#450

Well, hello 450. That's cool. 500 this year; it'll happen. 

*

The depression has once again floated in, seemingly on a heavy wind. Many around me are also affected by this transparent miasma. A contradiction in terms, but this is apt, as a contradiction in terms is how I feel, in body and mind. 

Rewatched Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children to help myself feel better. It was alright as it was happening, but its wake brought no true relief. Still, it took me outside of myself and lightened my load, as a good movie does.

*

What mighty revelation could I unsheathe for the four hundred and fiftiefth post? What truth could I rip from the living earth of my consciousness and the lightless depths beneath, where the big whales are? 

Shit, man. Wish I could. Have a list of albums I've listened to recently. Liked all of them a lot.

Lean Year, Lean Year

I Am: Rogue VHS, Rogue VHS

Neoteric and Teenage Crimes, Slvmber

Flight of the Ancients, The Shaolin Afronauts

empathogen, WILLOW

Logozo, Angélique Kido

Love Heart Cheat Code, Hiatus Kaiyote

No Accomodation for Lagos, Tony Allen & Africa 70

Second Time Round, Cymande

Chapter 2, Joe Gibbs and the Professionals

En Yay Sah, Janka Nabay & the Bubu Gang

Revolution, Little Steven

Songs From Moonlit Lake, Daniel Olsèn

Spiral Bound, Rebecca Sugar

No Summer No Cry, Slime Girls

*

Plus, of course, all the little odds and bits you hear when your friend plays records in his living room or the car, the interrupted albums and the standalone songs one checks out, stuff playing at work, etc, etc, the ears are always open and the world's noise is a song of itself.

*

Haven't been reading, as on top of the movies, I've been playing lots of video games. The screen time helps me acclimate to the new schedule, but eventually I will shut the screens off altogether and go on an absolute book tear. The juices are rising. But it'll be movies and games for awhile yet, plus when Ezra and I are done with Voyager, we can hopefully go into a phase of watching movies together, which will cut my personal load. 

Don't feel like reporting exhaustively on the video games. Nothing new except this great little game Minit, which I bagged for like 93 cents after applying accrued credit. It's real fun. How expansive a minute can be! How it reminds you what preciously short units of time playing a game expands and fills to bursting! A testament and a love letter to the form. It is also very funny.

*

Okaaaaay 

whaaateverrrrrr

Peace

--JL

#445

Whoo! Got-damn, shit, and HELL FUCK. 

Silence has invaded this space, never a thing I like to let stretch out, but the times demand what the times demand. Typing that made me itch to segue into current affairs, but I'm not going to do that. Commentary on this planet and its human doings has never been easier or less necessary. Necessary isn't exactly what I mean, but I didn't want to say pointless, because then that would sort of make it my job.

What I mean is that in the current moment, everyone knows what is wrong and why, and no one can do a single thing about it that's going to affect our sinister momentum.

We are but spectators, trapped in a garish, filthy arena which constantly extracts a toll we cannot refuse to pay; our untouchable criminal overlords ensconced in a crystal bubble set above it all, gurgling and fondling themselves as they roll around in a reeking paste of champagne, melted butter, and various illegal meats. Anyone pretending otherwise is part of the toll-extracting process, their perverse ambitions driving them towards that lofty perch I was just describing. 

Our only autonomy, indeed, our only ability, is to stop paying attention, try to enjoy each day as much as we can fashion ways to do so, and let whatever is going to kill us kill us in its own good time. This peasant wisdom is all that remains.

For my money, the expectation is to be killed by a drone. Accidentally or on purpose and designated an accident, or finally on purpose for a specific reason but the stated reason being something completely different and probably defamatory. Does it matter? I've decided that it doesn't at all. Drone, wild animal, heat, zombie, plague, explosion, impact, bullet--who gives a flying fuck how it happens and what people say afterwards if they even notice. Drown me. Choke me out. Defenestrate me. Fire me into space. Put a plastic rifle in my hands and send me out against ten million desperate, starving kinsmen  you call my enemies. I'll chuck it off to the side and wait for it to happen. I'm not fighting anyone about any of this. Can't bother with feelings about it anymore.  

RRRRRRANYHOW, reason I haven't posted since the last post is no longer that I am too tired and still adjusting to all the change--adjustment does continue, but at least my energy is rising nicely--but that I actually have too much to say. It has been difficult to approach the text field with confidence that I could walk away from it without making a massive dirigible of a post ten topics deep, thousands of words per topic.

I'll just talk about some culture today. I mean, now that I've already talked about all that other shit.

Culture! Love that stuff, and there's plenty to tell.

*

Ezra and I have been watching Star Trek all the time, maybe I mentioned it. Been going on awhile. A few episodes of the original series, most of The Next Generation, and now Voyager. We'll be watching Star Trek for a good minute, I expect. It's good! It's way better than Trekkies made it out to be. No one makes Trek as unappetizing as its evangelists. 

But it's good. Good as fuck, actually. There can be no settling of this debate, but naturally I am of the opinion that it's no Star Wars, though that is not the fault of Star Trek, as nothing can be. Frankly, it's not even a good comparison. They are in fact extremely different animals.

*

I have sometimes mentioned about movies I have seen here, but never anything even remotely approaching the exhaustive record-keeping I apply to the books I read. Even with the books, there are probably at least fifty or even more I have forgotten to mention. In fact I watch a lot of movies! Happens all the time.

However, the tenor has changed. My most intense period of watching movies--multiples in the day and night--was in my early twenties, and my rough estimate is about five hundred movies in a two-year period. I have gone through several more periods of a movie or two every day since, the last one being in 2019 and 2020 when I wasn't recording much of anything. Sometimes I don't watch any at all for long periods, or only occasionally.

Beginning before I started at the theater to two nights ago, I was watching cartoons and concentrating on other long-form stuff. The only movies I've watched all year were all the Star Wars movies, though I did those at least twice each.

Now that I am at the theater and now that I am done rewatching all Adventure Time and Steven Universe materials, I am ready to watch ten million movies again and shall endeavor to mark them down as I do the books, except I'm not going to bother with directors or anything, Titles only, man. Lionizing directors is not a thing with me, though I respect the role as much as anyone. Movies are everybody that made them though, and if you're interested, find them, watch them, and read the credits clear through to the end.

Wise Blood

Tuesday

Janet Planet

These movies were all excellent.

*

Been reading Ursula K. Le Guin's The Wind's Twelve Quarters and The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens, by Stephen Apkon. Fun stuff to read in tandem, trying to balance nonfiction and fiction more closely by consistently being reading at least one of each.

*

What movie will I watch today? I'll find out, and you'll hear about it in good time.

