the indelible impressions of repetitions, or maybe 'why it happens the same way'

these humans are for sure creatures of habit. when we get ideas and then write them down, we remember them. they make sense when we do that, and then the ideas might grow into something useful, or they might not. when we get ideas and dont write them down, we rarely remember them. and then they are useless. its either one or the other, for me it is at least. and for the last few weeks it's been one and now it'll be the other. the flip happened.

i've never been able to particularly identify what initiates my bouts with writer's block, well damn i suppose ive had bouts of a lot of things. in fact, as human do, projecting our lives forward, i cant help but predict many more bouts with various things in the future. some good some bad. but i digress, severely. i have ideas, just as we all do im sure. and in case you forgot, im talking about writing. but the 'hows and whys' arent really important to me, because i love very little more than that feeling just before i get that spark to write. its worth it to not write for a while in order to feel like this. thats what im trying to say.

given im in the smithing mood, then what to say? well thats not really a question. not one that ever merits answering directly anyway. but we do it anyway.

dylan is on the mind. dylan started it. this time and maybe the time before that, certainly he starts it most times. i hear dylan and i feel aware, motivated to do something, anything. whatever it is would be great and meaningful. i notice what doesnt make sense. i think about what my room looked like before i lived here, and what it might look like afterward, then i see this place decrepit. and then i think about what itd be like if i lived here when it was in such a state. i hover on that thought. then i move on because i think 'who gives a shit about that.'

i think about that day in 1966 that i wasnt alive. one of those days you most wish you had been though, in any capacity. good thing they made a recording of it.

it wasnt after the intermission that the paradigm shift of dylan non electric/electric occured. its not like the journos try to say it is. but it has to be made easy, or else people forget it.

the discussion of that event, or newport, or 65-66 in general inevitably begs the question for a listener casual or dedicated,' which are you for, electric or acoustic.' to answer by ignoring the obvious absurdity and apathetic simplicity of the question i'll answer it with what will probably be perceived as more absurdity and even more apathetic simplicity. id say id prefer the dylan of the intermission between the two sets. there was the dylan who knew that it was not he who was fixing to change his own figurative hat, but that it was in fact the audience and those around him who were, the ones actually in control of the framing of his image. here was the dylan who was not one or the other, but both, which is really neither at all. to the audience he no longer existed and so he could only be himself. with everybody knowing that he'd walk onstage in a few minutes and be immediately framed as a different person, as a traitor and not a champion. its fascinating to think about such transformations in such a pejorative context. to think about that is to wonder what change really is. and i dont know what it is. not sure we can know. not tonight anyway.

makes me wish i had a scrapbook of ephemera from my life. or really just concert tickets. but perhaps its better that my concert tickets are scattered around, in different boxes, pockets and whatever else. itll make that occasional finding of them meaningful, and gloss over the perpetual re-losing of them. because thats just what seems to happen.

decided to read blood meridian again. this happens from time to time. so incredible when the best western ever written is a categorical denouncing of manifest destiny. i'd sure like to rewind history on that one. im going to do so right quick.

horace greeley says 'go west, young man.' hello american exceptionalism.
creepy way to claim the presence of divine intervention. not sure it worked out so well here, unless you were a white guy.
ratzel comes to the usa, sees what he sees, goes back to germany saying 'lebensraum' and then we get the nazis.

anyway. might talk tomorrow about the bison economy. thats a fun one. good one for pissing people off.

tarkovsky

i like him. didn't know he took pictures too, thought it makes sense that he did. fun stuff for a gloomy saturday.

http://riowang.blogspot.com/2010/06/tarkovskys-polaroids.html

oh and this

http://thegreenhorns.wordpress.com/essays/essay-in-distrust-of-movements-by-wendell-berry/

music-fela, and afro-celt

oh my

dropped the ball on arcade fire, thats a shame. but really how i described it last week is probably good enough, so i'll leave it there.

i really like where i live now. its fun and i like how it smells. do not like how gq magazines smell.

us kids know

crimony, its been two days and i havent talked about the event yet. if i wait any longer ill have to start making up stuff that happened, or rather didnt happen. unfortunately, its 600, bright and hot, so im not creative. ill have something tonight. maybe.

i will mention though, running to my seats, running, with spoon playing 'the ghost of you lingers' was incredible. spoon live, with their distortion and woo tube effects reverberating in general, but eulogized by the metal roof of the amphitheater was incredible, and especially so for that song, when i wasnt giving them the gaze. haunting. and that was just the start of it.

