M. David Hornbuckle

Blog

  • Merzbow and Other Noise

    I saw Merzbow do a free show at an art gallery in Soho Friday night. He was sitting cross-legged behind a table with two iMacs and a small mixer. You would think he was meditating, except that every few seconds he would reach out and adjust something on one of the laptops. The experience was deafening, over an hour of relentless caustic sound. You get the feeling that it’s almost like a dare, to make it through the show without covering your ears. A lot of people left before it was over.

    But it was more than that. A lot of the sounds were extremely evocative – sometimes cartoonish like the sounds of movie monsters, enormous industrial machines, nightmarish screams, metallic clanks, helicopters and guns. It was like a Philip Glass composition made out of movie sound effects instead of pure tones.

    One of my music professors in college would always say, traditional music is all tension and release, tension and release. With this music the tension builds for a very long time before you get release, and you don’t get full release until the concert is over. I would start to internalize the sounds that repeated in a pattern, and then I would be jarred by a sound that came out of nowhere. Then the patterned sound would change slightly, and it would draw my attention to another area for a few moments. Then suddenly it would switch to an entirely different pattern, a different mood. At times, though, it felt entirely like I was going insane, and I felt myself on the edge of the most crippling depression. Fortunately, the concert ended before the darkness really took root.

    I just spoke to Weingarten. He saw Merzbow at a different concert on Saturday night and reported a very similar experience to what I felt. It really drove us both deep inside ourselves in a way that was ultimately not very pretty.

    It’s been many years since I was making that kind of music, and I never did it particularly well. But there is something very satisfying about manipulating loud, booming sound over a period of time. I remember feeling very lucid in those days. The album that I made with the noise band Smack Doris was interesting in some ways, and in fact, I got more notoriety for that than I had with any of my pop bands.

  • Heroes and Villains

    Every hero is a villain and vice versa. This phrase popped into my head randomly last night. I think it probably would not stand up to strict scrutiny, but it speaks to the complexity I think modern literary audiences should expect from a strong literary character. Certainly if you look at anyone in a position of great power in the real world, from presidents to dictators to policemen to rich business men, they are seen as heroes by some and villains by others.

  • Romance

    Someone started a thread on J’s website called “Have Irony & Ambivalence Vanquished Romance?”

    Here is what I wrote in response:

    Probably for a lot of people it has been vanquished. Modern romance requires a certain suspension of disbelief that’s hard to come by, unless you’re insane or otherwise uninhibited by reality. In other words, if you’re willing to believe in it, and you can find someone to play along, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work. Most people these days probably don’t have the temperament to make it work.

    But I also think I’m considering romance in a very old fashioned way. The nature of love relationships has been through a number of paradigm shifts in the last 200 years, but a lot of Western culture is still very hung up on the 18th Century style providential trajectory idea of love as salvation, etc, which is what comes to mind when you mention the idea of “romance” to me.

    There may very well be a modern vision of romance that fulfills the same human needs.

    A lot of people get so invested in the search for “romance” that they inevitably find it in terribly inappropriate places, and they are continually disappointed.

    Some mourn the death of romance, and some search (most likely in vain) for its reincarnation. In a lot of ways, it suffers a similar fate to the idea of God.

    Some day my prince will come.

  • Depression Logs

    There was a documentary on last night about the Dixie Chicks. I cried all the way through it. I have no idea why. They were being interviewed by some serious news type, maybe Mike Wallace. More likely, it was what’s his name, the What’s the Frequency Kenneth guy, since he’s from Texas. The one Donald Barthelme allegedly had beaten up. I can’t tell one newscaster from another. Dan Rather?

  • The M-Word

    Barnacles on her flesh. Her barnacled flesh. I was thinking about poetry a short while ago, and the phrase flashed through my mind, what my subconscious suggested as an example of ‘poetic’ language.

    Our choices of band names has changed now to either “The Wonky Pundits” or “The M-Word.” Most likely, it will be the latter. I like the fact that it’s meta-linguistic, and that it can be interpreted in a nearly infinite number of ways.

    Because Christopher is so young, and even more so because he is naïve about so many things, I find myself feeling philosophical after encounters with him. The cowardly non-commitment of agnosticism, for instance. I don’t believe in the complete truth of any information. Total certainty of anything is simply egocentric. What I would call ‘truth’ is not absolute, but just what ‘works.’ That’s what I get from Rorty’s pragmatism. You must commit to some truths in order to navigate through life, and the improbability that anything I would be inclined to call ‘God’ existing is so great that I have no problem committing to it with all my resources.

