Robert Pollard - Jack Sells the Cow LP (GBV Inc.)

This is a Robert Pollard solo album—12 songs, 32 minutes—hovering around the 80th percentile on a sliding scale of his own design, methinks. With this number, I aim to fold the extent of my critique, as it is all I see fit to impart on a Robert Pollard solo album in 2012, the fourth record he has been a part of this year and the googleth of his career. His net has been cast, with a fanbase like a block of granite and a persistence equally resolute. If ceaselessness panders to futility, here it is the writer’s burden to bear. The same agent that puts a damper on criticism’s utility is an accelerant to the torch of a relic. 


Dan Deacon - America LP (Domino)

At any point prior to America, mentioning Dan Deacon to this reviewer could evoke the following associations: 

1.) The guy that brought a loaf of homemade bread backstage for Bradford when my band played with Deerhunter in 2008.
2.) This:    

                                Q. "Can It Get Eddie Veddar?"         
                                A. "You bet your Dan Deacon it can!"

3.) That brassy ring-leader of the opposition in dogs vs. cats.
4.) "Who's chair is that? Not my chair. Not my chair, not my problem that's what I say..."

How is it that the public can be both paranoid and complacent about the apocalypse? Perhaps because, as philosopher Slavoj Zizek says, it is easier for people to imagine the world ending than what it would take to stop it. Although it is nothing if not narcissistic to suppose the rapture will happen in our lifetime, this possibility, with its various seductive entry points, flickers across the minds of the best of us. As a hypothetical, it is the great perspective-inducer, socioeconomic leveler and priority adjustment bureau, becoming ever more mercurial as it slouches toward reality. In such a case, sheer terror would eclipse any sense of beauty.

But the theoretical apocalypse?

Bailterspace - Strobosphere LP (Fire)

Strobosphere, Bailterspace’s first studio album since 1999, wastes no time in assuring us of its formidability. Whipfast, the first breach from silence to song in “Things That We Found” is merciless in its arrest. It is primarily the guitar melody that baits, hooks, and demands a replay, a replay that is permitted by the song’s fadeout, and with which the vocals, low and along for the ride, aren’t at odds. All of this has been standard critical issue for Bailterspace in the past, but here it’s on its head, servicing the song impressively.

Charlie Megira & The Modern Dance Club - Love Police

Confounding! Guitar virtuoso Charlie Megira’s identity is couched in ‘50s greaser/surf nostalgia, rounded out with an Elvis fixation. Half of the material on the double album Love Police is in debt to this, while the other half is a near-comprehensive skirting of the rock genres that have followed: ‘60s garage, ‘70s punk, tongue-in-cheek nods to No Wave, ‘60s heavy/hard rock, ‘80s and ‘90s re-interpretations of the same. It is all done with unnerving verisimilitude. Megira’s ability to deftly transition between styles, in form and historical scope, self-aggrandizes above all else. It creates a kiss-off element, and with “No Wave Exercise” and “Another No Wave Exercise,” he makes sure we know he knows (we know). They are what they claim, yet the album contains at least seven other tracks, without smart-aleck signifiers, that also tread my-kid-could-do-that waters via backwards tracking, radio roulette and some goddamn convincing hazardous Dead C.-esque guitar noise. Love Policebegs to be compartmentalized, and aims to be all inclusive with one-offs like “Existence” (hard rock), “Here Comes Your Mama” (country, swing), “Je Ne Parle Pas Francais” (new wave), and even “Dead Girl Blues” tacked onto the end, although the plug is pulled after 48 seconds (dude, we know you are not serious).

Liliane Lijn: Collected Film and Video Works 1970-2012

If you will be in New York this weekend, you would be wise to stop by Spectacle Theatre in Williamsburg, where for $5 you can see the films of Liliane Lijn - as curated by my girl Kellie Morgan at STRAIGHT TO VIDEO. She let me write the bio, below:

Liliane Lijn: Collected Film and Video Works 1970-2012 Spectacle Theatre
124 S. 3rd Brooklyn, New York

Liliane Lijn is widely known for her Poem Machines (invented in 1962 alongside William Burrough’s and Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine) through which she stirred conversation more relevant now than ever: the relationship between language and time, text and movement. Lijn’s application of text onto rotating cone-shaped “koans” stripped language of its meaning as it dematerialized the volume of the cone, inducing a hypnotic state not unlike the nullifying effect the increased rate of information has today. The Poem Machines were on view in MoMA’s Ecstatic Alphabet exhibition this past spring.

