back in canton, in the right lane on the information superhighway

but here's an interesting article i lifted from RAA by way of the NY Times, regarding the live music business:

" June 23, 2008
The Media Equation

Live Music Thrives as CDs Fade

By DAVID CARR
A little over a week ago, Patterson Hood, a guitarist and singer in the Drive-By Truckers, stood in front of a sleepy but amped noon crowd at Bonnaroo, the music festival in Manchester, Tenn., explaining profanely that it was time to, um, wake up. As he kicked into “The Righteous Path,” a song from the group’s new-ish record “Brighter Than Creation’s Dark,” it was if the space in front of him was filled with sunburned bobble-heads, each bouncing in unison to every word: “Trying to hold steady on the righteous path, 80 miles an hour with a worn-out map.”
Like much of Bonnaroo, the set was a display of the fealty between band and audience so thunderous that you barely hear the sound of a dying business.
Yes, the traditional music industry is in the tank — record sales are off another 10 percent this year and the Virgin Megastore in Times Square is closing, according to a Reuters report, joining a host of other record stores. That would seem to be bad news all around for music fans — 70,000 of whom showed up in this remote place to watch 158 bands play — and for Mr. Hood and his band.
Not so, he says.
“The collapse of the record business has been good for us, if anything. It’s leveled the playing field in a way where we can keep slugging it out and finding our fans,” he said while toweling himself off after the set.
With their epic Southern rock sounds whose influences range from William Faulkner to Lynyrd Skynyrd and the kind of musicians who don’t live for a photo shoot, the Drive-By Truckers were never going to be record industry darlings. As it is, they have found a sustainable, blue-collar business model of rock stardom in which selling concert tickets and T-shirts have replaced selling CDs.
“Thank God they can’t download those,” said Mr. Hood, the son of the famed Muscle Shoals Sound Studio bassist David Hood. “They follow us from city to city, see the shows, get drunk and buy shirts.”
After investing early and continuously in the Web, the Drive-By Truckers have a MySpace page with 37,000 friends, offering four songs from “Brighter Than Creation’s Dark” with almost 800,000 downloads alongside a touring schedule that would put James Brown in his prime to shame. This week, they will be in five cities and two countries (Canada, remember?).
Before file sharing tipped over the music business, bands used to tour in support of a record. Now they tour to get the dough to make a record. Cheap recording technology, along with all manner of electronic distribution, means that bands don’t need to sign with a giant recording label to get their music out there.
It has been going on a while. Ani DiFranco, the singer/songwriter, saw the future back in 1991 and skipped signing with a label, making her own records instead. “She would tour, endlessly, in her Volkswagen bug, and have two envelopes, one for the gig money and one for the record money,” said Scot Fisher, the manager and president of Righteous Babe Records, the label they created.
There are still pop acts that drop a record from on high with the help of a big label and see touring as a nuisance, but Bonnaroo in particular is a place where bands and fans have a much closer relationship, with direct sales of merchandise and recorded product. It can make for intimate ties: a woman in a cowboy hat who was carpeted with tattoos was asked the name of a particular song. “I don’t know what the name is, but I know who it’s about,” she said, with a wink.
In a sure sign of détente between the old and new faces of the business, Metallica, which very publicly went after file-sharers with corrosive rhetoric and aggressive legal tactics, showed up at Bonnaroo.
Back in the day, Metallica had good facts — downloaders were stealing their work — and a bad argument, one that could not stand up to a shift in paradigm where many fans walk around with their entire music collection in a shirt pocket. “We support live music,” the band’s singer and guitarist, James Hetfield, told the cheering hordes.
Established bands like Metallica and Pearl Jam, which also played Bonnaroo, may have taken some hits on overall sales. But the lower (iTunes) and nonexistent (file-sharing) profit margins on recorded product are a little easier to take, because ticket prices have doubled in the last 10 years, according to Gary Bongiovanni, editor in chief of Pollstar, a trade magazine that covers the live music industry.
For some bands, like the jam band Umphrey’s McGee, some music sales are a direct offshoot of the shows. The band reserves five tickets at every show for people who want to tape it and also records every set with room mikes and the sound board. Three-disc sets are burned on the spot and sold for $20. (Other bands have taken to popping the evening’s performance onto a thumb drive and selling that to departing fans.)
“If we can break even on a recording, then the rest of the business will take care of itself,” said Joel Cummins, the keyboard player in the band. “I think that the Internet gives us a way of getting connected with our fans. We get to make the kind of music we like — it’s definitely a little more complicated than just three chords and the truth — and use a long-tail business model to find and play for people who want to see what we can do live.”
The buy-share-trade dynamic was visible all over Bonnaroo, whether it was food, space in the tent or other substances. To one crusty old attendee, it felt a bit like the Yippie camp-in at Spokane that he stumbled onto back in 1974. (Speaking of which, when did tie-dye come back, and how can we make it go away again?)
But for musicians, the network is all part of the business. Selling out, once the death knell for bands seeking credibility, has now become an end in itself.
“This is by far our best record, if you ask me, so the tickets for shows are doing really well,” said Mr. Hood, sounding very much like an old label hand. “But then, the gas prices are killing us.”"

buckets of sleep, buckets of backaches

i've been having shitloads of fun up here in kent for the last few days. however, we started off with a marathon frisbee session the first night (more on that later) and my legs and spine haven't really recovered yet (as a result, most likely, of sleeping on a couch smaller than i am). i'm trying to work up some urban exploration story for the second half of my BB prompt way back when (though you'll see i've caught myself up on the other ones), and hopefully i'll post that tonight.

still having a hell of a time picking anything good out of that music video thing i made.

also would like to write a bit about what i've been up to lately, but i'm headed out shortly for dinner with some people.

i think i blew out my blog engine the other day with that 11-post day. also, it's harder to blog when you actually have real people to hang out with instead.

i'm really, really diggin' regina spektor's "soviet kitsch" and "begin to hope". been listening to some shins too, but it hasn't really grabbed me yet. mason's and trey's new albums are both excellent. i'll try to do proper reviews on them later this week.

saw prince caspian last night with andrea and bowes. it was a decent sequel. maybe more thoughts on that later, too. the internet gets crazy when you haven't been on it for awhile.

has anyone ever been to the wamu theatre in seattle? i'm thinking of seeing either the raconteurs or the cardinals/oasis there in the fall and i'm wondering if it's a shitty venue (the fact that it's called the wamu theatre already partially answers this question). i'm just a little worried by the idea of driving 5 hours each way and paying at least 50 bucks for a ticket to see the cardinals play for (likely) 45 minutes or so and then have oasis totally suck (which they have appeared to do since about 1996). at the same time, ryan on stage with oasis would be awesome. but probably not worth it. i'm more amenable to seeing the raconteurs, but they usually also play pretty short shows (a little over an hour) and though the kills are opening for them, i don't know how i feel about the kills. anybody have any kills-input?

OH MY GOD MY LIFE IS SO HARD!!

hand jive

(for Bloomsbury):

The info I'm using for this comes from here: http://www.wikihow.com/Read-Palms

1. Heart Line

Okay, according to the rubric on the right hand (dominant hand) we've got:
a) Starts under the index finger = content with love life
b) Largely parallel to the head line = good handle on emotions, but then suddenly the head line curves up really dramatically and touches the heart line just as the heart line gets all wonky and half-faded. I'm really curious what the fuck that could possibly mean.
c) After the aforementioned weirdness, it becomes curvy (freely expresses thoughts and emotions).
d) a few small lines crossing the heart line (emotional trauma).

On the left hand, it's the same, except it's completely lacking the weird part I mentioned above, and thusly stops under the middle finger (selfish) instead. Considering what the wiki said about left hand being natural traits and right hand being choices, I find this really interesting. Mostly for reasons that I will totally tell anyone who wants to know but probably won't just post blindly on my blog.

