Fire Death Stick presents - Battles, Ponytail, and Sharks & Sailors

First off congrats to the Kiwis on their America's Cup win and congrats Craig Biggio for hitting 3000. 3,000 hits may seem like a lot to baseball fans but but I saw Mike Gunn do that on a weekly basis. (insert drum hit here)

Last Saturday a corporation, figuring it could sell some of its death sticks, thought a good marketing ploy would be to sponsor a solid indie rock show at Numbers. Of course, any attempt at the corporation being "hip " was belied by the cluelessness of having corporate bikini clad models. "Uh, whuh. Yeah, ummm, just get some bikinis in there; it works at NASCAR and WWF doesn't it?" Whatever. But I ain't complaining. Hey, thanks for the free show you fucks. I mean free tickets to a Battles show with Sharks and Sailors? I'm in!

I'll admit though I was a bit worried as this was on the same day as the annual Houston Gay Pride parade which meant I was going to have to park a quite a few blocks away. Normally I'm down with the parade; it's actually really fun and we usually come back loaded with crap thrown to us from the floats. This time, it just loomed as a big hassle but luckily, the walk wasn't as bad as I expected and I actually got there in time. I had fretted over nothing. Unfortunately, "doors open at 8" was more of a suggestion than a reality as we all sat outside in the muggy Houston evening for what seemed like an hour. When we were let in, we found out that the show would be starting an hour later. So everyone sat and killed an hour. I learned that the banana scented condoms thrown out at last years parade are guaranteed to keep you from getting any STDs but they smell will also keep you from getting laid - so I'm told. We were all in agreement that the new LP pricer at Half Price Books in the Village really sucks ass. I thought I was the only one but apparently it's pretty obvious that the buyer is clueless. "Hey here is an original 60's Stones LP for $15 - too bad it has a huge gouge across it." It's a shame as we all agreed that it's always been a good place for worth perusing but now it's just annoying and frustrating. So, hey you HPB people get the LP dude or dudette to get on the ball ok? Well, I was bored enough at one point to try to score free death sticks and 12" Battles singles until finally at about 10PM Sharks and Sailors started up.

It was an odd Sharks and Sailors set given the muddy sound. From where I stood (at least until the last few songs), the usually clinically precise tones of this band seemed flat. I'm not sure what was up with the sound guy but let's just say he didn't put very much effort into their sound. You know given that you started an hour late, there really was no excuse for the sub-par sound. I found that pretty annoying but the band put on a pretty solid set crappy sound or no crappy sound. Phil Woodward had a new kit with a huge-ass kick drum and as usual he was there playing his kit like a drowning man. I swear he's a great drummer but you always think to yourself, "Is he going to have an aneurysm and keel over?" Some photographer needs to make a case study in his facial expressions someday. If you are in town you should catch them July 11th at the Proletariat; guitarist Al is going to be a father so you can expect a short hiatus from these guys soon after. In the meantime, I can report that the new LP is moving along over at Chris Ryan's Dead City Sound. Melissa says that it'll be out by October and I can't wait!


Ponytail followed and they are one freaky band. I mean let's just start with the guitarist pairing Adidas running shorts, a lumberjack shirt, and a fro that would rival the Dimes at their stylish best. The singer meanwhile screeches while dancing some weird dance that consists of hopping up and down while shaking her open hands over her chest - somewhere between some crazy-ass evangelical "possessed by the Holy Ghost" convulsion and an epileptic seizure. The music is just as bizarre. On the one hand they had enough time signatures changes and parts to resemble Prog, Anarco-punk, and math rock but they also weren't shy about just slamming the foot to the floor and driving a 4/4 1-4-5 progression like the dirtiest rock and roll band! It was pretty inexplicable but that's also the thing that made them really fun - you just didn't know where they were coming from next. I really don't see how you could not be amused or annoyed by this band. I fell in the former but if you were there and fell in the latter even you would have to admit you weren't bored.

The evening closed out with Battles (whom you've heard in the podcast before). The wait between Ponytail and battles can be summed up with "Wow, look at all the freaky equipment!!! Is there anything they don't have?" The set started off pretty solid there was this lovely moment where the three guitarists played this riff with each of them taking a small piece of the whole in a kind of game of hot potato. The played with a journeyman's precision and for the first half I was pretty amused. Then out of nowhere Scott (drummer of Antarctica Starts Here) walks up and says "You know this is good. The musicianship here is excellent but all in all I'd rather be home listening to latter era King Crimson. That's all I wanted to say." And he slips back into the darkness. The fucker! He was right! I mean on the one hand it wasn't really fair but given the musicianship and the compositional style yeah he was kind of right! That was it! Suddenly, I stopped looking at it on a technical musicianship level and started looking at it from a compositional level and live the songs really DO have a kind of sameness to them. I mean despite their chops and cleverness the songs kind of leave you with a bit of "and this is going where?" I mean don't get me wrong there is a lot to like about Battles (see the video below if you don't believe me) but, in the end, I doubt they are a band that 5 years from now I'll be raving about. In fact I skipped the encore and headed home where I plopped on some King Crimson and thought "That fucker!"



Bulletins: Jana Hunter had her gear stolen while on tour. She's lost everything. So if you can help you can help, you can do so by sending her money via paypal to mutualincarnation (at) gmail (dot) com. Thanks

Also, sad news, Hunter Ward of Poor Dumb Bastards left Houston for St. Peter's happy hour. Our heartfelt condolences to his family and friends.

Links:
Battles
Ponytail
Sharks and Sailors

Dead City Sound

I'll Be Watching You

I'm in Houston today so that I can do my duty as an old man to see The Police. They won't be playing Austin, despite Austin's claim of being the live music capital of the world. This apparently also confuses Stewart Copeland because he misidentifies a view from his Houston hotel room as an Austin hotel room in his recent documentary, Everyone Stares. There are lots of hotel rooms in the movie, so it's understandable how he could be confused. I mean, there was a Texas flag and the only place in Texas where they listen to music is Austin. Despite this, it's a pretty good watch.

The first and only other time I saw The Police was at the Summit in 1984. UB40 opened--and yes they did have more songs than "Red Red Wine" (which, you'll note is a Neil Diamond song). Afterwards, my middle school friend and I hung around the loading dock with some of the UB40 members until we saw Sting limo past us. I'm fairly certain nothing like that will happen tonight.

One more thing I'd like point out this week is that 99.9% of FCC complaints were filed by one activist organization. One.

Week 35: Memorable Quotes 1

Easy-out to writing a post, method 1 - quote somebody else. Here's Chuck Palahniuk talking about Guts. Relation to music? Very thin. More of it having to do with the fact that this piece of writing feels a bit like some music. Maybe like a Butthole Surferes show. Anyways, here’s Chuck, enjoy.

GUTS
by Chuck Palahniuk

Inhale.

Take in as much air as you can. This story should last about as long as you can hold your breath, and then just a little bit longer. So listen as fast as you can.

A friend of mine, when he was 13 years old he heard about "pegging." This is when a guy gets banged up the butt with a dildo. Stimulate the prostate gland hard enough, and the rumor is you can have explosive hands-free orgasms. At that age, this friend's a little sex maniac. He's always jonesing for a better way to get his rocks off. He goes out to buy a carrot and some petroleum jelly. To conduct a little private research. Then he pictures how it's going to look at the supermarket checkout counter, the lonely carrot and petroleum jelly rolling down the conveyer belt toward the grocery store cashier. All the shoppers waiting in line, watching. Everyone seeing the big evening he has planned.

So my friend, he buys milk and eggs and sugar and a carrot, all the ingredients for a carrot cake. And Vaseline.

Like he's going home to stick a carrot cake up his butt.

At home, he whittles the carrot into a blunt tool. He slathers it with grease and grinds his ass down on it. Then, nothing. No orgasm. Nothing happens except it hurts.