good stuff

gonna go back into the vault tonight..... not too deep though. and ill try to steer clear of stax and chess records and those usual suspects for this sort of thing.

jimmy mcgriff. funk. hammond b3. good shit.

bukka white. one man wrecking machine. played the national like this, but also slapped pretty well too, see 'aberdeen mississippi blues'. straight up beast. good shit.

baby face willette. made just a few records on blue note, then died. so emotive. good shit.

mississippi fred. the first generation of the north mississippi guys and maybe the most captivating, the second gen being rl burnside and junior kimbrough. who ive already expounded enough upon, i think. wish my right index finger worked like that. good shit.

eric dolpy. died young and weirdly, read his bio. mostly known as a sideman for coltrane, mingus, coleman, hamilton, nelson, et al, but as a band leader he was actually pretty big and influential for jimi hendrix, and you can hear it. good shit.

all i got

mash up

this


and this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXlaOsNBDkk

skreams new one is out today, this is on it. not as good as his remix of in for the kill. which was just on entourage. show has been good the last two weeks.

in defense of, part XII

set design.

full disclosure- ive had like 5 mojitos. so where two days ago i was not tom bissell and colson whitehead, today maybe i am. though, id like to think this is more like nick hornby, who certainly had a drink or two whilst writing. maybe perhaps though, irvine welsh-sans heroin.

set design is very big for me, from plays-which i love (still need to see rothko and fela). but musically (though fela is) from radiohead (obviously on the in rainbows tour, it was the best ever, the must anti bush, most traumatic, whatever, set design ever.) my god, the lights, the lights. etc. to bat for lashes, to hell i dunno im fascinated by every show i go to, so after radiohead this is a moot point. that being said, i havent yet watched any youtube videos for the arcade fire tour that ill be an active participant on for wednesday. i use for here in the glaswegian sense. and spoon. spoon is actually a band i like more than arcade fire, but unfortunately im locked in the paradigm that the headliner is the most important band.

this did not use to be the case.

however, in outdoor amphitheatre shows its my experience that the opening act never gets the credit they deserve, even though over spoon's 20 year history they are musically more (dont hate me) significant than arcade fire in terms of the influence they have on genres in general. socially they provide a certain steady outlet too, which is nice. while arcade fire, well musically nobody is really ripping them off, and socially the mainstream perception of them is well theyre left wing, so we like them and they have a haitian girl, so thats topical. in a slightly more lucid state (though i feel quite lucid enough, thank you very much, just not willing to spend time elaborating) id well, elaborate more. for lack of better words. fact of the matter is, and heres the point im trying to make, is that people take arcade fire at face value, though they really shouldnt. i mean to be honest, most people, in fact not most people, but only really like 10 people in the world listen to arcade fire through through the lens of habermas, et al, etc. habermas because of deliberative democracy, but others for other things.

anyway thats more or less what ive got on that. i started this meaning to say i havent seen the set design for arcade fire so im ready to be surprised. and i always wanted to see spoon first in austin so maybe this is a bit bittersweet for me, and im willing to demphasize losing my spoon virginity to ugly hotlanta. thats really what i meant.

anyway, im in the mood for new jersey

gone

this is the one where im supposed to talk about all that college has meant to me, etc. ideally, it should sound like colson whitehead or jonathan lethem has written it. someone like that. but for me, those guys arent very good. so i dont really know what that leaves me with. anyway. feels good right? anticlimactic, though i suppose thats the norm for me with these sorts of things. meta- this will not be.

as i write this, im actually more preoccupied thinking of what song/video or whatever to put at the end.

i actually got a pretty good idea for it, just now, but hold on.

i dont really know how to frame this. lessons learned? stuff i was supposed to do but didnt. still havent read the statue, nor been in fort hill. the latter because i hate calhoun, that could be the reason. what i go back and do it over? which part? hard to say, itd be a bit dull wouldnt it, all those same classes over, half of which i pretty much already had in hs. thad be like doign it over 3 times then wouldnt it? certainly thats the case for the first two years. also, my liver probably couldnt handle the do over. also, predictably tuition would increase and my scholarships wouldnt, so id have to pay them money. probably wouldnt be too thrilled about that. so no, i probably wouldnt do it again, but at the same time i certainly wouldnt do it any differently. maybe ill eat those words in a dozen years, or less. or more.

