I finally managed to get my hands on all of the '1981' mixes on Musicophilia; after a year versus our connections. "Computer" ends up being a pretty good introduction with at least three songs on there that you can already hum and basically then everything else infectious; right now, my favorite thing on the disc is Blue Nile's "I Love This Life," which isn't on Youtube and is nimble and fractured in ways that this song really isn't at all. This is still one of those bands I'm going to think pretty hard about.
This band was on "Ice," which was the first of the 1981 mixes I was able to piece together; the first song here and "Our Secret" are highlights. Lately I've had this thing for upbeat lyrics in dread-inducing music (see also.) The logical end to this is somebody lowering a boombox into a well and playing "You're The Best Around" to someone lying at the bottom with broken legs.
This is the first album in years (the last one was either Funeral or Still Bill) that I've felt okay about sticking on repeat for hours. I am fairly impressed that they were able to produce this themselves, at 21, and sound that stark. And I can't think of another "indie" record that uses sub bass at all. Can you guys?
My new roommate pissed on the carpet. I woke up at about 5am, he had his back to me; I asked him to take it to the bathroom, he said "but the toilet is ...over there" and kept pissing, putting a hand on my laptop to stabilize himself, then going back to sleep. I thought about murder, kicking him in the balls, him turning around and me getting pissed on. Thought about what I would go to jail for--not this, I guess. I sat up an hour later and he looked extremely relaxed--his neck as exposed as possible, stubble tracing a line to cut on. I talked to him like an hour ago, fists clenched; he went white and said he thought he had dreamed it.
When I get old and forgetful, I'm gonna be able to find the exact moment I soured on roommates. The day I lost my virginity, I just put some bassline talk up, but I am going to remember this, hell yes
And Rob Da Bank's shoegaze mix, which manages to put the best Slowdive song on most days right next to the best Lush song on most days. That there are only like twenty five or thirty OG shoegaze bands, with only enough CDs between them to fill a shoe box, does not diminish the selection.
It was a pretty awesome night, guys Current Mood: drained
Due to all the moving around I did, I only have the slightest idea why any of this is my 'thing,' but pretty much this track is the best thing to come out the year and to not hear it blaring out every window is proof that we will die apart as fools, etc. ( Read more... )
11:28 am - Happy New Year I got to use my computer for eight hours (broken DVD drive, constant restarts) before something entirely new went wrong (backlight of monitor conked out.) When you buy Gateway, you are not just buying a computer, you are also buying a little bundle of unsolvable problems.
05:15 pm I am actually in Death Valley now, twenty months after talking about it so glowingly. I stayed in Zion until last October, until I could use a Daft Punk concert as an excuse to get out. I spent seven months at the south rim of the Grand Canyon, with all the convinences of the city--a library, plentiful Internet, a cemetary--and kept walking around the edge of the canyon, walked out and back to the nearest city twice, got myself driven out to Flagstaff every time I thought I could afford it. I met awesome people and saw the world at a ridiculous scope, but I don't think I've ever lived so stupidly, as directionless as I did there. There are some voice posts from there that I can remember re-recording like a dozen times, fingers numbing up, but I can just barely remember what I was talking about.
I transferred out to Rocky Mountain, that was a little better. After two months, one of my freegan roommates started screaming the Hare Krishna chant at the walls, interspersed with a ragged "shut UP" the first day and prayers to fairys (faeries?) subsequently. I decided she could win this one, moved into the next open room. A week later, the woman quit; a visit to the veteran's hospital, the discovery of breast cancer. Breast cancer is horrible. Even more horrible than grinning when you hear someone has it.
As for Death Valley: the nearest town is, appropriately, a ghost town; an "opera house" that isn't ever sounded. Pahrump, the town before that, is a straight line with a Wal-Mart in the center, and the town before that is Las Vegas. Someone punched a hole in my closet door and stuck a flag there, at an angle, a memorial to fucking stupid. In the closet was a cheap calculator with battery and solar settings--the batteries in case of a nuclear winter? I'm pretty sure the flag and the calculator don't belong to my current roommate--the luggage on the floor says "Aubery Faust," so either sulphur or a bodice is tearing through the air--but other things, the Sauza-branded mixer and the two TVs, are harder to pin down. The land is beautiful; ten miles in and it feels like I've already seen all the colors of sand rising up, cohering into thorny peaks. Maybe this is the heat talking, stay tuned
I read A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, his first essay book, during the summer of 2002; I was supposed to be getting a job but it didn't feel as imperative as snarling at his tennis anecdotes, chuckling over his giving Frank Conroy shit for writing a brochure, going through the whole David Lynch article, maybe the most heavily footnoted, in one sitting.
In 2006, I was at the north rim of the Grand Canyon and my uncle, who was moving to Seattle, switching jobs, getting ready for a baby, still found time to send me a copy of Infinite Jest, along with a pretty crucial guide. I read about five hundred pages in a month, intermittently, and then I got nervy about having this book the size of my head staring me in the face every day and knocked the rest of it off in a weekend. One of the ways that the book is "infinite" is that it starts in media res for like forty pages, and then winds back to the actual story--if you actually took the plot apart and set it on one of those three-act slope things, you find that the book's climactic events are never actually depicted. It also like seventy pages of footnotes, which concealed an intimidating amount of drug knowledge and an awesome, Pynchonesque filmography that slowly builds towards inducing terrifying physiological responses.
