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Now that I've stopped asking myself "What am I doing?" while at work, I've found a new internal mantra. "What are we going to do about all the depression?"

And then, a few nights ago, I think I might have solved that riddle as well. I sent ten dollars to a PO Box in Rhode Island, ordering some copies of Paper Rodeo and maybe Chris Forgues' Low Tide. On the back, I felt the urge to draw. I drew my left hand, with "What are we going to do about all of the depression?" underneath it as a caption. Then, a frog, hanging out inside the mouth of a skull, which was wearing bunny ears, said "If this is a problem that can't be solved by being awesome then I don't know what to do." And then in conclusion there was a cubist drawing of a dinosaur saying "Wait I think it is."

And that I guess sums it up. And tonight in another situation, I was able to stem the mantra of "What am I doing?" again, via different means.

Also I saw an interview with a neuroscientist who wrote a book about how we respond to music who answered the zen koan "If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?" The answer is no, as sound is defined by pitch, which only exists once the vibration hits an eardrum.

There are jokes in my head that I won't write until they become true. Most of my jokes that I speak aloud, or write on the Rupert Murdoch Must Die blog, are just absurd lies. Who knows what will be the final fate of this joke? Maybe it'll just be the Joe Sayers minicomic punchline that was source material.

So Saturday I went and saw Man Man play in a warehouse turned art gallery. They were pretty aces, you know.

Then I hung out with my brother and watched Big Top Pee-Wee. I didn't want to say this to my brother, but I think Big Top might be better than Big Adventure. My brother is a pretty big proponent of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure as one of the best movies ever but it's one of those comedies where I find it hard to find the jokes. Big Top Pee-Wee I can find the jokes and laugh at them, because they're really bizarre- It's the whole "Why is this in a popular movie" type of hahas, but then you remember that it wasn't actually a popular movie.

I don't know if you heard about this, but the new Mike Judge movie Idiocracy kind of came out but is being completely buried by Fox and I guess I will see it on DVD.

Sunday I found out that Spaceboy Music is closing! Holy shit! Oh, South Street, you are in decline.

Okay I am listening to an old Best Show on WFMU and sucking on a lollipop so I can't really bring the blogging right now.

So tonight, at the Shellac show, I ran into people I used to work with, when I worked at a music store run by a former crackhead. One got fired, one quit. And the owner? It turns out that "former crackhead" is kind of a misnomer, as he got caught on South Street with a hooker and thirty-six bags of crack. But those two crazy kids have opened their own music store, Long In The Tooth Records, which I actually walked past when I tried to go to the comic book store (Fat Jack's) on Sansom to pick up the new Brendan McCarthy Solo. (The store was closed but man I anticipating reading that thing.) I don't think they have any employees besides the two of them. They are a couple who really like hardcore punk and horror movies and Janice was the first person to recommend Jan Svanmajer's work to me. I can't vouch for the quality of the store- They're not so into the stuff I'm into and I think that might be mostly below their radar but no kidding great people. Living the dream. It made me really happy.

You know what else made me really happy? Shellac. I appreciate that their songs when played live are in some ways vehicles for them to fuck around, or at least have, within all the tightness and mathiness, these spaces set off for Bob Weston and Steve Albini to put their arms out and say "Look at me, I'm a plane!" or for lyrical improvisations. They opened with Squirrel Song and Prayer To God was the next-to-last song. They played other songs I can't remember and songs I didn't recognize. But they were good.

Openers and-or co-headliners Uzeda were loud enough to cause hernias, I think. I felt my intestines move about. They disheveled my organs.

I'm not making mix CDs so how can people know what songs I've stumbled across I'm really into? Oh I know. I could write about them.

