So, the Boredoms show, June 30th, in Philadelphia, with Lightning Bolt and Hrvatski.

I think people played a lot of new shit. It's sometimes hard to tell with stuff like that though.

Keith Fullerton Whitman is like balding. He just had a laptop, and had probably done a great deal of programming in advance. I don't know. I know he was able to stand up, with his fingers not glued to the keyboard at all times, and drum along with his samples and stuff. He was pretty into what he was doing. I don't think the crowd knew who he was, but I think he won them over. Oh yeah: Not as loud as I expected, he wasn't doing the Irrevocably Overdriven thing of trying to max things into the red. He played songs that had length. One had a lot of video game samples. When I came in, he'd started his set but he was mostly just playing beeps. He got into rock out mode shortly thereafter. He was good. I had earplugs.

At one point one earplug fell out onto the ground but I put it back because Lightning Bolt are fucking loud. I didn't see them, as they played on the floor and a crowd emerged quickly. During the last couple songs, I rushed forward into the fray and got closer to the scene but all I saw were amps and the head of Brian Gibson's bass. It seemed like a lot of what was being played was new stuff, and some of it was pretty awesome. I got more covered in other dude's sweat during their set than I think has ever happened.

The Boredoms had three drummers and Eye playing- I guess a synth? I don't know. Show started with him holding what I thought were candles and waving them about. This created a sound and I don't think they were candles. Anyway- They were great. There was one song that was just like a dance gem that Yoshimi sung, it was like OOIOO or Black Dice remixing Deerhoof (music critic bullshit talk). Everything was good but that stood out. They played two encores. During the end of the first set, this Japanese dude started standing near me, with a little baby on his shoulder, baby wearing big red noise-cancelling type headphones. During the encore I saw this guy sitting on a speaker upfront. The kid clapped. It was great. Lot of dancing. Everything could be on an album. I recognized, like, a chord from Super Ae. Most stuff seemed new.

And then as I'm leaving this person's all "can I see your shirt" "yeah" "is that tux dog" "yeah" "this is ben jone's sister" "oh hi" "hey" "wait does that mean your poetry from when you were like twelve is in the paper rad book" "yeah, words to live by. well, that's embarassing." "for you or for me?" "i guess both of us, so it cancels out and we're cool" "high five for coolness" (we high five) "where'd you get that" "I made it, there's a website" "yeah i know, that's cool, i should tell my baby brother that someone's following his dogma" "yeah some nerdy kid in Philadelphia" Then I walked off to wash the sweat from my arms and face even though I could've pursued the conversation more or at least in some way tried to make myself seem awesome.

So, I'm in California, but I'm leaving for Philadelphia tomorrow.

Last night I got blackout drunk for the first time. Lesson learned: A bottle of vodka is too much. Evie Nelson, with whom I am staying, had friends at the Dyke March, and I went to meet them and had to drink to get over the whole "what am I doing here" thing. I got over it pretty quickly, and then, awhile after I stopped drinking, the evening lost its narrative. Apparently I was loud and uncontrollable. I remember puking three times but apparently it happened more than that.

Anyway California's nice. Berkeley's maybe crap, I don't know- I went into Ameoba and was kind of confused by the clutter, and they do the thing where there's a "miscellaneous" section at the end of every letter, rather than just going by alphabetical order. I went into Comic Relief and was confused by the layout and wasn't feeling confident enough to buy anything. I saw the Me A Mound book Picturebox put out and that looked cool, and maybe the only time I'll see such a thing.

I continue to feel faintly hung over.

My birthday is Tuesday. Sometime soon I am going to need to buy earplugs, because the thirtieth is The Boredoms show, with Lightning Bolt and Hrvatski opening. Good God. I will be so sober at that show.

holy shit dolphins

I just read a thing about how dolphins like pregnant women, and that due to the sonar, they can "see" the fetus inside. This makes so much sense when you think about ultrasounds, but never occurs to you when thinking about the Sega Genesis game Ecco The Dolphin, or Daredevil comics.

I wish I had sonar. I ran into someone a few weeks ago who I thought might be pregnant but I found out later that she had just gained a lot of weight after getting off heroin.

I went out last night to see The Ohsees play a house show. I did the thing where I stumbled into talking to them before they performed and thought they were nice enough people. They played a good show. They were winning. I'd only heard one song more than once, which I'd downloaded off an mp3 blog- I'd heard them played on the stereo at the house where the show was held and couldn't really get the magic due to the nature of their aesthetic and how it played off the open space of the backyard. I ended up talking to them afterwards, again with no real effort. Nice people who make good music. To talk about the music- It's all underwater lo-fi noise pop, with the noise more as texture than at the forefront. I think they use distorted microphones.

On another note- The new Nelly Furtado album produced by Timbaland is getting some hype. What I've heard I've kind of liked, but oh man that is very much all on the production because that girl's voice remains annoying. Like weirdly so, "I don't really get how this is popular in terms of being deigned acceptable by large segments of the population." Like- I get that indie music frequently features weird voices and it's taken like "oh idiosyncracy" but in pop music it makes me think "who is the audience" and I guess it's annoying people and so they like a voice that actually comes on bratty. Like so when the song comes on in a club the beat might lead to ass-shaking but the vocals encourage your worst behavior and most obnoxious tendencies.

Whereas the music on a Camera Obscura record just leads to swooning while the vocals encourage staying home and reading books, or maybe just talking quietly about feelings or some such thing. I've heard like two songs off the new one, and I like it okay. It's an aesthetic I fall into easier, you know. Today I read a George Saunders short story in a bookstore.

But I mean that's not all I do. But looking at my iTunes recently played playlist I don't know what it is I do. I wish I had been able to find that Ohsees record for download, it might help navigate that divide. Manitoba can navigate that divide- Dan Snaith of the describing his albums as being on some "next level Timbaland Brian Wilson shit" but I haven't been listening to Up In Flames. Right now I am wondering why.

By the way, before John Dwyer was in Ohsees he was in a band called Coachwhips who I downloaded today and they kind of work that Timbaland producing Nelly Furtado vibe but for unshaven rock club dudes rather than dance club ladees, PBRs rather than appletinis. I get the need for the vibe, I'm not going to deride too hard- Surely I am a man who likes his most obnoxious tendencies supported.

Jesus, it's late.

But anyway, yes, sometimes I almost get in fights.

I saw The Devil And Daniel Johnston Friday night. I've been listening to Daniel Johnston, yes, and getting his songs stuck in my head. Anyway, it's a good movie, pretty well-made besides a few little decisions that documentaries sometimes must deal with when dealing with things that aren't that visual or documented. But the story is good, the soundtrack is good. It's funny and it's sad and oh man Yip Jump Music is a good album.

I really should get some sleep.

Last night I made pancakes to give the class during the animation screenings, as a way to defuse the works I thought of as overly serious. I didn't know how to make them, and although they were edible enough, they sat in my stomach like paste and made me feel awful until I crapped and did some sit-ups.

The cartoon I made remains flawed, even following it's showing to the class, in its compromised form. I want to get it into fighting shape, because as it stands, I'm not sure whether it's good or not. Certainly I couldn't tell from the class's reaction.

And I've got to produce a ton of writing tomorrow, all reflecting on this class. I wrote a draft of a self-evaluation, but I've still got to rewrite this eight-page essay in a more academic form.

My obsession with the whole Paper Rad scene continues. I'm really fascinated by Dan Nadel and Picturebox, the people who released the book, as well as- Well, if you clicked the link, you'd see. Arty comics mostly, but also stuff like the Wilco book and the new Black Dice book. Fascinating. Dan Nadel is a guy with really weird and distinct tastes, that fascinate me because I get an impression of where he's coming from even if I have enthusiasms that he doesn't share at all. He's really into Mark Newgarden, who I recently read a good interview with. He's doing a new magazine, to be published by Lime Publishing, the same people that put out Arthur, and distributed for free. This is exciting to me.

This Bookslut interview with Salvador Plascencia informs me that a paperback version of The People Of Paper will soon exist. It kind of saddens me that I bought the hardcover, but I'd like to remind people that that book is really good, and maybe were you to read it in softcover, you'd enjoy it. The thing I like about that interview is just a little aside about what he learned from George Saunders, about the advice to be softer. It's something I agree with, and something that, secrets being told here now, makes me feel superior in my writing to this guy I had in a class whose literary heroes are William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, and Chuck Palahniuk. And that's a guy I liked, who I think is smart, but whose fiction actually struck me as unreadable for it coming off as adolescent in its use of profanity right at the start.

oh damn so this dude in my class Sam Hockley-Smith comes correct with the music blog! He's also stumbled across this thing so I was reading it and thinking "Huh, I should come correct with some music blog rather than be talking about Paper Rad and uncertainty all the livelong day." Which isn't to say this will magically become a music blog but hey, what if I talked about music? That would be alright.

So I make a statement of intent and then, you missed it, but I got distracted and read some of Rollie Pemberton's music blog.

I was told last night at a house show that I should write about music because I asked a band of three New York City girls who sounded kind of like Gang Gang Dance if they were into Gang Gang Dance. And they weren't. Actually- That band, Animental, were kind of hilarious in that- My mind does think like a music critic, just one that's really inarticulate. But here was the deal with them that I couldn't say to their face: That it seemed like they were just trendhopping everything that's happened since the year 2000. From Fannypack electroclash saying some words while doing choreography to a hip-hop beat to weird "is this freak-folk or just some self-conscious performance art type weirdness, I bet they hang out with CocoRosie at those Kill White parties" to stuff that kinda' reminded me of Gang Gang Dance to playing metal. I stood up front and looked pretty over it.

So, um, what am I not over, in these days of stuff not leaking? (Oh man I look forward to- Last Summer I was in Olympia and unemployed, not hearing any new music due to lack of the internet and funds, and shit was coming out in the form of official release that I hadn't heard- this Summer my internets might be fucked but I hope to find employment and Philly record stores don't blow, oh the fun I'll have) With new music mostly dull?