*

Musicwise, been sharpening my knowledge of and rabidly consuming cartoon soundtracks, game soundtracks, chiptunes, vaporwave, African folk (especially Malinese, my favorite), exciting jazz records minted in recent years, oddments and explorations here and there. Albums and other recordings of note inclide Deltron 3030 and the Deltron 3030 instrumentals, new extended recordings of the soundtracks to The Lord of the Rings movies by Howard Shore PLUS a six-movement orchestration of the music from all three films also by Howard Shore--the new choral arrangements in particular are amazing.

Heard belatedly that John Frusciante was back with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and they cut one with Rick Rubin, which has resulted in true greatness in the past, so I listened to part of that endeavor before getting bored and doing something else. I guess maybe they should finally have made an instrumental album if they wanted me to care. Anthony was once one of my icons, but now he's like my dad--lovable, worthy of respect, but needs to get the fuck out of my way. It's funny because they were born the same year, and I sure did rely on both of them to grow up. But one also grows beyond; it is the way of this world. I am more than they, as they were more than their fathers. I still need them, too, but on different terms and different timelines, for different things. Anthony keeps doing the same thing, though. 

Maybe I'll like that record in a couple of years, or their next one right away. Hope so. I like liking stuff, put work into enjoying stuff. It's an important thing to bring to culture, to criticism, to how you live your life. It's easy to hate, simple to excoriate. No flex at all, just gunpowder, and gunpowder is weaksauce. Loving something, seeing something beyond yourself and the power you get from tearing it down, is hard work, but essential. That's where the growth comes in. That stregthens the heart and the eye and the mind and the stomach. 

Not to say some shit doesn't need tearing down. Just that it should come after a great effort to love and understand deeply.

*

(Kermit the Frog voice) 

That's probably the correct note for my exit.

PEACE YOU MAGNIFICENT BITCHES 

(end Kermit)

--JL

#431

Today is my first tiny shift at the movie theater! What a life. What a privilege. Easily the most bohemian employment I have ever managed to secure, except for I suppose being a folkpunk roadie, but as that was unpaid labor, it's a different tenor. Gonna work very hard to bring value to the place. 

It's too bad to be back to making kid cash, but it's what you'd expect at a nonprofit. And this limit on our shared material gain as household with the money and the hours is what I need in order to still be able to do art and wrap up school. It is a compromise in my favor that I will do my best to honor. 

Woof. It's heavy. But I'm ready. Ah, to be embarking on a new leg of the journey! Again, what a privilege.

*

Do I have elaborations on yesterday's notions? I think not today, but sometime soon. I especially want to clarify what I mean about quitting our jobs and doing whatever we want, which is a phrasing I stand by but which may require significant teasing out in order to be fully coherent.

*

More want to say that the music I have been listening to has stayed essentially on the soundtracks tip, but has also moved into various reorchestrastions in the case of the Pokémon games soundtracks, which aren't really available on the wretched phone services.

Something else I should really consider is getting back into owning the lion's share of my own digital music, even if I have to steal it. What a sham life it is, paying apple x amount over x time for an ephemeral and limited capacity to give me the infinite reach and unerring grasp I crave when it comes to condensing music from the aether. 

Look, I use the service constantly. It gives unto me. But the compomise galls. That's all I'm saying. I miss being able to play .midi files ripped from a ROM on my iPod because it was all so much looser and trickable back in the day when my skills were edgy and my hunger sharp. So what if it was illegal and is still illegal? We lead short lives. I pay many personal prices for modernity along with the many we all pay as a species and force every other organism and the very crust of this earth to pay; at the very least, I should get to play a lot of video games and listen to a lot of music. I'll give up a lot of my money for the privilege, but I will also get what I consider is fair for the asking, and I'm not gonna lie to you: it's always more than what a company is willing to offer. So be it. 

My relationship with Nintendo springs to mind. They get a lot of my money and give me to most value out of any company, in my estimation. Sue me if it's an exceptionally 1% of the planet relationship, these luxury entertainment stylz, fuck it. It's the 21st century. As I say, video games are my personal blood payment for the suff'rance I grant the durance vile of modernity. And still I want more. They should give me more. I should be granted shatterproof assurances that my digital ownerships are ironclad, the they will have my back as much as I have theirs, etc. I'm tired of talking about all of this.

Anyway 0.5: I want like a tricorder from Star Trek with all of human culture nestled safely in its databanks and room for the full cultures of a million more species plus all that other juicy dope shit a tricorder can do. Damn, that would be fucking rad. 

Anyway 1: these reorchestrations are very teh bombuh. Braxton Burks, Masters of Sound, Eric Buchholz, Skotein, to begin a long list I don't have time for. Wonderful stuff, at any rate. 

Anyway 2: electric boogaloo

Anyway 3: think this is it for me.

*

Dang man here we go, gonna take a shower put on some pants a guy's gonna give me a shirt to wear and I'm gonna stand with a person and welcome human beings into a moviegoing experience from 2-5 after a couple of hours of paperwork and orientation stuff. Ok wow. Good to have all this visualized. It's all happening. It's all coming real. Time to remember how to be a human coworker. Whoo!

--JL

#408

Today I may play my trumpet. Sometimes I feel bad for owning like a ripped-out chunk of the planet, heated and smashed and stretched and alloyed with other chunks and molded and wrought and finished, and having undergone this torture to take on a silly-looking shape made for the sole purpose of creating a range of sounds as ephemeral as thoughts just to glorify kings or whatever, and remains a vibrant mechanism for much jackanapery in human activity.

Another way of looking at it is that I am in possession of something on the order of a physical miracle, a triumph of ludic engineering, life-ages of the Earth in the making, containing infinite potential, by and for the grace of God. 

Guess it's appropriate enough to keep hold of both, and blow some of my vox through it from time to time, and let it be apologia and hymn in one.

--JL

#352

The final installment, as it were, of the current generation of the main Pokémon games has dropped and it has hit me like a bullet that shatters into a hundred perfect rainbow love letters. Each time I have loaded up and played each iteration--the initial drop, the first additional chapter, and now this closer which I am hours and hours into exploring and revealed thereby that it will take hundreds more, that they could stop here and I could play with what we have on the switch for the rest of my life. They won't, and I'll keep going with them into the unlimited potential futures of the Pokémon World--in which we all live, praise be and God bless. 

Surely internet seethes with hatred for everything I love and appreciate about it, but culture war internet is a pimple, where our most putrid selves go to coalesce and collapse together into an ocean of stinking pus. Once you're done with internet thinking--with cultural hatred--you are back in the bloodstream, baby, and can love what you please waging peace like a gangster.

If only I could aid the world, and make that process faster. All one can say is no snobs no masters.

*

Look, I'll say it. I'm not gonna push around some false humility like an extra dick. I am fucking inordinately proud about that rhyme and scansion. Again, I'll say it myself: that was a mic drop. 

*

But I wouldn't drop a microphone really because that is not good for the equipment. Maybe if it was already crapping out pretty bad I could drop it as like a farewell. That would take some planning, and could never be as cool playing out as in my head, where it's already not very cool.