There's this song I got from an mp3 blog- I don't know which one- but it's an M. Ward song. I don't think I like that guy. But when I said it's an M. Ward song, I don't mean it- It's a Daniel Johnston song. That M. Ward covers. And adds Neko Case harmonies on the chorus. So any problems with M. Ward- Like that maybe he's generic and his production is toothless and really I just don't get it- Get blown away by, for one, the Daniel Johnston thing- Kind of like how I downloaded an Okkervil River song he guests on and I actually like it, even though I have the same complaints about Okkervil River- Daniel Johnston's unquestionable earnestness sells the shit out of some stuff that might approximate Matchbox Twenty or something similar, even if the artists with their name on the album are just using him for instant cred. But then there's Neko Case who is a much better singer than M. Ward. I'll give this to old M though- For a harmonizer his voice has a low end in a way that a Neko Case/Daniel Johnston collaboration would lack. (To say nothing of the fact that such a collaboration, if you're imagining it, would probably be terrifying for Ms. Case, oh man.) The Daniel Johnston song is "To Go Home" by the way, which I think I've heard, as the chorus "I'll stay true, to you, you know I will, I'll stay true forever or until" seems like it was in my memory already. That's the part Neko Case sings, by the way. Think that over in your brain and maybe you'll get why it makes me melt. The part where M. Ward says "I come home" over and over using like protools echos doesn't effect any change to my status of being a liquid, but that's fine because at that part I am already molten and I wouldn't want to become gaseous.

Then there's The Blow's Parentheses, which is the only good song on her new album, Paper Television, which I was totally excited for at one point. Oh, the things it does that the other songs don't- Like have two poignant relatable and painting-a-perfect-picture-of-a-persona lyrics. One of those being "If something in the deli aisle makes you cry, of course I'll put my arm around you and walk you outside, through the sliding doors, why would I mind" which is perfect because there've been times when the grocery store has freaked me out but every time I would expect other people to be bothered by my instability and there's been times when I've been unresponsive to other people's freaking out in the presence of that which is literally minor but symbolically huge. And then there's what it doesn't do that other songs do, like use the word "heart" and/or shit imagery.

Another one I'd put on a mix would be Swan Lake's All Fires. It's a Spencer Krug song but I think maybe with Dan Bejar and Casey Mercer doing harmonies way buried. Can I talk about this song? Only in allusion and off-handed ways. I mentioned it to a friend in an e-mail that was largely about a conceptual band and writing from holy fool persepectives. There's something at work within it. It's really good, certainly.

I have to keep listening to this new Akron/Family album. I did the thing where I downloaded it thinking I would only listen once and then buy it but then on that first listen was attacked by doubt. Because it does things like in the course of say the opening track, where it starts out with drum beats, then adds guitar noises, and at this point you're totally down, but then the vocals come in and it's weird in a way which is kind of awesome but also kind of ridiculous and then it keeps moving but more in that jam direction, away from the vocals, so the structure just seems really fucking weird and that part that was so crazy as to make you unsure whether or not it was a bad idea starts to seem like a bad idea (by the way, I'm not talking about the scatting that starts it off, that part clearly rules, I'm talking about when that scatting gives way to a capella singing of the title of the song- when that happens I'm like wwhhhaaaaaaaatttt and then the guitars come in all like country-ish or something) and then that stops and something else completely happens which is I guess better but structurally you think "is this what prog is like? What the fuck is happening? This is not a song." And then it just keeps on not really being a song, and it goes on for nine and a half minutes, and... You know it would be fucking thrilling live. Duh. Oh my god yeah see Akron/Family on tour certainly. But I already knew that. What about the album? I guess I have to keep listening to the album. It's got its moments.

I should go to a record store, see if I can pick up the new Wooden Wand and The Sky High Band thing. When I heard a lot of those songs at some backyard BBQ I liked it a lot although I don't know what's actually on the album.

What I've been thinking about for the past two days or so is how great the riff that serves as the chorus to The Flaming Lips' "She Don't Use Jelly" is. The thing about the Flaming Lips- I feel now like people in 2000 felt when they were all "The Soft Bulletin rules" and being confronted with people being like "Aren't they a one-hit wonder from 1993?" only that I'm saying "The Flaming Lips are great" and people are thinking "oh huh yeah I guess you like stuff that is kind of adult-contemporary but with big-ass strings and indie cred" because last time I heard The Soft Bulletin I lamented a youth wasted living like an old man.