For the record, I would characterize myself as being expressive and having a tendency to fall in love easily, as well as having a few instances of emotional trauma that those lines would account for. So at least in the case of the heart line, I think my reading is probably pretty accurate.

2. Head Line

a) Curved line = creativity
b) Separate from life line = adventure, enthusiasm for life
c) Multiple crosses = momentous decisions

I wonder if the weird sudden upslope that makes the head line contact the love line is indicative of some insane burst of creativity or something. Which apparently lead me to no longer be selfish. Or something. This is cool.

Interestingly, my left hand head line is longer (clear and focused thinking) and intersects with the life line (life is boring). It also has a huge break in it (inconsistencies in thought).

This reading, I think, is also pretty accurate; at least compared to how I perceive myself.

3. Life Line

a) Curvy = energetic
b) Deep = vitality

Also, there's a fucking insane break near the top of the life line, where it swings down and towards the lower left corner of my right hand. I have no idea what this means. The closest thing I can figure is that it counts as multiple life lines (extra vitality)? Hmm...must be all that diet coke.

The life line on my left hand is further away from my thumb (though the one on the right isn't really close to it either). Otherwise, it's mostly the same as the right hand, except it's missing the break/extra line.

4. Fate Line

a) Starts joined to life line = self-made, develops aspirations early on
b) One large break in direction = prone to external forces

For once, the left hand line is almost exactly the same. So I guess that means at least in once sense I have stayed the same as I was "originally". I just thought of that asian girl from "Juno" who keeps shouting "All babies want to get borned!" at the abortion clinic...

I had a little trouble with the last part (the palm/hand size), but the one that appeared to fit my palm description the best was "fire":

• spontaneous, enthusiastic and optimistic
• sometimes egoistic, impulsive and insensitive
• extroverts
• do things boldly and instinctively

I can see how maybe this sort of describes me, at least sometimes. However, in a lot of other elemental-based classification thingamajiggers, I'm usually classified as a "water" person (Cancer is a water sign, for example):

• creative, perceptive and sympathetic
• can be moody, emotional and inhibited
• introverts
• do things quietly and intuitively.

Which I think is probably a much better description of me. Except when I'm blogging. Or drunk. Or drunkenly blogging.

Also, I didn't see a marriage line...but I think there's probably a good reason for that ;)

Largely, this reading was creepily accurate. The differences between my left hand and my right hand could definitely indicate some major changes I made in my life in my teen years, moving away from a lot of the beliefs and values I had as a kid (both innately and through learning from parents, etc.) to almost the extreme opposites of those values. The traits reflected in some of the left-hand lines are some of those I became less interested in, while some of the ones shows in the right hand (especially some of the points where the lines all inexplicably do weird things) could definitely account for some of the inexplicably weird things that have indeed happened to me in the last decade.

This was very, very cool. Props to who I'm assuming was Toria for thinking of it (if it wasn't Toria, sorry).

eating as a non-self-contained activity

(for Bloomsbury):

Okay, so my first idea was to copy this one restaurant I once saw in Boston, at least in appearance. It was a diner that was built into an old train car (it might have been a trolley car, but a train car seems bigger, so that seems more likely). But then I realized that there's nowhere in Kent Ohio that a restaurant in a train car could be that it wouldn't be difficult to get to and/or wouldn't just look stupid and gimmicky. And Pullman already has one train sitting in the middle of it, so it would just seem like I was copying were I to build there.

So the train car is out.

So...I'd like to think this other idea would sell, but maybe it wouldn't. I really like eating, but I also really like doing other things while I'm eating, and I get the impression that lots of other people do too. So the first idea i had was to abolish the tradition of centering meal-eating around a table (which can only comfortably accomodate four people and still allow each of them to talk to each of the other, and which also makes it so you can't talk to anyone at any other table, without getting up and moving around, which is generally discouraged at ninety-nine percent of restaurants).

The second idea I had was to allow people to also engage in other non-social activities while eating if they so chose. Downtown Kent has a lot of multi-story row-type businesses, and occasionally over the years, some of these buildings have been owned by the same company or person, who puts a few different but complimentary businesses in on the various floors. So I was thinking that a restaurant might go well with, say, a bookstore and a little bar, or maybe a bookstore and a coffeeshop. or a coffeeshop and a little co-op. Or something. Those details aren't particularly important to the restaurant design itself, I suppose. Though I'm personally partial to the bookstore/bar combination. Who doesn't like to combine eating with reading and drinking? Nobody, that's who.

Well, the restaurant itself would be pretty similar to an idea that myself and a friend of mine came up with for a restaurant a few years ago: the vegetarian equivalent of a diner. This would attract, specifically two niche markets that traditional restaurants have largely failed to fill in my seven-year experience as a vegetarian: vegetarians who want to occasionally eat greasy food, and non-vegetarians who want to eat a meatless meal without having to know what TVP and falafel are.

The menu would probably be open to interpretation, but I'm thinking heavy on grease and non-complicated dishes. I mean, you're not going to come to a diner where you can sit on floor cushions and read a book and then go upstairs and get crunk afterwards and expect to order roast duck with white wine sauce. Or whatever. I'm thinking pretty heavy on things like hash browns, grilled sandwiches (my friend once suggested having a grilled cheese bar with various strange toppings, and though I like that idea I question other people's love of grilled cheese) and the like. I'm thinking like hangover food for hippies, but the type of food that non-veggies who have complexes about veggie food would still want to eat.

It's also very essential that this restaurant opens early, stays open late, and serves all of the food on the menu all day. Seriously, what's up with restaurants who have awesome lunch sandwiches or something and then won't let you have one because it's 5:12pm?

The restaurant itself definitely has brick walls, maybe adorned with paintings from some local artists who hangs them there for sale at for a modest price. Maybe there's a little shelf in the corner where customers can buy bread and things we ended up not using that day, so as to cut down on the amount of food we throw away. Maybe there isn't a shelf if that's a stupid idea. There would be a few tables just to appease people who like tables (hey, tables are alright, and so are people that use them). Otherwise there would be lots of comfy chairs and couches and possibly coffee tables. Ideally, the restaurant would be set up somewhat bar-like, with the counter and the kitchen in the back of the room, and the chairs/tables, etc. in front of it, immediately after you came in the front door. It would be cool if there was a wait staff, but I don't really see the point. You would just come up to the counter and tell people what you wanted and when it was done you'd come up and get it. Seems more straightforward that way.

Yeah, this place definitely wouldn't be for people who wanted their every need taken care of and catered to...

As you can probably tell, I'm making this up as I go. I think it's a pretty cool idea though, and could probably work in a few places I've lived (though likely not Pullman, because the demographic of people it's largely aimed towards mostly never come down from campus). If you have any questions about my crazy restaurant vision, I'd be happy to elaborate.

i just laughed and laughed just now i laughed.

check it.


Supreme Court Rules Death Penalty Is 'Totally Badass'

god, i love being a turtle!

