Some Words

It’s cold out. There’s been a lot of snow. I’m on a mission.

James Brown has died. Put his music on and get the good foot this holiday season. It’s what he would have wanted. He probably also would have wanted you to get high, but I’ll leave that choice up to you.

I’m trying to wake my brain up over here, before a bunch of writing. It doesn’t help that yesterday I was fighting off a cold. My friend Brad came over, and he had something, which he was worried about giving to other people. I had mixed up a wild sheep chase and wanted him to try some. Obviously he didn’t want to drink anything significant while sick, but I told him I wasn’t worried, as the high alcohol content would protect me from getting what he got. Every holiday season I try to do something st stupid. I’d say that counts this year, though managing to kill the conversation stone dead three times on Saturday night comes in a close second.

The letter writing went well today. I wrote letters to two old friends that I had largely lost contact with. Each of them got a couple of pages and a Muppet stamp, thank you U.S. Postal Service. My handwriting in printed letters has already improved. I might soon try some cursive. It felt good to write things out by hand again. I have always liked writing by hand over writing on a computer, as it slows me down. I think I create sentences that are less likely to be bloated crap. That may just be me romanticizing it though. When I first tried writing a novel, I wrote large portions of it out by hand. What stopped me was when I had to start moving it into a digital form for editing. In the end I decided that it just wasn’t worth it.

The other day YouTube helped me find a band. Several years ago I had seen a video while bored and watching MTV2. I didn’t catch the band id at the end though. All I heard was that the band was from Canada. For years I thought there was some Canadian band out there that I would just love, if I could remember who they were. I think my memories might have inflated my love of the song. A few weeks ago I looked up all the bands that had members who spent time with Broken Social Scene. Then I went to YouTube and started looking at the videos for these bands. I found it, Elevator Love Letter by Stars:

It’s not as good as I remember, not bad, but not the Canadian revelation I had dreamed of. I wish they’d stayed a myth. It’s always nice to think that there is another band out there just waiting for you to go nuts.

Tonight I started a new project. This is usually a dangerous thing for me. I start new projects too often and as a result not enough of them get done. My computer desktop has dozens of little digital sticky notes all over it, reminding me to do this or that.

This project was to write my friends using paper and pen. It seemed terribly old fashioned, but there is an appeal to that. I’m also horribly bad at writing them emails. Letters will hopefully feel special for both parties. It might even get me out of writing as often as I should, but I dont want to think of it that way.

The first thing I learned while trying to write, is that I no longer have good cursive skills. About six years ago I switched to printing all the letters. This, combined, I think, with my mild dyslexia, is conspiring against me. It is not that my penmanship is simply bad. I will actively think of a letter and write another one. I tried to write a capitol H three times tonight. When I failed to concentrate on my intentions fully, it did not look like an ‘h’ at all. Eventually I retired to printed letters in defeat. I even had to use lined paper. It was a sad moment. I felt like I was in grade school again. However, this has only strengthened my resolve.

I was also thinking, just before I started writing this post, that I was not doing what I wanted to do with this web space. There is a second page, marked stories, which contains some small part of my writing output. I do intend to continue to place things there. The posts on this page, on the other hand, are likely to undergo a substantial change in content. I have been trying to write down my thoughts on current events. This was a fool’s game. I keep up with what is going on, but trying to write about it as well was only drawing me away from the fiction. I had been afraid to write posts that seemed like a diary, or contained on any frequent basis things that would make it sound like a diary. I told myself this was done to prevent myself from looking like the thousands of other blogs out there. The thing is, that is exactly what those other blogs are doing. This web space isn’t going to draw anyone who isn’t either looking for stories, or a personal friend of some sort. A writer of political commentary I am not. I might touch on things like that, but not in any way I intend to be insightful. If you’re here for that, well let’s just hope you weren’t, because I wasn’t helping you. There will likely be less linking in the future as well, though in some ways writing personal observation frees me of having to think of a reason for a link to be relevant. Hopefully this actually leads to better, more enjoyable, posts on the site.

With that in mind…

On my commute several days ago, I was listening to the latest album by Hem. I was driving down 94 and for once I wasn’t in a traffic jam. The sky was overcast and there was just a touch of haze in the sky. I was wondering if listening to Hem stuck me in a demographic with reasonably thoughtful milquetoast middle managers (likely it does). As I hit a rise in the highway, a rush of unrelated memories came over me. All of them related to Canada. I was walking in the Beaches neighborhood of Toronto, listening to jazz. I was doing down a street in Oshawa toward my grandparents house. One of the rides on the Toronto islands came to mind. Then I remembered my grandmother’s funeral and several other wonderful memories which I had forgotten about, all in the space of six or seven seconds. This sort of thing is not unusual for me, but I had not previously associated Hem with any of these things. I have been leery of listening to the album since. It is, never the less, a good album.

This video has hijacked my brain. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched it over the last week and a half.

