15.4.09

We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed

Jackie posted This Is Just To Say on her blog a little wile ago and goddamn I havn't herd that poem in a wile the first time I herd it was in elementary school and it was just a cute thing and I've read some double you see double you recently because of his connections with the beats and letters of incoragement back and forth with Allen Ginsburg in the back of the eddition on Howl I took out from the library a couple months ago but some how I haden't come across that poem again and I read Jackie's post and its amazing and I didn't know what to say sure its cute still and very funny that he would wright that sure but just so crisp so so I don't know I suck at words to explain art all I say is 'I don't Know' all the time but that poem blew me away so sweet so cold so sweet so

This morning I had about two hours to kill before zero hour for busking and its not enough time to watch a movie and the only book I had out from the library was poetry and I was a bit burt out on poetry cause I've been working my way through Dylan Thomas and... whatever anyway I downloaded the most resent podcast of This American Life because Jackie has talked about it a lot and I read a peice about it in the AV Club and I wanted to check it out and at the end there is the poem again and it again was compleatly sublime and then a bunch of parodys after some of which were also so so brillient this is just to say and I guess thats where Jackie herd it too

Basicly I just miss Jackie. So much. Adrian for some reason I can talk to on the phone and thats ok and I don't miss him and all my other friends are, you know, all my other friends. I would go to hell and back for them but right now I have so much art I don't have time to miss them I guess. Too much to do. But with Jackie talking on the phone sucks. It doesn't suck, I mean I enjoy talking to her, but its not enough because it doesn't for some reason stop me from missing here. I'm so glad she's working at the Cafe again on saturdays because that was my day to come in to sit around and sip tea there.

The fourth paragraph goes like this: I don't usualy write things about events and plans I have with people outside of the ones that read this blog. Which is to say that this is not a diary, its a place for me to record and work through my thoughts. But...
The first thing I am doing when I get home, after eating a burrito, is calling Diana and telling her that she is comming on a date with me at Cafeina the next morning. Because breakfast there on a sunny day is the ideal first date in my mind. And also because I know its now become final that she is not going to New York for college next year which she is upset about but if I can't be with her in a more permanant time period at least I can be with her for just the summer and I don't think I could stand being in the same state with her and being seperate. I am writing this here so if Jackie is working that day (I kind of hope shes not, sory) she isn't just finding out about this. If she were just finding out about it she would get all excited for me and make me turn bright red and I don't want that to happen right then. 

The next day or so I'll go back to Cafeina and ask if they're hiring. 

i hope my heart goes first

14.4.09

Perfume-V

Most of the Mountain Goat's recorded output (and almost everything for the first decade of their existence) is recorded on a standard department store boom box. The point was immediacy, a song was conceived, it was recorded, it never was recorded again. If it wasn't recorded it was forgotten in a few days. I was kind of inspired. I ran the mic from a hand held mini cassette recorder through my standard cassette deck and recorded an acoustic noise version of the Mountain Goats "No Children" (even though thats one of their songs that isn't actually recorded on the boom box) and then I pressed record again and in one take improvised a guitar part, vocal melody, and lyrics to a song. Because I don't know what note I'm going to sing next the vocals are a bit wavery and it probably could be done a bit better if I re-recorded it but I think that would take away the intensity. Anyway, click the links below to hear them.


P.S. Allen Ginsburg is a BEAST

and it makes me feel ok, I don't feel ok

12.4.09

What Jail Is Like

I just had an epiphany. Sort of. Well, it was an sudden break through but about something almost completely inconsequential.

About nine months ago me and Chris Jones had a conversation about bands' fan bases. It came up when he got on Radiohead's case by dissing their fans. ("seriousness is not the same as intelligence no matter what virginal Radiohead fans say") and I said, yeah, I love Radiohead but I don't like most Radiohead fans I meet. The ones twenty five and older tend to be pissed off about kid a, which I don't understand at all. Was kid a really that unsettling? Its seems like a fairly normal album to me. Albeit a good one. The ones younger then twenty five are either hipsters or mainstream music listeners who I have no idea what they're doing around Radiohead or, yes, the virginal ultra-serious type. Of course there are always people I meet who likeRadiohead and are cool but generally I would bet against it. If we were to take guesses on weather I would get along with someone or not based purely on they're list of favorite bands, seeing Radiohead would not be a good sign to me. 

So me and CJ started thinking, what would be a good sign? A band who's fan base was cool more often then not. I couldn't think of anything. Chris mentioned the Velvet Underground and I guess that's pretty accurate. In the months in between then and now this question has stuck in the back of my mind and I've pulled a few others out. Cap'n Jazz, Owls, Dirty Projectors, its a little bit hard for me to imagine too many idiots like these bands but still all of these still didn't quite do it for me and so the question still hung around the back of my mind. 

Today I came up with a solution. Nirvana. Perhaps it was just in Albany but Nirvana is stuck in a weird place. They were so intensely popular with the generation directly preceding us and they strike a chord with almost every middle schooler to the extent that they become the epitome of uncool to the casual fan. As per the intense fan, they're hard enough that the indie pop crowd sees it as testosterone fueled bull shit and they're soft enough that the metal and punk crowd sees everything post-Bleach as commercialized sentimental crap. Which leaves the only people who would openly declare a love for Nirvana as being ones who didn't care about all that crap, and who could see Nirvana's unquestionable brilliance, and who didn't mind being considered the definition of uncool by all parties involved. I guess it also leaves the middle school crowd... and those still have not broken free of the middle school state of mind... but still. Its hard for me to imagine anyone over 15 with a unapologetic love for Nirvana being someone I couldn't respect. 

You see? This is an epiphany to me these days. Its fucking meaningless.



lonely? maybe. or maybe not it all depends