Yay. Placeholder blog post. Literally only doing anything at the moment because one member of an old peer group is also still assailing this mist.

Though my shit's been far less tumultuous over the last four years, I feel obligated to at least sound check the chasm.

Yeah, it feels okay. I used to write a lot. I used to like it. I can do it again.

Pseudoproof: I found a notebook that has preliminary research for the last handful of celeb interviews I did at USD. It also had class notes. And notes for op-eds I wanted to write but never sensed the audience for. And terrible, rough sketches for plays.

The freebie heroin taste you get is this: I apparently made my own mnemonic for the order of epochs for an earth science. Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, Holocene. For whatever, that's from most recent to most distant. Anyhow, that boiled down to PEOMPPH, which I remembered via "Porn ends on my penis; penis hard."

I was a crafty one all right.

Afraid to glance or glare...

Oh, Edsel...

 I'd almost entirely forgotten about them until I picked up the last Obits record Moody, Standard and Poor back when I was trying to review records again semiregularly.

 (deep breath for classic me storytelling, AKA done expect the point to reappear for some time)

I bought it knowing absolutely nothing about Obits other than the design of the packaging was ace. A mood was evoked by the colors, composition, and typography. Good enough.

 Driving home from the Electric Fetus, I gave the disc a preview. 45 seconds into the first track and barely a block down Franklin, the cigarette dropped from my mouth into my lap. My right hand was managing the steering wheel, and my left arm was out the window, fist clenched and pumping angrily. "FROBERG!" I bellowed.

 I don't really dislike Rick Froberg. I don't. But when I haven't heard one of his bands in awhile, I forget how his voice works and that human voices can work like that at all. Every ten years or so, I stumble across one of his projects, and this pattern had just been updated.

 Back in high school, I was a fairly bigbig Rocket From the Crypt Fan, which meant that I'd at least read about Drive like Jehu, Froberg's gig with Rocket frontman John Reis. I mean, the internet was around, but you couldn't burn CDs and you could maybe fit a short mp3 or two on a double-density 3 1/2 inch disk (still under 3 megs), and I was still in South Dakota, so it wasn't until I got to college in '97 that I got to experience Froberg for the first time.

 It was probably the first time I was left in alone in the KAOR studio that I really went nuts. I really had no idea which direction to go first. I went nuts and listened to pretty much every record and CD in there that I'd read about but had never heard. I even listened to Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation, which I'd owned on CD for years, but, shit. They had the Blast First pressing. How the fuck do you not give that some love?

 But yes. There was a copy of Yank Crime. I listened to it. Think I actually still have it somewhere. Don't really recall. At the time, since it sounded nothing like RFTC, I was utterly uninterested. But Froberg. Oh, that voice stands out.

 Years later, I pick up the Hot Snakes' Suicide Invoice because I faintly remembered reading a good review of it somewhere and I knew Reis had been involved. Froberg!

 So anyhow. The first listen to the Obits record was hasty and broken up over several drives from here-to-there and back-again. Absorb-y, but not really cogent. Anyhow, fourth or fifth listen, I totally fucking notice that one (and eventually two) of the songs were sung by a not-Froberg, and the not-Froberg's voice was TOTALLY recognizable. So that led me to Googling Sohrab Habibion, the guy in the album credits labeled probably something more helpful than not-Froberg.

Turns out he was in...

 Edsel.

 And I still have my copy of Techniques of Speed Hypnosis, which I actually remember hiding in the studio until I knew they were gonna sell all the CDs only I knew what were. Nope. Not concealing that I jacked stuff from the studio. But I felt guilty, so I made a point to but a TON of stuff when they unloaded. Man, it was OUTRAGEOUS what they wanted to charge for promotional copies (see what I did there, fuckers?) Anyhow. It's a great goddam record. Fits into that neat, bright, meaningful scuzzpop D.C. and nearby Virginia excelled at producing for so long, organized into a song-interlude-song-interlude rhythm. They put stuff out on Grass, Relativity, De Soto.

Full of goodness.

Musings on several months into vinyl fetishism...

I've been married for over a year now, and I like it. When I got married, I got many things: an amazing wife, a big party with all my friends and family, and a bunch of gifts. Still got the wife. Awesome. Still remember the party. Cool. Possess total recall of precisely one gift: a vinyl pressing of Mr. Bungle's California.