TMNT might have been on to something (specifically wearing color-coded bandannas tied around the middle of your face with eye holes cut in them), but they were also definitely NOT on to something (eating pizza with ice cream on it). it's gross.

ba-rock obama

just saw this on stereogum.

it's totally a geek thing, but i think it's fucking awesome that obama's favorite stones song is "gimme shelter". since i revealed not very long ago that it's also my favorite stones song. a lot of the other stuff on his list is pretty standard fare i think for people his age (even the "blood on the tracks" thing, though i love that album to death, isn't really a surprise for someone in their 50s who pays attention to music at all).

the miles and the coltrane give me hope for our great nation, however.

i'll try to work up some of those videos i mentioned yesterday sometime today. i also have to post some pictures from the trip. i HAVE to.

but right now i'm going to eat something and then start in on those bloomsbury bloggers prompts that i've fallen behind on.

i hope you don't have an RSS feed to this blog, because today i'm gonna be blowin' your shit up.

a thought from the actual present

i was talking to bowes awhile back and he posited (in response to me saying that i wanted a relationship with someone who i could be nice to) something like (and i'm paraphrasing heavily) that everyone gets with someone else primarily because they want to make themselves happy. i of course bristled at this because i like to think sunshine and puppies secretely shoot from people's asses. but there's definitely some truth to it. however, i also wondered today: what if what would make you personally happy would be making someone else happy? like, you could meet your own selfish need for happiness by doing nice things for other people? i think that's sort of my thing; empathy is personally satisfying. so yeah, maybe when i'm interested in someone it's largely because i think they'll improve my life, but since i gain a lot of my self-worth by being able to help other people and be empathetic towards them, it would ideally also be helping to improve their life in the process. beans.

wrapping up the cruise thoughts

(from 5/19 - 5/20):

went to san juan yesterday. took an actually interesting and historically/culturally relevant tour of the bacardi factory. and got drunk. then we went into old san juan and toured an old coastal fortress from the 1500s. then we shopped a bit (i.e. i followed my family around while they bought things), walking up and down old colonial roads that now mostly serve as alleys and one-way streets. then we were back to the ship and got drunk again. all before like 6pm.

i wondered just now if road infrastructure has more to do with america's status in pre-industrial times vs. other then-"first world" countries. western europe, for example, already had huge cities with roads built for foot traffic and carriage traffic when industrialism hit, forcing them to adjust those roads to having cars on them, or to tear up the roads and build new ones within the layout of their already-present cities. america only had a little of this going on, mostly in the extreme east (evidence of this still abounds in the boston area, for example), but most of the country wasn't at all built over when cars became important (see: the west). so we could begin building and planning cities with car/truck traffic already in mind. this seems like an important circumstantial advantage. does this make any sense? this idea seems sound, but i can't seem to express it coherently.

...

just got back from grand turk. the water was absurdly clear, and there were some great fish. of course the coral was all dead from all the zillions of tourists stepping on it over the years, but that's to be expected in a non-protected area like the beach we were at.

snorkeling is great though. like backpacking underwater. sunburn seems to be mostly receding. nobody's speaking spanish anymore; i can still catch about one word out of ten, but most of it seems to be some weird creole that i've never heard before.

i've come to the conclusion that couples dancing is cool. if you're actually with someone who knows what they're doing. not that i have a right to judge people on their dancing abilities, or lack thereof.

some thoughts at 2am

(from 6/17):

one thing that always strikes me when i'm in central america is that being unhappy with your job is such a first-world problem. or even largely an upper-middle-class white person problem. people here are happy just to have a job. they have other, more important things to be unhappy about. so many of these people perform simple, semi-mindless jobs that here, in the U.S., high school or college kids would mope their way through. but these people perform them with the appreciation and excitement that someone in the U.S. would reserve for, say, a job pitching in the majors or something.

a really cynical part of me likes to (or wants to) think that this happiness is feigned, that it's just acted out so that these people can get bigger tips, or better customer comments or whatever. but it's largely not. i've talked to a few of these people directly even about this. and a lot of the people, especially the ones working on the cruise ship itself (who work crazy hours for only a little pay and a month off each year) are genuinely happy to work a job that would be considered only slightly higher on the scale of humanity than rape in the U.S. it sort of puts things in perspective.

i'm not a fan of heat. it takes until about zero degrees before i get really uncomfortable in the winter, but it only takes until about seventy-five degrees before i get really uncomfortable in the summer; esp. in the midwest and the caribbean, where the air is made out of water.

it's funny because when i'm working at accomplishing something i can at least tolerate heat. my stints working at the refinery, parks and rec, parking services, landscaping in august, etc. proved that. but i just cannot understand people who purposely put themselves in uber-sunny and/or hot situations as a form of leisure. if us crackers were supposed to live on the beach, we'd be black.

take this quote from my mom, for instance: "i'll sit in the shade now; i should get the sun i need from being in the water". grammatically, this sentence makes sense to me - idealogically, not so much.

so now, while everyone else is sitting in the sun, slathered in lotion and soaking up the alcohol, i'm sitting in the shade, writing and drinking water and wearing clothes. i'm awesome. or something.

some horse shit

(from 6/15):

horses today. we started off with the usual, somewhat demoralizing bunting-family routine of waking up at 730am (on vacation) and proceeding to some planned activity. this time it was taking a tender to shore. by the time breakfast finally got to a place in my digestive system that made my brain start working, we were bumping around in the back of a mitsubishi fuso (which seems to be the working vehicle of choice in all of central america) with a wooden trailer attached to it, covered by a makeshift tin roof. that woke me up.

as always, i got the one recalcitrant, semi-mentally-handicapped horse of the group. this is a recurring theme in horse-related ventures for me. just in the circle we were walking the horses in while everyone else got saddled up, my horse broke the circle and went into the feeding pen four times, which resulted in a lot of people screaming in creole and hitting the horse a lot, as well as my right leg getting caught between a fence and a horse flank, which in turn resulted in a lot of blood and pain for me (not the horse).

once we got going in earnest, the horse came around a bit. he stayed mostly on the trail, though he was a little too fast and i had to keep reining him in for like 30 minutes to avoid eating other-horse-ass.

then we went riding in the ocean, at depth just below the horse's head. we were bareback for this, but it was easier than it sounds because of the water depth.

we finished out the day by sitting around on the beach, which sort of combines my least and most favorite bunting-vacation activities: sitting in the hot sun for a long time for no reason and swimming in the ocean. one of those two things was awesome.

it's interesting how hard the touristy parts of the islands here try to imbue you with "island spirit" - carefully chosen music, ethnic help that conveniently conforms to people's expectations, decor that's obviously not natural, but reinforces the ideas that white people have when they think of reggae culture, etc. who defines the amorphous "island spirit" anyway?

boat love

(from 6/15):

after dinner, we spent some time hanging out on the deck, at the back of the boat. this is quite possibly my favorite part of any boat-riding or cruising (despite my many, many issues with the latter). i love being on a boat in the ocean pretty much ever, though i suppose sailing is better than engine boating, especially at night under a near-full moon. it was crazy-hazy tonight, but enough of the moonlight got through that there was a trail of silver on the tops of the waves all the way to the horizon.

i'm generally leery about combining uber-capitalist ventures like cruising and romance, but i think sitting out in the middle of the night in the middle of the ocean on the deck of a boat would be a pretty good date.

miami airport

(from 6/15):

there's always a moment of shock when i land in ohio in the summer after spending the semester in washington. hitting the wall of mugginess for the first time, you can almost choke on it. the wetness of the air is a surprise - something you get used to after a few days, but a lot different from the dry, breezy air in the desert. here, the air just hangs.

then, going from ohio to miami, you have a similar experience. i always subconsciously think it can't get any stickier, and heavier. and then it does.

this time, we didn't walk directly out of the terminal into the haze; waiting for a bus under the airport terminal, we were surrounded by the cacophony of old vibrating fans and AC units battling mightily against the heat.

but, a bit ago, after dinner, walking along apath peppered by signs warning of the sresence of poisonous snakes and alligators, at 9pm, the humidity was still stifling even lacking the sun.

i didn't sleep on the plane today, which is weird. then i took something like a five hour nap in the hotel room. with this awesome bed. i love good beds. (that's what she said)

i had a bunch of weird dreams, as i often do when i nap. i can't really remember any of them clearly, but the end of the last one was melodramatic and sort of tearjerking and then i woke up and didn't know where i was, and i was tired and hungry and had this suddenly really strong urge to just be in my bedroom at home.

