I'm breaking my repeat rules, because recently I have fallen deeply in love with Okkervil River and this song is probably one of the most splendid thing I've ever had the pleasure of listening to live. Also, since there was a mild Beach Boys theme earlier in the month, it's appropriate that I continue the trend and use a song that utilizes Sloop John B in a similar way. It's also the end of the month, so what better way to end this one by saying:
Live and love.
John Berryman (orig. John Allyn Smith) was an American poet who threw himself off a bridge in 1972. His biological father shot himself early on in Smith's life and his mother remarried, making him a Berryman. I'm not a fan of poetry so I can't really comment on Berryman's poetry except to say that it looks like you can read his Dream Songs for relatively free as far as I can tell.
I like this one:
Filling her compact & delicious body with chicken páprika, she glanced at me twice. Fainting with interest, I hungered back and only the fact of her husband & four other people kept me from springing on her
or falling at her little feet and crying 'You are the hottest one for years of night Henry's dazed eyes have enjoyed, Brilliance.' I advanced upon (despairing) my spumoni.—Sir Bones: is stuffed, de world, wif feeding girls.
—Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes downcast ... The slob beside her feasts ... What wonders is she sitting on, over there? The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars. Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry. —Mr. Bones: there is.
Sloop John B is, of course, that marvelous Beach Boys song inspired by a folk tune about a bunch of unhappy sailors. I wish there was more to say about it, except that it's one of the earliest tunes I remember getting stuck in my head for years and years, as on one 'vacation' across the United States with my parents (when I was 9 years old) we ended up seeing Forest Gump about six times in various different states. I'm pretty sure Forest Gump is to blame for my taste in music.
How does it all come together? I don't know. It just does.
I heard this song on NPR when I lived in San Diego.
Wait. This album came out three years ago.
OK. I heard this song on... hmm...
Well, I don't actually know. I think I was driving.
Maybe I wasn't.
In September of 2006, I was...
21. Barely finishing my first month of being an active Twitter...er. Twitterer. Being incredibly emo over a break up that I should have been relieved about. I'd been 21 for 6 months and had yet to go to a bar, because I didn't really like to do anything. I think my main pass times at 21 were fanatically researching somewhat obscure (but totally in my demographic) Christian religious bullshit (Gnosticism) and searching for women who would tolerate me (and sleep with me, if there was something reasonably attractive about them) on OKCupid.
21 was like three years ago, that wasn't that long ago at all. It feels far away, because really, at that point, my "real life" had yet to even begin. I wonder that, in three years, I'll feel this same way about this time in my life. Part of me hopes I do, because I fear that "this is all there is" at this moment in time, like we all do sometimes, but another part of me thinks that I'll be the same as I am, just improved, maybe I'll have a six-pack or something. Maybe I'll own whatever the best Google phone is in three years. That'll make me pretty cool, I think.
Then another part of me realizes that our financial system is crumbling because it seems like everyone who traded a bunch of numbers around as if it were play money in a gigantic world-wide video-game just realized they were trading around a bunch of play money in a gigantic world-wide video-game when someone made a big mistake and actually asked for some real money that they could do something with aside from just swap it around between themselves for shiggles.
I'm pretty sure that we'll all be dead in 3 years. If it's not 2012 alone that kills us (and keep in mind, I don't believe in ghosts, nor aliens, but I'm totally certain we're going to transcend our physical forms and turn into trans-dimensional beings on the 21st of December 2012) then it's going to be the all out panic that occurs when everyone in the real world realizes that bits of paper are just as worthless as bits of numbers because they all mean fuck all when the rest of the world decides your bits of paper aren't 'real money' and then we'll just tear each other apart.
It's going to be rad. There will be fires. We won't have to worry about the government shutting down our raves. The roving packs of raiders in cage vans who drive into the middle of our raves and snatch up a couple people to sell them into slavery will still be a problem, but some of us will have awesome hair, like this guy with suits of leather armor. We'll fight over gasoline.
Or maybe the ice caps will melt and we'll fight over gasoline and dirt on big boats and shit. That'll be cool, too. Some of us will have gills.
Or maybe it won't be like that at all and there will be cities strewn across the US that merely lack the unifying aspect of a postal service, of a postman as it were, to re-band together and recreate the United States of America!
I propose that someone create a "Fact Certification Board" that people (companies, individuals) can hire in order to certify the facts of the statements that they make. Considering the fact that newsprint is dying and journalists will have no where to go, and that supposedly journalists care about things such as "facts" and "integrity", I would propose that out of work journalists take the time to make this a reality.
I will elect myself as the "Fact Certification Board Certification Awareness Czar" so that I will oversee the journalists and make sure they don't get a little rowdy the next time a President tries to shove a bunch of bullshit un-certifiable facts through them in order to dupe the American public into supporting a bullshit war.
It'll be the job of these people to give the common average American someone they can trust 100% to listen to. Not that it'll make any sort of difference but at least guys like me would have someone to turn to and say, "You know what, I don't care about personal bias, what I care about is reality. Tell me what the reality of the situation is and I'll believe that."
I like to believe that Penn & Teller are the beginnings of a "Fact Certification Board". Even though I've only seen bits and pieces of their "Bullshit" show, from what I've seen they seem to know what they're talking about and I feel like I'm becoming better informed. They show both sides of the argument (even if they use funny sounds to make the 'wrong' side look a little foolish) and, in the end, seem to just be genuinely angry (in the same way I am) that people are so fucking stupid.
I came across this episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit that deals entirely with bottle water and the recycling myth, so I posted it on MySpace. I'll embed the video here because it's really great. It is 30 minutes long.
If you didn't watch it, here's the gist: people like bottled water because it makes them think they are drinking better quality water, even when they're not, and they prove this with 'hidden camera' technology that seems honest enough. Personally I drink nothing but Arrowhead bottled water, even though it tastes like shit once it's no longer cold, and I like it more than tap water. Do I think it's better for me? I know people who claim that the fluoride in the drinking water is going to give us brain cancer or something but I'm pretty sure that's bullshit so, no, it's all about taste, and I'll admit that's probably all in my head. So, right there, I agree with Penn & Teller. I wish I didn't drink bottle water. If I didn't live in a house that stocked nothing but bottle water, I probably wouldn't drink it.
In the second half, Penn & Teller reveal that 'recycling' is simply an 8 billion dollar a year tax payer sink hole that does nothing but create more pollution and that people like to think that it makes them 'better people' by doing it and that's why they spend so much time focused on the 'recycling myth'. I already believed this just by logical deduction years ago that recycling my bottle probably didn't make a difference to anything, but Penn & Teller really 'opened my eyes' to the deeper truth of the ordeal.
