This blog is called "More self-absorption, more apocalyptic thinking."

I am frequently labeled as a contrarian, especially by people I've been in classes with. There is a lot of argument about this- contrarianism is linked to assholishness. You know that Onion headline "devil's advocate really just an asshole?" There's truth to that, which is why being labeled a contrarian irks me to the degree it does- I'm not playing devil's advocate, I mean the things I'm say. I do it a lot because I'm frequently presented by people who are being ideologues, and the world is more complicated than that. I feel conflicted about a lot of things, but I'm at the point where I can see things and disagree with them on the basis of there being things I disagree with, rather than just agree on the basis of there being things I agree with and end up in a cult. You know, the point is progress- thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

Note that for one class I was known for saying that Hegel, the philosopher associated with material dialectics, was a douchebag. This was specifically in the context of me disagreeing with the idea that followed, from Marx, that you're either a master or a slave. Come on, that's not true! I do agree with the fact that ideas if presented with their opposite lead to compromise at some point in the future- Which I think is what makes me not an asshole just saying things for the sake of saying them, because I believe in compromise.

What I want to get to is apocalyptic thinking.

But first, a digression- The fifties version of the future is a lot better than the one we have now, but couldn't modern technology be selectively applied to have that happen? So much of that was design.

Anyway, things get weird because there's this feeling of the conflicts ending. The idea of post-modernism is based on there being a lot of threads and people not feeling objective about things, there's this "end of history" phrase used by certain people in association with the end of the cold war. The latter is an especially stupid term. But still- there's a lot of conflicts which just kind of don't matter anymore. A lot of the positive thinking done by hippies with regards to an idea of enlightenment is that all conflicts will cease, because they'll realize they're all part of the same thing- which is basically humanity, but can also be described more complicatedly.

But I was thinking about the conflict between hippies and reality. Oh, that's putting it harshly. How about between the culture at large and the counterculture? I know that using those terms is stupid, because of how many different tangents and subcultures abound in each of them. That conflict has maybe largely been solved by appropriation. Which I don't mean in a bad way. Gary Panter's Rozz-Tox Manifesto works for me better than most manifestos.

So another way to phrase it, the thing I care more about, would be a conflict between spirituality and actual day-to-day living in a practical manner. This is I think where hippies are hoping to make real progress, when the shit goes down. But oh wait hey, the reason this blog exists, is to say that maybe that's already ended, and the good side lost, and that now what persists is this awful bullshit found in The Secret, and megachurches- you can pray for wealth or you can have positive thinking for wealth. A fake spirituality? Arguably, but it makes people feel the same way as the real stuff, seemingly.

So- yeah, apocalyptic thinking. The awfulness of that last bit combined with a lot of other things is what strikes me as symbolic of the end times, like there's this paradigm that exists that's just kind of terrible. Probably because it's one thing where I'm stuck on the thesis and the antithesis and trying to square out my own solution.

I don't know. I guess going back to that tangent is the solution- That we have alternate futures already envisioned instead of the one that we just slowly progress towards. There's the fifties one and also the Fort Thunder one. Oh and going back to victorian times there's also time travel and undersea adventures postulated. But we don't actually have time machines, same as we don't have jet packs. You know, I think it's better to stick with the recent past- a lot of people who decide to opt out of the future go back to a cavemen future, where they hunt and there's not actually agriculture, but there's technology like guns to make hunting easier, which I'm sure was basically imagined by some caveman.

"Decora" is Yo La Tengo's best song.

Also, once I work out a sidebar of links, I will link to the WFMU blog, which once a week reminds us that the world is weird, and if you have a dark sense of humor, amusing, and that is beautiful.

This blog post is called "Hot for discourse." I don't know how to make this blog have titles, nor do I know how to operate a links sidebar.

