Alas a distant malaise has come over me today, my day off. I say distant because it is hard to perceive, like looking through the back end of binoculars, and hard to punctuate and hard to locate. I feel it humming away spinning inside of me like a dark crystal of spinning energy and blue whorls and wisps, heart shaped, pulmonary, veined and arteried. Perhaps because snow falls from artery clouds today.
I've waited so long for this white ground and flakey footprints and brown sludge streams coupling and running along the gutters in fine swishing fastness. Unfortunately, my ass has planted itself, literally, down on my couch (pale eggshell colored ass-roots twine down in between couch cushions and grasp quarters, bread twisty-ties, indiscernible red plastic pieces, dog hair, human skulls, fingernails, toenails, skyscrapers, buttons, hopes, dreams, knock-knock jokes, actual shit, coffee grounds, fake rubber vomit, female condoms, scurvy, and other such effluvium). I cannot get up from this dark prison set aside for me by myself.
What are these empty fields of sound that stretch off into the distance as if they were spitting into the eye of the horizon, speckled with tiny tumbling bushes that are prickly to the touch but soft puffs of incognizible motion to the distance? What is this screaming sky that is coming down out of the blue and whites and passing in black spots on the ground?
I have seen the globe so far past my eyes perception, far beyond my presence. I have seen so much farther than any details in the crunching soot at my feet or the air dripping with dryness clenching at my throat and I have taken too much time drifting away from myself through this tiny bright window that I now type through at to you. There are pictures here. and sounds.
and off farther away I see the distant tables, thats mesa to you sir, and they sound like strangling bending air that squelches between beats like jelly mushing out from the inside of a bad sandwich. and I hear notes and sounds that tumble down cogs and cogs of a machine.
It is a contraption in the desert, a turned vehicle that flipped somehow, perhaps in the wind, perhaps in the somnambulance of an over-imbibed driver, perhaps placed here by a divine hand that rained them down and only the rest were crushed into sand under the weight of time and this one retained its shape and creaking guitar parts and rusted liver-spotted, pimpled rust.
"Well, well, well. Look what the cat dragged in" I shuffle into the back of the blogosphere, collar up as if splayed across a neighborhood watch sign, and sit down. Wooden foldout screeching a protest and shifting slightly to the right as I sit on empty air and crash to the floor causing a disturbance that draws no eyes from the empty room.
"Maybe you should've written or something before taking off."
"Are you mad?" I ask
"Not really, I've dealt with abandonment in the past." cleaning a mug.
I don't really want to talk about it. This is too hard so I'm going to take it easy, maybe kick my feet up. You see: I've been breathing the salty sea air on whaling missions and traveling across the globe in hot air balloons. and if I haven't been doing that then I certainly have been treking, somnambulant, across the vast landscapes of music and writing. Consuming. Consuming more than one might ever have thought possible. You, blog, are my bucket. It's about time to purge myself of this, this, this what?
This great corpulence. My belly has grown and I have popped through to the other side of my taste like pushing a finger through an opaque plastic trashbag. I find myself gravitating to the thick sounds of Jazz and funk and hip-hop and Kraut more than I find myself gravitating to the corpuscles of indie-pop that so many blogs have smitten themselves with, like licking the barnacles on the bottom of a ship. Why? Why?
I know I've left you stranded before, left you wallowing in deep swampy pools of the dimmest water without a wooden plank to helplessly grasp. or even half of a bright orange life-vest. I was off gallivanting with prostitutes and steamy wads of cash ejected from offshore slot machines on open-water steamboats, I apologize. I do indeed enjoy writing for you my crew, or maybe this is just writing for me.
Some days when I wake up to consume my black morning sludgewater I think of you and I think of me and I think of the sea-green waters that have yet to be traversed by us and I get excited at the prospect. Other days I wake up with crustacean eyes and a barnacled demeanor, I stare up at the timber ceiling in my room. Suddenly I bust in to my own cabin with a group of sweaty, grimacing, tattooed strongarms clutching thick coils of thick rope with their sweaty, meaty paws. I've come to keelhaul myself.
I can't tell you how difficult it is to play the role of punisher and punished simultaneously, to be the one standing shipside of the plank with a scimitar:
"Ye broke the cardinal rule of music blogging: not hosting yer own MP3's. Whats worse, ye been using Badongo, putfile and (Spits on the deck) RAPIDSHARE?" and then quickly jump to the oceanside of the plank to play the tattered me in tattered sackcloth, hands tied with shaggy, cutting searope:
"No no... I swear! I'm getting to it... I'll start hosting as soon as I can, I swear"
I jump back boatside and eye myself squinteyed for a second, my posse of gnarled sailors behind me, reething their muscles and waiting for me to try and escape so they can exact their flogs against my sallow back.