But the thing about that gift is that is was PERFECTLY suited to both Maureen and I.

The one problem: I burned up my stereo when I burned down France.

Sam, by way of giving us California, planted seeds that germinated several months ago when I convinced Maureen to let me go piece together a new stereo rig. Convinced is too strong a word as I didn't really have ply excessive charm, but still I prepared like it was going to be a Big Weird Fight. It's more fun that way.

I was unsatisfied with new gear offerings (in the financial ballpark we jointly agreed to), so I pieced together a modest system at a suburban pawn shop, and away we went.

A couple months in, and I'm throwing out about $50 a week on records. Sometimes it's $70 on two heavy pressings from a high-end boutique label like Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs, sometimes it's $30 on a wholly random smattering of used records at the Fetus (the Fall, Michael Jackson, and Jethro Tull).

I'm not really an audio snob. I easily slipped from CDs to mp3s without a complaint. I couldn't tell (that I could tell). The records I had were more out of ironic faux nostalgia or out of simple neat-o collectorhood. The difference between a polybagged comic book and Kraftwerk's Computer World were surprising negligible.

But years and years into the digital revolution, vinyl offers a surprisingly nice punch. Again, I don't have a high-end system. It's a Technics-made JC Penney turntable with a generic AT-71 stylus on a Nakamichi receiver through some old Avid speakers. But the presence is outstanding, and depending on the record, the clarity of space and separation is somewhat mind-blowing.

It's an easy and unsurprisingly accurate summation to dismiss my wonder as the result of years of settling for almost all recorded music to be absorbed via either my car or my computer. I get that.

But that's not the reason I've fallen in love with records.

It's the ritual.

I want to listen to some music. I select a record, shuck the plastic sleeve and the paper sleeve, gingerly pull out the record and examine it. I put it on the platter. If it's clean and shiny, I drop the needle. If not, I dose it with some Pfan Stat and give it a twirly wipe first. Then the music comes.

While not circumstantially identical, it takes me back to when I was a high schooler in Redfield; when I first discovered music. A box would come in the mail. Depending on who I thought I was getting a great deal from at the time, it contained music from either BMG or Columbia House. Down to my basement room I'd run, grabbing a comp notebook and my trusty Aiwa disc portable on the way to flopping on my bed where I'd lie and ACTIVELY LISTEN, going so far as to even transcribe any lyrics I found particularly compelling.

So far, the only regret I have is with selection. I'm not taking too many chances with unfamiliar material, instead frequently choosing to repurchase my greatest favorites from circa '96-'01.

I assume this is a personal fad that will eventually die, either from exhaustion of reasonably priced still-in-print options or a significant uptick in trustworthy new releases.

Oh, and as an added bonus, Maureen kind of likes listening to records too*. She raises the same eyebrow she raises whenever I find a new way of spending money as a substitute for being a creative, productive human, but, hey, to that end, I don't recall ever writing this extensively about either my various lens lusts or even about having spent the last three years as far more of a photographer than as a writer.

So there's that.

j.

* Yes, she more than "likes" listening to records. She still (correctly) thinks I'm spending too much money on it though.

Musical wife with spectatorjim.

This is fun. We had intentions of that sort of far-ranging house-cleaning couples frequently speculate about in their second year of marriage, but thankfully, I managed to subvert that by buying some beer and lugging some gear upstairs.

We've now been playing a game called Jim controls the iTunes, and Maureen plays bass to whatever Jim picks. We started with Echo and the Bunnymen's "Killing Moon" and have segued to Enon's "Natural Disasters."

This is fun.

Where to next?

Ten more yards.

Bah. Another false start. Blogging is tough, especially if you're loath to self-promote. One can project out to the void, but with not even an echo, desire to create either falters or is distracted by nearer, louder sirens.

Hence, I've been sinking time into elsewhere.

I'ma come back here and get more post-y.

Primarily because regular writing is the only thing that will keep my voice flexible, but also because I just posted something really clever on someone's Facebook update and nobody's noticed yet, even though it's been a whole seven minutes.

j.

Recent photos of note...

Shot lazily within 15 feet of my front door.

A pane of glass at work decided to shatter unexpectedly today. Something about a disproportionate glob of cadmium used in the tempering process absorbing heat and expanding at an unfriendly rate.

Perhaps a nice wallpaper?