*

2023 is almost over. The year ran at speed, it seems to me. This probably due to the true aging process taking hold of my system, my brain changing tempo, as it were, as my body undergoes its first "weakening" puberty. None of that is the point--do I even mean it? What the fuck. Never mind, speed on--Album Week this year will undergo what might be called a restructuring, in company terms, or reboot, in continuity terms. That's maybe what is called "inside baseball"? I like basketball, and Plato, if we're playing with spheres. There's no company. Not the kind with meetings and tiers and hierarchies would confabulate to create what is compressed into the term "inside baseball". 

Digression over. Welcome to Factually Musical, brought to you by Factually Pointless. This year, the next week's posts--today being Monday, running through Sunday--will appear, if they appear, in the form of paragraphs, perhaps making use of lists or figures, concerning various musical concepts, ragging and raging and even ranging from whatever the fuck I feel like to whatever the fuck ends up happening, period. How do you like that, motherfucker? Do you fucking...do you love it? Good. That is a huge relief. I didn't prepare very well and I was a little nervous. 

Onwards.

*

Because I am talking to more people a bit more regularly than since 2017, music is sometimes discussed. I guess music is like a part of life or something. Replete with emotional connections? Ringing any fucking bells? This is going to be about music. Music is about feelings.

Thing about feelings is that they arise, and exist well before any reasoning process can be applied, even if the arousal is rooted in layers and layers of reasoning process and lived experience. Indeed, this deeper rooting may even intensify and further remove the feeling from reason or the ability to interact with reason, because by the time our brains are even partially developed, most of us think in language so quickly that arousal and the resultant idea/reaction are perceived as simultaneous. This is something we need to try to remember when we think we've personally evolved beyond our emotions and have achieved command control. Please be convinced, without my further elaboration, that this is the mindset which leads to the most fabulously irrational behaviors that humans perpetrate. 

All this is by way of saying that one is never exempt from dealing with one's feelings, and one's feelings simply are what they are and not something to blame oneself for. Processes are processes. You may as well be angry with bedrock for having the percentage of silicates that it does, rather than some optimal figure you pulled out of your ass. Therefore, looking at what a computer program tells you is your most listened-to music and sharing it because someone shared their own computer-program-generated tallies for hours dedicated to particular music will generate feelings, before during, and after, and feelings lead to thoughts. As previously discussed. 

Let me, now that all is preambled to my satisfaction, tell you about some of those thoughts and feelings.

*

The relationship between data and the interpretation of what music is and how it behaves is ancient and fraught. Now we live in the time of Big Data, so we have a lot of grist to chew up in our little mills when it comes to, say, which rapper has the highest word count vs. vocabulary vs. repetition vs. various matrices of the preceding categories and as many as we can think of in addition. Ah, but who has done more with less? And who has turned less into significantly more than even that? And who defied convention in such a way as to skewer this math a third way? What escaped through the holes in the net? What lies deeper than these questions, these numbers, these ciphers?

It doesn't really matter and I don't really care, unless I care more that anything--depends on the question--but the actual thing about the questions is that they change how I feel about things and how I feel as I hunt for the answers and decide how I feel about what I'm able to find--a modifier on my lived experience, on my interpretative and emotional journey through existence. As importantly, I notice things, and that leads me to make connections with the data I have happened to access (which must be taken with a grain of salt in any case), and connections we make ourselves are key emotional warp, weft, and weave. 

That so much quantitative data and mathematical backbone be available, be elemental to something that every organism does and must experience in their own completely unique way--breathtaking! Terrifying? A hilarious joke? I always favor the latter, as you know, but we've only been crawling around the tip of this iceberg, and depths alway carry their risks, may contain subliminal horrors, always more tenebrous and unfamiliar than our beloved surfaces.

*

Yet to attain heights, we must suffer depths. Indeed, we must command both, if we are to advance. 

*

Basically, I felt ruffled that an industrial focus on what we most consume by volume must by its nature undermine the value--at last as perceived and reflected in the sense of the general antechamber of shared culture--because it obscures range. Because ape brain says numbers go higher are better, people with highest numbers are best. Oh, to be the Swiftie with the most hours of Taylor Swift listened to on this planet! POWER SO GREAT THE SIDEWALK SHATTERS IN A LINE TEN FEET BENEATH WHERE THEY FLOAT, WREATHED IN LUMINOUS ENERGIES THAT BLIND THE UNWORTHY!

In reality such a thing is only meaningful if you know the story and depending on how it makes you feel. In reality, an untold fuckton of bots and scripts and sockpuppets listened to 8760 hours of each of Taylor Swift's songs, maybe a few hardcases did something more linear manually, maybe one in a billion needed her in the ear all year no surcease no pause and is the one authentic claim to the figure and then the hundreds of millions of stories beyond, but none of it matters. I mean it's a fucking footnote to a blip, and matters the same amount--to me, precious, en masse and in total, precious, even if I hate the particular details I've chosen to discuss. To others, not. To some, also precious, but their feelings and their emotions will lead them in the direction of different performances, emotions, expressions, ideas, states of mind, further explorations and calculations. Concepts, interpretations, moments, communions, transcendences, all molecules on a great, trackless, unsoundable ocean on which we pass like ships in the night, and we signal one another, oh, we play music, we send up signal flares, we declare, we care, we share.

And so on.

*

Once again, back in reality, probably no one in ten million thinks about that list and its implications for more than a few minutes and certainly most would wish to tell me that I am overthinking, overcarrying, overstretching, and overinterpreting the affair to a degree which strains credulity. 

That is because I have a lot of feelings on the subject, which get away from me as I write although I am so aware of them that I spent all this effort telling you about it, dear reader, in the preamble, as an effort to remind myself, which has been a resounding failure--unless it was my plan all along to demonstrate what I believe is truly beautiful and meaningful about music, about love, about art, about life; which is to be carried away, which is to get ahead of oneself and fall into the sublime.

*

FACTUALLY MUSICAL

2023

HAS BEGUN

--JL

#340

What an August it has been! So much has happened since last I pounded symbols into these pixels. Indeed, initially, I typed out three weeks, reflecting that it feels more like four. In fact, no! It has been only sixteen days, evidence that not all of life is lived in the same chronometrical rhythm. Veritable cascades of impressions, changes, and conversations, further remarkable in that I have, despite being on vacation, largely hewed to a simple routine, stable despite multitudinous modifiers and prevailing conditions.

Some examples? Why not!

*

August is fourteen days old today, which is a great and very old-school unit of time which makes it for me to measure some things by--a fortnight. In the fort of these nights and days of a two-week period, which is, besides a very sensible span by many utilitarian measures, a comfortable unit of memory to me--the glowing coal of the most recent discrete chunk of time, past, but not yet the past, speaking loosely and subjectively. Anyhow I've taken a dozen round-trips on my bicycle in that time, during which the air quality has been mercifully almost always good. 