But stumbled across the high-larious performance on 90210 and was reminded "Man that guitar line is something killer"- Containing within it that whole My Bloody Valentine thing that led to me writing a post calling noise pop the best music ever, but in a way that's just ridiculously accessible and recognizable- A riff with a great tone, as opposed to the Only Shallow elephant-trunk guitar chord, which is a better sound but isn't, you know, a melody. Like it's poppy as hell but I've heard rumors of the volume of early-nineties Lips shows and I can imagine that as threatening. It's serrated, even though it's bubblegum. Having it hit you in the face is like on The Prisoner where the Rover bubble is on top of McGoohan's face and he's screaming, only imagine that as a sticky bubblegum bubble that once attached stretches the face out a bit.

So many guitar lines are more easily compared to knives than laser beam blasts. Like Fugazi or Sleater-Kinney. That's good stuff too. But I was imagining on my walk home a band with two guitarists trading off lines like those bands (or Televison or what have you) only the sounds are huge, they slash instead of stab. A band like that might as well call them Black Adam Sandler for all that they could be the new shape in entertainment.

Come on nineties revival.

The most recent post at the Rupert Murdoch Must Die blog, "Market Research" actually describes my life right now. It's there instead of here so it could more easily be filled with the jokes that are how I approach. But that's the situation.

On Saturday I went to Philadelphia to see Paper Rad. I bought the DVD and a minicomic. I could've bought more zines if I didn't buy the DVD, which had a lot of its content screened at the show, but I liked the idea of the DVD because it seemed so much more definitive and less ephemeral. This was probably dumb. Whatever. The zines were expensive, five bucks apiece for not a whole lot of reading content.

I meant to write more but Alfe's coming on now. I meant to watch this yesterday but couldn't find a DVD player in the house.

Oh, I didn't say in the Rupert Murdoch Must Die blog where exactly I'm working. Cherry Hill Mall. Consider that an actual blog exclusive. Do with that information what you will.

I pretty much can't get around without the bus system since there's nothing around here to do and it's hot as fuck out. I want to go to Oaklyn and try to track down obscure comics.

Alfe just said a thing about being out of sauce enablers. It's funny because my mom is awful at buying food and so the fridge is filled with condiments and repetition (four boxes of orange juice, what the eff?) and everything that's actual building blocks of meals is stored away in the freezer, not really marked and, you know, inedible without long periods of time spent thawing.

The Paper Rad comic I picked up (I think it's Ben Jones zine, Cartoon Workshop 2, Jessica Ciocci's is called Pig Tales and Jacob Ciocci's thing didn't seem to have a title and both were tempting and if I had ten more bucks on me I would've bought both) ends with the punchline of the character Ralphe saying "Does this burrito have cilantro in it?" Good stuff, good stuff.

I got a burnt copy of the next Blow record, Paper Television. It's a bad rip, and a bad burn too.

But on a first listen I think I'm still going to say that it's kind of disappointing, maybe intermittently annoying.

Track two, Parentheses, seems pretty good though, even though that's one where I think the bad rip comes through in my hearing- The chorus has what just sounds to me like the static of crinkling aluminum foil. But on the whole I'm still thinking it's a winner. That song, at least.

The record seems to have surging through it a use of too much of the same trite imagery (The word "heart" gets said a lot) and then there's at least one kind of overworked metaphor (That one involves poop. Actually, that one recurs as well. Awkwardly.) Parentheses has one or two lines that cut through all that malarkey to actually say things. Also, it has the best melody. The beats do cool stuff throughout, every once in a while, but what I think might be one of the best beats also has one of the worst melodies (It's the song where the word "shit" is said in the chorus, and the bad part of the vocal is Khaela doing like this scream-screech high note all over the damn place.)

Unrelated but: I am always wondering, always worrying about, what I would think were I to interact with a younger self, and what that younger self would think of me, the continuity in my behavior. The thing that makes me worry about this, I realize, is that in a lot of ways I'm not any better off than I was when I was younger. The things that I want now are things I think I've always wanted, that I have never had. Except for a few abstractions that I've grabbed momentarily.

