I seem to have wandered down a rabbit hole of esoterica as of late. It feels like the thing that began in high school, of liking things that were "indie" as opposed to "mainstream", when I watched Wes Anderson movies and listened to Pavement records, slowly gave way to more history in college- I think the first record I bought in Olympia was a reissue of Television's Marquee Moon, and one of the first DVDs I borrowed was Taxi Driver. That's just filling in gaps in the canon. And then I started watching movies like Little Murders and liking them a lot more Taxi Driver. You know, it's this thing that develops. It's become a cause for anxiety, because my best friend, who watched these movies with me, is moving out. And today I went to look at an apartment and found a guy who is, in general, similar to me- The same basic type of person, probably, but who I would probably be more psyched on three and a half years ago.

I shouldn't be harsh on this guy. If I moved in, I'm sure we'd get along, and I'm really hoping I can move in, so I won't be homeless.

My former roommate Evan Hashi has probably done the same thing as I have. We have different personalities and temperaments, but- I think he's done the same thing. The only thing is, he's specifically into music. I love music as well, but- It's like his thing particularly- He plays instruments, mixes recordings, has a radio show. For me, I write prose, I don't play music, but I like music a lot more probably because of that failing. I also like comics a lot, and maybe that's because I can't draw? I don't know. Maybe it's not because, so much as in spite of. Anyway. Because Evan specifically likes music, he's further down that particular rabbit hole, but not in a way that I see as my future, although I could certainly be wrong about this. Evan pretty much stopped listening to new music a little over a year ago, and when LCD Soundsystem came on at a party he made kind of disparaging remarks comparing it to Liquid Liquid. This is basically fine, although that new LCD Soundsystem is pretty fucking good, and maybe a party is better for dancing than dictating music criticism to no one. I haven't listened to his radio show, but I've heard him talk about it. And the other night I went to a party at his house, where I got really mad at him playing records- Stupidly mad. The party was kind of lame in general, being 95% dudes, so that contributed. But anyway- Evan's at that point that Quentin Tarantino's at- Not in terms of the quality of the work he makes, but at that level of nerdy specialization. And not the point of Quentin Tarantino's soundtracks, which are great. But the point of Quentin Tarantino's movie screening nights and presentation of DVD releases, where he's putting out really bad grindhouse movies that have one or two appealing shots or character actors or lines of dialogue. So at the party, there was a time when Evan was playing records that were annoying and bad that were either canonized (Bryan Ferry) or just had one or two good things per song, that a well-tuned ear could appreciate. I described it afterwards as novelty records- like Dr. Demento, if he had a show on WFMU. And I think that WFMU is amazing.

I'm kind of hoping that the fact that I don't just like music or movies with an all-consuming enthusiasm will stop me from getting to that point, but if it doesn't, I guess that's fine- I'm sure it will bring me joy to be that nerdy. But right now, I like the things that I stumble across and get obsessed with to be the opposite of the small character role. I like pieces of art that are completely overwhelming, almost monolithic. You might recall me talking about how great Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain was. The newest thing to find my favor is Gary Panter's Jimbo: Adventures In Paradise.

Gary Panter is a cartoonist, whose life story reminds me vaguely of Daniel Johnston's- Love of Jack Kirby, religious upbringing, acid trip- Except that Panter only took acid once, kind of hated it, although attributes importance to it, and followed through with his rejection of his parent's beliefs. Which I guess makes it completely different. Matt Groening likes them both, also. But Panter and Groening actually became friends, and Panter wrote a manifesto, The Rozz-Tox Manifesto, urging artists to infiltrate the mainstream themselves, because if you don't, you'll just be co-opted. This was probably one part influential to Matt Groening to one part articulating things he already knew. At the time of The Simpsons starting up, Panter was designing the sets on Pee-Wee's Playhouse. He also apparently wrote a Pee-Wee movie with Paul Reubens that wasn't made.

Panter also kind of draws like Daniel Johnston, but moreso it's true that he kind of draws like Brian Chippendale. And if you trace one strand of current alternative comics, like Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes, the people who do magazine illustrations, back up to Robert Crumb, or the Hernandez Brothers, it's safe to associate the people who do gallery shows, like the Fort Thunder dudes and Paper Rad, back to Gary Panter. This is kind of a paraphrase from a review I read today of the comic Cold Heat, that I loved, and meant to eulogize, but didn't. This is maybe bullshit because who knows if Panter would've drawn comics without the whole underground thing that Crumb helped to get going, and Charles Burns is but one of many people whose approach is a little of column A and a little of column B. In the awful comics issue of the awful Vice, I think, someone describes Panter as the first non-hippie to drawn an underground comic book. He is kind of a hippie though. But he's also described as the father of punk art. He might be the first not-a-misogynist man to draw an underground comic book.

God, this is all so much preamble. Before drawing these comics, he made comics in the early seventies that he threw at Marc Bolan at a T. Rex show. I imagine the people reading this blog will be coming at it with a music context.

Anyway. A lot of the contents of Jimbo: Adventures In Paradise are taken from the pages of Art Spiegelman's 1980 anthology RAW. Maus ran it that same anthology, as an insert, because it's smaller. This book is big, which showcases the art really well. I imagine it's the size of the actual magazine RAW, but I've never seen those. It's the size of the Charles Burns' El Borbah/Big Baby/Skin Deep reprints, or issue 23 of Eightball, or the Krazy Kat Fantagraphics softcovers- It's a really good size for presenting art at just the right size where it starts to bowl you over, you could hide your whole face behind one, which I don't think you can do with a normal size comic. Well, you kind of can- but after a lifetime, I'm really acclimated to that size. Art tends to look better bigger. Anyway, Art, as an editor, really encouraged Gary to go crazy with the art, drawing different styles with every panel, which is pretty much what happens in this book. There's also one-page comics from this late seventies punk magazine, Slash, that is rougher in its drawing style. This isn't to say it's bad, just that it's not as impressive. But it all coheres together as a book.

Anyway, it's all pretty much the opposite of Robert Crumb. There are no painstaking drawn images of women's asses here- For one thing, the artist has admitted he doesn't know how to draw attractive women. But more importantly, the art is drawn furiously, energetically. For another thing- I don't sense satire here, or irony, or the neuroticism that's in Crumb. There's anxiety, and it's palpable, but it's about the state of the world, the fear of a nuclear apocalypse. Note: These were comics drawn during the 1980s. There's a sense of humor to it, but- Okay, how can I best express the point of view in this comic, in words? One one-page strip drawn in 1978 contains a caption that reads "Can't stand a little emotion? Go read Nancy!" This is kind of a joke, but it's followed up a month later, a page later, in 1979, by Nancy appearing in the comic to reprimand the title character, Jimbo- "OK MAN! What's this I hear... about your calling my strip devoid of sentiment? I mean right on the surface it functions as a nostalgic buffer against future shock for a tired and technology-torn species." Hopefully you can read in the prose, there's a certain velocity there, even when it becomes more poetic, as well as my description of the drawing as, this work is kind of the screaming in terror as it runs towards the future, fleeing from nostalgia, which is maybe a good way to establish it as having the same point of view as punk. Only it remains really empathetic. The final sequence in the book is about a fear of nuclear bombs, as Jimbo tries to stop a bomb from going off, but can't- It ravages everything. The last bit is a sequence about a horse on fire, and Jimbo trying to kill it to end it's suffering, but unaware of whether or not what he does actually creates more suffering? It's kind of an amazing summary of what it feels like to be human, especially coming at the end of a collection, rather than as a piece in an anthology. It's also the moment that's more sustained in its drawing style than anything else in the book. Oh wait, looking at it again, that's not really true, it switches up a lot still.

Anyway, I think it's amazing. It's also out of print. There are other Gary Panter books in print, but they're not as good- one's a sketchbook, one's a reprint of a comic that he drew that Matt Groening published in the nineties and sold for three-dollars blown up and packaged as a hardcover- That's a version of Dante's Inferno with each canto done as a six-panel comics page, loosely translated, with burning hell replaced with a shopping mall. You might be able to read that for free in a good bookstore, but it's not anywhere as mindblowing as this thing. It's sad that a lot of his stuff is either out of print, and scattered to the winds, and that he's not really that prolific as a comics artist. He does some short work, that'll show up in an anthology or somewhere, like he was in McSweeney's 13, but those tend to not be so good. He's also a painter, but you know- those aren't reproduced so much. He does prints, and they go for fine-art prices. Picturebox is doing a monograph of his work next year, which will be good, but- I think he's really great at comics, and only so-so at painting. It's possible that book will prove me wrong. But this book that I have is a masterpiece. I would offer you come by my house and read it if you're in town, but I'm moving soon, and need to pack it up.

Note to self: I should make a movie about how honesty in a positive sense can be just as overwhelming and terrifying as honesty in a negative sense.

I guess I'm a huge nerd, but the most recent thing I've added to my list of regrets is that I never went to Seattle to debate Christopher Hitchens. He's doing a book tour for his book "God Isn't Great: Why Religion Ruins Everything," which I put in quotes instead of italics because I'm mostly paraphrasing. I read in The Stranger that Seattle was the only city where no one arose to meet his challenge to debate all comers. The debate would revolve around the existence of God, which is something I believe in.

I think that had I showed up, my discussion would've taken a different tack than others. I wouldn't have discussed the Iraq war- I've seen him on Bill Maher's and he seemed really well-informed. I might've had a few zingers at the ready in regards to his Vanity Fair piece "Why Women Aren't Funny," which is just as wrong-headed and uninformed as you'd expect a piece with that title to be.

