Teetering on the edge of inadvertent self-satire...

... not me. Or maybe. Now that I think about it.

This is what I actually mean, though:

Love it so much, especially the spoken word parts toward the end.

Also, more Teddy Pendergrass (have I posted this one before?):

The audience participation section is heart-meltingly cute.

Bonus - brilliant cover:

All of these have to be listened to all the way through to get the desired effect. Sadly, this sort of statement is necessary nowadays. I wonder if someday somebody will complain about the lack of drums on "Stairway To Heaven", you know?

What would Jesus Christ, Sexx Godd, do?

So there's a girl.

Of course there is.

I've moved on enough from Bronte to realize that infatuation is not quite the romantic ideal in 2013. Yet I still think there's something quite noble in unrequited love.

Why else?

Techno music,

Adorno,

and an abstract concept of "the people" that "the people" are not capable of delivering upon?

In fact, it's not even love I;m feeling. I've learned, harshly, that a submarine needs an oxygen tank. And yet. There's a girl.

Actually, a corner of my mind for seasons now. A sometime-sharer of conversations. 

A co-worker, though we never really work at the same time. Probably I am just a friend.

But I feel like I have kept my distance enough to not have quite blown it already (self-deception). She seems to value my company, but she is social. I am not. Imbalance.

She has been seeing someone else for almost a year now. I don't sense it will end soon, but I don't sense it will end in marriage, either. She's just the kind of girl who always has a boyfriend. Enough so that, should she come crying to me about a bad breakup with her current partner, well,

I would tell her to spend some time alone, to consider all the things she might have done had she not had to compromise, which

she would surely have done, had this not been the right relationship, which, in this fantasy, is true.

Obviously, to wait is pointless. There are other parasites on the corpse (which is really a more accurate way of expressing these things than something about fish, see) but there will also be a certain sense of disingenuousness about giving up:

The car you can afford.

The vacation to a neighboring town slightly less desolate

(instead of an island of cartoon-blue waters and palm trees so indifferent, they mock human desire).

I can't promise her anything. Devotion, yes, but she's beautiful enough, vibrant enough. Redolent of obtuse appraisals. A unique perspective, not just "quirky". Devotion is a penny.

Assumed.

I couldn't even say that it would work. It's just the frustration of not even having had the chance to find out.

A lottery ticket never to be scratched.

Ice cream melting in a dumpster behind a grocery store on a hot summer day.

Living well would be the best "revenge", but living well would also put me thousands of miles away. Not that I would hesitate. I would only hope that, should I ever board that plane to Barcelona, or Berlin, or Belarus, or Bosnia, or Bolivia, well, that her regret should equal mine.

To forget her is an act of self-preservation that creates a self not worth preserving.

I once described the rain as "a slow, silent paroxysm of the clouds". That was another girl.

Love doesn't solve problems, it legitimizes them.

Ladies

Well. I guess when you spend a lot of time with people who share the same assumptions, you forget the assumptions. Who knows who I would have been without dance music, but I'll still give credit: I don't really care if the singer of a song is female or male. I don't identify less one way or the other. Because the singer sings words. And the words and the delivery capture moods. And moods are human, for all humans. 

Didn't really realize this was uncommon until I moved to Providence and started spending time with unreconstructed punks who still haven't arrived at the conclusion that many of the smarter musicians reached in 1978 (it is 2013!): that punk's conservative aesthetic was at odds with the purportedly progressive politics. And the biggest aspect of that conservatism is the idea that guitar-driven, aggressive and macho music is the only real "rebel" music. Bzzt. Nope.

(this is the first time I have felt insecure about loving Ten City since high school, for fuck's sake!)

Should it really matter who sings? Nah! A jam is a jam.

Honestly...

If only because, I can't think of something better to do.

Not Pictured: Bills, Nihilism

Thoughts:

* Nobody thinks I have a sense of humor in my real life right now. It's not  true. I am surrounded by machismo. Self-effacing doesn't work if it is taken literally.

