People are generally useless, and that's as it should be

I am a media theorist. I'm also a loafer. A guy. A talker. A writer. An electronic musician. A lover.
These things have come about gradually. I'm not actually or intrinsically any of these things out of context.
I also find that, recently, I'm a temporary employee working as an administrative assistant.
On my way to work in the morning I pass all the other people who are probably split pretty evenly between people who are doing a job that is strange to them and outside their area of expertise and those who are doing their job, goddamnit, according to THE PLAN which, goddamnit, exists and doesn't demand contemplation, by GOD. The thing that binds these two groups of people together is the tacit agreement on the idea that people need to serve some kind of purpose in relation to other people. People need a job that assigns them some kind of station.
I don't really get it. Wishful thinking says (and not the morally-degraded notion of wishful thinking that first comes to mind when the term is brought up, the one that is pre-judged as useless because because as things are they can't come to fruition, but just that- thinking that contains an earnest wish) that we should recognize that people are people and they just want to do. As such, those folks who have been specialized out of demand for their talents or those people whose skills set is simply societally redundant to the point that there aren't jobs left for them- these folks should be let to chill on the social dime. A laid-back, non-commercial, non-competitive kibbutz is what the world should be. The truth of the matter is that most people are useless to other people. And they should be. People aren't for other people. So why should a dude such as myself get corralled into fake jobs such as the one I'm doing now just to scrape by when there are so many quality things he is capable of? What the hell am I doing? Overeducated and underqualified and chained to debt. I have to keep looking for better jobs, but the feeling nags at me that there's something in my "me"ness that just isn't commercially viable right now. Can't Uncle Sam send me to the Riviera till something comes up? What does wasting away in an office have to do with the general project of self-improvement? How about a system that apologizes to the individual with perks for not having a use for him or her instead of the individual always scraping to the system- man, that'd be too humane.
I'd really much rather be sunbathing. Or throwing a frisbee. Why can't I get anyone to throw a frisbee this summer?

This just in: at the bank its this guy's money, and can you fucking believe these schmucks? Also, next!

Recounting some things, finally just talking about boobs.

I went and saw Elyse play at Lit Lounge last night. Highly enjoyable. She was backed up by Your New Best Friend, a really good band in their own right. I bought a few beers downstairs from the bartender there. They have an interesting system wherein one must pay and order from a dude sitting at the bar and not the barkeep, said barkeep being a warm saccharine plastic tart, white as bone and as thrilling and clean on the eyes as a stick of mentholated gum on the tongue. Her shirt said boy beater. The bouncer-looking fellow received my cash politely and even repeated the order to the girl behind the bar though she was in earshot, though she had been the one I actually addressed with my dipsomaniacal fancies to begin with. What does it mean? I paid the man for the services of a very fine lady.
My enthusiasm got the better of me and I woke up stuttering dumb and probably reeking of alcohol, 3 days of beard growth to corroborate the unblinking cherry tomato eyes I brought to work with me. Not glamorous. The song I'm working on remains unfinished, but closer.
Bearclaw, I learned, is going to be playing at Lit on the 17th, hot on the heels of their recent show with Shellac in Milwaukee.
I have redoubled my job hunting efforts. Idealist.org is pretty cool, as good as a pair of firm space-race rocket cone breasts (the kind that get a slight ski jump bend in the end when they're bare), but not as easy on the eyes. Hell, I guess the only thing this website has in common with a great couple of breasts is that I like both of them.
A friend I met last night at Elyse's show, she of the lovely legs and the catching up over whiskey, confided to me that she met Regina Spektor last night and Regina Spektor has beautiful, otherworldly, astonishing, surprisingly large breasts that no one can take their eyes off of.
Finally, I've decided to become an indian. I figure if it's true that I'm 1/16 native I can probably get membership in a tribe, provided I can determine which tribe it is. If anyone has any resources that would come in handy please help me out by directing me to them. I would also be open to hearing any dirty Kachina doll jokes.

The Musical Baton!

Manny at Sugardisaster hit me this woke-up-late-but-slept-really-great morn with a little thing called a musical baton. The musical baton is this: a set of questions regarding your taste in and current involvement with musique, la musica, ongaku, music. It operates a bit like a chain letter, so you fill it in and pass it on. We are all well socialized in the operation of this sort of conceptual machine. We are so well-oiled. These, for better or for worse, are the ties that bind us to one another.
I give you: The musical baton.

*Total volume of music files on my computer
At this point I have no idea.

*Last CD I bought

BIG YOUTH "Ride Like Lightning: The Best of Big Youth 1972-1976"
Ride like lightning and you'll crash like thunder. Hunnnnnnnnh!