But my argument would've been based partly on my experience on LSD. Partly I would do this because it's funny, and easy to dismiss. Partly- you know, I already believe in God. But having a drug that triggers connections in different parts of the brain and leads to colossal feelings of there being things in the universe that are larger than you- I don't know, I think it's interesting. To some extent, it's dismissable. To another extent- you know, I tried to eat pizza, and couldn't, because it was intensified to the point where I felt like I was tasting the mold in the cheese and the yeast in the dough- I could sense all the bacteria reactions. These are real things. Other people become hyper-aware of blood rushing through their veins. One of the things I felt was the feeling that reality was much larger than anyone could comprehend. And I felt this all throughout my brain, in parts that I don't normally access. I don't know, I think that's interesting. I think that's worth contributing to a debate, even with someone who would probably shut me down harder than I've ever been shut down in my life.

But oh my God, have you read that "Why Women Aren't Funny" article? What a load of horseshit. Why would anyone agree with that guy about anything? He's not good at logic.

Two books I've read somewhat recently and liked a lot were Ian Svenonius' The Psychic Soviet and David Berman's Actual Air. The two are probably connected by clicks of Amazon.com recommendations, and their author's affiliation with the Drag City record label. Somehow my indie rock bias overcame my biases against political tracts and poetry. Both are really good, and honestly, calling Svenonius' book a political tract is probably a little dishonest.

Either way.

What's important about both of them is their clarity- Svenonius' book is insane with the stuff, in its ability to draw parallels amongst so many things, and multiple parallels found for the same thing, that it ends up cutting its subject matter into the shape of a diamond. It ends up being really cohesive as a set of essays.

Berman's book is poetry, and so it does the same thing. It's not metaphor, the parallels drawn. It's this way of seeing patterns emerge which is much larger than a single sentence could ever contain. It needs the tangents of thought shooting from strand to strand to map out the shape of the brain.

Does every book do this? Yes, a little bit, but there's something about fiction- that thing I love, that I read much more of than I read poetry and political tracts- with its narrative that forsakes this, in favor of the finality of a point that comes with a third act's resolution.

It emerges in a collection of Borges. It probably has more to do with the form of these books as collections of disparate works than their lack of narrative thrust, actually- It shows a set of thoughts all at once, rather than in progression.

I'm writing this book, and I can almost feel it approaching that, the size of thoughts accumulating. The thoughts are crazy thoughts that come in random bursts of typing. The shape that emerges isn't the shape of a plot. If you'll recall, I wanted that when I was reading Anthony Burgess' Tremor Of Intent, which I read between these two books, if memory serves.

I was talking about a friend of mine being crazy and gave as an example of something he would say at an inappropriate time, the Funkadelic line "I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe, I was not offended by them" and then I really felt that that line isn't crazy at all, and is in fact pretty much what it's all about.

I had my meeting with my professor where my work for the quarter was discussed. The thing she wrote seemed kind of laden with grammatical errors. The thought patterns are discernible, but it's the type of thing where I wish she wrote about what I learned rather than what I learnt.

I also went to the screening for people who were in SOS Media, the class I wanted to get into. I thought the thing I made was better than most of it. It's funny to see recurring themes- There's a lot of animals. Also, a lot of drones, which don't seem based on any real atmospheric consideration or aesthetic so much as it's a way to show work went into sound design. It happened at this animation screening last year- It's just this veneer of unpleasantness. Weird ripping off the surface elements of David Lynch. People also do like a "is this a dream/whoa what's happening" that's kind of taken from later David Lynch. Or people rip off the processing of voices from Twin Peaks. It just strikes me that it would be a lot more impressive to remind of something like David Lynch's student work, like The Grandmother. Granted, that stuff is really unpleasant and dark. But because it hasn't been cited so much- I don't know, I don't feel like there's surface elements there that could be ripped off. It's just so much the feeling of being set on fire and thrown in a river.

So, at this point, almost all of my friends are graduating from college. I'm not, there were two quarters when I didn't have any money for tuition, and so I've got some more time. But my good friend and current roommate Alex Tripp is graduating and moving away. It's going to be weird. Melancholic times are up ahead, looming in the future. We're out of this house at the end of June. He's going back to Alaska. My birthday is June 27th. I kind of want there to be some kind of party, something to take away from all the moving and attendant exhaustion. I imagine a backyard BBQ, fish tacos being grilled up to be seasoned with lime, and watermelon and lemonade on hand, Animal Collective on the stereo, drifting outdoors.

But next Thursday, my good friend and former roommate John Samson is coming to town. It's going to be great. Certainly there will be big parties. Or I should hope. He lived with Alex and I, along with Loren Thor, who is staying around Olympia at least for a while, and Evan Hashi (future unknown) in J208 on campus in what was an ongoing exercise in the best times ever. Hopefully there will be some photos taken of these weird and final moments. I hope I'm able to keep in better touch with these kids than the people I went to high school with. They're definitely a part of my imagined geodesic dome future.

I love these dudes. Deep friendships. I lived with these people, I shared a certain domestic intimacy. All of us are heterosexual, but I think there's something to be said for this intimacy that arises when for large periods of time, no one has a girlfriend. This is not to imply Fortress-Of-Solitude (the Lethem novel) moments, but just to say that it's not like there were women to share intimacy with. If we were female, our menstrual cycles would've synchronized. Our conversations were mostly jokes- but they were constant jokes, the type of thing that emerges from minds working automatically, saying whatever comes to mind. Everyone walked in everyone else's stream of consciousness, the waters got muddied.

I hope that none of them ever commit a murder because I would be obligated to lend them my bathtub to carve up the body and a couch for them to sleep on while they hide out waiting for the heat to cool down. But that probably won't happen, they're good dudes.

But you all know the difference I'm sure between keeping in touch with someone by telephone and walking around with them and responding to the same stimuli. The difference between AIM chats and face to face contact. And the difference as well between sharing current friends and meeting up with people and having the old times dominate the conversation, horribly. I'm not very good at the talk about the old times, and talking about what the old gang is up to, because of how horrible I am with keeping in touch with the old gang.

I'm listening to Elf Power. The winter is coming, and you have no time to waste.

What the fuck is up with these animated advertisments online now?

The worst are the ones for iTunes/iPods. Not just because they jump out of their frames with dancing, but the irony is that because they are such huge drains on computer's processors, they cause the product they're advertising (iTunes) to stutter, making it so I can't listen to music.

So I did my performance/video bit. There were technical problems, it was weird and baffling, but I don't think people hated it. At least one person really liked it.

Moving on from that, though, I just spent the last ten minutes looking at this record sleeve, that we somehow got for free of Mr. Rogers' album "Won't You Be My Neighbor." It's all songs for children meant to reassure them that they're special and loved. I haven't listened to it yet, I'm not sure I want to- Looking at the lyrics and explanatory notes is enough for me, in some ways. It's trying to communicate things that are so simple, in a simple manner, and there's these word choices to aid in that task that are kind of odd. I found the straightforwardness really pleasing and moving.

After an extended period of not even attempting to write these books in favor of working on this video, which followed an even longer period of just not getting a lot of writing done, I finally wrote a sizable chunk of prose. Awesome.

I also came to a way of describing the writing I do, in these books. No one really asks, but they do tell me that certain experiences are worth writing about after I express disinterest in them. Basically my writing is collections of crazy thoughts and jokes that aggregate to give the impression of intelligence and a structure and meaning. My books aren't even all that funny, so it's kind of a lie, but it seems a good way to explain it in the context of how I actually live, when I am forever making jokes and saying crazy shit.

I wrote a letter to the editor of the school newspaper the other day, telling them to please stop writing seminar papers as if they were opinion pieces. I singled out the Evergreen classes "Art After The End Of Art" and "Writing Beyond Language" as being particular signals that things were going to go badly. The latter I hold in particular low regard, although I realized that if that class was about comics, it would make sense. I then realized that a combination experimental fiction/comics program would be amazingly up my alley, but that no one at Evergreen would teach it due to either snobbery or reverse snobbery. But I think such a thing would make a lot of sense- a lot of the theory espoused by the experimental prose people is that words are just symbols, and a lot of theory talked up by a certain type of cartoonist is based on this kind of cartoon shorthand symbology. Basically, I could teach this class if I spent a year actually doing research into these things I feel like I already vaguely understand. Anyway, book one on the syllabus would be Daniel Clowes' Ice Haven. I don't talk about this theoretical class in the letter, I just make masturbation jokes.

Last night I watched the half-amazing I Am Cuba, a piece of propaganda made by the Soviet Union in the sixties and not released in America until 1996, when it was presented by a joint alliance of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. It's a really well-done film, one of the shots was stolen for Boogie Nights. The first chunk is really joyful and ecstatic filmmaking, weirdly- It's set in the times of Capitalism, and there's these scenes shot at danceclubs and poolside and stuff that are kind of tinted with bad vibes and misdeeds, but there's all these long tracking shots of beautiful people set to music. Capitalism rears its head, but oh man, the joy at work as this camera just runs around Cuba. It's so immediate. The only thing that's distancing is this weird voiceover, translating what the Cuban characters are saying into Russian for the Russian audience. There's also some English spoken, by the Americans who ruin everything.

I have this kind of ongoing and kind of racist conversation about what countries, in general, don't make good movies and which ones do. In this, Asia and Spanish-speaking countries come out well, and France and Russia get it pretty hard. For different reasons. Russian films, as well as literature, are just these miserable depressed things. And that emerges in I Am Cuba, in voiceover talking about how certain sounds of the ocean might as well be constant tears. There's kind of a weird tonal disparity.

The director's Russian, so I kind of do have to attribute the fun and joy that's present to him.

Anyway, as the movie goes on- it's over two and half hours long- it becomes tiring. There is a transition as the revolution begins. This stuff is presented with some of the same joy- molotov cocktails are thrown, there's a certain romance at work that allows for it. At the end it becomes a bit more of a war movie, as people die and get caught up to join the struggle. I was imagining that the finale would just be ecstatic, some kind of presentation of a utopia, although I guess that would just be people working and not really as fun-seeming as the swimming in pools footage. But no, it definitely just becomes less fun as it goes on. But it's pretty amazing on the whole, really moving movie-making.