I have this friend, let's call her Timothy, and she's one of those militant not-quite-hippie more-like-psycho environmental freaks. Mostly by this I mean that she spraypaints shit like "FREE YOUR MIND" and "ANARCHY" and "BELIEVE" all over her walls (along with stencils of pictures of herself which doesn't really seem very humble), pollutes MySpace with endless bulletins linking to YouTube videos about the "christian agenda" and how the "government wants to control your mind". For the most part she lives in a barn behind her mothers house between trips to rehab and the mental hospital, so already I'm playing a losing game by trying to show her a video with any sort of real information in it.
so, what?
the paper and plastic gets fucking dumped with the food that goes no where? is that what penn and teller were trying to say when they tested people to see if they'd sift thru their trash? what fucking point does that make?
i recycle; should i stop?
-tim
You're actually polluting MORE by recycling, is the point. There is no clean method of recycling, recycling is unnecessary. It's just a dirty, inefficient process. Should you stop recycling? Sure. It's your tax dollars paying for it, or I should say it's your mother's tax dollars paying for it.
Someone makes money off of it, that's why it exists, not because it does any good. It's engineered to pull on your heart strings.
i save all my recyclables and fucking get money for them.
you're mother's tax dollars are paying for your recycler man too dumbass.
Then I got aggravated and sent this, repeating part of the Penn & Teller video that it's obvious she didn't even watch all of:
so you take pride in the fact that you get paid to pollute under the false claim that recycling helps the environment? that's cool, too.
i'm sure the carbon foot print of all the links in the chain (you, driving to the recycling place, the cost of running the recycling place, the pollution associated with the machinery that helps sort the recycling stuff, the trucks that take the recycling to bigger recycling centers, all the pollution that those recycling centers create, then the pollution that the trucks taking the 'recycled' material to alternate places.
that's totally worth 5 cents a bottle. you're right.
it's cool to be militant about issues, timmy, but it's more important to be well informed.
She then sent me two MySpace comments:
eh. i stay in my bubble of happiness. meaning i didn't read your message because a. i just don't care man, and b.. i want to have a good day.
And then blocked me. This was a girl who spent her day posting videos to MySpace hoping to "inform" people about "the truth". This was a girl who wallpapers her MySpace with silly spacey slogans and inspirational quotes. I went to visit this girl when she was in the psych hospital, I was the only friend who did. This was a girl who used to call me eight times in a row if I didn't answer my phone, and send me eighteen thousand instant messages trying to hang out with me and it was so annoying. I didn't realize that all I had to do to get her to leave me alone forever was suggest that recycling is a waste of time!
It's kind of a relief, actually, but it's also too bad. A "Fact Certification Board" would never make a difference here. The recycling myth is so firmly ingrained into people's heads as a daily source of endorphins (I assume that when you feel good about yourself by recycling that it's due to some scientific release of endorphins from your brain that's triggered by some pretentiousness center deep within your medulla oblongblowhard) that suggesting that all those years of sorting your shit into special cans has been for nothing but... further polluting the environment and practically burning money.
You could have God himself come down from Heaven and tell the writhing masses that recycling is a pointless waste of time, and no one would listen. Someone would probably shoot him because he doesn't look like what they thought he'd look like and they're angry about it.
What makes people so inclined to accept one piece of information over another? Admittedly, sometimes all you can do is choose between two different people claiming their facts as the true ones, but with any sort of research you can find which side that actually has the truth, and if you can't find the truth you can usually find out that one side has a dishonest agenda that corrupts their information. There's no other way.
This is what journalists are supposed to do for the people. It's a pity newsprint is dying, and maybe it's not because everyone is getting their news on the internet. Maybe it's because people just don't care to have the truth exposed to them any longer? The internet is more relevant because it's easy to find your own niche and stick to it. Conflicting opinions never even enter into the equation.
Who needs newspapers when you have YouTube? When you have Twitter? The new truth is self-made, hand-crafted, and exclusively tailored to suit your taste, and it's all thanks to the internet.
Song Note: Beirut are one of my super favorite bands, so favorite that I haven't posted them until now. I love the mood of this song and it perfectly matches the way this topic makes me feel. The song isn't really about anything (his voice is more about music than words), but that doesn't change the fact that the song is beautiful and wonderful.
I was going to write about Weezer today, but I figured that I wanted to give people the impression that I actually like music at least some of the time, so we're going with this instead.
If I had known about Liam Finn's solo debut a year ago, I'm pretty sure this song would be far up near the top of my best of 2008 playlist. It's so brilliant.
I heard it at the end of an episode of The United States of Tara, and like oh my god, I used Shazam on my T-Mobile G1 with Google Only $97.99! and it was so totally sick you don't even know. Then I totally didn't download it illegally first, I immediately went to AmazonMP3 and bought it from them because even though Liam is Neil's son and will never have to worry about money for the rest of his life probably, he deserves money for this sleepy & wonderful album. I guess. He deserves money for about 75% of it.
If I was to find something to not like about the album as a whole, I would say he gets really stuck on repetitive phrases. For one whole song it's all "everyone gather to the chapel, to the chapel" over and over again, and then, most annoyingly, it's "I'LL BE LIGHTNING, YOU'LL BE LIGHTNING" in high pitched falsetto voices.
Stuff like that just doesn't play well, especially at low volumes underneath conversations because it forces people to stop talking and pay attention to "what the fuck is that annoying shit on the stereo?" There's no rhythm to it either, it's just a general flow, like a crowd wave at a baseball game, up and down it swells and ebbs consistently, droning. Shit like that kills me. I'm a fan of repetitive, anthemic songs, but they have to have a beat to them, a rhythm.
I notice now that I have the "CD version" of the release, which is missing five songs for some reason, I don't know why. What's odd is that I can't find any place that you can find the 19 track version for download, not even illegally. Also the 14 track version is only 53 minutes long, by no means a complete compact disc. I'm going to assume that Wikipedia is on crack. Any Liam Finn historians around who can perhaps provide a 19 track version of this album to me?
Anyway go buy this album and listen to it on a cool Saturday drive. If you're over here with me on the Best Coast then it's going to be a really nice day.
Site Note: How funny is it that all the ads over there are for buying stairs! Hah! Sheesh.
An unfortunate symptom of writing on the internet is that it's almost impossible to avoid snark. Snark, for my own definition and uses here, refers to that writing style we affectionately refer to as 'witty' or 'dry' or 'sarcastic' but really means 'I'm saying shit as mean as possible in the hopes other people will laugh'. I'm guilty of it, but I try to be really honest about it. It helps to feel justified about it, especially when someone calls you on something you say.
Snarky people, instead of saying, "Wow, your teeth are really white, did you just get them whitened?" would say, "Wow, your teeth look great, too bad the rest of you looks like shit in comparison. Shoulda spent that money on a new pair of jeans that doesn't make your ass look so huge, maybe?" Instead of saying, "I'm glad that President Obama is bringing change to America," the snarky person says, "I'm glad that President Obama is methodologically turning this country into a socialist snake pit blood orgy," or something.
So yesterday when I may have implied that this song tarnishes not only Mike Doughty's reputation but the reputation of all of Soul Coughing's previous work, maybe I was being a bit heavy handed. When I got home this morning and discovered Mike Doughty's twitter in reaction to my comments, I was shocked and surprised. Mostly because someone was actually paying attention.
