The Backbone of this Country is Independent Trucking

Oh- Oh yes.

The National: Alligator, Vamplifier: Long Silent Longing

The National: Alligator

The impulse when you come across something new is to try to hear something you've heard before. Your brain tries to put the pieces it finds into some understandable order. This recording is no exception. What do I want to compare this sound to? To the understatement and rhythm of Joy Division, to the repetitive prettiness of early Crooked Fingers. But there's a new complexity, there are epic, open spaces in the music where shit just goes nuts- pianos, guitars, background singers mixing with the lead. There are instances of delicate guitar work that eschew the whole Joy Division esthetic. Vocals like Neil Diamond, Ian Curtis, and Elvis packed together with lyrics which are the chronicle of a weird normality, a quotidian gothic. It's a recording that pulls you in to a new place, refracts you through a neglected facet of reality and makes you listen to accounts of things that simply refuse to rely on stock phraseology. Familiar words abut, and though the words are common enough, something in the arrangement requires all the power of your attention, like you've just walked in to a room where your best friend in the 4th grade is sitting there, unaging, in conversation with your grown children. Both are intimately familiar, but why HERE, why LIKE THIS?
What fury, what beauty. It's good.

Vamplifier: Long Silent Longing

I've been humming a lot of these songs and singing them to myself for the past couple of years. Now, finally, the cd is out and other people can get ahold of this great album and get hooked on these songs of obsession and love noir. Bluesy, garagey, pained, exalted. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a great nod to both the femme fatale and Gary Numan. She Used to Be my Baby is frenzied in its remembrance of one who got away and took a chunk with her. Every time I hear the words "She used to be my baby, she loved me maybe", I don't know whether to smile in the solidarity of shared experience or sit back and wonder one more time what the hell that one WAS thinking, really. Stripped. Filthy. Tight. Smokey. Just listen to this record.

Some CL ads I recently authored

http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/clt/69707630.html

http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/mis/69490174.html

http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/mis/69478070.html

Who fucking knew?

Fountains of Wayne do a cover of These Days. It's good. I'm not sure if anyone did it before her, but I know it as a Nico tune off of Chelsea Girls. Who knew?

My Dutch Wife!

Wild Anniemals Need Vodka, Are Very Polite

I just put on Magazine's "Permafrost," and as soon as the chorus line "I will drug you and fuck you on the permafrost" came up, I remembered I ought to write about my vanilla-mediated run-in with that cruel arctic clime last Thursday.
Saw the American debut of Norway's Annie at the glamorously packed Tribeca Grand Hotel by way of a free invite from a friend of a friend. Annie is a dancey, Kylie Minogue-y, Discoteque debutante with songs and moves endearingly clumsy and, as such, weirdly sexy. Imagine being Tom Hanks with Darrel Hannah nude as Venus standing in your living room making little girl noises and weird overtures to sex that you're not sure she- or you- understands. What is happening? You ask yourself. Then the mermaid pulls out a giant bottle of vodka and proceeds to drink half of it during her 5 or 6 song set. It's finally happening! the Tom Hanks you is forced to conclude. What do you do next? You scream "Play Heartbeat!" and attempt to dance ass to hip with the other early adopters, industry insiders and other types of sweating bodies while holding a messenger bag that you should have dropped off before going anywhere that night. Had a great time. Annie and her band do a good mix of European Giorgio Moroder disco revival replete with vocoders, Kylie Minogue coquetteishness, innocently direct overtures for sex and silly metaphors for aforementioned having lots of sex (see "Bubblegum"). Many thanks to my companion that evening, whose veteran scenester pushiness and unameliorated excitement at the prospect of seeing live music despite many unmoving bodies standing between her and the stage has imbued her with superpowers that turn her finely-lathed frame into some kind of mass surgical instrument/crowd drilling tool. Without her I would surely have pussed out and stood way back in the bar looking uncomfortable.
Annie was very polite.

A short note on personal responsibility

I just read that when John Lennon heard of Elvis's death, he was quoted as saying "Elvis died the day he went into the army."

We each have a responsibility to pax in perpetuity, do we not?

We each have a responsibility to our art.

why there are no guilty pleasures

Guilt is social. Pleasure isn't. Nothing is intrinsically guilt-inducing. Guilt is the internalization of external standards of moral trespass. Pleasure is automatic and can happen in absolute solitude, internally. A guilty pleasure is a combination of the internal self and external, social self, and it requires a decision, conscious or unconscious, to bring the detriment of guilt upon yourself. Guilt is the acceptance of a constructed social burden.
Guilt also differs from regret, because there are no overtly moral "should" or "should not" overtones, only "it would have been better" or "it would not have been better" given the particular context of reflection.

The Ease of Summer

Sam Prekop/Who's Your New Professor

Thrilljockey
Sam Prekop drives a big Mack truck of skill and arcane science through the leaden latent summer air like a faith healer through flesh. The summer. Remember those days of short pants, breasts, and near-naked spontaneity that taught you to ride a bike, that taught you to count your near friends and your free times dear, that taught you to throw a frisbee amid transplanted city girls on the Great Lawn at Central Park? Remember the simple slide into evening viewed through a slice of cooling humidity in the air? Remember easy living?
Deep in your heart, you know life isn't that simple, but if you take it fast enough and with enough gusto, if you take it all of an experiential piece, you can play along with yourself, pretend all those eighth-notes and off-beats, the algorithmic thrumming of your soul, the train under the street, the millions of obligations forgiven and enforced all around you really are simple and wonderful of themselves. With Who's Your Professor, Prekop brings all that to you at one more remove, stylizing it with his desperate-yet-unfettered aspirated vocals and refining it invisibly for you to take in the ludicrous gestalt of life refined as an essence for the ear, eighth-notes, off-beats, and high-energy jazz-hinting flourishes all. The very muted electronics and the unmistakable production give you at one and the same time the impression that it's a work of staggering simplicity and subtle, tweaked genius. And the guitar solo that reserved the long banquet hall for a couple of hours at the end of Dot Eye lacadaisically shoots a long snort of beatific lightning into your lobes. Imagine a "She's Not There" Carlos Santana working an electric guitar alseep inside a Picasso hanging on a wall inside the dream inside Garcia-Marquez's Eyes of a Blue Dog.
And I haven't even figured out what he's singing yet. This album is getting played all spring, all summer, all "all night," to invoke the poetic time/space the Breeders sing about on Last Splash. This is one for the record books.

