#287

One explanation for why certain bands gain prominence well beyond what would seem fair or just in a balanced universe is that people love guitars. I personally love guitars, so this is understandable to me. Though I play the bass and think of it as my "main" instrument, I never can understand why people seem to be so fixated on pumping up the bass; what they really mean is they want to feel the pulsing of the beat within their chest cavity in an unhealthy way.

Used to play tuba, and when I wanted to quit tuba in order to better concentrate on playing many other instruments as I like to do, my band director attempted to dissuade me by expounding upon how essential the bass element is to the sound of any given musical effort overall. I was not disputing this, and still do not, but it's not something people really hear except when it's not there. "When you're listening to rock music, don't you turn up the bass, on your speakers or in the car?" he asked me, trying to reach me through the evils of modernism (this was not my problem). "No," I replied. "I concentrate more on the guitars. Or the trumpets, which is what I want to go back to playing." "You're valuable to me as a tuba," he replied flatly, abandoning the relatability angle and thereby becoming much easier to understand. "You're not valuable as a trumpet. But if you really want to go down that road, you have to at least wait till tryouts next year to make the formal switch. We can talk about it at camp."*

Ah, band camp. He gave me the runaround then, too. A good band leader can't take shit from prima donna asshole kids, and whatever his faults, the man was one of the greats. 

The instrumentality of the bass line is not widely regarded, is what I'm saying. I think of something different when I think of bass music than simply root notes and the big drum. Yes, the framework is essential, and without it, it all falls down. And guitars are probably overrated. But guitars are awesome, and one time, a band I was playing with literally forgot me and left me at a liquor store waiting for them, and I had to catch up to them; this is a perfect illustration of how the bassist is regarded. Also, I just can't play the guitar for some reason. This means it retains its mystique, and I place all my inventive guitar energies into my bass instead. Makes me a terrible bassist to play guitar with, I can tell you. 

*

So, guitars. Better to say, specifically, electric guitars. How about a list of my top twenty albums in no particular order evaluated solely on the merits of the guitar work? Or maybe, top ten guitar albums, top twenty guitar tracks. That might be more information for less effort. One thing doing Album Week has taught me is that albums are much more difficult than songs.

Top Ten Albums On The Strength of Their Electric Guitars In No Particular Order Purely My By Own Unspoken Subjective Metrics Off the Top of My Head (Records with Carlos Santana here omitted for reasons of bias and proliferation; same goes for Caspian)

Dreaming of Revenge, Kaki King

Shadows Collide With People, John Frusciante

Hot Rats, Frank Zappa

Electric Mud, Muddy Waters

No Code, Pearl Jam

Stadium Arcadium, Red Hot Chili Peppers

This Is a Long Drive For Someone With Nothing to Think About, Modest Mouse

Ride the Lightning, Metallica

Sink / Swim, Cutting Room Floor

Mommy's Little Monster, Social Distortion

Honorable Mentions

Mexican Teenagers EP, Kaki King

Glow, Kaki King

Renihilation and Aesthetica, by Liturgy

Top Twenty Songs On the Strength Of Their Electric (Or, Sometimes, Combination Electric/Acoustic) Guitars In No Particular Order Purely By My Own Unspoken Subjective Metrics Off the Top of My Head (with an attempt to reach for more artists off more albums rather than, say, ten Caspian songs and ten Santana songs out of their discographies, which I could also do, and ALSO, omitting any songs/albums I have discussed before in Album Week 2019 or 2022)

"Height Down", John Frusciante & River Pheonix, Smile From the Streets You Hold

"Swans (Life After Death)", Islands, Return to the Sea

"Spitting Venom", Modest Mouse, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank

"Throw Away Your Television", Red Hot Chili Peppers, Live at Slane Castle (let us here include all extemporaneous jam intros/outros/interstitials to any given song played that evening)