Don't get me wrong: Even though I apologized for insulting Doughty personally--I didn't say I was wrong, which is the joy of apologizing because you can say you're sorry for anything as long as you internally acknowledge that you're totally right.
You can weigh in with your opinion today by hearing the song and comparing it to yesterday's song. By the way, there is no comparison, just so you don't waste your time.
Screenwriter's Blues was the (probably) drug influenced noodlings of a 24 year old dude. A 24 year old dude just like me. A dude and his friends in a band who were making crazy music. At 24 Doughty probably thought he was the greatest poet known to man, and not because he was, but because he was 24 and when you're young you think you're still awesome at shit even though time has proven you not to be.
Looking At The World... on the other hand is written by a 35 year old guy who's been through the whole record industry cluster fuck (it's usually safe to assume that a member of a band who was in the major label system probably has horror stories) and has come out the end better, stronger, and... with slick hook laden production and a really polished big band sound? What? And production from the guy responsible for Closing Time, the obnoxious song that I was tortured with all through my youth like a Abu Ghraib prisoner being forced to listen to Nine Inch Nails?
Eleven years is a long amount of time. Things change. Maybe Doughty decided that a firmer step into the commercial waters was the way to go. You can't fault him for it, it got him this song on Grey's Anatomy and Bones, both television shows that are still on the air 3 years later! That's saying a lot.
I could have used less snark, so I apologized. Instead of saying that this song basically makes me want to stab my eyes out, I should have said...
Mike Doughty's later solo work is less interesting to me, and perhaps has diminished my willingness to listen to Soul Coughing, because of his new-found focus on pop songwriting and writing infectious jingles that worm into your ear and refuse to get out. Personally, I am just not that into it, and do not care for it one bit.
Don't get me wrong, this song is infectious. It's horribly infectious. You hear it once and you spend the next hour or so going "IIIIIII FEEEEEEEEEEEL..." over and over again in your head. It's a good song to drive around to, because it's got a driving beat. The lyrics are pure Doughty: slightly poetic, easy to remember, very emotive. All in all it's a good Doughty pop song, as equally catchy as Soul Coughing's Circles, and... uh... Circles. I'm sure there are other Soul Coughing songs with overly infectious to the point of annoying choruses.
I also briefly realized that I talk a lot of shit on certain bands here, and that there are people who are behind those bands who may become offended that I'm insulting their work.
If Weezer showed up and was like, "What up, fool, you're saying we're a bunch of dirty sellouts?" I would wave their interview from SPIN in their face and be like, "Right here you say that you exist solely as a commercial enterprise and it was that way from the start and that's why you've shoveled out nothing but absolute shit music in the last few years in order to ride the wave of your massive cult-like success."
Then I realized that if I were a musician who's actually put CDs out there in the world, I'd bet that there are a lot of people out there who aren't going to like my music. There would probably even be fans of mine who would be upset with the course that my catalog would take over time. I bet they'd even write about it on the internet. I bet that I'd even randomly read it, as well.
Would I be offended?
I guess?
You know what, probably not. I'd say: You know what, internet writer, I am above this! I am an established musician with at least one MTV worthy song and over thirteen years in the business. You're just some dumb asshole who's never done anything worthwhile with your whole life, so all you do is sit on the internet and write mean things about people more artistically successful than yourself. Your stupid opinion doesn't matter to me!
So, all in all, I'm not really upset that Doughty is a real person who read my real words and was offended enough to fire off a 140-character message back at me (which requires zero thought and was probably just off-the-cuff and he forgot about it seconds later, which makes this whole post into making a big deal over nothing), but I am upset that he missed my point and that's why I apologized.
Sorry, Doughty, I just don't like music that sounds commercial. Haughty Melodic got a couple listens out of me (this track itself has 15 plays, and the only other still surviving in my collection, Starbucks, has 19 in four years; that's not saying much) but overall it made me dissatisfied with your work and since its release I have been less inclined you search out new releases from you.
Your live performance of "Grey Ghost" from "Smofe + Smang Live" is one of my favorite tracks by you. I play the "fake word bridge" for people in my car all the time. I don't know why no one from The Sims has ever tapped you to record good music with fake words for their games. You could do it, you can already sing in Simlish.
It's just that, you know, we're at different places in our lives right now. You're probably watching your bottom line (there's that snark again, implying that you're writing more commercial music in a desperate grab for cash) and I can't blame you for it, but I'm 24 years old. I want the music that you made when you were my age. Can you really blame me?
Your music is by no means bad, and I certainly don't want you to try to please me. I like your music because it's your music, and even when I don't like it, I'm glad that it's your music. Don't get the wrong idea: Looking At The World... is eighteen thousand times better anything actually played on the radio these days.
But, I'm young. I don't want to listen to shit that is manufactured to appeal to everyone. I want to listen to music that feels personal, powerful, and moving. I don't want to load up an album and be assaulted with a meticulously crafted adult contemporary pop song. I want something unique and unclean that speaks to me directly with it's sheer indie low-fi me-ness! I want to hear something that makes me go: God! No one else I know personally would ever listen to this!
...and you know what, with Haughty Melodic, you accomplished that, as I don't know anyone who would listen to it. It's just unfortunate that I don't want to listen to it either.
Fuck, there's that snark again.
Site Note: Fans will notice I put up Google Ads. Fans will also notice that there are 2 (two) links that allow you to hide the ads forever. The links rely on cookies, so this'll only stick between browsers and computers and have to be reset on each new machine. I'll eventually set it up so it'll auto-set the cookie if you visit more than twice or something like that. The ads are more for people who visit through search engines or randomly drop in on the site, as the ads can be relevant and help people get to where they're going. If you're offended, speak your mind, etc.
Over the years my fandom of Soul Coughing has faded slowly. There are a few songs of theirs that I still enjoy immensely, but it's their weird songs like this one and Bus to Beelzebub. Part of it, I think, has to do with how absolutely neutered and commercially polished Mike Doughty's solo work is (specifically his desperately plea for an adult contemporary pop hit [or something] with Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well, but who am I to judge?), which somehow retcons my taste for Soul Coughing into a guilty pleasure. Sometimes when they come on in my car while other people are in it, I feel bad for them.
But I always turn this song up. This is the ultimate Los Angeles song, there is none better. When you're up on a late night somewhere within Los Angeles, and I mean actually in the city, and it's five in the morning, this is what it feels like. It's tired, repetitive, but it's also frantic and wonderful, you feel like you are everywhere anyone would want to be, but everyone is already there, or they've already left, but you're alone. You almost feel like a king, briefly, but it wanes. Then you're just alone there in the car, and either there's someone on the radio talking about something, or there's this song shouting at you, and even if you're with other people you're alone because at five a.m. no one is really there anymore.
I was actually in Los Angeles at 5:00 AM once and this song came on.
