|
|
Friday, July 3rd, 2009
| |
12:37 pm - A few things
|
1. It sounds like I'm moving to Chicago in August. Yes.
2. Lisa rode the midnight bus so she could be here early today. I had to drive downtown, through the morning haze, to pick her up at 5:30am. She smells wonderful.
3. Fireworks.
4. Finally saw and hung out with my friends from school, which was delightful.
5. A fridge full of Corona.
|
|
(1 comment | comment on this)
|
| Sunday, June 21st, 2009
| |
4:30 pm - Crawling to an evening
|
Recorded a song that's called "Lacquer" (click to download) today. I want to make a record that has Neil Young's vintage & casual sounding drumming, The Beatles' over-compressed tinniness that makes sounds seem small, fractured hip-hop beats and glistening arpeggiated climaxes. In other words, I think I want to go back in time and make a record, but be able to do everything you can do with a computer. The ability to go back and edit things after the fact is a blessing.
Summer is getting weird in my head. I've been skateboarding a lot (which is wonderful). Need to start plugging away at the backlog of songs (4 or 5 deep now, all begging to be recorded properly), need to get a job that will pay me money and won't kill my soul, need to feel like a real person instead of a strange night-walker, need to get back my confidence, need to sit up straight, need to smile.
"What do you need? Can we help? Listen? Assist? Advise? Aide?" My parents asking me that almost brought me to tears. Nothing specific is wrong, and it's really a stretch to claim that things aren't well - I just don't know where I am right now, or quite how to be this person I am.
Lisa turned her hair blonde with a bottle of bleach and a good friend. I might think I'm with someone else for a second when I see her head out of the corner of my eye - the pictures were a little shocking! I guess Lisa got the "drastic change" she was looking for?
Chicago next weekend. Good times to be had. Travel to be bridged. Hours to be spent.
Looking South from the Carondelet crane over the Mississippi.
|
|
(1 comment | comment on this)
|
| Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
| |
1:35 pm - Lisa & Carondelet
|
|
| Thursday, June 11th, 2009
| |
7:29 pm - You could always be more fucked than you already are
|
|
| Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
| |
1:58 pm - Chant Circle (What's Perfect?)
|
You've got to chant when you're able
You've got to work in the heat
Use hands to make it all right
Don't want to go down in the flames
The first guess was right one
The first draft was a perfect fit
Absolute in action is naivety
Go slow or else you just imitate
It's not so dangerous, no.
Go slow, it's doctor's orders
If it seems slow, it's doctor's orders.
Too slow?
It's doctor's orders.
Absolute in action's naivety
Talking back to the heads on the TV
Eyes change from blue to dark grey
When I hear your shoes on the carpet
Can't perfect.
What's perfect?
Can't break what?
It's not there yet.
You can listen to this song, written and recorded today, if you download it here.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Saturday, May 30th, 2009
| |
6:45 pm - Inspiration over water
|
Last night, I went to the Carondolet Coke factory. It's a facility in south St. Louis that is probably on about 10 acres of abandoned land right next to the Mississippi river. The ruins of the factory are contaminated with coal ash, as it was used mainly as a coal gasification plant until 1987; there's a black layer of soot that coats the ground and crunches underfoot. We went at about midnight, parked nearby and slogged through nearly-muddy stretches and clouds of mosquitos so thick they could be confused for blankets. I used my bike light to guide the way, even though I was unfamiliar with the landscape - in the dark, there's no sense of distance or perspective, just your feet hoping not to clumsily land on a sharp edge or in an unseen hole. The smoke stack loomed large over everything, bearing the insignia of the company that owned it: GREAT LAKES CARBON, a hundred feet tall in white letters on a deep-red brick background. Another white tower, with steel latticework, watched from its lofty perch. We made our way to the dilapidated but brilliant loading/unloading crane, which is suspended at least a hundred feet above the Mississippi.
We climbed, precariously, onto the narrow walkway above that mystical river with St. Louis at our backs. The Arch was within view, but you couldn't tell it was the Arch without knowing that the Arch is the tallest thing in the St. Louis skyline - it was just a skinny, shiny piece of metal with a red light on the top, almost insignificant against the shimmering lights of the blighted downtown. The people I were with ride motorcycles, drink copious amounts of beer (and it shows, they've got amazing beer bellies), have full sleeves of tattoos, curse like it's something they get paid for, spit at every chance they get, smoke incessantly, scratch their balls openly and are generally uncouth on first judgment - yet they're some of the most gentle, caring, hilarious people I've ever met; it's as if the lesson is to not engage people based on their looks alone.