Anyway- One of my favorite critics is Douglas Wolk. He writes about music, including a book about James Brown, and was a WFMU DJ who once played six hours of mostly-rare James Brown on Christmas. Currently there's a review up on Pitchfork of a James Brown singles compilation, but he likes a lot more than just James Brown. He writes about comics, and both of these things have that combination of depth of knowledge that comes from pursuing a lot of different things, but still keeps a sense of value and quality. Anyway, he combines talking about the two at this link, which is why I feel obligated to mention it. His review of Brian Chippendale's Ninja that ran at Salon was one of the best I'd read because of his twin understanding of comics and music. At the link I just posted, there's links and talk of all sort of rare music. Oh, he's also going to start writing comics reviews over at The Savage Critics, home to some of my favorite other people I only know from the internet, like Abhay Khosla. That's a link to his first post, which made me gleeful at its apocalyptic thinking. If you can parse the nerdiness, you will be amazed. Some people can parse the nerdiness and then just get mad at it, but those people are not people I would ever socialize with, and so they don't read this blog. Alex, if you're reading this, this is a guy, who's message board ravings I would frequently read aloud, and also who first brought the movie Little Murders to my attention, for which I am forever grateful.

Sometimes I think for myself, but not today.

So, I've been going to this liberal arts college, doing creative work- Writing stuff, making movies. I've been doing it kind of outside the main channels for these things- Not taking the big writing classes, which are largely focused on experimental poetry, and not taking the big film classes, which are largely focused on experimental documentary work. I read the school newspaper and go "wow, this is really shitty," and chalk it up to the lack of editorial standards. Sometimes I go to the film screenings, and find some stuff that's pretty good, usually made by friends of mine. This was something I noticed in an animation class- That the people I was friends with did things I like, because there were shared aesthetics at work, and similar points of view.

Anyway- There's also a school literary journal. It's mostly poetry- almost all poetry, I think, but it does accept prose submissions. Anyway, I submitted this past year, kind of on a lark, and was rejected. Which wasn't really a big deal. The editor's someone I'm not really friends with- Someone I don't get along with at all, actually, and I realized I was just being sarcastic to her all the time, arbitrarily- somehow I'd never talked to her honestly. Until the whole literary journal thing, which was confrontational. I brought up that she mostly ran stuff from a circle of people that took classes taught by the same guy, she said she felt most comfortable coming up with a context to present that work, because she was familiar with the people who made it. Fair enough.

But anyway, here at this new place, that literary journal's in the bathroom. And there are people in it I'm on friendly terms with, or at least kind of know by acquaintance- We've taken the same classes, gone to the same shows, ridden the same buses, been at the same parties. I don't know, I figured there'd be something there in their work that I'd think was interesting.

Nope.

Seemingly, the whole experimental-poetry thing had filtered out all of the feelings and experiences that I had in common with these people. I don't know if it's just a result of their work being distanced from themselves, or if their work really does reflect them and my feeling of revulsion (a strong word, but yeah, pretty much) is just a reaction to that whole unbridgeable distance between two people thing. Either way, it's kind of a drag. What the fuck are people doing? Am I the only one at this college who takes the fact that Matt Groening is our one famous alum deeply to heart, as a signpost to try to be as real and iconoclastic as possible?

Come the fuck on, you assholes, you know deep down that The Simpsons is better than The Age Of Wire And String.

(This post's title should be: Jimbo In Purgatory.)

I don't know how to start this blog off, because I want it to go in a clear direction, but start from an odd place.

The thing about the whole porn-going-mainstream, debutante-sex-tape, pop-star's-vaginas, youth-of-today, that whole scene, thing, is the feeling of dishonesty. There's nothing wrong with being proud of your body, it gets weird when the idea of your body that you're presenting is distorted. Likewise, there's very little wrong with communicating your sexuality- except for the fact that sexuality is a really complicated thing that probably can't be communicated by having words written on the ass of your pants. Sometimes dreams show up in the subconscious that are really oddly sexualized, but not in a way that can be codified into fetish pornography- there are things in this world that are mostly just the province of our minds, that can't really be communicated by lifting your shirt up when the cameras are rolling. A shirt that shows a lot of cleavage projects sexuality like wearing all black depicts depression- not really getting at the core of the thing, to the point of maybe missing it completely.