But Lijn's video What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping, 1971–1973, documented the sculptures in a montage that is perhaps the ideal way to experience the breadth of their impact.

Always one to stay current, Lijn has used the evolutions of science, industry, and technology as fertile hunting grounds for unearthing the archetypal resonance within. This query begins with vignettes of industry in Factory Snaps, a series of production close-ups captured in Super 8 film using factories that aided Lijn in her work throughout the late ’60s in London. She trades the autobiographical jumping off point for one rooted in mythology in Fire Water and Caution Matter, initially a video installation, but shown in this program as vignettes. Fire Water further crops industry to specifics, while expanding its key to the logical mythographic end, which is to say the beginning, as Lijn documents two factories found along The Sacred Way – the connecting road from Athens to Eleusis. A “reconnection” of art and science is the central thread of Inner Space Outer Space, a series of interviews with scientists from when Lijn was a resident at the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley interspersed with moving images of her life’s work. But it is the timeless absurdity of Power Game that has provided the most coherent touchstone in Lijn’s career. The stipulations for this send-up of power, which uses the ambiguity of language as currency in which complicit “players” hedge their bets, was first staged by Lijn in 1974. This video enfolds layers of the original game with its subsequent re-stagings up to 2010. These films, along with a batch of autobiographical works that enlighten Lijn’s familial ties and early awareness of the body as matter, will be shown August 5th and August 19th at Spectacle Theatre in Brooklyn. Films in which art critic Frank Popper has heralded as instrumental in “the passage from the mechanical to the electronic in art” are not to be missed as we find ourselves approaching even more guarded passageways in art, technology, science and industry.

 Sunday, August 19th $5 Program 1: 7:30 Program 2: 10:00 Program 1: Practice/Process +Factory Snaps, 1970 +Fire Water, 2007-8 +Caution Matter, 2011 +What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping, 1971-1973 +Power Game, 1974 +Power Game The Arches, Glasgow, 2011 Program 2: Life/ Context/ Construction of Identity +Inner Space Outer Space, 2010 +It Never Happened Before, 2008 +Look a Doll! My Mother’s Story, 1998-2000 —Early Events— +Seagate: the Sea in my Elbow +Great Neck: Shouldering the Burden of Childhood +Lavender Queen +Paradise Lost About Spectacle: Spectacle Theater is a nonprofit cinema space located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Our programming features rare films, lost oddities, missing classics, and special events. All screenings are $5 unless otherwise noted.

Lorelei - Enterprising Sidewalks LP (Slumberland)

It has been nearly a quarter of a century since distortion, feedback and volume joined to form an unremitting flesh. It jostled the  pedantry of post-punk and offered a backbone to sentimental pop across the Atlantic. At once a warm blanket and fierce intimidator, shoegaze liberated the twee literati. At the helm was Washington DC’s Slumberland Records, an imprint that established lines for these transatlantic sentiments and then some. As important as it was to introduce Stereolab to America, it was the nurture and support to bands like The Lilys, The Swirlies and Lorelei that cultivated the American underground pop aesthetic as we know it. 

Samothrace - Reverence to Stone

At first, it was just an island. Later, in pre-Hellenic Greece, it was a place where you could sacrifice pig’s blood to chthonic deities and join a mystery cult. And in 1884, when an acephalous female in white marble appeared frozen atop a staircase at the Louvre to a stunned crowd, she presented her placard with a set of wings and no arms: The Winged Victory of Samothrace.

Magnet Magazine Guest Editor

My week as Guest Editor at Magnet Magazine has wrapped.
In case you missed anything, here are the highlights:

The New Face of Spokescreatures has  No Face, No Voice and No Identity

TV Yellow

Gran Torino

The Ungoogleable & The Unutterable: Two Trends in Naming

Dominoes Pizza Tries Harder: Self-Deprecation in Advertising

Something Funny This Way Comes

Aztec Camera's "Jump" (Loaded Version)

True Weird America

No Tops Without Bottoms, No Bottoms Without Tops: Being Defined By What You Are Not

Something Guided By Voices Related

The Rhyming Scheme is A-Z

A Titanic Misrecognition 

Hyper-Nostalgia

The Hot Dogs - Say What You Mean

Purity Ring - Shrines

An electric guitar riff, middle C, reverb—no genre holds propriety on these building blocks of sound. But as radio-friendly R&B becomes increasingly minimal and weird and art students are encouraged to experiment with hip-hop beats, there is a swath of music being produced today that hovers in a nondescript void. The artist’s voice, and its carotid attachment to biography, becomes the ultimate decider insofar as how a particular work is compartmentalized. Prior to the vocal track, such gonadal pop sounds could birth either R&B or indie-bound electro-pop. The splintering of genres, a homogenized generational sound, the democracy of production—are these good problems? Probably too soon to tell, but Purity Ring’s Shrines is a timely case-study.