* I got it used. Even though I am working five or six days a week right now, I still can't afford one of these things new. I also can't afford to read. Amazing how much one's mind is affected by not reading often. The results are obvious.

* I am worried that I actually like taking pictures of things that only matter to me and posting them on the Internet. I won't do this again until I visit my parents and see my cats.

* I find it almost impossible to get anything I actually need in cities anymore. Providence is especially bad. Even though I live ten minutes (walking) from downtown, I do virtually all of my shopping online.   I didn't shop online that often in New York or DC, but, now that I think about it, even after I was able to afford to live in large cities, usually only a few blocks away from the entrance to an underground rail system, I still had to go to either Virginia or that crappy mall now located next to the new basketball stadium in Brooklyn to get most of my essentials. I had never shopped at a Target until I moved to New York. Presumably, one moves to New York to never have to shop at Target.

That's really the irony of urban redevelopment, isn't it?

Why am I saying all of this? Well, I want to hook this thing up. I need a firewire cable. Nobody has one. Thanks, eBay. Again.

I will never own the Mercedes that you may associate with the following records...

There's a lot of music I love that has retrospectively come to be seen as "classy" so those who are not initiated to it will never be as long as that association is never broken. Too bad. For them.

Stan Getz is not my favorite tenor saxophonist because of the innovations that followed, which are closer to my heart, but he has possible the best timbre on that instrument ever (oh, and Jobim!!!):

I love Coltrane but get sick of people who pick sides either for or against his free period. Yeah, I own Interstellar Space. Blah blah blah. But (oh, and Hartman!!!):

Also, my favorite song (when drunk on a beautiful evening contemplating a failed romance):

Just Because

I love electronic music as much as ever. Or at least, I love my favorite records, and new favorite records, whether from "yesterday or today" as much as ever, but man, trying to imagine the mental space of the below... it is so, so distant.

Regardless, a dope track. No new ideas, no new themes. Just. BLEEP!

If only I had been drinking milk...

... I would have seen it come out my nose.

So yesterday I was on the phone with Apple asking some questions about a piece of software called Logic. Basically, I wanted to upgrade to the new version, and I was trying to confirm that the upgrades they used to sell (now being blown out for cheap on Amazon) were still current. I also wanted to know whether that upgrade came with printed manuals (it is a complex piece of software - I think the manual for it is the longest book I have read, and yes I am familiar with Tolstoy!). I didn't really get the information I was looking for. Not sure if it was because the person I was talking to didn't know or because I had found a way to spend half the money on something that they wanted to sell me. Regardless, I ordered that item at half the price. I am installing now... so we'll see.

When I asked about the manuals, I was told that Apple doesn't print them anymore because they are a "green" company. I would respect that except... aren't they the ones spending all their money convincing everyone to buy new iPhones every year? This is my third version of Logic. Version 7 was returned to them at the store years ago when I upgraded to version 8. Version 9, I can now confirm, at least for the upgrade, does NOT come with manuals. This upgrade process has played itself out over almost five years. I have one set of manuals. Exactly how many iPhones would I have purchased by now had I been an early adopter to that technology (I still don't have one)? And what landfill would those first few iPhones be sitting in now? The only manuals I have gotten are still sitting right on my desk, and they will be for years to come. Until I recycle them.

I don't even know if the above is interesting to read. But yes, I now have Logic on my computer again! And something else to go with it. I might even take a picture. Because today I got something in the mail that really, really made me happy. In fact, in many respects, it was a complex day in my world, and a really, truly difficult one for many people I know. But. I am giddy. GIDDY. When have I used that word in my writing before? Good luck with that search. This is one of those moments when I don't have anyone to talk to so I am talking to you.

Giddy. If I use this thing then I might have a chance of making something of myself. Someday. Perhaps. I still want to keep the expectations low until I have surpassed them.

Nukes

I vaguely remember the 1980s. I went to a fairly liberal private school for elementary school and I remember one year us kids were enlisted to give some sort of presentation on the dangers of nuclear war.

Hard to remember that aspect of the 1980s now.