Reviews of stuff I bought last Tuesday pt. II

tUnE-yArDs w h o k i l l

Both henceforth referred to as, respectively, Tuneyards and Whokill for convenience.

This album gives me pause. It is clearly good. It is clearly innovative and expressive and powerful and neato. But I have no idea what the hell any of it means. This is a work of restless genius, but it begs to be listened to almost more as an assertion of its own brilliant novelty than for any motivation that conventionally compels human beings to listen to music.

There's the blaringly awesome Gangsta, which herds Solex, Lily Allen, and M.I.A. into an inconsistently lit alley, takes their lunch money, and kicks the shit out of them for no other reason than that's just what happens when it gets out of bed.

Naturally, it's followed by the beautiful Powa, which is sweet (like a lullaby) and leads into sweet (like bad-ass). Merrill Garbus gots pipes, and she uses them here like they were both the fishnet stockings that caught your eye and the broken bottle used to demonstrate why you shouldn't stare.

Later, Bizness rips like you somehow already forgot about Gangsta. It's aggressive in its reach, but it feels merely assertive because you don't doubt that it gets what it wants.

You Yes You sets up with Garbus doing her thing, but then she yelps "What's that about? What's that about?" like a scalded Mark E. Smith.

As we start moving towards the wrap-up, Wooly Wolly Gong invokes the same spiraling introspection that made DJ Shadow's Endtroducing so powerful and with similar results. A circular guitar and a plainly affected drumbeat provide the bed over which Garbus croons sounds that evince both hope and dread independent of the word-vessels that contain them. Also, a truck drives by. You will look out your window for the offender, but no, it's just something there to fuck with headphones wearers.

The album closes on Killa, the feel-good not-a-single of the barbecue season. It sums up the album rather nicely. There are bits where a singular Garbus informs you of this and/or that, and intermingled are bits where multiple Garbi wrestle each other for the honor of exclaiming something you will never understand on the first several tries.

But there is something alienating about this album that keeps it from seeming more enjoyable to me. Is it the willful inconsistency? The chasing ideas back out from the rabbit hole?

The best I can come up with is to out myself as something of a sexist. I could use all the same hyperbole and praise I used for Ms. Garbus to describe a Dan Deacon record, except that I'm somehow all for that. The two aren't really stylistically similar, but they do share a similar grating-as-fuck-when-you're-not-in-the-mood quality. But I think I perhaps find a more satisfying logic in how a guy putters with deconstruction than a lady. Maybe?

Whokill is more than just a deconstruction though. Through all of its myriad filters and edits, it is a pop record (somehow) when all is said and done, and a damn good one.

j.

UPDATE: Technically 10/24/12, though I've been meaning to add this for months. Maybe after the implosion of indie/college rock, I'd fallen out of the habit of challenging my tastes? I don't know. I no longer question this record or Garbus. It's just plain great.

Reviews of stuff I bought last Tuesday.

Having been a bit frustrated at my inability to get myself to stick to the plan of reviewing a new album a week just to get the old juices going again, I hereby present a review of the first of three albums I bought last Tuesday.

First up, Man Man's Life Fantastic.

There appear to be two ways to look at Man Man's fourth album.

The first is to take Life Fantastic on its own individual and excellent merits, sealed away from the rest of the world (and it's predecessors) in an insular vacuum. The second is to liken it to your friend for whom the renaissance fair never ends and you're one, "Aye, m'lord," away from swearing off the all-night mead sessions.

Not that there aren't new tricks. Opener Knuckle Down chugs along fantastically courtesy of the 8-bit grit of its fuzzed-out synth bass underpinning.

Old tricks sail by here and there, some more welcome than others. It's ridiculously difficult to not chant "Mustache, mustache," when you hit the rhythm rocks at the heart of of Haute Tropique, and the prog interlude backloaded in Shameless (which might be the album's best track) also harkens back to Six Demon Bag.

Eel Bros. is just a little transitional throwaway bit of fun, but its attempt to fuse Nintendo phrasings with late '90s Beck tropical dance fever makes one kind of want to see Man Man dedicate a whole track to similar ideas.

The album closes on two strong cuts: the title track and Oh, La Brea. Life Fantastic swoons deliriously in tightening circles leading to a cacophonous center that's actually kind of surprising in just how tuff it is.