Baroness - Yellow & Green LP (relapse)

Yellow & Green has taken the form of a coming-out party for the band’s departure from “heavy,” and is sure to become part of a larger conversation regarding how American metal bands are evolving. The motives for such evolution are admirable: everyone in the old guard wants to save rock from obscurity as well as sustain metal’s legacy of consistent evolution. More and more cues have been taken from previously isolated metal landscapes, as evident by the recent sundering of Black Metal (Liturgy, etc). In the other direction, where we find Baroness, bands like Mastodon, Kylesa and Torche are spiraling out from the confines of any sub-genre to produce simply good guitar-based music.

Look ma! I'm Still Single!

Doug Mosurak decided to let me write for the unflinching Still Single. What follows is my first batch, and be sure to follow the link at the bottom to read reviews by my synonym finder (Andrew Earles) including Dichroics, Infinity People In Love With the Light, False Tropics Sample Based Beats, Criminal Code, Knock Knock We Will Raise Your Child and Looks Like Miaou.

Jennifer Castle – Castlemusic LP (Flemish Eye)

Although the first in her oeuvre to be released under her real name, Jennifer Castle’s Castlemusic is even more fractured and detached from self than what brought criticism to her previous albums. But the decision to nominally shift, while carrying the previous moniker of Castlemusic along for the ride as the album title, is one Castle admitted to not giving much forethought.

Nothing wrong with working on intuition. This album seems to be the result of disparate impulses to pick up instruments honed to craft, and indulge in a kind of anti-autobiographical therapy like some find in running or knitting. Imprinted here is a survey of Castle’s technical abilities, available tones, vocal range and evocations of style; a pretty impressive resume pitting Joni Mitchell against Mazzy Star in an atmospheric mystical Mad-Lib that’s got “the blues,” Canada-style.

It’s not that there isn’t something that can move here. “Neverride” employs a note-change that can bank on it as Castle ushers in some of the album’s most concrete lyrics, but the paper-thin falsetto confuses the sentiment. Something definitely stirs once the dandy, ready-made elfin morning of “Remembering” turns a dark corner. The mic’d ether is compromised in “The Friend,” a realistic representation of Fahey if it weren’t for the faint sound of a cell phone vibrating in the room. “Poor As Him” could be an uncompromising country punch if the guitar weren’t completely drowning in someone’s new tremelo toy. This album has resounding potential energy, effectively so in the first pass; a half hour spent in traction, bracing for the emotionally slaying knockout that never happens.

But why do people listen to music? Surely not always to be slayed, especially if you are from Canada. By the way, I am aware of Castle’s contributions to Fucked Up albums and that Fucked Up is also from Canada and that they happen to slay. Considering this, Castlemusic is a suitable soundtrack (funded by the country itself) to match any residual melancholy and hold it at bay. From American soil, all that technical talent seems distilled, like the bottle of whiskey I want to give Castle in hopes of dislodging something raw, devoid of cosmic wheelies.
(http://www.flemisheye.com)
(Elizabeth Murphy)

Catatonic Youth – “PISS SCENE” 7” EP (Perennial)