Some have been absolutely incredible rides. The worst was merely great. Stuff has happened to me like yesterday a young buck burst out of the scrub not ten meters from me diagonally in full career off the left side of the street, bolted across it, and made as if to zag in my direction; in my zeal to get a good look at the buck in movement I forgot all caution and actually sped up. The buck zagged away, across the path, and into the woods on the right. An air show is in the area and yesterday, too, many strange planes were flying around making some truly remarkable noises, which I factor as a catalyst to the weird but exhilarating deer behavior I personally experienced. Apparently one of the planes crashed later in the day. Bunch of 'em still flying around.

Other things I have seen include many people going about their day in many different modes of being; riding bikes also, puttering about their yards, driving their cars, walking along, being with animals, doing chores or paid work or nothing at all; sometimes, doing bizarre shit, as is normal and expected. For example, one man was shirtless on his porch, delivering a kind of monotone, medium-volume rant which seemed to me the indication of a banked but potentially explosive rage. This interpretation may have colored the impression I received of his holding a large revolver loosely in his right hand. I was never closer than about seven meters and moving along at a good clip I saw no reason to slack on, so my perceptions are by no means certain. Saw a man wandering up and down the strip separating a thoroughfare from a long drive that runs parallel screaming on his cell phone to someody about everything he could see happening interspersed with the outline of a vast conspiracy arrayed against him. He was doing the same from within a car that sat there abandoned ever since that day--perhaps ten days ago--till at least three days ago. 

Many amazing birds--goldfinch pairs, mourning doves, hawks and eagles, turkey vultures, woodpeckers, bluejays, crows, grackles, sparrows, starlings. Some of the flights and activities I have caught glimpses of has been very satisfying indeed--painterly, jewel-bright, elements of a ride which elevate its nature. To ride at the same speed of a low-flying bird not two armslengths away is such a snapshot of motion in space, such a spontaneous unification with the great dance of those who ride the wind with just their bodies, who in that moment seem to be saying, in the language of movement, "hey, you almost could be flying." The memories are all very dear to me, incandescent with that feeling of being close to flight, which is the best part about riding a bicycle.

Could go on and on, but there's other kinds of stuff to it all, which I want to be sure and try and cover. Onwards!

*

Read the incredible History, Big History, & Metahistory, ed. David C. Krakauer, John Lewis Gaddis, & Kenneth Pomeranz, from the Santa Fe Institute Press. It really was fucking phenomenal. Pursuing the Giordano Bruno thread with a certain avidity, I am rereading Lucretius' On The Nature of Things, which is cool but I think I would like to try a different translation. Pursuing concepts from the first book mentioned, also reading the other SFI Press book I have, Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute 1984-2019, ed. David C. Krakauer. Also Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, by bell hooks. If I get through those before my vacation is up, I should like to read a small book I have about Logic, or perhaps a book about Math.  

*

The Pontiac Vibe I drive finally shit the bed, so I've been driving Ezra to his job at summer camp in the van, which has been nice time together for us, and this amount of driving has resulted in listening to a lot of different music, following several programs of interest. Those pope teleplays were basically made by the music they wove into their picture, and consequently I have explored their soundtracks and gained an interest in recent electropop. Also this metal band Cattle Decapitation. Other recent trends inclue reacquainting myself with my CD collection and some of the stuff you can't really stream, like Cutting Room Floor's first album and its nested solo projects. Also a live Bob Marley & The Wailers show, Babylon by Bus, which presented its most enjoyable-ever listen--it had been a very long time, and I experienced many aspects and consequences of my maturation very positively through the sounds and ideas on this record. Beautiful. Plus I had never fully realized how amazing the guitar playing is.

*

On the gaming front, I concluded the storyline of Tears of the Kingdom. Absolutely phenomenal. There's a good thirty-five percent of the game still before what one might term true completion, and I have continued with some relish. The end of the story was one of the most gorgeous things that has ever happened to me. From the descent, which I performed from the highest reachable sky island, to the dazzling conclusion, it was perhaps the best ending to any Zelda game ever. Some finales have presented more of a challenge, some were mechanically denser, and the aesthetics of each places it firmly in a Golden Palace type situation, but for me, right now, this one leads the pack. Nintendo saw fit to release some Pokémon games on its official subscription ROM bank, and for some reason the Game Boy Color game featuring the Pokémon TCG really hooked me in. I've reached the Elite Four equivalent of that game.

*

On the social front, a friend I met during winter semester in class is staying with us while she figures out a housing situation. Been nice having a guest, some fun stuff. We saw Oppenheimer with her and her girlfriend, have shared many enlivening conversations, etc. That movie was super good, by the way. She even helped me move my dear friend Persephone's stuff from a storage unit to her new apartment, which was a nice fun time. 

Due to scholarly and transportation-rooted consideration, I've terminated my employment as a school bus driver on excellent terms, deciding that returning after vacation would finally present more logistical problems than it was worth. I'll get a more humble and less demanding position somehwere I can walk or bike to, just as I can walk or bike or bus to school. This is brought up by way of saying that this is why I could apparently so cold-bloodedly partake of ganja and trip on shrooms while in my position; I was fairly certain at the outset it would come to this. 

All that and I should make time for a few other friends, and perhaps my old friend Len, he with whom I am freshly shroom-communed should be playing and recording more soundscapes--one of the things we did on our trip--and perhaps even playing a show. We shall see! I know from wearying experience that one should never speak too confidently of such things are reality before their time, indeed, even up to mounting the stage at showtime. Strange to even entertain the idea of playing onstage again, but with Len, I think the thing may just be plausible. 

*

My spiritual condition has been boosted tremendously by this break, and by reuniting with the bicycle as near-daily practice. Every day a great joy is sustained within me; passes through me and moves around me. My heart is moved towards compassion towards each of the people that I see, however fleetingly. Love my husband and my cats, my digs and my tempos. I feel as though I am at the leading crest of a great vibration, a wave of energy that is clean and refreshing and tuneful. Listening to God's mighty silence I hear the universe, its great rushing whisper. It is infinite, as are we all, though this journey is brief, as all that exists in the universe is brief in the reckoning of infinite time.  

Our lives are an immutable part of an allness. No element of or perspective in the infinite narrative is unnecessary. Thus, all that exists, exists in a perfect balanace of equal meaning with everything else, from the infinitesimal to the cosmic, from the first to the last and in infinite recurrence. 

That's just some of the thinking I've been entertaining, along with its further implications. Possibly I am entirely off-base. 

*

Alright, fuckers! Signing off. Pray for this odd sinner.

--JL

#326

Probably the nicest thing about getting up super duper early even when I don't have to leave the house at six in the morning is listening to the birds wake up and do their morning dispatches, or paeans to their avian deities, or self-promotions, or community catchups, or hate speeches, or their art for art's sake, or whatever it is they're warbling and chirruping about before the sun comes up. Love to hear that stuff. 