Then, this kid, his mom yells it's supper time. She says to come down, right now.

He works the carrot out and stashes the slippery, filthy thing in the dirty clothes under his bed.

After dinner, he goes to find the carrot, and it's gone. All his dirty clothes, while he ate dinner, his mom grabbed them all to do laundry. No way could she not find the carrot, carefully shaped with a paring knife from her kitchen, still shiny with lube and stinky.

This friend of mine, he waits months under a black cloud, waiting for his folks to confront him. And they never do. Ever. Even now that he's grown up, that invisible carrot hangs over every Christmas dinner, every birthday party. Every Easter egg hunt with his kids, his parents' grandkids, that ghost carrot is hovering over all of them. That something too awful to name.

People in France have a phrase: "staircase wit." In French: esprit de l'escalier. It means that moment when you find the answer, but it's too late. Say you're at a party and someone insults you. You have to say something. So under pressure, with everybody watching, you say something lame. But the moment you leave the party....

As you start down the stairway, then-magic. You come up with the perfect thing you should've said. The perfect crippling put-down.

That’s the spirit of the stairway.

The trouble is, even the French don't have a phrase for the stupid things you actually do say under pressure. Those stupid, desperate things you actually think or do.

Some deeds are too low to even get a name. Too low to even get talked about.

Looking back, kid-psych experts, school counselors now say that most of the last peak in teen suicide was kids trying to choke while they beat off. Their folks would find them, a towel twisted around their kid's neck, the towel tied to the rod in their bedroom closet, the kid dead. Dead sperm everywhere. Of course the folks cleaned up. They put some pants on their kid. They made it look ... better. Intentional at least. The regular kind of sad teen suicide.

Another friend of mine, a kid from school, his older brother in the Navy said how guys in the Middle East jack off different than we do here. This brother was stationed in some camel country where the public market sells what could be fancy letter openers. Each fancy tool is just a thin rod of polished brass or silver, maybe as long as your hand, with a big tip at one end, either a big metal ball or the kind of fancy carved handle you'd see on a sword. This Navy brother says how Arab guys get their dick hard and then insert this metal rod inside the whole length of their boner. They jack off with the rod inside, and it makes getting off so much better. More intense.

It's this big brother who travels around the world, sending back French phrases. Russian phrases. Helpful jack-off tips.

After this, the little brother, one day he doesn't show up at school. That night, he calls to ask if I'll pick up his homework for the next couple weeks. Because he's in the hospital.

He's got to share a room with old people getting their guts worked on. He says how they all have to share the same television. All he's got for privacy is a curtain. His folks don't come and visit. On the phone, he says how right now his folks could just kill his big brother in the Navy.

On the phone, the kid says how-the day before-he was just a little stoned. At home in his bedroom, he was flopped on the bed. He was lighting a candle and flipping through some old porno magazines, getting ready to beat off. This is after he's heard from his Navy brother. That helpful hint about how Arabs beat off. The kid looks around for something that might do the job. A ballpoint pen's too big. A pencil's too big and rough. But dripped down the side of the candle, there's a thin, smooth ridge of wax that just might work. With just the tip of one finger, this kid snaps the long ridge of wax off the candle. He rolls it smooth between the palms of his hands. Long and smooth and thin.

Stoned and horny, he slips it down inside, deeper and deeper into the piss slit of his boner. With a good hank of the wax still poking out the top, he gets to work.

Even now, he says those Arab guys are pretty damn smart. They've totally reinvented jacking off. Flat on his back in bed, things are getting so good, this kid can't keep track of the wax. He's one good squeeze from shooting his wad when the wax isn't sticking out anymore.

The thin wax rod, it's slipped inside. All the way inside. So deep inside he can't even feel the lump of it inside his piss tube.

From downstairs, his mom shouts it's supper time. She says to come down, right now. This wax kid and the carrot kid are different people, but we all live pretty much the same life.

It's after dinner when the kid's guts start to hurt. It's wax, so he figured it would just melt inside him and he'd pee it out. Now his back hurts. His kidneys. He can't stand straight.

This kid talking on the phone from his hospital bed, in the background you can hear bells ding, people screaming. Game shows.

The X-rays show the truth, something long and thin, bent double inside his bladder. This long, thin V inside him, it's collecting all the minerals in his piss. It's getting bigger and rougher, coated with crystals of calcium, it's bumping around, ripping up the soft lining of his bladder, blocking his piss from getting out. His kidneys are backed up. What little that leaks out his dick is red with blood.

This kid and his folks, his whole family, them looking at the black X-ray with the doctor and the nurses standing there, the big V of wax glowing white for everybody to see, he has to tell the truth. The way Arabs get off. What his big brother wrote him from the Navy.

On the phone, right now, he starts to cry.

They paid for the bladder operation with his college fund. One stupid mistake, and now he'll never be a lawyer.

Sticking stuff inside yourself. Sticking yourself inside stuff. A candle in your dick or your head in a noose, we knew it was going to be big trouble.

What got me in trouble, I called it Pearl Diving. This meant whacking off underwater, sitting on the bottom at the deep end of my parents' swimming pool. With one deep breath, I'd kick my way to the bottom and slip off my swim trucks. I'd sit down there for two, three, four minutes.

Just from jacking oft' I had huge lung capacity. If I had the house to myself, I'd do this all afternoon. After I'd finally pump out my stuff, my sperm, it would hang there in big, fat, milky gobs.

After that was more diving, to catch it all. To collect it and wipe each handful in a towel. That's why it was called Pearl Diving. Even with chlorine, there was my sister to worry about. Or, Christ almighty, my mom.

That used to be my worst fear in the world: my teenage virgin sister, thinking she's just getting fat, then giving birth to a two-headed, retard baby. Both heads looking just like me. Me, the father and the uncle. In the end, it's never what you worry about that gets you.

The best part of Pearl Diving was the inlet port for the swimming pool filter and the circulation pump. The best part was getting naked and sitting on it.

As the French would say, Who doesn't like getting their butt sucked? Still, one minute you're just a kid getting off, and the next minute you'll never be a lawyer.

One minute I'm settling on the pool bottom and the sky is wavy, light blue through eight feet of water above my head. The world is silent except for the heartbeat in my ears. My yellow-striped swim trunks are looped around my neck for safe keeping, just in case a friend, neighbor, anybody shows up to ask why I skipped football practice. The steady suck of the pool inlet hole is lapping at me and I'm grinding my skinny white ass around on that feeling.

One minute I've got enough air and my dick's in my hand. My folks are gone at their work and my sister's got ballet. Nobody's supposed to be home for hours.

My hand brings me right to getting off, and I stop. I swim up to catch another big breath. I dive down and settle on the bottom.

I do this again and again.

This must be why girls want to sit on your face. The suction is like taking a dump that never ends. My dick hard and getting my butt eaten out, I do not need air. My heartbeat in my ears, I stay under until bright stars of light start worming around in my eyes. My legs straight out, the back of each knee rubbed raw against the concrete bottom. My toes are turning blue, my toes and fingers wrinkled from being so long in the water.

And then I let it happen. The big white gobs start spouting. The pearls. It's then I need some air. But when I go to kick off against the bottom, I can't. I can't get my feet under me. My ass is stuck.

Emergency paramedics will tell you that every year about 150 people get stuck this way, sucked by a circulation pump. Get your long hair caught, or your ass, and you're going to drown. Every year, tons of people do. Most of them in Florida.

People just don't talk about it. Not even French people talk about everything. Getting one knee up, getting one foot tucked under me, I get to half standing when I feel the tug against my butt. Getting my other foot under me, I kick off against the bottom. I'm kicking free, not touching the concrete, but not getting to the air, either.

Still kicking water, thrashing with both arms, I'm maybe halfway to the surface but not going higher. The heartbeat inside my head getting loud and fast.