RECOMMENDED

How aggravating is it when you send someone a very comprehensive text message and their response is, “what?” JUST READ IT AGAIN. Wait, do I have to send it again? Compelled to re-send the original message is how Diltz Barrett of Catatonic Youth must feel, because I will be goddammed if the two A-siders found here, “I’ve Had It” and “Out of Control”, aren’t the same … a man, a bedroom, a drum machine … songs on the FUCK JAZZ CD-R (ltd. ed. 30) from 2007. Save an additional song on the B-side (culled from The World’s Lousy With Ideas Vol. 5 comp –Ed.), it is the exact same 7” the condiment-barons at Hozac got their grubby hands on in 2008, which remains the mustard (mmmmm) of the label’s catalog. And that’s it: four years, four songs. I’d like to liken the re-re-release of these songs to the senior thesis of a sneaky Situationist art school devil behind the curtains, because when the affliction of a particular low-income refurb cottage industry is that it all sounds the same, and you are the proprietor of two consummate examples working within the limits of the genre, how hilarious is it to RE-RELEASE THE SAME TWO SONGS OVER AND OVER? Call it over-thinking-man’s lo-fi, but seriously … Catatonic Youth? The devil drawing on the cover and label? “PISS SCENE”? Which is actually printed on the cover in quotes, acknowledging the incredulity of its own existence. Here we are, four years later and “PISS SCENE” remains the shit-shine specimen of what one man with a four-track mind and a bladder full of piss and vinegar can do. That is legitimate urgency you’re hearing folks! How did he do it? Locked in his bedroom, he literally had to take a piss. (http://www.perennialdeath.com)
(Elizabeth Murphy)

The Croissants – s/t 7” EP (Sacramento)

This punk rock band should be called The Scones because this feels like a chore and they aren’t even French. Someone should tell them they don’t have to do this. Here is my review:

“This is some bratty pop punk. Short songs, quick execution and minimal lyrics. Four songs straight out of the RAMONES play book. All that is missing is the 1-2-3-4 count before each song.”  -Maximum Rock N Roll

“Trashy pop punk of the highest order is what you get from this Sacramento three-piece. Lo-fi and DIY, these Croissants are filled with distorted guitars and snotty, sneering vocals. These numbers are also incredibly peppy and catchy, with lots of “Oh Yeah” choruses. Reatards and/or Nobunny fans will rejoice with this little gem of a record”  -Razorcake Magazine

(http://www.sacramaniacs.com)
(Elizabeth Murphy)

Final Club – Blank Entertainment LP (Adagio830)

RECOMMENDED

“Everything has been done” has been done. The hard kernel at the center of punk ideology has been mimicked ad infinitum itself, but it is easy to discern those using it as affectation, and those really feeling its effect. Above any redundancy of love, mimeographed joy or remembrance at odds with the day it is this – the nihilistic constraints that exist when you are just four guys toting guitar, drums, bass and vox – that Final Club are waxing passionate about. Like molasses, writhing tunefulness folds over this record’s austere packaging and signifiers, encasing a quality that sneaks in with a grade A “banger” or whatever in “Tragic World”. But more than this song running laps around your average flappy garage disavowal is that it’s a gatekeeper, ushering in the masses with an innocuous party invite. Are you listening? This is meant only for you. “Buy Into It” pulls in lyrically before turning its lilting nostalgia into a portable welt distributor that services the rest of the album; making turns and drawing corners at odd, exciting moments. Alternate universes are revealed in slight, then SIKE! A tangible chorus. Hair-raising, but tangible. Bite-size psychedelic asides begot catchy pop, and vice-versa. The methods all seem so coherent but they swell; see “Wizard Wells”, the return to zero song – the song that makes you want to listen to the whole album again at once. And a note on the guitar: Holy shit. Diverse and demanding of your attention: think Polvo. Also demanding are the lyrics. They poke out with bleak awareness, yet this all ends without infecting emptiness. For the dose was a placebo, all you felt was real; this is no empty gesture. Now we all know one can be too smart for their own good. Intelligence can compromise integrity, especially as one gets older and it becomes laced with anxiety. If this record has propriety on any finitude, it’s in its specificity. Captured on Blank Entertainment is the result of precise amounts of self-awareness, musical ability and youthful energy; all operating on the exact frequencies needed for it to happen.
(http://www.adagio830.de)
(Elizabeth Murphy)

Mattress – Eldorado 12” EP (Malt Duck)

Bedroom rockabilly, or what a sober Jim Morrison would be doing if he had continued to partake full-steam ahead until around Y2K. Eldorado is classic DDIY (literally – this is a vinyl reissue of his first CD-R, dating back to 2006), effects keyboard-reliant song type things with vocals that seem to be making fun of Danzig and Alan Vega, or touched people. It’s the local art guy that incidentally chose music as his medium. His thesis is to incessantly create and his inspiration is the perpetual lack of any coherent fan base. There is at least one in every town, with their yearly message board diatribes bent on uncloaking the secret society of those in town that can “get shows.” Stillborn zinger factories and purveyors of inoperable puns (underground rappers do this too), they implement phrasememes and malapropisms in vain, as they operate on only one level.