caramel Krunch!

If none of you have tried this, you simply must.

Desperation is my alarm clock

If I say I'm getting up at 7:00, I'll be up at five with the lowing of curses from the payphones outside. The guy on the other end is gonna screw his bro' and they're caught, they're caught. The one on the street says he should never have opened his big mouth.

Kind of an old one about living in Uptown in Minneapolis

Been busy. Haven't been able to post, really. Thought I'd air this one out.



Breathing bits and pieces of heat
Stunned daily
In recovery from and awaiting
Deeply religious experience.
Slack-jawed and vapid
Clawing at walking
And failing
Clawing at drinking
And failing well
Falling well short of expectations
Making do as though it’s the vogue

Clawing at running downhill
Desperate even in gravity’s good company
Failing miserably
And wondering at it

Uptown, you’re a suspect bitch

On Hennepin a spaghetti of veins and ink of
Skinny punk rock pasta
Dimming bulbs

Green as anything
As the people in it
Wet behind the ears
In uptown fallacious
Slumming it
Like a rock star

Here with my membership card
Me and lifestyle, boy
Hand in hand we’ll rock the party
In punch-drunk
Hungover
Uptown
We’re hanging up our watches
And stopping the clocks

weird cold dream update

Last night I dreamt about reanimated animals made to run around and play just as though they were alive through some revolutionary form of taxidermy. Temporary process and, as no one knew what energy source they were drawing on, no one knew how temporary.

Somehow associated with this was my going to some remote mountain town and tracking down my high school girlfriend, who had a shoebox full of my things and letters she had penned but never sent to me. And a reanimated kitten that, it made sense to think at the time, was reanimated so it could be posed more realistically dressed as a cowboy and riding another animal. It got away and started chasing something. I said, "It's so energetic." She said, "It's not energetic. It's dead."
There were some other things to do with a central-park type place at night, but can't remember them.

松本のどこか

ありがとう奈美。

the dipshic say the luv won't stop

The folks outside on First Ave
Screaming into the payphones
making their demands
clear as knives
in the name of love
for the love of god
in the name of love
they perpetrate a great deal of need and hate
they won't walk away, each from the other
they're screaming
I'm here
I'm here
you dirty motherfucker
now come pick me up

if you find that you're unstoppable...

If a blonde girl from Texas
Can wash under my lips
There is only some small piece of future
Before the whole branded world
Falls beneath the total acceptance of my embrace

Whipping Through It

Get Used

BoingBoing has pointed this out:
Cory Doctorow: Many readers have written to point out that AOL's new Terms of Service for AIM "include the right for AOL to use anything and everything you send through AIM in any way they see fit, without informing you. A sample passage: '...by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy.'"

Wonder what service I'll start using. So much of this depends on a network of friends who actually use the same tech you do. i.e. why cell phones here still suck.

Here's the link.

Universal Pussy

If I might-
Chicks on Speed made a really great song, but, if I might, with Universal Pussy, on 99 cents, they show that they maybe didn't know how they came about all their other great songs before that 2003 album.
It's a great song. It's a great in-your-face thing. The production tells me, as a home electro entrepreneur, that the chix are re-learning their whole schtick. It's good and it's heartening.

Hooray for chicx.

Lktrk

A neon cross with an erection
let this be my reflection
a representation of the divinity of my hard-on for you.
Number 1!

Why Nabokov Means Bad News

David Byrne showed some Powerpoint slides created as satires of the information-expressing capabilities of Powerpoint that were expressing the plots and nuances of great works of literature and culture in Powerpoint's unrefined, low-resolution style. They were funny. One of the works he picked to flash up on the screen before us before moving on was Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. It was nearly incomprehensible.

Before I go any further, Nabokov is pronounced Na-BOE-kuv, with the second vowel stressed and long.

I mentioned that I thought the slide was incomprehensible in my consumer culture class on Thursday, prompting the question from the prof as to whether I had ever read the book. I said that no, I hadn't, that I'd read a part of it, but for the most part I have a special aversion to Nabokov. But I wasn't able to say this before a certain female in the room spoke up with her ringing endorsement of the text as a wonderful piece of lit.

My aversion to Nabokov is not a direct result of his work in and of itself. It is more to do with the type of women he seems to appeal to and therefore tends to remind me of. What type of woman is this, you ask? It is the woman who knows exactly what she is doing. She lives for power in any situation and eschews all sincere contact. She lives for attention and the manipulation of any situation for maximum long-term attention and the reception of maximum personal benefit by means of that long-term lavishing of attention. They are the women who want to be Lolita, who, above all else, though they don't know it themselves, though they simply have an overpowering sexual appetite for him, want to destroy Nabokov, the man who sees through them and thus is the only man with power over them. Men like these are the only ones that such women will actively pursue.

I'm going to go have a beer. Ciao.