*

Maybe you're wondering what kind of music I've been listening to lately! If so, today is a present just for you; today, the universe has rewarded you, and you specifically, with precisely what you crave, what you long for in the cold watches of the night. And who could blame you for these harrowing needs? To try to live one's life in ignorance of what I play in the car to stave off transit madness is to languish in a darkness far from God. I also play music when I do the dishes.

That's the when of it. The how? A bluetoof speaker, because our hatchback's audio system is not functional. Sometimes, with the dishes, a boombox, to play CD's. 

Now, finally, the what.

Carpenter Brut's first album, Trilogy, has seen some play, as has The Protomen's The Protomen. SeZon's remake of the Metroid Prime OST is quite good. Taken separately, Kimya Dawson's album Thunder Thighs and Aesop Rock's Garbology have made their rounds, especially Thunder Thighs, which is probably my most-played music lately; taken together, as The Uncluded, their album Hokey Fright has also been "spinning", inasmuch as albums can spin through a streaming service and in a telephone. Kimya Dawson's other albums have also seen action of late. Traditional and Folk Songs of Yugoslavia, played by Branko Mataja, brought me great pleasure. 

Finally, deserving of their own paragraph, The Movers have brought me such joy and lightness of soul that I seriously considered printing pamphlpets and making time to hand them out on street corners, courtyards, pavilions--wherever the public blood courses, that I may infuse it with Glad Tidings. 

Seriously, in my head, I was composing lines like "Did you know that music has healing properties? Have you ever imagined a world living in a sustained and glorious harmony? Please, take a minute to listen to The Movers, and once you have, tell a friend. In this simple way, we can contribute to a new era of peace and prosperity on our beautiful planet."

*

Ok! There is a lot for me to do for school right about now, but I'll try to make some more posts this week. Maybe sometime this spring deliver a fresh book, finally, finally go from ninety-five percent complete to one hundred. I keep saying it, in hopes that it may encourage the thing to come to pass. 

PEACE


--JL

#324

Dear heavens! The crushing silence of nonproduction! It howls without sound. Well, a lot's been going on, completely apart from apocalyptic ice storms that left us without power for four days straight. Let me tell you, we got off easy. 

*

Been on break from school this week, and even this blest reprieve has not filled my body with gumption and celerity. Indeed, I've mostly been sitting. Got plenty of work to do for school, but I haven't moved on it one bit! Nope, just sitting and looking at comics. It's high school all over again, sans consistent and actionable erections.

We got bigger micro SD cards for our Switches, so I spent a lot of yesterday archiving, moving, and redownloading games. It's all on the giant new card, with seventy gigs to spare, and my old card lies empty and waiting for new harvests in a neat little case for them that Ezra found online, reminiscent of a green puck-style weed grinder but instead containing two rows of very tiny slots. And sooner than sanity or reason would deem appropriate or healthy, it may well be necessary; the new crop of Resident Evil games, new Zelda, more Kirby, and a host of other shit I'm extremely interested in are all clamoring for my attention. Most of these games aren't out yet, you understand. But they exert their wicked magnetism on my brain nonetheless; Tears of the Kingdom in particular is poised to destroy my life and I can feel its tonnage hovering above me like a certain celestial body in certain other Zelda game.

Wistfully, when withdrawing the tiny little wafer of potentiality from its plastic chrysallis, I remembered the end of my time in high school, when I was looking at external hard drives, expensive affairs, expensive because they had recently been designed to store a whopping fifty gigabytes of data and released to the bleeding edge of the consumer market. These days, I would expect a hard drive of comparable physical size to hold all recorded human achievement, including DNA libraries. No one even sells a product anymore that holds only fifty gigs--even a pen drive has to hold triple that to be worth pricing dollars. I used to swap a two-gig pen drive back and forth with my ex-girlfriend so we could share music. This represented a huge leap forward from being in middle school, when our age group was mostly stuck burning CD's at each other. This new micro SD card of mine holds two hundred and fifty-six gigs, which is about a hundred and forty more gigs than all the music I had accumulated by the time I left high school.

*

Boy, mentioning high school that many times sure left me in a position where I have to tell a story from high school, basically! Strap in. For a story from middle school, though.

*

Thinking about this one lately because it's such a juicy cut of how being on the autism spectrum can ramify into your life and you can remain unaware of it for years, even more than a decade afterwards. No shit, you can be a grown man, going about the business of men, and suddenly realize, "ah, no, that was a perfectly readable and even extremely plain interaction, and I was fundamentally unequipped for it."

Also known as "oh, wait--I was the weird one after all. I was the weird one this whole time."

Invited to a birthday party by a girl. To begin with, I did not fully understand what this even means, nor did I realize it was something to which I might want to devote a few thought-cycles to. I didn't know her very well, we had a couple of classes in common. What this means, in practice, is not that she wanted to be friends, or was trying to be friendly, which was my interpretation at the time, nor was it the second possibility in my mind--that a criterion of presence was in use, such as, inviting everyone in one or perhaps a certain few of her classes. What this truly means is that I was included for a specific purpose, indeed, a machination. Ignorant of this possibility and thinking nothing of personal wants or possible gains, I merely accepted because it would have been impolite to refuse.

Showing up on time, bearing a birthday card and some nice chocolate from Venezuela as a gift--another piece of evidence bearing the stamp of my total naiveté--made me the first person present outside of her closest friends, who had of course been there all along to help her set up the party and prepare psychologically. Prepare psychologically for a Teen Party held by American Youth, something I really had absolutely no experience with even tangentially. The Animorphs didn't really go to teen parties--their narrative was taken up with somewhat less idyllic concerns. There was one pool party, but two of them were there as mice and the party was destroyed by a massive extraterrestrial beast. I digress, but so that it is understood that this was the piece of culture that had furnished me with the absolute most context for what I was about to experience.

It is understandable--I don't look like how I write. I don't look how people expect an autistic-ass nerd to look. I write, and perhaps it would be fair to imagine a kind of grub, hands ensconced in those carpal tunnel things, with no hair growing where my headphones constantly press against my scalp. Instead, because of genetics--my parents are very beautiful--and a penchant for taking care of my body, I look like I should get laid at parties. I have healthy head of hair, symmetrical features in fair proportions, etc. So, again, it is understandable that people would try--before they knew any better--to get me to parties in order to fill out the party's general sexiness quotient. I can't help that, and believe me when I say I take no pleasure whatsoever in typing it out. 

In this case, no sooner did a certain other girl arrive at the party than she made a beeline for me. I was already sitting on a couch, totally alone, fully ignored by the hostess. The new arrival, a girl from my advisory class that I knew from elementary school the year before, put a song on the boombox and sat next to me in such a way--how shall I describe it? She wasn't bad at it. Her posture showcased the length of her legs, which were folded up onto the couch with her knees almost touching my thigh, her torso turned on the axis of her hips so her breasts, such as they were, were pointing directly at me, with one arm behind her, and her face slightly turned away while maintaing eye contact. It's not how people usually sit, is what I'm saying--it was a calculated posture. Most people reading this can probably infer its purpose. This didn't really register with me at the time. Rather, I wondered if she was accustomed to sitting on couches or if perhaps this was one of her first times. 