"Don't Wait For the Sun", American Hi-Fi, American Hi-Fi

"Murmaider II: The Water God", Dethclock, Dethalbum II

"Tempting Time", Animals As Leaders, Animals As Leaders

"L.A. Woman", The Doors, L.A. Woman

"Barnes", Pinback, Autumn of the Seraphs

"Quadrophenia", The Who, Quadrophenia

"Worlds Apart", Bruce Springsteen, The Rising

"There's No Home For You Here", The White Stripes, Elephant

"March To the Witch's Castle", Funkadelic, Cosmic Slop

"At Least That's What You Said", Wilco, A Ghost is Born

"Arms of a Thief", Iron & Wine, Around the Well

"The Mountain", Krallice, Dimensional Bleedthrough

"Ex Cathedra", Wolves in the Throne Room, Black Cascade

"Sister", Sufjan Stevens, Seven Swans

"1969", The Stooges, The Stooges

Last, I'm buckin' the rules and posting a four-way all in the same move, check it:

"I Want It All", "Hammer to Fall", "The Show Must Go On", "One Vision", Queen, (not writing out the albums; it's Queen, the later albums mostly)

Honorable Mentions

They are LEGION, many deserving a spot in what might be the "actual" top twenty, but this is just an exercise in the vein of a speedrun. I cannot stress how non-exhaustive and unauthoritative today's post has been. For the sake of honor, I shall mention 

"Halo Theme Mjolnir Mix", Martin O'Donnel and Michael Salvatori, featuring Steve Vai, Halo 2 Original Soundtrack 

*

So there's some food for thought! Or not. On that note, time to cook lunch. Or maybe order sandwiches. Probably left things too late. I am too hungry to think clearly any longer.

Album! Week! Twenty! Twenty! Two! 

--JL

*On another occasion, regarding the trumpet thing: "You got great tone, but you don't work your scales. You don't work hard enough to make high chairs. It's that simple." And it was. Now when I play my trumpet it's pretty much just scales and long tones, a little bit of extemporaneous whatever, then back in the case. Too late I have learned, but it's never too late to just enjoy playing, so it's not a waste or anything. I'd play my tuba too, if I could find one. Funnily, no one ever criticized that I didn't practice my tuba scales. 

#286

Given the choice, and there is usually a choice, though much more rarely when camping, I like to bake bacon in an oven. More is gained from the rendering process, and it is much easier to achieve crispness without blackening. It is slower, but taking more time is something I like to do. Given the choice. Too often there is a dearth of choice, due to modern quotidian pressures over which the individual has poor and fleeting, if any, influence over. Also, with fresh liquid bacon grease heated to spitting, cooking delicious perfect scrambled eggs takes about forty seconds. So one gets a little time back, with the proper preparation. 

All this is by way of saying I cooked breakfast real proper this morning. We must celebrate the tiny victories whenever possible. Soon we will be dead, and breakfast no more.

*

Wrote that yesterday, and delved greedily and deep into work on the what was to be the next album--but that is not today's album. Dunno how much it comes across, but I do a considerable deal of research on most posts where I make any kind of reference, even if I know the subject well--and research for certain posts can be quite extensive. My research for the post I began yesterday and continued all day today has not yet completed and I've had ten tabs open on pages ten to twenty scrolls deep, plus I may have to pull out some books. So that album's post will be published later this week, which is even something of a relief, as it is a lot of emotional work as well, and maybe would be served by parsing out.

I love doing research so much, Seriously. I would get paid for it, in a world where I gave a fuck about myself and demanded my money's worth. More applicably to this timeline, if I do enough research, I can learn enough to understand that there is no point in actually writing about the thing I am researching, since my understanding is simply too shallow, as is all knowledge. 

*

No album today! It's Sunday, I ate a huge turkey sandwich for lunch and I need a nap. Maybe I'll add to this post after a nap, but probably not. Breakfast and research are good enough topic for a decent blog post, in my opinion. My memory of that accomplishment is still shining brightly. Those really were perfect eggs, man.

--JL

#285

Saw on Slashdot, reported in Nature but unconfirmed on other news sites: a UK laboratory has accomplished the use of quantum technology to perform an accurate underground scan outdoors on live dirt to image an existing tunnel. I have been waiting for this watershed moment in sensor technology since I was a tiny child, feeling instinctively and coming to know intellectually that the complete fossil record will only get us partway to where we want to go, let alone digging for it. Also, scan tech is just fucking cool as hell. I am cautiously but giddily excited. The times, man! To have been alive for the past thirty years, and, I imagine, the past fifty, is to have lived in a ridiculous fantasy world. Can't wait to be a hundred years old so I can teleport to the moon colony and jump around the terraformed gardens, to tour the moons of Jupiter and witness the great planetrises.

