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When I was 14 or 15 the internet girlfriend of Mark Sam Olynciw sent me some LSD tabs wrapped up in gum wrappers through the United States Postal Service. I didn’t think they’d ever get to me, but they did.

This guy, Mark Olynciw, was the biggest douchebag I ever knew back then, and he and I had little flame wars between our websites—mine was ElectricBiscuit.com and his was Riothero.com. I considered him hugely pretentious, constantly trying to write about shit that sounded smart while I was just all about speaking my mind and trying to piss people off by doing it. I’d discover that he’d be stealing the things people said from other websites or from books and posting them on his blog—which was always more popular than mine at the time which pissed me off quite a bit—as if they were his own, so I’d call him out.

One of the best things he ever did was steal the entire design template from an MTV webpage about Radiohead—which was back when Radiohead was releasing Kid A and the hype around it was absolutely huge—and fiddle with it so it would be the design of his blog, except he didn’t bother to give any credit to where he got it from, so I called him out, and then we got into another flame war and he’d go off about how it didn’t matter.

Him and his stupid little internet girlfriend would call my house and pose as interviewers and ask me completely innocuous questions that I would answer honestly because I didn’t give a crap, and then they’d start giggling like they were pulling a fast one on me by asking me about my TV watching habits and I would just be like, “Seriously? This is funny to you guys? Don’t you realize you’re just wasting YOUR time?” If this was happening to me these days I would say, “Come on, you’re letting the terrorists win,” but this was back before the word “terrorist” was in the forefront vernacular of every American.

It’s been 11 years since those days but it’s obvious that I forget absolutely nothing. What’s even funnier is that if you look at the source of riothero.com right now he’s still doing the same thing; he’s commented out the credit for where he got the template from. He’s not even using the website but he’s still careful to make sure people don’t know that he’s not making the shit himself. Some things never change, Mark! Glad to see you’re still a douche nozzle!

Anyway, I took two tabs of this really weak LSD that this girl sent me and it didn’t do anything after an hour. I started talking to another online friend of mine, whose name I can’t remember and whose website I can’t remember and so I have to point out how isn’t it funny that you remember your enemies better than you remember your friends, and he was like, “It’s probably some weak shit, put two more under your tongue and let me know what happens,” so I did, and an hour later nothing happened, so he told me to just put the last four or so under my tongue and let them fully dissolve and see what happens.

About half an hour later I WAS TRIPPING BALLS. My monitor started swirling around, and I could still type so I was like, “DUDE I AM TRIPPING BALLS!” so he told me to put on some music, and at the time I was listening to a lot of industrial dance music, which I realize now is an easy way to say “psuedo-wannabe-industrial shit that is completely neutered and mostly retarded”, and I loved this song Orange Moon so I put it on and it became the soundtrack for my entire trip. I didn’t want to put anything else on for fear of ruining the awesome feelings it was giving me, so I just put it on loop.

It played even when I crawled out of my bathroom window and laid in the grass outside my house staring up at the trees, which were swaying gently in the breeze, which was making the branches cast waves through the night sky, which was full of millions of stars, more stars than I had ever seen in my life, and they were all moving in and out of each other, like there were three different planes of stars and they were each undulating, moving in and out of each other. It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen in my life.

Pretty much everything I saw that night was the most amazing thing I had seen in my life up til that point (I had yet to have sex or even see a naked woman in person, much less have one under me moaning with the pleasure I was inflicting upon her, so my point of reference at the time was relatively limited) and I crawled back in my window to grab my digital camera, and then started taking pictures of the amazing things I was seeing. At one point I climbed up onto a brick wall and precariously balanced on it while leaning over several feet and holding onto the roof just to snap a picture of some power lines—and now it occurs to me this is probably how people on acid seriously injure themselves.

The next day when I sobered up and looked at the pictures, I was disappointed to see that they were just pictures of grass, of tree bark really up close and entirely out of focus, and of the corner of the roof of my house. I still felt a little funny, though, like I was enlightened in some way, and I don’t mean in the spiritual sense, but my body actually felt lighter, like some weight had been lifted off my shoulders, not a metaphorical burden, but an actual weight.