a thought at 4:30am

(from 6/13):

i always thought that the most profound mark of a relationship or friendship was (at least on some level) the point at which you were comfortable sharing anything and everything, sure that the other person would be willing to listen and to indulge you. now i think there's a level beyond blind acceptance. or more correctly, that blind acceptance doesn't really exist. it's a quality we create and apply to a relationship that we enjoy so much or that is so important to us that we force ourselves to idealize it. nobody is 100% indulgent. so perhaps the real final stage is this: reaching a point with someone where you are willing to tell them everything and anything but because you know they'll either be okay with that or willing to listen to what you have to say OR you respect them enough that you're willing to accept them NOT being okay with it, because you understand and trust that that denial must be based on sound reasoning.

i thought of this the other day because i was talking to a good friend of mine and communicating some pretty heavy stuff, but i wasn't nervous at all about doing so. i assumed at the time it was because said person was perfectly understanding in my eyes, but later realized this wasn't really realistic...instead i just knew that if they didn't want to deal with my problems that i would be able to accept that because i could fully believe that their reasons for turning me down were sound. cool.

the tyranny of morning

in my six month absence from ohio, i had forgotten the primary peril of couch-sleeping at chez bowes: that the guy who owns the house has literally an army of relations and servants who come and go in the early hours of the morning seemingly constantly.

i apparently slept through everyone leaving for work this morning, after falling asleep (finally) at 6am, but i couldn't sleep through a middle-aged lady tromping up and down the steps carrying huge crates full of laundry starting at 10am.

then there's the always-awkward portion of the day that's choosing the right time to get off the couch so that i can get to the bathroom, put my pants on, and get cleaned up before coming back out and introducing myself as the homeless guy who sleeps on the couch. good times.

deflowering my camera

here're a few pictures from my new camera's maiden voyage: my brother's graduation from OSU. very seldom will you see the shoe this empty.

things i saw in SkyMall

1. iMuffs - $179.99
2. 42' iPod TV - $1699.99
3. capcom vintage arcade game cabinet - $3,695.95 (+ $200.00 S+H)
4. voice-activated R2-D2 - $119.95
5. personal between-the-sheets bed fan - $79.95
6. world's largest crossword puzzle (over 20,000 clues) - $29.99
7. marshmallow shooter - $24.95
8. aquabot robotic pool cleaner - $2,199.99
9. the only gutter-cleaning robot - $129.99
10. pet crate/end table - $299.99
11. hi-performance running sandals - $79.99
12. mlb scrabble - $36.00
13. personal breathalyzer - $189.99
14. counterfeit bill detector - $449.99
15. edge brownie pan (obviously a ridiculous idea) - $39.95

two thoughts on this:
1. who the fuck has such terrible impulse control that they not only decide to buy something like a counterfeit bill detector, but they also can't even wait to get off of the airplane they're on to do so?

2. there is a preponderance of robots in SkyMall.

random scribbles

not scribbles coffee company (or as i called it while talking to andrea earlier "the coffee squirrel"), but instead a bunch of random notes i wrote in my notebook while travelling last week. i like to write long things (as you've noticed by now, i'm sure), but i also have a habit of writing single lines, single thoughts. these often turn into song lyrics, but even if they don't, they are often still worth writing down for various reasons. so, completely context-less, here are some:

i spent most of today with no shirt on. sorry.

i've decided i have a genetic predisposition towards finding eastern european women attractive.

50 spf suntan lotion just saved my life.

there's a john and joan cusack movie that i haven't seen.

we're currently switching back and forth between "nancy grace" and "the bachelorette" on TV.

we passed a sign today (in san juan) outside a bar that read: "NBA Finals. Full Game. With Sound."

sign on a taxi in san juan: "it is nice to be important. it is more important to be nice".

food eaten in the 2 hours before dinner: veggie burger and fries, two pieces of pizza, one sushi roll, a bowl of ice cream, and a martini. fuck.

"alvin and the chipmunks" is a fucking terrible movie.

welcome to Not Wearing Pants Is Fucking Awesome.

i now have three green dress shirts. i don't know why. i look terrible in green.

videowned!

i made an hourlong video (or so) of my playing a bunch of my songs right before i left pullman, with the hope of being able to post a few songs on youtube or something. however (of course), after testing the sound for something like five hours, and getting it set just right, i ended with a recording that had all sorts of pops and crackles and overloads in it. so i really don't know if any of the songs are useable.

on the good side, i now know what i look like when i'm singing. i can't say it's very flattering...but it's good to at least know.

anyway, i'm going to watch the whole thing tomorrow and maybe edit out a song or two that i can actually post. and when i do, i will.

did that makes sense? it's getting to be that time of the night where shit just falls apart as soon as it leaves my neurons.

this is what happens when you have only CC TV for a week...

you end up watching an hour of random music videos on loop constantly. now, thanks to the magic of youtube, i can also bring them to you.

this is the TV i watched on my vacation:




and this. thanks again UMG, for disabling embedding on youtube. and all the sense that makes.

dance, sucka!

i watched "blades of glory" today. and i thought it was hilarious. alright?! i'm not ashamed of myself! it was fucking hilarious!! stop judging me!!

also, i just installed the final firefox 3 thingamajig.

lastly, i should have reliable wireless for at least five days. so prepare to get super-spammed. maybe starting as soon as i finish catching up on my facebook stuff.

important. very important.

i'll be back.

on again

i'm back. peeling sunburn and all. i'm trying to tidy some things up in the next day or two (including myself), but i'm hoping to hit kent by tuesday evening, so i should be online more often then...i'll have to hunt a few of you down on IM that i haven't talked to for awhile. because, you know, that makes a lot more sense than just calling you or something.

but anyway, my inbox wants me to know that there are 8 million things going on that i should know about. so if any of those things involve you, please have patience until tuesday. i also have a few bloomsbury prompts to catch up as well as like 40 real pages of writing that i'll transcribe some stuff from and about 200 pictures, some of which aren't mortally embarrassing.

i'd write more now, but i have to save bandwidth for downloading the ryan adams show that i missed while i was gone. priorities, yo.

also, my phone is completely dead now, thanks to toria ;) so...if you want to call, call my canton number. if you don't know what it is, ask me and i'll tell you. i almost posted it...but even I'M not THAT stupid...

also, i may have a surprise for you all on wednesday.

off again...

i'm taking off in a few hours on vacation for a little over a week. i should be back on the 22nd, but until then i won't have any internet or phone communication ability.

for those of you that are ohio-local, i should be able to actually interact with you socially when i get back too, because there won't be any more bunting vacation-preparation insanity to put up with/avoid.

for those of you who aren't ohio local, it looks like i'll be back in pullman on july 26th. though i haven't bought the ticket yet, so that's not official.

now i have to go back to packing shorts, tank tops, and dress clothes. this totally sounds like my kind of vacation.

sike.

bring your own hollowed-out camel carcass

My first inclination when compiling this list was to plumb my bookshelves and put together a list of the greatest and most compelling literary minds in my collection as the prospective guests at my hypothetical party.

Then I thought about how most of my “dinner parties” work. Usually there aren’t enough plates to go around, and if there are, they’re mismatched in both size and appearance. Most of the guests end up sitting on the floor; lines of sight are awkward if you want to talk to more than one person at a time. This isn’t really because I’m incapable of laying out a Victorian-style spread; I just find the enterprise largely pointless. As I think I mentioned in my previous post, dinner is more about the people and the conversation than it is either food or artifice. Not necessarily the kind of environment you’d want to inject a Nietzsche or a Tolkien into. Let’s face it: most well-known literary types (especially non-contemporary ones) are going to be disinterested in sitting on cushions, eating grilled cheese and listening to my upstairs neighbors blare German trance music.