I'm pretty sure I was driving home from this girl's 4k/mo apartment off of Hollywood, which is pretty Los Angeles of me, if you ask me. That girl was a total bitch, which was pretty Los Angeles of her as well. I'm pretty sure it was about a month or two later that she invited (booty-called?) me over, just to tell me that my hair was too long and that she wouldn't fuck me with long hair. I drove 40 goddamn minutes to Encino, just to turn around and drive it back.
Bitches.
Amazon Note: Unfortunately AmazonMP3 does not seem to offer anything but live Soul Coughing bootlegs. Thusly, I link to their Best Of on AmazonPhysicalMedia.
Reading briefly on what "ego" really is (I am an uneducated fool, if no one has noticed that yet) I'm a little mortified: loss of ego through drug use would be terrible! It'd be a complete disassociation with reality, probably launching you soundly into the realm of lunatics and psycho killers! Who'd ever want that?
Hang on to your ego, indeed.
On the other hand, maybe LSD-users weren't that clever, and the jargon discussed here didn't deal with the Freudian ego but just the generic catch-all "self-confidence" and "big-headedness" meaning of ego. Maybe tripping humbles you, gives you more perspective, and maybe that's what the song is about.
Funny then that Frank Black who, in the opening of Pixies-documentary loudQUIETloud says, "Well it's my goddamn band, right?" half-joking, half-looking at the camera as if he's going to regret saying that later, is singing this song about holding on to your ego. I like to point fingers, so I will: Frank Black's giant ego killed the Pixies. Literally, it came out of his head and broke up the band. It was crazy. You should have been there.
It's OK. Frank Black has never had a hit single on par with Kim Deal's The Breeder's "Last Splash" so, in the end, the joke is on Frank Black. They're both so fucked up in the head (as evidenced in loudQUIETloud) that neither one of them can win that competition.
It's a shame, had the Pixies managed to stay together and rape the rotting corpse of their artistic merit, you know, like Weezer, they could probably be at least as big as Weezer, if not even bigger.
I'm late today. I'm suffering through that thing that people call the dip these days, where the enthusiasm you had at the beginning of a project wears off and then it turns into work. Hard, painful, laborious work. It's kinda silly. In the past I would have probably gotten bored and wandered off somewhere. Not these days! I'm going to take my own advice.
Brian Wilson's original version of this song, "Hang On to Your Ego" featured virtually identical lyrics but fellow Beach Boy Mike Love objected by the potentially LSD-inspired lyrics of the choruses. Wilson yielded to re-writes and what we got is this song.
It's interesting because they're both good versions, and the only difference between them meaning wise is that Answer's lyrics are directed inwardly, while Ego's lyrics are projected outwardly. Both songs are about the trouble there is in pushing against people who seem unwilling to improve their situation, but Ego's tone is nearly accusatory. "You, you there, you're going to lose the fight for your ego!"
...which isn't at all a bad thing, I suppose, unless you're totally square, which I guess Mike Love was.
Answer takes on a tone similar to I Just Wasn't Made for These Times, where the lyrics are more inner strife, more navel-gazing about the great injustice of the world: Why can't everyone just be more like me?
It's ironic, then, that the song was re-written due to external influences on Wilson's new found creativity. Wilson was living in a world of inspiration and drugs and almost no one else around him was. He wrote a song about it, and the straights brought the hammer down on him, without even realizing they were just feeding his delusion. It's no wonder then, with all the self-fulfilling prophecisizing, that Wilson eventually went kind of loony.
The answer is, unfortunately, that there is no answer. You can't convince people to your way by pushing against them, nor by insulting their way of life
Then there's this video of a kid covering the Misfits cover, whose guitar should be wrenched from his hands and then used to beat him repeatedly. Not necessarily because it's bad but because his hair sucks.
I don't want to say that I fuck a lot or anything, but...
Actually I'd say compared to most of the people I know, I would say that I've slept with less people than the average amount of people the people who've actually slept with people have slept with. Did you like that? Was it good for you?
What I mean is, in my group of friends, people either fall into two sides: the near-virgins (have had sex with maybe one and a half people) and the guys whose number of lays are pretty high up there. I'm neither of those. I've got a respectable hopefully non-STD-fear-inducing number.
I'll admit that I have felt jealous of my friends who have had sex with more women, I think every dude probably gets a little jealous over a friend's lays every now and then, it's natural male competition. I thought about what makes me different from my friends who obviously fuck more than I do. I broke it down to a few things:
1. Having sex with a chick I hardly know (or know quite well and have never slept with before) who is ridiculously drunk doesn't sound like something I would feel good about. I don't sit comfortably with the idea of "go to a bar and pick up on a drunk chick", it seems unfair. It's even more unfair because I don't drink, but even if I do drink I never lose control or sight of my values and morals. Even if I'm drunk I'm still not as drunk as some random bitch at a bar, especially if she's the kind who wants to wander home with some strange dude. I would also really feel like shit if some drunk chick woke up next to me and was like, "Oh Lord, what have I done?" Sober chicks only, thanks!
2. Having sex with the kind of chick who would randomly fuck you without really knowing you, drunk or not, doesn't really sound like a good idea either. "Hi, you're hot, let's go fuck in the bathroom," doesn't seem romantic. Don't get me wrong, I like to put my penis in vaginas, but if you're fucking me within 30 minutes of knowing me... well, there's a lot of other people in the world that you could have fucked within 30 minutes of knowing them that had some things about them that you maybe should have known.
3. I am totally unwilling to sleep with someone who has slept with someone I know personally. I watch friends fuck their friend's exgirlfriends, or just some girl that, for some reason, is going on the world tour of cock within a group of guys. I don't get that. I think that, during sex, I would be thinking, "Dude, Eddie's penis was in this same place maybe a week ago, shit, it's like I'm rubbing my penis on his." For this reason, I only date out of my area. (I once dated a girl who was already friends with friends of mine and now I pay child support. Correlation research, here.)
I am running so incredibly late today. This sucks.
Every time I tell someone that I bought tickets to the Nine Inch Nails / Jane's Addiction tour, they usually say, "Oh, Nine Inch Nails, that's cool, but do you like Jane's Addiction?" and they make a face like the thought of sitting through Jane's Addiction would be a painful experience. I say, "No, I like Jane's Addiction, they're pretty rad."
I am pretty sure that this song is the cause of that. I think it got way overplayed when a lot of us kids my age were too young to enjoy it and it's tainted it for us ever since. Personally I always liked the song, even if I could never understand a thing he was saying. Now-a-days I can, and hell, I can relate, stealing shit is awesome.
Jane's Addiction does actually play more music than just this song. I remember listening to an album of theirs that they released an album in 2003 that was actually kind of heavy and fun to listen to, but I haven't listened to it since 2003 so I guess you can't say I thought it was any good. Recently I listened to both of their first albums and I enjoyed them enough to not listen to them again.
But come on, they're Jane's Addiction, doesn't anyone get it? I think all my friends are retards.
You can download a free EP of new Nine Inch Nails and Jane's Addiction material over at http://www.ninja2009.com/, in a typical Trent Reznor "let's give away free music 'cause I'm so crazy!" sort of way.
