Real Name:
Brendan Harvey
Role:
Bio:
Brendan Harvey has amounted to nothing in the twenty-eight years he has had since birth. It seems emblematic that he never reached a height of four feet; in fact, to this day he remains a stout 3 feet, 2 and 3/4 inches tall. While many in this world have gone homeless and hungry under the most depraved conditions, Brendan Harvey has never had the fortune of garnishing such pity. Obtrusive and unintelligible speech is often a sign of dementia, and given sympathy in kind, yet Brendan Harvey has the unfortunate disposition of boasting that his equally obtrusive and unintelligible writing is of the highest artistic talent.
The work he does here at Ennui is a clear example of his uselessness. Comparably revolting blog entries are available at www.thecyphertheory.blogspot.com. He is currently in the process of writing an epic philosophical treatise, just as he is currently in the process of balding. He expects to die young of alcoholism, yet has not overcome the obstacle of despising the taste of all liquor; although, on days in which he was particularly adamant in achieving this goal, he consumed upwards of 2 wine coolers, and 3/4ths of a third. He will likely live to the ripe age of eighty-seven, at which time, in the process of composing his obituary, he will write the only clear sentence of his career: 'My mother never loved me'; unfortunately, due to severe Alzheimer's, he will cloud this line with the following: 'Who is my mother?' His death will bring modest sympathy.
There is a point at which sensuality manifests as anger, and there is a point at which anger matures into the grace of striding confidently forward in time. Santigold’s self-titled debut album masters the rhythm and modalities of this stride, producing in this process the finest debut I’ve heard since M.I.A.’s Arular.
Stacking chairs on tables, closing up shop for the night, I told the man dressed as a David Lee Roth disciple that he would have to find another place to drink his quad-shot Americano. His hands shook as he put a new tape into his walkman. He shoved his belongings into a duffel bag, and he stoop up 6’2’’ to me. He was obviously schizophrenic, likely homeless, worked out regularly, and popped amphetamines for fun.
He was a regular when I worked for Starbucks. The brand name attracted the crazies. They were mostly innocent. Some would unnerve customers as they argued vehemently with figments of their imagination.
JAZZ has been my drug of choice, but each drug has its complements. Charlie Parker chose heroin, and though his unsettled melodies are intoxicating, I never understood how an intoxicated man could play like that. I need all my faculties just to listen. Huffing paint doesn’t work so well if your bag has a hole in it, and the same is true with jazz. On its own, Mingus’s “Better Get it in Your Soul” is an amphetamine, and Thelonious’s “Epistrophy” clears my head like a good barbiturate should. However, the album I, Lucifer by The Real Tuesday Weld is both a modern-day complement to the drug of jazz, and an album that makes me want to get strung out, have my stomach pumped, and get strung out again.
WE all know of the experiments where a rat, a monkey, or a college slacker is given a choice between food and drugs, and chooses to starve rather than be without heroin, weed, or Johnny Walker. It is a fantasy of mine that I will be subjected to such an experiment, where one lever gets me high and the other lever satisfies the munchies. All the complexities of navigating in [...]
WHEN I was still a child, the Cold War had ended, and with it I thought history too was over. I was disappointed. After all, the Cold War was the dominant reference point for four decades of art, music, and literature. The Vietnam War counterculture movement defined my parents’ generation. And then here I was, born into a plateau of peace and prosperity, where social and environmental consciousness had won out, and it seemed like there would be no more wars to fight in, or to protest against, This may have been a juvenile belief, and a juvenile desire, but I have come to realize that I wasn’t alone in these sentiments…
-->