Oh, La Brea works a bit differently. It operates somewhere in the neighborhood of a medley of their various preferred pastiches, but incredibly satisfyingly.

In conjunction with the previous track, it does beg the rather awkward question of when will frontman Honus Honus pull a Nick Cave and, while recognizing his supporting players as The World's Most Enabling Band, take the spotlight unto himself and attempt to flourish as a Named Songwriter Guy as opposed to basking in the nurturing safety of being the Main Guy In a Quirky Fringe Band.

At the very minimum, Life Fantastic is good . To those new to the fold, it may even be their best. But four albums in, Man Man are less trailblazers than minstrels making merry in their very own crop circle.

However, it's a very nice crop circle, and the mead is very nice, especially after a few cups, and maybe entirely worth putting up with a few more thees and thous.

Dream #1

So not my first dream, and thankfully not a Frist dream.

But I figgered I might as well document them on the rare occasion that they occur.

This is from last night, so it's had most of the day to alternate between coming together and falling apart entirely.

Anyhow. I'm out with a dog (maybe Dagny, maybe not a dog at all, but at least another friendly, playful entity) on a beach between the sea and some mighty tall cliffs. It's definitely night, but a waxful-if-not-full moon is doing its thing, and I've got my Maglite to boot.

Why am I there? I think I was meeting up with a party maybe? Not sure. So there I am, on a sandy beach that's maybe 15o yards from rocky, sheer cliffs to crashing surfs, looking for something, playing my flashlight along whatever shrubs or rock piles there might be.

I knew the specifics of the next part when I woke up this morning, but have since forgotten them. Something to the effect of finding a lost child. I didn't return him to anyone, and I don't remember the kid speaking at all, but I kind of played the flashlight back in the direction I'd come from and said, "That way." The boy was seemingly grateful and ran off where I'd pointed.

Some time passes. Maybe a night, maybe a week. I don't know.

I'm on a similar stretch of beach, doing kind of the same thing, but I know that I'm making my way towards the kid's parents' house for a reward or recognition or something. It's a big, ridiculous Spanish villa-type thing with white walls and red tile roofs and more split levels than anyone would ever want.

It's still night, or perhaps night again, but I have no sidekick.

I get there.

Not really sure what's going to happen or supposed to happen next, but I decide to sneak off to the bathroom before anything big happens. I walk down a long hallway that seems to be kind of rickety, although I could never tell you why. I find the bathroom and go in.

The toilet is next to a window. I'm pissing in the toilet, trying to be quiet so they don't know I'm not wherever I'm supposed to be. It's taking forever. I look out the window. It's not night anymore, or at least not out the window, which overlooks a staggering, rocky, cliffy stairstepped waterfall leading to a tropical tree-laden lagoon. I'm still pissing, and the stream seems to get louder and more powerful.
The bathroom begins to shake.

The wall with the window shears off from the house and falls down onto the first step and splinters shoot everywhere. I take a step back towards the hallway, still pissing.

The toilet is next to go down the cliff, and I remember seeing it hit a rock not too far below and bounce into the lagoon far below with a splash. I pissed in it until it would have come undone from the plumbing, had it been attached to any.

The rest of the bathroom, myself included, went next.

I tried to mirror the trajectory of the toilet but miscalculated. I sensed the household was watching me and that a great tragedy was unfolding. I hit the first step of rocks hard but bounced high, far higher than I had originally fallen and arc up and over into a loose sort of compost heap next to the lagoon, and that impact siphons off enough excess kinetic energy that I only bounce about ten feet up and over into inexplicably dry soil.

I knew that I'd hit hard and was fucked up, but also that I was pretty badass for having survived the fall I did. The frames to my eyeglasses were straight ahead of me, temples even with the bridge, but the lenses were gone. I staggered to my feet, limped a step and smiled.

We flash forward some time. I'm well-dressed, maybe in a suit, probably wearing sunglasses, and kind of too warm. I'm standing in some sort of park with palm trees, maybe in front of a spendy Florida hotel or something. Someone (again, unsure of who, but certainly a friendly) is chatting with me. It feels like a social debriefing following a lengthy hospital stay.

Just as I'm reiterating how great I feel and how wonderful it is to be alive, I notice one of my hands has had a couple knuckles amputated and the stumps seem kind of flattened and burned.