We made it to the top of the crane and wandered through spider webs that dotted the rusting steel frame while trying to dodge the spotlights coming off of barges. All around us, in the wee hours of the morning, there was industry: barges were loaded and unloaded, going up and downstream (when they're going upstream, they require a tremendous amount of fuel and make lurching, belching sounds that sounds like a dragster having a tantrum), chugging along in the water to mysterious destinations. The wake from the barges washed over everything and made slurping noises as it met the banks of the river; giant elliptical patterns interfering with each other coated the muddy surface of the mighty river, giving the water a deeply expressive quality. The force of the river was obviously astounding: we mused that if one were unfortunate and fell into the river from the crane and swam across to Illinois you'd end up miles and miles downstream. There's simply no way to fight that current, so we suspended ourselves above it and watched it carry the land and water and thoughts away with it: back to the ocean, the source and the destination, the beginning and the ending. The wasteland of American industry, long abandoned and automated except for a few hard and daring souls, sprawled all around us covered in a hazy morning fog. The moon swung low and watched us for a while before it disappeared behind the horizon, meeting the top of a coal firing plant and illuminating its pipes, illuminating the beautifully and mercifully abandoned wasteland around us.
St. Louis is a city of deep contrasts - the poor and rich live within blocks of each other, the ghetto and the most gentrified parts of town tend to be within yards of each other, blacks and whites act on what they believe is a irrevocable division between them, cars outnumber people when you travel. The way that the abandoned industrial complex can sit so closely to the indestructible, eternal spirit of an earth-shaping force like the Mississippi is just another reminder of how fragile these things we worry ourselves sick over really are. In time, the crane will fall and the barges will rust away, the banks of the river will grow wider and deeper, all of the companies that use the river will close their doors, everyone living today will eventually die. There is beauty in the fleeting, momentary glimpse I got of how quickly what's natural overruns what's man-made: what we value and care about are just things we get caught up in to keep ourselves busy, it seems. Holding still above that shifting river reminded me of just how little I can control, how little I can influence the world but how precious it really is to me. I'm so pleased to be alive, to be a part of this giant sensory soup, to take part in even a little bit of time in the vast history of the planet. We live in a curious time, in a curious place, with curious interests and values and ideas. Will they look back and think: what fools, building cranes and factories - or will they be astounded by the unmentionably strong will it must have taken to piece all of these things together?
Photographs taken by others, courtesy Ecology of Absence. I may take my own soon.
|
|
(1 comment | comment on this)
|
| Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
| |
4:28 pm - Paint on the edges.
|
Sick from fallout
Nervous from dreams
Maced, bound, gagged
Not quite that bad
Still: not what you think about it.
Contemplating rhythms,
structures,
harmonies,
melodies,
it's not too many parameters -
in fact it's sort of disappointing
just how simple it is.
Not searching for validation anymore
I know what I want and I know
that it's meant to be mine.
Giving a name to the fear
is an easy way to tell it to fuck off,
otherwise it's nameless
in the backseat of your car,
watching with dark eyes.
Cleanup. On aisle brain.
Sense is having the nerve
to speak when you know it's time to speak up,
not quashing spinning thoughts
before they can spiral out
in bubbly, clumsily worded bursts.
I have to use what I love to make a living,
not drift into some alternate world,
or pretend tomorrow will yield different results,
but concentrate on today,
and these rooms,
and these moments;
how hard I'll try to make this work,
how badly I'd love for it to be a success.
I want to write songs
and talk about what we're building,
make a big mess of my room in the process,
clean it up and discover
that glinting kernel
wrapped up by my aging hands.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Friday, May 22nd, 2009
| |
7:18 pm - Reading words from far away.
|
The next time you say "always" I'll punch you in your face.
