Nocturnally Emanating

Quietly night timing it on the roof deck of a huge city that wasn't done with you till late makes for good google earth night photography.

Cafe, Coffee Quaffs, Coif Checking, Boyee

Sitting in my summer cold weather perch counting the brassy blondes, keeping tabs on the shakes they so let fly in spite of mistaken coiffure.

- - &

Listening to Skoda Mluvit by Schneider TM, true follow-up to o-2's zoomer. Much more lush, droningpsych. Denser. Still !freak epop&clicky!

cool itunes shortcuts

http://channels.lockergnome.com/rss/archives/rss_talk/20060602_resync_itunes_podcasts_with_rss_via_the_keyboard.phtml

wireless midi keyboards

http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/06/02/midair/index.php?lsrc=mwrss

Things Get Realer

2 Live Krew Meets Prince and acne giveaway mashup professionalism. So skilled, so many hours in the studio as evidenced by the editing, the granular samples, time fucking, progress checking of the recorded words with skips, repeats, flags that no, that was a sample, that- what you thought for the first second was just a live flow. Deep bass, alternation between a sparse use of sounds that are small and good for echoing in the imaginary spaces inside effects boxes and deluges of rhythm samples. Exciting party music, wanky electronics.
Records this good function to obviate the purpose of the music critic entirely. When there is nothing to embellish or sweeten with undeserved praise, when there is no rapture not simply standing free and unafraid in the world and available to any rhythmically infatuated listening audience, what remains for the critic to do? Sometimes things are good, and then they speak for themselves.
Any fool can look on the grandest temples built by the hand of man and proclaim "they are there," but whom does this benefit? The temples are unperturbed and the time it took to speak those words to the world at large distracted new eyes from their own baptism in awareness.
I am listening to this great fucking record. There's nothing else I can tell you.
Spank Rock.

Comes on, the way you feel, come on, come on

I am not as calm as a bottle of scotch, but a vice in hand and handy supply is a happy peace of mind you only find with a few spare minutes to go out of your way and a few rare dollars to spare.
Instead, I am relearning how to sweat, mercifully alone in my apartment as sky dumps belly on Manhattan in first few humid 24 hour tours of early summer's foreshadows. I am not as calm as a bottle of scotch, to dip in as though dancing, so Instead it is two Löwenbräu hastily and impulsively bought from the bodega on whose rafts I ride out the tumult I feel and the tumult screaming in white sheets like wrathful wraiths more than restive casting shadows at stupid hours.
I hate to be alone.
And with so much yet to do at young to adolescent late hours too early posing as evening but still fooling me who likes to sleep and forget.
Evening, but not even and really never with mornings and days spent lopsided waylaid.

Tall, Willowy and the Violence of Feminine Abundance Manifest Paired as a Vaudeville Duo

The whole thing means that one day our whole form of courtship and the source of all our "coolness" will no longer be accessible to the kids.

Listening to the new AFX now, daring myself to be surprised- prerequisite behavioral mod for folding it into the grey matter- and dropping none-too-subtle references to an amazing album by the Folk Implosion, wherein Lou Barlow slinks with oily pipes "Insinuation really makes it happen"... cha cha cha.

(This one)

April 13

April 13th was Maundy Thursday, the feast day observing Christ's washing of the disciples' feet.