This does not bother me. I rationalize it as being a small price to pay for surviving such a tremendous fall. I must have done it aloud, as my compatriot warns me that if my hand is surprising to me, then I should maybe or maybe not look at my face.

I don't know that I ever find a mirror to look into, but I remember looking for one. I know that I did find out that, years ago, I had interviewed for the Volante a man who had fallen down a bouncy cliff from a bathroom in a strikingly similar fashion to myself.

I took note of the man's forgettable name and set out to track him down.

Things get hazy again, but I find him at the racetrack and am about to ask him some questions about what happened when I am waylaid by a college-aged reporter who wants to ask me questions about falling down a bouncy mountain.

Helloooo, old shit!

Just stumbled across some unreleased Brainiac songs that I haven't heard since I first downloaded music via free university-provided dial-up.

They're not great, and kind of obnoxious because the mixes I got this time are all inexplicably hard-panned to the right channel (yes, I am on headphones, and yes, the plug is seated fully), but holy nostalgia for France. Wow.

Baby steps.

Time Out for Relevance

Where are all the gun-toting Second Amendment champions when the gun-toting nutjobs come out?

Don't get used to it...

This is just something to do while I wait for the coffee to be done.

The coffee is just something to do while I wait to smoke.

The Pall Mall is something I do while I wait for Maureen to get home,

at which point I will run inside and act like I've been cleaning all afternoon.

Review of Jonah Knight's Ghosts Don't Disappear

Full disclosure: 13 years ago, Jonah played the Ziggens' Have a Bitchin' Summer over KAOR's waves for me as a demonstration of how cool it is to be a college radio jock. He may or may not have had a tape out roughly the same time that I kinda dug (he did).

Over the 6 songs and 22 minutes that make up his latest EP, Ghosts Don't Disappear, Frederick, MD musician Jonah Knight manages to sound both earnest and jaded, which is a bit of a neat trick. His storytelling voice is strong, while his singing voice evinces nostalgia for long-since-recovered-from pain.

On Far, he keeps mostly to a robustly authoritative whisper, only turning on the yearn-faucet for the swelling chorus. Going into the final third of the same song, Knight adds some desperate exasperation to the line, “And I will haunt you, my love/ until we both are dust,” that provides a satisfying emphasis despite feeling a bit menacing compared to the rest of the song.

The ghost/haunting pastiche is represented throughout, though never overbearingly. While a song may mention either theme word explicitly, it's just as likely the apparition in question is simply an evocative memory more powerful than expected.

Musically, Knight's guitar playing is well beyond competent, but it never threatens to steal the spotlight from the stories, keeping the tension taut and focused. His supporting cast augment his arrangements, adding beauty but no bloat.

The Window Frames (article-noun-verb, not article-adjective-noun) offers ruminations on the portal through which the inside and the outside examine each other.

In Someday We'll All Be Ghosts,he describes a deceased ship captain as follows: “He lived life on the ocean/ now he lives death in the ground.” Normally, I resent usage of the oft-lazy trick of writing something obvious but writing it like a moron to make it seem more pithy, but here Knight uses it to great effect, setting up compelling imagery of the geographies that inspired him.

On his website (jonahofthesea.com), Knight expresses a frustration with describing his music to others. People have compared him to a litany of acoustic rock/folk types that I could agree with only tenuously. While, yes, in essence, he is technically just another dude with an acoustic guitar, his methodology is entirely different. He doesn't indulge in the pedantic placeholder strumming so many, many dudes with acoustics rely on. He doesn't make the Springsteen face while playing (I hope).

Rather, there's a cool restraint to these songs that does set him aside from would-be genre peers. His point of view tends to be that of a reliable narrator with varying degrees of personal involvement, which leads to something of a detached perspective. Presumably owing to his theatre background, he's got the language to tell the stories he wants to, and the stories are the key.

Now as far as what his music reminds me of exactly , I might say Harry Chapin and then immediately regret it. Chapin's not at all what I think I mean, but that impulse does suggest that Knight has more in common with the singer/songwriters of generations past than he does with the contemporary batch.

Every now and again, a phrase will roll off Knight's tongue that'll prompt me to think of Joe Genaro. Not to say these songs sound like the Dead Milkmen; they don't. But his voice has a wit and a lilt to it that hints at his quirkier, more playful side not shown here.