See? See how things stood? It would never in one million years have occurred to me that I could ever be the oblivious idiot, which is part of how I so often was.

The song she had put on was "What's Your Fantasy", by Ludacris, featuring Shawna. 

"This is my favorite song," she said silkily, looking directly at me.

"Yeah?" I responded, utterly nonplussed.

"Yeah. I just love the words so much."

Listen. The song is literally, without preamble or disambiguation, about wanting to lick someone from their head to their toes and asking about sexual fantasies, presumably in order to fulfill them with alacrity. Not real complicated. I have never been made of stone--quite the opposite. I knew what sex was, and I was anything but immune to the allure around the concept. If she had sat down and said "Joseph, you are attractive to me and I want to explore our budding sexuality. I want to make out with you and feel your hands on me," I would have been like "Yes. You too are attractive, that sounds both pleasurable and educational, and I am one hundred percent up for it."

That is basically what she was trying to tell me with the tools our culture and her socialization had made available to her, yes--I see that now. At the time, I merely thought that she was trying to convey cultural information about herself and her taste in music, to which I didn't really have much to say--I primarily listened to movie soundtracks at this point in my life. I think I might have told her that. She pretty much left me alone after the song was over, as we had listened to it in strained silence and then I told her that it was a pretty good song, I guess? 

Most of the party I spent right on that couch, receiving an education in the popular rap stylings of the early aughts while everyone else danced badly and socialized happily, saying absolutely nothing about anything that grasped my interest. Didn't even really want to eat or drink anything they were serving; I suppose if it had been the kind of party where illicit alcohol was snuck, I would have gotten drunk. This probably would have changed the trajectory of my social life radically. As it was, only when they finally got around to showing 8 Mile on a big television did I make the bold and radical move of switching couches. The movie was also very educational, in its way.

Homegirl never came onto me again. Unless I missed another couple instances, who knows.

Next week, at school, the birthday girl and her best friend cornered me to ask why I had gifted her such shitty chocolate. I told them there was no way the chocolate was shitty and they assured me that it was, a bad texture, bad on the palate. I told them that it wasn't the kind of chocolate you chewed vigorously, it was the kind you let melt in your mouth. They looked at each other, then at me like I was a space alien, then walked away without saying anything else.

people are so weird, I thought to myself.

*

Before I release you from my eldritch, thrice-cursed grasp--lo! Books I have recently purchased with nowhere to put them and totally cognizant that I should not be spending the money they cost. I buy prunes from amazon, because that is the place that has organic prunes to which no sugar has been added. Prunes are very good for the body. Less good for the body is dying of exposure because I can't pay my mortgage, but most times I'm on there for my healthsome prunes, books tend to get added to the cart. It's like they know all of my weaknesses, or something. The psychic puncture and resulting bloodshed can be wallpapered over by telling myself they'll be useful for school. Some of them, anyway.

The Nonexistent Knight, by Italo Calvino

A Small Place, by Jamaica Kincaid

Not-Knowing: the Essays and Interviews, by Donald Barthelme

Regarding the Pain of Others, by Susan Sontag

The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, and Intlligence Evolved From Our Primate Ancestors to Modern Humans, by Stanley I. Greenspan, M.D.; and Stuart D. Shanker, D. Phil. (One of my favorite books about brains ever!)

The Art of Cruelty, by Maggie Nelson

The Aeneid, by Vergil, translated by Shadi Bartsch

*

BAM! KAPOW! FUCKIN POSTED!!!

--JL 

#312

Speaking of music, a thing that happened even since last time I wrote at length about The Mountain Goats--not so long ago--is that they put out yet another new album, Bleed Out. It's a very good album. Like, way better than I expected it to be given the pace of release lately. Not all the time, but too often, when artists put out work at an increased rate, it goes hand in hand with a certain compromise in quality. This record is as crazy good as Dark in Here, which really says a great deal. The last three albums could any one of them and as a group of three be the very best they've ever made, though I might say that about many groups of three of their albums. Anyhow, my favorite tracks off Bleed Out, for the nonce: "Bones Don't Rust", "Guys on Every Corner", "Incandescent Ruins", "Bleed Out", and a couple more though I'm not ready to say which. Have to listen to it some more, though I have listened to it quite a bit.

In point of fact, I'm doing a project I haven't done in several years now, which is smacking all the extant Mountain Goats music I can get onto a single playlist and listening to the whole thing on shuffle. It's going fair smoothly; I've had problems in the past with the device losing its place or playing something else without my telling it so. This current phone and current build of iTunes/"Music"/whatever is treating me ok, though, and am a few hours into a 28-hours-plus endeavor.

Since I mostly listen to music in the car, trips to and from work or over to see my parents are the main avenue. Need to listen to the phone try its best all alone or use a bluetooth speaker, since the car won't play CD's or tapes or fucking anything except the radio, and not very well. The van does whatever you could want, but I leave driving that to Ezra. In the kitchen, while doing dishes or cooking, I listen to a CD on our shiny blue boombox. It's got a Spinosaurus sticker and a Psittacosaurus sticker on it. 

*

Believe it or not, I still haven't got around to completing Paradise Lost. Part of the way through Steppenwolf and Los Años Extraordinarios, but I put all of that on hold to reread all of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire stuff--Fire and Blood, The World of Ice and Fire, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, and the main ASoIaF series. 

That other stuff is still on hold at the moment because I'm rereading all my J.R.R. Tolkien; wrapped up The Silmarillion, Beren and Lúthien, and The Children of Húrin, finishing up Unfinished Tales, then when that's done, on to The Fall of Gondolin, the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings itself for last.

Frankly, I'll try to finish the other stuff, but probably what will happen is once I'm finished with the Tolkien I will read my new Haruki Murakami books, and then maybe probably reread all the other ones I have and maybe buy some more I don't have and read those. It's just what I'm feeling. We'll see. After that I'm thinking about Ursula K. Le Guin. Or a bunch of science/history/philosophy books. We'll see. That's far ahead. You never know. We will just have to see.

*

Ok cool whatever BYE

--JL

#311

Hey! Look! I'm still alive! Motherfuckers reading this must be beside themselves, all shitting and pissing uncontrollably with overweening joy that I have deigned to type a word into a text field. 

You're all most welcome. One of the cats is asleep on my lap, so I don't wanna get up, plus I'm all finished with clicking around internet for now, and lack the critical wherewithal to work on actual material--what by all rights I ought to be doing with this time. So here I am.