The Persistence of the Word

These hours, ever growing early, so also ever grow later. Merlin lived backwards in time, proceeding forever from an ancient state to a youth unfettered by our amnesiac births. We often, men, not characters in books, point ourselves on a line fixed in a conceptual and unknowable distance for the sake of our narrative conventions. The cult of the goal and the cult of purpose rule the stories we and our neighbors live out, nimbly avoiding any acknowledgment beyond technical instruction that these stories take advantage of arcs, zeniths, nadirs, azimuths. The lines these trains run, these words read in are curved, enclosed, and on occasion memory intrudes strongly and boorishly into inappropriate alphabetized chambers we occupy from morning till night. We live always on both sides of time, and memory, that dream we never wake from, proceeds ad infinitum, not stopped, but occurring as the grain of simultanagnosia in moments we have experienced and must always experience. We live in memory, memory ordered by privelege. Memory informs even the crossing of the apparently airless lock between experience and reaction. We hear the music first always on the ebb, always first meeting the ear at its most dramatic, thunderous, frightening. If you would dare to be so surprised as to forget yourself, hypnotised, moved to dream through your memories as you wake and let unfurl the languages you know according to the naturally inscribed laws of their expression- then you would find in that ebb and decline new grammars which are, to the one, the wake and tumult of retreat from order, but to the other the same declension is the verbing of nouns in a world in reaction unrelenting in moulting its names and the addresses of its names' stations. All tongues fold at the end in clover's fractal, and all fingers persist at the ends of arms in dreams in the extension of impossible motions. All languages, would that you could again forget, fold and bend like protein, each word recalling all the others it is piled upon and beside, advancing concurrent with all events that the word remembers, for the word remembers and is simultaneity.

Off

It's been some time since I posted anything here to coerce you. Those moments when I only want to sit down and write either haven't been coming or happen whilst whiling my time away at work.
No excuses, just talking to talk, to be in the practice.
If'n you haven't seen it, I recommend reading this.

Nassau by the Sea and Cake is one of those singular occurrences in the universe which will never again be repeated. As is the song noodling through my headphones right now, "A Summer Wasting" by Belle and Sebastian. To be an artist, to act always in the feline tense, to never stop in the sightless and distanceless oasis of Eliot's shadow between the deed thought and the deed acted, to act with such continuous suppleness and seamlessness between the self and the works and deeds of your hands and days is on par with the creation of a new class of celestial body, is to ignore all the established rules of physics and introduce a new and independent stranger who only coincidentally resembles some distant and removed cousin to the gluon or some other of the brood of that tiny populace that teems to make up the fabric of all of our assumptions as to the foundation of every reality.

...

A bit of a non-sequitur, but I love electronic music. Aphex Twin, under moniker AFX/Analord has compiled and released on cd a selection of tracks from his recently ended Analord vinyl series. I bit and ordered it. It hasn't arrived yet, but what I've heard of the Analord stuff I've liked very much. I got so excited about that that I got the Family Glue Global Goon album and soaked up the constantly surprising changes in production and sound that are James' trademark. Then I listened to most of the Richard D. James album. Then I spent an hour making popping static noises on my synthesizer.

I am always energized when I hear the stuff Aphex Twin comes up with- I am energized because I am always surprised, I am always faked out at every musical fork in the track, and new things are always proven possible in his production. The possibility, the endless and confusion profligance of possibility available in electronic music is why I love it. It is the possibility to create a sound that has never existed before and to blow your own mind, and if you're lucky, the mind of others with.

Today in history the first shots were fired in the civil war.

Arab Strap at Southpaw, 4/7/06

The Crazy Field

Using rudimentary image-composing skills, this is a visual description of what happens when you notice a crazy person and are pulled into their "crazy field."

Needs a Vacation.

Spent the day today up in the 80s in the Upper West Side. Spring is fully in swing here, all the trees are pushing out into the world with white flowers. The wider avenues up there were breezy and sunny. It was good to be where it is less crowded, where the crazies don't cram themselves will-he-nill-he to not share the streets with working stiffs like you, but actually work to occupy the spaces where you stand precisely. We came back down to the village after our relaxing field trip, found ourselves strolling behind a man holding court alone, arguing with voices, who stopped on the corner to get behind the two of us. Unnerving. As we crossed to the other side of the street to be away from him (on E 5th) he stopped his argument with the unheard suggestion maker, stopped his insistence that he just wanted to go home, that he was going to 233 E 5th St. and taking a left, but not these guys, not these guys- and began thanking us as we walked away. Or thanking something. Or just giving thanks.

Even the relative calm and the enormous palaces of the UWS were a welcome change to a spring that, as every year, finds the streets thronged with folks no longer just surviving a chill, but redoubling their efforts to be in your field of attention, in your space, and as crazy as a phalanx of March Hares.