The bright sparks of light crossing and crisscrossing my eyes, I turn and look back ... but it doesn't make sense. This thick rope, some kind of snake, blue-white and braided with veins, has come up out of the pool drain and it's holding on to my butt. Some of the veins are leaking blood, red blood that looks black underwater and drifts away from little rips in the pale skin of the snake. The blood trails away, disappearing in the water, and inside the snake's thin, blue-white skin you can see lumps of some half-digested meal.

That's the only way this makes sense. Some horrible sea monster, a sea serpent, something that's never seen the light of day, it's been hiding in the dark bottom of the pool drain, waiting to eat me.

So ...I kick at it, at the slippery, rubbery knotted skin and veins of it, and more of it seems to pull out of the pool drain. It's maybe as long as my leg now, but still holding tight around my butthole. With another kick, I'm an inch closer to getting another breath. Still feeling the snake tug at my ass, I'm an inch closer to my escape.

Knotted inside the snake, you can see corn and peanuts. You can see a long bright-orange ball. It's the kind of horse pill vitamin my dad makes me take, to help put on weight. To get a football scholarship. With extra iron and omega-three fatty acids.

It's seeing that vitamin pill that saves my life.

It's not a snake. It's my large intestine, my colon pulled out of me. What doctors call prolapsed. It's my guts sucked into the drain.

Paramedics will tell you a swimming pool pump pulls 80 gallons of water every minute. That's about 400 pounds of pressure. The big problem is we're all connected together inside. Your ass is just the far end of your mouth. If I let go, the pump keeps working-unraveling my insides-until it's got my tongue. Imagine taking a 400-pound shit and you can see how this might turn you inside out.

What I can tell you is your guts don't feel much pain. Not the way your skin feels pain. The stuff you're digesting, doctors call it fecal matter. Higher up is chyme, pockets of a thin, runny mess studded with corn and peanuts and round green peas.

That's all this soup of blood and corn, shit and sperm and peanuts floating around me. Even with my guts unraveling out my ass, me holding on to what's left, even then my first want is to somehow get my swimsuit back on.

God forbid my folks see my dick.

My one hand holding a fist around my ass, my other hand snags my yellow-striped swim trunks and pulls them from around my neck. Still, getting into them is impossible.

You want to feel your intestines, go buy a pack of those lambskin condoms. Take one out and unroll it. Pack it with peanut butter. Smear it with petroleum jelly and hold it under water. Then try to tear it. Try to pull it in half. It's too tough and rubbery. It's so slimy you can't hold on.

A lambskin condom, that's just plain old intestine.

You can see what I'm up against.

You let go for a second and you're gutted.

You swim for the surface, for a breath, and you're gutted.

You don't swim and you drown.

It's a choice between being dead right now or a minute from right now.

What my folks will find after work is a big naked fetus, curled in on itself. Floating in the cloudy water of their backyard pool. Tethered to the bottom by a thick rope of veins and twisted guts. The opposite of a kid hanging himself to death while he jacks off. This is the baby they brought home from the hospital 13 years ago. Here's the kid they hoped would snag a football scholarship and get an MBA. Who'd care for them in their old age. Here's all their hopes and dreams. Floating here, naked and dead. All around him, big milky pearls of wasted sperm.

Either that or my folks will find me wrapped in a bloody towel, collapsed halfway from the pool to the kitchen telephone, the ragged, torn scrap of my guts still hanging out the leg of my yellow-striped swim trunks.

What even the French won't talk about.

That big brother in the Navy, he taught us one other good phrase. A Russian phrase. The way we say, "I need that like I need a hole in my head...," Russian people say, "I need that like I need teeth in my asshole......

Mne eto nado kak zuby v zadnitse.

Those stories about how animals caught in a trap will chew off their leg, well, any coyote would tell you a couple bites beats the hell out of being dead.

Hell ... even if you're Russian, someday you just might want those teeth.

Otherwise, what you have to do is you have to twist around. You hook one elbow behind your knee and pull that leg up into your face. You bite and snap at your own ass. You run out of air and you will chew through anything to get that next breath.

It's not something you want to tell a girl on the first date. Not if you expect a kiss good night. If I told you how it tasted, you would never, ever again eat calamari.

It's hard to say what my parents were more disgusted by: how I'd got in trouble or how I'd saved myself. After the hospital, my mom said, "You didn't know what you were doing, honey. You were in shock." And she learned how to cook poached eggs.

All those people grossed out or feeling sorry for me....

I need that like I need teeth in my asshole.

Nowadays, people always tell me I look too skinny. People at dinner parties get all quiet and pissed off when I don't eat the pot roast they cooked. Pot roast kills me. Baked ham. Anything that hangs around inside my guts for longer than a couple of hours, it comes out still food. Home-cooked lima beans or chunk light tuna fish, I'll stand up and find it still sitting there in the toilet.

After you have a radical bowel resectioning, you don't digest meat so great. Most people, you have five feet of large intestine. I'm lucky to have my six inches. So I never got a football scholarship. Never got an MBA. Both my friends, the wax kid and the carrot kid, they grew up, got big, but I've never weighed a pound more than I did that day when I was 13.

Another big problem was my folks paid a lot of good money for that swimming pool. In the end my dad just told the pool guy it was a dog. The family dog fell in and drowned. The dead body got pulled into the pump. Even when the pool guy cracked open the filter casing and fished out a rubbery tube, a watery hank of intestine with a big orange vitamin pill still inside, even then my dad just said, "That dog was fucking nuts."

Even from my upstairs bedroom window, you could hear my dad say, "We couldn't trust that dog alone for a second...."

Then my sister missed her period.

Even after they changed the pool water, after they sold the house and we moved to another state, after my sister's abortion, even then my folks never mentioned it again.

Ever.

That is our invisible carrot.

You. Now you can take a good, deep breath.

I still have not.

Small Worlds

Thursday evening found me at the Hideout listening toRoss and Sam of Hotel Brotherhood perform a short acoustic set. It was a special occasion because Ross doesn't live here any more. He lives in Marfa, Texas doing a double internship with the Chinati Foundation. He's recorded in Marfa at Ramona's friends' studio. He tells me David Beebe, who did that Banana Blender thing and Satellite Lounge and the Continental, well he is starting up a venue in Marfa.

small world

Ross is from Balitmore but has relatives in Houston who I met when I played bass for HB at a Proletariat gig last year. Turns out Ross' cousin was a classmate of mine at Strake Jesuit.

small world

Anyway I turned to the Hideout bartender for a drink and what do I see peeking out of his vest but the letters ultureci and a black pumpkin-headed stickman. And I say to the bartender, "is that a Culturecide shirt?" He gets excited and tells me that it is and tells me that he made it himself after his original wore thin. I tell him I'm from Houston and that I know some of those guys, yadda yadda. I then recognize him as the drummer for Plastic Crimewave Sound and I tell him that we've actually shared the stage because THE LATEST once played with PCS. He says he loves THE LATEST and points to where he has our first vinyl right over by the bar. He says he loves the first song. I brag, "I wrote that song." He asks if I'm singing. I tell him it's Bob. He says it's the singing he likes. Oh well. So anyway Lawrence tells me to come out Sunday because he's hosting a country music festival and all sorts of good bands are gonna be there including one of my favorites, Freakwater, and they're gonna have real beef brisket which is a rarity in these parts. So we forgo the Soul Festival on Saturday for the Country Festival. A sacrifice I really really hated to make. Well then Jim from Dreamweapon and Town & Country turns around and says, "I have that album," while pointing to Lawrence's shirt.

small world

Later that night, I went up to Open Mike at the bar and spent a good deal of time talking to a young player who impressed me with his set filled with Faces material and of all things the Sir Douglas Quintet. He told me that Doug Sahm was in his top five favorite songwriters. I told him that I wish I had known, I would have played Texas Rangerman during my set. He told me I Wanna Be Your Momma Again was his absolute favorite Doug Sahm song. I asked him if he liked Townes Van Zandt as well because he's one of my favs.