This is where Shary Boyle's art comes in. I posted a link to her website when I first found it, after it was announced she was going to be in Kramers Ergot 6, but I didn't really talk about it. My first thoughts were probably "huh, that's interesting imagery" and "I like her color sense." But her drawings and sculpture capture bigger things than most art does. It really short-circuits my ability to talk about it, besides just giving that general context. It sums up other things as well, the general idea of having things inside you that bloom in such a way as to explode your body, which is largely separate from anything sexual besides it being tied to some kind of disassociation between body and mind. Her work screams. I read somewhere, from someone who's seen her earlier work, that it used to be concerned with awkwardness, shame, and trembling. But now it's moved on to be this vision of what the world should be, that exists on the other side of all the nervousness, where things go wild. It's related to surrealism, but free of the misogyny that tends to pop up with those dudes. I don't blame the surrealists for having that pop up, I understand how it happens. I'm just saying, that's not in her work, for reasons that should be self-evident. I did read, however, that Shary's work almost was on display at the Sea-Tac airport but was rejected for its "lesbian overtones." That's in quotes, but it's a paraphrase- they might've been "lesbian undertones" as well, or just subtext. It's a thing that bubbles up, and then only barely- I don't think it's crass, but I think it would be an odd thing for an airport, if only for the explosive quality of it.

As I wandered into the common area of this new living arrangement, I heard in the back room, where the women were, "You make me feel like a natural woman" playing from the stereo, and for a brief second I imagined someone was singing along with it, which I think is maybe always how it should be with that song. I attribute my logic about this to lingering Murphy Brown memories, but now that I type this I'm probably thinking more of a commercial for Herbal Essences shampoo than an actual episode of Murphy Brown.

I pointed this out to Alex before he left- The new M.I.A. video, I guess for "Bird Flu," is kind of biting the Paper Rad aesthetic. So is the album art, which I've since seen..

Just a note. I look forward to that record though- I like that M.I.A. I posted about her website before her record came out, talking about her little visual art doodles.
"Bird Flu" is named because "the beat gon' kill everyone!!!!" which I think is funny, and then holy shit that is indeed a good beat.

This is what I'm doing right now. I'm living out in the woods of Olympia, in a place with a broken dryer, so clothes dry by hanging on a line. It's nice to feel like you're in a position to aid escaped convicts and people caught up in slapstick shenanigans that have left them in the nude. It's the opposite of a luxury to get up in the morning and wander outside to pick up a shirt and socks and then put them on, but charming all the same, in a way that's preferable to a luxury, at least to me, right now.

The last Liars record, Drum's Not Dead, was pretty cool, but I had some reservations about it. Part of this was the weird rip I had which killed the flow. I got more into it when I heard it on vinyl. But part of it was this feeling of doubting the sincerity of the band. They had put out a record I liked, They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top, and they kept on switching it up, various EPs. There was this impression they wouldn't stay still, and then their second record came out, which a lot of people hated, and they said they consciously removed everything that people said they liked about the first record, so it wouldn't become a crutch. I think all of this is great, and I liked They Were Wrong, So We Drowned. I saw a lot of continuity between that and all their other stuff. Then Drum's Not Dead came out, and it actually did seem really different. I read an interview where they talked about listening to Sunn O))) records. The first record was compared to post-punk, and it just started to feel a little bit like trend-hopping, somehow inorganic. But there were moments that still felt really sincere- notably the last track, "The Other Side Of Mt. Heart Attack." The first time I listened to the record I was so excited I just say down in a comfortable chair to listen to it as intently as I could. I ended up falling asleep, but that last track woke me up. Not because it's loud, there's just this clarity to it, this palpable emotion that's completely different from all of their other songs I would consider favorites. Someone posited it as a response to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Maps," because both bands lead singers were dating for awhile, and this seemed likely. Anyway, that song was like placing a flag at some very high point, the peak of a mountain, to use their metaphor. It claimed some territory for its own, after sneaking there in the night. It's a sudden moment, although it brings out a lot of the record after you've heard it. Like, "Oh, that's where this is going."

The new record then is able to roam around this territory, broader than it's been before. And so Liars are a rock band now. It's not just all these type of dancefloor fistfights and broken windows of the first few records, or the weird night in the woods of Drum's Not Dead. Emotion has been addressed by "The Other Side Of Mt. Heart Attack," and now it's just a thing that can be there, that can pop up on a song like "Pure Unevil" and not be a big deal.