  • Fighting Fantasies

    I know a lot of people probably have fight fantasies, little daydreams where you take out all your aggressions on someone deserving. When I was a kid, it was a group of bullies from school. I set up pillows on my bed and punched and kicked them, acting out the entire scene. Later, I got a punching bag that I used up until I left home. My victims became more anonymous, groups of inner city gang members (which I knew about only through television) and other ominous criminals.

    Of course, I also got into actual fights from time to time. These events typically lasted little more than a couple of minutes. Usually they got broken up before they really got started. Even so, they were awkward, ugly.

    In my crime-fighting fantasies, fights are beautifully and meticulously choreographed, right down to my explanations to the cops afterwards. Although they sometimes involve a specific person with whom I’ve had a recent altercation, they usually involve random muggers and thugs you might run into late at night on the subway. Lately, I have not only fantasized about a fight, but I’ve added the power to hypnotize my nemeses into believing they are having a heart attack, have some late stage cancer, or have a broken arm or leg, thus avoiding the gymnastics of having to actually throw and avoid punches.

  • Color Blind

    I realized that I never wrote in here about Jessica. Jessica is a transvestite I met on the internet. M and I met her (or her male counterpart, actually) at a bar on the upper west side for a couple of drinks and some lovely conversation (mostly on trivia game shows and Australian wildlife). During the day, s/he is a mild-mannered philosophy professor named XX, although XX always at least wears women’s underwear beneath his men’s clothes. During our discussion, we learned that an unusually high percentage of people in the field of philosophy are color blind. I was reminded of this yesterday, because I found out that Christopher also is color blind.

    A couple of nights ago, I was thinking about color blindness and suddenly wondered what it might be like to be shape-blind, or what that would possibly mean even. I decided that it would mean that you couldn’t distinguish corners from curves, or something like that. I’ve been plagued by questions like this lately.

  • Feminism?

    There’s been much discussion on J’s website about the relationship of feminism to female-only spaces. That discussion digressed into a discussion of what it would be like to like in a matriarchy, and now it’s further digressed into petty complaints from women about various types of mistreatment that they attribute to sexism. Many of these complaints – not being taken seriously by your landlord, not being listened to – all happen to me too. Feminism is so important, it really frustrates me when the issues get clouded with all this victim-culture bullshit. People are often assholes – sometimes being a woman is one of the reasons that people pull out of thin air when they decide they want to be mean to you.

  • Family Life

    I’m trying to think back on my family life growing up. E once mentioned that she thought I probably hadn’t gotten much affection from my father as a kid. This was, of course, a kind of knee jerk, pseudo-psychological analysis based on less than nothing. In fact, it was always clear to me that he was hyper-conscious of showing affection, even though it seemed to be unfamiliar and tentative territory for him. I think he shares with me a strange kind of shyness that makes us easily embarrassed, but I never felt that this embarrassment equaled a lack of affection.

    My mother, although more outwardly emotional that my father, is also very tentative in approaching issue that might be sensitive, even my tattoos.

    On the morning of 9/11/01, when she called me during the attack on the World Trade Center, Chris Weingarten had slept on my sofa the night before. At the time, he was living with relatives in New Jersey and doing an internship at CMJ magazine. If we were out late, as we were the night before, he would miss the last bus to New Jersey and crash at my apartment. When she called and woke me up after the first plane hit, I woke up Chris and told him. When she heard me talking to another man, she started asking me odd questions that I didn’t understand at the time. Are you home? Who’s there with you? I started to get the feeling that she thought I might have spent the night with a male lover, but she wasn’t sure how to breach the subject. Under the circumstances, I’m not sure why it would have been interesting or important.

  • More Dreams

    Two nights ago I dreamed of a princess who was given a “candle of Saint Stephen,” which, in my dream, was a blue candle that you chewed, and it caused you to spit out blue blood. The spitting of blue blood was a ritual that removed royalty from your lineage and allowed you to learn humility.

    Last night I dreamed M and I were both working for a phone sex operation where people called to listen to us having sex, and we dressed up in costumes for this.