There's a record store in Pennsauken where I could probably buy a bunch of Prince records for like two bucks apiece but the money situation's not too good. Self-control, self-control! There's also a copy of Bitches Brew for 25 bucks which is high but maybe it's an original pressing or some shit. I don't know. I shouldn't spend money anyway.

Oh right- I'm in New Jersey now. Have been since last Monday, when I pissed off my brother. He went away for a weekend, gave me chores to do- Giving the cat food and water. Which I do anyway, even when he's around. But after giving the cat food the morning of his return, my brother still came home to an empty bowl (Cats eat food) and concluded that I did nothing and so am not to be trusted and am hopelessly immature and can't stay with him for at least a while, which kind of fucked the whole "job in Philly" bit so I think now I'm looking for work in New Jersey, even though I don't want to stay with my mom either, I guess I'll just have to once I find employment.

I'm at my mom's house, on her computer. I see she's been looking up Asperger's Syndrome. Does this make me paranoid that she thinks I have Asperger's? Yes. I kind of think that's the type of thing that if you had never actually seen someone who had it, you might think it was a problem for anyone whose behavior struck you as being odd or outside the norm of what you want and expect people to be. I have a different perception of social interaction and expectation than she does, I think.

This is just paranoia, she's not making any accusations or anything. Still I've got the fear.

My dad might be going to prison. I wish I had known about this earlier. But he, being a drunk, often drives drunk. He was pulled over recently. A third offense. So he has to stand trial, and got an expensive lawyer to try to make it so the first time didn't count because he didn't have legal representation. Which strikes me as bullshit, but what do I know of the law?

It seems fairly unlikely he'll go to prison, what with being in his forties and white and all that.

I don't know what'll happen to him. I hope he doesn't get sent to rehab, just because I know he's not really repentant.

I don't want him to go to prison, even though that would be funny to me, in an awful kind of way.

He's moving out of his parent's house, though, which is for the best. Closer to work so that if his license gets taken away for ten years (which strikes me as something that should probably happen, and is apparently a possibility) he could still keep his job.

Interacting with my dad is weird. He belittles my haircut, I tell him that my brother saw him in a strip club and said he was the sleaziest dude there. He argues that he's not sleazy, he's playful. I say my brother calls 'em as he sees 'em, and is way less biased than he is, since no one wants to think they're sleazy. He tells me he might be going to prison, but he likes to party hard and likes having crazy friends. I tell him that it is bad to have crazy friends exclusively, and that a balance must be maintained between the crazy and the sane. Then I tell him not to go to prison, and point out that he, in living with his parents, tends to get angry about nothing.

I've been happier since I left home, but since he moved back in with his parents, he's had a heart attack.

What I'm saying is that I am now at the point where I am better at living life than he is. And I say this as someone who's unemployed. He's paid for a few quarters of tuition. You know what's funny? Life is funny. Life is goddamn hilarious.

I don't want my dad to go to prison, but I've wanted him to learn a lesson that would mean stop drinking to excess and hanging out with- when he says crazy people he means perverts with serious drug problems- but I mean I guess he is as against his own self-growth as I am mine.

My mom used to hope and maybe pray that my dad would get in a car accident, not too bad, but enough to make him learn a lesson. I used to imagine scenarios where he would hit me with a car while driving drunk. And when I was younger and more religious I would pray for his redemption, just a general becoming a better person. Now I just have a dark sense of humor but I still feel a kinship with that younger me, and feel like the connection between being deeply cynical and darkly humored and being religious and spiritual is undervalued. I don't know what'll happen to my dad, and I don't know if he'll change. More on this story as it develops, although as I type it I feel like nothing will ever happen.

I read Kurt Vonnegut's Jailbird, and liked it okay, and was able to relate to parts of it if I was being intellectually dishonest.

So this was interesting, a thing in Harper's about the right wing's strategies in forming the narratives they tell. It starts off slow, gets good with historical details, and ends up making sense in the end if you go into it already sharing it's political biases.