Jerry Harrison "Worlds In Collision"

The album from which this track comes gets dissed implicitly in Rip It Up And Start Again. Probably rightfully so, but I like this track. Danny Krivit brought a re-edit of this to Dope Jams one night that he was commissioned to do (I think) way back when this album wasn't even out yet. Less vocals, more obtuse funkiness, which is correct. Sadly, I don't think it has seen the light of day outside of Danny's DJ sets.

Pretty Tony "Will We Ever Learn"

My jam of the last few days. I got turned on to it by a close friend and fellow DJ who is just as anonymous to you as I am. Got it last year, finally cleaned it off and put it on recently. Sick.

Easier to spot...

Just in case there are any PVD residents reading...

Yeah, I am here.

I was at Unicorn Hard On/Ital/Container tonight. And lol. I have to say, actually, that as I much as I have fulminated against "hipster house", um, Ital's set wasn't bad. Which is to say, well, if 90% of people who make records should just fucking stop, right, now, yeah, Ital should continue. But I still was not that impressed. But I guess that means he is in the 91st percentile of people making music, which is a good thing. He was good, not great, but only Beethoven and Chic are great, so, you know...

Anyways, what failed tonight was not the "house" but the "hipsters". As I said to a friend I was trying to convince to come down, if only to be able to share in my misery as opposed to the self-decption of others: it's a dance music event - come sit or stand.

Ital tried to rock the crowd. I almost felt sorry for him. Except he plays in Europe. And takes his fucking money, I'm sure. So whatever. Sometimes you fuck, sometimes you masturbate. At least one person gets off regardless. If life is meaningless, then "progress" can be defined as such: even the wealthy no longer feel comfortable paying others to wipe their bottoms.

Amazing that these artists are so hip. It's like: take an urban culture, wait twenty years, take out all the emotions, all the opinions, all the oppositional tendencies, all the funk, all the sweat, all the vitality, all the black people, and then get a good agent and a good haircut. And someone will actually be fooled into thinking that YOU are the underground! Why? Because you don't listen to Mumford and Sons? Mumford and Sons fans are actually a minority!  The majority of the people are not in the mainstream. A dirty secret, that. (Of course, people who listen to Mumford and Sons think they are not in the mainstream, either. Because, Lady Gaga, ha. And even Lady Gaga fans probably feel put upon by something!)

I sent an email to a friend recently and I didn't get a response. Probably because that person is really, really busy. But I overanalyze. And in my fantasies, I didn't get a response because either I was too personal or too snobby. Let's just say the latter.

I was complaining about people and their dancing. Let's start from the top, the One: I can't dance. But. I have been to parties. I have been to parties. I will never be President. I have been to parties. And I can say this: what separates the good ones from the bad ones is the way in which people respond to the records. At a good party, the mood changes with the music. At a bad one, the mood stays the same. And you could say, well, as long as people are dancing, but, no. If people dance the same way regardless of the mood of the music, then that means they are not reacting to the music, but something else. And fuck that, that means they are not actually listening. Or maybe listening, but not hearing. And if the most "involved" patrons are not even hearing it, then fuck it. You can book me to DJ, I don't suck. Fly me to Paris. But if I come out there and feel like I could play this or this* and get the same response, then why am I even there? What's the point? Will people feel cheated if they don't have someone to stare at (And why are they staring anyways?)? I'll bring a fucking iPod and cash in my drink tickets. Thanks. I need new sneakers. Get me an agent. I can cut my own hair.

There is no culture, only middle-class people positioning for status amongst themselves. I will never, ever get a tattoo because I AM PUNK AS FUCK! Get it? Didn't think so.








*(Sad sign of the economics of buying vinyl: I actually own the latter record but not the former [yet]!)

_____
Oh and one more thing. Sometimes convictions can be strengthened when they are challenged and the challenge fails. As a DJ, I can walk into a room, look around, and play accordingly. 1000 people already sweating? Bang it out! 10 people with arms crossed? Well, something else. Live PAs leave little room for adjustment.