Also I guess war is happening. When is it not, though. Hope no one is bothering my diasporic Ukranian friends at this time. There is a particular agony when your point of origin is in the newsmedia; photographs you never wanted to see reproduced everywhere you look, know-nothing fuckwits telling you what you should feel or accept, the worst questions at the most inane and inopportune times, etc. I pray for a swift end to these harrowing events, and as minimal a fallout as reality will allow. Also the many other conflicts and genocides unfolding as I type.

*

It would be a good day to talk about like, a U2 record, specifically, War. You know, "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and all. I don't really like U2 at all, though. A task for others.

Now, the song "No Man's Land", by Eric Bogle (I always think of the Dropkick Murphys version, personally), that's close to the mark for me. Also and more generally applicable in any case, Black Sabbath's "War Pigs (Luke's Wall)", the best song about war as far as I know anything about it, right up with "Masters of War" by Bob Dylan (my preference is for the New York City Town Hall version on The Bootleg Series vol. 7: No Direction Home, which are the discs closest to my heart in that series). Great tracks, those, evergreen in any situation. Could be wrong and out of touch, but it seems like people don't do antiwar songs like they did back in the day. Can't personally think of anyone off the top of my head besides Neil Young, who is an old-timer from back in the day. Living With War, there's an album. 

At any rate, maybe I don't talk too much about the whole deal. Maybe there's no need to pack that kind of heat on a day like today. I am sure, though I shall not look around to verify, that enough people are doing enough stuff, at least in terms of satisfactorily performative self service to personal optics and the amassment of modern clout.

*

What differentiates modern clout from traditional clout? Well, some would say that a wi-fi outage or a server crash evaporating every trace of your clout means you are in fact without what the ancients would have considered clout. Clout used be more durable. Took more to earn, took more to lose.

We are how we are and the times are the times, though. As someone who wields absolutely zero clout outside of his own personal bubble, maybe I'm not even qualified to comment. Maybe I've got the wrong idea.

*

The Berlin Wall came down the year I was born; nevertheless, the world was still at war, and it has been at war without cease ever since. Mostly people just get on with it. What the fuck are you gonna do, you know? What the fuck is there to do. Make art. Fuck around. Do necessary communitarian labor. These activities make it hard to go to war, which is basically a net good even if you're not great at any of them. 

As always, my disclaimer: what the fuck do I know about anything? Nothing.

*

Well, I mentioned some albums. That'll have to do for today, because today is kind of depressing, and I'm gonna hang out with a friend. 

Peace, peace, peace gosh darn it

--JL

#284

How is a raven like a writing desk? Each is composed of a suspension of trillions of little bits arranged around emptiness. How is a raven like a writing desk? Each contains compartments not immediately knowable by the eye alone; perhaps containing something else, perhaps not. How is a raven like a writing desk? Each present an obstacle to other phenomena that would occupy the exact point in spacetime where said raven or writing desk happens to reside. How is a raven like a writing desk? Some version of each is in your mind's eye right now, probably. How is a raven like a writing desk? A raven and a writing desk cannot be truly differentiated or compared. Like everything else in the universe, they are just mathematical expressions. Only our hilarious brains, tricksters that they are, invent these differences from whole cloth.

Hey! What's all this got to do with Album Week 2022? Well, how is a raven like a writing desk? 

In fact, today's post is not an Album Week post; I slept very very badly and I got stuff to do today, so the previous babble is about the best I can do for you. Nevertheless, rest secure in the knowledge that I love you with all my heart, dear reader. 

Please turn in at least a paragraph on what you and a raven and a writing desk all have in common. Thank you. Peace. Goodbye. Thank you. Bye.

--JL

#283

Main trouble with Album Week is that the shape and weight of a whole album makes the discussion of any one track somewhat unwieldly, and sometimes that's all I'd like to do--discuss Joanna Newsom's song "Go Long" without having to talk about Have One On Me, which is rather a sprawl of music, or talk about "Radio Ethiopia" without necessarily needing to touch on the rest of Radio Ethiopia (Patti Smith Group). The first post of Album Week 2022 was pretty long in order to say just a few things that I wanted to say about Bach's "Toccata & Fugue in D minor" and still get to the rest of it (all in brief--much as I value concision, long-windedness is my curse, and it can be assured that wherever I choose to stop, I could have gone on and on), and I could generate a post twice as long still to discuss that composition further. Part of me wants to! 