small world

Well Sunday comes around and the Country Music Festival was better than you might expect for being hosted by the drummer for one of the city's hottest psychedelic outfits. Truth is Lawrence Peters is a fantastic country musician and he got some terrific acts, including as I said, Freakwater. So was the beef brisket, terrific I mean. Up on stage came the Blue Line Riders, a local group (which Chicagoans would get right away since the Blue Line is a CTA train). BLR does old country hits. They got one strong-voiced girl to cover the freight train songs and they got another girl with a sweet high voice to cover the sad songs. And they got a picker, a pedal steel player, upright bass and drums - all solid players. The Blue Line Riders played Van Zandt's White Freight Liner, sounded great, put a back beat to it. Kelly Hogan went up next. She's absolutely tight and got one of the prettiest voices but she's not dainty. She's Patsy Cline. Well she went and performed Doug Sahm's I Wanna Be Your Momma Again.

small world

Freakwater - Hero/Heroine

Kelly Hogan - 1,000,001

Town & Country - Bee Call

Look out Your Window, Fuckbag

Look out your window. Are you near a window? Look out the nearest window. What do you see? Do you see the seething unrest, the pervading sense of entitlement, and the purposeful, methodical chaos that coats every surface like ash from a volcanic eruption? I do. I don’t even have to look out the window because I already see it everywhere. I see it when I sleep, and it waits for me when I wake. “Good morning,” it so cheerfully greets me. But I know better. There truly is no rest for the wicked.

Being a decent person is work. You have to laboriously do things the right way, and you must do them always with an eye to the rest of the world. You have to be sensitive and thoughtful. Being blasé about your responsibilities as a human is a surefire way to weed out the wheat from the chaff. And I’m here to tell you, it’s almost all chaff.

If you are not one to give a shit about the rest, then your road is one fraught with ease, low on worry. You look at each day as a contest, a challenge between yourself and the entire wave of history. When the ugliness of man sits at your bedside and greets you as you wake, you are ready for it; you already made a place for it beside you.

People suck. As a child I began to suspect this. When my family moved here to this toilet of a state the pieces began to fall into shape. Cruelty was the order of the day. Kids were out to fuck one another. There were battle lines to be drawn. Gone was the innocence of youth. But even deeper than that, I realized that the innocence that I had led myself to believe existed, in fact never did. Kids are at heart animals, and animals are at heart out to eat, shit, and fuck every single day of their lives. Just because we have the mental fortitude to use a Blackberry does not mean we have the gumption to rise above our station.

Nature is a tether.

Bill Hicks thought we held in our mitts the ability to evolve beyond our roost and (in his words), “get the fuck off this planet.”

It was a dream, and no doubt it helped him get through the otherwise crystalline clarity with which he was able to peer into the dark, unwholesome void that is our nature.

The claims of those who cling to the rigors of faith, which revolve around the ideas of redemption and rapturous envelopment into the fold of His glory, are increasingly showing themselves to be poetically quaint and little more.

We all operate within the confines of finality and bookend our existence with platitudes and philosophical constructs of some sort or another, but none of it really has a face in direct confrontation with actual reality. Reality is reserved for the empty nothingness that pervades in totality.

But seriously folks…

Enough of that cheerful music chat, let’s get on to an example of our reptilian nature, shall we?

Some poor fucking kid in Louisville, Kentucky had the incredible misfortune of having her feet sheared off in an amusement park accident. Base though it may be, the irony of this is not lost on me. Perhaps the cosmic threat must be carried out in order to make good on the promise of facing our fears in the (increasingly less it would seem with all the recent incidents) relative level of safety found on roller coasters. You don’t ride one if it’s entirely safe. But then again, you don’t ride them if you have good reason to believe you might end up permanently maimed from them either. Sure, it’s a tightrope, but the frozen lemonade and turkey leg consuming masses would have it no other way.

Call me callous if you wish (you wouldn’t be the first), but when I read the following quotes from CBS News online, I couldn’t help but laugh. And it sure does tie in to my exposition on man’s cold inhumanity.

Enjoy…

Chris Smith, an unfortunately named Kentucky retard, who sadly wasn’t unlucky enough to be maimed himself, deposited this nugget of wisdom about witnessing the incident:

"When I got up there, the lady, she was just sitting there and she didn’t have no legs," Smith said. "She didn’t have no legs at all. She was just calm, probably in shock from everything."

And then mister science dropped this little chestnut, which will possibly keep me in stitches for the rest of the day:

"My son’s over there tripping out man," Williams said. "You want to come to a park and feel safe you know. We’ve got season passes. We’re not coming back for sure."

That last bit, the part about the season passes and not coming back. Kentucky Chris dropped the bomb of the day with that baby. My case in point. People don’t give a fuck about one another, end of story.

This clown just saw a little girl have her feet sliced off on a fucking thrill ride, and all he can say, to a reporter mind you, not to himself in his tiny little funnel-cake laden brain, no, to a CBS reporter, this guy says, “we’ve got season passes, we’re not coming back for sure.”

Yeah, good call dude. It really must suck to have spent all that money you earned down at the tracks on season passes for your impish, inbred children, just to see your fun dashed with one ‘whoosh’ of a snapped cable. I wonder if the footless girl will share in your feelings of financial loss.

I guess I’m just a sucker for human ugliness.
For some reason it’s hard for people, often including my own friends, to understand the ramifications of being a misanthrope. I am infamous both at work and in my personal life for being someone who “hates people.” I hear it all the time. I am accused of writing hatefully, of being antisocial, of being mean, of being a whole host of negative things. I’m not going to try and say that I don’t have those qualities. I do. But it still rankles me to this day to hear other people badger me about it. I mean for fuck’s sake, people are mean to each other! We are cruel and callous and insensitive and only concerned with our season passes and taking swipes at people we don’t know and many more endless items of varying degrees of shittiness.

Me, I love to write out my anger. It is cathartic to identify, magnify, and exorcise that which makes me ashamed to be a man. Otherwise, without an overreaching philosophy of survival, guys like me are relegated to places like death row, or skid row, or a halfway house, and on, ad-infinitum.

I made a certain peace with myself years ago. I agreed to give this life a shot, despite my discomfort, despite my awkwardness, despite the oceanic tide of doubt that swells through almost everything that I do. At first it was simply enough to have this disclaimer to patch onto the days that lied ahead taunting me with clenched fists. But eventually, I was able to actually carve a little niche of sanity and joy out of the morass. I have fought, and continue to fight, tooth and nail against my natural impulses and against the bumpy road that always seems to have another mile to go.

Growing up the way I did, and ending up in Texas, it wasn’t that far fetched to imagine that I might at one point pick up a guitar and try it on for size. So many young white boys in the suburbs of 1980’s America shared such a dream. I was lucky enough to work on it and to have a little bit of natural ability.

I’ve found little that I can honestly say will carry me through the nights. I’ve got books, films, and I’ve got music. And once I picked up a guitar, it was an easy fifteen years during which the mere thought of putting the thing down was simply a wildly fantastic idea to me. Finally I had found something that gave me a small piece of meaning in my life. I often fantasized about how I would go about giving up the guitar, and if that would ever happen. I figured I would either be maimed like our Kentucky friend or I would simply become old and tired and that the thrill might actually flicker away.

I was the guy who surprised my friends when I got a job. I just wasn’t the kind of guy who would seem to need convention or order. In truth, I am a strong acolyte for a sense of order and control over my life. It oozes out of me. I have never set foot in college. Never enrolled, never gave it too much thought. It isn’t for me. And that is sometimes hard to explain to snobby yuppies like… well, like my father, who I know still thinks there’s something wrong with me because I didn’t turn out like my siblings, either in a great school, or out of a great school with a degree and a great job.