I loved the hours
every penny fell and it didn't matter
I dropped my feelings
for what I thought would be stable
Turns out I should have spoken up
when it was still possible
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Thursday, May 21st, 2009
| |
1:45 am - Trip to Chicago, Milwaukee, cars.
|
Animal Collective too loud in a 4-story tall room with young kids. Am I this age? I think I could be. The treble burns your ears and the reverb washes out any distinct sound while the transitions go on for what seems like hours. They play a total of 11 songs over 2 hours. Standing would be weird - so much time is spent waiting for them to move onto the next thing. The singing sounds like a choir and a rapper harmonizing, and there's definitely some sort of scat influence going on in how Noah Lennox sings. It's a surreal experience not because it's all melting rooms and strange psychedelic patterns but because it's remarkably mundane: it is routine. It is normal. They seem well rested, clean and happy. They don't talk much between songs and really only stop playing a couple of times, seemingly just to catch their breath and sip bottled water. Always bottled: can't have loose cups about to spill on all these wires. "I thought there would be more instruments," she says - well, I can't blame you, it's no "band" in the normal sense - the word collective has been possessed by three nerdy men from Baltimore now, so there's no use calling it anything other than the perfectly fitting and ironic name: Animal Collective. Three guys with a few tables with cloths draped over them, blinking lights, strange projected images on a giant beach ball, too much reverb and lots of effects pedals. If it weren't so perfect it'd be worth making fun of. If it weren't so self-aware it might be an out-of-body experience. But we were all firmly in our bodies, in that room, in that damp sweaty air, next to the river in Milwaukee.
Birds swoop over our heads and threaten us with their yellow beaks and pillowy feathers. They call out to us and laugh and dive and seem much more threatening than they should. We're on the 6th floor of a parking garage overlooking an unfamiliar city while the sky turns to orange and purple at our backs, the future is coming on and we can't be sure what that means. So we strut on in empty streets, wait on slow traffic signals, trust our instincts. Talk amongst yourselves. Do we disagree? Perhaps, perhaps even often, but we always tend to come out on the other side of the conflict with a sense that what we're talking about isn't just empty banter. A shame, then, that it's so hard to remember exactly what was said...if I were a man of photographs, you'd see a lot of flashing colors and strange lines jutting between beautiful white and flushed-red faces, eyes open and daunting, women on a mission next to men with too much to say.
The sky is open and gazing at us on the way back. The game is "spot the cloud," no one wins. Not for seven hours between Chicago and Saint Louis. A landfill and the Arch: garbage? The sight of Saint Louis from fifteen miles out from the top of a hill, Cahokia mounds overlooking everything (those wise, wise Natives), second-guessing each and every thought on a slow climb. The GPS unit talks in funny accents. Fragments grow at me, I take them and I guide them to a safe place where I can piece together what I need to stay healthy.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Friday, May 15th, 2009
| |
6:39 pm - Padded feet
|
My shoes provide minimal protection, especially against all this city's concrete. Walked around in Clayton staring at oversized houses after going to the dentist and the DMV. A Japanese man said hello to me, a white woman carrying an Ann Coulter book wouldn't even look up when I greeted her, children were getting out of school, construction workers were sounding gruff on phones. Greenery everywhere: trees are already thick with their summer clothes. There were all sorts of strange smells coming from the blooms, each block seemed to have its own distinct aroma as well as its own fashionable facades on the houses. My feet are sore from the walking, the skin feels like it wants to be thicker. Just traveling mundane distances took quite a while - I probably only walked 8 miles, but it seemed long, long, long.
Saint Louis is inhospitable to walkers: I saw literally hundreds of cars but only a handful of people using their own legs to propel them around. I used to feel like I was being judged by the passing cars, like I wasn't good enough to own a car - now I realize that it's probably the other way around. I only get to see their cars, their speed, hear their tires and engines while they get a full-on glance at me. Perhaps some of them talk to each other about me, perhaps I go totally unnoticed. The point is that there's no reason to be ashamed of using some method of transport besides the car, in fact, it might be something to be quite proud of. It's not so easy in this city. I sang to myself for a few blocks, wishing I could record it...or just save those moments for people to hear, rather than dry throatiness and weariness from staring too long at weird waveforms.
Most of my desirable possessions that have some sort of use-value beyond just being ornamental are unpacked: guitars, xylophone, keyboards, art supplies, some old lyrics for songs I haven't finished yet, Joey's Budweiser clock-thermometer, a file cabinet, etc. I'm trying to settle in, temporarily. It's precarious. What else is new?