What I did last post was kind of fun and refreshing, though. Short bits. Love some short bits. 

Comes down to it though, I am the one in charge of Album Week, and if I want to discuss an album primarily through the vehicle of a single one of its tracks, I guess I can give myself that permission any old time. Could even talk about it through just the album art, I guess. 

So! What sojourn shall we drag ourselves through today, dear reader? Well, read on, my friend.

*

Real quick: I love reading Wikipedia very much, but because I can't look at how much of it there is to read, like with a book, it's painfully difficult to know when to stop, and to organize my approach. Also its authority has made it difficult for websites of a certain flavor to survive. I remember, early days on the world wide web, surfing over to various homemade pages full of information and art about myths and legends. These basically don't exist anymore; sadly, who would read them? We have Wikipedia, and because it is meant to be counted on as a reliable source, much embroidery is lost. 

Mentioned because I got sucked into their featured article yesterday, on James A. Garfield, the 20th president of the United States. Pretty interesting. It's always such a time to be alive, and people sure do get busy with stuff.  

*

Okay. Album Week 2022, day three, let's talk about Waking Season, by Caspian. 

To do so properly, we would be well-served in skating back to Caspian's first offering, The Four Trees. First heard this album while I was tripping acid, and it was a revelatory, sublime experience, notable for its non-dilution in sober circumstances. Caspian is just the best band in the post-rock quadrant as far as I'm concerned; I remember the friend who showed me the music (a culturally nomadic hummingbird; he sips, he moves on, he never comes back to the flower again, which, as a magpie who clutches all treasures close in his nest, I find perplexing, frustrating, and even somehow depressing) frowning at me about how "there are better bands", when I just wanted to listen to Caspian some more. This was at a time in our lives when most of our hours not spent working at a Chinese restaurant were spent drinking and smoking while listening to and playing music together for hours on end. Maybe he's right, but I don't think so, and even if he were, my feelings about things are more important than some potential standard of correctness. The patterns they established and explored in The Four Trees, especially in the first two tracks, "Moksha" and "Some Are White Light", are simply very close to my heart. Music that has always been playing within me, expressed by another. This vibrational recognition is a special aspect of the godhead, a feeling I get from Caspian in a way I get from no other band, with the exception of The Mountain Goats.

The Four Trees promised more; Tertia, their second album, didn't deliver it. It's a good album, a necessary step in their journey, just not an escalating one. They dodged a weak sophomore effort--a well-documented curse in art--by producing an an album that functions as a bridge. It is with Waking Season that what is reached for beyond the exhilarating accomplishments of The Four Trees and the buildup of Tertia is attained: hybridization, ascension, expansion, a full bloom. 

*

Been going back and forth on the merits of a track-by-track breakdown of this record, since it is one of my very favorite albums of all time, but I can't hear it in my head without sounding foolish. Another time, maybe!

*

To put it simply, Waking Season is spiritually orgasmic, a coming together of powers and feelings that surges and climaxes without loss. And while their next LP's and EP's are also amazing, really truly amazing, full of incredible music that goes even further and never disappoints, songs and albums I listen to over and over and over again, Waking Season inhabits a plateau where it lives alone; a place I come back to and experience cleaner, purer air more than any other in Caspian's oeuvre. 

*

Started going through the hiring process for local school bus drivers. Think the first part is behind me and seemingly positively; the next step is the physical tomorrow, then getting my commercial license and going through training. By the middle of March, I expect to be driving a route! I also have an interview on Monday to work at the local recycling center. We will see how these events play out, how these potentialities unfold or retreat. All things are in the palms of God's hands. 

Yeah, that movie. I still plan to make it, and maintain my writing output, but life requires a backbone, patterns, routines, and most particularly, steady money coming in. Can't blithely live off the savings. Hopefully these jobs and opportunities will result in a weekly schedule that serves the community, puts enough cash in the till, and leaves me time and energy for endeavors creative and domestic. Can't involve myself the same way as I did in the last kitchen, which may well be the Last Kitchen. That's how I'm feeling now. If I absolutely have to return to food, I'll look for work at farms. Cooking ought be a home project for me henceforth.