But fuck all that, I never wanted it. So my life is an endless walk through a super high-tension and highly charged field of dual situations. On the one hand, I am fiercely independent, simple, and totally unable to do what it would take to make me respectable and successful. On the other hand, I am mired in a sea of mediocrity, because within the confines of the mundane I am able to feel secure enough to survive. If I give up what I consider my virtue, then I will lose my sense of self and become more like the rest of the world. If I let go of the conventional life that I have assumed in the last decade: the wife, the children, the mortgage, and the best behavior, then I will fall prey to my more self-destructive urges and lose my orbit and enter someplace fairly dark.

So the allure of performance before an audience is still there. The Mike Gunn received an invitation to play a reunion show of the Axiom bands from Houston’s 90’s. Me, I would play it in a heartbeat. Scott feels otherwise. No surprise there. But in all honesty, what would we accomplish that night? I think we were pretty good. When we were on I felt fucking amazing. That won’t happen if we play that show. It’s virtually impossible. But the thought of doing something like that is really appealing to me. One reason is that I don’t that I have done much work of value since then. Project Grimm was a solid rock band, and I think an underrated one. But having said that, I don’t think we ever even came close to doing what I wanted to do with it. That’s why I eventually quit Project Grimm. I was miserable.

Since, I have not had the kind of time and the situation to really apply myself to the guitar. Taking the break that I did to raise my son out of total parental dependency was a real hit to my guitar playing. What started out as a self-imposed break has become more of an exile. I don’t see how I could really have a serious go at being a performer any longer. All my friends are either in bands already or are no longer interested in making music either with me or at all. I gave the solo deal a shot for a while, but it was such a let down to try and battle Sisyphus for the rock-pushing rights that I simply let inertia take its course.

So now, I bore you with tales of personal failure in the stead of actually doing something with my guitar. Now, when I pick the damn thing up, I find that my fingers aren’t as nimble as they once were (which wasn’t that much to begin with).

I am also way older than anyone who comes to shows cares to know. And the killer is that I still refuse to self-promote. Where does that leave me?

Here.

This is why writing has taken on such an appealing luster to me now. I absolutely love to put thoughts down in some semblance of order. The same hedges still lie in my way, but I continue to weave around them as best I can.

I keep my guitars, and I still have my amp. I’ll probably die with them somewhere still near. And though you may never hear me pick one up again, it doesn’t matter. I still contribute in my own way. And I’m not dead yet. So, look out your window. What do you see?

going to the dentist, part 2

Not actually my dentist.

Generally, being able to visualize things in great detail before they happen is an asset, especially if one works as an architect to make her living. Not forseeing potential pitfalls can result in delays, lack of coordination between trades, change orders, and very pissed off clients. Therefore, I spend a great deal of my time and energy in my head completing things and then re-presenting those things on paper and in models to various clients and contractors.

I also have a tendency to do this with music. I zoom backwards and forwards within entire compositions finished inside my head by following the internal logic of a piece. These days, tunes which unfold in predictable patterns bore me; I prefer structures with unpremeditated outcomes.

Unfortunately, this capacity for visualization and preference for improvisation or experimental structures is of no use whatsoever when going to the dentist. In fact, it proves to be a bit of a hindrance. What I’m really trying to do here is develop a plausible excuse for you and me as to why I vomited and blacked out at the dentist’s office after he merely injected the novacaine into my gums. The dentist explained to me afterwards that my own fear caused me to go into shock/have a panic attack. He hadn’t even touched the wisdom tooth that was supposed to come out.

Ever seen the movies Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno) or Old Boy? Remember the sequence of the opening of the leather case with all of the metal instruments prior to the torture of the resistance fighter (PL)? I had to hide under my seat in the theater until my friend Kate tapped me on the shoulder to let me know the torture scene was over, and I’m not quite sure I’ve forgiven my ex for making me watch Old Boy with him on our second date ever. Tarantino’s splatter is laughably fake in all of his movies whereas Park Chan-Wook’s scene where a hotel-owner has his teeth forcibly removed with a clawhammer somehow is not.

I sit across from a man in my office everyday who has a 5-inch scar on his neck from a botched dental procedure. Some tissue became infected after the procedure resulting in a goiter-sized abscess that had to be drained. One of the veteran nurses from Columbia-Presbyterian eventually passed out when the abscess was punctured.

In an operation that went surprisingly well, my ex had his upper gums surgically removed, broken in three places, reinserted with metal posts, and his jaw wired shut for three weeks while it healed. He says there was blood everywhere.

So, when the dentist told me to swish and spit after he injected the novacaine, I should have seen just water, because there was only water. Through some previously unknown power of the mind, I instead saw blood. Perhaps it didn’t help that the dental assistant had opened up the tool pack (flashback to the leather case with torture instruments of PL) and spread out each of the utensils in front of me and then left me alone with my imagination for 10 minutes prior to the arrival of the dentist? In any case, the ability of the rational mind to override the creative capacity for envisioning a bloody and horrific destruction of teeth and gums ultimately failed me. I ordered the dentist out of the way lest the evidence of my nausea result on him, stumbled through the reception area as my vision went black, hit the doorway to the bathroom, fell on the toilet, vomited neatly, stood up, blacked out again, was aided back to my chair in a lying down position, given cold compresses on my neck and forhead, and slowly came to.

All this for a wisdom tooth that came in a bit awkwardly. Sometimes the fear is worse than the thing itself.

Other people have survived much, much worse procedures without novacaine, anesthetics, or painkillers of any sort; I should be able to do this. The ordeal has been rescheduled for this Thursday. I’ve self-perscribed a couple of Xanax and found a good blindfold.

From guy drinking beer (Dan) clockwise: Bayou Mermaid (Jennie); Blue (that's a dude with pasties) & UV (Kirsten), aliens from the planet Prudencia.

On Saturday, Coney Island hosted the Mermaid Parade (a day during which bodypaint and seashells become acceptable alternatives to clothing) and on Sunday, some friends and I watched Oakley Hall and Superchunk at the McCarren Park Pool. The bassist of Oakley Hall, Jesse Barnes, is an unbelievably nice guy, and if you ever see them perform, I urge you to buy him a beer. I was in a bit of a daze for the entire weekend because everything feels like it is fast-forwarding back to the dental chair.

The guy for whom you should buy a beer is on the right.

scraping up the debris

I have landed, finally, back in New Zealand, and none of my plans for this week's column, neither my mooted part 2 of chaos and control or my also-postulated part 2 of electronic music that doesn't suck, will come to be this week. I will, however, give you a quick story.

As penance for having a great time in Europe, my travel to Hong Kong was disastrous. I arrived at the Venice airport in a panic with only an hour before my flight, only to find that I needn't be in a rush at all, as the flight's been cancelled. The flight was to be to Frankfurt, and then to Hong Kong seven hours later. No problem - there's still got to be some way to get me to Frankfurt in time, right?

No, so I go to Munich, which has a flight to Hong Kong that leaves (and, resultingly, arrives) about four hours later. This at first appears to be a blessing, as Munich airport is perhaps my favorite airport to date that I've seen. I wound up in the outdoor beer garden for a couple hours with a German who spoke better English than he gave himself credit for, drinking beer and eating large chunks of meat.

Was it the beer garden diet in lieu of things like vegetables and water? Or was it the plane food? I don't know, but when I tried to go to sleep on the plane shortly after dinner, not only could I not sleep, but I felt alternately hot, then cold, then broke out into dry sweats, then ran for the toilet in one of those not sure what direction to face panics.

(I hurt just thinking about it.)

Twenty minutes later and much lighter, I managed to finally drift off for a while, but then woke up around the time the lights came on for breakfast. Two hours to go, still feeling a bit rubbish, and of course there's a baby screaming.

