers, doing drills. I remember the first time I saw a plane, it was Wednesday, 9/19.  I went to college near a  power plant with two cement torch chimneys so these things made me nervous.  I imagine living like this for 40, 50 years, collecting history for my son just in case it stops.  Waiting for the break, the thaw, the Islamofascist perestroika. The Western glasnost Gorbachev and the Dubai-Vegas-Beijing Red Dawn white trash show.  Waiting for the INF bombs to come in off the market.  There is no end of history, Francis Fukuyama. There is history or nothing.

Obama will close Gitmo but will hold enemy combatants indefinitely without trial on the mainland.  Semantics must be justice. There are pictures of Pelosi toasting Cheney and Shepard Fairey laughing, obey, obey, obey, obey the giants and their posses.  I was a kid in the 80’s.

I thought we’d have more now:  sustainable communities instead of social networks.  Colonies in space.  Personal computers and their market like I didn’t get when I was 10, personal accessories and spirit trips but  lazy outward pushing.  If Richard Branson brings the heavens we should fill them.#

 

Sufjan At The Nursing Home

~ Chris Cocca ~ 4 Comments

A few days ago I told you about hearing “Chicago” at Friendly’s and being lost in a moment.   Today I was visiting a nursing home and the same thing happened.  A nursing home.  Bizarre.  I was gone for a minute.

My grandfather passed away last year.  He lived for a few years before that in a nursing home.  I found out before my visit to the home today that my dad, my sister, and I all dreamt about him (my grandfather) last night.

The Beloved and the Knowing

~ Chris Cocca ~ 3 Comments
I’ve been thinking about Plato’s idea of the Beloved, and about how every decent pop song ever written exhibits the yearning for wholeness and completion that Plato locates in the Beloved.  This is, perhaps not coincidentally, also why so many pop songs can be rendered as peans to what we usually mean when we say “God.” (Brian Wilson knew this when he talked about “Smile” 40 years ago).   That’s really all I have to say about it; just that pop songs are almost invariably Platonic. Our relationship with the Beloved teaches us about ourselves, cultivates joy, and lifts us for observations of the divine.  (Brian Wilson knew this when when he wrote “God Only Knows” and knew it again the first time Carl finished singing the first line).
The spiritual tension isn’t always expressed as sexual/romantic.  Often it’s rendered in terms of what people usually mean when they say “platonic” in the first place.  How right they are, as it turns out.  All the Pink Floyd songs about Syd Barrett are about the platonic (in the popular and classical senses) friendship of Roger Waters and Barrett and then its loss, or rather Waters’ and the world’s loss of Barrett spiraling out from Barrett’s own loss of self.  God, those songs are good.
I suppose you need this yearning if you’re going to make art.  I suppose you need this sense of incompleteness…I suppose this is why art has become so personal and why didactic art or message art is usually bad.  I suppose it’s also why you can hear and see yearning in art at all, that is, why you can receive it as such, why you can feel like you own it, why you can sing a stranger’s words and somehow still feel known and like you know.  And so then art is in the intuitive, emotional knowing that we are not finished. That we lack.  What it is we lack is something else.  God or human other, lover, loving, love?  But at least there is the knowing.

The Terse Realism of Second Grade

~ Chris Cocca ~ 7 Comments

My friend Nathan found this among his elementary school papers.  I love it.  Note the terse realism.

He also found our dinosaur reports.  Mine isn’t bad, but his is awesome.  This is the kind of thing he probably got in trouble for for not following the rules of the assignment, but I think he deserved extra credit.

Mine:

His:

Yeah, that is awesome.

Admit two, please

~ Chris Cocca ~ 2 Comments

I just got the galley proof for next month’s issue of AdmitTwo which will feature a hundred-word piece by me that I combined with a creative commons licensed picture from Flickr (with appropriate credit and permissions from the photographer.  It’s the Dylan story some of you have read.

Now that that’s ready, I’ll be getting in touch with those of you that wanted to work on some pieces for future submission to this unique venue.

 

Mad World: R.E.M.? No. Gary Jules? Yes. Tears For Fears? First.

~ Chris Cocca ~ 21 Comments

People have been finding this post for years because Gary Jules sounds a little like Michael Stipe.

R.E.M. does not sing “Mad World.” Gary Jules does. And it’s a Tears for Fears cover?  Those first two sentences are for the good folks finding their way here by searching “REM Mad World.”  The third sentence is an admission: if it’s not “Shout” or that other song, I don’t know it.  “Everybody Wants to Rule The World.”  That’s a great one.

I was listening to WXPN tonight and they were streaming some indie band who said “we promised to learn a song by the beautiful Leonard Cohen for tonight. But then we didn’t.” Just last night a friend emailed me and said “I actually don’t listen to all that much Leonard Cohen (interpretation, I don’t listen to leonard cohen but I don’t want to sound uncool by saying so straight out.”)

This post is originally from July, 2008. As I add these notes, that’s over a decade ago. Everyone who wasn’t already a Leonard Cohen fan then now surely is. 

This next part was an update to the original post from a few years ago, from whenever The King is Dead came out:

A few days ago, I heard The Decemberists talking about their new record, The King Is Dead.  Colin Meloy was getting into the influences behind the album’s vibe and used the adjective REMy. I thought, well yes, “Down By The Water” is basically “The One I Love” with different words, more accordion, and Gillian Welch.  Then David Dye mentioned that Peter Buck played on three tracks and asked Colin Meloy what that was like. Meloy said that Buck was really cool about the influence and put the band at ease by saying he learned everything he knew from the Byrds.   Speaking of influences, I’m still waiting for a Wilco/Belle & Sebastian performance of “This Is Just a Modern Rock Song/California Stars.”  Come on, team.