More Shit on My Turntable

My music attention-span goes in waves. It's usually feast or famine. And praise Jesus it's finally back to feast, because I've been hard-up for some new good shit.

1. Beck's Guero--I finally got my hands on this cd on Friday, after digging on "Girl" for a few weeks (you can watch the video, and thus hear the song if you haven't already, HERE). I dig Beck. I realized this weekend that he definitely ranks somewhere in my Top 10 Sexiest Singing Voices list. He can croon with it and he can funktify and he can freak out. I mean, he's quite the man, wrapped up in a foxy little shaggy-haired boy's body. Yes yes. But back to the music--Guero is quite quite good. Nothing like Sea Change, nothing at all. But damn good summer music. And surprisingly, "Girl" has been bumped from my favorite song on the cd to be replaced by "Hell Yes" which is way more fun than one person should have while trapped in their freaking hot car. Oh wait. Well, there are other things that'd probably be more fun. But you get my drift. And "Que Onda Guero" is a good strutting-down-the-hot-summer-streets-while-drinking-a-sweaty-cold-bottle-of-pop-and-grooving-on-the-ladies kinda song. Oh yeah.



2. The White Stripes' Get Behind Me Satan--By far, the best song on here is the last song, which has a nice bit of quiet sass to it--"I'm Lonely (But I Ain't That Lonely Yet)." Again, we have another fella up on my list of Top 10 Sexiest Singing Voices--I mean listen to the boy wail all falsetto and shit in the first song and you'll get what I'm saying. *Getting a little hot under the collar* Plus, he has such a knack for cute weird love songie songs like "Hotel Yorba" and ones on his new album like "The Doorbell." "Little Ghost" is also a weird little romp into some crazy-ass bluegrassy shit. And damn, I'm all leaving Meg out--she does a bit of singing on here as well, in "Passive Manipulation," but it didn't do much for me like "In the Cold Cold Night" did. It's a fun and cute song, but that's about it. Overall though, there's a lot of fun shit on here that will make your stereo very very happy. Check it out.

3. The Books--I mention them again, only b/c they've been getting the most airplay out of any new cd of mine at work, in my car, and at home. They's some really really good shit. Again, listen to the title track for "The Lemon of Pink" HERE, and dammit, go out and buy their albums. Especially listen to "Take Time" as that is one of my favorite songs. Yeah. You heard me.

4. Andrew Bird--He is so pretty in the voice department, despite looking alarmingly similar to that dude from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Anyways, he's got a weird thing for lots of whistling which you'd THINK would be annoying but which ends up being rather cool. He also sounds (yeah, I hate doing comparisons, but it's hard not to in this case) strikingly similar to Jeff Buckley sometimes, in that pure and haunting kinda way, and Mason Jennings in that stripped down and peaceful kinda way. These are good things. And his live shit is quite amazing: Listen to some of his stuff HERE.



5. The Killers Hot Fuss--The lead singer is way too fricking pretty for his own good. And normally that would annoy me. But the music is sexy in a way that I haven't felt since my long months of Strokes-obsessed lusting. Everybody's heard "Mr. Brightside" a hundred trazillion times on the radio at this point, but dammit if I don't dig that song. As for the rest of the cd, there's little burps and pimples that don't do it for me (mainly in the realm of lyrics: "This is your last chance to find/ A go-go dance to disco now") but dammit if the cd doesn't end up making me want to be sweet-talked over beers and pool by some shaggy-haired New Yorker and then break his heart whenever I listen to this album. Catch 'em HERE.

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Par-Tay

Saturday morning, sometime past 1 am: E's in the middle of the street on his hands and knees. The rest of us are standing around, some of us bouncing from foot to foot with pent up energy. Others howling and shouting with excitement. My brother clearly is more of a deviant bastard than I'd realized--he'd placed two award-winning dares in the Truth or Dare Jenga bowl. One required the recipient to drink a punch-glass full of toilet water--luckily no one drew this one. The other required the recipient to go out in the middle of my street and lick the pavement. We hollered some more as E bent over and stuck out his tongue and then drew it slowly along the rough pavement. Folks across the street a few houses down clearly got caught up in the spectacle as well, hollering and cheering right along with us.