its funny, for someone as fascinated by origins, endings and paradigm shifts as myself, i really don't acknowledge what should be perceived to be my own. well because, quite frankly, i dont really think tehy are. i mean what is college supposed to be? vocational training? you give diplomas to dogs when they graduate obedience school. the similarities between that and this are striking. for me seeing radiohead the first time was more significant, hearing burial the first time, seeing horsefeathers, crossing from germany into the czech rep., and really about 100 other things were too. maybe it was that time when i saw a noble laureate and no more than 50 others came. but hey, we have a football team. and frats.

what book was i reading when i came to campus freshman year? lets think, cause this might actually be the only way for me to effectively bookend this thing, and perhaps maybe cause this post to take on the order of something less than than the most obnoxious case of exceptionalism since well, i just thought of a million things. i was reading at least two things. the first was extremely loud and incredibly close by js foer. its fitting that im reading his latest at the moment. circle of life and all that. it be perfect for inarritu to write that into the movie he hasnt yet made, but certainly will, after i meet him at sundance. anyway, its a notable book. and very important in the sense that through it, i was able to realize most people at clemson would not be reading the books that i read. its because that novel makes you look around at people. also it throws a little trauma at the reader but that wasnt important to me at the time, later it would be though. i was also reading the fall by camus. thats a very good book for kids to be reading the first week of their freshman year. because when faced with what we are told are limitless opportunties, all you really are in fact living in is isolation, imprisonment, and these are the realities of existence, collegiate.

wish this was more prosaic, call this a rough draft.

i want to end this on a quote, but instead of somebody elses, ill do my own. i think ill get it right, though ill be corrected if it isnt.

dammit i cant quite remember how it went....

"college-something white people above a certain income level have to do"

not poetic, hardly accurate. but at its core, there is a bit of something to that statement.

rite of passage? for me when i think i rite of passage i think of vikings or stravinsky, both really. and when i think of college i dont htink of vikings, or stravinsky. this is bad bad logic, but im sticking with it.

so, what gets the privilege of being the last song selected by me as an undergraduate? probably something deserving, but winner of the title it is-what was i listening to first day freshman year?

i actually assumed my own existence extends until tomorrow, and with camus being a central part of htis post, well, apparently i havent learned anything. im just tired, ok.

not going to lie, probably was this

or/also

and other stuff. but this is good.

yeah

john you son of a bitch stop writing

whatever i dont care. im in the mood and i aint always. this is fun. keep the fun up. narrate your life. who said that? no clue but i like it. as long as you arent pretentious or derivitave or both. which i may be. i cant judge. can i not judge myself? whatever i dont feel like dealing with those questions. im sober.

newayz big radiohead binge tonight, so much so that i might play it on through sunrise, and cue no surprises as the sun comes up. in fact, that sounds like a damn good idea. i cant wait to stay up into the middle of the night again with people. that junk is fun.

i want to draw a picture of burial's 'ghost hardware' of how the samples ascend and descend. especially the christina aguilera one. thatd be an incredible painting i think, at least what im visualizing. like a curvalinear rothko. thats blowing my mind right now. which i didnt recognize until like a week ago, after listening to this album more than any other over the last two years. at least at night. i make a distinction. what i listen to at night i rarely listen to during the day. same goes for film and art and that. at night i want ot be like straight out of a dystopian semi-future. during the day i want to build a house and read books. its not that simple, but thats the gist.


gonna rate some urban stuff now. cause i wanna.


dont know whether to hate or respect. its funny. dubstep doesnt have to be serious right? its just better when it is. always.


ok like i completely hate rusko. hes bringing the four on the floor beat into dubstep and calling it dubstep. which totally makes it not dubstep. makes it more like grime or DnB, but my god its impossible to know nowadays. anyway, this has amber coffman of dirty proj's on sampled. and its not a bad track, good to dance to efficiently, which is usually impossible in dubstep. but dont call this dubstep for my sake. its just not dubstep. its rusko being good at merging a few styles and making it sound his own. diplo produced this, and diplo makes clubs good (look at hsi remixes and remember hes solely responsible for the masses knowing about M.I.A., for which we should be thankful) but listen to/watch this one...



the guy is an idiot. a totally mongoloid. 1-like 80% of a dj is how you look. so that means 80% of anything rusko does is ridiculous before he even drops his first beat. and seriously thats wayyyy too much cocaine. and if this is dubstep? well how can it be? this is probably more 1990s chicago house at times, that then jumps into early 2000s uk garage. it sounds ok. just not dubstep by any stretch. i mean dont get me wrong, i love hearing this stuff in a club.