Early Smog records. Julius Caesar and Wild Love, from Drag City, early nineties, fuzz and noise all up in it. Julius Caesar, I believe, is Jim O'Rourke produced. (by the way, I'm calling him the Brian Eno of the modern era these days.) It's got songs where lyrics like "I'm gonna' be so drunk at your wedding" get repeated ad infinitum. Wild Love's got songs where lyrics like "Every girl I've ever loved has wanted to be hit" being repeated ad nauseam. And there's noise, pointing a way for lyrics-are-the-focus music outside of acoustic guitar strumming.

I mean, I'm not listening to that now. I was just listening to a Jamie Lidell live set Alex downloaded and wanted to hear. But I was thinking about it today, songs running through the head. What am I listening to? In cars with iPods being asked to name music as some kind of game to see if it is on the iPod and just thinking like "oh man I have no idea."

I was listening to Prefuse 73's Surrounded By Silence, and I think I want to listen to that album a lot actually, and just don't follow through. It's so great, slept on, and- God, fascinating. Scott Herren commenting on someone's MySpace saying he's been making metal. Would that be the Hisham/Tyondai collaboration? That dude's awesome. His name is Guillermo Scott Herren. Awesome. Giving shoutouts to Borges in liner notes, just working all over the place. I'm not too into Vocal Studies and Uprock Narratives, it just strikes me as too instrumental hip-hop at it's most me thinking why isn't this weirder and more abrasive? Surrounded By Silence is just all over the place and pushing things forward- The stuff where a vocal'll skip as part of the beat and then what's on top will almost harmonize with it? Or the fact that even when it's not being crazy, there's members of the Wu-Tang Clan rapping on top? Oh man so good. Security Screenings, however, is not so good.

So here's some things that are on my Soulseek wishlist, that I am waiting for the leak: The next DJ Shadow, which is going to have rappers on it, all of whom I think are horrible? Am I wrong about that? I think that's going to be fascinating.

The new Yo La Tengo, I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Kick Your Ass. Such a good title. The one song I've heard, released to the Matador website, has horns. I have a weird relationship to Yo La Tengo, in that I mostly don't like Ira Kaplan's voice.

New Wooden Wand And The Sky High Band. I heard this at the house of a Kill Rock Stars employee who would probably get fired if it ended up leaking this early. I guess what I heard was like a ton of songs, that have been broken up into an album and an EP's worth of outtakes? That's my understanding. Anyway, that stuff was good, and I like Wooden Wand.

That Dan Bejar/Spencer Krug/Casey Mercer supergroup jam. I didn't like the last two Destroyer records, and Frog Eyes guy has a voice that I mostly find it hard to get past, but oh man that last Sunset Rubdown? And those Destroyer records that I do like? And the fact that dude with the voice I guess has an appeal and was a nice enough dude at a show? High hopes, high hopes.

The upcoming Mountain Goats, Get Lonely. I'm not even going to explain this but despite that comment about lyric-driven music and guitar strums early, John Darnielle can fucking murder it. His lyrics are better than Bill Callahan's, narratives rather than self-loathing confessional chants.

And Soft Circle, which is the solo album of Hisham Barucha, ex-Lightning Bolt, ex-Black Dice, now collaborating with Scott Herren.

Also Nina Nastasia Peel Sessions, and a vain gesture towards hope that the Brainiac Peel Session was recorded by someone.

It is hard not to feel like I am living in wreckage. Not even filth, not squalor- although damn but I am going to need some drain cleaner and some sealant before I move out of this house, 1720 Brawne Avenue (last rent check is in the mailbox, with a notice of our moving out enclosed), but wreckage, some kind of collapse. I am listening to Lightning Bolt, and the floor's littered with newspapers because of the screenprinting, and I'm looking at a lot of Fort Thunder stuff, reading interviews with those dudes, and yeah I feel like some kind of monkey wandering about in a postapocalyptic landscape.

Me and Alex are both doing experimental animations. I don't know about him, but I feel like we're foraging through some kind of wilderness, some kind of uncharted space. Or alternately, like I'm bombing urban areas in some kind of attempt at terraforming.

It's pretty consuming. I didn't get into SOS Media, and I'm not really looking at other classes, or applying to stuff- I don't have much of a portfolio, and won't until this thing is done. I am living in the moment, and that puts a good deal on the backburner- Including this novel, sadly, and the live-action film, but- whatever, in the moment, doing something small, that will be finished. Lest credit be lost. Speaking of lost credit- I've got to rewrite this paper I handed in, as the teacher thought some of it was unclear, and not long enough- There's like a page of digressions about where my head is located that I gave a film a reading which differs from most, that I kind of consider the heart of the piece. Partly I didn't have a lot to say, and so I stream-of-consciousness rambled in an attempt to hit at something larger. Partly it's a boredom with the form of the academic essay. I don't want to rewrite it, because of this larger animation thing being so time-consuming and genuinely rewarding- I can't imagine I'd write an academic essay I'd be proud of, especially if it's a second draft of something weirder.

I've been thinking, as I was thinking last year, about stopping reading comics for a year. To let my head breathe out, get that influence a bit less direct, cut down on distraction. I'm still convinced it's a good idea. I'd think like a normal person, for a while. But the issue becomes- Well partly the issue is the weird comics-becoming-more-mainstream-with-my-peer-set thing, that to stop wouldn't necessarily make me more normal, so much as make me feel like I'm part of some backlash. It's doing the animation that makes me wary, really- The work being what it is is a result of my engagement with that world, and it feels weird to withdraw. I read comics and listen to music and watch movies and keep up with all these things out of some quest for the newest-latest. The idea is that by being aware of everything, I'll be able to make what I do super-awesome, as it will be informed by things that not everyone is taking inspiration from.

Today I wished out loud that there was a program at Evergreen that would do such things, actually be interdisciplinary in a way that made sense in the context of a liberal arts school- Put music creation and painting all jumbled together in movie-making, to inform a sense of structure and composition. I've been thinking, and this thinking, too, is inspired by the whole Fort Thunder/Paper Rad thing- that the only way to exist as an artist making weird art is to make a whole lot of it, in a variety of different mediums, so people who don't necessarily care about your work in one medium would care because they knew you from another, etc. I can't imagine just writing stories and having people care, because no one would know who I was. But if I did that and made films, my name would be out there in two different circles, and if someone heard my name in both contexts, I would then have a greater presence in someone's mind. To say nothing of the fact that you can express different sentiments in different mediums, and that working in all the mediums that interested you would be able to express yourself more fully.

So that's one idea. But then there's the other idea- that if I skipped a year of comics, when I came back, the cream will have risen to the top, so to speak. I wouldn't waste money chasing things that ended up being mediocre. And in the lack of the chase, I'd air out my head, and be more myself as a person rather than a set of influences from comics, and I'd have more to say. But the question then is how much of myself is that quest for the new? The answer, at least now, is "pretty much all of it." And that's, you know, kind of disturbing, in that in tends to manifest itself in being unable to talk to people about actual events. There's a part of me that would like to be, if not a "normal" person, than a "real" one, whose ideas mostly stem from actual life experiences.

Sometimes I think that people that aren't always out and aware of the newest things are boring. Other times I hate how this seems a lot like hipsterism. I don't know. Is my head a strong enough structure that if I remove the bricks under which the bridge is built, it will lean into itself in such a way as to stay standing? That's the question I'm asking myself now, mostly. That and the question of what constitutes a normal person.

Paper Rad is great. I heard about that this past year, I think, by way of being comics-world-engaged. Had I been more on the ball I would've heard about that and Fort Thunder ages ago. In the quest for the newest-latest, I am not the most on-point.

Sorry this is so digressive. This is what happens when I don't write a blog with any frequency. I need to get back in the habit.

Here's an event from my actual life. It's old, but I think it relates to my wilderness feelings described earlier. About a month ago, I was at a bookstore in downtown Olympia, paging through a copy of We All Die Alone, the book of Mark Newgarden cartoons I've discussed in the past. There's some essays and stuff- context is provided. And there's some talk about Newgarden's work for Topp's in the eighties, being at this novelty company and just throwing stuff out there at this time that, in the words of the interviewee, culture was dead. And as I was walking up the path to my house, I thought about that, the concept of culture dying, whether it could happen again. I took the optimistic view, the type espoused by those that believe that time and history is speeding up, and information is growing and will at some point (2012) just be doubling every second or something impossibly ridiculous. And I thought to myself, no, culture won't be dying.

And then I stepped out off the path, onto the little square of blacktop that serves as my driveway, where one of the neighbor kids was hitting the ground with some piece of rock or metal, repeatedly.

Since that day, that's pretty much my new metaphor for things that don't really do anything besides negate themselves- I used it to describe sound poetry in class the other day, in a story I'm not going to get into.

Mostly I am thinking about the wilderness.

Oh, and people have died. Alex Toth, the cartoonist, and John Dolph, a guy around my age that went to the same church as me back in New Jersey. Sad fact is that I had a more visceral reaction to the news of Toth's death, whisper-yelling "Fuck!" than that of the person I actually knew but was never all that close too, although I liked him.

I don't have a ticket back to Philadelphia. I plan to take a sojourn by bus across these United States. What I do have a ticket for is a Boredoms/Lightning Bolt show on June 30th. Now it is June 1st. So that's- I've been like this for a while now, having these thoughts and these worries and these distractions, but now I guess the end is near, and all will be sorted by then. Perhaps I will sort out some shit here. Perhaps I will sort shit out as well in this book I'm supposed to be writing.

At the end of this month I will be twenty-one, I'm hoping the birthday comes with me in a traincar, eyes looking out at America, pounding sentences into holes shaped like novels and approaching epiphany.