"so ye been sayin' for a fornight now and I haven't seen anything. And ye been slackin on the posting m'boy, you know what that calls fer!"
"I know I know, please, please don't do this! not again!"
I readjust my captain's tricorner, sheath my curved blade, saunter out to the end of the plank next to bearded me and stare darkly into my eyes and then pinch my cheeks and say:
"too late ye scurvy dog, say 'ello to Davy Jones!"
))kick((
Under the boat it's quite peaceful. Everytime I plunge, Buddy Holly plays for some inexplicable reason.
The ropes cut deep into my hands as the bottomside of the boat, splintered and be-barnacled, rasps along my face and stomach and legs drawing blood that in turn draws the sharp toothed harps and pianos. These sea creatures live for chum like me, they pluck along behind me and lick their lips. They are slow moving creatures though, often being drawn astray by schools of violins, bottom feeders, following boats for scraps of resin: dropped overboard. The strings converge and scatter as I skitter along the sharp base of the boat.
I ignore these hyenas, mere scavengers, it is the blood-thirsty saxophone I worry about. Traveling alone, these creatures can swim faster than seven deckhands can pull, and typically, I'm pulling myself alone so any sign of the sax could be certain death. I've heard stories of keelhauling ropes suddenly going slack and waters turning chunky and crimson. Everyone present at those fishy feasts said they heard the faint glimmerings of Paul Desmond, of Take Five. I shudder to think even now of the jaw gnashing fates of those men and women.
So far I've come up on the other side, blue cheeked, lacerated and bloody, coughing up saltwater, but I've survived. I welcome myself back to the boat, slap myself (painfully) on the back and hand myself a hot cup of joe.
"ye lived through it again meboy, now hurry up and get that MP3 hosting"
Check out Sufjan doing a performance at BAM about the BQE. Apparently he will be playing old stuff and new stuff. I'd like to see it considering the live version of Majesty Snowbird is one of my new favorite musics. Are you going?
I think that, perhaps, Neil Sedaka could be one of the most brilliant men in existence in our time. Let us begin a short journey through this half-assed post wherein I try to pass off clicking around on a bunch of youtube videos and embedding them as an actually well thought out musical analysis (which I suppose you don't come here for anyway [if you're a moocher here for the mp3's just skip to the bottom!])
here we go:
I've known gaydars that could pierce through thick iron walls wrought from the deepest forges at the molten center of Detroit, alas my gaydar glands withered at birth and never went through the same growth spurt as my peers. but I can still see that Sedaka is as gay as two canarys in an appletini birdbath.
here's the classic Breaking Up (with your boyfriend) is Hard to Do
Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen:
watch how uncomfortable he is in this one:
Neil Sedaka with Fountains of Wayne at Joe's Pub (I was at this show, it was quite splendid).
His genius is possibly second only to mine. The funny thing is he has been famous for so long that he has the same demeanor of a dictator who will kill one for the slightest infraction, an index finger bend, a poorly placed butt-scratch, but does it with a sadistic sense of humor as well, like instead of putting one in front of a shooting squad he confines one into a room where only reality TV is playing. I love him. Here's some downloads for those who want them:
These days, the Zeitgeist moves faster than anyone cares to remember. I remember only several years ago when the moons and stars were still aligned. Back when the curvature of spacetime had not been warped sticky, like four dimensional honey, dripping with the sheer weight of useless information; Blogs: millions upon millions of satellites orbiting that blazing ball of gas, Google.
Sean Bell was shot and killed by undercover police at his bachelor party. Papoose is a rapper from Bedford Stuy in Brooklyn who wrote a song called "50 shots" about the incident. The incident was important and terrifying, but much of media has performed it's obligatory outcry and the story has fallen back back back through the pages of the newspapers. The Zeitgeist has moved on. So will I.
The thing that fascinates me about Papoose is his penchant for disseminating information, as if his raps were political pamphlets thrown, billowing down from a rooftop. He's New York's new wiz kid, produced, with ballyhoo, like the school braniac at a spelling bee.
Clearly NAS is no longer New York's answer, if you were prithee to the red-light, green-light middling sounds of "Hip-Hop Is Dead." Jay-Z is merely keeping house: making sure the floo is closed in the chimbly when he leaves for a month, getting creative with the leftover Ramen noodles and spices, stealing the neighbor's wi-fi.
Truth be told Papoose isn't really that great, listening to him is kind of like squinting your eyes and pretending the face you drew on the paper bag is Jay-Z. He doesn't have much charisma, his voice is like a younger Jay-Z, his rhymes lose footing very quickly by backpedaling over meaning. Why is he so lucrative? Well, I suppose you could ask that same question about Kanye. Why is Kanye so lucrative? Kanye's lyrics are frequently god-awful (have you heard the new one? we won't talk about the identity politics of "You could be my black Kate Moss tonight" or the even stranger identity politics implicit in positioning himself as the post-apocalypse God-child Tetsuo in 'Akira') but he's a fantastic composer of beats.
