a mystical house of light, pluto, suicide in smogtown

(for peter gelles of american film institute, dead at 33)

As the train pulls out of eugene and I am freshly coffee-ed and full of vegan fruit cobbler on my mind is this: finance. We need money to make nick maybury's record.

But in the meantime, what needs to happen is that all of his clean demos need to go on to youtube, with a picture file to hold the place.

And if we could make videos that would be nice.

I showed nick the easy sweet elliott smith video of “angeles” shot in black and white, roaming through portland in a car, and singing of a future.

Was it angelus the daytime prayer, or angeles, the city of dreams.

He said it was so beautiful. I wanted him to see that the path to greatness is not always limited by perfection. Imperfect technologies, and the fleetingness of time, make the art which is wabi-sabi, perfect in its imperfection. A mind as limitless as his could make 100 takes of the same song.

But as everything is so expensive, how could we possibly hire genius sound engineers like dustin mosley or make big budget videos?

It is my certainty that in the future, everything will flow like water, limitless creativity into the ocean of infinite internet and life. As I spoke with grant fitzpatrick we both seemed to agree that it is about the process, not the product.

The scenes from 98 radiohead documentary Meeting People is Easy show the tiresome craft of recording perfection, with all the best equipment of the time. Were it not for that film, we might never know the rare unreleased song, about a nasty surprise, a song so dark and sinister, so laboriously dark as to be radio poison.

In a manifesto of internet philosophy I concocted in the nick maybury lab, I mused that in the future we will pay each other in rainbows, we the fey utopians of internet prophecy. I wrote marion belle of bowery beasts beseechingly, please beg nick maybury to release the music of the revolution.

My melodramatic imagination senses the doom of time. But nick will live a long healthy life. Nonetheless, the imperative, publish or perish, rains guilt upon my mind. In sharing, the kopimi culture thrives.

Were we to write the business plan for the arts venture capital for the music of the future, the eco festivals, the utopias, the music concert in the gulf, what returns would we promise?????

who will monetize this? And will their money have value? I doubt it . . .

Nick so incisevely said, the future of music business involves plastic money and I said yes digital money. Cognitive commerce.

I get the feeling nick even hides the extremity of his genius in favor of humility most of the time. I found out a few too many wonderful things listening to he and his industry mate chatter on about resumes, celebrity, music business shenanigans. In my innocence, I want to learn law and finance, economics and business. Not because I think they have any meaning, but because I can see them falling apart before our eyes.

What emerges are larger truths: hope, fear, despair, love, hunger, poverty, environmental crisis.

The song I need to find now is “spanish electro.” I hear yoga studio music . . .

in my future I feel the effects of the anarchist punk hippies in oregon, so deliberately anti-capitalist, busking on the streets, living.

I wrote the most emotional heartfelt letter of thanks to nick and have promised to give him my life's concern.

When I grew up in nashville my dad steve eng would take me to the ryman auditorium, tapings of the nashville network, the grand old opry, the country music hall of fame, lower broad. My entire childhood was permeated by the passion and desperation of musicians.

What is now so favorable is the democratization of internet standards. Nick has inspired me with his facile usage of the obvious technologies for self-publicity.

When I found him for the first nick maybury solo set at cranes in february 2009, he told me, he did his own hair, fashion, publicity, management, music, programming, etc. so proudly.

What I think is important in the future is the internationalization of creative expression. So that an end result for an artist should not be merely heaps of money or glory, but a soul satisfaction in helping people realize new heights of creative expression.

My brother is currently working on programming artist websites under his new company engbot media. As the proliferation of the social media sites ecclipsed the home site, so too I think videoblogs and youtube will eclipse, or peripheralize the facebooks of the world. Life will be televised, the revolution, the process.

My favorite things were lofi. Bob dylan's bootleg sessions. The juvenalia of the aritsts who died young, egon schiele, elliott smith, aubrey beardsley.

To feel that yes life is too short, well it might be. And if it is perfect later well then that would be nice too.