Guitarist Dave Navarro directed a porn movie in 2007 starring one of the hottest pornstars ever, Jenna Haze, who apparently has legs instead of arms (don't click that link if you, say, are under the age of 18, or work in a place that frowns on naked wet nipples). I think that's pretty interesting. I have not seen it, but believe me I am going to seek it out now.
My girlfriend told me last night that the site has been boring this week due to a lack of stories involving me being disappointed or in some way destroyed by someone else. That's too bad, because there aren't any stories involving this song either.
There's a five page debate over on SongMeanings over whether he is singing "my sun-eyed girl" or "my cyanide girl" during the chorus. At one point someone suggests he is occasionally saying "last sun up, girl" which makes even less sense. My opinion is that I read once that it was "cyanide" and that has always stuck with me since. The general dark tone of the song makes "my sun-eyed girl" seem absolutely ridiculous, as the rest of the lyrics are rather gothic (as in dark) in tone. Who wants to weigh in?
Apparently the actual liner notes have an ellipsis in place of whatever word it is ("my ... girl"), so I guess Beck purposefully sung a fake word (in the same vein as Mike Doughty) and weighed the syllables differently each time to maximize the potential ambiguousness of the song. Way to go Beck.
Which leads me into my next point: how does Beck do it? He releases introspective arty albums that are awesome, and then radio-friendly Top 40 albums that everyone loves. He can even combine the two, on this song, and give me dark lyrics that I can totally feel and relate to, but wrap them up in a song that makes me wanna bounce around on a sunny day!
Is it because he's a Scientologist? Going by John Travolta (who manages to make people love him, then hate him, then have Tarrantino make people love him again, and then hate him again) and Will Smith (who just sucks) I would not say that consistently high levels of awesomeness run in the Scientologist brood inherently. Beck was "raised" Scientologist so he's not necessarily one of those psychos who sought it out all on his own, so maybe that's the difference between him and all the other wackos.
The point is, above all else, this is clearly a love song.
Great, it's another one of those bands where I have to say that I don't really know anything about them nor do I listen to them outside of this one song. It's a shame that it's Interpol, I'm talking about, as I have heard other songs by them and they are not at all like this one and not at all nauseating. I generally associate the whole Joy Derivative group of bands with a bizarre urge to puke all over anyone in the vacinity.
But Interpol ain't half bad. I hear the singer is so cool he likes to smoke cigarettes while on stage, which sounds pretty wild if you ask me. (And Los Angeles totally harshes their mellow due to an indoor smoking ban!) These guys know how to rock.
I listened to this song a lot back when I was on methamphetamine (back in 'nam). It reminds me of being high as fuck and waving my arm out the car window at night, feeling the wind whip and caress my hands. Bandages (that infernal song) by Hot Hot Heat reminds me of doing the same thing, but during the day.
Ah, to be eighteen again.
Site Note: I didn't realize today was Day 100. That's pretty cool. I guess I should have written something special.
Ah, Faith No More's Mike Patton. He is an artist of such varied styling. He can rock out, descend into metal, flirt with hip hop, and flail wildly with experimental zeal. With Peeping Tom, it's his mocking take on the pop album.
Mojo, then, is his mocking take on songs that glorify "the good life", the endless partying, drug use, and general stupidity. This is a song I could see Paris Hilton waving her arms around and 'woo'ing to, all the while never getting it. (The joke, I guess, aside from the fact that the song is simply tongue in cheek complete with Britney Spears reference, is that Mike Patton claims he has never used drugs.)
All that said and done, however, Peeping Tom is a good album of party music. I'd suspect that if you're not familiar with Mike Patton you won't get the general dark ("General Dark!") and uneasy feeling that runs (all current-like) through the album. A couple years ago I put it on at a party, but I don't think anyone noticed that the music had changed, so maybe Patton did good.
Since I posted a video with the song the other day, I figured I might as well do so here, just because I think Mike Patton's hairnet may or may not be part of the joke. This is their debut appearance on Conan O'Brien.
It's hard to believe I started this month with a moody piano piece!
Unfortunately, this album doesn't seem to be available on Amazon MP3 even though most of their other work is on there. Not sure why.
When I was a kid, I would always hear Faith No More's Epic. I think my sister, who was in high school right as I was becoming cognizant, left MTV on a lot. I saw a lot of George Michael's burning leather jacket in the Freedom video. I saw a lot of Bjork's fish flopping around in the video for Epic. I remember Sinead O'Connor sweeping the VMAs. I was five! How crazy.
When I was 12, I got an advance copy of Album of the Year from a friend of my sister's who worked in a record store, and I vaguely remembered Epic, so I listened to it. Can't say that I liked it all that much, but about four years later I got really into The Real Thing and now I'm one of those crazy people who likes mostly all of Mike Patton's solo work, so expect to see some of that shit (Tomahawk, Fantomas, Peeping Tom) around here sometime.
Faith No More made an awesome music video for this song (with Jennifer Jason Leigh in it), which caused me to eventually go watch Vertigo and fall madly in love with Kim Novak.
Amazon Note: This is another one of those albums that you can get shipped to you for less than $4 if you buy it used from Amazon's secondary sellers.
Heh, it's Pi day. I'm not going to pretend to know anything about mathematics, but you have to wonder if there's some more advanced civilization out there that sets "1" to Pi, for whatever reason. You know, how the US uses Fahrenheit even though it's retarded in the face of Celsius. Our planet doesn't get it, that if our number system was perfect then Pi wouldn't be a non-repeating non-terminating decimal. Perhaps, if we some how realigned our sciences then Pi would instead be a whole number. This is, of course, totally impossible, but I'm sure if Douglas Adams was still around he could have worked it into a Dirk Gently book.
("What do you mean that Pi is a whole number?" Dirk asked incredulously. "Why yes! A couple years ago we decided that all this fussing over how long Pi is was getting rather needless. We elected instead to set Pi to a whole number and then re-decide everything else around that!" a rather small man in tiny glasses quipped. "But that's ridiculous," Dirk opined, "what happens if I only have a single item of something? I've got a third of Pi?" "No, of course not! A single item is equivalent to one point zero four seven one, repeating onward from there, Pi. You see...")
I watched some interviews with this band, which consists of some quiet mousy dude and a somewhat annoying Asian chick, online somewhere. I think it may have been in their podcasts in iTunes. The podcasts were only notable for the fact that they discuss the creation process behind a few of the songs on the album. What's funny is that each one is almost exactly the same: the guy says, "I had this idea, so I made it, and then I sent it to her to work on," and then the chick goes, "Yeah he sent me what he had and it was total rubbish so then I just changed it up quite a bit."
Every time. There is not a song where she ever says anything nice about the guy's work at all.
I mostly just enjoy this album by Blonde Redhead because their lyrics remind me of foreigners with a poor grasp of English. She doesn't really sing lead on this track, but on other ones she sounds like Cartman's bad Chinese caricature from the Indy Rape episode. Not to get into touchy territory, but it kind of cracks me up really bad. On top of that the songwriting is just silly for the most part. On one song, Publisher, the guy sings, "say what you say, say it like a cat"
How do cats say things?