I only wish I had been older, and more capable of holding onto that feeling. My memories of my one LSD experience are distant now and I can hardly remember how I really felt at the time. It’s as if the experience wasn’t mine, but one that was told to me so many times by a friend that I’ve begun to be able to tell it myself in such a way that it feels in my head as if I was experiencing it myself.

I listen to Orange Moon now and I have no recollection of the way it made me feel, just the vague memory that it made me feel like I was full of pure joy. The angst and depression I was loaded with when I was 15 temporarily melted away and for a couple of hours I cared about nothing else in the world but how absolutely beautiful it all was, and afterward it didn’t matter that it was all a hallucination, knowing that didn’t diminish the experience at all.

You know what… anyone got any LSD they want to send me through the mail?

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Australian 20 year old “Pogo” crafted an short EP of electronic tracks composed mostly solely out of samples from Alice in Wonderland. That’s all you really need to know about this. First track “Alice” is the clear standout and I discovered it thanks to this amazing thing which uses Pogo’s cool as shit YouTube video and stacks it and layers in such a way that if you are stoned, or even if you aren’t stoned, you will trip balls on how absolutely incredible it is.

I’m going to link to that a few more times because you should really check it out because it is so awesome.

If you click on the album art above you can go to Last.FM, where you can download all four songs off the EP for free. This isn’t awe-inspiring stuff, but it feels great and both Alice and this track Lost have worked their way into my regular rotation and they should be in yours too. Add a little whimsy to every day.

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Back before my freshman year of high school a little independent film came out called The Blair Witch Project. I’d say most people hear the title of this movie and they groan, usually about how terrible it was, but before most people thought it was terrible, a lot of people thought it was amazing and absolutely ground breaking. I saw it the second day of limited release, back when people still thought it might be real due to the clever marketing campaign that just blatantly lied to people and said that it was found footage. I was probably the only person in the sold out theater who knew it wasn’t real, but by the end of the movie I was scared shitless. I had just witnessed the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen in my life.

I think a lot of it was to do with the fact that my 14 year old mind had been heavily saturated with first person shooter games over the last four years, starting with Wolfenstein 3D for the SNES when I was 9, Doom for SNES when I was 10, Doom II for Windows 95 and Quake when I was 11 and so on. In short, I think my little brain was acclimated to seeing things in the first person perspective and being completely immersed in them, so when the final section of Blair Witch happened, and I was second to the front row so that the screen was the only thing I could see, and they started running through that house with the cameras as if they were their only eyes, it wasn’t them in that house, it was me and what happened to them didn’t happen to them, it happened to me.

I couldn’t talk for a few hours after seeing it. When I got home I just laid down on my floor for a while. I couldn’t even articulate in my head why I was so scared by it. It just moved me on some primal level, and I became an immediate fan.

I started up a website at BlairWoods.com and begun compiling all the information I could on the film. I hunted down interviews in magazines and newspapers, and slowly brought together all the information into one large dossier including how they found the actors, how much they paid them, what gear they used, how they used a pre-programmed GPS unit to move between checkpoints that the directors would stock with small amounts of food and secret notes for each actor on how they should behave. I still remember a lot of it: the actors were absolutely alone in the woods for days, by the end of the shoot they were living off an apple a day, seriously starving in order to make their performances more convincing, that they improvised certain things like when Mike threw the map away. A lot of this info is now on the wikipedia page for the movie.

The highlight of all this for me was that my website got mentioned in an article that was syndicated in newspapers around the country. I still have a copy of the Los Angeles Times with a reference to BlairWoods.com right on the front page of whatever section it was. Pretty cool for a 14 year old. The only downside was that I never had any sort of advertising on the website, this was back before Google got into the advertising business or was at all relevant. I remembered applying to be a part of UGO but they shot me down. Oh well.

This song was included on the faux-soundtrack for the movie called Josh’s Blair Witch Mix which mostly sucked.

For the record, The Blair Witch Project is 5,000 times better than that Paranormal Activity bullshit with it’s stupid generic horror movie The Ring-like bullshit ending.

Listen and Download @ http://thedemise.staires.org

Back in June of 2008 I was asked to throw together a muxtape of music by my long-time twitter friend @leftsider that was representative of my ‘taste’ in music. At the time I was going through a lot of ridiculous emo bullshit because this dumb whore up in San Jose was fucking around with my heart and I was being a dumb piece of shit who didn’t want to realize how awesome he was and dump the cunt, so I put together this really sorrowful 12-track playlist.