My second inclination was to pick a bunch of my friends to invite, but that’s less interesting in the sense that it’s less random, I have a list of friends that I haven’t seen in a long time that I could use easily to fill a table, and most of you know at least some of those people already anyway. So finally I picked a bunch of people who I see as personal influences but who I also think would be fun to have in my shitty apartment. So here they are:

Pair #1: Ryan Adams and Bob Dylan

This is the one pair I’m pretty much entirely serious about. Adams and Dylan have probably influenced me more than any pair of writers (though I would consider them writers too, myself) through their music and songwriting. They both seem to have similar attitudes about life, similar disregard for the lure of popular fame, and are similarly inscrutable – though Dylan achieves this inscrutability through introversion and Adams through extroversion.

I would love to be a fly on the wall during their own conversation, as if either of them actually attempted to talk to me I would probably be reduced to a puddle of stupidity (in fact, I met Adams briefly this past winter and couldn’t manage much other than stutters, sputters, and a few half-crazy giggles).

These two writers, more than any other I have come across, are not only wonderfully expressive, but are so in such a way that resonates so well with my own beliefs and approach to life that sitting around on couch cushions with them would be enough to melt my brain (in a good way). Then I’d probably get really drunk on cocktails, get out my guitars and insist that they take turns playing until they would get really uncomfortable and leave.

Pair #2: Hugh Laurie and Sir Ian McKellen

I wanted to pick at least two actors or actresses, but there weren’t any actresses I could think of to invite that I wouldn’t embarrass myself in front of by staring at throughout the entire dinner, so I figured inviting a British guy and a gay British guy was a safer bet. Even though my scruffiest beard is still about five tiers lower on the awesome-scruffiness ladder than Hugh Laurie’s five o’clock shadow, I could probably tear my eyes away from his jawline long enough to hold a decent conversation.

Not only does Hugh play my favorite television character (on House), he also has his fingers in about thirty-nine other interesting things at any given time, and seems to be a genuinely interesting and pithy guy.

Add this to McKellen’s venerable presence (Christopher Lee and Peter O’Toole also came to mind, but my instinct was to go with McKellen), his wit, and his decades of just generally kicking ass and being awesome, and I could imagine the two of these actors would hit it off extremely well, probably drink more than they ate, and provide me with enough secondhand wisdom that I just wouldn’t have to pay attention to life at all for the next ten years because I’d already know everything.

Pair #3: Bear Grylls and Les Stroud

Originally, I wanted my third pair to be people who are already dead. This is mostly because inviting a pair of zombies to your dinner party means more food for everyone else, but also partially because I thought it would be interesting to talk to someone who lived in another time and/or a different culture. This opened entirely too many possibilities, though, so I limited myself to choosing currently living people of western European descent. Or Australian descent. Or whatever.

Bear Grylls and Les Stroud, besides having a lot to talk about with each other, would actually fulfill my main desire in wanting to invite zombies (despite being very much alive) in the sense that they would probably forego eating the food given to them on plates in favor of eating some animal’s testicles, or half-dead insects, or birds they shot down with improvised slingshots made from rubber bands and parts of my car. They are both hosts of survival “reality” shows (I use that label tentatively, based on my less-than positive opinion of ninety-five percent of reality shows): Bear’s intense but somewhat staged Man Vs. Wild and Les’s far more awesome but more slowly paced Survivorman. I don’t necessarily have an intense philosophical agenda for pairing these two. Of course I’m interested in the outdoors, backpacking, wildernesses, and the like, and it would be great to be able to talk to each of them about some of their experiences, but I think it would be just as interesting to see their two approaches (at least as those approaches are portrayed on their respective shows) intersect and see how they interacted with each other. Plus, Les would likely bust out his harmonica (probably while trying to heat leftovers over a fire he conjured using a windbreak, bits of fabric from his underwear, the bowl of a pipe he got from an ancient native american fasting ceremony and some wood shavings). I just hope that Bear wouldn’t gut an entire camel carcass and crawl inside of it when it came time to fall asleep on the floor of my apartment. At least not without fronting the cash for the cleaning bill.

"highway mixtape" or "blogging diarrhea"

I’m cheating in two ways on this one. For one, I already compose a monthly mixtape for my other blog (the crazy one), and I’m going to use one of those compilations for this prompt. For two, this compilation isn’t about a particular place as much as it’s about a trip I took one weekend in January of this year.

The trip was from Pullman to Salem, Oregon and then to Seattle Washington and then back to Pullman in a rented neon blue Ford Focus hatchback during the worst snowstorm to hit eastern Washington in my three years living there so far. I was chasing my favorite band, the Cardinals, up the west coast for two nights in a row, and then being chased back east by a fleet of snow-laden clouds. I had been a bit of a social recluse for the entire previous fall, and hadn’t gotten out much except to work, and so the idea of going on a road trip, especially by myself, was a little overwhelming. I was nervous as I headed towards Salem, despite the then-perfect weather, that the entire trip would end up being a depressing, lonely wash, and therefore a waste of about three hundred dollars I had already had to conjure using my credit card.

The trip ended up being fantastic. The weather was beautiful for the first day and a half, and I got to both Salem and Seattle in time to spend consecutive afternoons wandering around each downtown, and then walking from my hotel to the theatre. Both Cardinals’ shows were easily the best concerts I’d seen in ten years of seeing live music. Even the driving, even in the heart of the snowstorm on the way back across Washington from Seattle, was enjoyable.

As well as being an adventure in and of itself, the music I played while on the road ended up being an almost perfect music of genres and emotionally important songs that served as the ideal background to the landscape rolling by, whether it was the dry, sun-soaked rolling hills of southeastern Washington or the lonely wind-swept snowdrifts of the I-90 shoulder coming down out of the Snoqualmie Pass, heading towards Pullman.

Music is already a very important element to any road trip for me; many of my friends can attest that I put more time into picking CDs to my car CD wallet than I do planning the trip’s route, or packing more necessary things like food or clothes. It’s important to me to have a good sonic accompaniment to any adventure. Supposedly smell is the sense most strongly tied to memory; to me hearing (and hearing music in particular) is a close second. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of songs that for me are tied to specific memories, events, people, etc., some to the point that I can’t listen to a certain song without tearing up, or smiling, or laughing, or having a nearly overwhelming urge to call a certain person or to sit down and write a story before memories balloon out of control in my brain.

So, having said that, here’s my mixtape for the Seattle and Salem roadtrip of January 2008. I’ll reupload this album as well, so when you’re done reading if you want to download the songs onto your computer, you can. Hope you like.

1) The Flaming Lips – “Fight Test” – Everyone loves “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots”, but the first track off of this album is just as good in my opinion. This is the song that came on as I rolled into Salem for the first time, and navigated a few one-way streets while crossing through a wonderfully homey and rural downtown area on my way to my hotel while the sunlight from the setting sun glinted off the roof of the capitol building. The song’s excellent soul-searching lyrics (remarkably straightforward for a Flaming Lips song) are perfect for a roadtrip song, for being on the road and for being between definite points existentially and/or geographically.

2) Nujabes – “Blessing It (Remix)” – A few tracks from the Nujabes albums Metaphorical Music and Modal Soul factor into this mixtape. They are two of my all-time favorite albums, partially because they are great albums in their own right and partially because they were albums that I listened to heavily from January 2007 to August 2007, which was a pretty dramatic and transitional time in my life, and so just about every song is loaded with extra meanings and memories for me. This song came first on the mixtape because it’s more upbeat, and is all about just being appreciative and humble, which is always a good feeling to have when you’re tearing through southeastern Washington with the wind in your hair. Plus, there’s some biographical significance in the line “Children of the Sun, watch out we’re comin’ for ya, rockin’ from the ‘natti, midwest to California” in the sense that I’ve definitely rocked this song a few times while driving west from the ‘natti (also known by non-locals as Cincinatti, Ohio) to the west coast.

3) Radiohead – “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” – This song has a sort of feel to it that’s lilting and driving at the same time. It builds throughout the song, and is the perfect sort of tune melodically for the ups and downs and winding high-altitude roads leading through the mountains in the heart of Washington on a sunny fifty-something day. Plus, In Rainbows had just come out recently and I was listening to it obsessively at the time.