Alright! Enough rambles! I finished that book about the Gospel and Sopranos. It kind of only got worse, but remained pretty good and quite readable. Then I started reading The Power of Myth, which is a conversation/interview between the legendary Joseph Campbell and the journalist Bill Moyers, recorded around the time the PBS series of the same name was being produced, later compiled and edited. It's awesome. Like, it's really fucking fantastic.

Cool. Cool. Even though I don't smoke anything anymore, because I am old, I remain with the feeling that compels me to say that it would be well to smoke marijuana on the daily, baby, party on. Really I just mean you can let yourself live life how you feel.

Peace!

--JL

#282

Whoa! Album Week 2022 continues, by the merciful grace of the computer angels! I'll be blown. Really thought everything would crash again. 

Drinking hemp milk right now. When I was smoking weed, hemp milk didn't really taste like anything. Now this hemp milk tastes extremely like weed. Like a bunch of terpene oil mixed into oatmilk with a top note of plain unsalted roasted peanuts. Man, it's good. I've had to quit drinking cow's milk, which has long been my most favorite of beverages, because to drink more than a little in my coffee has lately resulted in a protracted period of extremely toxic farts. Part of me is sad, bereaved even, but all things run their course. 

To put it another way, absolutely everything you've ever loved and thought to possess, from your special talents to your basal functions, is rented, not owned. All that you are and all that you were is and was a passing on to its next form, as life consumes life so that it may beget life, and praise be. I'll miss milk, but there's always something beautiful about moving onto the next stage in life no matter how stupid or sad the particulars. I still have so much; in the end, I'll have nothing; in nothing, perhaps everything. We shall see!

*

Hm hm hm. What album what album. What...album...shall I discuss today? Maybe, since it's late and I'm tired, I'll do a volley of albums, and generate just a tidbit about each.

Revolver, The Beatles: The only truly dope Beatles album. This opinion was controversial amongst my classmates and friends growing up, who largely championed Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, but according to Wikipedia, a growing critical body agrees with me. I have to admit, because of who I am, this dampens my already halfhearted ardor for this record. Truly I am an incurable and insufferable iconoclast. I will sharpen my position thus: the last track is the only truly dope Beatles track. Honorable mentions are dusted throughout Revolver and the rest of their discography, I suppose.

Electric Mud, Muddy Waters: There's considerable hate for this effort out there, but I dig it big. Hell, I fuckin love it, each track. I'm a sucker for this jam.

Perfect From Now On, Built to Spill: This is one of those albums, and consequentially, bands that I found and listened to and fell in love with before learning how iconic it all is. So sue me. It's amazing. They rock. Especially love "Randy Describes Eternity" and perhaps even moreso "Made-Up Dreams".

Temporary Forever, BUSDRIVER: The dude makes very different music these days, but this album is forever yup yes I went there no shame here yesssss nothing temporary about this forever boys

Foxx Bodies, Foxx Bodies: The wave of heavy new surfpunk that rocked 2015 and 2016 crested no higher than this record. "Annie" is just an awesome song. If you listen to a lot of this kind of stuff it might not stand out too much. It's just my wavelength, though, a tremendous album in my estimation.

*

Ok! Ok. Tomorrow is...another day.

In Album Week 2022! Whoooooo!

*

Went over to my parents and talked about this Argentinian professor's breakdown of this South Korean-born Swiss-German philosopher's newest book with my dad. Their names are Claudio Alvarez Terán and Byung-Chul Han. Real good to chew the fat with the old man. Not leaving the house much these days, but I really oughta go over there more. See: the third paragraph of this post. Time is valuable.

--JL

#281

Hey hey! Album Week 2022! We're committing, dear reader, and I feel pretty good about it. Last Album Week, the year 2019, my relationship with music was only beginning to thaw after a fraught icelock. Grim, grim, a bad week, a bad time in my heart and brain. Since then, I have felt my way back to music as of old, a healing process I shall attempt to chronicle in some fashion throughout the week. Let the healing continue. 

Now then! What album shall I discuss today? I don't even know! Let me get another cup of coffee and mull it over. 