Back when muxtape was operating as a free-for-all playlist maker, they limited you to 12 tracks, which is why this is much shorter than any other mixtape I’ve put up. It’s been a few months since I’ve made a long running playlist, and I’ve been slowly working on a couple in my head and just need to sit down and do them (one will hopefully be a small history lesson, tracking the origin and progression of psychedelia over the last four decades that I’ve been wanting to do for about six months now, and the other will be a “get pumped up and fuck shit up” playlist) but in the meantime I figured I’d put this one up, ’cause I just stumbled on it.

I listened to it last night and with a few exceptions, the mood of it is quite consistent. Vampire Weekend’s Bryn doesn’t really belong at all. The Dresden Dolls’ The Gardener runs two minutes too long to be acceptable for a mixtape and could be successfully replaced with better album cut The Mouse and the Model. 16 Horsepower’s Outlaw Song is one of my favorite songs of all time but doesn’t fit the theme at all… It’s obvious I just threw this together before I had any inklings of taking playlist/mixtape construction “seriously” (it’s surprising even to me how seriously I take it now).

Either way, a lot of good stuff on here. Bottom of the Hudson’s Riot Act is the best song nobody has heard and once you hear it you should make it your life’s works to expose it to as many people as possible. I think most of these tracks have appeared on here over the years if you want to read about my individual thoughts on them, search for them on the map.

Listen and Download @ http://thedemise.staires.org

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I’m not a Regina Spektor fan. I can’t be: I lack the necessary equipment, namely a vagina, and I am far too self-aware to not feel silly when I listen to the majority of her music. Years ago, when I was barely a teenager and spent a lot of time hiding under my comforter contemplating the never ending pit of sorrow manifesting itself in my navel, I probably would have loved her a lot. As it is, though, she just makes me feel kind of silly. If someone caught me listening to a Regina Spektor record, say, my mother or father came in the room without knocking first, I would feel the same amount of shame that I would if my cock was in my hand and I was pounding at it with the utmost furvor while clown porn lit up my face with whites, reds, and pinks. Hell, perhaps Regina Spektor would bring me more shame.

Regardless, I gave her live show a very nice review, and mentioned in it how this was the song that really got to me, really pulled at my heart strings, and for about a month or two afterward hearing it was enough to bring tears to my eyes. It still kind of does.

I don’t have much to say about this song. It is oblique and sad sounding. I was contemplating reposting something I wrote on my personal site, because the mood between them is similar, but I won’t paste it here. If this post isn’t enough reading for you, I recommend that you check out what I wrote last night in defense of suicide and Andrew Koenig.

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Years ago (how many doesn’t matter) Delta Spirit drummer Brandon Young was buying a pack of cigarettes at 2:30 in the morning and heard some guy singing and playing guitar down by the trolley tracks, but what was unusual about this guy was that he actually sounded pretty good, so he got the guys phone number. That guy was Matt Vasquez, the guy you hear singing on this song. When Brandon’s band broke up, he contacted Matt, who was living with five other guys in a two bedroom apartment. It seems like when most people on the internet retell this story they embellish it a little, saying Matt was homeless, but he wasn’t, but I guess it’s fun to think of the story that way if you want.

This song obviously alludes to this history.

It’s also obvious why I like this song: it’s joyous, loud, inspirational, and tugs on that place in your chest that makes you want to stand up and sing along, or at least just pay attention. However, this is one of those albums that suffers from that typical album tradition of putting the best song on the album as the second song. The rest of the album never lives up to the promise of this song, and that is too bad, because an album full of songs this good would have made this album an instant classic.

As it is, this is the one really good song, and now you’ve heard it.

Site Note: Due to having issues with my websites showing up in Google search results for things I do not want my websites showing up in Google search results for, I’ve removed all of them from every search engine. This means that search box that was over there on the side won’t work anymore, but you don’t really need it anyway, so I’ve removed it. Eventually I’ll add it back with a normal search function.