I've had mushrooms offered me but I've been declining due to the being busy. Which might seem like something some uptight boring person who would have a bad trip would do. But this past Sunday, a girl with massage training put her hand on my shoulder and grabbed at the muscles. She found no tension being carried. Because I put it all out there, was what someone standing nearby proposed when this observation was made aloud. And I was like "Cool" and then I explained that do to my lack of tension, all she was doing, basically, was pinching my shoulder in a way that was fairly uncomfortable.

So, I'm late on paying these bills. And I'm behind on this work for class, maybe- Reading a book that's none-too-compelling, writing a close reading about an animation I don't really feel I understand enough for such a thing. I want to hand in a resume to Orca Books sometime in the near future- They're not hiring, and I'm too busy, but I want to make a small gesture towards maybe staying in Olympia and saving myself a hassle. I'm dropping balls in a way that Bruce Lee never did, is what I'm saying.

(did you catch all the levels there? There were some levels there.)

But today I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time, I stood on the west coast and looked out on water and didn't see land. I walked the beach, picked up sandollars, sung "woo-oo-ooh, these are selfish times" to myself, and felt the sand beneath my feet, various textures from fine grains to compacted to wet, had the cold water come up in the form of a tide and numb my feet, played with dogs and punched the ground. There were all of these trees that had been bleached white and were washed up and covered in sand, like images from Days Between Stations, looking like wooly mammoth bones, and being referred to as such by me.

Yesterday I spent some money that I don't have ordering CDs from Amazon- That upcoming Matmos record, and the McCluskyism 3-disc. The Matmos album is great, and I was tired of people downloading it off me when they should just be buying it. Today Pitchfork gave the new Sunset Rubdown a Best New Music recommendation, and then a shitload of people downloaded it off me. I've had it for awhile now, and I agree with Brandon Stosuy's opinion about it- It's really good, one of my favorites, something I've listened to a lot to come out this year, along with that Matmos album- Using the whole iTunes most played feature I find I've listened to those, Islands, and Man Man the most. (After that, it's Lightning Ghost by Bird Show.) All of these would be records worth buying, if you're someone with disposable income.

There was a woman on The Colbert Report on Wednesday, Caitlin Flanagan, promoting a book against feminism. Since she was opposed to feminism and pre sandwich-and-baby-making, I have no moral reservations at all saying she was an unappealing woman, with ridiculous hair. The interview was dryly unconfrontational, but frat boys in the audience whooped it up.

Meanwhile- I read a story on Yahoo news about Bush trying to lower gas prices by urging environmental regulations and stopping putting things in the oil reserve. What awful ideas. He's also cutting tax breaks to oil companies and urging larger tax breaks for hybrid owners, which is decent, but in a word: SINKINGSHIPSINKINGSHIPSINKINGSHIPSINKINGSHIPSINKINGSHIP. John Kerry apparently talked reducing the influx of oil to the surplus in his election campaign. Bush denounced it then as playing politics. SINKINGSHIPSINKINGSHIP.

No one's going to care about this at all, it's just nerdy thought-documentation for my own sake. After I posted that list of the best albums of last year, pretty much immediately, I declared Why- Elephant Eyelash my favorite. I don't know- That might actually be what I say on the list. But what I hadn't heard at that point was the Akron/Family Angels Of Light split, which I've listened to so much since then. Anyway- That should displace Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's spot, even though I like them. It should just be in the second fifth. And, towards the bottom of the list, there's a Numbers record I hadn't heard at the time of my list-making, just as a way to give credit for a good live show. I've heard, it's not too good, displace it entirely. For an even twenty-five.

God, that's some OCD shit. Or, it would be if I hadn't been thinking it for awhile, and am just writing it down now so I can stop thinking it, as it'll be documented.

In other news, I'm pretty into apples.

So I have finally read the final draft that my faculty wrote about me and my work last quarter. It's pretty awful, harsh in that way where it's not necessarily trying to be harsh, but is trying to talk about something not really understood in a way where there's a lot of condescension that's somewhat unavoidable, but even that's tainted with an active dislike. But fuck it, I can't be bothered, I'm moving on, got this class, got a good thing going. So that professor's now an enemy, so be it. I have enemies, that's how I do: I'm kind of unlikable. She's not my nemesis, just one of many in my rogue's gallery.

But now I'm in this animation class and I've got some books to read and I'm working on a thing I'm really excited about. It might be good enough to redeem Evergreen a bit.

So, Penguin's putting out a series of classic books with packaging redesigned by cartoonists. The Jungle, for example, is going to have a cover by Charles Burns, although I don't think it's that great of an illustration. I think some of the packaging is awesome- Some is good enough to make me care about things I didn't previously care about, some are just better designed versions of things I already care about. I do feel like it's mostly uniformly a step up, even when the artists involved aren't people I care about. Some of them, I just don't know how to feel. The only one I'd designate as being clearly bad is Art Spiegelman's cover for The New York Trilogy, but maybe that's actually awesome and I just don't get it because I haven't read the material. The only one on the market currently, I think, is Chris Ware's version of Voltaire's Candide, which I think looks amazing but I can't find a large enough image to link to. It's worth noting that it's not just cartoonists doing the front cover illustration, although I do think that in many cases, that'd be enough of an improvement- but a design of the backcover and inside cover flaps as well. Ware seemingly even got some jokes in. Even beyond such decisions of design, it's just interesting to me the decisions made for the packaging of the content- I don't know who did the cover, but Rashomon is going to have an introduction written by Haruki Murakami.

Connections drawn: So on the MySpace page for the Mary Timony band, under influences, Paper Rad is cited. In the new Arthur, there's a Ben Jones strip about the nineties, and a quest to Boston for the lead singer. There is talk of Polvo and the lead singer in question ends up being female. It's a good strip. I like Paper Rad, and I've been listening to Helium with some regularity.

I don't know if I talked about how good the new Ghostface album is- I think I did. Anyway, what I heard was an advance copy, fourteen tracks. The actual album is weaker, in that of what I'm downloading now, a lot of the added material is just godawful skits that no album needs. It's too bad, as that promo is really good.

I'll probably just have it on iTunes, that fourteen-track version, maybe with some of the extra stuff if it's worth keeping, and have the original art up as well. (The one with fish in a net on it, rather than just Ghostface and his posse.)

In other news, it's hard to make french fries. I used a lot of oil, and it never got crispy. I looked up what I should've done after I had already done things wrong. (I should've washed the potatoes in cold water, and then blanched them, before the process.)

So further notes on exactly what kind of hippie this professor who's not giving me all the credits I rightfull deserve is: She's the kind that'll force you to watch What The Bleep Do We Know?, drives a VW bus, but still when you're sitting in her office you find a well-worn copy of Atlas Shrugged sitting on the bookshelf at eye-level.

"You can tell a lot about a woman by the way she scrubs a cauldron."

Are there any novels out there that are as insightful as to how human nature and America and all the shit work as some offhand Paul Mooney interview nonsense talk? I kind of doubt it.

This is from an interview at that one site some girl you know is probably trying to get images of their breasts hosted on:

"A few weeks ago Hillary Clinton said “This administration was run like a plantation.” Do you know who flipped when she said that? Laura Bush. When you’re on a plantation, who does the master sleep with? Condoleeza!"

No fucking shit: This kind of thought process kicks Phillip Roth square in the balls.

No, it's cool, I can have the sword of Damocles hanging over my head indefinitely. It's cool.

So yesterday I had my evaluation conference, with a teacher who I already knew liked me. He gave me all the credit he could. But, the class was split up, and I had another teacher for this independent project I was working on. She only gave me two credits of a possible eight.

So I had to set up an appointment with her. I did so, for 3 PM today. When I woke up, I got an e-mail from her telling me she had to reschedule, as her kid relapsed and has a 105 degree fever. I could come in at 10 or 12, but if I came in at 12, the meeting would be limited to only fifteen minutes. I was not awake at 10, so 12 it was. She also asked for an e-mail that would detail what I did and how that was enough work for full credit. I write her an e-mail. When I get there at 12, she's still in her meeting with the person before me- One of those common occurences at Evergreen, the mom who's older than everyone else that all the students feel uncomfortable and wary about. Anyway, the meeting goes on for another ten minutes.

So I say "should we reschedule?" She says yes, because she hadn't read that e-mail I sent her, because it was long. Which it would've had to be, to account for all the time I had spent.

So there'll be a meeting at some point on Friday. With another person there, the program's third teacher, who I never interacted with for any length of time at all. I guess he'd be mediating, assigning credits? I don't quite get it, but she thinks he needs to be there.

I've complained about this teacher in the past, although not on here. I don't like her hippie leanings, the kind that don't manifest themselves in terms of being easy-going or environmentally minded, but just in stupid beliefs. I've got sympathy for her kid's sickness, but part of the problem, I think I recall, stemmed from her going back and forth between antibiotics and new age cures. The latter wouldn't work at all, as being three years old he's probably not cogniscent (sic) of what's happening enough for any kind of psychosomatic placebo effect to take place.

I'm mostly tired of typing about this situation, and only did this post to make that last joke.

Wow, Alex Tripp is on-point.

Okay, so, on this new Matmos album, which I've talked about in the past- (Antony sings on it, and there's an instrument made from a cow vagina/reproductive organs, played with a vacuum cleaner, sounding kind of like a bagpipe- I thought that was an odd combo) there's a song, track 3, called Tract For Valerie Solanas. The concept of the album is a series of portraits for people, with sounds for them- Track 9, Rag for William S. Burroughs, has typewriters for percussion, for example.

Anyway. The tract has more vocals than most, a pretty constant voice, saying things which I don't think are in the SCUM Manifesto but I read that awhile ago. "get a good job, comanaging the shitpile" gets said, as does "Destroy the male sex."

Anyway. What Alex just pointed out to me, that he apparently got like a week ago, is what the sounds that aren't vocals are. The more musical sounds. That's the cow vagina and accompanying organs. Or, a reproductive tract. It's a pun.