Hey, not all dorks are smart, some are just dorks. But it is all about context. Hypothetically, if I was on a grueling, ill-attended month-long US tour with my, say, mid-to-low level indie rock band and Mattress were opening for us in Eureka, California, it is a safe bet that there would be some R. Stevie Moore inspired rhetoric surrounding his performance in a very drunk van on the way to the hotel. And with that said, what really makes this much different than a John Maus, other than Mattress not understanding the value in lo-fi swashbuckling? Maybe it is who you know. But don’t worry Mattress, you will get yours. I would be ahead of my time to give Eldorado an unabashedly glowing review in the present. This is not the music people like in real time, but rather the music people will be digging up in 30 years, vying for the rights to reissue it.
(http://www.maltduckrecords.com)
(Elizabeth Murphy)

William Cody Watson – Bill Murray LP (Bathetic)

Looped incidental music; the kind played to induce calm when you get a colonic or bikini wax. Your kooky buddy has a Buddha Box that he named Bill Murray (doesn’t make sense! So funny!). This record includes an insert that simply states, “They Will Never Believe You”, which is (allegedly) what Bill Murray said to some guy after temporarily blinding him before passing him on the street. It turns out Bill Murray was incorrect: Everyone believes him. The story would not be so widely disseminated otherwise, yet it is only due to Murray’s reflexive supposition that the incident is worth retelling in the first place. That is called situational irony. This record, sonically nondescript and nonrepresentational, is an underscore to an anecdote.
(http://www.batheticrecords.com/bill_murray)
(Elizabeth Murphy)

                                                                                                                                        -from Still Single

The Young - Dub Egg LP (Matador)

Youth: the period of possibility, room to grow, and spitfire resolve. The Young’s debut album, Voyager of Legend, released in 2010 on Mexican Summer, harbored all the emergent exuberance you could hope for in a first record. It was a combination of spritely hooks and a kind of musical formidability, like, say, punkers suddenly released from their genre shackles of enforced simplicity to find a newfound freedom in developing some chops.

Kimbra - Vows LP (Warner Bros.)

Literally the interpretive dance of music, and the metaphor is implied. Which is confusing, yet a pointed confusion. Like two ships meant to pass in the night, the space that doesn't connect is exactly where sense rests, pure and perfect. Leave it alone. Don't even touch it with your mind - that would be salt to slug.

or

IT'S LIKE A METAPHOR.

*********************************************************************************
If indie labels are the new majors, one must assume major labels have now been usurped by even more almighty power structures, operating in cahoots with organizations that go as far into the Earth’s crust as you can fathom. These projectionists are so skilled at crafting reality, you might think the words you are reading are actually real and possibly that I am really fucking crazy. Still, imagine what they are manufacturing beyond a thousand Linda Perry clones on steroids: the synthetic opiate of the masses, popular music. It is for this reason that when questions of authenticity are raised by dubious journalists, albeit cast from a reactionary embrace, the answer seems obvious. Of course, they wrote this music—it is horrible. Unfortunately, with Kimbra’s Vows, released on Warner Bros, nothing is that tidy.

Royal Headache - s/t (What's Your Rupture?)

Punk broke rock. It also gave us a way to put it back together. In the aftermath, rock & roll has consisted of experiments in assemblage. We amalgamate the past with the tools and license punk rock repurposed from the poor and uncool, a.k.a. DIY.

Screaming Females - Ugly LP (Don Giovanni)

Ahhh, blog post avoidance snowball....you are powerless over me now.

I am reminded of the old job at Dairy Queen. My resignation, met with blessings, was sealed with promises to visit as I pursued my dreams of not working. But my heavy heart grew light - a week passed and soon another, quicker yet another, and before long free ice cream sounded like an anxiety attack on a cone.

Time to face the music.

Below is something I have done in the meantime.
********************************************************************************
Marissa Paternoster’s reputation as “one of the female shredders” proceeds her, but this fact is usually followed by a couple unnecessary details (her diminutive stature and lesbianism). The info makes for interesting copy and gender intrigue is only natural, but it all seems remiss upon hearing Ugly, the fifth album from Paternoster’s Jersey based trio, Screaming Females. The soundbite should be, “She is one of the female shredders—and she can write a song too,” as such a trait is increasingly rare, regardless of gender.