The only song-to-song comparison I'll make is, again, not perfect and doesn't reflect the guts of the song, but The Problem With Math does shop at the same suit store as Yo La Tengo's Our Way To Fall. This is not a bad thing. I like ethereally warbling organs and whispered recountings of something or another.

Overall, this is an above-average collection of songs that exists on the fringes of a genre I absolutely detest. Knight puts compelling and quality songwriting before instrumental wankery, and establishing and maintaining moods over chart-friendly singalongability. For that, I forgive him his choice of tools in trade, and add commendation. He's more than just a dude with an acoustic.

Also, here's a thinger that ought give you an idea or two what the hell I just talked about for 700 words.

Progressive volume increases...

I am not beholden. I've been laid off for a month and a half. I can do what I please.

It's S.O.P. for me to behave as though the bracketing statements of the verbal triptych above are true, but that centerpiece has been in effect for about six weeks now.

Time to do something, right?

Yeah, getting there.

Bear with me.

j.

New direction/experiment/motivation.

I miss music. I used to listen to it a lot.

I mean music with some aspect of concrete nature. Not just the sound associated with and representing it, but with the physical manifestation of it. The disc, be it shiny and silver or matte black; or the cassette or whatever. Jewel cases and sleeves and liner notes with useful contents and sometimes empty pages.

I miss that, which is more ironic than disingenuous.

All that physical music I acquired I took shit care of, even before Compu-Tor the destroyer came along. I got my shit scratched fast because I was prone to stacking and spilling and drinking and smoking near.

I also miss writing about music.

So here I sit, freshly returned from the Electric Fetus. I decided that I would buy a new album a week and write at least 500 words regarding whatever the hell it was.

I actually bought three: two used that I knew well but never owned, and the one new to fulfill my new forced hobby.

Trans Am's Future World and Lungfish's Talking Songs For Walking are known quantities to me, representative of that '90s indie realm that I hold so dear.

Unfortunately, my selection for a new record to go over was tough.

Everything there looked like crap. I suppose listening to the new Liars at a listening post in a record store is not the ideal exposure, but I was just as bored with that one as I was with their first one while driving around Sioux City with Scott when it first came out.

I wasn't feeling the new Gorillaz, and though I was tempted by the new Quasi record since they're playing St. Paul soon, it just didn't feel right either.

I figured I had a better chance striking gold with a wholly unknown quantity.

I ended up grabbing an album called Big Echo by some band called the Morning Benders. The art was kinda neat, and given that I can like a morning nip or two, I thought I might get along with them.

A passive absorption of the first five songs is not wholly promising.

Let me absorb it and I'll tell you what it is and what I think.

Placeholder.

No post in almost three months? For shame, me.

First fantasy draft of the season in a couple hours. It'll be weird. It's a two-QB league, which I enjoyed more than I thought I would when I joined this league last year. We also lost some teams, so it's gonna be an eight-team league with retardedly well-stocked rosters.

Three drafts after that, then I watch football whole bunches.

I think this blog is going to turn into a photoblog, as I seem to vaguely recall a time I enjoyed writing regularly, and, what, with my newly refound interest in photography, might as well see what that's like.

And I must kayak on Calhoun before the summer's out.

Paradox versus flexibility...

An idea I had for a story is actually getting a little bit of development.

It's a time travel story, so I've been absorbing all the time travel speculative fiction I can.

In my opinion, the first thing you have to nail down before you approach anything at all is the binary nature of time travel: either there is predestination or there isn't.

If there is, then everything that your time-traveling character does was part of the timeline from the get-go. Character X going back in time was predestined, and the future (his or her present) couldn't be the way it is without them having gone back to the past to do whatever it is they do/did. Everything they do is guided, and though it may appear to them to be free will, it isn't.

If there isn't, then, effectively, there are no rules at all. Everything is in flux, constantly being altered. The only way around this isn't even logically feasible. You can say that your story is the first time time travel happened, but then you have to deal with the logical conceit that after your story is told, people are still mucking about with the past, present and future, and therefore, your story is actually just a snapshot of a possibility. Your whole timeline isn't a timeline anymore. It's a pigpile point of wrestling realities.

This debate is heavy on my mind. From a personal, theophilosophical point of view, I find predestination abhorrent, But as someone trying to tell a story, I crave the structure provided by fate.