I'll tell you what wasn't interesting, what was kind of stupid, was this Lev Grossman thing in Time about how there's no literary voice of the generation. The best part is when it starts off listing the ages of authors as a way to dismiss people who were never nominated: Seriously I think that we all knew that Michael Chabon was pretty much writing exclusively for old people, specifically nerds. Really an awful piece of writing- The part where Zadie Smith gets cited but only almost, with the stipulation that she might not qualify because she lives in England- She's also a black woman and everyone else cited was a white man. But what's really important here is that she, at 30, is probably actually just outside the frame of consideration, in my mind.

Alex, when looking at the Paper Rad book, called that the art of this generation. I was like "they're older than us" but it's worth noting that they're still younger than Zadie Smith and at least I'm pretty sure the cultural reference points that are important are shared.

This should also come into play with the also-stupid-but-for-different-reasons Chuck Klosterman article about the lack of video game criticism.

Like I think it's important that Paper Rad (and cartoonist Bryan Lee O'Malley) are dealing with that detritus of video games in their art, their work that's not-prose-novels. Just from a position of if I were a cultural critic, what would I think is important in terms of shaping the lives of people alive right now. Or was important, in the past. There's important things that need to be taken into consideration with what people are dealing with- All cultural critics are thinking to say is 9/11, which is so fucking reductive and psychologically that happened after my personality was pretty much already formed. No one thinks to mention Columbine as a big thing but I thought it was huge at the time it occurred although post-high-school it seems less so, but maybe it taught some kids fear and empathy in a way that's shaped their lives.

But let's take, for the people that fell outside marketer's post-Douglas Coupland purview, the important formative stuff as happening from the late-eighties on. I don't know when to say the formative stuff ended. 9/11 maybe in terms of- that created a world that we now have to live with but seemingly cannot actually change. (This is why I started with that Harper's article, by the way- I like the idea at the end that a lot of people are just kind of over America.)

That means liberalism, by the way. Like, the way I think about it- Think of how much The Simpsons is imprinted on your brain, and how that's been there since childhood. There are other sitcoms that are important too- Thank you Seinfeld, for teaching me about unacceptable behavior. I mean I guess that's the mark of young people in general but my understanding of the show Diff'rent Strokes (I think- By the way, that show is an example of stuff around in the late eighties that didn't matter at all in terms of shaping the lives of people who are now in their twenties) is that that's not always the case. But I don't know- Maybe I am just a douchebag elitist in that in the same way I would think anyone conservative must have their head in the fucking sand, if they are young they are just completely out of step with the zeitgeist. (And not even because of the whole war equals killing of the nation's young thing, actually.) But I think of the formative stuff and I can't imagine- Like even growing up with rap so huge seems like it should maybe take the edge off racism a bit, which is so huge with conservatives.

I don't know, I'm not really that interested in that whole voice-of-a-generation bullshit but I felt obligated to comment on it as someone who's not a fucking old man writing for Time the criticial establishment- Why would that guy even think he would know who was speaking for the young people? God such an awful article. Also annoying is the similarity in tone for all the pieces he speaks for, the douchebag. All angry and whiny and snivelling, and by placing it in context, that is what he expects and seemingly wants from the future. I get the impression, vaguely, the a lot of the people producing good work now are producing work that's fairly gentle, possibly in response to how awful the global situation is, which is weird and maybe unlikely but I don't know: It seems like a lot of people are trying to be calm and buddhist and spiritual and communicate in their work, rather than just froths of rage and whininess. Maybe that's just like the calmness of living with the post-apocalypse and growing up without a feeling of entitlement.

By the way, I'm under the impression that the next Paper Rad book, the one that I think'll be out before the end of the year, will be like a collection of various previously released but in small-print-run minicomics and zines and whatnot.

So, yesterday I found out that Syd Barrett is dead, the West African Black Rhino is probably extinct, and Sleater-Kinney's going on indefinite hiatus.

And today, here in Philadelphia, it's grotesquely hot and humid.

I need to look for work again. I found employment at the CD store briefly, but they realized they don't actually need employees, despite the help wanted sign in the window, and I don't follow directions so well when they're counter-intuitive and the reasoning is not explained to me.

I did one day's worth of work, with the store owner's wife, who is proof that even an awful pustule of hate can find love in this world, if only with another pustule of hate, if you don't mind that love being filled with resentment. She was awful.