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Thursday, May 14th, 2009
| |
9:05 pm - I live here (for returning)
|
Find the comfort in the things you love
and turn them toward yourself
in a slow motion daydream:
people, places, thoughts, feelings
melting into mind's eye
seen but unseen
concrete but fleeting.
Being human is managing dissonance,
reconciling two contradictory ideas,
building wires to tap out code with,
using words to shape the air,
trying to have no regrets,
making it always look easier than it really is.
It's a miracle
or perhaps a random chance,
all sorts of pieces that fell into their rightful place.
But don't forget that we're precariously placed
and that the wire-thin floor holding us back
from the depths of hell and its unmentionable dark
can fall through
any moment
any time
whenever, on a whim -
yes, it's regrettable to be so fragile
but a regrettable necessity
to prevent us being too attached,
to prevent us being too sure.
I'm living in Saint Louis again. I want to make a little bit of a new life.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Monday, May 11th, 2009
| |
2:07 pm - This, again.
|
Put the things you define yourself with into boxes. Pack them onto a vehicle. Wrap yourself up in dust and get into every nook and cranny - who knows what sort of cloud you'll walk through - fold all the clothes, put all the notebooks away, stash all the instruments safely, make sure the wires aren't too tangled to travel. What happens to all this furniture? What happens to all these friends?
It's been a strange few days - the transition is really starting to come down. I can feel it affecting the people around me just as strongly as it's changed me. I'm ready, in some sense, but in others I don't think anyone can be prepared. It's just one step at a time on a long climb up a monument...
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Thursday, May 7th, 2009
| |
2:52 am
|
|
3am, I think this paper is done. I'm not coming apart at the seams quite the way I thought I (could) would. I'd love to tell you more, but there is very little - we stayed up late, far past our bedtimes, and made it to a diner at 5am in time to eat too much food and then pass out on couches last night. It was epic, it was normal, it was bizarrely sweet to be called part of a core group. And even sweeter to really feel that way.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Saturday, May 2nd, 2009
| |
12:52 pm
|
|
| Friday, May 1st, 2009
| |
1:38 pm - Society of Friends
|
Are there words,
many words,
that you're afraid to speak?
Words like love,
words like dying?
I find it hard to talk
when I'm in your gaze.
Will it really get easier
one of these days?
I try to open my mouth but I don't hear a sound.
Can try to be something else but I'm only myself.
Try to bend it,
try to mold it.
It's only what it is,
it's only what it is.
Tonight: let's put our pieces to line,
or is it too soon to decide?
Can't be sure it's right, I know...
faith takes time.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
| |
6:51 pm - Noise / Value / Rooms / Losing your voice
|
My voice was gone for an entire weekend. I realized how much I rely on it, and how valuable it is to me, and how much I would really lose if I could never sing again. So talk, and speak, and use those reedy throats to vibrate the world.
From notebooks, on what chaos is stirring in my mind:
See, the thing is that Americans never really wanted to
work together to make being human better.
They wanted the other people to do the hard work for them.
These are of course unfair generalizations,
but why skirt the truth in favor of a few exemplary asterisks,
why skirt the truth just so you don't have to tread on a few sensitive toes?
Now you have an easy way to train your thoughts:
a screen in a room moving the mind,
a room in the world as the platform to travel on,
a body going nowhere and moving nothing,
ex-urbs and dead-burbs
and coal cars on rails all built by prudent men
in flush times
to furnish this motionless utopia.
As the density increases, so does the noise
and as the amount of information increases
its value inherently decreases.
There's that "less-is-more" lesson coming up again,
something unheeded by the clever
engineers and profiteers:
value is just noise between us.
Birds squawking.
Insects chirping.
People talking.
I don't think the luck runs out, but if it does, it may take time to notice.
Supermen made the world in the images
forgetting that others after them needed work to do -
and not just cleaning up the half-finished mess! -
or did they think it would be very sweet of them
to just let us sit still, in rooms, watching thoughts sift through screens?
How to confound the system that was build to confine and confuse?
Drink in these great threads
that wind into thick, yarny balls
in our bitter stomachs;
swallow that twine
and keep the end out, near your lips,
to be tugged on slowly
when you must bear your own acid
and sear angry faces.
The passions are really a problem, not some solution.
How to be passionate about boredom?
How to relate to a world that wants to be the death of you?