It really reminded me of the strength of cinema as a thing where visuals can accompany music and really communicate joy in a way similar to how music can. It's not all dance numbers, I Am Cuba- There's also shouts of defiance against the forces that control us, which is the same principle, even though there's more drama at stake. People just tear themselves apart and give in, and there's always just this energy at work.

I had a dream the other day that I went to see a Man Man show and the band was selling sandwiches that they had kind of branded with their personality. The drummer was selling a sandwich that had thinly-cut steak topped with cottage cheese and peaches. In the dream I thought that was a really good idea for a sandwich. When I woke up, I realized that the idea of a band selling sandwiches is actually a good one for your more stoner-y bands.

So, after my post with videos a few days ago, Julie Klausner of those videos sent me an e-mail, which was slightly unnerving. But more important than that is the fact that after that post, I watched a lot more of her videos posted on Youtube, including the very funny "Cat News" series. I'm also fond of the "How We Met" video, which has a cameo appearance by cartoonist Lauren Weinstein and her husband, writer Tim Hodler. I don't know where, but they're named in the credits. Watch them.

I saw Dinosaur Jr. last night. They played at the Capitol Theatre, and I worked security, asking for IDs and such. Here is my response to that show- There is nothing I love more than losing my shit. But there are times when it feels like faking an orgasm. That was how that went. An added parallel could be made about the lack of intimacy in such a venue, a large theater, with a balcony and a stage.

But more blog-about-able than the actual show was the fact that I worked security. I worked for a little over two hours, in time to watch the band Awesome Color. Anyway, they weren't so good, and I milled about the theater. I saw a friend of mine outside, standing with her boyfriend, who is a dude I don't like at all. Still, when I went out to say hello to them, they ignored me and ran inside. I grabbed the dude I don't like at all by the arm, because I had been working security, and they were running in seemingly without paying. He brushed me off. I talked to one of the on-duty dudes. He went after them. I talked to the guard on duty a few minutes later.

"He said he was in a band, I think he's in Awesome Color."
"Awesome Color is the band on stage right now. He's just in a shitty local noise duo, and was acting entitled. Jesus, what an asshole." I think I might've thrown in the word "scenester" as well.

So after Awesome Color finished their set, some people I knew were outside smoking. I told them, "hey, if you see (name omitted), kick him in the balls."

It's worth noting that the people I was talking to like dude in question more than they like me, I am pretty sure. So they defend his not paying. But one of them then says, "hey, he's jewish, he's cheap, you can't expect him to pay for things." "He's special." "That's like insisting a person in a wheelchair use the stairs."

At the time, I was just frustrated at them defending their friend's kind of douchey behavior. And I didn't want to get off-message, and so just reiterated- "What an entitled ass. He's only 'special' inasmuch as he's retarded." But as I was walking home, I realized- Hey, what the fuck? Not like I don't do the thing where racism is brought up for comedic purposes, and it's not like I would consider a lot of the people who do that to actually be racists- but the statement actually was presenting a stereotype at face value, with no actual form of criticism behind it. It was just based on "It's not racist if you like the race." There was also talk of me being racist for being mad at him, which is actually a joke about racism, and thus more forgivable.

There was also talk about how I shouldn't care, how I didn't have a stake in the theater. I explained that I do volunteer at the theater, and can see movies for free because of this, and I like the place a lot. The response was they they didn't see why I had a stake in it. The argument could've been made that I got in for free, and didn't have to pay- even a joke about me being jewish and cheap could be made in that context. Anyway.

So, Dinosaur Jr. live- I had earplugs in. They played a lot of stuff off of Beyond, it seemed like, although I could be wrong about that- Certainly I don't know all their songs. But it is weird, that reunion concert thing, where people want to hear certain songs, certain routines that they know. As opposed to shows with smaller bands, where, because it's a given that a lot of people there don't go in caring, they then have to play harder, make a more forceful impression.

i sure am glad evie nelson is my friend! she just enabled comments on my blog after giving me shit about it for almost four years. what a gal. you can tell she didn't write this blog entry herself b/c what kind of asshole would link to her own myspace in someone else's blog?

oh shit.

I think this is great.



I stumbled across it while searching for the Michael Kupperman TV Funhouse cartoon "Big Boobs Einstein." I've established that I think that Michael Kupperman is the funniest dude in comics, for his sense of absurdism- his Snake And Bacon's Cartoon Cabaret book is amazing. It is maybe too unrelentingly ridiculous for most people- it's not character-based comedy at all, there's nothing to really ground it. I found that cartoon later, somewhere other than Youtube, but this is better. It's made with Julie Klausner, who I had heard about due to her comedy show in New York with Jackie Clarke, Obsessed, probably when I heard that Tom Scharpling had done it once. There are other Julie and Jackie shorts on Youtube, and I think they're great. The video of the live performances don't work so well for me, but I can't even really watch live performances by bands on Youtube. The short film format is great, well-suited for parodies of videos made by soap opera actresses.

They're really funny- as two-woman sketch comedy duos go, I'd put them above the L.A.-based Clifford And Kidd, who came to my attention from their talking about candy bars, which is the type of thing that makes me pay attention to people.

Also from L.A., I like the videos made by Neil Campbell and Paul Rust. Neil Campbell also does a comic strip, found online, called My Naked Dad, that is intermittently funny. Rather than link to that, I will instead point to when his blog had an entry I thought was great.

This post was edited because I got a name wrong, in a way that bothered me, because the name I said that was wrong belongs to a person I don't think is very funny.

I feel weird about posting about a music thing right after Pitchfork wrote about it. I'd read about Dan Deacon before, but felt put off by the album title, "Spiderman Of The Rings" and had reservations about how contrived the guy's physical appearance seemed. Anyway, the record's actually great. I don't know how well it'll hold up, for how stripped-down it is, but for now, it makes an immediate impression powered by positivity.

This is most true on the twelve-minute long "Wham City," named after an art collective/building that housed shows in Baltimore. Oh man, but how I love collectives- the mystery evoked. The Lisa Frank imagery of that song, "there is a castle that glows, there is a fountain" combined with the whole collective bit along with the music- It's all old electronics, put towards poppy effect, bringing Nintendo to mind- signals "this is of the same mindset as Paper Rad, which I love" in a way which should put all of the things that get me on guard in the right context. There's not the same sense of noise and overload. It gets closer to something a kid would actually like, although I don't have kids around to play records for.

Anyway, it's good.

Have I written about Marnie Stern? I went to her show, saw opening acts that weren't loud enough to cut down on the sound of snare drums, I went out front and talked to friends and missed the main event because it turned out that she was playing second to last, with the not-very-good-at-all Barr the actual headliner. I'd heard a few of her songs at home, and felt like they were hit and miss, but that a live show would be fun rock and roll times. After the show I heard the rest, and it actually started meaning a lot to me- The lyrical content is these weird anthems for art-making: "I've been off the radar way too long." This peaks with the last song, which is seriously amazing- it's narration and guitar, explicitly trying to evoke imagery through sound. What turns it into a song instead of just Peter And The Wolf in miniature is the - well, there's a chorus- but large chunks that state the intent, which is art-making. "I will paint you a picture that's inside my head, but first I must carve out a space." This sounds pretentious, but coming after an album's worth of guitar shredding craziness and a vocal style that caterwauls within it's small singsong range it's just this affirmation- A tiny break from the sameness to put it all into context, so it stops being this tiring thing and starts being a lucid moment.

That then turns into a framing device for discussing this art and music collision point, which is the space where the ridiculous figure of Dan Deacon resides.

Oh, and the guy from Barr, Brendan Fowler, has a magazine, ANP Quarterly, the last issue of which had a great Paper Rad cover story, so that ties it all together too, if poorly.

I just wrote some stuff about this elsewhere on the internet, but I just watched the Alejandro Jodorowsky movie The Holy Mountain. It's awesome, I loved it. It's the weirdest movie I've ever seen. So weird and off on its own shit that I can't even imagine it being someone's favorite movie because of the way it falls so outside human experience that you can't make certain connections to it. But it's amazing. Like, the best science-fiction world-building ever. But then cross that with like VALIS-level psychosis and Borges-type thought-processes and mysticism. Alejandro Jodorowsky stands on the highest mountain with his pupils huge and hallucinates it all, but he does it completely sober. If you saw this movie while tripping on acid it would rip you to shreds. Seriously: Weirdest movie ever. Not in a pretentious way- Who would you be trying to impress by pretending when you make this movie? God? And not in a weird to people who don't watch a lot of movies way. It's a masterpiece, and not in the way that a Hitchcock movie is a masterpiece- It doesn't give a shit about the rules of film or whatever, and it can't be evaluated in terms of technical skill or anything boring. See it if you want to know how much more there is.

It's late at night, and I've been sewing by hand. I was listening to Wooden Wand, and the urge struck to listen to Wilco. That urge has been in my head off and on for a while recently, with Jesus Etc. running through my head, as well as vague memories of Misunderstood and Via Chicago. I haven't listened to them in ages- At some point I realized that I didn't actually like them, I just liked Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and a few songs apiece off the two preceding records. And I had fun at their show on the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot tour. Also, freshman year in the dorms, my official copy of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot kind of disappeared, and was replaced in the packaging with a burn labeled Yankee Hotel Buttfuck. I never listened to it because of my fears that the audio would be much lower and that this would really bother me. Somehow I think also that this experience and relabeling got into my memories, like I would associate it with freshman year and not the time I actually listened to it the most, which was high school.

Specifically, the room I had in high school, and the rust belt summers, hot and humid. My room was a loft that went unreached by the central air conditioning, so it got to be pretty sweltering. Somehow in my mind Yankee Hotel Foxtrot got haunted by humidity. It's a warm weather record, but that country vibe that hangs over it reminds me of the south. It's not even an alt-country record. Still, when it's hot in the poor places at night, I'm not going outside, I'm listening to that Wilco record. Even that production, thick with noise and odd percussion rattles like insects in the night. Or the feeling of sitting in a car with the windows up and heat accruing in between the glass. I remember Jesus Etc running through my head as my mom and stepdad looked at houses to buy and move into after I graduated high school.