I am going to try to have more courage in all things artistic too. What's the use of me telling my heroes to be even more courageous, when I am as timid as a little lamb????

so all that footage will be coded and described.

As I succumbed to darling nick's take-down requests for last june, I might stand my ground a little more so to say, the earth is limitless, time is limitless, film is limitless. Art is all there is, all that is important, especially as it frees humanity.

So please we might become more free to share our wabi sabi imperfections, and lean into the dance of it a little.

I won't be around forever either. When my dark side was busy devouring my mind like a cancer, I wanted to burn it all, delete the entire internet, every blog, book, and poem.

Indeed, I destroyed a lot of good work.

But this demonic need to create and destroy, like kali, oh please help me.

A 33 year old film-maker from the american film institute killed himself this week. I got the news last tuesday.

I came to LA with death in my heart, terrified by time and mortality, elliott's suicide/murder, I came instinctually magnetically biologically driven, in a method defying logic or reason.

It is because art is profound that we remained in smogtown so long. The beautiful people there with their beautiful dreams and their beautiful deaths.

As I became immobilized by grief and love and life, I cloistered myself that wednesday 25 august 2010 against death and the moon.

I listened to thom yorke wail away about the present tense, a time which is now here with us, presently.

I watched thom speak about climate change at the copenhagen climate conference.

His songs meant so much to so many. He taught us that it was ok computer, so we might all become blackberry robots, desperate for a signal, ground control in a paradox of relationality, giving way to a new way of cyborg living.

I sang a song in french with accidental distortion on bambuser, a requiem for peter. Vikram singh is giving a memorial service today back in smogtown, today, sunday 25 august. I am thinking of him.

In my elegy, I sang of the house of light and a perfect angel, and a place of repose. That ecstasy could not be taken from me, nor the urge to commemorate it. Though fear of stigma and incarceration chase me, I realize now the visions of andre breton and antonin artaud.

That we might free ourselves to live new ways of art.

Immensely inspired by jaques demy's the umbrellas of cherbourg, and philip glass's les enfants terribles, and the chansons de francis poulenc, michael nyman's prospero's books, and charlotte gainsbourg, I am realizing new ways of living, dying.

I tried to tell nicky about my composition. He did not seem to hear me. But then it became as though it were the live videocast of a rehearsal for the friday early am noir band neptune. I sang the main theme, the maison de lumiere, the house of light, inspired from my new aussie scorpio friend jack noire (justin de vries) of the house of light, his berlin band.

It was as though I couldn't take it in all at once. I had to get to the place of metaphysical epiphany before I could ever comprehend such a concept, a house of light. But it was there in the silent friendship of nick maybury, in our haunted hotel, with me a clatter at the computer, typing of the crying light, in letters he'll never read, that I could finally lay down, and open my heart to the evolutions of love, the house of light.

It is as I confess my love, that it blooms anew, and the particular reunites with the infinite, and the teacher takes me to the ocean of pure bliss, pure love.

The grasping will not do, the love is everywhere, on every corner polyamour. But the life support that feeds me until these moments of transcendence occurr is nick maybury's music. Somehow nothing else will do.

Sometimes it seems it is partly because he is just so nice and sweet to me, no one has ever been so sweet to me.

But I think he is really something, and so too do these loads of celebrities that need him to play guitar with them.

Nature has no derivatives, and I can't wait for the fir trees to whisper things. Even the roses in LA had no smell on coronado. The smog had burnt up my nose. The roses in the portland rose gardens wish for more music for their sickly sweet perfume. They want to hear nick's song “shiva the goddess” and “spanish electro.”

I want to remix nick maybury's “pieces of my love” (sex vox) with royksopp's “i'm in love with a robot.”

or pieces with shiva.