And man, holy shit- Matmos can talk all they want about the album, and how they hope people get it when it comes out, since the packaging's so important, (Dan Clowes is involved, drawing something) but this, the slow reveal of the tracklisting with the knowledge of the people, without the aid of liner notes, is something special. Just learning bits of someone's history and then listening to the track for those sounds- The sound of a cigarette burning flesh on "Germs Burn For Darby Crash," for example- It's really fun.

Like on first listen I was thinking "this is a really great album, probably going to end up being the best of the year," and then, the more I listen, the more I learn, the more I catch. There's layers to this.

I imagine that actually buying the album, with liner notes detailing sound sources, will just be such an epiphany.

When I think about the future, I am terrified. The money that has been in a saving's account is almost completely spent. Job prospects in Olympia are grim to non-existent. School involves a lot of shit and I'm VERY worried about not getting full credit. At the end of June, my lease expires, and my ties to Olympia are severed. Also I'll turn twenty-one, and that will mean the end of my dad's child support. The school situation is also sketchy enough that health insurance is up in the air.

I need to stop being on the internet so much. I need to make this film, write this book, do this schoolwork, find a paying job.

Everything is going to crumble, basically, and I need to have something done before that happens. The schoolwork's the least of the problems, the job is to prevent life-crumbling. The movie's to have something to show, same as the book only in some ways bigger: I haven't made a movie, and I need to, in order to prove how smart I am if given a roof over my head and resources and comfort enough to do such things.

The things I want to do are the same things I've always wanted to do and have never done. It's so fucking tragic, so fucking ordinary.

Tomorrow the things I have to do are schoolwork things. That's okay, though, I guess. Hopefully the video game distraction is dead to me now. I think it might be. Today I reread/rewrote the first seven chapters of this book- It was designed to have a small climax, be a working model, within those first seven chapters, that I could then show people, but then I reread a while back, possibly in a weird mood, and found it really overwrought and kind of unacceptable. I think it's better now. It's not perfect, but nothing is. It is what it is. I can move forward. I'd rather make Stop, You're Blowing My Mind than write this book, though, I think. In terms of immediacy. In terms of what I'd rather do first. Hopefully my writing this will serve as a declaration of intent.

Tomorrow I will wake up early, erect by half-past-ten. I will tear up the schoolwork. Maybe give the Classified ads a look. Talk to people about this movie- I only ever have the confidence to do so in late-night nervous fits, during the day time I'm more insecure somehow. A different kind of nervousness, one more conducive to staying home. Only on the verge of the sleep do my balls drop. It's awful.

Further Books sample cataloging- "I can't find the books, they must be in La Jolla" is from a This American Life bit.

However! "I suppose it doesn't really matter which way we go" (from, I think, "Be Good To Them Always) is from the Nicolas Roeg movie Walkabout, which was recently viewed. It's pretty great.

I just walked home from a party, and am listening to the last couple tracks off Elephant Eyelash. There is alcohol in my system, and the general sexual frustration and a sad awareness of the fact that my memory isn't so good with faces/names/places. I didn't offend anyone, I don't think. I don't know if I made any kind of impression at all.

Alpha Incipiens ran through my head as dance music played. I was coaxed out onto the dance floor for M.I.A. by two pretty lesbians who I got along with maybe better than anyone else. They were drunk and I was aware of their lesbianism and so that probably helped everybody with the getting along.

John Samson's back in town! Awesome.

I had a good night, and I hope the vestigial limbs of the evening reach into the memories of all who decided that I was cool.

I got a compliment from my old neighboring roommate Will, who said that I was "hella nerdy" but the shoes I rock are always so gangster and that's cool and old-school. Yeahhhh.

I've got the glory of the world world-view.

Oh man, Michel Gondry. As I wait for The Science Of Sleep and Dave Chappelle's Block Party to be released (they're both finished) I find out that his next film, Master Of Space And Time, is going to have a screenplay written by Daniel Clowes, based on some sci-fi novel I've never read, but by a guy who's apparently fairly well-regarded. And will star Jack Black.

Oh man, Michel Gondry.

I just saw Akron/Family. I'd been listening to their split with Angels Of Light a lot recently, to get psyched. They were awesome, as a band making music and as a band made up of dudes with senses of humor and stuff. I had a lot of fun. You should all buy that split, and then go see them live and be up front dancing with all of these total nerds.

They made Jim Gaffigan references and like weird confrontational humor.

Banter: "I'd like to dedicate this next song..."

He trails off into silence, puts a hand on one side of his face, leans on the microphone with his lip, and then sighs deeply.

AND THEN THEY ROCKED OUT FUCKING HARD.

Noise and synths, melodica and quiet folk songs, and some of it was danceable and some of it not at all, but enough to make the people who were all "I want to sit in a chair, you sit down" and I was all "No dudes, you should be standing, you will all be standing" realize that I fucking win and am not to be questioned ever.

Long bit of music criticism about Modest Mouse's The Lonesome Crowded West starting...

NOW

I was resentful of the dance-punk hype, the insinuation that indie kids didn't dance because they hated fun, were too uptight to like anything. There's some music where dancing just isn't the point, isn't what you're supposed to do, even if there's a groove. For me, alone in my bedroom in high school, listening to Modest Mouse's The Lonesome Crowded West, I paced. Back and forth.

There's a rhythm, a groove, but it's not coming from a funk place. It's coming, I feel, from a krautrock place if any such influence can be ascribed other than the pacific northwest nineteen-nineties scene, which- There's no reason to have that limited a framework, although it seems that what most critics did. And, yeah, not to deride that, or at least, the aspect Up Records released. It's kind of a paramount example of nineties indie rock, all treble and cool influences. But, like, krautrock's a cool influence.

The krautrock thing- There's a rhythm, yes, and the rhythm is the drive, but over that, beneath that, all over, there's just this guitar, which works with it, while just- It seems to do more. The songs don't seem written based on the chord progressions, or, if they were, they mutated and are now rhythm-driven. The guitar then just throbs, with rhythm, yeah, and melody, but dissonance as well. It just squeals about, throws noises out there, all while doing all the other things it's supposed to do.

The vocals and lyrics, too, seem rhythm-driven- Repetitious to a certain extent, but not in the pejorative sense. Music is repetition and variation, and there's enough variation to it all, especially in how it plays off of everything.

The Nude As The News review said that the album has verses and choruses, but which is which is hard to distinguish- Melodies and structures just get repeated throughout songs, and it's all groove-based, all based on that rhythmic framework. The vocals are just getting spat out, switching up as often as anything else, really, but repetitious enough.

It's pacing music- Different places in the room highlight certain sounds, but there's more to it. There's something introspective in pacing that isn't in dancing. It's more conducive to self-laceration. You can nod your head and sway your hips, you can feel the beat, but there's still a voice there, and it's still saying stuff, it's still coming in. Phrases repeat themselves for reinforcement, but get framed in new contexts. Not unlike how thoughts work when you're ruminating on a subject.

And the beat just goes on.

Whenever I think of this album, I think of something building, structures being erected, made of wood, wire, spiralling upward. All while I think of three men just bashing it the fuck out. Rhythms. Some of that is the imagery of buildings on the art. Some of that's the length- It's one second shy of an even seventy-four minutes. Towers are going to be brought to mind. But there's a certain kind of construction that builds a tower rather than just stacking a lot of small boxes into rows.

Third Planet, off The Moon And Antarctica, is more of an anthem, in some ways. More traditionally anthemic. Not that there's not stuff to sing along to here, or whatever- Certainly "I'm trying to drink away the part of the day I cannot sleep away" gets a lot of mileage. But so many songs on Lonesome Crowded West are just- yeah, krautrock- The Can kind, there's no motorik beat here. (And holy living fuck is Jeremiah Green a good drummer) There's this rhythm, and it shifts, and it builds on itself. So frequently the climax isn't the chorus- those are hard to find, after all- but the finale, where there's no more words, where the guitar is just getting the shit beat out of it, propelling the building ever upward, with the rest of it just whirring along with it, some kind of violent levitation. A similar enough principle applies to the end, which is mostly just drumming, although there's more going on beneath it than just a drumbeat.

No guitar on the finale to Jesus Christ Was An Only Child, just a fiddle melody, but again, the same principle, of melody as finale. That song, oh man, for all the other stuff I mentioned, that totally applies to this song, is also notable for the whole-

I'm not even talking about the themes. The religious stuff, the America stuff. But that's all there, in spades. Lyric-writing wise. Whatever. Listen to it and pick up the repeated phrases and all that stuff is there, it's great, lyrically, but musically, you know, the placing emotional climaxes on just instrumental works rather well. It works just as well when Isaac Brock screams out "I didn't move to the city, the city moved to me, and I! Want! Out! Desperately!" But that's not all the songs, you know?

But the religious stuff, I did want to address briefly, in that for mythology purposes, I fucking love that there's two guys in the band with Old Testament biblical names. And that one of them sings the line, about Jesus Christ, that God "shoulda' killed that little fucker before he even had."

And that's not even, again- that's not like the heart of the record, that line. That's a toss-off. There's other religious references- and by religious references, I mean toying with iconography, rather than direct allusions- that get more play. The last two songs, mostly acoustic instrument-driven, more traditional in instrumentation, pre-electronic stuff, (same holds true for Jesus Christ Was An Only Child, earlier- fiddle!) addresses the topic as well, more conclusively, if not so much more straight-forwardly.

It's just so tangled and so verbal, and so personal a discussion of these distinct things. It feels so bashed out, in a way which in some ways I prefer to the more orchestrated and produced stuff that- I enjoy a lot, that I'd call my favorite records, more sonically detailed things, better with sound, but this... For that stupid abstract concept of "rock and roll," this is as good as the traditional method gets. The more orchestrated stuff sometimes includes better songcraft, but- I mean, that's not rock and roll, is it? That's some kind of classical pop standard. This, you know, "rolls" more than that, with the groove emphasis. It also "rocks" harder than most of that stuff.

