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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other news, I'm pretty into apples.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow, Alex Tripp is on-point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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