4) Stereolab – “Hallucinex” – Stereolab was a band I was introduced to in the whirlwind summer of 2007. In particular their album Sound Dust was a soundtrack to a lot of summer adventures in which I was attempting to forget the uncertainty of my future professionally and emotionally. This song in particular stuck out to me when it came up later during my January trip because of its jammy, relaxed vibe in comparison to some of the other, meatier songs on the album. Plus, the moment when the lead singer shouts “Ka-bang!” is so hilarious and adorable at once, it’s enough to recommend the song on its own.

5) Girl Talk – “Hold Up” – Incorporating a Girl Talk song into a mixtape is a tough business, but Night Ripper was an integral part of the first part of my roadtrip (if you haven’t noticed, this tracklist is largely chronological, starting on Friday in Pullman and progressing as my drive progressed). I picked this particular “track” from the album because of the inclusion of the guitar line from the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” and part of Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So”. I don’t care much for the other Girl Talk albums, but I love this one and this is one of my favorite parts of the album.

6) Nujabes – “Feather” – This is a slower Nujabes song, and if I’m not mistaken I was now moving from Salem after the first night’s show towards Seattle, in a light but grey coastal rainstorm on Saturday morning, still entranced by the brilliance of the show, but also a bit reflective from spending an entire day and half alone in my car, in a hotel room, and then in my car again. This song also reminds me very clearly of my drive back to Pullman in August 2007, where I played the album twice while passing through Minneapolis en route to visit my friend Sarah, and then again right after on my way through Montana.

7) Jurassic 5 – “The Influence” – It was hard to pick a single Jurassic 5 track, because they’re such a great band to listen to when driving. This was shortly after the sun came out on the second day of driving and the realization set in that the rest of my day literally would consist of driving on the highway, walking around in downtown Seattle, and seeing my favorite band at the Paramount. Needless to say, I rapped along with the whole thing. This song also contains the anti-bourgeois battle cry “Fuck yo Lexus!” which was adopted by my friends and I in middle-class Ohio years ago.

8) Nujabes – “The Final View” – This is the last of the Nujabes songs on the mix. It’s an instrumental, and a little more atmospheric. This was during a particularly quiet and reflective part of the drive. It’s off the same album that I mentioned earlier, and also puts me in mind of the trip I took to North Dakota in August 2007. It’s also a song that I associate with driving around my “hometown” of Kent Ohio in the summer of 2007, searching for spots in the hazy, humid, mugginess of midnight to play frisbee with friends undisturbed for a few hours.

9) Radiohead – “Reckoner” – This song is sort of the lynchpin of the mixtape. This song I played a few times on this trip, but remember most clearly the time that I had already come down out of the mountains and was nearly back in Pullman at the end of the trip. It was dark at this point, and the snow was still blowing (there was already a foot or so on the ground) and the road was nearly non-visible. This song is what Radiohead does best; it’s absolutely haunting, empty, and dark, and best represents the lonely, still sensation that is always part of driving hundreds or thousands of miles by yourself on empty roads.

10) Wilco – “Heavy Metal Drummer” – This song is set in the tracklist as it is to be a sort of foil to “Reckoner”. Wilco does melancholy very well, but this song is particularly nostalgic while remaining idealistic, and makes me think of the optimistic beginning of a journey, or the optimistic end of one. The refrain “I miss the innocence I’ve known/Playing Kiss covers beautiful and stoned” is almost creepily evocative of my experiences as an early-20-something…

11) The Jayhawks – “Tailspin” – This is another perfect roadtrip song; in fact, the album (Rainy Day Music) as a whole is a great driving album. This was playing as I came into Seattle under a perfect, bright sun which illuminated the peaks of the waves in the sound as I drove over it.

12) The Rolling Stones – “Shine a Light” (Live) – This is one of my favorite Stones songs, which is saying a lot. Whereas most of their songs are really fun, or dark, or a cross of both, this one is almost hymn-like in its beauty. No wonder Scorsese chose to title his Rolling Stones doc after this song (even if the song itself isn’t actually in the documentary). Anyway, it’s another really good song to hear when you’re rolling through the middle of nowhere maybe (or not) reflecting on some of the things you have to be grateful for. Plus, Keith’s guitar solo towards the end of this version is just ridiculously great (at about the 4:00 mark).

13) Coldplay – “God Put a Smile On Your Face” – For some reason, at some point after crossing the Pass, I decided to put on Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head. This was a CD that I first heard during my first road trip with my then-girlfriend in 2004 (always an important first during a dating experience, at least if you’re me), and I hadn’t really listened to it since then (though not for the reasons you might suspect, I just didn’t like it that much). This song really struck me, there in central Washington, as a really great song off an album that spawned a few radio singles and a fair amount of critical disregard for all the other tracks (including this one). This song in particular brings to mind memories of driving snow and struggling snowplows.

14) Grant-Lee Phillips – “I Often Dream of Trains” – I find this song really haunting. Maybe because I often dream of trains. Trains themselves are very lonely, cold, almost phantom-like to me. They’re also a really significant part of my past (having lived close to heavy train traffic everywhere I’ve lived in my life until Pullman). So a song about trains that already has a creepy sort of melody to it is risking achieving record levels of creepiness if it hits my ears. I don’t want to get on a rant about the awesomeness and loneliness of trains and train tracks here, because I’ve written about it before and no doubt will again soon. Anyway, this song just had to go on here.

15) Norah Jones – “Thinking About You” – I like Norah Jones a lot. I’m not even a closet Norah Jones fan, because I’ll fucking admit this to you and everyone else. So there. I think Norah Jones writes fantastic music. And this particular Norah album kept me from freezing to death in a snowstorm with a malfunctioning car heater. She’s that awesome. Like I said earlier, there are a bevy of different emotions that go along with any roadtrip, and smiley-cloud cuddle-jazz, Hammond organs, and subdued horn lines are just some of those emotions that come up in this song despite not really being in any of the other songs on this mix. Great song.

16) Bert Jansch – “Hey Pretty Girl” – Every Bert Jansch song (just about) and the ones off of The Black Swan in particular evoke either autumn leaves crunching underfoot while navigating a stiff breeze or the crunch of snow underfoot while navigating a biting winter gust – depending on the song. This one is in the latter category. Headlights reflecting off of falling snowflakes in the wan light of a sunset nearly hidden by a grey wall of clouds is what this song brought to mind even before I listened to it while seeing that exact thing out my windshield.

17) Grant-Lee Phillips – “City of Refuge” – This is another GLP song; this one ended up on the mix particularly because when it was on, I was at a point in the snowstorm and at a point between central and eastern Washington where I honestly wasn’t sure that I was going to get out of the storm in one piece, and the lyrics seemed appropriate. With nothing but more snow behind me, I got out of the car, dug my feet into a knee-high drift and pushed the car back onto the highway (with some help) from a nearly snowed-in gas station driveway, then put on this song as I made my run for Pullman.

18) Ryan Adams and the Cardinals – “Down In a Hole” – This is actually the Cardinals covering Stone Temple Pilots, but it was one of the last songs they played on the second night in Seattle, and one of my favorites. It sort of represents the bottom rung of the existential ladder that I was talking about earlier as much as Norah’s song embodies the top rung, and I think is sort of appropriate in that sense. Plus Ryan and Neal Casal’s harmonies are fantastic.

19) Coldplay – “The Scientist” – I lose double points for this one. First because it’s a really obvious mixtape choice, on account of being cheesy and commercial, and second because it’s already on the Long Way Round soundtrack, which is one of my favorite roadtrip compilation CDs. But I stole it anyway. I like Coldplay, for some reason, and this song is suitably epic/cheesy to encapsulate the feelings inherent in any stage of an adventure. I got a huge smile on my face when this song came on. If that makes me a loser, then I guess I’m a loser.