Now do you know what to do in this experience? Hells yes - you put on the noise cancelling headphones and throw Magic Hour's NO EXCESS IS ABSURD on the iPod, of course! I don't know how many people know or care about Magic Hour, but this record is easily their pinnacle and must be one of my top 30 or so most listened-to albums of the last 15 years.

Basically, Magic Hour were two couples - Wayne and Kate from Crystallized Movements and Damon and Naomi from Galaxie 500, if I remember the genealogy correctly, who somehow wound up together and stumbled for one album onto the perfect space rock formula, with just enough song form to make you think you're listening to a coherently structured piece of music and then minutes of jamming or soloing or something, that to me actually sounds quite considered despite its free flowing expression.

Sadly, their follow-ups never lived up to the original: the sequel, WILL THEY TURN YOU ON OR WILL THEY TURN ON YOU, took their two tendencies and split them into separate songs (1 side of pop songs, 1 side of jam) to diminishing returns, while SECESSION '96 is (as I remember it) a good enough instrumental jam album but entirely lacking the vocal charms of NO EXCESS IS ABSURD.

But that's fine, because most bands make an album this good, this focused, and most of all this healing in their entire career. And with the crying of a child in pain muted under a wall of guitar, somehow I felt better. That is, until I arrived at my hostel, which was deep in the heart of Chungking Mansions, which features prominently in Wong Kar-Wai's film CHUNGKING EXPRESS. And if you find yourself saying, "Gee, I don't remember anything that looked like a hostel in that movie", I say to you: Exactly.

But that's another story, which I may share later, but for now I must collapse.

Napcast XX3

Click on the podcast link in the right margin of this blog to hear episodes of the NONALIGNMENT PACT podcasts. If you need help, just ask.

Please submit guesses for mystery person'- mystery friend's-mystery tune in the comments section of this post.

Clues may be provided if the song cannot be guessed.

Thanks for submitting music.

If you want to do a podcast, guest host a podcast, submit music, or submit artwork, or anything else relative EMAIL ME HERE.

Artwork is by Kilian.

I apologize for not having a podcast last week. Just couldn't be done.

Here's a picture of one of our village's recent casualties. It was a necessary evil, and at least this one was an animal.

Rude am I in my Speech

We had some visitors last Sunday and we got to talking about bandmates. He described this bandmate as a guy who says the most awful things but then, while still not understanding why he'd offended you, would back down . It was like the guy has a social Tourret's Syndrome. Given that our visitor could be considered from my generation, I couldn't help but notice some parallels to bands from Houston I grew up with and how we are all a sorry lot when it comes to social skills. Don't get me wrong, there were some gregarious people back then, but for the most part we were all socially clumsy geeks. Here is a classic example:

C is playing a show in town and staying in our house. C, unfortunately, can eat only the blandest foods because C bought some new-age fancy tongue scraper that, well, scraped the fuck out of C's tongue. (Taste buds will grow back but only after a long time and, as it turns out, it hurts like hell.) We pull into a gas station and as I'm getting gas I see S at the station.

"Hey S, guess who's in Town - C!"

"Oh hey C!"

As we're pumping gas I explain the crazy tongue scraper story and S turns with a face exploding with laughter and, while pointing, guffaws "What? A tongue scraper? What, was it made of metal? What the fuck were you thinking? Haw Haw Haw!"

You want another example? I may have cited this one before but it's a classic Mike Gunn moment where, during a show at Rudyard's downstairs, a young couple got up to dance and John turned to the couple and chided them mercilessly; the couple literally hung their heads and slunk out. Classic Mike Gunn I tells ya.

Now, I'm pretty much a social misfit as well so I'm no better. I'd say that most of my ineptitude comes from being terrible with names and faces. The classic example was a party we attended where a friend (whom I'd known for years) was wearing some glasses.

I asked "Who is that?"

"You ass, that's T wearing glasses!!!"

You know how annoying it is that nobody at the Daily Planet can tell Clark Kent is Superman because of of his elaborate disguise that consists solely of dark glasses? Well, I'd be just as clueless as the rest of them. If you wave at me at a show there is likely to be a big delay as my brain thinks; 'OK is that that dude? Dude, maybe it is but maybe it's not. Let's see, it looks like him but he's pretty clean-cut today. Maybe he just got off work or something. Oh wait, yeah, that's him. But, wait, maybe he's waving at that dude behind me. Maybe I should hedge my bets and wave back a bit.' Meanwhile the dude waving by now is thinking that I'm a totally rude asshole when in reality I'm just an idiot. Look, the reason Fred wears that white polo and ascot, Velma wears orange, and Daphne wears that purple dress is that Shaggy is so wasted half the time that he'd be lost if they wore anything else. That's me except I don't smoke dope anymore and I likely never even got close to the level that Shaggy and Scooby smoke on a daily basis.

So it's refreshing when I see bands like Sharks and Sailors, The Dimes, The Jonx, Satin Hooks, and so on; with a few exceptions, the bands these days actually are sociable and genuinely nice. In contrast, looking back in the late 80s and early 90s, I'd venture to say that, while unintentional, we probably came off as self-absorbed assholes. I don't know what was up our asses but how we were never run out of town, I'll never know.

Credits:
Goofus and Gallant from Highlights Magazine and drawn by Anni Matsick

Another List of Things

Thing One:
One of the more spirited conversations in Barcelona happened late on the first night we were there when we began discussing the relative differences between the different types of metal* and the different types of other music genres, specifically indie. Apparently El Conorio had had a similar discussion with his host in Berlin. The discussion of metal quickly turned to a discussion of the differences between the different subgenres of electronic music. Conor held that without being very familiar with these subgenres it isn't possible to say that the differences are small with any authority. Doug and I disagreed. I maintain that the differences are objectively smaller between the various subgenres of metal and electronic than they are between the various subgenres of indie. I think this is mostly because the things that define something as indie aren't necessarily musical. Much of what is commonly called indie is more of a social aesthetic than a musical one, so the musical differences can be widely variant. Feel free to discuss.

Thing Two:
Did you know that people were encoding computer programs on vinyl in the 80s? This seems like something I would have known about, but I guess not.

Thing Three:
The Wonderful and Frightening World of Mark E. Smith.



Part two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine.

Thing Four:
Al Gore is planning a rock concert against global warming on all continents set for next month. I wonder who will be playing the Antarctic stage. Though apparently it won't be the first down way under, as claimed.

Thing Five:
Mr Van Vliet says listen to the birds.

That's where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren't going anywhere.

Thing Six:
One last thing for Ramon.



*Conor sent the Onion link to Doug and me today.

Week 34: Los Abandoned

We’ve been moving all week, so I haven’t had much time for caring about anything else, so this post will be half-assed about a band that half of me doesn’t care about, but the other half finds halfway charming in a half assed way.

I generally haven’t liked any of the Southern California pop punk stuff, although occasionally there is a catchy song that comes out of it that makes me smile, but that is less and less the case these days.

But Los Abandoned, although they get lumped in with that crowd, seem to be a little different. Although their song Van Nuys es Very Nice is a perfect example of a better than average pop punk tune, I was attracted to it because I have a hard time not liking lyrics like "The upper-lower middle class that you can only find here has gente con muchos acentos viven en apartamentos" just 'cause they are half in English and half in Spanish. I was expecting more of the same kind of punky stuff from their other songs, but surprisingly they are all over the place, which might be why labels keep dropping them. And maybe they are a little too all over the place, but i prefer that to having all the songs sound the same. On the other hand few of their other songs use the seamless mix of Spanish and English that they have in Van Nuys; most are in either one or the other language and this is dissapointing. If they would sing more in Spanglish and play less punky, i would care a lot more about them, as it is I'm just a bit curious to hear what they do next.

In the NAPcast you’ll get to hear other songs, but for now, here’s the video for Van Nuys es Very Nice.