*

In 2011, EMI released an album of  Leopold Stokowski's Bach transcriptions in their American Artistry Series. The title of this disc is Bach by Stokowski, composed of recordings made in the late 1957 and '58, and remastered and released in 1997.

In 1940, Disney released Fantasia--sort of--the Wikipedia article is worth a readthrough. Maybe I'm biased, but it is extremely fascinating stuff by my lights. The important takeaways as far as is relevant to Bach, by Stokowski, is that Stokowski conducted the musical score for that musical film as well as using some of his own transcriptions and abridgments; most relevantly, Bach's "Toccata & Fugue in D minor". The 1990 film release, basis for the 1991 home release, which I used to watch on videocassette practically every single day of my life from the ages of two to four, featured a restoration of those recordings, as opposed to the 1977 rerelease, which was rerecorded in its entirety by Irwin Kostal (seriously, read that wiki. It's a whole story).

My favorite section in Fantasia is and always was the first, the abstract animations set to Bach's "Toccata & Fugue in D minor", followed in my heart by the prehistoric tale set to Igor Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring". Stravinsky understandably hated what Stokowski did with his piece, but I stand by it as an effort towards a cohesive film.

All this to say, the last track on Bach by Stokowski is "Toccata & Fugue in D minor", last as in Fantasia it is first, and by 1957 is just ever so subtly different in tone and transcription than in 1939, which for me, is hugely significant and fascinating. And it was looking for other versions of "Toccata & Fugue in D minor" that I found Bach by Stokowski.

*

This set of recordings, found through Apple Music, whose strictures and cost among its competitors I have bent to as the most amenable to my personal style (which is against such services in the first place, but, needs must concede), is what truly brought me back to feeling like myself in the liminal space of listening to music. 

When I am truly at my lowest, it is classical I need. More precisely and usefully, symphonic music and chamber music. But for a long time, Bach wasn't really a big part of my listening pool simply because I was leaning too heavily on a combination of listening to Beethoven's "Symphony no. 7" as much as possible, propensity to seek more new music out as a balance to that, and the feeling that Bach, along with Mozart, are overutilized and overrated (why Beethoven was exempt from this ruling is a personal thing--I really need that symphony). I'm over this now. But I didn't immerse myself deeply in Bach until last winter, when I started listening to each track on Bach by Stokowski every single morning on my way to work and on my way back, and also at work when I could get away with it.

The track list, annotated, is as follows. All pieces transcribed by Stokowski from Johann Sebastian Bach excepting 5, which is a Stokowski transcription of a Bach transcription of Martin Luther:

Passacaglia & Fugue in C minor, BWV 582: This shit is so good. My blood gallops just thinking about it. The last four minutes are just some of the most fucking incredible minutes of music ever. I am serious. I could break this whole baby down minute by minute is how good it is, but it's not specific track week, it's album week. Anyway kicking off with this piece is almost unwise, it's so epic and full and gorgeous, but what the hell. This piece is insanely great to walk a mile to all alone at four in the morning, and that is mostly how I have taken it in, but it is also excellent driving music.

Komm Süßer Tod (Come Sweet Death), BWV478: Man, who ain't been there?

Bourrée from Suite No. 2 in A minor, BWV 807 (The English Suites, BWV 806-11): I always think this piece is going to annoy me from how it starts but if I just hang on like forty seconds everything turns out all right, and then it's very beautiful.

Violin Partita No. 1 in B Minor,  BWV 1002 (Sarabande): Like track 1, this piece is very exciting once it builds up. A big favorite, very full.

Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott (A Mighty Fortress is Our God) BWV 80?: I have a lot of problems with Luther, including even the lyrics to this hymn, but the music itself is not one my problems with Luther. Absolutely beautiful music, twice-strained to perfection like the finest clear spirits.

Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248 (Sinfonia): This piece is easy to get annoyed by, so it's smart to save it for a few listens at one part of the year.

"Little" Fugue in G minor, BWV 578: This is what we call a banger, without much more explanation. Fuckin' rock 'n roll shit.

Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV1068 (Air [Air on a G String] BWV 10066-9): Not much to say about this piece, but it's a good 'un. You can listen to it whenever.

Mein Jesu, was vor Seelenweh (My Jesus, What Agony of the Soul), BWV 487: Takes patience to get the reward, and it's not for every day, but this is a beautiful peace when the mood hits you right. 