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I’d hate to come across as one of those people who is excessively cynical and jaded, but sometimes when people are just too bohemian it just pisses me off, it makes me want to break things, to call them liars to their faces, scoff and roll my eyes. The woman behind this band is one of those people. In an attempt to find anyone discussing anything about this song without describing what it sounds like (“However, looking at the albums that I value most closely, the ones that make me feel the closest to the artist – these albums often do not contain those studio enhancements, and are relatively “lo-fi.”” Oh-fucking-please.) and not what it feels like and coming up short—cause apparently music blogging is all about wanking yourself off on how many words you can cram into a sentence describing the texture of the static on the guitar—I stumbled on this pseudo-interview with Merrill Garbus, the woman whose voice you hear on this song.

In it her first sentence is, “The year I graduated high school was also the year that Zaire became the Democratic Republic of Congo: 1997” like I give a fuck or that it is even relevant to anything. Is this interview about your music or what a pretentious ‘tard you can make yourself out to be just in the first thing you say?

“I went to a camp in Massachusetts, where my mom taught music and played for folk dancing. It wasn’t a camp for kids, mostly, but for adults” and that sounds like the kind of place where kids get molested and used in bizarre sex rituals their brains sympathetically force them to forget.

Then there’s “When I was 21 I lived in Kenya and became friends with some hip-hop musicians who lived in Dandora, one of the bigger slums in Nairobi,” who the fuck IS this chick? Were her parents filthy rich or something? We’re just going to fly our child all over the world so she can have this rich bohemian lifestyle and grow up to make indie records after hanging out in slums with black people even though she is a white girl!

As part of that experience she adds, “I would wake up in the morning and go to get these donuts, fried fresh. They were delicious little golden puffs of dough. A whole bag of about 12 for 2 shillings, so like maybe 30 cents. I don’t eat doughy fried things anymore.”

OK, I’m sorry, but there is only one thing I can take away from all this babble: This chick is obviously completely fucking insane and is making all of this up. When you throw that kind of detail into a story when you’re talking about yourself casually to an interviewer there is only one option: you are completely full of shit. Again, I’d hate to come across as super jaded and cynical, but seriously, even Barack Obama doesn’t tell stories this pretentious about himself and he probably has the right to ’cause he’s the fucking President.

Also: “I don’t eat doughy fried things anymore”? So you’re probably a chronic liar and you’re joyless for no reason at all. Fried food is bad! No one eat it! Nevermind that you can eat it and then you can exercise and, you know, keep enjoying fried things because they are tasty and delicious! I mean, if it’s good enough for people living in slums why isn’t it good enough for you?

I would make up some elaborate back story about my awesome bohemian life just to have an example here, something about how I lived in some small country you’re not even sure really exists but you assume it does ’cause I am talking about it, and how I made friends with some of the natives even though I was white and I was sure they were going to give me AIDS if they even touched me, and they played the most bizarre form of jungle hip hop dance music and it was so influential on me when I was 16 and living here by myself because my parents thought I needed to experience what it was like to build houses in impoverished countries and after the first week or two I didn’t even miss running water and there is just something spiritual, you know, about having to boil all your water before you even use it to brush your teeth ’cause they don’t even know what the word potable means, you know, and then I hid in the woods for two years when I was eighteen deep in the forests of Montana with some mountain people, really secluded stuff you know people don’t even you know know these people exist but I sought them out ’cause I am JUST THAT FUCKING COOL so please listen to my music buy my album it’s on a major independent label.

As an aside, I like this song a lot, I think it feels cool and it makes me want to sing. The rest of the album sucks ass. There is no emotion in it, it’s kind of like someone really boring just talking in your ear for an hour and when they’re done talking you realize that even though you were listening you can’t remember a goddamn thing they said. She also rAnDoM CaPs eVeRy SoNg TiTlE wHiCh Is SoMe AnNoYiNg AsS lItTle KiD sHiT sHe ShOuLd Be SlApPeD fOr.

To quote that blog post again: “This leads to an intimate experience, as you get the feeling that you’re listening to some unearthed cassette tapes found in your grandmother’s attic, discovering a lost gem from the past.” Oh fucking please. Any time you listen to an album like that sure it’s all like WOW the first time but then you listen to it a couple more times and you realize why that shit was hidden in your grandmother’s attic never to be heard by anyone ever again: it sucks ass.