fly lo is great. hes also american, which is rare for thi stuff. honoring the late hip hop pioneer/awesome guy j dilla.

benga is pretty cool. i like him. makes stuff thats pretty honest dubstep that you can still dance to. 26 basslines isnt actually false advertising, theyre all there. it doesnt feel like too many either. i hate when everybody thinks they have to do those 8 bit noises to establish i high end. dont do it. this isnt crystal castles.


the bug. jungle+dubstep. i eat it up. its obnoxious, invasive, parasitic and freaking great. saw kevin martin doing another project in ldn last year.



this one in fact. effing great stuff.


the guys that started it all. this song should have been at the top of this blog. because at :28 when the bass drops youre like. holy shit. then when spaceape comes in at 1:30 its just sewer bliss. its like seeing the beginning of the universe. seriously. or doctor who doing somethign epique. freaking great. more than that. sonic genius, kode 9. makes me want to be on the south bank every waking moment.


this was just great. not a fan of danger mouse, he does a few things ok. but cee lo's voice is just great. and hes a funny looking man.


the fade on this is what makes it. zombie march.



grimeee. love this man. anthemic.


so i havent talked about skream. i like skream. especially remixes. this man can make a dubstep remix of any song in about a minute it seems like. seriously he does everything. hundreds. he does his own stuff too but its shite. this one is so good.




listening to something from 15 years ago and having it sound like something that hasnt yet happened is an incredible feeling. beth gibbons happens to be cool as all get out. dragging while singing this is increible. geoff barrow's stack and rig is probably worth over $50,000, conservative estimate. theres something great about an acoustic guitar and honesty. theres also something cool about a rig like that and what it can do. this would be a great place to end this. but i dont want to stop.


sun ra is a good not stopping place. fascinating guy, but i cant let myself start on a jazz track, otherwise this will last three days or 8 minutes in this case. sun ra is great. makes you feel music. not just hear it or think it or whatever. he ups the relevance. ill leave it there.


yeah ok. its just interesting. i dont like all the hooks. and the structure of the song. too much pop. but the performance art she does is so detailed and thought out i gotta respect that. and lets face it, shes better than britney and them ever were in like every way. and as my friend always points out, shes got a damn rilke quote on her arm. so shes got to be on my side.



alright last one. pinnacle of hip hop. screams ambition.

best line in fiction-prose

what is? i dunno. gonna have to think about that. and i feel so bad because i probably wont be able to think of what is exactly my favorite. but heres a shot at it.

candidates:

no country for old men-"You think when you wake up in the mornin' yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else."

extremely loud and incredibly close-"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living"

serena-"It’s ever been the way of the man of science or philosophy. Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can’t see nothing.”

heart of darkness-"The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much."

everything wendell berry has ever written.-this is a cop out. so-"Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy." cant remember where this came from.

huck finn-"You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth."

the myth of sisyphus-"there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn."

the savage detectives-"Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragicomedy." love this full quote, where he talks about how he'd be under various dictators. but this is the kicker.

hitch hikers guide to the galaxy-"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons."

the idea of nathan zuckerman sorry thats not a quote.

saturday-"When there are no consequences, being wrong is simply a diversion."

this is not going to end.

grapes of wrath- "It don't take no nerve to do somepin when there ain't nothin' else you can do."

faulkner-somewhere, he said hed rather choose pain than nothing. so wherever that appeared.

arg but there are so many obvious things not on here. hmm.

good country people- "Her voice when she spoke hand an almost pleading sound. 'Aren't you,' she murmured, 'aren't you just good country people?'...'Yeah,' he said, curling his lip slightly, 'but it ain't held me back none. I'm as good as you any day in the week.'"

the corrections-"The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself."

reckon ill leave it here. whats the best? hmm. what does that mean? most relevant to me? none are any more than another. concise? cogent? whatever. i dunno. what sounds the best right now, how about that? no i dont like that. what hits my chest like a freight train but draws me in?

first is probably huck finn, second savage detectives, third no country for old men. but these arent my favorite books, necessarily. and that huck finn quote isnt the most meaningful, but it sets that tone and setting that is so definitively american, you are made to read the novel in that voice. its great.

the bolano one. hard to isolate anything he wrote in a quote, because its just so wordy. but that bit makes a good job of it. what does it mean? its like bolano, you have no idea what hes saying, but you actually do. its not that its personal or anything like that, or even that its cryptic or esoteric. but actually its all three of those things. cant explain it. it just is.