All in all, I'd say it was a successful party.

And if not, at least we got to see E lick the nasty-ass, steel-meel coated pavement. Hee hee.

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Pigpen

This week has been a filthy filthy week. And not in any kinda fun "bow chicka bow wow" kinda filthy way.

The heatwave is making my apartment a stinkbeast.

And combining that with the fact that I've been trying to scrub shit down for when I have people over on Saturday, I've been one helluva sneezing, heaving, sweaty stinkbeast these past few days as well.

Tuesday I dragged my window air conditioner downstairs from my loft to try to wedge in the kitchen window so that Saturday's party-goers might have SOME respite from the heat. The a/c was caked in birdshit. And, like all air conditioners, it was ridiculously awkward to carry. Especially down a spiral staircase. Quickly I was caked in birdshit as well. I started to bring it down once and then relented once sweat started spilling off me and down the stairs like Niagara Falls, thinking it'd probably be best to wait until I had a second pair of hands to help. But as I am a bit obsessive at times (and my bare stomach and arms were already smeared with the aforementioned old sweaty birdshit), I figured I might as well suck it up and drag it down.

The a/c was about a fraction of an inch smaller than the width of my spiral staircase, so it would get wedged in the rungs at every step. I was sweating in pools which were swirling and mixing filthily with the poopies all over the damn thing. Step. Stop. De-wedge. Step. Stop. Dewedge. This went on for a couple minutes (minus one mishap which almost resulted in me falling off the staircase) until I finally made it to the bottom, completely caked in dusty poopie filth.

This is how much I love you, my friends.

Yesterday, I got a burst of energy and decided that it was the night to scrub every inch of my apartment clean, from bathroom to kitchen to living room to bedroom. I have not one but TWO exposed brick chimneys in my apartment which leave a fine silt of brick caking everything nearby. So I went through WAY too many rags dusting. And the dusting resulted in a barrage of girly-sneezes--more often than not lately, my sneezes actually CONTAIN the word "achoo" in them. This should not be the case as only cartoon characters should sneeze like this.

I was pretty much a fire hydrant of sweat all night, vacuuming off rugs and carpeting and pillows in my loft bedroom which is about 300 degrees hotter than the rest of the apartment. I also scrubbed birdshit out of my bedroom window finally--I'd been avoiding touching it for as long as possible.

I walked around in my bra the whole time while cleaning--I'm waiting for the day my neighbor's wife comes over and accuses me of trying to seduce her man by walking around my apartment half-clothed all the time. It should be soon I'm sure. I was a massive swirl of dirt and dust and sweat and Windex-stench and mop-goop and if someone had grabbed me with both hands, I surely would've shot out from their grasp like some lubed-up wiener or something, that's how gross and greasy I was.

And after it was all over with and I sighed myself happy beneath a nice beam of shower-water, there were black footprints all over the bottom of my bathtub, as though my shower were a dance-instructor's studio.

I am now officially clean. For the time being. At least as clean as a "dirty hippie" can be.

We'll see how long that lasts.

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Call Received 4:30 am, Sunday...

No matter how many times I set the time and date on my answering machine, it somehow gets completely off-track. My sister called me sometime yesterday, and the machine told me that she had called/will call Sunday at 4:30 am.

I haven't yet decided if my machine is in fact divining future phone calls or channeling past ones. I prefer the thought that it's foreseeing the future, that my sister will have actually called me this upcoming Sunday but that my machine gave me her message five days ahead of time.

This somehow seems worthy of some sorta philosophical discussion.

But I am tired from lack of sleep, so instead I will quote The Books:

"That which is now
That which is to be hath already been
That which is now hath already been
To be to that which is that which is now

Something is happening that is not happening
Something is happening which is not happening at all

That which is now
That which is to be hath already been
That which is now hath already been
There is no remembrance of former things"

("Take Time"--The Books)

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Letter to Dennis Hopper

Dear Dennis Hopper,

What happened to you, man?? Once upon a time you were the king of all things anti-establishmentarian, and now I see that you're playing a fricking "colonel with a life-long commitment to the military*" in some horky pro-patriotic Jerry Bruckheimer tv show called E-Ring, a show about "protecting the homeland and protecting either all of mankind or the life of a lone soldier" which, in the previews for it, has a big old American flag waving patriotically under the title?