On another she sings, "twenty-three magic, if you change the name of love", which just reminds me of the silly phrases you find on stuff at Morning Glory. Things like, "Ah, first day of school. Perhaps happiness today! with this pretty Notebook.. true dreams come." My favorite on the site so far is this New York notebook which isn't so much poorly written as broken into lines perfectly arranged to evoke maximum retardation.
Lucky the music kicks ass and even if it's all a little ridiculous, it's still fun to listen to.
I played this song that friend of mine who is into metal. I said, you're not going to like it, but doesn't this chick sound kind of hot when she goes "uh-UH-uhhh"? He said, yeah, actually, it's kind of totally annoying but she does sound kind of hot. We wondered, then, if Metric singer Emily Haines was hot.
Really the only good lyric in this whole song is, "Our faces all resemble dying roses," which I almost kind of want to laugh at, but I guess I can visualize it and understand.
I heard something about how the creation of this album was strained, but I don't know anything about that, so no music history for you today. Maybe next time I post a Sleater-Kinney song.
The first time I listened to The Woods, I was not impressed. It sounded like a lot of static and noise, and not at all something that I wanted to listen to. I kept trying for some reason, though, and eventually Entertain got through to me.
I have musical weaknesses, things that will make me love a song pretty much no matter what. One is falsetto background "ooohs" and "ahhhs", another is call and response vocals, and yet another are songs that are anthemic. This song has the first two, and it was most certainly the "ahh-ahh-ahh" in the background of the choruses that caught my attention the first time.
After that the rest of the album fell in line. Yes, it's a lot of static (almost so much that you'd swear someone had to have said "isn't this too much static?" at some point) and it's grungy (which is part of it's charm!) but it's also loud and it fucking rocks.
I've got a friend who's really into metal, all forms of metal, melodic death and all that jazz. I played him some Sleater-Kinney off this album and said, "See, this is what I consider heavy, what I think rocks harder than anything else," and he just looked at me baffled.
To me, it's true. Metal is all dudes grunting and yelling and thrashing on guitars super fast, and it doesn't necessarily sound heavy or powerful to me. (Or it's dudes singing in super high pitched voices over screaming guitars which just makes me think the music is being performed by a bunch of spandex clad long haired homosexuals.) I've got no connection to that, and most of the time the lyrics are nonsense or indecipherable anyway, so what is there in it that is heavy? I can't rock out to a 246 beats per minute double bass-drum blast. That's not going to get me emotionally charged.
Now, you put a couple of chicks behind some instruments cranked up so loud that they crunch and grind, and let them wail about sellouts and our lousy government (or formerly lousy government, it's hard to get used to that, like writing 2008 when you meant 2009 'cause the year is so fresh) and I will tell you that you've found the secret to music that rocks my face off.
It's a shame that so few bands rock like Sleater-Kinney do. It's also a shame that, much like Nickel Creek in 2005 as well, that they released their best album and then disbanded. It's probably a good thing that some bands decide to give it up at their peak, so we don't have to watch them slowly wither away into success inspired pretentious jerk-off competitions (imagine if Radiohead had broken up after OK Computer or Kid A or even Amnesiac) or rape the rotting corpse of their reputation (imagine Rilo Kiley breaking up after More Adventurous, Smashing Pumpkins after Ava Adore, The Beatles after Sgt. Peppers, The Who after Teenage Wasteland).
I talk a lot of shit on Rilo Kiley, because it's such a shame watching a group slowly destroy itself. I don't claim to know a lot about the inner workings of the band, and their entry on Wikipedia says nothing about personal tensions in the band, but I have my theories.
I saw them play twice in 2004 in San Diego, and at both shows the audience was composed primarily of 14-16 year old kids who were dressed as if it was an 1980's costume party (in which no one present had been alive in the eighties, nor had any idea how people actually dressed in the eighties). They (and I mean a good majority of the crowd) sat down on the floor while Tilly and the Wall played, back when no one knew who they were, and you know that all of those kids probably worship them now. When Michael Runion came out, he insulted the oblivious crowd by saying, "Hold on a second, just mingle or something, swap MySpace profiles or something..."
The crowd became alert and surged toward the stage when Rilo Kiley came out, creating an solid mass of bodies that stood, without movement, throughout the whole show. Like rabbits standing in front of a giant headlight they want to get closer to, the mass of poorly dressed children just stared, concentrating hard on making sure they didn't touch anyone they were standing next to. Further back you had kids sitting on cellphones, txting away, talking to each other. A couple shouted song titles the band refused to play.
Blake Sennett, Rilo Kiley's guitarist, sneered at the crowd for the most part and hid behind sunglasses (a behavior I did not see replicated when I saw Blake play with The Elected in Los Angeles). The other band members seemed mechanical, going through the motions. Jenny Lewis seemed to be the only person on stage who enjoyed the silent adoration oozing from the unmoving masses of teenagers in front of them.
I don't claim to know what they were like before their crowd turned into a bunch of teenagers, but what I saw was a band at odds with their scene, and probably with themselves since Sennett and Lewis' former relationship couldn't have been good for the interpersonal band dynamic. You factor in Sennett's songs with The Elected about some anonymous female claiming, drunkenly, that their band's only reason for success if her songwriting and that his songs suck, and you start to wonder how autobiographical Sennett's music really is.
Jenny Lewis' solo success, riding on the back of a false southern accent (you're from Los Angeles, honey, not Tennessee), down home folky country girl posturing and the teeming thousands of tasteless teenage girls and boys listening to her relentless shit probably didn't do much to help Jenny Lewis' ego from slowly absorbing whatever good there ever was in Rilo Kiley's music. So, then there was Under the Blacklight, what I'll consider Rilo Kiley's official statement that their period of good music has passed and from now on they'll just be trying to cash in on the name. It's all just a paycheck to them, now. (At least Weezer has the decency to admit publicly that they're only in it for the money!)
It's like when Olivia Tremor Control broke up (except that OTC never got on a major label and never had an audience full of retards to try to cash in on). Hart went on to make music with his set of influences under Circulatory System, and Doss went on to do The Sunshine Fix with his. Only with Rilo Kiley we've got Blake Sennett making good music with The Elected, and Jenny Lewis slowly raping the bloated corpse of country music by singing horrible songs for Disney movies.
I wonder sometimes if, when I'm older, I'll understand certain songs better. I can't think of any specific occurrences off the top of my head, but I am pretty certain I can relate a lot better now to most of the angry and depressing shit I listened to in middle school. Nirvana makes a lot more sense, that's for sure.
I am only 24, so the extent of my experience on this earth is pretty short. I'm about 10 years short of the age of the guy who wrote this song, but I feel like I can relate to it pretty well. The music itself is almost way too gleeful for my taste, and I really don't like anything else by Beulah, but I've loved this song for a few years now.