It's just that, while doing all that, it's actually interesting, despite/because of its oft-used materials. Other stuff is more moving, or is moving in a way that's rare and hard to find. But this is just great, just as this thing, this structure. It's not beautiful like a painting is beautiful, or a person; but like a building, some kind of architecture, and it's a big enough a thing to get lost in. And then find yourself pacing somewhere in the middle floors, in front of big giant glass windows, overlooking something else, although some kind of city with its presence in it, lost in thought as the weather outside reflects your inner thoughts back at you in some way only vaguely understandable, and when lightning strikes the building the power surges through and the lights maybe blink or flash but the threat of the building collapsing is never all that real.

And although that could've been an ending, I'm not intent to let that lie, because there's still more that needs to be discussed- The fact that an album is both its own complete thing like a novel or a film, but a document of a band at a point in time, and that so much coherence is just through the editing process of editing a collection of songs, of all the thoughts pertaining to a certain broad set of subjects down. To use a literary metaphor, it's a diary at the same time it's a novel with a narrative. The surrounding EPs and singles are all great, as was the albums that preceded and followed. The Lonesome Crowded West is just a guidebook to one way to write songs, one writing process for one group at a particular point in time. So aside from that "what a great album," it should be pointed out that Modest Mouse should be addressed very much in terms of "what a great band."

The new Ol' Dirty Bastard album is awful. Not enough ODB, too much Macy Gray. I'm going to say maybe two acceptable tracks so far, and they're the ones with members of the Wu-Tang Clan guesting. Despite a bit of weird uncomfortable misogyny on the Ghostface track- Ghostface threatens that he and ODB will doubleteam you from behind if you don't have his money. Disturbing enough just as a rape threat before you think about the fact that he probably only said that after ODB was dead, so...

Seriously, awful shit.

I am washing my brain out.

Followup to the Erickson talk of a few days ago: I've been reading stuff he read at Salon, including a piece where he offhandedly praises The Invisibles, and this piece, http://dir.salon.com/story/sex/feature/2000/08/18/erickson_sanctimony/index.html?sid=965738, where he says something really insightful as an offhanded attack on Peggy Noonan, the woman who came off so impossibly creepy on The Daily Show towards the end of last year.

This is the line: "To an extent this is a victory of ideology itself, of the argument advanced by people like Peggy Noonan that by definition a nonideological man like Clinton has no true principles and thus whatever social justice he speaks for can be dismissed. To an ideologue like Noonan, who shapes the truth to suit her biases, the man who shapes his biases to suit the truth is a nihilist."

This fits in with the awesome Onion A.V. Club interview with Stephen Colbert from two weeks ago, which can be read at http://www.avclub.com/content/node/44705. Stephen Colbert, it should be noted, destroyed Peggy Noonan with nonchalant awesomeness when he interviewed her.

Betty Friedan died, age 85. That's new.

My professor said some stupid shit the other day. No one called him out on it. Not even I, as he just said it as part of a long digression and I didn't want to further the tangent.

He was complaining about WASL, the standardized test for the state of Washington, and how biased it is. He started out by talking about the discrepancy between the results of success of special-ed and non-special-ed students, and how this is proof of the WASL being biased against kids in special ed.

He went on to list other groups the test is biased against- whites get higher scores than non-whites, with, and I quote him, "Asians being included as white."

I think I was the only person who blinked at statements like this, but blinking isn't really enough, and I'm now mad at myself for not saying "Excuse me, what the fuck?"

I am not foreseeing myself writing any fiction tonight, (First seven chapters of Do You Remember When The World Ended are finished, ask to read them if you want to read them) so the blogging will commence.

Days spent in bookstores. Saw stuff I rarely see, emblazoned with crazy-positive blurbs. A Steve Erickson novel, whose Days Between Stations liked quite a bit, got support from Tom Robbins, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gibson. It's nonetheless a rare occasion to come across his stuff. Meanwhile, Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, kind of an acknowledged classic but rarely come across, I came across today. It has this quote on the front from Dylan Thomas, saying "This is a good book to get for your sister if she's a drunk and nasty girl." This is a paraphrase, but I'm striving for accuracy. Then it gets respect from the likes of James Joyce and Updike and all kinds of people. I need to read it.

Also, saw a magazine for vegetarians with the line "Friends don't let friends eat meat" on it, possibly the most untrue statement ever. Does anyone involved with that magazine believe in it? I don't want to say if they did, they would have no friends at all, but theoretically their friends could all be vegetarians, a very insular clique at work at that magazine. But I like to think they would all at least secretly hate each other, what with it being abundantly clear they were all total douchebags.

I looked at We All Die Alone, the coffee-table book of Mark Newgarden work. It's pretty cool. If I were in the coffee-table book market, I might give it a go, but the content's not super-strong for anyone to actually need. If you come across it in a bookstore, give it a long enough flip-through that you feel acquainted with all the content within. One reoccurring thing is a gag cartoon but with a long paragraph of a character's monologue beneath it in tiny type. The one that really got me was a homeless man doing stand-up. Alternately, there's the talk of the work for Topps in the eighties, as the guy behind Garbage Pail Kids, but also such novelties as Barfing Family Candy. Even funnier to me is the idea that never became more than a phrase, "sandwich gum." The name of that book again: We All Die Alone.

Post the Canada election of Conservatives, the Palestineans have elected Hamas to have control of the majority of their parliament.

I'm listening to the 1972 Aphrodite's Child 666 and I'm thinking apocalypse. But I am always thinking apocalypse. I wish there were less things to make me think that.

Democrats better take control of the House and Senate this year, oh my god.

Until then it'll be all bugfuck insane Supreme Court appointees and subsequent decisions and EVERYONE GOING TO WAR.

The Conservative party won the Canadian election. I wrote the obvious joke, but I deleted it.

Seriously, this is weird. And disturbing, like pretty much any Conservative victory. (except in situations where the liberals might seriously be too far gone, and my definition of "too far gone" is pretty far out- What I saw of that one interview with the governor of San Francisco was pretty off-the-charts, with the "We don't want a ship that was used in World War II in our bay" opinion, but I'd want more of a minor backlash than a full-fledged election of a neocon, which is in no danger of happening so what am I talking about)

I found out who Shary Boyle was yesterday, upon seeing her work in a preview for the next Kramers Ergot book. I dig it. I know so little about art, am forever behind the times, but most people are even more head-up-their-ass.

http://www.sharyboyle.com

to be as "with it" as I am.

EDIT: I don't actually know Shary's gender.

According to a thing I read on the internet and can't find the link for, Steve Albini claims that Polly Jean Harvey ate only potatoes with sauces during the recording of Rid Of Me.

Elsewhere I'd heard that you can live just on potatoes indefinitely, although you'd be really unhealthy. This knowledge is what really spurred my love affair with the potato.

The album sounds like that potato diet, to me. Just scraping by, unhealthily and nervously. Thin-sounding, although not tinny. Like... I didn't really catch much of a distinction between the album and the 4-track demos. The difference, as was explained to me, is that the demos have no rhythm section. No bass, no drums. Rid Of Me- it's just this vicious little scrawny thing of a record, and it subsists on potatoes, and it's fucking great.

Oh man, people who didn't get into The Best Show On WFMU when I was all "you guys, you guys, the Best Show On WFMU" missed the fuck out.

This show culminated with a rap battle between frequent annoying caller MC Steinberg having a rap battle with the actual Ted Leo (of "and the Pharmacists"), judged by celebrity guests Marky Ramone, (voiced by Jon Wurster) Timmy Von Trimble, (voiced by Jon Wurster) and Philly Boy Roy (also Jon Wurster in a voice-acting comedy improv firehouse barn-burner fooforaw of a performance). Then Ted Leo covered Dancing In The Dark, in tribute to the state of New Jersey. I was dying. Ted Leo made a Mother 13 reference. Jesus. Way to earn my respect, Mr. Leo.

This Built To Spill record- I guess there's like weird promobot echoed screaming? God, it's annoying. I guess when it comes out, I'll delete the mp3s, because it really is super-annoying- I don't even know what it's saying. "Who is Mike Dowd?" What the fuck?

It's striking me as good, though. It's weird to hear new things that are still really similar to things I've heard before, when those things in question are like my favorite things, but very rarely listened to these days. Which, I think, means that this album is going to be a key one to own, to really get into and live with, because that's what I do with Built To Spill records.

And that reverberated scream really is just awful.

This new Loose Fur album, that I expressed hope for not too long ago, actually blows.

It's playing now. It's a lot more Jeff Tweedy than Jim O'Rourke. The sound is thicker than on the first album, but it's not "dense," it just takes away that minimalist sense of space. It's not as mellow as the first either, it's theoretically more rocking; but never actually rocking, never bringing me to that state of being rocked, getting psyched, etc. It's just dull and nowhere, hard to get excited about.

Actually, no, it's rocking out a little bit right now, noisily, but it does it in short bursts.

There's just no mood at work. The first album was a nighttime in warm weather record, this is just... It's not too good. Did I ever talk about the conclusion that I came to about Wilco? It's this: I only like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, (or, as my copy is now labeled, Yankee Hotel Buttfuck) as an album, but that was enough to convince me I liked Wilco, even though the other records I own, I like maybe four songs on apiece. And that's after listening to them a lot, I can't think of anything good on A Ghost Is Born. I liked them when I saw them live, too, but that was on the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot tour, playing with Sonic Youth.

But yeah, this Loose Fur record- I don't think I like it. It's also, I should note, a concept album, seemingly, about Jesus and religion. Tweedy's voice, lyrically, is more smart-ass than emotionally affecting, more witty/clever than poetically declarative- I guess that's the O'Rourke influence, but I'm going to say it doesn't work.