*Song playing right now
I'm at work and I'm a little overstimulated these past couple of days, so I haven't been listening to much music. The last song I really listened to- Sunday, I think- was "Discreet Music" by Brian Eno.
That's a lie. I just remembered that yesterday I got on the train to meet Joe for some Joe at Bread and Chocolate (only to find it closed for construction, its normally open and inviting confines obstructed by the detritus of transformational accoutrements, it's atypically shadowy dining area dancing to the strobe of an acetylene torch) and needed to listen to "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)("I feel numb/born with a weak heart/but I guess I must be having fun")," followed by "The Nice People Argument" by Ted Leo ("And brother, they just won't listen/so you've got to choose your side/all your talk is just so much pissing/if you're just along for the ride"). In fact I just put that on my ipod for another listen. I guess that's what I'm listening to, but I wasn't when I began this. Digitally mediated narration means the end of linear self-description if you're honest.



*Five songs (albums) I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me.
Ok.
Ok.

"1. BRIAN ENO "Another Green World

2. SHELLAC "At Action Park", "Terraform"

3. ERLEND OYE "Unrest"

4. NEW ORDER "Power, Corruption, and Lies"

This is getting difficult. Acts of inclusion are always acts of exclusion. Ask me at any other day and time and my amoebic mind may have encompassed a wholly otherwise distinguished version of the canon. Caveat in place, know that I am cheating as I continue with...

5. ...A Four-way toss-up between TED LEO "Tej(?) Leo/Rx Pharmacists"

HARMONIA "Deluxe"

LES SAVY FAV "Go Forth"

and THE REPLACEMENTS "Tim"

Now that I've done that I know that I've left something out.
Shit.

* Three people to whom I'm passing the baton
Ok. whitehothouse, nightscenestealers, and pyani.

Manny also saw fit to add a question to compensate for the fact the last question was not really a question. The question he put to me was:
* If you could eat any meal of the day with any 3 artists (alive or dead), what meal, what kind of food, and which artists?

1. Dostoevsky, breakfast, Strong black tea, sproti on buttered bread, breakfast at a cafe on a canal in St. Petersburg
2. Henry Miller, Late lunch, cabbage soup followed by several bottles of wine with a view on a park or a plaza or a river or a teeming profligance of life and furtive, living stupidity.
3. Me, Lunch or early dinner, Ramen or some kind of cold -men out of doors. Beer.

That's what I got.

Do not wait for halcyon days

Manny has his hitching pics up, a hello from one of the most beautiful places on earth. A friendly reminder to not let grass grow under your feet.

A small oasis of sanity

New York passes bill to allow the "morning after" pill without prescription.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=873882&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

Get Perpendicular On this Fucking Dance Floor

Technology is cool, but not this cool.
Watch hard drives and little magnetic bits break it down here.
I really don't know what to say about this. There's a guy working for Hitachi who was paid to write the line "we need expanded membership, but that would make us flip, causing an end that's too abrupt, because our data is corrupt.

"Hey, is that actuator man?"

"Neither the Heavens are Humane, nor is life above or below - or within me."

- Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

"The bull of the days is skewbald
the cart of the years is slow
Our god is speed
the heart is our drum"
- V. Mayakovsky, Our March

Long-suffering Slavs
and Slavophiles
overwhelmed by the menageries
of of shit and divinity
understand very well
rapports as pipelines-
the agency of he who suffers
and his mistress,
the chemical become his mind;
understand very well
that so many angels dancing
on the head of a pin
is dazzling,
but the single angel perched on the needle's tip,
in her rarefied state of companionship,
is an edifying object of study.
She does not dizzy, but appears to illuminate.
He who aspires to intelligence
knows this single angel
better than the passage of years
that has flung him through
his life in hyper-stimulation,
and the scent given off
by the angel's arm on a warm day
comes clearly, and appears true
to one of such heart
who feels so daily confused
and between his positions.

the dumb scorch of a distant and very constant sun

My silence has been professionally necessary, as I can now say that all the pieces are in place for the next phase. Suffice it to say that I reel from the dumb scorch of a very distant and constant sun (that speechless gaze), that all mysteries assure us they will only tie their secret knots fast, more tightly and more impossibly to confound the Chinese, and those to my flesh. Sometimes you wake up next to a French girl, and you watch the girl quietly dress and try to sneak out at 5:30 in the morning. You begin to wonder, and the wonder is a signal and you know that the plan is in place and working perfectly. What unknowable ritual is this? Why, when the Americans are content to lie about all morning in hopes something more will be on offer when the world has been warmed and its evening silence is civilized with the madness of motion and conversation (the STUTTERING and the SCREAMING and the constance of emergencies being carted from one locale to another more appropriate in red boxes!)?
I see eyes. Great, blue eyes with the lines of preternatural age that go to water as I feel myself and my questions slacken. It was unnecessary to take the ergot HQ provided, the holistic approach has found the intended visions presenting themselves printed out of air into my thinning arms. She could be a quiet French au pair on a holiday reprieve from her Allentown place of work, she could be a 16-year-old Polish girl from Brooklyn who speaks excellent French and wants to lie to someone.
Send cigarettes. Send money. Send sunscreen. These bottles here have nothing but butts and ashes in them. Send me a diversion, because as she left she left her ring, and I know she'll come back for it. I'll never be told if it was an accident or if she meant it. These questions, as I was warned, are torture. I go to take the coffee cure.
The glamour of my penury, as my job search continues, is hysterical.