Their album titles are also cute - 'Demo Tape', 'Self Titled EP', 'Office Xmas Party', and 'Mix Tape'.

Blues, Bloomsday and Father's Day Bling

Blues

This just in from our traveling correspondent* in La la land:

Houston guitar wizard, Aaron Loesch, shakes up the sweat factory guitar world and is now the reigning Guitar Center King of the Blues.

Though among his many cool winnings is a 59' reissue Gibson Les Paul, he won it all with a hacked-up pawn shop acoustic.

Though he's an expert Jaguar mechanic, he's now the proud owner of a 2007 Ford Mustang.

In oddly related news, Chrish stood three feet from Billy Bob Thorton and proclaims him to be on the short side (disclaimer: our roving correspondent stands at six feet five inches, so short may be relative).

Here is footage for the fine folks back home.


Bloomsday

Saturday was the 103rd Anniversay of June 16th, 1904 on which day all of James Joyce's Ulysses takes place. I hope your Bloomsday, like Aaron Loesch's, was fruitful.

Bling

Sunday was Father's Day. I hope all you fathers out there got your deserved bling. Happy Belated Father's Day to Clay, Clinton, John, Ramon, Roberto, Snake, SOV and all the other fathers lingering out there including me (well come late January anyway if all goes well).

Breaking News from Austin!


Houston Press Assistant Music Editor headed your way Stonians.

*Little brother Chrish

Strut on a Line, it's Disco and Rhyme

The Mike Gunn was playing in Dallas, and this girl comes up to me after the show. She is three-sheets-to-the-wind if she’s had one drink, and she thinks I am someone famous. I’m not entirely sure who she actually thinks I am. It stands to reason that famous people don’t play Dallas on a weekend night to an audience of one frightfully drunk and emotionally distant girl. But I guess that this is the power of drink, this ability to put aside any sense of reason for the more pressing reptilian need for sexual gratification. Apparently, one can drink enough to think that the imbecile bashing away on a handful of power-chords to an empty bar is actually a fuckable celebrity. She is trying desperately to get me to accompany her to some party. I assume that in her inebriated wisdom this will be her ploy to get me to show her my penis. It won’t happen.

It won’t happen for a number of reasons. For one, I wouldn’t take advantage of someone so pathetic under any circumstances. It’s not in my make-up. In addition to that, she’s hammered, and I would undoubtedly either die in her car due to her going off the road somewhere near the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza, or worse, we would have sloppy, sweaty sex back in her hovel, whereupon I would thereafter be forced to commit hara-kiri with the sharpest item I could find. And most importantly, it won’t happen because my girlfriend is standing right next to me.

I think the last bit is the clincher.

You know, I’ve got to say, it’s indescribably defeating to drive your entire band and all its insanely heavy gadgetry to another city just to play in front of no one. As Scott Grimm always pointed out, even the soundman left. I would like to report that we did it anyway, since I was a complete ass about the whole thing and ended up putting my foot down. To me, since we made the effort, and this overly nice friend of Tom’s was putting us up for the night, the most we could do was play our set.

For the record, I am no stranger to playing in front of nobody. I have also played solo shows for not a single soul other than myself. It’s a wee bit daunting to do this. I don’t really recommend it. If that’s your bag, stay home. It’s worked for me ever since. I make no claims to attracting audiences to watch me do my thing anyway. I basically refuse to tell anyone I have a show, utterly refuse to flyer, and have an intense disdain for anyone who would think watching me play guitar wouldn’t be a tortuous affair. I am the living embodiment of the Groucho Marx line about not wanting to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member. I mean for fuck’s sake, what bastard would dream of leaving their home to spend money they actually earned just to watch me hide from them and then abuse a guitar for about thirty minutes?

I have soured on the whole show-going experience over the years. I’m sure the biggest reason is that I am a total pussy. But beyond that, it really is no fun for me anymore. But it’s not just that. If you have had the incredible fortune of trolling through the underbelly of my self-perception, then you are well aware of my reasons for avoiding rock life.

I hate clubs, hate bartenders, bookers, soundmen, drunks, smokers, chain wallets, worker jackets with patches on them, nose rings, posturing, fight starting, flame paint jobs, “cool” fliers, desperate horny drunks, despondent suicidal drug addicts low on cash, bleach blonde stripper girls who look the women in Hostel the day after the night before, guys stuck so far into their adolescence that they think being called The Gooch or Catfish or Mikey or Nuts or Booger is a hipster term of endearment, rehearsal studios, bands who never pay rehearsal studio rent without being harassed (all of them), rock musicians who think they are brilliant when they aren’t (most of them), smelly mics, gurgling eardrums, and of course, acting like I care. I fucking hate acting like I care, because oh, how I do not care a whit.

So I am happy now to sit at a distance and pontificate.

Not that I have anything of value to say. In past comments I have been accused (I can think of no other way to frame it) of having worshipers in the blog. I think the evidence is less than forthcoming. On (electronic) paper, I am a total loudmouth. But it isn’t who I really am. Ask anyone who really knows me. Ask Ramon.

Since its inception, I have wanted to use this forum to say something profound about music, about the pleasure of listening to it, and the joy of making it. But maybe I don’t have that much profundity in me. You’ve all done what I’ve done, seen what I’ve seen, heard what I’ve heard. Your stories are as good, if not better than mine. I guess I tie my joy in music to my ongoing obsession with aesthetics. Finding and appreciating that which I feel is beautiful is my main goal in life. And as the years mercilessly pile up, I’ve found that what I find to be beautiful not only grows and expands but also seems to be in constant flux. And so to reiterate, I have intended to use this blog to say something meaningful about how I think and how I feel about something that is so universal and so fucking amazing. I can only hope that my voice has come through.

Mine is a tiny squeaking nag way down in the pipeline. I’d love to make you cry, but I never will because I suspect that I’m not that strong a writer. And this fact burns my ass to no end. In real life, I do better when you don’t notice me. I am doing my job if I can blend in without being noticed. Fronting a rock band made this kind of hard to do, but I think I managed to pull it off. But eventually, it became too much to ask of myself, and the time had arrived to step away for an indefinite hiatus. I have no desperate need to be noticed, no overreaching desire to be loved no matter the cost. I leave this to the girl in Dallas who still tells her friends about the night she almost fucked Simon Le Bon, or whoever the hell she thought I was.

So what do you serve in here? Who is your master? In other words, why do we write this blog in the first place? I think a lot of it has to do with a mutual level of respect that the members share for one another, at least in various capacities.

One of the biggest reasons I do this is because it grants me a level of discipline that I would otherwise quite probably not have. I have a brain that doesn’t turn off. Ever. This isn’t to say that it works particularly well, or that it is a particularly healthy brain. It’s just an insanely active brain. I used drugs for various reasons, not the least of which was to quite the noise. It helped a little, but ultimately it failed. In fact, it eventually made things worse. Writing with a weekly deadline helps keep the pressure on, and having you fucks read this and critique it lends an outside perspective that I generally don’t get in life, thanks to being an almost complete recluse.

So here’s my dream life. I run away for five straight years. I don’t work, I don’t have a phone, and I don’t have a TV. I live off of my (imaginary) savings account. All I do is play guitar, read, write, and speak to absolutely no one. I thank the checkout person at the store. And that about does it. And nobody waits up for me. I take a vow of complete silence. I read as many books as I can. I write for several hours daily. I paint. I play guitar. And I think about things.

That to me is nirvana.

The following is not.

If you’ve ever played in a band, and you were the default money guy, then you know the horrors of hanging out with the bar-tards that linger about the damn place after closing. It’s a miracle that you aren’t required to pull your dick out and lay it on the desk to see who’s got the longest. That’s the mindset of bar people after closing. You know that dimwit with the chain-wallet behind the bar that won’t give you the time of day when you want a beer? Closing time is the witching hour for these fellows. Suddenly they want to be your friend. They want to tell you about the girl who just left them. They want you to know how much they miss their snake, Snags, and their vinyl copy of Ratt’s Out of the Cellar that that bitch made off with. They share these vapid tales of lovelorn thuggery and fragile manhood in hopes that you will feel some sort of empathy for how deep they are. I don’t know why this used to happen to me, but night after night, some drunken imbecile felt the need to let me know that they had actual feelings.