Oh and this dude came into a store looking to use a bathroom, which I told him he couldn't do there, so he said "I guess I'll just go here then" and put his hand on his crotch. I told him to get out, and long interchange of dialogue back and forth made short since I don't remember it with that much accuracy anyway, (although an important part is when he brings his hand back to his head as if in preparation to slap me) his parting words are "Fuck you Jew boy."

Casual anti-semitism is so weird because I don't think that many people actually care that people are Jewish enough to hate them.

(I also had an interaction where I walked past a crowd of people sitting down at night and they spoke to me in genericisms, to which I said "yup" and one of them said "Yup? what are you, Jewish?" which is weirder.)

I still need that haircut, still need that resume printed, still need a section of the newspaper with classifieds. But now I also need the paycheck from that day I worked.

I read three books in between leaving Olympia and arriving in Philadelphia. I wrote stuff in my notebook that responded to the work, or were basically blog entries. This will basically be me writing about those books, but if anything else in the notebooks is of interest, I'll write it out. I also wrote notes on my laptop, but the laptop power cord has melted and so I'm using my brother's computer.

On the morning I left Olympia I saw a sign I'd seen before and had meant to document, but didn't. Something like "Obscene language is unacceptable in recovery." It was by that Vietnamese place on Fourth Avenue, right after the bridge, like behind it on a street that ran perpendicular that I can't think of. I viewed it through a window. I didn't think that place was a rehab clinic, and I don't really know what it's deal is.

Also on the day I left Olympia, there were Nazis in downtown, at the street fair, waving flags and wearing armbands. Everyone just greeted them with ambivalence, not wanting to give them the satisfaction, but the temptation to engage them in a way that could lead to violence was tempting. I could've said "Hey Nazis! Go back to douche-land!" or a variation that turned "Nazi" into "nozzle."

I left on a Sunday. Friday I saw Art School Confidential and then partied until five in the morning, and in doing so learned I don't have to worry about whiskey-dick. (Or at least not complete impotence resulting from drunkenness.) Also on Friday a bit of my cartoon was erased from a DV tape, but I took it in stride. It might not be a total disaster.

Portland seemed nice for the half hour or so I spent there.

Anyway, so the books I read. The first being George Saunder's Pastoralia, which was fun. I'd read the best story before buying the book. Two stories end with a character acting humanely and sympathetically in accordance to their instincts, but against what they reason is their better judgment. In the title story, which is longer than the others, the nice human behavior is practiced throughout, until the end, where there is a figurative straw breaking the camel's back. Another story, "The Barber's Unhappiness," ends with unreasonable expectations and plans for the future, which will probably not be fulfilled, which is for the best. But basically, this is the sympathy that goes throughout the book. I didn't dislike this stuff, it's gentleness, but- Saunders is actually a really funny guy, and that doesn't come through with that much regularity here. Part of it's that maybe that sense of humor, which is basically satirical, runs counter to the human sympathetic impulse. I prefer the funny stuff. I wish he was better at doing both at once, and maybe he is in other stuff. "Winky" wins the book for it navigating between both sides more easily than anything else, and even there, the humor is mostly found at the beginning.

Following that, I read Alan Moore's Voice Of The Fire, which I didn't really like. I certainly wasn't compelled to finish it, so much as I read it for lack of anything else to do on the train. I read it in two days, which doesn't mean I enjoyed it so much as I'm pretty confident I didn't miss anything. It seemed overwritten, trying too hard in its prose. It's also- it's ostensibly a novel, but it's basically a set of connected short stories, and so it ends up becoming very much about its themes, which aren't really that interesting. And they're specific themes, in that the writer has others, that he deals with in his comics, that are much more interesting. Some of what unites the book isn't a theme so much as it is just reoccuring imagery. Nothing really gets resolved. In the last chapter, there's also a reference to Pig Bodine as a character in Gravity's Rainbow, but I think he's actually in V. Although that's a minor complaint. But mostly- it's not fun, it's self-consciously difficult, and for no real payoff. Moore's a guy who's able to write good prose in comics, but so much of that really varies from work to work. Here, it's just kind of overheated experimentation that's maybe beautiful but is mostly obfuscating.