It Might Get Shitty.

(continued from Mommy, what's a Skrillex? , kinda)

     Superbowl Sunday '12 was spent at mom's but instead of having wings we had defining types of music listeners.

Here is what we came up with:

Co-workers - Barely buy CD's or MP3's, maybe have a satellite radio in their car, maybe an iPod but it was probably a gift or purchased as a fetish object. The radio is their #1 source for new music and that is FM radio waves. Music isn't considered. They listen to the radio in their home. When asked about their personal taste, they "like a little bit of everything".... "EXCEPT country."

Name TBA - Music is considered but any purity in reasoning has been convoluted. These people chose music at some point in life, usually high school or immediately after (when people think they have to choose between music and sports). This functions, naturally, to form their social group. Optimistically, there was an authentic kernel of interest in music informing this decision but sooner rather than later, they lose the plot. Already engrained in a social/genre setting (it occurs at varying degrees in every music genre) they craft their "top 20" (definitely have iPods, probably don't have a record player) from their peers....o

kay, blogs... okay, Pitchfork. It is also worth noting that they are probably barflies and barnacles.

Retirees - Differ from the above because they had a real vested interest in music for their formative years and beyond. They were either in bands, music writers or had some other crucial role in the biz. At so

me point and for varying reasons (domesticity, "real" job, loss of spirit) they loose the knack for discernment. The muscle isn't exercised, therefore they are agreeable to new diluted trends and have no drive to delve into histories. They stopped buying records and what is left of their collection is in a closet, basement or man cave.

Real Music Fans (RMFs) - You know who you are, 'nuff said.

Y2K2

"Are you open?"

"Yes. But I have to change over. It's a new day."
-January 1, 2012 12:05 am
cashier at this amazing store we found - it has everything and is open 24 hours, even on holidays!

     And a New Year. But not just like that - it is that it has been a year at that moment, the moment chosen to bookend and celebrate a slab of time: 5,4,3,2,1.... that was a year. Each one is broken off as uniformly as possible, with daylight savings and leap years in place as regulators yet there is always a slight indentation or smear off the back.

     
     This nod of recognition to 365 days is the scripted wink of an actor; smiles cued to shutter speeds capture the evidence of a dress rehearsal. A particular small-talk-special (once-a-year only!) infolds all conversations: what "kind of year" did it feel like, short or long? Such is pretty damn obtuse for small talk fodder and the only time solipsism is invited to the party - like dream sequences and if you like gum or not, the information is completely worthless to others.


     Consider an agreement in kind. It is not analogous to agreeing on the weather. One's experience of time is the epitome of subjectivity. In turn, the idea of a stimulating debate on time perception is hilarious in it's absurdity. I guess this makes the topic a paragon of small talk. It is simply an agreement to engage, the tacit offering of an empty vessel served in the name of social graces or (to give it much credit) an invitation suggesting potential. No thoughtful response necessary; this one is all call.

Feedback of time either smacks you in the face or doesn't yet everyone seems to choose a side in pleasantries. I have never heard anyone state "it felt like a year" but I have also never been to an Asbergers ball or inside a Miranda July movie.* The consensus usually is that "the year went by so fast". This makes sense, especially as we age and each year becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of the whole. Nothing good can follow "it was a long year..." but that is in framing. Each determination can be both positive and negative.

An ineffable fave....

...conclusion pitched aggressively to the void.




*No dig to those with Asbergers syndrome. They probably somehow know the correct answer here.

Best of 2012

     This new bloggity-blog thing seems like a good way to hold oneself accountable to New Years resolutions. Here they will be archived, protection courtesy the guise of the public eye - making it hard to forget about them a year from now....as long as I have maintained this.
Here they are, in a sort of particular order:



1. Keep up with my bloggity-blog

2. Apply theories of Henri Bergson when approaching music, art and entertainment. The refraction of this critical lens is still in development but the general idea is to isolate everything. Songs, television episodes, texts, films and singular works of visual art are not only to be separated from their maker (re: Barthes) but from all previous works and histories to which it pertains. Evaluate everything as an autonomous player - operating from an assigned seat in history and armed with what his mama gave 'em. All art is an orphan. This is more of a practice than anything close to dogma....yet. Meanwhile it will lessen reactionary impulses and dismiss the authority of preconceived notions. This has surely closed me off from some inspired moments in the past. Good exercise.