Great.

That whole life is not for me. Someone else can do it. Let Spain Colored Orange do it, they seem agreeable. Let Million Year Dance do it, that Eastern philosophy posturing ought to get a bit of a workout before they head straight for the slums of Harp magazine and an opening slot on Jeff Tweedy’s Naked Man with a Banjo Tour 2007. Those guys are better suited to deal with that sort of thing, for better or worse. I’ll stay home, home where the wife leaves me alone to foster my idiotic fantasies and prepubescent emotional detours into lands most imagined. Everyone has a world in which they belong. Mine is most likely far, far away from the rigors of nightclubs and their assorted indignities.

Any of you remember hauling your crap into a club full of employees who treat you either like you don’t exist, or better still, as if you have fucked their favorite dog? Isn’t that a treat? I don’t care if you like my band, club person, but since someone at the establishment decided to book my band, perhaps you could make a small attempt to hide your hatred for me. I’m doing it for you. And trust me, it’s hard.

I don’t know what it was about Emo’s here in Houston, but they had a real bad habit of hiring the biggest idiots in the universe to run sound. If I had to deal with one guy who thought he was Albert Einstein with an SM57, I’ve dealt with a thousand.

I can’t even imagine how many times I’ve heard this little gem:

“Dude, you’re gonna’ need to adjust your tone.”

Or:

“That’s pretty cool, but I’m gonna’ give you some more reverb on your vocal.”

Here’s a tip for all you closet wizards who have ever shat upon the bands of America at Emo’s Houston.

Shut the fuck up, listen to the band, evaluate the entire sound, make sure everyone is heard, and (shock of shocks), mixed together in a way that complements the band. What you don’t want to do is make the bands up on stage sound as though they shoved all their instruments up their asses and then dialed in their set over a cell phone. That is what we call a bad mix.

I do not miss any of this. How could anyone ever want to go through this garbage at all, ever? Maybe I should have left with the drunk girl. Left and never looked back.

As we drive away in her broken down Chevy, we sit in silence listening to Whitesnake on the radio. The song just came on without anyone making a move to change it. There is nothing to say. We both have a job to do. Mine entails never coming back to my past; hers, only she can know. Her apartment is fragrant, gauzy and dark. Her cat weaves around my feet. I drink a bottle of water and sit on her bed. She is in the other room. I catch myself in the mirror. For a second I am in equal parts amused and disgusted with the man who looks back at me. But before I can laugh about it she comes back. Pausing briefly in the doorway, she undoes her top button and then turns out the light. I’m hungry like the wolf.

going to the dentist, part 1

[Blogger note: your author here is having a battle with Blogger over the usage of Verdana as a font and over the mysterious insertion of "font size=0" into the text, thus causing whole paragraphs to disappear.]

I have to leave for the dentist in ½ hour. I haven’t been to the dentist in 4 years. Xrays and cleaning will cost $410. I already know they are going to tell me that I need to have the wisdom tooth that is making a nuisance of itself removed. This doesn’t have anything to do with music.

Last week on Thursday I became sort of depressed (call it the Barcelona come-down) and didn’t want to leave my apartment. Being the responsible person I am, I got on an airplane two Sundays ago, as scheduled, because I thought I would need to be here for a job that is about to begin construction. As it turns out, a certain person with the initials A.P. (would that I could give her full name and contact details so that I could solicit you to send her random hate mail) hadn’t communicated clearly her requirements for a Certificate of Insurance and has managed to delay the paperwork circus. Meanwhile, the contractor, who is one of the best contractors is the city and we are damned lucky to have his attention, seems to be stalling as well. In short, there was absolutely no reason why I had to get on that airplane and I should have stayed in Barcelona and gone to the Sonar Festival. Have you taken a look at the Multimedia section? Lately I’ve been subjected to a number of bad video/music performances, and would have been fantastic to see something interesting, just to clear my head out.

Jost Muxfeldt - Audio Kinematics

I did see Lily Allen perform on Tuesday and Sasha spin for a private party at Cielo on Thursday, so I really shouldn’t be moping.Must leave for the dentist now.If the nerves in my gums somehow don’t affect the nerves in my fingers, I may type more about this later.

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Ok. That was an irrational fear. The dentist was easy. You know they take digital xrays of your teeth these days? The wisdom tooth is coming out on Friday. Let's hope they give me lots of anesthetics.

I like Lily Allen. She picks fights/gets picked on by the same people I would choose to pick on/get in a fight with, if I did that sort of thing: Bob Geldorf, Cheryl Tweedy (of Girls Aloud), Chris Moyles. She's beautiful, has got a great vibe, can sing, and her lyrics make Kate and I laugh. Her father (Keith Allen) is Welsh.

Sasha is also Welsh. I’m guessing he just wanted to test out some new material on a small crowd with a really good sound system last Thursday. The event was not publicized and what special list my friend Elie is on, I have no idea. As I mentioned previously, that Thursday I had been alternately staring at the ground, then the ceiling, then questioning the momentum of my life and wondering how trying to be a responsible adult would ever pay off, then staring at New York out of my window and trying to make it all turn into Barcelona. The phone rings. I haven’t spoken with Elie in nine months because he’s been locked up inside of the GSD. “I have a plus one,” he says. Suddenly, I’m not stuck staring at flat surfaces anymore. These days Sasha uses Ableton Live (a piece of software) to create his mixes, which means he’s not playing a track and then fading into another- he’s mixing the various layers of his tracks live. Is there a new word for someone who does this? Live-DJ-producer-programmer? Sasha didn’t fail my high expectations of him. Fuck Barcelona. I didn’t really mean that.

Funny Sonar review… read The Bad- Como se dice afterhours?

chaos and control vol. 1

John's comments on Jesus Lizard this week, where he noted one of their charms (if that's the word) was to sound on the verge of falling apart while being completely in control, oddly reflected a discussion I had with BBODG, where I was trying to explain what I liked about Modest Mouse. (The terminology I used came closer to 'spastic energy', but the feeling in my head is that the two are similar - it's the sense that the song is going all over the place and energy is flying but that you're still being taken on a journey.)

In the interim I've been trying to come up with some unifying theory about chaos and control and music, and failing. But I did notice this.

I bought a Charles Lloyd CD the other week, and only when I opened it did I notice that it featured pianist Keith Jarrett and drummer Jack DeJohnette. Now, I have an irrational prejudice against these two - I consider ECM to be the safe, defanged version of avant-jazz, and these two label perennials to be at the vanguard of their attempts to make avant-jazz as bland as possible. But I must confess to hypocrisy, or something, in that I've never actually listened to their records. Hence irrational hypocrisy.

Since I was recently in a situation where I was doing a lot of driving and had only three CDs, I gave this CD many careful listens. And one of the interesting revelations was that probably the player that goes furthest out into the sun, most into the land of freedom, is actually Mr. Jarrett, with a piano solo that rides out from the song's conventional jazz structure into wild woods unknown, and starts slamming away dischordantly.

But just as the wave's really starting to crest, Jarrett backs away, and retreats into some very safe chord changes, and the song resumes.

I've been thinking a lot about what to make of this - I mean, it's clear he's got it in him, but he seems to be afraid to fully embrace the chaos. My best conclusion is that it's an Icarus-like moment where he flew too close to the sun unintentionally, as little of his work elsewhere on the album reflects this freedom. And a fear of freedom is something that no musician is usually better for.

Or is that true? I dunno, but it sounds good. I'll think about it and post more on the topic next week.