The good that comes from these accidental conjectures:
refraction on the walls,
the glint of potential;
dangling dust patterns
rearranged, improvised,
cast about by nervous hands and
splayed out as "what might be,"
such beautiful arrangement work
from lots of tiny pieces scattered round.
These pieces might cut the soles of our feet
when we forget them, stumbling out of our bedrooms
in the morning, cursing the occasion -
spittle becoming fine diamonds in the dawning sun.
What there is to talk about
and the stuff we've no way to talk about.
All that wordless stuff is much heavier.
Verbalizing disrupts and lops off the noisy background,
the very important noise behind us,
words cutting at the store of fat
necessary to winter this sort of cold.
Verbalizing bends the memory so it's wrong,
like speaking is itself an act of remembering and rewriting,
and the unspeakable (as the flowing source)
powers that violent, imprecise act
of trying to be
specific.
Never knew what he wanted
except when it was after the fact.
Couldn't.
Did anyway.
Did not complain.
Had privilege.
Afraid to speak up.
Meant to make the best of gloom,
meant to put a light in a darkness,
saw the truth coming on fast
and ducked just in time.
Then went sideways,
stepped over the cracks and holes
and left a wonderful artifact.
There's no big story but the one we write here and now
otherwise it's just a mess,
and we are making meaning from static and
interference patterns;
not the cut-and-dry,
not the reader's summary,
not the real intent,
not the actual message,
not the foolish notion: "this means, on its own, without me."
nor the notion: "it is all meaningless."
no, no, no
it's not pinned to a paradigm
any more than you are
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Friday, April 24th, 2009
| |
3:16 pm
|
She has taste
to think she is unique.
There's a pattern hidden,
cypher and spindle,
red ribbons.
She has taste,
so how can she keep all this to herself?
The first sample of light
in a hallway
at the end of the night,
are you still wishing for sweet relief?
She knows it's absurd
to live on Earth.
She can be trusted,
soaking in the sound.
I saw a place and
it was what I wanted,
rolling by the open window.
What is alone?
The first glint of light on the floor?
This word and this attempt to settle our terms?
I could never say enough.
I can only say too much.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Thursday, April 23rd, 2009
| |
8:35 pm - Scribbled at the end of a day
|
A helicopter flew close overhead during the first girl's presentation at our senior seminar conference. It rains, hard, after mine - which went well, even though I had to gloss over my slides to stay under the time requirement. Verbosity could be the death of me.
After that was over, I went to Kevin's and played around on the drums with Alex. I tried to work on a new song that sounds like it will be something very pretty once it's all configured.
Some words I hastily wrote on the back of an envelope:
I regret nothing
except when I was nothing
you'll hold to the strings
you'll make and you'll make and you'll make and you'll make it all
you do it this way -
I want it that way -
roadsigns and highways
are how you greet me.
six hundred miles,
thin rails coasting to her.
oh, take it easy!
I'm really trying to have enough.
I regret nothing
except when I was nothing.
keeping me in a trance
wind me, wind me,
blow me away, wind, please.
come on.
send me where I should have been.
is that what I really meant?
please let me regret nothing in this one day.
everything.
Look at me looping funny patterns around in my head. Look at how it splays out in pixels on your screen. It's a bundle of miracles that this could happen.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
| |
11:59 pm - Love those PVC pipes
|
In other words, dioxins are an undesirable byproduct of polymerizing PVC and eliminating the production of dioxins while maintaining the polymerization reaction may be difficult. Dioxins created by vinyl chloride production are released by on-site incinerators, flares, boilers, wastewater treatment systems and even in trace quantities in vinyl resins.
The "risk of dioxin emissions puts PVC consistently among the worst materials for human health impacts."
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| |
10:10 pm
|
remember when?
remember now.
or else it will all go too fast.
remember now: it is passing.
the end of this big thing,
this crucial point around which
we pivot
like diamond dust swirled, on a whim,
into a few fragile bodies.
a memory of the other room,
and your voice sliding down to another note
in a way that I don't quite enjoy.
Should I have walked into that room?
Should I have told you how to sing?
I like the way it turned out
occasionally.
I like the way it could
turn.
The goosebumps are not
something I can avoid
they come and go on the whims
of a string -
The shadows on the wall,
all that seem so passing.
The places I almost stayed
and all the times I should have.
remember, now.
remember when?
remember now.
remember
now
|
|
(comment on this)
|
|
|
|
|