Now I'm living in a moderate climate. It's starting to get warmer, t-shirt weather, but in the night I am very very comfortable; still keeping a blanket on my bed rather than investing in an oscillating fan. The Wilco record isn't alone in seeming like hot weather music- This Silver Jews record I'm listening to right now? Or those Wooden Wand records. Looking at my 2007 playlist- that Modest Mouse record that's not too good, that Shins record, Deerhunter, The Ohsees, Boris with Michio Kurihara- all of these would benefit from that type of thickness to the air and the drunkeness of dehydration, and a different relationship between the inside and the outside.

Has there ever been a hip-hop record called Don't Fear The Rapper?

I stumbled across a news story which will now be the default thing I bring up when the subject of astrology comes up. A scientific study found that students conceived between May and August had lower test scores than those conceived at other parts of the year. This is just on average. But it was across the board, regardless of things like race or gender or class. The theory proposed on why this might be the case is that during the months of May through August, that's when there's the highest concentration of pesticides found in ground water.

I saw Grindhouse, finally, as it showed at the Capitol Theater, with a beer and wine garden for its opening night. Because of the platter system of projection at the theater, there was an actual intermission. This will be annoying as shit next week when INLAND EMPIRE is shown, and the intermission destroys the delicate vibe of terror and people will have time to talk to people about what they think about the movie thus far.

But wait, I want to talk about Grindhouse. First off, these movies aren't that different from other movies made by the same director. Every Robert Rodriguez movie is as retarded as Planet Terror. I like them all, but they're retarded. This just has fake film grain, added digitally. And a large chunk of plot removed.

I keep on talking about Death Proof more though. Tom Scharpling, of the Best Show On WFMU was hilarious- he hated these movies, but he also hated Kill Bill. You know, he's wrong about stuff. But, when talking about Death Proof- he says it's a tribute to "those great grind house movies, like My Dinner With Andre" because it's so talky, also comparing it to if Kevin Smith had directed Cannonball Run. I think Death Proof becomes a lot better when the cast switches- the second group is a lot more charming and entertaining. The first set of characters has a great soundtrack, but there's also long lingering shots of text messaging that become kind of tedious. Also the first part has bad actor Quentin Tarantino in it, along with bad actress Rose Macgowan. Rose Macgowan's a lot more watchable in Planet Terror, because that movie actually does things.

Kurt Russell's pretty much the only watchable actor in the first half of Death Proof.

Oh man, you all know about Quentin Tarantino's foot fetish, right? If you know about it, there's a lot more flags raised in Death Proof than in any other movie of his I've seen. The fact that one of the actresses actually had a foot double is my favorite revelation of the credits, better even than that Tarantino's character in Planet Terror is just called "rapist # 1."

I like the second group of actresses in Death Proof a lot. Not for all the pop culture referencing, but just for- I don't know, there not being shots of them doing text messaging? Although how weird is it that everyone is psyched on them kicking ass at the end as they've abandoned the fourth member of the group to pretty much get raped? Maybe that's because the audience was drunk and forgot about her.

Weird uses of actresses though- I thought that abandoned girl was really pretty, she had like five lines and was just dismissed as being stupid. In Planet Terror, the one bit that establishes the doctor, with the needles, is fucking amazing as a sequence, and makes that character awesome. That's like two minutes, and then she just becomes really generic- not a small quirky supporting character, just a female lead who doesn't get a gun for a leg. Planet Terror doesn't really have characters so much as just a relentless plot. Death Proof has characters, and a plot that meanders between shots of asses (and feet) and a few crazy stunts.

Planet Terror seems like a John Carpenter movie, but that's mostly because of the soundtrack, as actual John Carpenter movies aren't as fast-paced.

A brief expression of concern for the future of journalism:

Circulation in general is down with newspapers and magazines, because people can get the information for free from the internet, just as fast.

Prose reporting has a large edge on television reporting, because television reporting is more responsive to video, and thus, spectacle, than the actual details of things like legislation.

However: New technology is moving news on the internet in a direction that's further from newspapers, and closer to TV news.

These are generalities, there's still a lot of writing on the internet. But I'm referring to a direction things are moving in that I think is kind of undesirable.

I just watched the movie Gilda, because seemingly I've seen everything that's actually up my alley and am now just watching movies that are classics of one type or another. I liked the Rita Hayworth movie The Lady From Shanghai, but that had number one best dude Orson Welles behind it. Gilda is seemingly better-regarded though. It was directed by a guy I never heard of, but there is that bit of film history that cares more about movie stars than I do.

Casablanca is directed by a guy whose name I can't remember either, very much a studio film, and I don't like that one at all- I don't like the quotes associated. There are little scraps of dialogue in Gilda that I think are amazing, which is why I'm writing about the fact that I saw it. "Statistically, there's more women on Earth than anything else." "You can only die once, and he committed suicide three months ago." These are paraphrases.

I mean, most of the dialogue is impossible to follow the train of thought and meaning behind it, because it's just ridiculous and circling around points. But there are these little bits of straightforward lucidity. :

"and think about- would it be corny to say your sins?"
"yes it would."
"well, I said it anyway."

and those bits are amazing. I'm sure that if I watched it multiple times I would be able to quote from it as casually as any song lyric or good season of The Simpsons.

It's almost comparable to lyric writing in the way it works- Really inconsistent, but pitched at this certain high level so the bad is kind of atrocious, but you go with it for the moments it works- the punchlines and the choruses. And maybe these isolated lines don't work so well on this page, stripped of context, the same way "I'm out for presidents to represent me (say what) I'm out for presidents to represent me (say what) I'm out for dead presidents to represent me" might not work without inflection.

All talking about rap is done at least halfway for the benefit of Sam Hockley-Smith, who links to this blog from his sidebar.

But yeah seriously, pretty much any Orson Welles movie is better than any movie it would ever be compared with- even if the comparison isn't one of genre and shared star, but just time period and quality. If you were to compare The Trial to Psycho on the basis of Anthony Perkins being in both, I would assert that The Trial is better.

I'm not going to talk about music this go-round, I'm going to talk about cereal. These new Choco-Nilla Cocoa Krispies, where half of them are vanilla flavored, are killer. I am a sucker for vanilla in cereals, remember my talking up the Vanilla Creme Frosted Mini Wheats, but vanilla is a pretty good bean.

HOLY SHIT NEW BLOG TEMPLATE

I think I've mentioned my fondness for the Spank Rock record Yoyoyoyoyo on this blog- At the time I did a best-of-2006 records list, I had only heard half of it, but it's come up as being a contender. I'll say this now- For what I've heard, it's my third favorite/"best" hip-hop record of last year.

But this is funny- It got a lot of negative reviews and hand-wringing over perceived misogyny. Maybe it's because the first person I knew to actually say "Holy Shit Spank Rock is amazing" was a woman that I don't really think much of that. It's just kind of frank and occasionally goofy- it's talking about sex, but it's certainly not violent or in any way off-putting. It's a party record.

Meanwhile, other rap records with way more offensive content get a pass- The crack rap, with all the violence a life of drug dealing implies, gets shitloads of praise. I imagine it's the same type of thing as in movie rating, that people are much more comfortable with violence than they are with sex.

And the beats, which were praised, still may not get enough credit for their ability to actually develop- "Sweet Talk" and "Bump," as dance songs, both have these shifts towards the end in speed which are pretty rewarding, which delineate them firmly as songs while still seeming like shifts in a DJ set in a way that having numerous switches into and out of a different tempo for a chorus or something wouldn't work.

I kind of think of it in the same terms as Girl Talk's Night Ripper, without all of the annoying samples that show up around "Friday Night."

What's odd is that I haven't written a Kurt Vonnegut obituary here. I've been bringing up his death to people, and getting kind of meager responses. Maybe people felt guilty, as I did, for not having read the majority of his work- He was a prolific dude. And, after a certain point, you feel like you get it, you get the thing. This seems insulting, but really, no. I think his work was incredibly successful in what I think art is supposed to do- communicate a consciousness and a point of view.

The awful Fox News obituary is hilarious because of the way it misses all of that for how it's tied in with politics. Because Vonnegut was political, but his politics were tied to his humanism, and what he valued in such a way that to talk about him simply as being liberal or Socialist or whatever is to miss the point, because political party is all just gang affiliation. With Vonnegut, the politics were never as poorly thought out as all that, they were deeply felt based on principles of what human beings deserve.

I never thought that Vonnegut's narratives were the best thing about his work- The metafiction conceit of Breakfast Of Champions worked the best for me, but the more straightforward stuff always felt almost hampered by its plot convolutions. I also don't think I ever laughed out loud reading his books- There's a sense of humor, but the jokes aren't laughers, at least for me. The jokes are nonetheless a part of what makes it all work, though. Because the thing that makes Vonnegut so successful is related to the jokes, and his humanity- It's the moments of clarity. Vonnegut saw the world so clearly. There's always this single point of view, but it's always so right on in its sense of humanity and dignity. Part of that is the acknowledgment that humor gets us through it. I can't even talk about it. Basically, I think that to not like Kurt Vonnegut is to be a bad person. He's dead, and you have his books, which really do say all he had to say and map out his consciousness.

The tragedy of his death is that we no longer have the best dude who is right all the time to say what is right. We have people who can do it, of course, but there's a power to around-the-blockness. In Man Without A Country, it's discussed that Bush is the worst president America's had, worse than Nixon and Reagan. He says this as someone who lived during the time of a truly great president- Franklin Delano Roosevelt- and who, at the time, didn't even vote for him in favor of voting for the Socialist candidate in at least one election.