It occurs to me now to pose the question- does the perennial reemergence of bedlam from hibernation like Persephone from the clutches of Hades come by the nomenclature of the March Hare purely through a flight of Lewis Carroll's fancy, or have Johannes Quotidian Publics throughout the slog of history been given pause to comment on the blossoming madness this season sprouts without fail, ushering the term earlier into the coded parlance reserved for the open secret of naming lunatics than the publication of Alice In Wonderland?

Whatever. Batshit crazies have hatched from their Easter eggs.

Sunday, Sunday- Someone Forgot to Mention You

Good afternoon. Another Sunday has fallen on us, another week has rippled by.
I've been listening to The Juan Maclean, Jimmy Edgar, Number Girl, and, man, man- who else? I'd love to get hold of the new Sondre Lerche. It also occurs to me that I have, late in the game, also been really enjoying Vitalic's OK Cowboy.
The Replacements are getting a best-of together and recording a few new tracks to throw on it, to boot. Mentioned everywhere else, why not here?
My new copy of Solaris came in the mail yesterday by recently passed visionary Stanislaw Lem:

"...Grastrom set out to demonstrate that the most abstract achievements of science, the most advanced theories and victories of mathematics represented nothing more than a stumbling, one or two-step progression from our rude, prehistoric, anthropomorphic understanding of the universe around us..."



My Pitchfork Music Festival tix arrived in the mail on Friday. My paycheck, however, did not.

Balls, what a switch!

What else? What else?

Added links in sidebar to friends of Coerce You, Who Can Get Fucked, Bearclaw, Holy Roman Empire, Wind or Ghost. These guys are such friends to Coerce You that Coerce You is touched. Friends are what make a website that pretends to make a person's individual point of view inherently important really special. You guys make each day pop, and you make me cooler.

Oh, hell yes. Yes. Hell of yes. More as it comes to me.

Sam Prekop and Archer Prewitt at Southpaw

Photos of the two Chicago auteurs playing last night at Southpaw sans rhythm or any other backup save each other. Excellent renditions of a few Sea and Cake songs were thrown in along with pretty much the whole new Prekop album. Do Now Fairly Well, Civilise, an oldie that I didn't know the name of but that was familiar to me, Midtown were all taken from the Sea and Cake songbook. The pretty, aspirated vocals, the jazz, the freshly complicated guitar lines, the mutant bossanova made me smile and sway.

This song is sexy.

"Pop the glock" by Uffie.

She's on Myspace I guess. Read about her on Bigstereo.

Last Friday I couldn't get in the shower in the morning. My soap and shampoo were in the downstairs bathroom, and that was where Michael Rother, kraut-rock pioneer of Neu!, Kraftwerk, and Harmonia (among other things) fame was performing his ablutions, blow-drying his grey hair.

Thursday before that I came home from work characteristically (of late) late, and Michael Rother was sitting on my couch with Josh slouched and watching something about disasters on the History Channel. I then went and had a glass of wine with Josh and Rother in the wine bar downstairs.

Saturday I saw Rother perform with a couple other musicians- one of whom was Ben from Secret Machines, and it blew my mind.

Tonight I came home and small talked with Rother again.

This post is just not bizarre enough to convey how surreal this is to me.

A kraut-rock pioneer, auteur and guitarist behind some of my favorite recordings of all time, has just been hanging out in my house for a week.

"De Luxe" (Harmonia)

Last night's dream was an encounter with the uncanny. In my grandmother's house, standing in the hallway upstairs, I looked into my grandfather's bedroom. There, where I always expect there to be, stood an apparition- but this was of myself, shirtless, long-haired, staring at me exactly as I look today. Seeing this doppelganger filled me with fear, provoking a response that was merely the repeated quaking accusation of its identity. It stood expressionless and stared at me ominously. I gasped the words, "It's me! It's me!", the "it" somehow meaning more than simply that unknown thing that stood before me, but instead signifying some other, more intimately familiar unknown. I struggled to wake as, in my dream, I descended the stair. Downstairs, waiting and staring up at me from the other side of the bannister with the same unnerving look, was the apparition. I could not wake and the phantom would not dissolve until I had come within range of it with my fists. When I swung at it, it vanished, and I awoke.