It keeps on popping up. There's anthems and there's pop songs- Some people were making Jesus And Mary Chain comparisons, but "Houseclouds" makes me think of some Blur song or another. Alex also pointed out that some of the songs are like some of their more abstract b-sides, which is also true, only they've been turned into songs, albeit some of the less poppy songs on the record.

The first song starts off not so good, as the bad kind of drone-rocker, where "rock" is the goal but "drone" is what's achieved, seemingly accidentally- where the chords are being slashed away at, but it just seems tedious, like the chords aren't being changed enough, and there just isn't enough a sense of dynamics- but then there is a shift, and the second half becomes really interesting, and it becomes clear that the opening was just a further carving out a place, another flag planted. Liars are an amazing band.

I have the internet in my new home, but still no phone. Anyway, here's a blog I wrote late last night going on early in the morning.

When I think about what I would like this blog to be, I envision less personal talk and more writing about art and music. I would like to get my criticism skills up to snuff. But when late nights turn into early mornings and I feel the need to write things down, the thing I'm most likely to be critical of is myself.

Basically I worry about the way maturity is manifesting itself. I find more and more I'm acting in ways based on some kind of concept of coolness. People do this when they want people to like them. People wanting other people to like them and then acting in an artificial manner is kind of a hallmark of social interaction, but it's awful. Especially the whole "coolness" concept. Because coolness more often than not translates to emotional distance.

I'm finding this really hard to articulate. I can articulate it in fiction where you can maybe grasp it intuitively based on your own knowledge, but I'm trying to put it simply.

The issue that arises is that, in acting cool because you want someone else to like you, it becomes really easy to not actually care that much about the other person, because they don't know the entirety of you. And this is the thing in relationships- all of them, not just those based on undercurrents of lust, friendships as well- that always striked me as fucked-up. To phrase it in terms of romantic relationships, that element where saying "I love you" becomes a massive thing. It seemed to me so simple, there were times when I loved everyone. Why would that be problematic to say? But now, it just seems like there are very few people that I love, and a lot more that are kind of bothersome and problematic for one reason or another. And those reasons all translate to not actually being yourself around them to the extent that you feel you should be. The idea of "coolness" begets actual coolness, i.e. an absence of warmth.

It leads to these weird imbalances in relationships where one person likes the other person much more than their feelings are returned. I'm using the term relationships in the broad sense, but when you start to think about in the more common and more specific sense you find a situation that people take for granted as fact and turn into power dynamics and that is really disgusting and troublesome.

What I'm saying is that I very genuinely do not want to care what other people think about me. Or at least, I don't want that to dictate my actions. I think that's the ideal place to be. It puts you in a space where you can actually love people. This is idealistic, an urge towards childhood rather than adulthood, in a way that does seem problematic. It also points away from hipsterdom towards nerdiness, but clearly that is the way to go.

It can't all just be making art that reveals our deeper selves in the hopes that someone finds that presentational form attractive.

So I have a house. It's very close to the Evergreen campus, despairingly so. It's off in the woods, and the phone jack is busted and there stands a circuit board which connects to a phone that doesn't work. I feel like a guest there, off in my room, away from the people who seem nice enough.

Anyway, things worked out, is what I'm saying, although I'll be harder to get in touch with. My wireless card got bent in the move, so I can't access the internet in my new home for the time being. It will be replaced.

I feel distracted by the internet.

As I walked over to the school library I was thinking about horror films and how it's kind of not really my genre but still Alex and I were attracted to watching them. I think the deal is that the things horror deals in are things that are adjectives that can be attributed to good art, even if most horror isn't actually good- it always strives towards intensity, and to induce dread, which- I was reading someone talk about Brian Chippendale's Ninja, and he talked about how seeing something like that induces this existential dread, in that it's something you need to confront. Or Art Spiegelman, talking about Gary Panter's Jimbo in Purgatory, said that seeing it made him break out in a cold sweat in the presence of real art. So yeah, that intensity. It's also related to the way that even though that most of the music I listen to is gentle, there are things that are loud and intense in a way that wins you over easily in a live setting, because it's so impressive. Yeah.

My internet is no longer at my house. Here's a blog I wrote last night around 1:30 AM.

Oh, how I hate this.