In the same way as there are people who are willing to claim Christianity for the side of conservativism and people to claim Jesus as a hippie, there are people who argue where George Orwell would stand on the war on Iraq. We know where Vonnegut stood on the current set of world affairs, but maybe that clarity will get lost to time's future history. That's one of the tragedies. The other is simply that the world lost a good person.

This new Wooden Wand record, James And The Quiet, is pretty good. Alex says it's great when you're drunk, which seems really likely. There's this country vibe at work- According to the MySpace, Wooden Wand lives in Tennessee now, and I had been under the impression that he used to live in Brooklyn. There's this summertime humidity, sweet tea on the porch feeling.

It's not my favorite Wooden Wand record- There's this CD-R from a tour last Spring that's all demos and covers that's sparse in all the right ways. It's got songs on it from his tour partner, Hush Arbors, including one where high notes are hit and sustained in a way that's unnerving and seems really loud, and that unlistenability works really well with the rest of it, and its cold lonely nights. The Flood, recorded with The Vanishing Voice, is really good as well- That's like a jammy concept record. When I say jammy, that brings awful music to mind. It's not jam band music- There's none of those bass tones that people only do the worst dancing to. There's limited chords and a lot of call and response, and it goes on for a while, but the noise apocalypse is summoned with acoustic instruments.

This is more straightforward. It's twelve songs. There's harmonies, which I had heard on Wooden Wand demos at the house of a guy who worked at 5RC who would've lost his job had said demos ever been released. They were amazing there, but I feel like I maybe imagined them, sitting in the dark around a campfire after a backyard barbecue. This record would work well in that context, which is a really good memory. People from Sonic Youth play on it, and it remains a country record. I don't like Neil Young, but it works for me the way some of those records work for other people, but there's a deeper voice and no unpleasant connotations.

The title track is by far the high point. That's what's playing right now. It's hard to point to a high point on a record like this, where there aren't really singles, and there's limited variations to what's overall a mood piece. It's the next to last song on the album, where the energy picks up a little, but the arrangement remains stripped down, with no drums. The phrase sung in refrain is "the shame, shame, shame of love; James and the quiet and the stars up above." Sometimes "stars up" is replaced with "angels." That sums up how it all works. To continue to work it out: Wooden Wand's real name is James Toth, and the song hits direct.

I've never seen the MTV show My Super Sweet 16, so the most offensive thing I've ever witnessed on TV would have to be an anti-smoking ad. It begins with the statistic that 86% of teens would prefer to date a non-smoker. It then shows a girl saying she'd date whoever, including a smoker. The viewer is supposed to be disgusted by this girl, and so, theoretically, if they have high standards, they won't smoke so they can have their pick of the dating pool. The girl shown isn't actually that bad-looking. She is, at worst, just a normal person, and could even be described as kind of cute. She has glasses and an overbite. That's about as bad as it gets.

This ad is awful for a number of reasons- The first thing that jumps out at you is its assertion that this completely normal looking person should be considered disgusting and unlovable. Then there's the larger fact that these anti-smoking ads are only targeted to teenagers who are underage- Once you turn eighteen, the only thing telling you that smoking is a bad idea is the Surgeon General's Warning. Said Surgeon General's Warning make a much better anti-smoking advertisement than those shown on TV, which I believe in general are subsidized by tobacco companies. Even the whole fact that all of these ads for teenagers are targeted so much towards shallowness and seeming attractive and relationships is kind of offensive- Like the anti-pot PSAs which make a big deal about how you will eat more and thus gain weight.

Although again: I have no problem with the Souther Salazar anti-pot ads. I think those are great.

Earlier I was reading this book, a collection of lectures talking about music and sound design in film. I put it on my contract after I came across it in the stacks of the library. It's awesome. Basics of film-making come up, and so does the minutiae of sound. It's illuminating. The only bad thing about it is this: I started reading it just thinking in terms of sound design for this thing I'm doing that's going to be really odd. The first thing I read was Carter Burwell's piece- He does the soundtrack for all the Coen brothers movies. It's interesting for a number of reasons, but early on, within the first paragraph or two, he convinces me that this thing will need to have music in it. I didn't want to do that, because I'm not a musician and so can't compose things. But he talks about how the place of music in film is to create this blanket of affect and emotion, to create feeling, and suggest things going on beneath the surface that you can't see- And because these things are suggested, music leads to increased suspension of disbelief, because you feel things intuitively and tie them to what you see. So now I think that my weird and ridiculous thing will need music to guide the audience towards emotion when faced with this weird ridiculousness rather than away towards revulsion. It makes perfect sense. My previous stance was that music was this thing in movies that throws up an aesthetic more forcefully than anything else that will occur, and thus will alienate some people. I'm not going to renege on this opinion now, but there's certainly a truth to what Burwell says.

I'm listening to this record, 'Blue' Gene Tyranny's "Out Of The Blue" from 1977. I guess he was an avant-garde composer, but this is his "pop" record, which is still four songs long, with the last one over 26 minutes long, with the shortest six minutes long. It's occasionally pretentious, especially on this last track, but on the whole, it's interesting and kind of moving. A lot of the pretention is just this long-winded and digressive way of circling around things, without stating them, because the things in question are hard to state, but they're no less universal than things found in other pop songs, probably. The last song is a letter that spends a great deal of time talking about consciousness. It's an alright album for one in the morning, which is true for a lot of experimental droney stuff and a lot of folk music as well. It's neither of those, but you know.

"Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke" and "Don't sweat the small stuff... and it's all small stuff" might just be different ways of saying the same thing.

About a week ago I had a dream where I went to Boston, a city I've never been to, and is by all accounts a racist shithole. The dream of Boston had nothing to do with Boston and my knowledge of it so much as just a dream image of a city- It was amazing, all high bridges and cheap foreign restaurants, and music stores going out of business and offering things for dirt cheap, and nothing to fear because there were other music stores nearby to take its place.

Last night I had another dream, one so exciting that it got my heart to beating faster and woke me up. In that dream I was reading Ian Svenonius' The Psychic Soviet, and read an essay that started off by saying "If Olympia Washington is Fort Thunder, which it is, in that it's away from everything and you can do anything you want to there;" I got so excited that I ran around on an office chair in the parking lot in front of Grocery Outlet, where Rainy Day Records used to be, singing the Pavement refrain "I'll try and I'll try and I'll try and I'll try and I'll try, I'll try and I'll try and I'll try and I'll try" until the dream reality could no longer sustain itself.

The truth is closer to the dreams on the edge of sleep where you're reading imagined Batman comics and want to say the dialogue aloud into a tape recorder, because they have a certain weird poetry to them, but the ability to be able to operate a tape recorder and talk can't coexist with the ability to read the comics that only exist in your head.

Menomena's Friend And Foe arrived in the mail today. Seemingly, the version I've been listening to has the wrong tracklist. But I think I prefer that wrong tracklist to the one actually being used in terms of its flow. Perhaps that's just me being used to the incorrect version.

I'm thinking about starting another blog, one with more focus, and that talks for longer lengths. Something put out into the world with a bit more deliberateness than this thing. I am completely in favor of haphazardness and self-sabotage, but maybe it's getting to the point where trying a bit and "marketing myself" would be for the best. I put the phrase "marketing myself" in quotes because it really does strike me as distasteful. But maybe just applying my energies to something other than nothing is enough.

The last book I read was Anthony Burgess' Tremor of Intent. It's the first novel I've read in awhile, and it did a thing that I really wanted to witness, and hope to internalize. It had a plot, with twists, and it had this kind of construction, and there were thematic things going on which were clear and tied to the characters. I'm writing some books, but the characters don't actually do anything. When they do, it's more of a reaction to general things. It's not well-constructed or thought out at all. It's something I hope to get past at some point.

Tremor Of Intent is a book about spies, written in 1965. It doesn't have the weird psychedelic pulp glamor that you might want out of such a thing. It's not that kind of a book. It's its own thing, something smart. It's out of print, but it's not a tossed-off genre exercise.

Burgess' Napoleon Symphony is also out of print, and the next thing I plan to read. It's apparently Burgess' favorite work. That's a bit more experimental, but I'm hoping it will still have the stuff I'm trying to teach myself.

The last novel before Tremor Of Intent I started to read was John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy. Before that, the last novel I actually finished was, I think, Thomas Pynchon's V., which, although it's awesome, doesn't really do the point-a-to-point-b thing. I love it, and I love Joseph Heller's Something Happened, which is barely a novel for how little happens, but I don't want to write like that exclusively. They're too very different books- One kind of hops from one thing to another, based seemingly mostly on what the author wants to talk about, and the other is extremely focused. But there are books that split the difference, and are focused on a variety of things as they move from one to another, and these things tend to be quick reads, but I just haven't been dealing with them for awhile. I think the trick is to read shorter things, one after the other. I'm trying to learn what forward momentum looks like, because right now the writing is going slow, and I think it might be tied to my not knowing.

It's worth noting that a lot of my favorite books don't really go anywhere, don't fit the mold. The argument is that post-modern blah blah blah. However! One of my favorites, the cartoonist Kevin Huizenga, is kind of aware that he has problems as well. His are the same as mine, with regards to narrative, and characters that are distinct entities. I talked about him, and his problem, (self-diagnosed) when talking about the top comics of 2006- I said his were the absolute tops. But I also said that his best story, The Feathered Ogre, actually had a plot that developed and characters and the whole bit. Or Else 4, The Wild Kingdom, is great, and it is totally free-wheeling and abstract like poetry, and captures a whole lot of things. But he wants to push on, and hopefully break through to the thing.

I mean, yeah, the truth is, you don't need to do the thing, and you can still be great. A lot of comics, because of the nature of serialization and their being long-running, don't go anywhere or do anything. They're good for the territory they mine within that, the aesthetics and point of view at work. Honestly, if I wrote a book that ended up the prose equivalent of Calvin And Hobbes, that would be just as compulsively readable as a novel. Maybe even better, for its rereadability. But it seems like this classic mold of storytelling, where the finale reveals the point, is nothing to scoff at. Maybe I'm wrong, and plots are kind of dumb, and a distraction from what I'm really interested in. But it seems like it requires more thought, so it's probably not that stupid.