What is appealing about Papoose to Jive that he would be worth 1.5 mil? well, aside from the fact that he already has major draw (see his mix tapes: Busta, Nas, Mary J Blige, Swizz Beats, Just Blaze) in the NYC area, he has garnered much acclaim more because of his ideas than his words, very much like Kanye (and R Kelly's wily ego). 50 Shots was pretty widely accepted as being a return to the New Yorkpolitcal consciousnessform that Ghostface said was dead after Amadou Diallo was shot in 1999. ("I knew New York was wack when they shot my man Amadou Diallo forty-one fucking times and ain't nobody stand up. But if that shit happen in L.A. somewhere, they would have went to bat for Amadou Diallo. It would have been hell. Stores getting burnt the fuck up. New York don't stand for nothing.") Its a return to "The Message" that Grandmaster Flash made popular so many years ago during Hip-Hop's honeymoon period at the Roxy in NYC.
case in point:
Recently I read an interview in Vibe about Papoose's signing to Jive records for 1.5 million. He spoke about his upcoming release in Sept. 07, "The Nacirema Dream" (see what he did there?), but what fascinated me most in the interview revolved around his work on the copious mixtapes emblazoned with his name. Specifically the stuff about his Law Library series.
(I have combined all three tracks into one for easier listening and easier access and heres some lyrics one, two, three but rest assured, I don't care for you, my readers, that much.)
Papoose's Law Library series trampolines upon a simple concept and it is this: people don't know the law without lawyers to explain it to them. If they can't afford lawyers why not eloquently (quite for papoose) describe a person's rights to him over a beat?
I'm not a big fan of the beats on the songs themselves: muzakky dimly lit tunes with green lampshades and spectacles. It fits the mood of the song and doesn't detract from the words, which is the idea.
These songs are what I'm talking about when I say his ideas are superior to his flow. There's nothing that special about the songs but they are riveting simply because of the sheer amount of useful information one is receiving in such a short period. He's no Aesop Rock, but then again, Aesop wouldn't be able to deliver these lines with such clarity, we'd be plodding through a swamp of metaphors and assonance before any sort of meaning could be arrived at.
Anyhoo, enjoy yourself with this one and we'll look out for Papoose's debut in Sept. it ought to be stupid big when it drops.
here's Ye with his stupid new expensive video (Scream anyone?)
I woke up early this morning. I've been trying to go to sleep at a more reasonable hour. I've spent far too many a night in the past year closing my eyes and slowing my breath at the so-called witching hour, that hour in the night where the shapes and sizes of normal things like pillows and tables are transmogrified into horrible creatures, pint glasses and cigarettes, who beg me to sap them of their ambrosial broth.
The leaf, my friends, will be turned over.
I woke up early this morning and remembered that my morning ritual of coffee had been disrupted by a lack of it. I drew my pantaloons to my waist and proceeded towards the grocery store down the block to retrieve the seeds that would germinate into the brown liquid I do so dearly enjoy.
and I felt the deliquescent heat seep from the windowsills, the orange rust on iron bars, the chalk white stoops, the leftover gravel. It rained very hard yesterday, meaning something about the weather is changing, the scorching heat being shunted further east, over the sea, by cool sprays up in the stratosphere.
When I returned to my apartment and composed my breakfast and coffee into a satisfactory symphony of flavors, my computer greeted me with a sonic recap of my brisk footed circuit.
I don't usually use promos (last time I used one, a contrary reader called me the N word. Inappropriate.) but my canvas morning imbibed this music, plim: To swell, as grain or wood with water.
Story goes that Justin Vernon holed himself up in his father's cabin after the breakup of his old band (these guys) like so many Ed Drostes or Springsteens. He stayed there the three months of Winter and emerged, be-bearded and bedraggled, with this album.
Some of the music sounds like it could be buried beneath the scratch-n-sniff surface of Grey's Anatomy in some sort of papery montage treacly tripe, it does fall short at that. But other moments of the album work on so very simple a level that it burrows beneath the brick wall holding my nose up in the snooting position and my fingers hit repeat unhindered by my listening brain.
Here is a place to listen to the entire album: Bon Iver
oh, yes, and before I forget, Kitsch Me Gorgeous, that handsome devil, has a link to a recap of the 77Boadrum show in Brooklyn last Saturday that yours truly went to, as well as a link to a Boooootleg. check out this LIIIINK
I've never eaten a sandwich that I didn't like, but I guess I could conceive of some I wouldn't like.
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If any record label, artist, or human being would like me to remove any recorded track, video, or any other type of media I can't think of now, please let me know and it will be removed promptly.