Violin Partita No. 3 in E, BWV 1006 (Preludio): Maybe they just put this in to let you breathe before the T&F, but it is a fine piece in its own right--just that by this time, my body is ready for the finale. 

Toccata & Fugue in D minor, BWV 565: Objectively one of the greatest things ever made. I read or heard that a dude tripping very heavily was asked by machine elves/aliens to justify human existence and he said that all he could think of were the works of J.S. Bach. Bearing this piece in mind alone, that's good enough for me. Dude said it was good enough for the elf/alien, and I believe it. I've listened to this one piece of Bach's--I mean, listened, my whole self bent on it, brain churning and frothing--as arranged by Stokowski probably one thousand times and I will never get tired of it. 

*

My love for classical music burns exceeding bright, but the "classical community" is thickly thronged with the kind of viruses it's only possible to find in petri dishes. These assholes are not born, they are forged by a culture that doesn't give a fuck how bloody their diamonds or what goes extinct where as long as they have the most money and the last word. Some people believe Bach should never be trascribed, recorded, or performed except for on the pipe organ as "originally intended", but while acknowledging that these people are entitled to their feelings and opinions, I assert that anyone has the right to do whatever they want with music whoever might like it or not. It's music. You really have to be some kind of perverse to tell people that they shouldn't make or listen to or like music because of some made-up standard that you can't mathematically justify. Music is real, opinions are fake. Music is useful, opinions are useless. Music is free, opposition to music being free is slavish. Feel what you want, also listen to what you want, and don't listen to what you don't want, but don't waste my bandwidth telling me I need to be more like you, or that the world ought to conform to how you think it ought to sound. I won't, and it won't. Suck your own dick and praise the flavor however much you feel the need to, just leave me out of it.

The following Ludwig van Beethoven quote, perhaps inelegantly translated, perhaps victim to the man's own strangeness, is my favorite of his, so far as I have found, and runs as follows:

"Music is the single, the immaterial entry into a higher world of knowledge which envelops man but which he cannot understand...what the soul receives through music through the senses is spiritual revelation incarnate..."

It is my firm conviction that he is perfectly correct in this, and therefore, I contend that music cannot be wrong of itself, whatever issue you can take with it personally or intellectually.

*

Ok, think that'll about do it. The only other news I have for you is that I did indeed finish that book I was reading: The Stone of Heaven: Unearthing the Secret History of Imperial Green Jade, by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark. Hell of a ride. My friend Aiden gave me The Gospel According to Tony Soprano: An Unauthorized Look Into the Soul of TV's Top Mob Boss and His Family, by Chris Seay. He might have meant it as a combination joke gift and symbol of appreciation for me, since I often casually pontificate on the spiritual value of The Sopranos and Tony in particular, but it's pretty good. I could fight Seay on a lot of stuff in there but he also gets the show, which is very valuable, and seems like a relatively open-minded guy, which is even more valuable, especially in a pastor. I am also reading Paradise Lost, by John Milton, which is a surprisingly heavy metal poem. Someone should do a music video. But a long one, something like maybe Fantasia.

Oh! Oh, man! Back in the nineties I got the second book in The Seventh Tower series, Castle, by Garth Nix, in a Scholastic Fun Pack (those things absolutely rocked my freaking socks, more on them someday). On the strength of the writing, characterization, and worldbuilding of that one-sixth of the story, I read that little paperback to a fine wornness. Only much later did I acquire the third book, Aenir, and later still, the first book, The Fall, each of which I read just a couple of times. Later I acquired the last three books (Above the Veil, Into Battle, and The Violet Keystone) bound in one hardcover, which I believe I mentioned in the summation of a haul here in the blog. Well, I finally brought myself to read it to the end earlier this month, and am pleased and relieved to report that it was absolutely awesome all the way through, so cool, so beautiful, so well-conceived and awesome, worth the twenty-year-plus journey. Wow. It is simply amazing to be alive and to continue living. Wow. Good shit.

*

Day one! Woop woop! See y'all tomorrow with something pretty different. Unless a minor change I just made in the laptop causes everything to crash again. By now, who gives a fuck. All the passion in my breast regarding this eventuality has burnt to a smudge.