So this is maybe something of a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence: I think the Oscar committee got it right. My favorite movie of 2006 remains Idiocracy, but The Departed is amazing enough that I'll agree with that "Best Picture" bit. Granted, I didn't see the movie it was based on, Infernal Affairs, starring Tony Leung, and I'm sure that had its charms and that if I had seen it The Departed might not gleam as it did.

But for a suspense drama- I just kept on eating Doritos. Not to stay awake, but as a compulsion that just kind of developed as I got into it. Like the idea of a popcorn movie. Kind of an awesome premise. There's one moment where a twist comes that's kind of unforeseen, and I actually felt let down, because it seemed to negate the perfect symmetry of the dramatic tension, but then it doesn't matter at all almost instantaneously.

It's kind of a dad movie, in that Oscar-winning way of being really tightly well-done crime genre drama stuff. My tastes might run more towards some Michel Gondry Science Of Sleep whimsy parade, in general. But yeah, I just thought this worked really well. It's the type of movie that has Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, and Jack Nicholson in it, but I like all those dudes. I felt it, I went along with it. The jokes worked.

It seems like I would like Pan's Labyrinth more, because that's a bit closer to fun times. But no- I thought the stuff that worked best there was the more serious historic drama stuff, with the monsters all ugly CGI. It also didn't really integrate the parts enough for me- It became too easy to read the fantasy stuff as literal fantasy. It never becomes magical realism, and the closest it gets is just having characters exhibit magical thinking. It's no The Science Of Sleep. It does seem likely that it is better than every other Guillermo Del Toro movie, but does anyone really care about that guy?

The Prestige works a bit better, in its slow progression from historical fiction that's kind of ridiculous in its premise to full-blown fucking ridiculous elements. That just feels a lot like a Batman Begins companion piece to me. Although- First movie I'd ever seen Hugh Jackman in, and he's pretty insufferable and not really all that fun to watch. I actually don't think I like any of the actors in that movie, in terms of them being fun to watch on their own. Some have just earned some goodwill from other movies. Oh wait- David Bowie as Nikola Tesla. But that's not really an awesome performance or anything.

Who's up for a post about writing?

Yesterday I told a kid to quit!

I hadn't read any of his writing. But in the brief chat, he outlined a whole lot of things that are awful, starting off by admitting that he says things he doesn't mean for the sake of saying things. And then moving on to say stuff, probably vaguely informed by philosophy, about "text" and whatnot and how the only thing we as humans have is language to recognize each other and - I don't know, it's pretty easy to tune someone out once they admit that they say things for the sake of saying them.

His philosophy was, essentially, the opposite of that found in that writing class at Evergreen that I had. But I'm sure it was informed by stuff he'd heard in another writing class, I think one taught by a guy I don't like because of my experiences with him in another program. Anyway, the other philosophy is that writing is all about truth-telling. Objective truth-telling, and that by editing that's what you get at. My argument against that was that fiction was lies and subjective and that's not really a bad thing.

Basically I would say that people write about their thoughts, which is informed by both subjective and objective thoughts, for the sake of communicating empathy with other people. And when I say write about their thoughts, I mean communicate or make art etc.

But why I'm writing this is because it makes sense that the other positions would be found in academia, by writing types who aren't really that successful. Because their stances are really isolating and insulating, from criticism. Both exist so that saying "I don't like it" isn't really valid, because it's beside the point. Saying "I don't like it" to reportage of the truth doesn't matter. Saying "I don't like it" to someone who doesn't really care about what they're saying doesn't really harm them.

But "I don't like it" is a pretty valid response to art, or people.

Not to make too big a deal out of this, basically my "I don't like it" or "You should quit writing" lines are the type of thing designed for the sake of being unpretentious, not really grand statements, so much as they are the type of thing that could and would be said by a sarcastic talking dog. Which I think is basically how the things I say should be taken. I quote cartoon characters more often than I quote philosophers.

So, about a week ago, I took acid. I'm not much of a drug user, but I think I romanticized LSD since tenth grade, or thereabouts. It's pretty easy to do when everything you like is described as psychedelic. I'd never done it because it was never offered to me for free.

Usually, I find the discrepancy between people's perception of me and my own view of myself kind of annoying. Sometimes, however, it's accurate. Most people view me as straight-edge, which is something I would never assign to myself- Because from the time I was in tenth grade, everything I liked was described as psychedelic, or made by people who were high. But pretty much any time I do a drug, I don't enjoy it, and kind of regret it.

This is not to say that my experience on acid was terrible. I think a lot of people will try to frame it in those "it is either totally awesome or completely terrifying" terms, because of how intense it is. But sometimes things are just intense but don't really make a strong impression. Like the movie INLAND EMPIRE.

It was kind of fun for the first hour or so, before it kicked in and when it started to kick in. I turned off the bright light in the living room and listened to Enon's Believo! and J Dilla's Donuts. These are both really good records. I started to have visual hallucinations I guess towards the beginning of Donuts. Sadly, they were not Blue Meanies and other imagery from the movie Yellow Submarine (which I love), but just little kaleidoscopic light patterns on the carpet. Also, my thought seemed to move faster- My own internal train of thought. That was fun, although those thoughts didn't really go anywhere. They just moved at speed high enough to be completely unable to slow down and then articulate to another person, which I really wanted to do, because communication is a pretty big part of life.

How it felt: The girl who gave me the drug lived with another girl who did it for the first time recently and said it felt really sexual. But she didn't mean this in terms of being aroused. The way she described it ended up being the same way I felt, I think. Basically, muscles tighten up (I figure) and nerves become more stimulated. I would compare it to the feeling of metal becoming magnetized. Again, this was early on, when I was listening to the last few songs on the Enon record. Towards the end I pretty much didn't feel anything besides a vague nervous energy.

I couldn't eat food. I knew this was going to happen, but after I took it I felt hungry and wanted to eat before it kicked in. Alex was making a Boboli pizza. It hadn't really kicked in at the time it went in the oven, but by the time it was out, I took a bite and it was really disgusting. The intensity was off-putting. It was like I could taste the bacterial cultures that turned the milk into cheese and that caused the bread to rise.

Anyway, eventually I went completely inside my own head. It was neither awesome nor nightmarish, but basically like dreams I have had in the past. I couldn't communicate, even though I wanted to, and attempts fell apart into crazy person gibbering. That was probably the majority of the trip. Eventually I just went to sleep because all I was doing was pacing around the house having weird thought-loops.

There was a part when things got really internal where the records put on after Dilla just kind of scanned as the sound of synapses firing. These include Keith Fullerton Whitman's Lisbon and the first disc of Godspeed You Black Emporer's Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. I really needed the fast-paced weird pop pace of the stuff that I put on to serve as a point of contrast with the speed in my own head, to keep track of things.

Part of the romanticization of hallucinations is the promise of imagination. No big breakthroughs were reached, no epiphanies were had. The day after I just felt kind of tired. Writing is as tricky as ever, just as slow-going. The reason I finally wrote about it now is that I was working on these books and thought that the stuff I was writing now is actually less crazy and weird and vibrant and funny than what I was doing before. I don't think this is going to be trend, like I somehow damaged my brain, so much as just a thing that kind of happened due to other factors, but I thought it was worth chronicling.

I regret it inasmuch as it's easy to attribute the feeling of tiredness to the drug, and to know myself as a sober person and act like taking acid throws that off. In time I'll forget about it and my thoughts will get weird again, I took the doing of the drug pretty much in stride.

Listen to Enon's Believo, that record is the shit.

This is the movie I made!

Here is a quote from a This American Life episode, "My Experimental Phase," taken from a thirteen-year-old's diary during a time of experimentation, to wrap up an entry: "I gotta' go change my tampon, at least I'm not pregnant yet!" I hope to say this as often as possible, as is appropriate.

So, I made a movie. It's called Sad Times Together. I made it with some people for the class, Art Media Praxis, that I got kicked out of. I worked absurdly hard on it, and in doing so, I learned a lot. It was a learning experience.

Tomorrow/today it's going to be shown to the class. The people I worked with are going to get school credit for it, I won't. That's fine- It's a learning experience.

The thing is that it's all fucked up. It's got its flaws. They're all over the thing, they're almost innumerable.

First off, I'll say what it got right. It's a comedy, and it's funny, I like the jokes in it. I can barely discern them anymore, because I've done the editing and looked all over, and some of the jokes are tiny and unnoticeable. I've looked at so many computer screens I don't even want to look at this one, right now, as I type.

Holy shit I worked so hard on it. It's part of an installation- One of the things in this installation is a cassette tape recording of a voice pressuring you to smoke weed, because that's something a character does to another character in the movie. The actor who played the weed-smoking character didn't want to do the voice. So I did the tape, I improvised for close to two hours, talking about smoking pot. Which I don't do. It's pretty funny. No one will listen to the entirety of the tape. I did that recording tonight, while the DVDs burned.

The character who pressures someone to smoke weed is named Jorge. The character is a guy of English descent speaking with an affected accent. One of the things I'm worried about is someone getting offended. Not because it's racist- I'm afraid of someone being offended because it's stupid, and couching their offense by saying it's racist. Which I don't think it actually is.

But I don't think I'll be able to be around to make this distinction. The teachers do not want me around, they might kick me off campus. The movie and the installation is mostly me, mostly my voice, and I am the loudest and most articulate person involved in its production, and so I really want to be there to say "hey wait, this isn't racist, this is just stupid, let's at least be honest here." I don't think I'll be able to.

The thing was mine. A lot of the jokes are mine, not all of them. The characters- holy shit so much of it is me. I'm all over the fucking thing. I did the majority of the editing. But- I didn't do all of it. And I didn't really write a script, most of the thing's improvised- I fed people lines but still. There was one scene where a script was insisted on, I wrote one, and then it kind of got garbled and fucked up anyway. Stuff went unshot due to the unpaid actors being in a rush to get out and really just the constant fear of deadline.