EDIT: However, this Books live show I downloaded off the same guy I got the Loose Fur record from is totally amazing, oh man you guys, want to see them when they come to Seattle, if we can, and if we can't, maybe a trip to Canada would be in order? So good, so good!

Did I talk about The Squid And The Whale? It's good- I planned to see it again pretty much as soon as it ended. You'd like it, I bet. It might end a bit more abruptly than I'd like, but that's one of the reasons why I want to see it again. It's a good ending, I suppose, and well-executed in some ways, but... I guess the scene that preceded ended too abruptly, or something? I don't know. I missed the very beginning, so maybe that was key to the pacing. I think I watched it in a weird daze, maybe, where things didn't accumulate like they should've.

In the place of content about things of import, here is an idea for something to do when you only have traces of jam left in jars, and cannot reach them with a knife. Wash it out with hot water, and then use the hot water for tea. Or alternately wash it out with tea, and then drink that, maybe out of the jar. I think this is pretty good, but I am kind of disgusting.

I seriously just posted, but oh my god, did you know that both of Thora Birch's parents were porn actors- Jack Birch and Carol Connors? And that they also have a kid named Bolt Birch? Holy fucking shit, this is amazing.

I started class two days ago, don't quite know how it'll turn out yet. My project thing involves working for/with Yes Yes. My seminar is godawful, everyone's a Washington resident/community college transfer, and the teacher is a fiscal conservative.

The first book I'm reading, that was read last quarter and I need to catch up, is awful. It's corporate bullshit with new age leanings, the kind of thing your manager would give to you when you worked for General Motors and thought you might not be giving enough to the team. Oh, and I had to buy it new in a panic, and it was expensive. All of these books, business books, whatever, are ungodly expensive new and are then found on Half. com for less than a dollar when a new printing comes out.

Alex plans to go back to Alaska for the summer, which I can't hold against him or even discourage, as this past summer blew, but may make moving out harder, and weirds up my options a bit. I don't know. Maybe I'll hobo about this summer? I should do that while I'm young.

My most recent brilliant idea for the future/perfect job involves working as a DJ for a water park, playing Animal Collective, the Go! Team, and Pavement. Said water park would also have a movie theater/art gallery underground for nighttime and the winter.

My shirts and pants grow more holes.

My friend Ken, who works for Sounds Familyre, said he'd send me a copy of Ships, the new Danielson record, with Deerhoof on it.

I need to finish this chapter of the novel I'm writing, chapter seven. The first seven chapters are designed to give a model for how the book works, how the two narrators play off each other, with chapter seven providing a small emotional climax. It has to be really good. Once it's done, people can read this first chunk, which is something I'm not allowing right now. It's a slow-going process, this bit in particular- I knocked out a chunk over break that I was really proud of.

I downloaded two songs off the upcoming Flaming Lips record, At War With The Mystics. They're not awful, thank God. Not especially vital and mind-blowing, but album context is important, and I didn't really expect them to be.

I don't expect 2006 to be as good a year for music as 2005, but maybe that Built To Spill record that I've been waiting for since, like, 2004 will come out, as well as the new Circulatory System record which I've been waiting for since probably the same time.

I need to write this book, I need to shoot this movie, I need to make things happen.

Fun facts about my dad that are frequently forgotten: He is a liar.

In this instance, I am referring to his saying things like "I will send you money" or "I will send the college money for this quarter's tuition."

He might not necessarily be lying this time, he might just be late. But as it stands, I got dropped from my class for unpaid tuition. Fucking Evergreen.

For those who were wondering whether the next Beth Orton album, the one Jim O'Rourke produced, would be any good, the answer is no. Beth's voice is pretty dull, and her songwriting is as well. The production is good, but not interesting. Like, it's not overproduced or offputtingly slick and huge, like moments on Aimee Mann records, but there's nothing cool going on. I was thinking that- I mean, Beth Orton's got some electronic background, right? Not the good kind, but the dancey kind- I think she was on Astralwerks for a time, yes? None of that here, it's just dignified quiet acoustic backdrops. It's good in that it's actually tasteful. Maybe too much so- Occasionally, it goes for bigger stuff, poppier choruses, volume, dynamics, whatever, and it just doesn't quite come off.

There's supposed to be a Loose Fur album in 2006, right? That should be good.

Man, I never liked Rilo Kiley, but some mp3 blog posted covers they did of After Hours by The Velvet Underground and In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. I'm not going to say they ruined the songs, but I will say they shit all over them. Oh god do they ever.

Not as funny as a black ventriloquist, but still funny, are articles about trends in Hollywood and how sad they are. They are always about a dependence on sequels and franchises and remakes, and always pointing to Oscar-bait as the films that should be saving us all. It's a Mad Libs with blank spaces so specific that you can't even write "fart" when it asks for a noun (or a verb).

My brother rejected a friends request from Rupert Murdoch Must Die and called me lame. He also doesn't like my haircut. I had a bit I wanted to write, to him, post-friendage, about how I like to call it a "Hair Uncut" and pretend that my hair is actually a DVD of a teen grossout comedy, and hope that people will comb through my hair in a search for boobs, which can't be found in haircuts, but can maybe be found in Hair Uncuts.

I just saw a black ventriloquist on BET. His puppet was really large and dressed the same way he was, in a gold suit.

I kind of feel like he might be the only black guy ever that I'm cooler than, but I only saw him do one joke.

The first town I remember living in was Sicklerville, New Jersey. That was the closest thing I ever came to the quintessential suburban experience- I lived in a house with both of my parents, who were married to each other. There was a backyard, fenced in, a large dad-built deck enclosed within it. I remember my brother jumping the fences, and I did it once or twice myself, albeit with more difficulty.

The last time I passed through Sicklerville, it was gross. Just on some level- some psychogeography or whatever. I felt sick, unpleasant. There's a chapter of From Hell about Whitechapel being designed as this horrible occult place, all the churches forming a pentagram, and how that affects the people that live there. That kind of feeling.

Last night I talked about this with my brother- He pointed out that one of his friend's dads was a taxidermist, and I pointed out that one of his friend's dads was also found out to be a child molestor.

We didn't talk about my actual dad, who was basically serving as his dad at the time, and his mostly normal tendencies- porn half-hidden, late nights at strip clubs.

The house was located in a development, and the street that was in front of our house ran parallel to a highway, which was audible, and visible through a patch of trees. That road, according to Mike, was the expressway to Atlantic City. Which is a horrible depressing place in its own right.

What's funny about this horrible sketch is that Mike and I were both happy there, in this weird oblivious danger. Mike sledded down that hill that led towards the highway, as it tipped up at the end and there was no real danger of actually finding oneself on it. I remember the fence-jumping, the climbing beneath the deck, trick-or-treating.

I reread The Eaters again- That's probably one of my favorite comics. When I first heard about it, I was horrified. I was in like fifth or sixth grade, and it's a comic about a family of cannibals. Later I'd get into the writer, Peter Milligan, and track it down. I read it compulsively, but didn't consciously process it as being good until afterwards. It's a dark comedy. The most reading, I read it and actually laughed while reading it. I just like it more and more each time.

My mom has a subscription to Us Weekly these days.

Hello there, internet. It is now twenty-aught-six, the year of our lord.

New Year's Eve was spent in Philadelphia, running around with my brother and also lurking silently. I realized that my brother, right now, is kind of living the 2046 life with regards to the women: post break-up with someone he loved and now he's just fucking some god-awful randoms. This has been going on for awhile, actually.

Here's a question: Going into someplace and being like "what's the deal with this place": better or worse than walking in somewhere and automatically knowing what it's deal is? And this is a false binary, as the best possible situation is to walk in somewhere and not really give a shit what the deal specifically is.

When the new year came in, I was watching fireworks and wishing for The Go! Team to be playing.

These are the songs I was thinking of this weekend-

Whatever Hold Steady/Lifter Puller song has the line "she says she loves the scene unity, but hates the team spirit." This is as a result of meeting someone cool, ex of Olympia.

This Year by The Mountain Goats. On new year's eve it's outlived it's usefulness, new year's day and I'm hoping it'll never be appropriate again.

Animal Collective's Who Could Win A Rabbit. In the get-psyched team buildup and the welcome to the future payoff, I just wanted to chant this.

Why?'s Act Five-I go on and on. Here's like a slice of what I remember- "Even if the day is saved, and the couples kiss before the credit's list there will be more than a lifetime of death" something something, imagery of a film ending and unspooling.

And The Breeders' I Just Wanna Get Along, at all times forever before venturing out of the house into people and crowds.

I wanted and still want to pick up copies of Sung Tongs, Elephant Eyelash, the Tago Mago remaster for cheap but for cheap is a shifting scale of a phrase. I bought Mouse On Mars' Idiology, the Black Eyes s/t album, and a used copy of The Argument by Fugazi. This is by no means enough.

And if I can get a copy of V. I'd be happy with that turn of events.

I've got this book I'm writing and if I could pound out the chapters I'm working on now before returning to Olympia I would be very happy indeed. I don't know if that'll happen though.

Alternately, I am trying to think of Rupert Murdoch Must Die blogs. The Philly kids almost make me want to take that bullshit site more seriously but I'm keeping up my dedication to jokes.

I've got new shoes and probably should've followed up on that haircut bit, I don't know.

There's a good feeling in the air, I think. Optimism. Got this digital camera and a brain full of ideas. I have a home for the next six months. I am holding out hope for adventures.

Oh- my brother bought my mom a copy of the latest Decemberists record for Christmas. I hope she likes it for the sake of punchline-ease.

If anyone reading this is in Olympia and it is not yet January fifth, could you pick up and hold onto my mail? Mostly I'm worried about the new issue of McSweeney's, which I imagine is swaddled in cardboard and sitting not in my mailbox, but in front of my door. That's the McSweeney's that comes with a DVD- you could even open it up if you wanted, as long as I knew you were doing it and you returned it. You would be breaking a federal law, and I wouldn't even care. Other federal laws you could break and I wouldn't even care include drug trafficking and sedition.