(I talked a little bit about it with a coworker--she'd apparently read every other DFW book and found him hilarious. I raised my eyebrows. She was teaching somewhere in Africa; she would tell them about Marcel Duchamp, and then go back and explain toilets. I kinda wish I was in touch.)
When I finished Infinite Jest, I was glad that somebody on the literary scene still taking big formal risks, still pursuing their own decadent and faintly perverse ambitions, and who was also a figure who people were likely to find common ground on, who you could chat about while you were eating lunch. Who lives who can take this place?
12:53 am - Happy birthday, John--a quote "Another suspect was the ringleader of the Lobster Circus, who lashed at a wagon-ring of these unresponsive creatures as though at the advancing spawn of the devil. 'The time will come,' he announced, 'when these mothers will be silent.' And at that he laid the whip into a lobster positioned side-on to him, breaking it in half.
[...]
Skychum felt light, relieved. He had acquitted himself with honour. He enjoyed the jelly and ice-cream feast set up for the contestants backstage. Even the chimp's food-flinging antics made him smile. He approached the winner with goodwill. 'Congratulations sir. Those lobsters of yours are a brutal threat to mankind.'
The winner looked mournfully up at him. 'I love them,' he whispered, and was swept away backwards by the make-up crew."
11:36 pm - The 2007 longeur, to get this going again I'm not in Death Valley. I'm at the south rim of the Grand Canyon, working at a job where the clear highlight of my work is staring out the windows and the best part about my day is that the sun will set. The pay is worse, people stay here for decades, shoveling snow, out of inertia, the food costs actual money instead of being magically whisked out of my pay.
My first roommate looked unnervingly like me, but could not stop talking shit, once played me songs of faith with an acoustic guitar and a voice like a bee trapped in a jar. He was mind-bogglingly paranoid. Someone was always out to get him, possibly because he would not stop going into public areas and arguing vigorously and unjustlly with the drunk. After two weeks of me staring angrily at him, he tried to get out of the dorm but just ended up moving across the hall. My second roommate was amiable enough--if you're thirty years old and still buying boxes of Natural Ice, you're gonna be sociable in some odd way--but I wasn't, and I think I also scared him off.
There's an Internet connection in my room, and I am slowly siphoning off the media I will want to drag out into the desert wastes. I am still resolved towards Death Valley, this summer, towards possibly cooking an organ just by staying outside long enough. They have an outdoor pool! Maybe I'll see it boil.
02:06 am - Post #600; I celebrate with math It doesn't look like I could ever be bothered with previous milestones, but I've recently downloaded ljArchive (around post 598.) There's probably not enough data to provide a representative sample or anything, but I'm still interested in the "Regressive Entry Analysis." I actually believe in this stuff is useful and valuable, although a few of the matricies seem to be fucked ("dream," "sleep," and "wake" should have a better heading to go under than "consciousness alteration," which is too preciously early-70s, and the inclusion of the word "desert" under the "voyage" heading is too Jungian to be any good. A lot of the assumptions behind this break down when a journal's being used to describe events, but ...it's a neat trick.)
( Stats ) ( The highlights of the past ) Current Mood: ask yourself: when will my time come? Current Music: has it all been said and done?
12:25 am - SURROUNDINGS The day after I typed the last entries, I got all the wacky customers, the ones these days I'm almost positive get cherry-picked for some dumb Internetted-up anecdote. As ever, I take more issue with my co-workers.
I don't remember what I told you all about the Grand Canyon. I'm pretty sure I never said anything about Bryce Canyon. I'll try to keep this forward.
CURRENT: Contract term of 11/15/06-05/02/07; showed up a day early, through misunderstanding. A five mile walk/fifteen minute drive to the nearest post office. Thanks to tight canyon walls, cellular reception has passed from legend to myth. We had a month or so where I had to go fetal for warmth, layered up with every blanket carefully arranged and my feet knees up to my chin, but it's been very clement this month. Animals are everywhere; deer lounging around the hills near employee cabins, turkeys rut near the park lodge, ring-tailed cats and foxes get out of the way before you're positive where you'll go. A bird in a parrotish range of blues and greens touched down in front of me today, hopped once, and then took off with a wide, sideways curve. For a while, the kitchen staff was affectionately feeding a skunk right next to their dumpster; it had a crazy-eyed, pointed face I'd previously associated with over-groomed dogs. At times, this park has appealed to misplaced pastoral impulses, even to the desire to anthropomorphize, in ways that the Grand Canyon didn't--I spent about five or ten minutes, after a walk back from the post office, watching two ducks negotiating their way down the river, one ahead of the other, the one ahead moving with more assurance, the other jerking its head around. I want to think that the one in back was learning, but restrain the thought at every turn, even and especially now. The landscape is widely varied, but there is never a sense of a wide-open space; I'm often conscious of being "boxed in" in ways that I did not feel from other boundaries (ie. the Grand Canyon's long, uneven drops.) I'm in a job with little responsibility, zero chance of advancement, and an increasing drift towards patronization and intrigue. Business-wise, the government essentially forces us to lose money for a few months; I can catch up on reading while imagining what an arriving customer might look like, or while thinking about the three or four couples who've came. I talk with almost everyone, feel close to no one. Most of the people I liked from the North Rim tend towards complaining that there's nothing to do, which I am repulsed by. Every woman working here is married, although I can think of one at the moment who's still flirty. New faces arrive in three weeks, and with this averaging effect and a chance to equivocate I might feel better about the people I work with.