20) Bob Dylan – “Trying To Get To Heaven” – Who better to close out an epic adventure than Bob Dylan? Nobody, that’s who. This song is from his 1999 masterpiece Time Out Of Mind. Even if you don’t like Dylan, or think you don’t, try listening to this whole album, really just sitting down and listening to it, once. If you don’t get a lump in your throat at some point, you might want to check your pulse to see if you really have a heart. It was really hard to pick one song off of this album to include, but this one seemed the most appropriate, because isn’t “tryin’ to get to heaven before they close the door” what life, and road trips are all about?

Sorry this post got a bit out of hand. Here’s the link to the CD if you want to download it. If there’s a problem with the download, let me know and I’ll fix it.

global warming claims another victim

i couldn't stand it anymore. with at least a week of triple-digit temperatures in my near future, and an already ridiculously low tolerance for heat, i had to get my hair cut off. at least, most of it. i feel terrible. i miss my hair, and my head feels so light i'm a little afraid that i'm going to give myself whiplash if i try to turn around too quickly.

before:




after:


argh.

WARNING: this is looong, and i didn't write it...

...but i found it on my laptop today while searching through my documents from spring '08 semester. it came from the now-defunct DRA blog. i don't know when it was posted, or why, or really why i saved it, as it's sort of a random shaving off the sculpture of awesome randomness that was the blog for the short time that it existed. but i thought i'd post it here, partially so that you can read it if you want, and partially so that i don't lose it again. it might be meaningless to you if you're not obsessed with DRA, but hopefully it's not. there are a lot of things in here that i've often felt, said, or thought myself...i guess i vibe with a lot of it. is that really an expression? whatever.

i gots to go work on the BB post from last friday. cheers.

“ I have these terrible terrible days just like you, like anybody. A life of them. No breaks.
And that seems to be compounded by the fact that I chose ( I CHOSE) to make myself what I am. What I wanted to be when I grew up, which was some kind of writer or artist. Someone who wasn’t afraid. Because they are so afraid. Inside, in my bones, I am always mythology. I am always sure that in art, a person should be REQUIRED to be as fucked-up, as damaged, as beautiful as they are. Because what an honor it is to be ANY kind of artist. and for people to actually see you, well, that is something else. Something in me led me here.
Also in me, my heart, not my bones, is just a scared person. Terrified. And very easy to break. The last year and a half has been more of a growing up part of my life than any I can name. Mainly because it took me ten years to even figure out why I was doing this or how I was going to make it mean something.
I made a promise to myself A long time ago to fail like crazy, and to also succeed like crazy, right in front on everybody. I knew that went well with this implied code I found hidden away in my treasure chest of records and artists and poets that led me to share back.
I mean, we are Americans some of us, and what we don’t have culturally because we are such a new country is, historically insane people we treasure. At least maybe America didn’t have enough time to love those people like we should have.
I dont want to be anything but what I am FULL ON.
I see what people say.
“He’s nuts”
“He sucks, he hasn’t made a decent record since….”
blah blah
But you know what,
I fucking make my records. I work. I bust my ass. I GIVE IT AWAY to you how I feel. I let you SEE ME. I let me be a mirror to some part of you if you want.
I don’t charge you for that.
I don’t PRETEND to be a fucking thing.
I just AM.
that is what i like about art, what i like about the color orange, what i like about failure and what i like about feeling things. It happens to me and my art, my loud mouth, my failures and triumphs, they are about the truth. they are about simply getting up, trying, and seeing what happens.
I think this is important to share. Not to be an example, but because, it is fucking real, and I am always confused.
I love things so much.
I hurt so much.
I feel so much love.
I spends so little time “hating” shit and so SO much time loving LOVING shit.
They make websites where people discuss this stuff.
I saw my own verse, re-edited, or scaled down so it could be torn down, and I didn’t like that. Not one bit. There is this one guy in particular at one of the sites made to change the name so it was not my name, this horrible awful singer (he posted a link to his music once and it sounded like someone beating Gillian Welch up melodically) who for years, years just sits and anytime I am brought up thinks of the worst thing he can think of to be horrible about me. Why?
I don’t have that kind of time. I mean, I am ALWAYS working on something.
I am a work in progress.
I am also sometimes terribly torn apart, torn limb from limb from recent failures I might have prevented if I had super powers. I don’t.
I just love art.
I am at the heart of it, a rather simple human being who says and does things you probably think about or you probably say.
If not, then it’s fine. Then I am crazy.
And crazy is very good for art.
Crazy is essential to the balance of life.
I mean,
we live on a rock spinning in outer space around a fucking sun in the outer reaches of a galaxy the middle of nowhere in space, and despite your or anybody else’s faith in anything, I will bet your god or idea of of who your god is has not appeared before you and said,
“hey gerald, I am just going to borrow a pair of socks and go out in the town square and just, you know, tell every body what the meaning of life is because the violence and madness is getting a bit out of control, and I might have done this before so many people had been killed and stuff over however many wars and the french inquisition and the witch trials and the constant battles between warring nations for their belief systems, but you know, I was out late at the bar, and one thing led to another, and I ended up with this insanely hot girl who works at the MET. god, she has the most beautiful hands. got any aspirin…..how do i look, should i wear red or regular socks with these shoes when i tell everybody?”
NO
This is not what is going on.
WE are here/
we are lost on a planet in the middle of fuck all nowhere in the universe and you know it. You know that Polar Bears don’t get together and worship shit. they get hungry and sleep and swim and love little baby ice bears and find more ice stuff.
is it because they are not as developed?
NO
it is because they did not discover
a. farming
b. mathematics
c. language
and as fucked up as this sounds, those are all ABSTRACT ideas. we have too much hair or not enough depending on who you ask, because SOMETHING happened to us when there was a food supply shortage sometimes around the Sumerian habitation of mesopotamia.
we started farming.
counting
making cuneiform documents
ABSTRACT
not natural
…now we talkj on computers and go see Jasper Johns collections even if they are just the Gray ones (who came up with that? so stupid- i mean, i’m glad i got to see a few pieces i love but cmon, do an overview, yr the MET for cryin out loud.)
anyway,
I go through a thousand lifetimes a day.
One repeat performance lately is regret.
I lost a love.
I lost myself.
I haven’t been so distraught and sober before.
I hadn’t dealt.
I am dealing.
And you know what, it felt good to put all that shit out there.
I think it was quite revealing. I think despite what anybody says, you can see me. I am so fucking human.
I am so weak.
But I don’t mind.
I love things.
I like the mystery of life. I think about why we are here and what for EVERY fucking day, when i wake up and before bed.
If there is a God, i think he might find that funny.
and when i have hit my knees to pray, when the shit hit the fan and i didn’t care anymore if i prayed or not, i told God really bad jokes and asked him stuff like, “do you get shit for having a beard in paintings. does anybody say you look like that guy from the Doobie Brothers? because, if you do have a beard, and are A WHITE DUDE (hardly, no way if there is a God he is white….sorry, white people is a new thing, nor is it a dude. sorry. (Most) Men are incapable of processing their view of the world in an emotional and rational way at the same time. We just were built to hunt animals, and along the way, with the help of a few organized religions, demonized women and repressed their natural heroic nature. It’s just true. Zeus is awesome sure. But I’m afraid if he dealt with having a baby he might not so cocky. Also put him in a workplace with a fine set of get-away sticks and you would see the lighting pointed not to the sky but at the water-cooler and Jim and Larry, who spent ten years masturbating and one year thinking about their purpose here on Earth, which probably had some conclusion that ended up in a subscription to a magazine about cars. Vile fucking creatures men are, most I should say, when they are not busy humiliating themselves. ) you need a new look.
I figure he needs a few prayers that ask him how he is doing. what kind of filing system he uses and if he is okay.
sometimes, if the universe is god, or vice versa, i think, she/he/it probably needs to take a break, make everybody stop for a second, and have a nice glass of juice and a bath.
it helps to stop for a second.
it really does.
Anyway, I liked running my own internet t.v. channel about being a human being. It was very real.
I have to go study some fabric and texture stuff for my paintings today and think about how, if at all, I would proceed with this, because, it was working. It was doing something.
I noticed some of the people that just were tagging along to call me a goods for nothing fuck-wit ( which i can be) or people who liked some of the music i made ( which i like too sometimes but it is never really that far out enough for me, and hardly what i really am. i prefer my writing and art to music but have trouble thinking about a life without music. i mean, it led me here) i noticed, some of those people started to think about art again.
REMEMBER THIS>
one day, a cave man picked up a piece of rock and drew a beautiful bison or buffalo on a cave wall and now,
now we are here.
we are here now, in a world of designs and abstractions.
so,
it might be a good idea to examine what a truth is and level the playing field some.
Making D.R.AdamsFilms Inc. was hard, HARD as fuck, not easy. Not something I got off on. It was a challenge.
Because I am the one hiding when i sing. I am the one who does not like interviews and would rather MAKE something.
It was my way of trying to be BALLS OUT like Black Flag or Franz Klein. I was trying to do something with myself.
and it felt punk as fuck to be REAL and HUMAN and not at all like the idea of what a typical rock musician is like.
So i am going to study. I work all day to keep this job too. I work like a madman on ideas and writing and i experiment with form and i let myself feel as much as i can.
in my opinion, as an artist of any kind, your work is between you and your canvas,
BUT
as a person, as someone who is making art to be seen,
you are at the service of others
who do not have that life, do not want to go that far, or are afraid
so
i always try and say the hardest thing
share the things that i love and hurt the most
and protect what i can of myself in the process
but i am still learning
and
in these advancing times
i guess
i am not sure anymore what is the line between a truth and an example of it.
so i am going to think about that.
meanwhile,
i love you.
every one of you even if you hate me, because you are special
a special event in the history of the cosmos
and you deserve special treatment
and to laugh
and to learn
one beautiful moment at a time.
thanks,
DRA ”