I also read Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde, which is not really the type of thing I read regularly, but had heard was really good and it was a comic so it kind of falls into my purview even if I don't read a lot of nonfiction about recent events. I didn't dig it, which really shouldn't surprise me at all, considering. It's interesting, I learned stuff, even if I'm forgetting it now, but- Not my thing in a whole lot of ways. And really, I should've known this. I will offer this criticism though- He's not a very good caricaturist, and when he was drawing real people, I never really felt like I got an idea of what they looked like, and a lot of characters struck me as indistinct, which is a problem when you're doing journalism in comics form.

I wish I had more fun things to read on the ride from San Francisco to Chicago. Right now I've got my brother's books on hands, which means a lot of design books (Blue Note album covers , especially those designed and photographed by Reid Miles, are ill!) and I started to read Kurt Vonnegut's Jailbird. I also read The R. Crumb Handbook, which I gave him for Christmas, and was reminded of what I suspected/knew- That I don't really like that dude's work. (The racist imagery is particularly weird, because it's deployment probably isn't to racist ends, and I don't think he's a racist so much as he's playing with the imagery, but it's just fucking weird imagery, classic racist stuff that's so beyond my actual experience, in that even if I'm going to admit to having the occasional racist tendency, it's more a question of urban fear than weird inhuman caricatures. Like, big black dudes might beat me up, but I don't think they're subhuman. Crumb's depictions are just like what the fuck? That Crumb's frequently made a big deal of for his honesty, especially where the misogyny shows up- which I'm uncomfortable with as well, for a number of reasons, one of which is that his set of perversions and obsessions strikes me as weird- puts the racist stuff in a weird place in terms of being meant ironically.) He can draw, though. Won't fault him that.

So here's the bad thing about living in Philadelphia: I don't really have my shit together, and I don't have any friends in the city proper, and sometimes (like Sunday) I get derided by my mom and my brother for the way I live my life, like how I am inviting people to kick my ass. I'm bad at eye contact, girls tell my brother that I am so awkward, and my brother worries about me. I'm getting a cell phone tomorrow because brother made my mom an ultimatum that I can't live with him without one, because I create too much worry because I'm just so goddamn punchable.

So I guess soon I'll be easier to get in contact with.

I feel like a sellout.

Also family's paying for a haircut. I'm not really happy with my hair right now, my bangs are for shit, but expensive haircuts, even if I don't have to pay are just ideologically suspect.

And I don't know if I'm going to pursue this but a dude told me that I could maybe get a job at American Apparel, he gave me a name to ask for. That's probably too far away to be practical anyway but it's symptomatic of something larger and awful.

Further down this route of course would be actual photos on myspace and going to bars two or more times a week.

The sad truth is that Olympia is a place I can exist without awkwardness, where I can be harsh and honest and off-putting rather than in Philadelphia where I don't know what I'm doing. I can imagine myself just giving in completely to someone else's idea of coolness and still not being attractive to anyone.

My mom referred yesterday to Olympia not being the real world. She meant due to the lack of blacks. I came to the revelation in like junior year that the real world doesn't exist, we're all in our bubbles. City people like to think themselves oh so worldly but I'm sure that farmers think they're full of shit because of how detached they are from the food they eat, how their meat gets made. And the farmer are right but they are stupid and vote against their own interests and wear cowboy hats. And there are people who think they are in it because they are so debauched but the world of debauchery is a ridiculous one. What I'm saying is I can exist in Olympia, and Olympia kind of sucks and I create tension but it's cool.

I would like to live in Philadelphia but I don't want to sell my soul.

I bought comics today as some way to navigate the divide. As an exercise to hold them in my hand and still look people in the eye, to embrace that nerdy part of me that I trust and try to show some faith in it.

There is a part of me that knows that you can never be any more or less than what you actually are but I don't know what that actually means or how it can translate into not getting mugged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I continue to feel faintly hung over.

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

holy shit dolphins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus, it's late.

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

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

I really should get some sleep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mostly I am thinking about the wilderness.

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

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

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

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