I mean, you played that journalist dude in that little under-the-radar anti-Vietnam movie called Apocalypse Now. And you made that movie called, what was it, um yeah: EASY FRICKING RIDER which was all about being against the establishment and embracing the counterculture lifestyle.

What's the matter with you, man? You've become a fricking errand boy, sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.

It's sad, man. It's just plain sad.

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Drought

I haven't seen anything interesting in days.

No tiny little heart-warming oddities or gems that make me wanna wrap all of humanity up in a big bear hug and say, GODDAMMIT I'M HAPPY TO BE ALIVE.

Nothing.




Perhaps tonight.

Perhaps.

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Gorgefest 2005

This weekend was "The Weekend of Food." I feel as though I ate non-stop, and all of it was of fantastic quality.

The gorging began Friday evening when E cooked a nice dinner of roasted garlic pasta for me. The pasta was flush with the aromatic flavors of garlic, a big plus for me since I {heart} garlic ever so much that I even find myself contemplating putting a bit of it on absurd things like ice cream. With a bit of shredded parmesan cheese and some red pepper flakes, this was a delectable dish, and couched between a nice side of steamed broccoli and bagettes crusted with a homemade brushchetta that I'd made earlier in the day (I was not too bowled over by THIS unfortunately). The evening was topped off with some rich ooey gooey brownies for dessert around midnight.

Saturday night, we'd finally made reservations to eat at a fancy Tremont restaurant like we'd been planning way back in February. We settled on Fahrenheit because, unlike all the other Tremont restaurants, it had more than one vegetarian entree to choose from.

Dinner started off with avocado and french brie bruschetta. It was good, though not knock-your-socks-off impressive, mostly because I could have easily made this at home: Toast a baguette, slice a nice ripe slice of avocado and place it on top, slice a bit of warm brie and place that on top of the avocado, and drizzle some sort of creamy garlic honey viniagrette over both and garnish with a few ripe cherry tomatoes. However, when they brought out the free bread- goods, that's when I started to get a bit more impressed with the quality of the food. The bread was the sweetest, most crumbly good bread I've had in a while. It was so good that I felt like one of Pavlov's dogs while eating it. This was served with some kind of herby butter and an olive/olive oil dip, but it most certainly didn't need anything spread across it to be appreciated.

The bread festivities were followed by the salads. After a bit of thought, I'd settled on the Bing Cherry salad. I'm not a fan of cherries, mind you, but it sounded so good that I figured I could just pick the cherries off if they weren't doing anything for me. What I didn't realize was that when they said "cherry salad," they meant cherry salad. The bulk of the salad consisted of cherries with a sweet balsamic dressing drizzled over them and some blue cheese nestled in the little cherry-curves. There WERE a tiny bit of greens, sticking out of a toasted bagette like tail feathers on a peacock, but the majority of the salad consisted of cherries. I was leery at first, but the cherries were FANTASTIC, especially when coupled with the sweet viniagrette and blue cheese. I was definitely pleased with my choice. I also tried a nibble of E's salad which I'd made fun of him for ordering (simply because it was the most average of salad's listed) but I deserved a swift kick in the ass for the teasing as the viniagrette dressing was out of this world--I don't think I've ever tasted a dressing as yummy.

For our entrees, we settled on two pizzas that we'd decided to split with one another. E got the Meditteranean pizza which consisted of pesto, tomatoes, kalamata olives, and red onions. I got the Portobello 'za which was topped with portobellos, caramelized onions, goat cheese, and rosemary. Both were fantastic, but I preferred mine out of the two. And they both were just as good when reheated in the oven for dinner on Sunday. I felt a bit lame sitting at a fancy restaurant with our table decked out with... er... pizzas of all things. Fancy restaurants really need to start working on their veggie friendliness so us veggie-heads don't end up looking so lame (*Note to Patrick for when he starts his own food-slinging business). But it was definitely worth it since their pizzas were moreso a delicacy than something slung into a quickly-driven car and arriving at your door half-cold.