Actually, I've tried to work on the next post a great many times and have sunk effort into three or four separate drafts--something I try not to do, for the very good reason that drafting kills my momentum in this space stone dead. Gotta rattle off the piece and smash the publish button in one go; that's how it's done and that's how to do it. But here I am, with thousands of words all backed up in the ether and nothing fit to show for it. 

In lieu of any of that, I'll just knock off some random shit, like I'm supposed to, as is my god-granted right, in accordance with my artistic mission.

*

For the longest time I've meant to mention how much I like the band World's End Girlfriend. Now I have! Fuck YES! It's finally happened! They are a really fucking good band. Here's a list of some of the bands/artists I've gotten into in the last couple of years that, for one reason or another, I fail or forget to mention anything about:

• World's End Girlfriend
• Magic Sword
• Le Matos
• Lera Lynn
• Iannis Xenakis
• Sidney Gish
• Jeff Rosenstock
• Fantastic Negrito 
• Rainbow Kitten Surprise

Here's an appended list of artists/bands I've gotten back into or appreciated in a new way:

• The Fiery Furnaces
• Wolves in the Throne Room
• Caribou
• Tegan and Sara
• Architecture in Helsinki
• Arcade Fire
• Broken Social Scene

*

Bought of bunch of Haruki Murakami books, and they should arrive at my house today. While buying my own books (I am still the main purchaser of my own books, but I hardly expect more than that in my lifetime or beyond), I decided I wanted a treat from the giant logistics company that wasn't just my own stuff or ten-pound bags of prunes.

Haruki Murakami is one of those dudes that's so famous in the English latitudes, like Hayao Miyazaki, that I would feel weird writing out his name in the correct order. This bothers me, but I can't do much about it.

*

Don't know why the spacing between paragraphs sometimes seems off on the posts. Why would a setting change without being changed? Why do I bother asking? I'll just do my best to fix it later, if I'm doing the wrong thing, aesthetically, now. It barely matters, except that it drives me fucking bugshit.

*

EAT THAT BITCHES TOTALLY A FUCKIN POST 

IT TOTALLY FUCKIN HAPPENED
ROCK N FUCKIN ROOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLL

--JL

p.s. the Murakami books I got were:

The Elephant Vanishes

After the Quake

South of the Border, West of the Sun

p.p.s. I also got this book that I haven't read since my old best friend lent it to me when we were kids. Prince Ombra, by Roderick MacLeish. I remember this book being a fuckin' trip. It didn't arrive till well after the other books in the order, and I plumb forgot I'd bought it. Nice surprise.

#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

#270

Felt like something special might happen for this post, and when thinking about what it might be, it struck that announcing that I had recorded an album might be nice. So I laid down about 32 minutes of track in eight sections using GarageBand, named it scratch clock valley, and that was that. Working on getting it on some form of service that is linkable and functional to whomsoever might be interested. Right now it's on my own Apple Music, and nowhere else. Maybe I'll figure out how to put album art on it. Maybe I'll be able to fix the track order. Maybe it can be on the service for people to download, or I can figure out how to make a Soundcloud. But if I can't do these things, it really doesn't matter.

Here's a tracklist, just because I'm happy with the names I assigned to these simple tunes, and the aesthetics of a tracklist are extremely important to me:

1. wobbly master ghost punch grief combo

2. exuberant penitence phantasmagoria

3. toughest part of the skull

4. matchstick pick

5. soft moss dissolution

6. heedless spiller

7. Buteo Tenken #7

8. "bonus track"

*

So! Down to the meat of it. 

Today I went to a Kroger with my husband and was violently reminded that I am so antisocial without the orthotic of cigarettes that I have actual fight responses to everyone I see sometimes, which is why I try not to leave the house except to walk extremely fast. The mask thing with covid has made it all even worse. I comply with mask stuff, but I hate to, and I hate the masks. I feel like everyone is waiting for the right moment to assault me, and why wouldn't they. This is anxiety I am familiar with from pre-masks, but so acute with them that I am having trouble maintaining self-control.

Consciously, I know that rare is the individual that would fuck with me at all. Nothing ever happens. My muscular armor and spiritual pressure are extremely powerful, as is my eye contact. I just absolutely fucking loathe being perceived. 

Ok peace if you stay the fuck outta my face

--JL

#201

Since yesterday, I have not listened to the Two Gallants or Gogol Bordello albums that were released while I wasn't participating in anything that was happening, but I did listen to the Caspian album that was released during that strange, deeply isolated time.

Wildly off the chain. So everfucking mothercrashing good, so far beyond superlative. These dudes continually exceed their promise, giving me everything I could want from their next record every time and an order of magnitude more. Every time! Dust and Disquiet. So beautiful I cried a tiny bit as I walked home, during the first swell of "Sad Heart of Mine". Hyperawareness of the total permeation of the complete love of God in everything before my eyes and infinitely in every direction overfilled my torso and leaked out of my eyes. That is how that was.

*

Probably tomorrow I will get to those other two or at least one. In addition oughta finish hearing  Aesop Rock's The Impossible Kid and also Malibu Ken. Whenever, though. That seems less important at this juncture.

*

Also of special note on In League With Dragons are the songs "Going Invisible 2", "Clemency for the Wizard King", and "An Antidote for Strychnine". Those four are my special favorites from the album, the fourth being "Possum By Night", as I mentioned yesterday.

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The sunset did so many crazy things as I finished typing this post. 'Twas a magnificent time. It was a great, blazing hot day and I had tremendously great walks. My special shoes are back from the shop and the joy of walking is back to full power. It's been a lucky week and a lot of good stuff happened.

Yo. Y'all. Midsommar, written and directed by Ari Aster, is no joke flat-out one of the best movies ever made. Period. My girlfriend and I went and saw it yesterday evening, testing out the renovation on our once-crummy and hella run-down local small pre-1950 theater. Both the newly splendid theater and the film were everything anyone could possibly want from the stated purposes of the phenomena in question.

Seriously one of the best movies ever. I haven't seen anything that good in years and years, maybe more than five or even seven years. Everybody in the world (who has some confidence in the strength of their stomach and the resilience of their nerve) should watch this thing.

I should probably qualify a little more. The movie is fucked up, maybe more fucked up than any movie I've ever seen. It's funny as hell and gorgeous to look at and groundbreaking in a dozen discrete ways but yeah, this is stuff that has made people leave theaters in panics and rages and rants and have to go be sick and stuff.

Nothing gets me off more than shit like that, provided it is done artfully, to a perceptible point and purpose, but the point is if you freak out easy, this is a movie you should not watch. Even if you don't, this bad baby might push your limits. Antichrist is one of my favorite movies ever, and I think this goes considerably further in a couple key ways. If I can even compare a movie to Antichrist it's an incredible day at the office; I cannot even compare it to the rest of its director's oeuvre. Here there are ample comparisons to be made, and things that keep each work fully in itself and beyond comparison. Midsommar brings it to that level and maybe a notch or two further out.