I'm sitting around a half-empty and one-quarter-boxed-up house. I spent all day waiting on a call from these people who I met with yesterday, for them to tell me whether or not I could move in to their house. I called them up, talked to a nice person, and was told that another roommate just came in and they had to talk it over with him. Then that roommate called me back, and in his (torturously, not charmingly, not in this situation) awkward and roundabout way told me that they're probably going to go with a closer friend.

This is the reoccurring pattern, of meeting with people, and thinking it's going well, and envisioning living with them and how charming that would be, because I got along with them in the meeting, and then finding out that they have other friends who take priority. I understand putting friends before strangers. But this time- I think the call fell just after my birthday ended, after it ticked past midnight onto the twenty-eighth, and I need to be out of here completely on the thirtieth- I just started to think "Well, sorry I'm not cool enough for you" and then getting really mad, feeling really negative, depression and rage and panic and dread. Sitting paralyzed in a comfortable chair that I actually probably need to get rid of, waiting for that awkward-as-shit guy to call back and say "hey dude I'm kidding, you're golden." Knowing that won't actually happen, but feeling like it should, because of the sheer bullshit nature of the call itself.

That's what I hate, just feeling all that hatred, and how easily and arbitrarily it could've been love and praises to God had he said "oh yeah, you got the room, you can start moving in your boxes tomorrow." And it's because I'm not friends with these people, because I don't have preexisting relationships.

I feel right now like I either want to be held tightly, or to be struck by lightning, but with both of those being the same thing- this larger thing that could engulf me as I'm caught up in all this small petty bullshit.

The other day I ran into a friend of mine on the street as she was going into a store to look at dresses. I went with her and as she combed through the racks I occasionally offered my opinions, which ended up just being one opinion, that I really like geometric patterns, as a thing to engulf a body.

I'm listening to Kites' Peace Trials- The record that vacillates between noise tracks that grow more brutal and songs that become prettier and prettier. CF of Kites also draws comics, one of which I linked to on the Highwater site awhile back, and is in the SPX 2001 anthology, where the finale is a person drawing lines on the ground and being consumed by them as a form of escape from the drudgery of jobs.

I'm typing words on this screen, on Wordpad, and I'll post it to Blogger tomorrow, at school, as the internet is turned off here. I'm writing past the hatred, which is nigh-all-consuming- It's aimed at my not being cool enough, and at those that don't think I'm cool enough- so that maybe by one AM the only emotion left to deal with will be the trembling panic. Would that I could try to transcend it all the more by turning away from it and producing something beautiful, but I'm at the point in my book-writing where I don't really know what to do next, besides a general idea of there being something amazing and maybe holy, and I'm just really not in the space to produce that right now.

When I was thinking about geometric patterns the other day, I was thinking of them partly as this thing that suggests the infinite, partly as this thing which looks interesting in the way it folds on an actual moving frame, and partly as a way to visually depict music- Repetition with variation and patterns and math. What I want is for the speakers to push more than just the air, to actually push against my body that converts me into it, that I would dissolve and cascade through the room in zigzagging lines, and that when the music stops my body would just be multiple colors staining the
carpet and the walls.


God, OK, wait- can I just let that stand as the emotional climax, but keep on writing, because I want to go to sleep soon, and before I do that, I want to get out these other thoughts, that came after I was done listening to Kites, and was listening to The Mountain Goats instead. I feel bad whenever I say something that comes off suicidal, because I'm not suicidal. But the other day I gave someone my pitch for the meaning of life- That the idea behind life is that you make enough of an impression of the world so that when you die, you transcend that, and people remember you, even if only for a little while. Part of the imagery that I just tried to deliver is- something of your consciousness persisting even as you stop being something making conscious decisions all the time and having existence be something you have to work at. Pretty much if there was a book with all my thoughts in it and my name on it I wouldn't really matter if I was still walking around with my name on me. Likewise if you were to make some kind of scientific advancement or build some kind of shelter, there's nothing wrong with that being around instead of your actual presence. This kind of also reflects on the artist Ray Johnson, subject of the movie How To Draw A Bunny, and how I feel about what he did.

I also wanted to write more about CF's comics, and I could talk more about them, and how they relate to Ben Jones' comics, but I think it should suffice to say that they point towards transcendence, and I will single out as another example of this the two page comic in the Paper Rad, BJ And Da Dogs book about the guard.

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.