3. Spend less time compartmentalizing ideas. Throw all them shits together. Less placing and more tossing. Put it in the wrong drawer! Sit back and watch the novel juxtapositions partner-up.... things ne'er before considered (this is as close as I get to cut-up right now). I waste too much of my damn precious time organizing, thoughts and things, anyway. Which brings me to....

4. Practice utilitarianism and apply it's central principle to time management. Utilitarianism states that what is best for most is best for all. All decision-making must ultimately consider this to maintain the integrity of the philosophy. Of course this may result in varying degrees of collateral discomfort for the individual; ideally taken in stride as temporal dues. I have fancied myself a subscriber to this process although I am no "headbanger of morality" (copyright TIWWAH 2012). I like rules and go to utilitarianism for the sensible blanket dialectic it suggests. When faced with a decision, weigh the positive outcome potential for each option and choose accordingly. This structural initiative at the core of utilitarianism is pleasantly operable in everyday scenarios and a welcome relief when things get ethically sticky. Now I am going to further whittle it down and personalize it. iUtilitarianism ya'll!
What is best for the most is best for all.
Highlighted words can be replaced with EMM / ASE / US / goals / productivity / plans / / / /
I am EMM, he is ASE and US is EMM and ASE.
5. Say "fuck it" more

6. Say "fuck it" less

7. "Get Fat!" (for you Grandma!)

..............

Schrodinger's Lottery Ticket

A record in a box is neither good nor bad....

We just got home from a day of fun in Mississippi. I should be working on the thing with a deadline but I am dealing with a batch of LPs that hitched a ride across the border. They snuck into the back of the Ranger, somehow charging us $1.99 each for the ticket. I have never been fond of moxie, but it turns out I find these hanger-ons to be irresistible: A neat cross-section of works that have piqued my interest in the past which I have never really heard; a strident clan held together by tenuous threads of inference, aesthetic affinity and parallels in time or intersections of label patronage. It’s as if they were wrapped up with a bow big enough to accent a brand new car. I almost feel like I was set up. Let's review:

The Wolfgang Press The Burden of Mules 4AD 1983 Thought it would be more Aztec Camera or C86 guitar twee but it turns out to be an almost spot on (mate!) sketch of Flowers of Romance in the three songs on “this side”. Layers of primitive beats and John Lydon yelling his forebodings from the bathroom down the hall compete for best of show in the look-a-like contest. A more thematic instrumental opens the “over” side (perhaps meant to be heard first) with the drums carried over in full. We hear vocals again in the quirkier (if you like that sort of thing) “Prostitute I” and with authority, singer Michael Allen now pitches the stylings of Mark Perry. The impersonation is intensely compatible with the matter-of-fact dribble on the established profession. More hunger pangs, yelps and architectural reverb; this time led on by a cyclical bass line or two and we are back again, so soon but so ready for more Sniffin' Glue at “Prostitute II”. It is a reprise or reworking of some sort but godamnit if I can't tell the two apart. Then the last song lets itself in as a non-threatening steady drip of water and the albums' bedtime story ensues. It's told by grandma but she is a robot and not a very good one. The story was transcribed from a handkerchief David Lynch blew his nose in once and something has teeth. Your robot grandma obviously doesn't care about you but the backing track, resolute in This Mortal Coil, sure seems like it does and will coax you to sleep. It all comes to a soft crescendo obfuscating all the incidental sounds in the room. I am glad this record is not worth a ton of money because I want to listen to it over and over.

Depeche Mode Music for the Masses Sire 1987

Nothing like a Depeche Mode record to make you feel like you were born in the wrong time. It would have been nice to have these jams as my default high school soundtrack. A successful, thoroughly polished yet legitimately good pop song - heard wide on the radio, would have been a welcome example in my formative years. A perfect pop song is a role model in its existence; a quality product that is also appreciated by the masses is so very rare. "Behind the Wheel" on the charts would serve as an inescapable reminder that prosperity and authenticity can coexist. Then the next song comes on and I don't feel like that anymore.

What follows are the four Ministry recordings acquired today; the first and second full-length LPs, a 12" single and an EP. I have high hopes for these recordings.

Ministry With Sympathy Arista 1983
A how-to of various ways to suck in the early 80's. Al Jourgensen himself called this “an abortion of an album”. (I discovered that quote after putting down my first sentence.) (I don't understand what you mean by this “backspace”....) (If Ministry had to suffer a false start, I do too.)

