Some Damns.

I've found a lot of really great new music in the past year or so, but this melted my head in a way not much else has:


Damn. DAMN! OK. I wish this had come out recently so I could give it a proper review, but still. The synth track that kicks in at the start reminds me of some Bela Fleck songs I've heard, where they get a similar sound by putting woodwind instruments through a wawa pedal.

I like this kind of music, but I do not like labeling it as IDM ('intelligent dance music'). Seriously? Please don't take something great and douchify it by adding a label like that. I hope I never have to hear anyone say "I like Intelligent Dance Music" in real-life conversation so I won't have to waste any energy disemboweling them.

Spring break is ending. I read RAY by Barry Hannah. Damn. Started reading Native Son by Richard Wright, also damn so far. Started reading The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh, which is not quite damn, but still pretty good in a different way. Trying to gear up for some papers and other things I need to finish, solidify. Pretty sure I'm going to leave the states after graduation, at least for a few years. I'm going to get certified to teach english as a foreign language soon so this can happen. Seems reliable, because I sure don't want to go to grad school right away, even though I'm looking forward to it. I need some non-school experience first. MFA-land can wait a few years.

De-wintering

Review of Liars' new album, Sisterworld, up @ 20 Watts.

It's a mighty enjoyable listen. One of my favorite things in music is when a song changes mood/energy level suddenly, in an unexpected way that somehow still works. This album has a lot of that, all of it executed very well. Check it out.

Currently at home, writing papers, hunting for summer jobs that will be low in the 'shame' department. Looked on Craigslist for the hell of it, and found this. Damn. I mean clearly the overall professionalism of the way the ad was written just speaks volumes about how shady this is, but it's still kind of tempting. Good material? Hell yes. I think I could be a pretty competent ghostwriter.

Shit.

Chocolate Makes You Happy

First thing, I got a story coming out in the next issue of Neon, which makes me excited. This is the first piece of fiction I've actually managed to sell, (only have had poems before), so it's good to know somebody digs it. I'm slowly getting past the learning curve of finding out which places to submit to. It took a while to stumble on the right home for this piece, although most of the rejections I got were personal and pretty human about the reasons it didn't work for the publication. Hopefully this is the start of many goods to come. Keeps the motivation high.

Second thing: Lo. Holy shit. This is a movie that is severely under-talked about. Mind-eatingly innovative, but very simple at the same time. It is a textbook example of the way a low budget can really make an awesome story even better, in the same way that lo-fi recording is sometimes beneficial to the atmosphere of a certain style of music. I think it is also a testament to how meta-fiction can live on in new, surprising forms. Some of the awesome things this movie includes are:

- Main exposition told via a demon rock band, singing a corny pop song

- Monsters from hell using the phrase, "You kids crack my shit up," and making it work.

- A married couple in hell, bickering about who gets tortured worse

- Stage plays within stage plays

Getting in depth about it any more would give away the things that make it great, so all I can say is, SEE IT. If you have netflix, stream it. It is not a typical horror/supernatural movie, it's something else. And it straddles the line between humor/terrifying with serious expertise. I hope more comes out from the same people.

Third - The band Xiu Xiu's new album "Dear God, I Hate Myself," is brilliant. For a while I was skeptical about Xiu Xiu, I had the feeling that they more or less were just trying to be weird for weird's sake, e.g., trying to ride the coattails of Beefheart. But damn, this album is something, and feels more polished than some of the other stuff I've heard by them. Here's the best way I can describe it: It takes the 'feel good' essence of today's party/dance music and replaces it with a hysterical sense of human misery. I have a full review of it coming out at 20 Watts in a couple days. Listen to this:

Maybe I am reading too much into these guys, but I think it's pretty awesome. I guess the bottom line is, I'm glad that someone is doing what they're doing musically.

Otherwise, winter is wintery. Gonna go read some more classic hebrew fiction now.