--JL

#280

Strange days, dear reader. Poking about on this laptop has revealed that apparently--wait. Before I go into that--why does every web browser in existence wish to be made the default browser? What exactly is the advantage in this default status? Can't you all just get along? Mainly, can't you all just shut the fuck up about it? Man alive. None of you are the default browser. All of you are on the same shitlist.

Anyway, my work and all my files were still in this laptop. Even my old bookmarks in the web browsers--even the fuckin tabs I had open in 2018 and 2019 were still available to me. All I had to do was give microsoft some information I had long declined to give them, and hey presto. I have my old laptop back again, along with old work I believed to be destroyed. This machine used to crash every other time I booted up and wipe away everything. Battery problems, screen issues, everything you could imagine, and no way to fix any of it. Time and time again, the browsers would act as though I had never set them up, and the file directory would be empty no matter what I'd tried to save. Somehow all of it came back. Mind you, this computer I am typing on had been turned off for two whole years. I am so small in the face of this banal mystery, which I have decided to conclude hinges on my basic incompetence.

Hope I can get my new work off the macbook and onto this thing, which is now running seemingly without flaw, hitch, or snag. Then, from this thing onto the PC which I will finally personally build after years of knowing that I should and mentioning it multiple times to this blog, to my friends and family, to God in his Firmament and yet not getting around to it. None of my problems will be solved, I expect, but at least I'll be able to learn more from my experiences. Maybe. 

*

Sleep has been extra fucked. Didn't go to bed till a quarter to four in the morning, like some kind of wretched teenager. Today is Friday, so I think tomorrow is a good day to start Album Week 2022, but for today, think I'm gonna call it. Blinding headache. Chores to do. Just wanna lay back, finish this great book I been reading on the history of jadeite, and consume superhero media. 

Have a day of such orgasmic spasms that the very root of your being quakes like a leaf in the rain.

--JL

#279

That fucking god damn macbook air of mine broke again. Again, for the third time, in the same exact way. But can I blame them, these aesthete hawkers of wares designed for obsolescence? No. Cannot. I possess all of the knowledge and resources to build my own computing device, as any reasonable and capable individual should, and the lazy, concussed choice to purchase a laptop that is too thin from a company I know full well takes advantage of slave labor to build shit designed to break is entirely on me. 

So I very luckily managed to repair the Toshiba on which I began to write this blog in the first place. It's not a safe box in that I fully expect it to wipe its documents constantly, but I suppose if I just keep everything on the cloud and external hard drives for the rest of my life this isn't really a huge problem. What I truly need is the discipline to use it as a blogging box, and basically nothing else. One nice thing about this laptop is that it does not automatically capitalize macintosh products. Also I need to build my own computer, as I have mentioned.

Anyway it hasn't been that big of a deal since I wouldn't have been updating all that much anyway, save the first few days of February. Ezra got his tits yeeted, and the focus has been on recovery, which takes a deal of personal bandwidth from all parties. Emptying the Jackson-Pratt drains was particularly savory. The cats have sympathetically demanded more attention as well. My sleep has not been great. It historically was never great, before weed, and the readjustment to these sober conditions has brought my insomnia back to the fore.

Remembering my dreams on the regular again, though, which...well. It's complicated. I have always suffered from bad nightmares, sometimes recurring, and night terrors, but it's a tradeoff. Dreaming is important. In the end, I deem it preferable to suffer nightmares and wake up with strangled cries in my throat than to only remember twenty-odd dreams a year. If the horror of my nightmares is the price for consistent dreaming, so be it. I've run away from it all for long enough. My oneironautical duties require all the spiritual pressure I can muster, whether I like it or not.

*

Yesterday Ezra and I went down to the river and were blessed to meet a great congregation of waterfowl. Alone in our section of the park, we watched mallards, mergansers both common and hooded, canada geese, and mute swans paddle around, play, fight, take to the air, land on the water, dive, rest and waddle on ice, forage the bank right up to to forest floor at our feet, and raise a great heavenly anseriform choir. Beautiful day. 

*

Feel a little clumsy on this keyboard and in general on this particular approach to the text field, so I'm gonna call it here. See you tomorrow, or perhaps, even later today. Been thinking about the possibility of Album Week 2022. 

Peace out, FUCKERS

--JL