The concept, in its initial form, revolved around sports gambling and time travel. Attempts to flesh it out rapidly escalated into something that would have to be a series or something. Too many plots for an effective, easy to sell, 1 1/2 hour comedy script. I can imagine Ebert's review of the film. He complains that one subplot should have been the main plot. I agree. But that's not what I set out to write.

Well, I'll update the progress on this as I feel necessary, but it's going forward. Now, to prepare for more negagement parties and concerts.

Yes, it's true. Every time the Kickback plays up here, I go to an engagement party.

Fuckin' weird is what it is.

Whoopsy fucksy.

Cool thing: In planning a musicful tomorrow, I swung by the Cabooze to pick up my ticket to see Man Man and Gogol Bordello, which should occupy the time until I get to see the Kickback at Triple Rock just down the road.

I got there in time to buy the last ticket. Sweet.

Shitty thing: I was there to buy two tickets. Now I sit on my email to see if any Craigslist knuckleheads can come through.

Shit.

!UPDATE: The face value on the ticket is $24. The price of me saving face on this otherwise embarrassing snafu is $36.09. Thank you, Ticketmaster, and fuck you as well. Also, fuck the Cabooze for playing this game.

Anticipation

Moe's due home soon. Moe's due home soon. Moe's due home soon. Moe's due home soon. Moe's due home soon. Moe's due home soon. Moe's due home soon. Moe's due home soon. Moe's due home soon. Moe's due home soon. Moe's due home soon. Moe's due home soon. Moe's due home soon. Moe's due home soon. Moe's due home soon. Moe's due home soon. Moe's due home soon.

Don't know how this will translate to the page, but in the entry window, I got the nice vertical word acrostic going. Happy about the content of the sentence and how that worked out.

Up late last night reorganizing the basement. Looks like it might be better for me. Slept solidly with bed in new place and a north-south alignment.

Woke up this morning and Dremeled an inch and a quarter off of an old wire shelf that was laying around. Nailed it to the window over the new typewriter location. Fresh air with no Henry exit. Sweetness.

The guy I was supposed to write with on Saturday never showed, so I enjoyed a day outside the coffee shop, swilling overpriced-but-that's-the-point coffee drinks, swallowing sunshine and fresh air and strangers in whale-engulfing-the-krill gulps. Listened to iPod via headphones and on a strictly albums-only basis. Filled up pages in an old Volante-issued reporter's notebook I had laying around.

Not the day intended, but a day truly enjoyed.

Yesterday, Wyatt saw a body floating in the Mississippi Rive from the Stone Arch Bridge.

Impatience and Moderation

I just wrote a draft of a blog that sounded too much like the crap I'm sick of being.

I think I'm going to buy a shitload of blank CDs and album-by-album, burn off the contents of my hard drive. I will also buy a couple of huge binders and attempt to take care of them. I better, because then I'm going to delete all the mp3s.

For years I've been bitching about how crappy I think music has gotten, when the single biggest problem is that I haven't been carrying my weight. Yeah, there is a lot of shitty new music out there, but when I only listen to music for a half hour in my car a day and then listen to 100 gigs on shuffle when I'm drinking, it's no fucking wonder that nothing's wowed me in forever.

Read Jake Mohan's blog (jakemohan.net). He's Run at the Dog's drummer. Obviously an excellent drummer, but he's also a helluva writer. He's also been doing a pretty good job of documenting their current tour thus far: blurbs here and there and loads of pretty pictures.

Yeah, reading a good blog is why I felt embarassed to keep going down the track I was going and will be resuming if this sentence runs on much longer.

I'm going to meet up with a filmmaker buddy tomorrow at Spyhouse and we're gonna brainstorm some ideas. He's an arty spaz whose vision exceeds his grasp, and I'm a curmudgeon who seemingly prefers unfulfillment to failure, so I think we ought to be able to help each other out.

He has visions of being a director on par with Woody Allen and Quentin Tarantino, and I'm more interested in the screenwriting end of things, but we have a common awareness: very rarely does anybody get the project they want made made they way that they want it at the beginning of their career, so we're going to collaborate on a blatantly commercial project in the hopes of selling the fucking thing and getting our names out there.

It ought to be, at worst, a fun, novel and productive use of a Saturday, and at best, well, actually, I'd just be happy with a productive Saturday, so let's just go from there?

Whee!

j.