Ministry “All Day" b/w "Everyday (is Halloween)” Wax Trax! 1985 It's like I have this unfounded standard in my head for how early Ministry should sound and they are just BARELY passing here. This single slid by on reminding me of Go Insane-era Lindsay Buckingham with a British accent.....a faux British accent, Mr. Jourgensen is from Chicago. I made a commitment long-ago to accept and possibly embrace this sort of affectation; I find it endearing. Hopefully he is not copying off the dumbest kid in class.

Ministry "Cold Life" b/w "I'm Falling" "Primental" & "Cold Life Dub" Wax Trax! 1985 Picked up a copy of AP Magazine today and learned the kids are using prescription drugs. Wanna know why? “Dubstep”, says Alex Downtain of Marietta, Georgia.

Ministry Twitch Sire 1986 I actually listened to this one first. Thank fucking God. Not sure if I would have made it here otherwise.

.......to be continued

...and sometimes I dip the whole thing in chocolate

We usually start the day with some kind of cookie. It is most likely a lemon sandwich cookie; the kind you can get for two dollars in a package slightly too large length-wise that only a family of six should be able to ingest fully by expiration. The cookies are housed in a plastic tray and wrapping created in the school of user-indifferent to user-i'm-going-to-ruin-your-day technology depending on how far you are in the package and how sensitive your ears are to the acoustic terrorism of the anti-sensuous giving of the wrapping.

Eyes open, a few slight adjustments of the body and a sentence or fragment from a dream or waking thought slips past the aural demarcation line that separates the mind from the commons to become the first entry of the day in the dialogue of two; no intention but duty. It is the brave or ignorant front line in the celebrated battle of conversation with another, the kind you never want to end, some nights foregoing sleep for it to be seamless into the next day (much to the suspicion of others). This initial utterance is at risk of dying in vain a flimsy sentiment; the remainder of whatever can be siphoned from the drug run-off drop box of your subconscious and a dangler from the previous day's to-do list. But as cut-up style equations lay and lie, the math for this morning's initial utterance was simple.

“I wonder what will be the cookie of the year.”

This statement is the result of thinking about and reading top lists for the year and having a theoretical interest in eating something peppermint, made manifest by last night/this morning's peppermint sugar cookie as the featured daily vitamin. But cookies on the brain are an anomaly.

To be empirically sound, my top-ten list of cookies could only feature three types before I would have license to either lie off my ass about cookies or get real dumb with metaphor about it. Don't worry, I have no intention to start listing my “cookie moments” of 2011, but I will have to sit here and think about how absurd it would be to pen a top-ten cookie list in the former fashion.

Here is what I came up with...

-Top ten cookie list as homework assignment. Here the child either gets busted from copying another child's list instead of thinking of their own. Another option would be that the child randomly wrote down ten cookie types and the pedantic teacher deduced either from inconsistency of taste preferences or some kind of magic that the list was false.

-Jilted dessert critic has a melt-down and lists the worst cookies she can think of as a murder/suicide-style vengeance to the world. Beyond victimless to completely pointless, this hypothetical is actually making me kinda sad.

That was in real-time. Yes, part of this will be a dumping ground for kiss-offs and full-blown make-outs with homeless ideas and constructs,. Part of this will be serious, part of this will be silly but it will always be very serious about being silly. And this is the difference. I would like to take this opportunity to state some claims:

The brief cookie list detour above stands. I am writing in pen. We will exhaust all options. We will make the entire space available for these options. We will think twice, three times, four times about something before forming an opinion and we still reserve the right to change our mind. We will beg for others to change our minds. We will press the re-start button to remove any pity-party that tries to sneak into our brain rager. Like strict parents who actually love their children, we will call bullshit on the artless and sexless, not for any reason other than the fact that we care about the crafts at hand.

There are way too many “cool parents” buying their children cheap beer and trying to look hot way past their prime and they are calling the shots and buying in. Just because you did it does not mean it is good. It is not enough to do-it-yourself... DO IT RIGHT. And this is calling myself to arms as much, if not more than, anybody else.

The first thing you say in the morning may fall flat on its face. The observance you keep repeating, longing to get at its center, may cause eyes in dull heads to roll. The result of your opus of brilliance may receive diminishing returns. But while others are window shopping for meaning, I am making a fake cookie list, or whatever...

THIS IS WHY WE ARE HERE.