After some tasty conversation--I haven't had good dinner convo like this in quite some time--and after our bellies were wobbly with food, we settled on desserts. I had gone to the restaurant with my heart set on the chocolate tart that was on their on-line menu and was a bit disappointed when I realized that it wasn't on their regular menu for some reason. So I moaned and groaned a bit with disappointment while E settled on the chocolate cake that had bumped the tart off the menu. I settled on one of their specials for the evening, a mango-tapioca tart. Both were cute as buttons when they arrived--E's cake was circular and drizzled in even MORE chocolate. Mine was like a sunrise, speckled with brilliant yellow-oranges, a sweet sauce dripped on top of the plate that looked like a rising sun. And both were delicious ways to end the evening. Mine was sweet, light, and refreshing, and E's was rich and chocolatey. We were both pleased.

The bill came out to about $70. This is the most I've ever spent on a two-person meal. I was happy that E was the first one to pop my cherry in expensive dining, and it was a good place to do some bing cherry-popping at.

The food didn't stop here, however. Sunday, we dodged the torrential downpours and ventured over to the Taste of Tremont around 3:00. The streets were jampacked with people, and we spent a good 20 minutes roaming around and gazing with drooling mouths at all the food stands. As soon as I saw the Sokolowski's stand, I knew I was getting pierogies. I'd heard rave reviews about them, and given that I'd probably never drag my ass over to the actual restaurant just for pierogies (despite it being about a 30 second walk from my house), I'd figure now was a good chance to try them. E and I ordered a dozen of them for $7. These were also melt in your mouth fantastic. I've never had a pierogie that's come even in the vicinity of tastiness to these pierogies. They were draped and oozing with delicious butter and onions and peppers, and they were full of homemade goodness. I topped this off with a chocolate-covered frozen banana afterwards (which always reminds me of going to the zoo when I was little)--a perfect way to bust the final button on my pants and end the weekend gorge-fest.

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Not with a Whimper But a Bang

Last night, I chatted with E about what I want my funeral to be like when I finally kick the bucket.

Morbid, yes.

But here are the finalized plans:

It will be a closed casket wake;

People must be cheerful and not weepy and all that--otherwise they will be punished;

Along with the "no crying" rule, the viewing must be a celebration of my life, lame as it was;

AC/DC'S "TNT" will be pumped in over loud-speakers during the wake;

There will be a light show;

Footage of me playing air guitar to "TNT" will be taken sometime before my passing--said footage will be made into a hologram which will be projected on top of the casket during the "TNT" guitar solo;

There will also be pyrotechnics on either side of the casket, and these will be shot off during the climax of the song (see accompanying picture, courtesy of EPM designs);

I will be cremated.

If only LIFE were this interesting.

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Shit That's Been On My Turntable Lately

1. Godspeed You Black Emperor: This is some damn good spooky shit. Songs are typically no shorter than 10 minutes. Some are spoken word, some are just instrumental. All make you feel as though you are stumbling through apocalyptic landscapes--take a listen to a clip of "The Dead Flag Blues" sometime and/or read the lyrics here. And what's even scarier is that some of them make you recognize that wading through the politics and current events of today is an even bleaker and more apocalyptic landscape (listen to a clip of "Blaise Bailey Finnegan III," another notable favorite of mine).

2. Le Tigre's This Island--This has been getting a lot of airtime in my car as of late. It's the kind of music that makes you wanna throw punches and howl. On a first listen, I wasn't too bowled over. But being the lazy shit that I am, I left it in my car's cd player and failed to take it out for a couple weeks, so it quickly grew on me. It's got a crazy good energy and it revs me up in the morning, singing to it at the top of my lungs on the way to work. The only weak point on this album is the cover of the Pointers Sisters song "I'm So Excited." However, the not-too-shabby anti-war song on this album called "New Kicks" makes up for it. (Notables: "Don't Drink Poison" and "Nanny Nanny Boo Boo")