Airwaves, brah

The first broadcast went smoothly. I had a steady number of 8-10 listeners the whole time, which is pretty good for AM college radio. I read some of the segments about depression from Infinite Jest and played music that aimed to fit in with the reading thematically, i.e., sad without being sappy or overbearing. Here's the full depression playlist:

Roads – Portishead
El Manana – Gorillaz
(These two compliment each other well, since they're in the same key and have pretty like chord structures. They made for a good introduction to the mood of the show.)
The Stranger Song – Leonard Cohen
(Hot damn, nobody writes lyrics like this anymore. All that irreverent Judeo-Christian wordplay. I think the old recording quality adds to the song's impact also. It's dark, but not pitch black.)
Drom Hardt (Requiem Pt. 1) – Kaizers Orchestra
(This could very well be pitch black, if not for the fact that the lyrics are in Norwegian and thus harder to understand. If this had been sung in English, I wouldn't have played it, as the translation shows some seriously heavy misery. It has a really nice string arrangement at the end that worked well as background music.)
Dirt in the Ground – Tom Waits
(Appropriately somber Waits, full of his trademark vocal howlin' without being too cooky about it.)
Volcano – Beck
Mad World – Michael Andrews
(These two paired nicely together, and although that version of 'Mad World' has been severely overplayed, it's still a damn good cover. Much preferred to the original.)
28 Ghosts IV – Nine Inch Nails
(The list needed something ambiguous and instrumental in order to make the transition to the more hopeful songs at the end. This is probably my favorite track off of the Ghosts album. Brooding.)
Little Person – Jon Brion & Deanna Story
(From the Synecdoche, NY soundtrack. Gorgeous, and it still hits sadness-ground-zero for me just as hard as it did the first time I heard it. This song is a great example of the way a melody can really bring out the power of really simple, straightforward lyrics.)
Tables and Chairs – Andrew Bird
(I had to close with something that was happy without being stupid about it, i.e., positive, but not Walkin' On Sunshine positive. I think this fit the ticket alright, Bird is a solid songwriter, with an ear for clever lyrics without being too self-consciously “clever” about them.)

Next week's show will be about bigotry. I'll be doing a dramatic reading of an incredibly tasteless column that was published in the student newspaper last year, amongst other goods.

Eh. February is a real Satan-month.

It's official now, yo:

Click here to listen. Official first broadcast will be next week or the week after, depending on how fast I learn not to fail at using the studio. Score!


PS: The artwork here is by the brain-eatingly awesome Mia Makila.

"..."

An internet writing exercise I just thought of:

-Go to WikiQuote
-Click "random page"
-Paste the first quote on each page into a blank document, get about 3 or so
-Imagine the subject matter/story of the novel that these quotes could be an epigraph for.

Here are the ones that just came up for me:

"I got soul but I'm not a soldier "
- The Killers

"The limit to our growth is our ability to get the best talent on the planet and get them working on the toughest computing problems around."
-Wayne Rosing, Former Google VP of Engineering

"Wondering at your good fortune that all your children look like me?"
-Lancelot, King Arthur (2004)

So far as I can tell, this book would involve adultery, cockiness, overcoming cowardice, the internet, business expansion, trying to do really hard stuff. Maybe some cyberpunk would get mixed up in there too, I get the feeling that the novel would be like Neuromancer + Meet Bill. Sounds promising. I'll sell the idea to an agent and get a 99999999$ advance + movie tie-in rights, then start the much-awaited sequel, Son of Virtual Accountant Family Man Hero. Maybe make it a trilogy or quadrilogy.

Rhyming is not evil.

Crazy artists get the press
Lazy artists get to rest
Cheesy artists silver spoon
Sleazy artists paint the poon

Tortured artists drink the beers
Nurtured artists thank the peers
Weepy artists hark despair
Creepy artists grease the hair

Pomo artists hate the term
Homo artists get the perm
Prison artists poke the skin
Jizm artists get too thin

Healthy artists quite uncouth,
Wealthy artists ain't the truth
Modest artists play the fool
Every artist boasts the cool