I worked harder on it than my other collaborators, and I was the one least afraid of a deadline. I knew I'd be able to work on it and get it done. And I thought this as someone who'd never edited video before.

Because I'd never edited video before, I made a lot of first-time mistakes. Looking over the thing, it's ridiculously fast. Everything seems like cross-cutting, like things are happening simultaneously, due to the lack of establishing shots, or anything done for pacing- I think part of it was that I couldn't work out how to turn establishing shots into jokes.

For some reason, the movie Caddyshack ended up at the top of the Netflix queue and shipping. I started to know as I approached finishing that I would want to watch Caddyshack at the end of it. (Note: Caddyshack isn't my favorite movie by a long shot, it's my brother's, I kind of struggle to find the jokes in it.) I only watched a little bit, but- Yeah, like having a lightswitch flipped- okay that is how you edit a comedy and give it a pace. It's funny- Taking all the film theory classes and reading criticism etc. definitely informed the making of the movie, and making the editing and framing choices that I did make, but the major things that I missed and then learned got reinforced immediately while watching the first ten minutes of Caddyshack. (After that I tried to fall asleep, and failed.)

The movie i's a little less than twenty minutes long, and the thing was made in a little less than two weeks, pretty much. Which is an accomplishment- it is pretty long but it is just so rushed. My short stories and novels have the same kind of stupid pacing, but I think I can fix these problems in film after a few more tries.

Another reason my eyes burn is because I decided to send out MySpace bulletins out promoting it. I couldn't talk shit in it there, I didn't want to apologize for it. Although I need to, because it's so fucked up.

I didn't do all of the editing. I left four scenes to one of my collaborators. Those scenes have a somewhat different rhythm, there's a different eye approaching them. I think it's not unlikely I'll go back and reedit it to my own sense of rhythm, after tomorrow's installation.

I'm all over the place in this writing. I really am quite anxious, my insides feel awful.

I kind of wrote it, there are things in it that I wanted to say. But I left it to other people to say them, or at least I depended on them somewhat to know what I was saying, but I never articulated my point enough for it to be understood. And now it's garbled to the point of not even really being able to be discerned. I tried to put as much content as I could in the thing, but there's points where it just collapses.

God, collaborating. I like it a lot in some ways, but there's this problem- There's things that are too corny to say out loud, that you try to say with art, but in collaborating with someone else you kind of need to say them, to state what's important, to be honest for the sake of being on the same page. With every point a close collaborator misses there's a part of the movie that breaks.

I can fix some of the problems with editing- I can give it a more consistent tone and maybe a more measured pace but that's not the only problem. There's still the problem that if people think it's stupid, they're not wrong.

There's lessons and I learned them, but right now, I am dreading tomorrow to the point where I can't fall asleep.

I like the people I worked with a lot. I should say that. I think they're fun, and the movie wouldn't exist at all without them, and I need the movie to exist in order to learn what I needed to learn. The only issue is one I would probably have with almost anyone- The old unbridgeable chasm between two people. I don't actually think it's unbridgeable. But these people are my friends and I tried to keep it light and just say "hey this is a comedy" and the only question I will ever ask is "is this funny" and so something gets lost. It's the old shallowness to friendships that leads to me looking at MySpace as I send out these bulletins and wondering how many of these people I'm actually friends with and genuinely like.

They're also friends so I don't want to go insane with perfectionist tendencies and get mad.

The thing I'm most happy with about the movie is that the title is "Sad Times Together" and that's mostly (not strictly) a Hold Steady reference. And again, some of the jokes. This is not enough to massage my intestines to a state of flow and normalcy. I am going to go to the bathroom now, and hopefully after that I'll be able to sleep soundly.

There are parts of my mind that are already moving on to the next thing, something weird and private that I can trust.

I want to write these books, but there are no words for them right now.

I had one of those days where a large chunk of your life collapses- Related to going to school, I got kicked out of the class I was going to. For real this time, for serious. I'm still working on a film project with other people in the class, but I need to do other things as well. Whatever. I've been taking that in stride since this morning, talk to me on the phone or in person and I'll explain what happened.

I did go to class today though, which is how they found me and told me to get lost. And before doing that I went to the computer center to print out my assignments. That was the most recent time I checked that e-mail account until just now, where I found another e-mail, allegedly from myself, that I did not send. It was titled "turn turn" and had text that said "Finally. I've been waiting my owl life to meet you."

In all likelihood this is either something attacking a bunch of hotmail accounts or it's someone who got onto hotmail after me because I didn't close things out properly. I don't think that happened, but it's possible.

It pretty much unnerved me, being on some last three David Lynch movies identity-doubling tip. Also there was an allusion to owls, which makes me think of Twin Peaks. "The owls are not what they seem."

But I switched my password up and I have other e-mail accounts. I will try to take this in stride.

I did a nice little bit of writing today, coming up with a crazy person's talking-to-herself monologue for the movie. One line of which is "It's too late in the day for a McGriddle and too early in the year for a shamrock shake" which I think we can all relate to.

The Sarah Silverman Program that premiered on Comedy Central on Thursday is my new favorite TV show, I'm pretty sure. When I saw Jesus Is Magic, I didn't laugh as much as I should've because I was familiar with so much of the material already, but this format works really well. A really great cast, and a really great creative voice, and in the premiere at least, there was really cool Rob Schrab animation. The tone forsakes ironic bigotry almost completely in favor of a tone that is basically that of the Stella TV show but with more obvious jokes. (And now that I think about it, the structure, with the larger supporting cast, helps it out too in contrast with Stella's focus.) And on the next one Zach Galifianakis plays a homeless person! I love it!

I also love the internet Maria Bamford Show:




I saw the movie Brick, which, at the time of its release, seemed like the criticisms people were having were pretty valid. Then it made some end-of-the-year top ten lists which made me check it out. I think it's a bit overstylized and kind of doesn't work in terms of actually creating a world. It takes cliches and then recontextualizes them into a place where they don't make sense.

I also got the Saturday Night Live Best of TV Funhouse DVD, which has a handful of great special features but is on the whole really uneven. If I were to take the time and go through the DVD I could probably edit together a sweet hour-long VHS tape, with all of the point of view and conceptual hahas and none of the unfunny sexual innuendo.

There's this new band called Au Revoir Simone, who I first heard on an mp3 from the Grizzly Bear blog. I liked the song, "Backyards Of Our Neighbors." Then Pitchfork linked to a music video for a song called "Fallen Snow." They are three women, with keyboards that sound like pianos and vocal harmonies. It's not overproduced. It's pretty music, really pleasant and calming, kind of like Beach House minus the organ drone and dynamics.

From the video it turns out they're pretty as their voices, which will probably lead to creepiness in the future from music message boards. Let me lead the charge, with something that I don't think is inappropriate. The songs sound like deep tissue massage, and they have these kind of release effects. Wink wink. But this is the music's power- blockages become undone and thoughts get free, it feels like drinking water. It gets me in the mood to write, it brings on some kind of clarity. Lavender Diamond does the same thing.

The power lies in the freshness, more so than in repeated listens, I think. I compare it to water and there's this never the same river twice quality to listening to things that are unexpected. It's important to note also that the Au Revoir Simone structures aren't so repetitive in terms of recognizable choruses. There's just melody. Lavender Diamond repeat and chant, which is its own power.

Right now I wish I had the whole album.

EDIT: Some of the other, poppier songs, lose the melancholy r in a way that is still pleasant but maybe off-putting as a general aesthetic.

I decided towards the end of last year that I should spend this school quarter making a little movie, a comedy. There was some conceptual framework, but mostly the idea was that it would be funny. We didn't have a plot. We had a meeting, came up with some jokes. Today we had another one, finalized a narrative. Anyway, it's filthy. It's not filth, it should be good but oh man we just got together and came up with things we thought were funny and they were mostly dirty. And maybe mildly retarded. You might see my junk. Get ready, it should be great.

It will be awhile before I write a list of my favorite movies of 2006. I don't see so many movies in a year, and mostly it feels like an even dumber enterprise than a list of albums- There's not as much emotional encoding, stuff doesn't strike me as strongly.

It will take me awhile to get through all the movies I heard were good. Tomorrow I'll be seeing INLAND EMPIRE.

But I just saw Idiocracy, now that it's on DVD. And holy shit that was funny. Not so well-made a movie, with the voiceover going over things that could probably be really well-executed, but it works really better as a satire than Borat did, and it works better as science-fiction than Children Of Men. These are specific criteria, those movies work better as movies. Idiocracy might be better than Office Space, if only on an idea level since it's not as likable. But I liked it a lot, I thought it did the whole smart/dumb comedy really well. I like movies, I haven't seen that many that came out this year.

I know it's better than For Your Consideration, though. I laughed out loud exactly once at that movie, and that laugh was not as sustained as the ones in Idiocracy.

These are just comedies, I haven't even seen Talladega Nights or Jackass Number Two. I don't really expect I'd like the latter, but you know. Saying. But yeah, good comedy in 2006. I also really liked the "Middle America" episode of Wonder Showzen, which falls along similar lines to a lot of this stuff. (Not like other episodes of Wonder Showzen weren't really good, but in terms of contempt for a large swath of America, that one fits the trend.)

I also saw Michael Showalter's The Baxter, from 2005, which has a likable cast and is mildly funny and I think succeeds at what it wants to be, and what it wants to be is something I like. Different from these other stuff for being gentle and a romantic comedy and things like that. It's kind of weird/interesting in its sincerity as opposed to the absurdism of Stella (which is actually a minor character's name in this movie). At the same time, there's still this level of self-awareness and ridiculousness, which is both subtle and played kind of straight, but still- Michael Showalter majored in semiotics and a lot of the comedy in something like Wet Hot American Summer comes just from the presence of cliches. So, it's a weird movie, but it works because of how likable the cast is, and their ability to play both angles, so it just becomes this thing that very much is what it is. Partly it's an exercise. Some scenes don't make sense. But essentially it comes down to being a romantic comedy, but cast with people that a certain type of people like and find relatable so it works for this audience which is not Nora Ephron. Anyway, if you think you'd like it, you probably will.