no country for old men-the past, it matters.

that was fun.

musak

i know i know

i post this song like once a month, btu really its one of the greatest.



the drive by truckers, proving to the world that not all southerners are right wing, lost cause, racist, homophobes. its so great to hear.

right so

fall for greenville line up is ace this year. the only year id pay money to go to a free festival. so ill be there. everyday, for the entire time. its almost as if every band that paste magazine is obsessed with is coming. +2 ramseur records bands, 1 of which being half of the everybodyfields. im ecstatic. deer tick, jason isbell, etc etc etc. 4 FREE



how i feel right now^ best recording of this ive found. an idea just popped into my mind. i want to go play guitar in the wal mart parking lot. this is insane. but i feel like i need to do this.

peaches in the summertime, apples in the fall.

I had a dream last night that involved the english comedian, David Mitchell, methamphetamine, and myself, all at a house party. interestingly i didnt do meth nor talk to mitchell. in fact i cant quite remember what it was that i did do. probably just watched people do meth and talk to david mitchell. now its been a while since ive read freud and i havent yet seen inception so i dont really want to talk about dreams. so ive got nothing more on that.

also, i used to tell my dad that beer tastes like green beans. he didnt believe me. and recently i havent thought so either. however. as i have just eaten a plate full of green beans and am now drinking a beer, i once again think the tastes are close.

30 min break in between ^ that and this v

right, so. bonnie 'prince' billy, will oldham, palace, palace brothers. whatever you want to call him. or rather, more like whatever he wants to call himself. his lyrics are just shocking. normal/normal/normal/disturbing. i like them. he makes everyone else seem normal/normal/normal/normal. same goes for death to everyone. for me this is basically a route course in the light/dark, overworld/underworld binary present in existentialism, for better or for worse. the irony of that question-'im actually living, are you?' because to the protag, living is decadent and to not be living is to not be decadent. does it make sense? yeah, kinda. theres certainly some grandeur in the decadence, especially in art. i mean what good writer/artist/musician wasnt dealing with a complete addiction to opiates for at least part of their productive lives (and usually their most prolific)? probably most are/were. for a while its positively correlated, then its, well, not. and to be clear and transparent, i certainly wouldnt want to be on opiates. nor would i want the people that build bridges and run our lives through wall street on them either (though i definitely think, especially in the case of wall street, that they are). but i digress, this song is not about heroin, it just sounds like it is.

that repetition of 'im stuck here, but here is where life is, where you are you are just pretending to live.' we've read it lots of times, but we rarely hear it, especially in a folk/antifolk context. thats what makes will oldham great. sure i love folk, more than most, but oftentimes its treatment of death in the city is maybe too, well, faulknerian and less rothian. or probably to be more accurate delilloian or reedian (as in lou). why do we, the read always have to add -ians and -isms? probably because its easier, and thats why im fine with it. and its like a nerd inside joke that isnt math or sci fi related. we have to cherish those. anyway.

i want to talk about the chorus, or one of the choruses. 'and it makes hosing/much more fun.' what is hosing? too be honest im not really sure but i ahve some guesses. oldham definitely builds a lot of songs around misuse of words, or by structuring new contexts around old words to create new meanings. i think here that 'hosing' certainly refers to the life he lives. whores and murder, maybe, but probably. more heavy than the whores than the murder i would bet, this isnt death metal. alas, both viable meanings of the term. this life is what he calls living, but by the Other is considered to be nonliving, or living in the underworld or disassociated from reality. the key subtlety here is that he acknowledges that his life is 'hosing.' by doing so is he subtely implicating himself as 'nonliving' then? the rebuttal being, 'life is hosing at its core, etc.' oftentimes thats what any similar discussion of existentialism falls back on, and thats why sartre ended up looking dumb and camus, by acknowledging absurdity looked substantially less so, but to many still pretty dumb. in short. in too short. but thats what im getting at. basically this guy knows hes fucked up, but is trying to justify his own existence. thats the key take away here. and we all do it every day.

woo

http://cnn.com/video/?/video/politics/2010/08/01/sotu.graham.favorite.sc.cnn


hahahahhaha lindsey....

feeling kind of mod

this is why shteyngart is awesome. love my nyc jewish friends. hahah james franco. no he actually isnt that russian. cant wait to pick this up.



always fun to hear musicians, especially avant garde ones, talk about artists, especially avant garde ones.