SARTA, meet fist. fist, SARTA.

so, it was pointed out to me by a friend of mine that my transportation woes for the rest of the summer (getting from kent to canton and back) could be solved by simply using public transportation. so i hopped on www.sartaonline.com and tried to work something out. unfortunately, the line that goes to akron (which would only necessitate making the akron-to-portage bus at a dead run from the station through downtown akron in 10 minutes any time of the day OR sitting for a few hours in downtown akron until the next bus comes around) starts on cherry avenue in canton, which is completely inaccessible from any of the bus lines that come anywhere within walking distance of navarre road, which is the main road off the allotment where my parents' house is.

so, unless i had a car to get me to cherry avenue (thus negating my need to take the bus in the first place), the quickest route that i've been able to find in an hour or so of looking at maps contains three separate bus lines i'd have to take around canton (which is about the size of spokane and its environs) for god knows how long (likely something like an hour, all told) to get to cherry avenue, to take that bus to akron (another 30-45 minutes), after which, assuming i make the almost-impossible conversion to the PARTA line in my alloted 10 minutes, i can take the PARTA (because people in akron and kent actually use the public transportation line and thus there are actually useful routes) straight from downtown akron to the KSU student center, where i could easily walk to the edge of town (where i need to be) in about 40 minutes.

not only is this problematic in the sense that the entire trip time would be something like 4 hours and cost something like 5-10 dollars each way every time, it also requires an incredibly intricate amount of planning each time, and there's always the element of possible catastrophe in the sense that i could miss any of these connections at any time and then just end up trapped in the middle of canton or akron, forcing either one of my friends (which i would feel bad about since the point of the bus ride is to not force them to drive me in the first place) or my parents (to whom anything unexpected at all in the universe is a massive, pulsating nuisance, provoking sighing and fury) to come rescue me.

if only there was some way to take the PARTA from my driveway to the KSU student center...

i suppose i'm not really complaining about the shitfest that is SARTA; they're consistently low on funding, nobody uses their lines, and the people who do are (95 percent of the time) just getting from the grocery to their home or vice versa. ohio public transit isn't set up for long distances; i guess i'm just spoiled by washington's public transit, which can get you from spokane to pullman or pullman to moscow in the blink of an eye for a reasonable price...but that's just as much a function of geographical arrangement of cities and roads in both places as it is funding and public support of RTA-apparatuses.

it seems like, i this part of the country, you just need to have a car to travel anywhere. and that's stupid. but i suppose that's the mentality our country is built on.

verizowned one last time

even in death, my verizon account continues to torment me. after spending an hour today trying to figure out how to pay my last bill (which is mysteriously 116 dollars instead of 75 dollars, but at this point i'm so exhausted from dealing with this fucking shithole company for three years that i'm just going to pay them the extra 40 dollars to just leave me alone forever), i have now logged a total of three hours attempting to make said payment.

first of all, i had to endure a decent amount of phone-operator chicanery to cancel my account, and now they won't even make it easy to take my money the final time. verizon is so pissed that we're breaking up that she's just going to leave all her furniture in my apartment to prove a point. whatever point that is.

i had a fun weekend in columbus, but it also made clear to me that i'm not particularly ready to be a parent yet, in the sense that a lot of it was sitting still in uncomfortable seats for hours to experience one or two minutes of something important happening to someone you care about, which seems to be the center of the american parenting experience. i took lots of pictures with the new camera i got; i'll try to post some next time i can get my laptop online...right now i have no way to transfer photos (or any data, for that matter) from my laptop to the home computer. so the multimedia posts will have to wait.

incommunicado

so, i left my cell phone charger at bowes's place yesterday. obviously, this is just something i have to get out of the way at the beginning of every visit to ohio. anyway, i probably won't be able to get to it until monday or tuesday at the earliest. so if you call me, i won't answer my phone. at least for a few days. possibly for a week or two. 'tis all.

aria of sorrow

despite sounding like a metallica song title circa "...and justice for all", "castlevania: aria of sorrow" is a fantastic gameboy advance game i've been playing a lot lately. i'm not going to do a full-on review or anything, partially because i haven't finished it yet. but it's one of those excellent genre-bending games. it combines the usual awesomeness of castlevania platforming, whipping, and item collecting with an exploration mechanic very similar to the 2-D metroid games and then adds an icing made of a really simple but not so-simple-its-pointless RPG interface, which involves collecting enemy special moves by killing those enemies, buying weapons and armor at shops that boost certain skills and not others, and collecting special abilities throughout the game like being able to dodge backwards quickly and being able to jump again in mid-jump. there are two other castlevania games on the GBA that i haven't played yet. if they're half as good, my brain will explode.

i played "metroid: zero mission" and "metroid: fusion" last week, all the way through (about 3 hours each) and they were both fantastic, but now in retrospect castlevania blows them away. they both introduced an interesting new mechanic to the metroid formula though: "fusion" had the virus-storyline that had you exploring an abandoned space station mostly at the behest of a computer which could open and close certain parts of the ship when necessary and could give you certain weapons "downloads" throughout the game for performing certain tasks. it was very story-driven compared to other "metroid"s, but it was really good. "zero mission" was originally largely a rehash of the first metroid game, but then it introduced a bunch of story elements and moves, items, etc. from "fusion", and the third act especially had a lot of innovative (for metroid games) gameplay moments that made it almost as good as "fusion".

i'm going to try to finish "aria" this weekend. i finally tracked down a copy of "symphony of the night" too, which i've been hearing awesome things about since it came out in lik 1997 or whatever. so it'll be fun to play that.

i wish i had a guitar. i want to write a song.