A brief bit of personal goings-on: My professors want me to either leave my program for an independent contract or in some way change my behavior, as they think me saying "Hey, I don't really think that what this is saying is all that interesting" after long periods made up of a whole lot of nothing is conducive to a positive learning environment. I maintain that this type of intimidating presentation of work is much more destructive, but clearly this is unbridgeable terrain. I don't know what I'll do, it was a weird conversation- these issues coming up now, two weeks in, rather than at my evaluation conference at the end of last quarter, and after I apparently did a good job facilitating seminar. I find it hard to process this conversation as taking place, but I'm sure as class becomes more awkward it will be more fully understood.

Also before I get to talking about music, I'll say I just did one of my Achewood-reading jags, which I hadn't read since mid-November. Since then it's been on fire, seemingly, totally hilarious. Start here, but open in a new window because I have opinions about music I want to regale you with.

I think that Panda Bear's Person Pitch record is going to be great. It's been coming out in drips and drabs, in the form of various singles on different labels, and what I've heard is quite good. I think I'll do the thing where I stop listening to these things as they leak and instead wait for the record's release, March 20th. I've heard enough of it to get a grasp for what it is, seemingly. It'll be the record to soundtrack my hair growing back and out, and winter turning to Spring and that then turning to Summer.

Seemingly different but in fact rather complementary is the new Boris record, Rainbow. Already out in Japan and coming out on Drag City in Spring. I only listened to Pink a little bit before deleting it from my computer. This past Christmas break, I downloaded the opening track, Farewell, off Pitchfork's top tracks list. That was my favorite track when I had the record, but it was just this drone piece, and when it ends on record it goes into crazy-rocking Japanese metal. (Japanese metal isn't like the Scandinavian crazy stuff, it's pretty likable. It's about as ridiculous as that movie Survive Style 5+, not ridiculous like blood sacrifices.) On its own it's unsatisfying. This is prettier, basically, not as loud. They're something of a drone band, but this is the drone taken away, and so this is a lot more dynamic than Pink. It's not free from rockers, but there's a lot of pretty stuff, and so those rockers stand out more, while still working as a record. It's more of a record and less just a general aesthetic.

Oh also, you might remember on my top 15 records of 2006 list that I didn't have a fifteen. Or that's how I remember it, I might be wrong. But I remember saying that if there was to be a next hip-hop record, it might be Spank Rock's YoYoYoYoYoYo, but I hadn't heard the whole thing. Now I have. I'd missed "Sweet Talk," which is the highlight.

I have been catching up on music, following all of the best-of lists calling things to my attention. I'd only heard a chunk of Girl Talk's Night Ripper, and made the declaration that Unstoppable was better. No one heard Unstoppable to know what the differences were. Basically, Unstoppable has songs, using the same samples throughout. It's a large number of samples, but they were these little self-contained units, and they were tweaked a bit more, pitchshifted to high pitches for comedic effect, and a lot of glitches added for more rhythms and individuality. Night Ripper is closer to a DJ set or a bunch of mashups. It still works well, it's still got some great moments, but the way those moments work is different.

I also hadn't heard Beach House's self-titled record, which is really nice. Two people, one male, one female, and there's an organ, and they make pretty droney dreamy pop songs. Basically, they are kind of similar to Brightblack Morning Light but better in every possible way. Including, probably, as people, because Brightblack Morning Light came off as really dumb hippies in that Arthur from a few months back.

That's the stuff that was really good. There's other things which maybe require a bit more of an investigation. (Although it turns out that Scott Walker's The Drift was about as boring as I thought it would be when I heard about in it January)

That story I posted on Christmas has been rewritten and is now essentially finished. But why I write this is to bring attention to Douglas Wolk, a music critic who had a show on WFMU, wrote a book on James Brown's Live At The Apollo, and did a Christmas show in 2001 featuring six hours of James Brown, who's also a comics critic who resolved to read a graphic novel a day in 2006. He didn't do it, but you know- I admire anyone with that level of dedication to more than one interest. I'm listening to his James Brown Christmas special now.

Menomena are the favorite band of someone who is smarter than be. I imagine them as being younger, too. Their new album, Friend And Foe, is better than their first record, I Am The Fun Blame Monster, even though the same issue afflicts it. All of the songs are huge. Not in terms of length, like that Joanna Newsom record, but in terms of density of movement, how much is happening at any given moment. A lot of the songs are strong enough to serve as openers. Every song is an album in miniature, possessed of tiny thrilling movements. Every sound is huge- The drums could break fingers. I hear that this album, when released, will have art by Craig Thompson, a lot of it in a little booklet. Holy shit these songs are ridiculous. The lyrics are accessible as anthems or anything that would be on a rock radio ballad, but they're delivered as something careening, not safe enough to ride in without smashing your head multiple times against a window.

Every song is a bomb going off on a city block. The album jumps over the city, from territory to territory, finding different spaces to eradicate, and every little bit of demolition seems different. It's all fucking crazy. It's all a bit too much. It's like how when I watched Children Of Men, I was hoping for Car by Built To Spill over the end-credits. But that movie's too prog for such things. (The soundtrack has King Crimson on it, as well as Radiohead, remixes of Aphex Twin, a muzak-y cover of Ruby Tuesday by The Rolling Stones, and classical soundtrack music.)

Children Of Men is a good movie. Arguably great. It's got the stuff of greatness in it. But there's also a whole hell of a lot of "Wait why is this happening?" that is never resolved. Weird holes in the center of a science-fiction movie. As an action movie, it's well-done and brutal, thrilling and unexpectedly moving when the tension lets up just because of how nice it is that the tension lets up. As a political movie, it's muddled because of that issue of "why are things happening?" It's political in general, addressing that things exist, but just giving you an apocalypse in response. Alfonso Cuaron also made Y Tu Mama Tambien, and that movie was similarly a little bit overrated, and weird in its presentation of politics as backdrop. People respond to the presence of the politics, and see their sympathies in a weird horror about other people's reactions to immigration. Dystopianism. This was the stuff that got to me too- The moment of tension relief comes when someone says "Ceasefire" and somehow that speaks to a brief moment off in the future, our real future, when such things are widespread. A moment in miniature that gets to that hope by its ability to create a small world so tense and reflective of our own if only vaguely.

It also makes me think of the Destroyer song off City Of Daughters "No Ceasefires (Crimes Against The State Of Our Love, Baby)" although for no real reason. But you know, that simplicity, that relief of tension. "Think globally, act nobley" is how that song starts and it's what Children Of Men does, and so kudos are given. But I just wish I knew why things were happening, the same way that I wish Menomena gave you the occasional foothold.

If I could blog by telepathy, you would've gotten a bunch of stuff yesterday, concerning my stepfather's nudity, and how My Name Is Earl annoys me for the same reasons Arrested Development did.

Anyway, I'll just say that I'm currently a little bummed about the cancellation of a Black Dice show in Philadelphia. And that John Darnielle is currently doing a thing which should make the Da Capo best music writing 2007 book, with his "Thirty Short Poems About My Favorite Black Metal Band." It's maybe the best stuff he's done since that Strokes piece. He's stopped writing the long pieces, mostly, which I find disappointing, but it's the cumulative weight of this new series of short pieces which has works to the same effect.

When I wrote my list of the best albums of 2006, I mentioned that there was a lot of stuff I hadn't heard. One that I listed was Juana Molina's Son. (Another that I listed was Earth's Hex, which came out in 2005, it turns out.) I bought that the other day. At the moment- It's pretty. It's interesting. It's overall pleasant but nothing heartstopping. There've been Notwist comparisons, but it's not as prone to anthems. The reason for my reservations might be the fact that the songs are in Spanish, and this puts a damper on singalongs. But it's also not really dynamic.

It's the type of thing I'd listen to a lot in mp3 form, I think, when it's nearing the end of the evening but there's a need for music. It's music for that mood, which is a tired one. I don't know if I'll select it in CD form to listen to in those moments, since usually, when I go to those, it is because I am reaching for a specific feeling, wanting to hear the songs that have been stuck in my head.

But the mood Juana Molina is for is a mood I am frequently in. I'm in it now, in New Jersey, 1:59 AM, and the only songs on this computer are things I've downloaded while I've been around here, with only mp3 blogs, and no file-sharing software to aid me.

A few days ago I cut my hair, all of it, the head stuff anyway. Not pubes. It got out of hand and I decided to just scorch the earth, because some people (women) had told me that the bald thing worked out well for me.

And I guess my head has grown, or maybe it's these glasses that are different from my old glasses although not so much that people can tell the difference.

Because hoo boy this doesn't look too good at all. I will wait for it to grow back, in this new year, and I resolve to learn a lesson, that a shaved head is a young man's game. (I got the idea from fictional characters that were the type that an angry young fellow would like. I might look like a monk now, but that's not where the impulse arose when I was in high school, and now there is a disconnect.)

It will grow back.

Spent last night running around with my brother keyless, and had to go back to his house with him because I didn't have a key. And we left early because he had been aching to fuck his ladyfriend. But I ran around spending money, bars with entry fees, with that feeling of restraint that comes from not really being in your element, when you are with someone who is in their element and probably judging your from your ability to roll with it.

So here is hoping that 2007 is spent in my element, that that is something I will be able I will able to break through to and then cultivate. That includes doing more writing, right? It does if I am at all the person I think of myself as being, which I kind of need to be, in order to ever be in my element.

The literal element I'm in would be oxygen, but I'm talking about figurative elements here people.