3. Mike Doughty's new album, Haughty Melodic--Based on this album and some of it's more obvious lyrics (like those to "His Truth is Marching On"--They say that God is great / They say that God is love / And I believe them"), I've come to the conclusion that Mike Doughty has found Jesus. And finding Jesus doesn't make for the best of songs, at least in this case. What used to have a bit of bite to it, a bit of edginess, is now a bit nauseatingly upbeat at times, in that pro-Jesusy kinda way (minus a couple songs about loneliness). Doughty's newest album is a bit weak and flabby in places. Many of the songs were already on his live album, Smofe & Smang. And they had much more energy and weren't weighted down (and cheesed up) by too many instruments and harmonizing voices like they are on this album. *AND YET* the man has a knack for writing catchy songs--what can I say. After one listen, I couldn't get American Car outta my head for about 24 hours the next day. So despite the fact that it's not his BEST album perhaps, it's worth checking out.



4. The Books'--This is some certifiably weird-ass music, like being trapped with Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka in a large derigible while on acid and eating cotton candy and talking to a large pink horse. Download and listen to "The Lemon of Pink" here and you'll see what I mean. It's good shit. But it scares me a little.

5. Elliott Smith--The boy makes my heart ache. I heard "Everything Reminds Me of Her" on the radio last week and I finally whipped my ass into shape and went and ordered XO and Figure 8 from the library to listen to again. My favorite Elliott Smith song to unexpectedly catch on the radio is "Waltz #2 (XO)." If you've never listened to him before, check him out. Once you hear him, you'll realize why and how he's influenced so many different musicians. I now go cry.

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Oh My God, Kenny Loggins, You Make Me Wanna Jam a Pen in My Eye!

Kenny Loggins has, hands down, the worst cover art of any musician. Ever. And a terrible penchant for glowy orbs.

















Vox humana, Lisee!

Vox motherfucking humana!

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...In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don't try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present.

When you are content to be simply yourself
and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you.

--Tao Te Ching

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"I'll Have a Heineken with that Zen"

There is way too much negative energy in my life as of late. Not negativity necessarily (a lot of the negative energy is trying to be filtered out towards something good), but definite negative energy. Some of it is trivial (the perpetual swearing and hoarse dog-barking of my neighbors) and some of it not so trivial (the lives of my friends). But much of it is infused with negative energy. And I try not to absorb it, try to let it just run off me. But still it sits there. Like a thick wad of soap-scummed greased hair, it's plugged up all my shit. And nothing good has been coming in or going out lately because of it.

Most of this negative energy is seeping out from the things and people that I love so goddamned much that I think I've not even noticed that these people and things were leaking in the first place. Some of the leakage I understand. Some I don't. All of it I feel empathy towards, at least as much as I can, which is probably why I'm all clogged up as of late. Lack of caring and lack of compassion is like Draino and just lets all that bad shit slide straight on through. But I think because I do love and understand these things and people, I didn't even notice all that matted scum-ringed mess until I finally realized I was standing there, ankle-deep in my own filthy waters.

I have a tendency to listen listen listen and somewhere along the way, I think I started forgetting to speak. Started forgetting to speak, and started forgetting to listen to myself. A sad and accidental muting. And that's part of what's clogging me up as well. All these thoughts and feelings inside me that haven't been directed outwards in a long damn time. Lately I've been in a place where I rarely speak except to reverberate with echoes of listening. This is good. But this is also not good.

Yesterday, I realized that I've really gotta do something about this. Michfest will help, no doubt, but I'm gonna need something that'll start a bit sooner and be a bit more long-term and constant. A regular "cleaning of the pipes" one might say.

So last night, I went and did a bit of meditation/Pranayama down the street for 45 minutes. I sat with my body straight and centered, aligned, and tried to give it time to speak again and time for me to listen. It is terribly hard for me to quiet all these bass-drum, Harley-trembling, dog-barking energies rattling around me at all times, but I did my best. I stretched my body. I quieted it, and in the quiet, I listened. I remembered what it sounds like to hear myself breath. I remembered what it feels like to have the pulse in my stomach, so familiar, beating slow rhythms against my outspread palms.

But even then, in the quietest moment, the outside rocked in with a crash--a large decorative bronze plate fell off the wall mid-meditation, almost leapt off through the quiet, resounding with a flat gonging rattle against the floor. Everyone chuckled, the peace momentarily disrupted, like a reminder that this will take work and this peace is an achievement, something we all need to direct our energies towards.