It's a fuckin trip, check it out if you can handle a bad trip as well as a good one.


--JL

#200

Wow, the two hundredth post. The second hundred is complete, or will  be, when I smash that "post" button. When it gets smashed. When I pound that post button, grinding it hard into the surface of the world wide web, the two hundredth factually pointless post will burrow into internet's flesh and there it will fester for eternity, or however much less than that depending on how things go.

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200.

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There are a lot of bands and musicians that are very special to me in the kind of way that sort of defines one as a person. The hard core, you know.

If a person's hard core is made up of, say, early-nineties gangster rap, a few particular strains of what the record companies call rhythm and blues from the early and middle aughts, and the Frank Ocean wave, it will have some bearing on how the person carries and dresses themselves, and how they parse their cultural world and move through society. You might have formed a picture of this person in your mind; you may be able to form various pictures of various persons that might fit this bill. How this is done is dependent on the lenses you view this person through, your own hard core; perhaps this person stands very close to you, or perhaps your fascination with honky-tonk, bluegrass, and country music recorded before the year nineteen-sixty places a few lenses of refraction in between the place where you stand and they do. Perhaps you mainly listen to Sibelius and Debussy, or are completely consumed by surf-infused third-wave riot grrl shriekpunk. Maybe you used to be very into hardcore but now it's groovy 80's synthpop and the return of the electronic organ aesthetic.

'Sall good, folks. Music is just math you can hear. Patterns and iterations. All of it unique and exactly the same. The rest is coats of paint and personality. Intent and reception.

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Selectively--keeping it after 1900, avoiding incidental music, and omitting artists for whom only spare tracks reach this level (one fine day perhaps I shall generate a tracklist), and relegating The Red Hot Chili Peppers to "honorable mention" status--my own hard core is comprised of the following artists:

Gogol Bordello, Caspian, Rubén Blades, Robert Johnson, Quinteto Contrapunto, Two Gallants, Simón Díaz, Muddy Waters, John Frusciante, Serenata Guayanesa, Aesop Rock, Modest Mouse, Louis Armstrong, Santana, Ensemble Gurrufío, and Nina Simone.

There was no particular order, there. There is no truly ranking the hard core, you need it all to be who you are, totally separate from art that you can talk rationally or dispassionately about. There is art you can fully compass and bind within your ideas, and there is art for which though your ideas are bigger and more important and more fully  developed than perhaps any other ideas you have, they fall short, and don't matter, in the face of the indescribable feeling, the duende, the grace.

Beyond the hard core, though, residing in an innerspace even more vast and intimate than the place where your favorite music lives, there's the stuff that transcends even the ranks of the first and best. To analogize, in bookworld, Lord of the Rings is, as I have stated in no uncertain terms, beyond human reproach and the greatest extant literary achievement. On this matter, I will brook no argument because there is not one to be had; people who care less than I do about Lord of the Rings can have those arguments. To me, those people, when they are talking about Lord of the Rings, might as well not exist. Easier to understand people who actively hate Lord of the Rings or cannot so much as begin it than people who read it, maybe even more than once, and don't "get" it.

Even though there's nothing to get because what is actually happening is that this work warps the space around it (my psyche) and fundamentally changed its reality. My subjective position is both integral to my being-in-the-world and at odds with how the world actually is, for in this world, no work of hand or human symbol reigns supreme, and in mine, a miracle took place. In the end, of course, it's just a story. But everybody has their Story.

Coming back to music, it's Queen, and The Mountain Goats.

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This year, The Mountain Goats dropped their seventeenth studio album.

Yes. Seventeen. Kind of an important number in this blog. 

After the way Goths was received and popularized, I felt pretty sick in myself about where things were in general, and not long afterwards a lot of life happened, so I was caught off guard by In League With Dragons because I had stopped reading about music, stopped looking at places that hype and criticize music. And I didn't listen to it for a few months after it dropped because I wasn't acquiring anything new either, hadn't heard the new Two Gallants or the new Gogol Bordello, nothing. I was icy with music, frozen in place.

Things are thawing now, though, and I've given it a few spins. Every Mountain Goats album is at one time or another my favorite, it never stops, always something is happening, and right now In League With Dragons is it, their best work and best writing so far, absolutely beautiful, a comfort and a clarion call and an incredible pleasure.

"Possum By Night". What a fucking track. How does something like this even happen.

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When you were born only a few years before somebody started putting their music out on cassette tapes, there is a disadvantage when it comes to being on board for the early days. I didn't hear The Mountain Goats till I was sixteen and they were starting to become quite popular--Heretic Pride, an album which was pretty big, dropped a little while after I started listening; my first new Mountain Goats. Heady, halcyon days.

The track that got me good, the hook, was "Up the Wolves". 

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Feels good to be listening to music again. I may write more about The Mountain Goats tomorrow, and I may not. 

I have also been listening to a lot of Jimmy Cliff, Toots and The Maytals, The Animals, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Also all the other music I have mentioned today.


--JL

#168

Album Week! Haven't written very much about music for this blog, because my last and hopefully properly dead and unfindable (haha what a fun dream) blog was supposedly about music. It was only conceptually attached to music, but I did write a lot about music, since that is something I like to do.

Well, liked to do. Eventually a disgust in myself and in what I was doing surged over me with such force that my very bone structure altered slightly.

Running around with bands and being in bands and engaging with scenes is something I walked away from very decidedly. Even playing my own music and composing and putting out my own stuff has become questionable to me and perhaps something I will walk away from as well. Shit has gotten to where I listen to less music than I ever have in  my life.

Music is one of the best thing about life, though, no question, and as I've been feeling like I've neglected music, which made me sad, I thought I'd write down some thoughts about some albums over the next seven posts.

Album Week! Fuck art, music is hateful. Strap in.

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This first album was selected by grabbing my big binder full of CD's, whapping it open on my lap, and jabbing a finger at it with my eyes closed. 

Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane. 

Clearly I am being tested.

What the fuck am I supposed to say about this record? Two dudes who play their instruments in a singular fashion they essentially invented themselves get together in the  Five Spot Club. At one point John plays the chorus of one of those marchy obnoxious folk tunes they make you learn in elementary school (or did he just like, do a reveille? I forget, he inserts something, at any rate) in the middle of one of his spattering solo runs, which he had used to hint at the fact that he might do that. Then he does it and you're like "wow, man, you actually did it". Thelonious Monk is Thelonious Monk. Dude's a mega genius and does no wrong on the keys, the way that dude interacts with the keys is a special thing. Snare drum is very pronounced in the mix. It's Art Blakey, everything with the drums is perfect.

It's fucking good. You should listen to it. Coltrane's not doing any of that shit where it seems like he's having an actual vitriolic fight with his sax but he is twisting the limits of tone. Mostly they're just having fun. An easy, smoky kind of night, complex shit is happening but it's not screaming about itself. Play it before dinner, you can dance to this one.


--JL