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.

Meet the Band

You can stand next to the people you may like to be.

Will this change anyone?

A simple equation will tell us.

+


=

or



Clearly, all the results are likely to be mixed, but can be counted on to lean heavily toward confused inner turmoil whilst dressed in suits or outward displays of obvious identity issues.

Who is this guy?

Yeah, it happens to some of the best of us, I guess- putting us out of the running for that select group of people who would simply be "the best of us," the qualifying term "some" mercifully absent from the prologues to their terms of vaguest grouping. Bacchanalia is good for putting yourself outside of the things, the Catholicism, the morbid pasts, the unwhole and unwholesome reflections that revisit from time to time, hiccup memories of a different self set to chastise the current, worldly you in quiet moments when the hive-mind connection isn't being used for downloading porn, loving someone, moving forward. But bacchanalia is a medium, set in place millions of years ago by the ur-cells when they were still thinking about getting together with these "mitochondrian" guys, still considering a strategic alliance to assert their permanent physicality in contradistinction to the spiritual world they were the pumping and oozing self-reflections of. Forgetfulness...
Oh, Lethe.
Step outside yourself and move ahead, but the important step you eventually cut the corners from (speed and sleek achievement of desired effect; as above, so in the corporeal below- remember the cellular dream imperative!): Remember to bring yourself along.

I have left hundreds of impressions on people, I have spoken from my soul over and over as a reflex, but the words press out ahead of my bread-crumb man who sits soaking up the leavings of his yeast brothers somewhere behind the tight column of meanings faster than the light that sighs forward in a free rage from the headlights of the rented automobile we escape in.

I am forgetting things, or people are remembering the parts of me they know are important for me, while I remember only the parts of myself that know where to find my next drink.

Was it in summer of 2004? Who is this man and what is he thinking about? What conclusions did he come to, what thunderclaps did he cleave the virgin souls of the assembled with when he broke his reverie and decided it was time to speak?



It becomes so frighteningly easy, as I become older, to internalize the lack of regard I think others must have for me... no one's listening, and I just have all these sermons on the mount to pass my time discarding. An unremembering shell that my words continue to echo out of in search of new bodies, new lives.

Oh, memory. Will you help me to remember, once in awhile, to stop and talk to myself?

When It Means Something to People

I like when people put something out in the world that means something to them. I like it when they do it only because it means something to them. They do it not because it will aggrandize* (*embiggen) them, but because, hey, here with the going there and waking up sometimes late or sometimes with no place to be, always flush with cash and slick with slit or almost as oft skint and friendless queued up so's to wait for the next do-right to jump the line or line-jumping for ghastly utopian principles that will pay their dividends not in grudges but in pure cash money future for all babes, puppies, and bumblebees kind of world we live in, for some people life just ain't so simple that it's all about constant self-PR work. I like reading something someone wrote that was uncensored and unfiltered from inception to inscription because it was a thought. I like it when someone is so surprised that they have learned something from life that they just say it. I like when this kind of thing surprises someone else, and suddenly two people have a reason to support each other. I like when people can make lasting friends whose acquaintance is valuable beyond expiry and beyond cheap commodity just because of the way one has of batting an eye after their particular fashion in the opinion of another. I like it when people come out of their ruse-goldberg contraptions and show you who they are un-self-consciously, uncalculatingly.

I guess I should get to what prompted me to write this.
I like The Life Pursuit.
I like that when I listen to this record I want to spout about sincerity.

"The Life Pursuit" (Belle & Sebastian)

Similarities

The new Prefuse 73 cd, "Security Screenings", has a cover remarkably similar to the old Coil cd, "Love's Secret Domain".

Just saying.

Compare for yourselves:






Man. Funny how a little trick of meshing neurons will get you back into music you haven't listened to in years. That is all.

We pillory the fading, terminal impulses of the day, for if we shouldn't postpone them once and for all, at the very least we stretch them out that much longer.

Terminator T9 Wants Me to Say "Hangover Home"

Hangover home, exclamation point, it's what my Fighters stick it out, poking tiny buttons better suited for speaking in math (thansk, Rajiohdea), but did I saw taht?

I cunt mean ot.

won't anything come out right again? The tech has its own designs, but whose were they first?

And what will it have me say next?

Rain, My Spending Habits

It's raining this morning in New York. It's early February, and it doesn't look like it's getting cold anytime soon. I used to reassure myself that the climactic change wasn't really happening- it always seemed like the cold bit of winter had just been pushed a month or so further into the year. This year, however, the doomsayers are are attractive to me like a middle-aged fellow's crises-beset divorcee's genuflection at the altar of fresh nubility is to him.
That's right. I am tempted to believe THE END IS NEAR as much as that balding guy who just split with his wife wants to give a girl in high school his wife's cold sores.
Rain is shitty. But, so are the sidewalks, so I guess we need some.

I had a refund for some stuff on Amazon I got to use yesterday- replaced a borrowed book with a nice library copy, hardcover with dust jacket. Got the yet-to-be-released Belle and Sebastian, a new Polysics record (I have Neu! and For Young Electric Pop, but I think FYEP was released under a different title in the states). I also got "Musique Automatique" (Stereo Total)
by Stereo Total, because I couldn't think of anything else to get.

ephemera:
-Craig Finn from The Hold Steady does a cameo on a P.O.S. (Minneapolis Hip-Hop) song.
-Egon Schiele exhibition at Neue Gallery is really good.
-currently reading Innocents Abroad by Twain.

-There is a new Morrissey track leaked
-There is a new Sufjan Stevens track leaked

Definition: BEDIZENED

From the OED- "Dressed up with vulgar finery."