Up until about a year ago I was really exploring my religious side. I got all into Gnosticism (which makes things really difficult: "So, what are you, then?" "A gnostic." "Agnostic?" "No, a gnostic."), rewrote part of Matthew in a more modern tone, tried to hang out with people I used to go to Sunday School with (that was so fun... SYKE!!) and generally just sat around feeling all conflicted all the time.
Wise Blood showed me that worrying too much about religion is not a good thing for the most part. If you worry about it too much, either by believing or wondering if you should believe, you're going to end up fucking some shit up. (If there is a moral in Wise Blood, I am pretty sure that is it.) After reading, I'd say it took about six months for it all to sink in, subconsciously, I think.
I don't mean to attribute my disenchantment with religion to Flannery O'Connor solely, though her frank (and "grotesque") depictions of good ol' American living do a lot for my case against religion (and general humanity) ("General Humanity!"). There were other factors that maybe I'll get into some day if I still feel the same way.
Now I just feel kind of stupid. Mostly I can't believe people fall for it, or that I was so mystified by it. I could delve into the variety of reasons I may have been attracted to the idea of religion (feeling out of control, having no self-confidence, being naive and lonely) but instead, my feelings on the matter of religion comes down to:
Seriously, people believe that hoodoo? If you really need to believe in some invisible dude somewhere so you behave yourself, then, jesus, you've got issues. People should start treating intensely religious people as if they have a psychological condition. There are people out there who make their children pray every night, but get upset when they can't make their kid's imaginary friends go away.
Update: I thought it would be interesting to note that after writing this, I went onto Beulah's Wikipedia entry only to discover that singer/song-writer Miles Kurosky is a fan of Flannery O'Connor as well. Guess this song's connection to O'Connor is stronger than just my own ramblings here.
I saw The Beta Band open for Radiohead back in 2002 (or 2001). It was pretty rad. It was before Radiohead decided that making real music with real instruments was unsophisticated rubbish.
When I was a lot younger I read this book called Lizard, which I hardly remember now except that I enjoyed it and I related to it enough that I still remember the reading of it fondly. This song reminds me of that book.
I guess it actually reminds me a lot of the books I read back in elementary school. The mood of the song reminds me of what I thought the world of Maniac Magee was like. Grey and depressing, but slightly wondrous enough that the lives lead are still worth leading.
I'm mostly randomly because I don't have a lot to say about this song.
I've been listening to this song for a pretty long time. It's one of those songs that feels immediate, like it's always been there in my subconscious, just waiting to get heard for real. I remember I hooked one of my girlfriends on it nearly four years ago, pretty sure she still listens to it today. You'd think this would be a single of theirs, but no, this is just some random album track that I got all hooked on a while back that no one has probably ever heard before. (I don't really listen to I Am Kloot, just this song.)
I think a lot of it has to do with lyrics that make more sense out of context than they do within the song. The song as a whole doesn't seem to mean anything, but you take a couple of lines here and there and it sounds like something you can relate to. It's easy to remember, so after about two listens you can sing along with the whole thing. I think his voice is pleasant and gentle, while dealing with thoughts that might be upsetting (if you can assemble that out of how vague it is), and the pace of the song isn't plodding, but a brisk yet leisurely stroll.
A definite sunny day song.
Happy Spring Forward, if you live in areas crazy enough to participate in DST. Go use that extra hour of sunlight in the afternoon to drive around aimlessly while listening to this song (and others like it).
I passed over an opportunity to see these guys play live in September and I've been kicking myself ever since. The couple behind the band play together all the time, not as Bodies of Water but as them playing Bodies of Water. I assume without the benefit of a full band behind them they aren't as impressive, but I'll probably try to go see them on the 12th.
This song makes me think of performance art, like after she's done singing and the music picks up I can imagine some elaborate stage routine being performed to the music this song unleashes in the last two minutes. A grand envisioning of what it would be like to be trapped in a cave, but fed through the lens of 1970's Genesis and prog-rock in general. (It does remind me quite a bit of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.)
I'm sure live there are no such theatrics, but that's OK too, because I am sure they utterly rock everything down around them. This album is great from beginning to end and I adore several of the songs (only 3 out of 9 songs didn't make it into my 'rotation') so I recommend it pretty highly.
When I first listened to this song eight months ago, it really resonated with me deeply. I'd just fallen out of a relationship that was somewhat devastating, that I hadn't yet really reacted to, and started to believe, melodramatically, that I was just meant to be involuntarily alone. I gave up hope on finding anyone who would tolerate me in the LA area, assuming that the superficial corruption that lurks within all us Angelinos was going to make it impossible to find a cool chick.
Around the same time that I discovered this album, Sea Wolf was opening a show for Okkervil River, a band that I didn't really listen to but was curious about, so I bought two tickets assuming my friend Trista would go with me. (My memory is a little hazy here.) It's not often that you discover a band and then get to see them in concert while you're still in your honey-moon-y "omfg i love this band so much!!1!" phase, so I knew it was going to be incredibly awesome.
At the last minute I invited this girl who had messaged me on OKCupid. We didn't get along very well in text (apparently we both thought we sounded kinda like weirdos) but after one lengthy phone call I asked her if she wanted to go to the show with me, and she agreed.
We met up at a Starbucks and talked about nothing I could even begin to remember now, but we got along and enjoyed the first band (Zykos) and then Sea Wolf came out. We headed down to the floor from the balcony area of the Henry Fonda, and stood off to the side watching Sea Wolf. She was dancing around and looking pretty beautiful. I wanted to reach out and touch her (but I felt all leprous because I had poison oak grossness on my arm under the sleeve on my left arm) but the usual anxiety, the horribleness of not being able to read people's minds, made me uncertain and anxious.
I told myself that if they played You're A Wolf, which I knew they would, I would have to take action because listening to this song while standing back and watching a pretty girl dance around who you're all longing for is just too fucking pathetic. I didn't want to be that guy, that awkward guy who might be in his twenties but still acts like an acne-ridden fifteen year old, who goes home and writes on his el-jay about how he had an opportunity but wasted it because he couldn't be certain he wouldn't fail. Although my last relationship left me second guessing everyone's true intentions and thoughts all the time, I was going to take a risk in an attempt to not be a giant pussy.
So, of course they played You're A Wolf, and I put my arms around her and said, "I'm sorry but I need you closer to me," and she settled into my arms, and that was that. It's been mostly happily ever after after that.
Sea Wolf was good, too. Okkervil River was better, but sort of on a different plane of existence entirely so it's not really like they were "better" than Sea Wolf, per se, they were just more entertaining in a different way.
I was reading journal entries from my old websites on the Internet Archive yesterday from back when I lived in San Diego. I don't know why I wrote so candidly, so publicly, and didn't realize at all I was absolutely crazy. There's all this moaning about being in love with some girl I worked with who I never even asked out. All this hope and wonder at the girl I finally started dating down there, only to be moaning about how unlikely it all was from the start. It's no wonder things fell apart down there: I was a complete moron.