FUTURE: Contract term 05/15/07- . You can hook up a land line, if you're lucky. Animals, if descriptions are to be believed, are myriad and murderous; towels should line room openings to (divert? / capture?) scorpions. Spiders (according to a cackling shithead) will jump to and eat low-flying birds. July, I think, has an average temperature in the high hundred and tens, and last year's high of a hundred and twenty five. (For context, I remember crossing the Arizona/California border when it was about one hundred and ten; standing outside and breathing was a parching, counter-instinctual act. One of the big reasons I want to go there is because I cannot articulate what, exactly, the problem felt like, or what a problem a magnitude or so larger entails. (Also, there's a swimming pool; I imagine it boiling, without people.)) There's a lot of space, a lot of beauty, which in the summer is mostly experienced during rushes from air conditioner to air conditioner. Also slow going at the job, possibly due to mid-road combustion and melting. I go in strange, although veterans of the North Rim and Bryce Canyon will turn up around late October/early November, when it's gone down to the low 90s. "Town" (that usually equals "a Wal-Mart," to us, possibly now to most) is an hour away, Las Vegas two.
The one sign that lies over my bed is a "Fishwatcher's Field Guide," full of exotic names and deep, stirring colors; scrawled filefish, rock hind, honey damselfish, blue chromis. No fish with a color in its name was named lazily, I know from years back that that really is the first thing you'd reflect on. (Nostalgia is rearing; can I turn this around?) One of my big reasons for going to these places, the one that quells most of my irritance at the food and the isolation, is to get the same kind of visual shocks; so it interests me that I'm taking this next assignment mostly to see how livable the heat is, to what degree I can press on in it.
02:12 am Of course, I can type like that and still feel embarrassed at listening to DEPECHE MODE. Current Mood: with ever-y thought Current Music: and with ever-y breath
01:20 am - No idea--picked up my mail today Got the most recent Steve Aylett book, "Fain the Sorcerer," today--it's way more subdued, but still as good as previous works. Not every line crackles with an aside or joke but those that do lie with a greater weight; more importantly, instead of just being this book of blind, antic misanthropes, it's actually got a plot that shows understanding and sympathy as something inevitable with time. And basically every book I've liked lately does this; The Known World, Little, Big, The Colour of Memory, even Leave It To Psmith (man, especially that--the Wodehousian tropes and styles are such that you can basically forgive any action) all seem to come down with people becoming wiser. It's nothing I would have noticed a year ago, but now it seems like the only thing.
I can see the opposite, a lack of understanding, too--I whiled away one January afternoon reading an abandoned copy of 50 Cent's autobiography, which is never reflective--you read it and think that this was just a straight recollection of how he was organizing his thoughts and making his own life sensible to himself, without any reflection really, without even being able to comment on the weirdness of outrunning the police on a motorcycle and then dressing in drag, straight up Billy Wilder style (if 50 is going to talk about using "the Weird Al Yankovich method," I have no compunctions about using this reference,) to evade the cops. There's just a very linear way of explaining how he lived, a structure that can't help but support triumphant come-ups and a thick, silky gloss over any unpleasantness that you might have perpetuated on your lonesome.
This is a drunken way of saying that I'll be trying to make entries regularly from now on, that I have been reading; it could also be something about how disconsolate I am about this Valentine's Day, but this holiday is just barely sensible for me these days. Back in 2000, I can recall being strident about this Valentine's Day, all of the pink hearts and getting people to take a picture of me chewing on a construction paper heart--why, girls stopped me in the mall to talk this over, one was even expressing some admiration. Now, who knows? I guess I'm for love? Dang.
Stay tuned for further self-abasement (edited: I can't honestly pretense towards dignity when I've got those BADGES OF SHAME still kicking around from a few years ago,) a knowledge of what better people have done without the courage to build on what they do, self-loathing galore, maybe the occasional chunk of fiction, me linking to blog posts squarely within my own political persuasions and spluttering with horror at the latest news. I've been listening to this "dubstep" lately with the kind of fascination I used to reserve for my first tapes, so this Internetted diary may become a little MP3-heavy soon. My uncle sent me Paramahanoa Yogananda's "Autobiography of a Yogi," which is full of attempts to reconcile Buddhism and Christianity but also rife with deeply enlightened people punching out tigers--and so I will also take odds on a Buddhist-related crack-up, or a sketchy trip to Southeast Asia within a year. Life is just stuffed full of surprises. Current Music: Depeche Mode - I Want You Now
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flicker's journal