I am glad that the underworld loops song got confirmed as the BP oil clean-up song. Think of that!!!! I asked did it have a name. Nick said no. I told him I had named it for cheesy corporate propaganda painting the BP oil spill as some magic PR coup. That the song does the trick, it is a march across oily beeches. should we ask the world for more inspiring disasters?????

music and environment are the same healing . . . rebecca agrees . . . this will all work out fine . . . nick had me listening to nick drake's pink moon, so low-fi, and it nearly had my heart in shredds. I longed for an embrace, but chose words and writing and insomnia's sublimations. And even more I longed for the security of our limitless infinite friendship and respect, with boundless intimacy and boundless distance magnetising things across space and gravity.

In the morning he called me sweet pea, and I laughed. I had just written him by email a few hours before how we are two peas in a pod. Except of course, I am no nick maybury of the guitar or programming.

I was ready to be dismissed back to purgatory, but resumed my role as dreamer, assistant, blogger, think tank, artist, masseuse, sister, best friend, advisor . . .

and so happy to be singing, in perfect symmetry of our love and loves, of the maison du lumiere, the perfect angel, the transcendent place no one else shows me . . .

when I get home I am going to make sure it all exists somewhere for the infinite internet . . . and code it all and name it. I was working on the translations this morning . . . . . .

in the wake of an artist's suicide, we might try better to laugh at death and dying, with knives out, to take a last stab at the nothingness, take a few windows out, corrupt few machines in our digital sweatshops of our fascist times . . .

I wrote to nick

"I come to you when I feel empty

you teach me to live again"

and as I was writing this he emailed me, “miss you heaps”

I was sitting at the airport like an antechamber to an execution, desperate to get to the pluto show monday 23 august 2010. it is just so good.

But as if to overwhelm imagination, after spending friday night (saturday a.m. 28 august 2010) alone with nick maybury's laptop, I feel like the luckiest most tormented person on earth, because there is so much amazing music, that no one is allowed to hear.

Pluto is the tip of the iceberg.

There was an album about quarks, the nick maybury quintet, lots of mellow electro stuff in the vein of AIR of ulrich schnauss and kraftwerk. Say “hubble bubble.”

I keep writing my film-maker friends courtney stephens and zeke hawkins. They do well not to respond, because indeed they are busy, and I am fantastical.

But I am convinced that this music belongs in films. And then I get to thinking, oh, I am making the films. They are all low budget short films for the twitter sized appetite. They are a short film series of my vision of claustrophobia and ethics, love and panic, existentialism and loneliness. I already made them that night, or some beginnings, as a documentary of my art and ideas. Now I need nick's permission to post them, presuming we are old world, and not all digital anarchists, media wizards, partners, best friends, kopimi revolutionaries.

It gives me butterflies in my stomach.

Really the moment of change or collapse happened at a january thunder from heaven show at cranes with nick maybury playing the sickest part on guitar I ever heard.

I promptly learned how to film it, not realizing mylittle panasonic had film capability.

It was all over.

The guitar piece still haunts me.

I told nick it as such an honor to be in his presence. Indeed, it it really is and ever was.

When he played for the first time with thunder at the roxy in 08 I was curious who that was. I spoke to him and said it was nice, despite feeling awkward. I hope cam powell is okay, and really miss and love thunder from heaven . . .

the nausea that leaps up like a tide of vomit at my throat is my body's way of telling me I am in love. With life again.

I told nick pluto killed my bulimia, a cruel disease which followed me around since I was sixteen. Well it was august 23 2009 and nick played his set with stella mozgawa of warpaint and grant fitzpatrick. Something flipped like a switch.

I kept telling myself, I am nick maybury's friend, and therein came such a sense of worth and power, a real friendship, at last. That I might begin to respect myself.

Now carefully I will get juices and even food sometime, but I won't bury this head in toilet anymore, not after my teeth have been redone so expensively.

Bulimia is like the darkness in thunder from heaven, or the darkeness of any addictive cycle.

I wanted nick to know that the beauty of his vision and kindness had set me on a better path. And the nausea still laps at my throat, but it is because I have so much emotion.

The apathy I pretend, falls away with the mysticism of this music and being of light . . . happy again to begin again . . . happy

for peter gelles, 33 years old and dead