Learning to listen to and trust your inner voice of reason is probably unnecessarily difficult for just about everyone. I'd go so far as to say that this is the clear dividing line between children and adults, but that development of it evolves over such a long and varied period of time that it's difficult to pinpoint at all. I even wrote down that I knew that what I was doing (moving in with some girl I barely knew after two weeks, putting my job in jeopardy) wasn't going to end well at all, but that I was doing it anyway and I didn't understand why.
Looking back, I think I was just lonely and naive. It's easy to delude yourself into thinking that what you want is actually worth wanting despite all the consequences, especially when you've got absolutely nothing better to do with your time. You overlook so many things early on that you shouldn't, just in the hopes of having something, anything. It's not until later that you start to get comfortable, stop being lonely, and start getting annoyed.
Sometimes I wish I could not give a shit again, and be all carefree and make stupid mistakes and end up briefly homeless because of crazy Louisiana southern baptist women, but then I remember what I didn't know back then: that being miserable is not fun. It's like no one sent me the memo back then. I thought being depressed and hating myself all day was just the way things were. It turns out that it's not. There are better ways to live. It's crazy.
So many miserable relationships. So many failures foreshadowed, foreseen, but unavoided.
This song might be about this. I don't know.
Song Note: This song is another song that I didn't used to like but iTunes Genius threw it between so many songs that I do like that I got hooked on it subconsciously. It works beautifully for quiet background music, but it wasn't until today that I played it loudly through my home stereo and I will say: Wow! This is a beautiful song.
I love the story of this song, the parallels between being trapped because of your greed and because of your selflessness. It goes something like this: the poor wolf (or, boy, singer of song) who was lured into the well by a cunning fox (or, hot sexy girl, decidedly not the girl singing in this song), laments his sorry state of living, only to be resurrected as a lighthouse worker, who feels still trapped by his personal responsibility for potential shipwrecks.
Only one person on SongMeanings mentions Karma in a glancing blow, saying it's more Eastern karma than Christian karma and I don't know anything about that. I do know that it makes sense, that your resurrection / rebirth should, in some way, be funny and punishing. How apropos is it that the foolish wolf / Win Butler / boy who couldn't even take care of himself is reborn / resurrected / reincarnated as someone who has to take care of loads of other people?
They're all lessons learned. What Dreams May Come (the book, not the Robin Williams movie) touches on this a little bit. Massive spoilers: at the end when the guy saves the girl, the people in charge go: "Yeah, that's great and everything, but no," and force reincarnation, and because she killed herself with sleeping pills, she has to go back as some African girl with chronic insomnia her whole life. How great is that!
So just think about that next time you think about how miserable you are. Maybe you did something really lousy in a past life that you're paying for now in some warped and twisted way.* Try to enjoy it!
Not that I believe any of that. You never know, though.
* This is all kind of fun because you can look at really gross fat people, the kind of fat people that make you feel sad, and then think that they were probably really vapid super models who OD'd on tons of coke, or, you know, rich beautiful people who lived selfish beautiful lives and now they are fat and sweating in motorized wheelie carts because their sugar-laden insulin-deprived feet are too numb to carry their gigantic diabetic asses around. With that kind of thinking you don't feel sad for them any more, and can spit on them with ease. Just like it should be.
Kind of crazy to think that I still have 280 songs to go just to hit the year milestone. The sad thing is when you back up and look at 85 songs from a distance, it's only 6 hours of music. I've got maybe a week of radio show playlists. I'm the world's slowest DJ.
When I lived in San Diego five years ago (really?) I spent a lot of time alone. I had no real social contact with anyone outside of my job for about a year, but I also discovered that I liked writing fiction and I wrote a small amount of it that is somewhat painful to read now, but the ideas are strong and the feelings I had when I wrote it were phenomenal. It actually felt like that over the course of one day, a whole story was playing itself out involuntarily in my head, which I later wrote down after rushing home at ninety miles an hour down the 805-S.
I guess it was because I was alone so much, my head had nothing better to do than conjure up twisted fiction. Once I started spending time with people again, the spark I felt to write faded away pretty much completely. A couple times over the last couple years I have gotten very lonely and ended up writing something fictional, but never too seriously.
Does my muse only visit me when I am completely alone? Is that my curse? That if I want to write well, I have to seclude myself from reality? Am I that tortured artist, who has to tell people, "No, sorry, I can't be close to you, I must write, it is my calling!"?
Fuck that. I've been trying to shed the teenage feeling that what I do should come naturally and be completely easy from the start. Sure, there's the creative spark and sometimes inspiration strikes and it flows from you like wine from a cask, but it's foolish to think that it isn't any work at all. It was foolish of me to think that I could just do whatever I wanted without any discipline.
It's easy to become discouraged when you just assume you'll be good at everything. I think a lot of people are victims of this, and either they spend their lives trying to do things they never become good at because they quit when it stops being fun, or eventually they just become supernovas of low self-confidence.
A few people on SongMeanings claim that this song is about just this, that songwriting isn't easy, and it's easy to sit around and feel bummed out that it's not coming around naturally. You've got to force it, sometimes, and chase down that muse and grab her by the throat.
Part of the reason I am doing staires_!_ is just for this reason. I need to learn discipline, to learn how to write something interesting on command, how to force creativity when it doesn't just come around on it's own. You can get good at anything as long as you stick to it. Maybe one day I'll be good at this.
The Hold Steady are one of those few bands that I like for just one album, and that album is this one, Separation Sunday. I love how literary it is, I guess. I love that NPR can write 'used to create tension' in reference to Craig Finn's songwriting.
I'm not a religious person, (though a while back i was deeply interested in the Gospel of Thomas and all sorts of other Jesus stuff, but eventually i discovered that the only truth in the world that matters is: do for others what you would want to have done for you. that's the only religion there is), but something about people who are pulled deeply into Christianity really intrigues me (Wise Blood comes to mind) and this whole album is about possibly born again drug addicts? What does it all even mean?
I saw them play when they were on Jimmy Kimmel about the time the Chips Ahoy! music video came out. They are so incredibly awesome live. So awesome, in fact, that I find all their other albums largely unlistenable. I've got no deep interest in the songs (I dig the concept, you see) and they sound so much better live. It was funny because so few people showed up to see them play for free that they had to move the show indoors to the small lobby stage so it would look like there were more people there. By funny, I mean sad, but they're a lot more popular now.
A lot of why they sound better live than on their albums has to do with Craig Finn's song-speak vocal being partially buried by the sheer loud awesomeness of the musicians playing. It's much easier to rock out when he's not blaring into your ears like the drunk guy at the bar who won't stop yelling about his crazy drug addict friends and his religious upbringing.
There's no place to buy this anywhere on the internet, as such, there is no stylish album art to click on. This is a side project of Amanda Palmer and accordion player Jason Webley.
It's my birthday today. I'll be at Disneyland all day because they give out free tickets to you on your birthday and I figure, why not, why not begin my 25th year of life at Disneyland? Why not, I say?