At the end, we joined together with an exhaled, extended OMMMMMM. This is my favorite part of meditation--the intimacy of dozens of voices joined into one note on an exhale, a thousand breaths mingling into one to be inhaled again by everyone moments later, the sense of connection to one another, to the universe, with just one small drawn-out word, one trembling note that lays itself softly over all of us and then settles into quiet.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It is now raining outside! The first time in weeks. And it smells fresh and clean, like it could quickly and easily smear away these past few weeks of bone-dry heat and make everything new again. And in the distance, I can hear the thunder growling with the slow tectonic shiftings that come with change.

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*Sob*

Reasons I hate my job:

Walked in at 7 am this Monday morning, groggily shuffling down a cubicle aisle, and my eyes caught on a magnet in a fellow drone's cube which read

IT'S BEEN A CTRL-ALT-DELETE KIND OF DAY.

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Not-So-Exquisite Boredom

I am out of stuff to do today at work.

I volunteered my time to help anyone else out that needs it but received nothing in response.

You would think this would be good. But it is not.

I still have to sit in front of a computer and pretend to be doing something useful.

This is the pretend usefulness that I am pretending to do.

I just got a nectarine. It is hard like the hard part of a baby skull (not that softie part where you can damage their brain if you drop them on it--if it were that, I could gnaw on it right now, but alas).

Right now my friend Jef is in NYC. This just popped into my head. I am going to say the stuff that pops into my head. You will grow bored but you should be doing something more interesting than reading this anyways.

Popcorn.

Lesbot.

Last night folks a couple houses down decided to shoot off their remaining fireworks at 1 am in the morning (redundant). This gave me a series of small heart attacks.

Also, someone moved into the house on the back lot from me. I can see in their door window. So I'm assuming they can see into mine. I am envious because they have a screen door out to their balcony. I am also saddened because I have to be more careful about running from room to room in the buff.

Which reminds me that I really need to use my sweet blue 1970s roller skates sometime soon. I am afraid to use them in my apartment for fear that they will scratch up the hard wood floor. But man would it make a good skating rink.

Nippular.

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Ennui

I haven't written anything interesting on here in a while.

I must to change this.

But this entry won't be the one to do so. Sorry to disappoint.

Last night, when I was drifting off to sleep, my mind was lazily wandering from random thought to random thought. However, I must've been straddling the big ol' wang of unconsciousness, because every so often I'd realize that what I was reflecting upon in my alleged wakefulness was actually stuff that was bizarre dream stuff rather than actual events or people. Does this happen to anyone else? There I am, thinking I'm totally with it, reflecting upon bizarre shit that never really happened, but doing so as though it HAD. Like reflecting on events involving E and long lengths of sausage links.

Never have E and long lengths of sausage links been around one another--at least to my knowledge. They probably haven't even found themselves nestling against one another in a sentence prior to this blog. Yet there I was, trying to fall asleep, reflecting serenely on E and sausage links.

Normally here I'd say, "This seems like a metaphor for the way my life has been as of late," but really it hasn't. And I've been saying that much too often lately. So I won't.

I did have a dream last night that I was on a large wooden plane/ship (not quite sure) with a co-worker and we realized that huge amounts of explosives were being stored somewhere on board. However, all the stuff on board was work-related stuff that was being shipped elsewhere, but we knew that there were explosives packed in there somewhere. It was quite harrowing.

I blame E for inspiring this dream since he's gotten that horrible horrible AC/DC song--TNT--stuck in my head at least once a day for the past week. Which would be moreso horrible and terrible if he didn't pronounce the second line like JJ from GOOD TIME: "TNT--I'm dyno-mite!" which just completely negates all the AC/DCness from the song to the point that you can't HELP but laugh.

Btw, be sure to check out and give smooches to M at The Best in Me/The Beast in Me--today is her last day in the blogosphere.

I swear to god next week I'll write something slightly more deep or at least remotely interesting.

Dyno-mite.

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Yesterday, D stood around in my kitchen, eating bottom-of-the-bag Dorito crumbs out of a bowl with a spoon as though it were cereal.

It's gonna be a boring 3+ months.

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