I saw King Kong. I enjoyed a lot of it, but pretty much anytime someone talks about something that could be cut from it, I agree- The subplot with the one kid on the boat, those handheld strobe shots, a few shots of Naomi Watts climbing a ladder, if the bits with the natives could be made not-racist, that'd be sweet. Jack Black actually being funny also would've been cool.

But there are parts where a giant ape is punching dinosaurs. Those are sweet.

Oh, and this is bullshit- Bank Of America has a different computer system for California, Washington, and Idaho than the rest of the country, so I can't use an ATM. When I talked to people at the bank today, they were really confused- I need to deposit money so this check I sent my landlord, post-dated for the first of January for that month's rent, can go through and not be overdrawing. I don't know if I'd be able to withdraw money. But yeah, that's something to know in case I ever visit Portland.

For Christmas I got some like fifty-five dollars worth of Barnes And Noble gift cards, maybe forty bucks cash, and a digital video camera.

I continue, I think, to alienate myself from my extended family. Or at least- I don't know, I like cash, but it's not really enough to let me live, and if anyone were to ask if I wanted something that wasn't cash I could say Thomas Pynchon's V or Home Movies DVDs or a laundry list of CDs without even really thinking about it. I don't know if when you read that list of stuff I got, you got the impression of how not fun it was to open presents. My eyes were mostly dead-eyed, because I knew about the DV camera in advance.

I go out to meals with my mom a lot, which gets annoying, just on a "holy fuck you eat out a lot" level. I start to think things like "If you ate out like only three or four times a week, and sent the money you saved to me, I would have an infinitely easier life." Maybe it's not actually that frequent, and it just feels like it to me because I never eat out anymore and I'm just like the Jewiest kid ever?

I have so little to actually complain about, I guess, in the grand scheme of things. I hope something fun (perhaps debaucherous, maybe just maniacal) happens on New Year's Eve. So frequently I am only entertaining myself and just annoying/alienating other people, and that would be a fine way to ring in the new year but I can't do it alone.

You know what would be fun? Having some kind of audio playback device on your person that just yelled shit that either you or someone else recorded at random intervals, as you were somewhere in public. By fun I maybe mean nightmarish. I would love to record one of these tapes for someone- the Brian Nicholson as Horrible Party Guest Disassociated From All Things Going On Around Him Cassette.

Maybe there'd be songs on it, too, but again: Only at random intervals. Songs like "The Classical" by The Fall, or "Gareth Brown Says" by McLusky maybe, but maybe just normal mixtape stuff like Animal Collective or Girl Talk. Imagine that braying from the inside pocket of your jacket. At the end of the tape there would maybe be a sad song, as you leave the party alone and unloved but until then it'd be all "Hey there fuck-face!"

Hey there fuck-face.

So I finally came up with a title for this novel-thing I've been working on, which has had some tentative titles, all of which were terrible. And I was happy, and I wrote it down, and I went down to brush my teeth.

The title I came up with was "Do You Remember When The World Ended?" which I think has a certain charm and appropriateness, it's actually really on-the-nose but that's better than some bullshit abstraction, right?

Anyway, yeah, I was happy with it. Until I said it aloud, and realized the uncomfortable similarity to the opportunistic post-9/11 country song "Where Were You When The World Stopped Turning?"

And I smile-laughed outwardly while inside I cursed myself.

The new title is "Have You Forgotten (That Time The World Ended)." Which has none of those problems.

That was a joke, by the way, for those who didn't keep up with every new fuck-the-a-rabs song that comes down the pike.

I don't know what the title should be. "Do You Remember When The World Ended?" is probably too fucking long. And punctuation- probably a bad idea. But seriously, my other working titles, that I never really stood by for a second- much much worse. Or, if they're good, they were better for the things I originally came up with them for that I will probably never get around to doing.

So it's December 22nd, ten days until 2006, but I was laying in bed reviewing my year, and so the year-in-review post can be made. Perhaps this is jumping the gun: When I made my 2005 mix CD, I had yet to hear that Why album which I'm now calling one of my favorites.

But tomorrow I go for an eye exam, and new glasses will be found. We could call this post, 2005 - The Year My Glasses Broke, a reference to that movie, The Year My Voice Broke, that I haven't seen and don't even have in the Netflix queue.

Basically a bad year. I had pinned some hope for redemption onto it- The plan was to return to the East coast, then go up to New York City, see Evie Nelson, and maybe this would magically improve everything. I got to New York, made a call, found out she was in Brooklyn, I went to Brooklyn, made a call, found out she was specifically in the part of Brooklyn known as Greenpoint, went to Greenpoint, the corner of Greenpoint and Manhattan Avenue, made a call, and before I could find out specifically where we stood in relation to one another, her phone died, and I returned to New Jersey with my nose running like it had been all day.

In the days between then and now, my nose has stopped running. It started running just shortly before I left Olympia, so it's not like that was the defining aspect of my year.

The defining aspect of my year, basically, was that it sucked, economically. Jobs fell through or were horrible scams, loans and offers of money also fell through. Class stuff fell apart and I was left with nothing much to do except for write fiction, listen to music, and watch movies.

I saw a lot of movies this year- Alex got a Netflix queue, I took a film class, went to a film festival, and started learning how to be a projectionist at the Capitol Theatre.

The best movie of the year was 3-Iron. I kept on calling it transcendent, kept on thinking about how transcendence is the best thing a film can aspire to. But really- any film that's entertaining is transcendent, since it allows you to think of something else for awhile. It takes you somewhere outside of your own problems. This is true for any good piece of art, essentially. Entertainment is distraction, and distraction is basically all we want.

3-Iron was transcendent, the movie of the year, and truly great art, it how it lingered. Pretty much as soon as I saw it, I knew it was the movie of the year, so I kept it with me, in the back of my mind, and it served as something to think about even when I wasn't watching it.

Comicswise- The stuff I read and enjoyed was more on the arty end than the entertainment end. Like, Anders Nilsen's Big Questions and Kevin Huizenga's Or Else comics- those were good. But for, like, inner calm, more than what I want out of comics, which I mostly didn't get- Michael Kupperman was funny, and Scott Pilgrim volume 2 was awesome and some fistpumping adrenalizing grin-inducing fun but most of what I read, I regretted not going through with that whole "stop reading comics" idea I had.

But whatever, my argument about transcendence and entertainment is basically a supporting argument to my long-held thesis about the distinction between high and low art being bullshit so I guess I shouldn't be too bothered.

But as for this year in review focusing on art- that was the good part of the year. That and the people, my friends, I can't sell them short. But so much of the bonding happened over music and film that I find it hard to oversell that stuff.

Most movies I saw and liked I either made my friends see or we watched them together. So when I talk about how I saw two bad-ass movies Orson Welles made, know that Alex Tripp was in the room both times, and liked them just as much, if not more, than I did. (The Trial and F For Fake- amazing)

Dude was also there for hours of Twin Peaks on video cassette, Little Murders, and a great deal of other things. I saw Mind Game with him, along with Loren and Evan. And I argued for The Wicker Man so more people saw it, and I talked up 3-Iron to people as well.

Music was pretty much the same deal- Loren Thor came through with the new Deerhoof album when I was internet-free, and then we went to Seattle to see them, the day after we saw the Go! Team. I already posted a best music of the year list, and now you can see what webzines are running and how wrong they are.

There was no music and no movies when I was living with Atlanta and Mikako, those few weeks, but they kept me alive. There was no transcendence then, just the feeling of being in the shit and feeling it. I don't want to downplay that either- The sun on my neck and walking back and forth.

Much in the same way that I kept 3-Iron in my head, once I heard Feels, that enriched some shit- pretty much anytime I was around nature, I was whooping up those songs in my head.

And I did some writing this year- finishing up short stories (thanks to all who read them and liked them, once again, holy shit) and trying to start something larger. The year started with that independent contract, and yeah, that went well.

The film class that followed- There was that festival, which I dreaded, and very rarely saw anything good- aside from 3-Iron- but being in Seattle, you know, peers and friendships and whatnot- that was the feeling it, that was the thing I was in.

So much more in it, feeling it, when basically homeless and relying on a stranger's kindness, and walking around a landscape rather than inside.

Inside is, as ever, the goddamn internet, which aside from music stealing, is the bad kind of distraction.

But let me tell you a conversation I had. I argued on behalf of irony- not the "look at my mustache, it is one generally seen on one with less education than I possess," but the good kind. It's the kind of argument where- I don't want to be seen as one of the mustache kids, but I do want to be seen as one of the funny kids, and I don't want to be an over-earnest emo asshole. And there was talk about how irony was basically killing society, getting in the way of honest expression, and I made an argument which was mostly ignored.

Basically- the way I use irony/humor, it's not a distancing technique. It's basically- if conversation is an art, than humor is a metaphor, a lens. What Charlie Kaufman does in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, is dressing stuff up in this sci-fi clothing, to get at what he means, because it can't be done in a more direct way. And in conversation- there's no science fiction there. There's just jokes, but... If it's not quite the same thing, it's damn close.

And from a literary or creative perspective- the line between deadpan absurdism and magic realism is mostly one of intent, not so much a distinction of technique, a conclusion I came to watching that episode of Stella where they start a farm in the floorboards of their apartment. And deadpan absurdism is fucking hilarious, and magic realism is awesome. I could further make the argument that the personality equivalent of magic realism is basically being dedicated to awesomeness.

(Oh, you know what was great, this year- Getting into the Best Show On WFMU. I might have heard the Timmy Von Trimble bit before, and some other stuff, but this year I actually dove into the archives and the whole bit.)

(I feel the need to clarify that when I talk about magic realism so fucking much, I'm not talking particularly about Marquez- who I first read this year!- because I'm not the biggest fan of his and I wish he'd push the weirdness/magic further- but rather, other people who I associate with creating good art.)