I went to see Anathallo last night. They were at the Varsity Theater, which is a pretty good venue. Matt was hanging around out front, and I talked to him a little bit. He’s even taller than when I last chatted with him, which admittedly was before he graduated from high school. It was, on the whole, a very odd experience. Matt is just a straight up friendly guy. Based on my experience with him, I don’t think he can help being nice to people. Chatting with him, and then seeing how he held himself on stage, I remembered what he was like when I last saw them, playing at New Moon Records in Mt. Pleasant. The whole band was better. They’re more comfortable on the stage and it shows.

I was frustrated by the opening act though. It was Page France. The lead singer has an interesting enough voice, and is passable on the guitar. The rest of the band didn’t seem very musical though, including a woman who played keys one handed all night. She also sometimes pulled out a tambourine or played the glockenspiel, again one handed. Her voice seemed hesitant and she was a bit unsure of the beat. The drummer and bassist were never called on to do much of anything. The point seemed to be cramming as many uses of the words dove, blood, fish, and chariot into each song as possible. I feel I’m being a little too mean, as I was clearly not the audience they had in mind, but on the whole I felt it was like listening to Neutral Milk Hotel, if they had been put on lithium, robbing them of the raw crazy passion that made them interesting.

Crooked Timber just had a link up to this site. It’s three minute musical sequences, based on colored dots rotating in a circle at fixed speeds, a visual music box.

Today I tried to buy tickets online for a show on Sunday. There were complications, relating to Ticketmaster not believing that I might have moved in the year since I was last forced to use their online ticketing system. Before I even got that far though, I had to enter a word from a jpeg with hashes across it. It’s a fairly standard thing these days, to prevent automated use of sites. The word that Ticketmaster wanted me to enter was ‘choke.’ That seemed about right.

Oh, and because the show was cheap, their fees literally doubled the cost of ordering online. I’m going to buy them in person now. Ah the convenience of this modern world.

So, a classic club has closed its doors. I never got to go. I don’t get out of the house much… and I live in Minnesota. But I read this post at Martini Republic and I did feel a little sad to hear this place was closing. It’s been about to happen for ages, but arts institutions always seem to be on the brink anyway, so often it doesn’t get noticed.

I don’t have a CBGB shirt, but judging from how many of them I see around town (and how few of those people have probably been to the club) the place has reached a point where it was more legend than fact. Punk stopped meaning what it used to long ago. The reality of the club was probably the same, but whatever reality it had, it no longer exists to counterbalance the myth.

Every now and then I check out what’s happing to my
Uncle Charlie. He’s in this odd little musical space somewhere between rockabilly and a hard place. Anyhow, he’s got a new album out, and there is also a podcast from a radio show he did a little while ago. There were a few good laughs in it, so I thought I’d post it here. The highlights as I see it are a song about propecia, rambling about being in Ann Arbor loving Iggy or Commander Cody, and my uncle contemplating his musical relation to Weird Al.

Edit: I swear I didn’t realize I was making that pun. Please believe me.

Old link from Boing Boing in which the entertainment industry calls people who use encryption are pedophiles. Man… I work at an ISP, and by that standard everyone I work with has short eyes. But that’s actually really canny. There’s a history of pedophilia being used to tar things. Think about that. If you hear about pedophiles in the media, the reporter always goes out of their way to underline that they find the activity loathsome. It’s so stigmatized that just reporting on it makes you have to deny that you are one. Painting encryption as the domain of sex offenders may be the entertainment industry’s only way of stopping this otherwise totally sane and sensible thing to do with your data.

Oh and speaking of data, this other Boing Boing post underlines how they want you to give up the right to own it.

The Valve had this little bit about why people like me are posting pointless chunks of our personal lives online.

Matthew Yglesias laments that he likes a band that Pitchfork doesn’t. I feel for you Matt. Maybe not on that band, but for a review site Pitchfork often feels like they’re too worried with being trend setters, or getting caught out liking something dorky. That might harm their indie cred, but it would tell me that they actually cared about the music, or having fun with the stuff. Still, there are times when the reviewer seems to know that music can be about fun more than art or that you don’t have to take yourself seriously all the time. Sometimes they even let on that personal taste or situation might effect you’re like or dislike of an album, not its inherent value as some sort of object of art.

And finally, me wanty, but $30 is a bit high for a t-shirt to me.

P.S. Jewish Priates!

I want to sail the seas in search of booty like my ancestors.

I appears that my uncle has put out a new album. I’ll have to check that out. I’ll be honest, he’s not always to my taste. But I sing “Without My Woman” in the shower all the time. When his stuff does work for me, it’s really fun.

And also, college Republicans at the U of Mich are crazy. I must be reading the wrong blogs though, because I didn’t see any of them link this story to the Dick Cheney Hunting mishap. For shame.

iTunes 7 still can’t get the album art for “Come on Feel the Illinoise!” Come on iTunes, I can see it in the damn music store. Don’t punish me because my brother gave me the album as a gift. Not since transparency worked its way into Xorg have I worked this hard to get a pointless feature to work.