And a dedication to awesomeness, you know, that's the thing to strive for. That's my aim.

I hope I ring in the new year something fierce. I've never done that, and that's probably not going to change this year. Being home for the holidays... Bleh. Fine for Christmas, but for New Years, I find it antithetical to what I want.

A brief flash of insight:

There are, at the core of my personality, maybe two warring impulses, two perhaps incompatible parts. Parts that, if isolated into other individuals, I would find insufferable due to the other part within myself.

There's some kind of sweetness, which I hate to attribute to myself, as it seems so simple, but I mean: I do try to be a good person. And I mostly succeed.

But then there's the fuck-it-all-anyway aspect, the cynicism, that manifests itself in stuff which is, I guess, perhaps innately destructive. Although as I write this now, I guess I doubt that part.

But anyway, warring impulses, same person.

What's weird is that I guess this can be found in children, albeit in a different form. The cynicism isn't there, and the destruction and malevolence comes out of the same innocence that I tend to associate with the whole trying to be a good person.

Maybe it's the self-awareness that leads to the isolation of these parts, but the nature of those human roots that make them impossible to get away from? I don't know, I didn't start writing with a thesis in mind.

But as I started typing this I started to think that maybe it this reason that makes noise pop the best music ever. Or, obviously, the best art is going to have to address both these aspects, but noise pop does it at a basic level of sound, rather than just lyrics? Or it gets back to childhood, by putting the sweetness of melody and the destruction of force right up against each other as something pure.

Contained here is basically the root of an essay I will probably never write about My Bloody Valentine- the sweetness of the melody of romance, combined with this content of sex and lust, reflected in a sound that, in all its powers, has the rhythms of fucking in it, the catharsis of orgasm, and sounds like the inside of the womb, with the sound of male/female harmonies as pure as children. This is a pretentious way of pointing it, but it'd work itself out, I think, as a longer essay.

Meanwhile, in Olympia, the music scene is so fucking backward-looking to this idea of childhood- faking a purity in both ways, and coming off naive or autistic. The eighties twee stuff, obviously, but the new avant-garde noise kids have this whole "bashing something expensive" aesthetic thing there- still so earnest but just... I find both annoying and dishonest and possessing a schtick. Neither side is as complex as actual childhood, and all the more annoying knowing that it's being made by people with all the horrible hang-ups of adulthood.

Let me write this down, mostly as a note for myself: There are similar themes at work within John Barth's The End Of The Road and Jules Feiffer's Little Murders. Little Murders is probably the better work, funnier and more complex, but The End Of The Road is a book that, at the time I finished it, I was ready to declare the best book I'd ever read. It's not, but it's still something.

Anyway, yes, if you haven't done so already, you should watch Little Murders. It's directed by Alan Arkin, came out in 1971, is based on a play, and stars Elliott Gould. Donald Sutherland shows up. It's a black comedy, one that is a predecessor in many ways to Larry David's stuff, but it has more to say about the human condition and how to live your life. It's my favorite movie of the seventies.

Man, I love reading reviews of Jesus Is Magic. For those who haven't, the general gist is "Sarah Silverman is funny, and I'd bang her. The fact that I'd bang her makes her even funnier. However: Is making jokes that I totally laughed at a good thing for my morality? And what about the morality of the nation?"

Also, I watched the documentary Devil's Playground, about the Amish practice of Rumspringa. It's every bit as good as you'd want it to be, completely fascinating. The main character looks like a Culkin, then gets addicted to crank. Amish girls don't change their manner of dress during their free years, although the boys do. Oh, and running around and sowing your wild oats basically takes the form of being a white-trash dumbass.

I finished reading Salvador Plascencia's The People Of Paper not too long ago. I started reading it not too long ago- Maybe three days before I finished. Oh, compulsively readable books. I love you so.

It was good- I was anticipating it quite a bit, having heard some hype, and the introduction of it's amazing, and after that it kicks in with typography tricks that looked fun.

It's a break-up book, in some ways- ways that are obvious when you read it. Not that it doesn't have other things going for it, but I mean- If that's the mood you're in, especially if you're male, (It's pretty specifically male- Again, not like it's not good or whatever, but for reading a book that shares some of the feelings you're going through at any specific time) feel free to give this one a go. Or, to be fatalistic about it, keep it in mind for the next time this mood strikes, along with that Why? album I'm so struck with.

Anyway- The title refers to two things: Fictional characters and actual origami people brought to life. The book splits the difference between magic realism and metafiction. The magic realist stuff has a heavier emphasis on the fantastic than Marquez, to the point where it's outright fantastical actually; the "magic realist" label is probably just coming from Plascencia's Mexican origins and his literary pedigree- the book was published by McSweeney's.

The fantastic elements and the magic realist elements are basically inextricable, which makes the question of where Plascencia's going next kind of interesting. I prefer the magic realist stuff- I'm pretty sure the making yourself a character in a fictional book is a trick that can only be used once, which I guess would mean that the only thing would be a straight-up memoir, which would be dull. The more... god, I want to say the more fantastical elements, but that's not quite what I want to say- The fictional character bits are very human, and even though the imaginative stuff is aces, I don't not want to talk about the character bits.

Yeah, it all works, it's all linked up. Nothing can be jettisoned really, from this book at least. It's imaginative and beautifully written and very human. It's clever, but the cleverness is necessary for what it's doing.

It's really great- not the best book I've ever read, but a great one.

All The Real Girls is the good kind of indie movie, not the bad kind. It actually works and is funny and moving and individual and not hip and condescending and... It's just so much a collection of individual scenes, and the scope of how it works, it comes off more like an album loosely based on a concept and a narrative like a more recent Mountain Goats album, or maybe a book of haikus based on a theme.

I want to say it's the last indie movie I've seen to really work for me and affect me since Lovely And Amazing, but Me And You And Everyone We Know was more recent. I guess I'm thinking Nicole Holofcener because this feels smaller. Or because Lovely And Amazing is just closer to the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say an indie movie in reference.

As for the bad kind: Does anyone think that Brokeback Mountain will have scenes of pudding being eaten? And I mean that literally, as a South Park reference, than as pudding as meaning semen.

For better blogging, you should be reading that myspace thing. I bring the laughs something fierce.

But yeah, see All The Real Girls, if you get the chance. And by "if you get the chance," I mean pursue it, because it's not a hard movie to see- It's on DVD.

A conversation with Alex at the corner of Harrison and Division led to the creation of a myspace profile, which is not in my name as such a thing would be hopelessly lame. However: http://www.myspace.com/rupertmurdochmustdie for all your internet phenomenon needs! If you are on that site (which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, by the way- that is the gag) or know someone that is, they should befriend me because that's how you become an internet phenomenon.

A post like so many I feel I've written before: Took my short stories that I started writing upon coming to college and that I think I'm finished with and put them into one file, for a theoretical book, called Youth And How To Waste It. It was really satisfying to do this, and look over that stuff, this weird little overview of my mind for basically two years and the reflections I had, the veiled autobio, etc. I wish I could format it in Wordpad so the couple of stories that I saved doublespaced could be single-spaced like the rest, but mostly I've got something printable. Not really publishable by other people, but if I were to take a bookmaking class and make a chapbook or something, I'd have a fine little document- The stories are put into a particular order, and it starts off awkward and gets stronger, and I think by the end there's enough that's happened for an affecting payoff. It's weird and all over the place but it's a portrait of my head from a variety of angles.

Movies watched recently, a brief rundown: I saw Sideways, which I thought was overrated- my least favorite Alexander Payne movie yet. I'm thinking my favorite is About Schmidt, perhaps? That's got some moments that aren't so awesome, but it actually feels like a movie to me, and there's that strong (although weird and abrupt) ending. Sideways felt like TV to me, never as funny or as tragic as it should've been. The happy ending felt false.

Speaking of About Schmidt, I saw Broken Flowers, which felt like a companion piece to that film, coming at similar subject matter from a different angle. It seemed like most critics and everybody else was disappointed- to me it felt very Jim Jarmusch directing a late-period Bill Murray movie- deadpan and minimal but not annoyingly so. It wasn't as funny as such a thing could maybe be expected to be, but it was cool- The bits where Murray listens to music in his car are similar to bits in Ghost Dog, and yeah, a lot like About Schmidt- old people roadtrip movies, reconciling with their pasts.

Saw Kim Ki-Duk's Bad Guy, following my becoming obsessed with him after seeing 3-Iron at the festival. I was confused by the plot's movement, character motivations, etc. but I liked it- I had low expectations, or maybe just weird ones- I expected crazy violence and shock tactics. I also saw Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... And Spring, which I don't know if I talked about here- I liked the first segment, which raised my expectations a lot. Also I knew a lot of the plot beats ahead of time, so that kind of detracted.

Um, I saw The Warriors. Once Upon A Time In Mexico. Mirrormask. Belle De Jour. I watch a lot of movies. You all know how I live- Like Bruce Springsteen once sang, something something sitting here trying to write this book.

I bought my brother the R. Crumb Handbook for Christmas, and hope he'll like it. No idea what to get my mom but I am very poor, too poor even to really get something for my brother so maybe shit'll be excused.

I finished Libra- my DeLillo affair is kind of done, I think. Underworld is really well-written though. I'm reading this McSweeney's best-of, and I'll be finished that soon enough.

Mostly everything is the same as it ever was and is, soon this year will be over and maybe 2006 will be different. Mid-term elections to look forward to, and with such things come hope, I guess. Maybe jobs, financial aid, classes that don't suck, maybe making a movie, maybe making music, all those things I am always waiting to happen, maybe those will finally happen.

Sadly I'm pretty sure those Yo La Tengo Hanukkah shows I was looking forward to are 21-up. Seriously kids, 2006. Perhaps that will be our year.