my chuck taylors weigh a ton.

yet another place holder

2010-01-23T18:53:00.000-08:00

the girly-girl (yeah, i'm still deeply in love with her) is painting the bathrooms. so the whole house smells like poison.

of course, being her, she chose the least toxic paint available, which is nice, but still... paint fumes.

which makes me want to listen to big star, boards of canada, lee dorsey, kongas, fug, maurice fulton, the fugs (or anything by ed sanders), horace silver, nitedog the dj, the novi singers, one dove, elastica, eric dolphy, sonny clark, and shitloads of other music that sounds... well. good when you're high.

carry on. that's what's been played here today. oh, and steely dan.

wow, it's been well over a year.

2010-01-11T19:31:00.000-08:00

indeed. what's a disco boy to do?

now that i remember the password to this account... post more, apparently.

sigh. currently loving records by OM, popul vuh, krokodil, grant green, horace silver, deerhunter, black flag, freddie hubbard, eric dolphy, they came from the stars i saw them, lindstrom & prins thomas, paul hardcastle, the monochrome set, kongas, the last poets, tropea, joni mitchell, elvin jones, flora purim, jadell, roy harper, sandy denny, undisputed truth, don blackman, clan of xymox, vivian vee, emmylou harris, the smiths, two lone swordsmen, joe henderson, cheap trick, can, husker du, sex vid, hercules and love affair, steve winwood, boards of canada, and just about anything i go and see which is performed live.

support live music, folks, it's fun for you and them.

honesty is the best policy

2008-11-21T09:07:00.000-08:00

don't get excited, this is yet another place filler

2008-11-19T19:02:00.000-08:00

sheeeit, it's been so long since i've checked my own blog... i only looked at it to see if satan himself was linkable... he is, but i don't have time for it, and i'll likely revisit the subject. anyhoo, this is yet another placeholder.

so what's new with disco boy? well, i'm back in the dj game again, albeit reluctantly and in a rather tenuous-to-the-industry sort of way. i play records two nights a week at a hotel that's at the edge of the water in seattle, and boy howdy is it boring. but, they are going to pay someone money, so it might as well be me. i own records. i know how to play them. put the money right here, in my hand. and why don't i love it? well, for one thing, i'm totally unnecessary. any crappy ipod could do what i do. no dancefloor, the music is so quiet that nobody pays attention. i still have a day job that requires me up and at em' at the wee small hours, so one night a week i get squat for sleep. hotel guests are largely uninterested in me. hotel employees have heard the rumors about my nightly wage, and are pissed that they have to walk around and talk to people and bathe and pretend to care, and i sit in the corner, farting about, and earning slightly more money than they do. well i'm FUCKING SORRY. i'm just the lucky dork with a semi-skill that seems to earn a wage, now and again.

and what else? well, in a form, i unearthed on the internet. see, i've always tried to lay low, keep the government name hidden, dance... unda-neeth the ray-dah... and then, just as a test, i put my real name on my facebook account. and goddamn, so many schoolmates and folks of that nature hunted me down. and it's been... well... it's been... enlightening. the first thing i learned is that more girls like me than guys, and i'm pretty much cool with that. as a heterosexual, isn't that what we hope for? i also found out that everyone i grew up with has kids. everyone. no exceptions. kids, all over the fucking place. some are even named after me (which isn't true, my first name exploded in popularity over the last few years, i'm in the fine company as scads of anklebiters named madison, price, aidan, dakota, trevor and so on). i also found out that everyone is married. once again, i'm out of sorts. furthermore, everyone has better jobs then me. but that's no surprise.

if my day job was better, i wouldn't feel like i needed a night job. but the day job, while mildly entertaining, is having it's soul sucked from it's butthole by venture capitalists and consultants. i shouldn't be surprised, but i'm still rather unimpressed. i survived the first round of layoffs, but i'm sure after the new year, my necks on the chopping block. and i'll be fine, but just for once, just one fuckin' time in my life, i'd love to play for the winning team. i'd love to be involved in an industry or company or what-have-ya that's on the rise, and not treading water or in decline. just once! what's a guy gotta do?

oh, and i'm getting fat. most people wouldn't have expected that, but this sit down all goddamn day is fucking with my metabolism.

but as always, good music makes me feel better. i'm constantly lookin' out for kickass records, and i'm frequently finding, or even re-discovering them. so what's working for me? well, good christ, i had no idea that aimee mann was such a clever songwriter. "the forgotten arm" is a solid, solid concept record. alain toussant has been thrilling me with raw vibes and slippery grooves. john-in-th'-morning played primal scream's "movin' on up" the morning after obama's victory, and i shed a tear in the dark drive on the way to work, fucking inspiring, i had forgotten how good of a record "screamadelica" was. i'm feeling' old sonny rollins records, along with grant green and thelonious monk, on the jazz angle. the quiet village LP, while mostly re-edits, is really good. the fleet foxes... lordy, what a great show not too long ago, and that album could be my record of the year. the chromatics are great. i've been listening to old sparks records, and it's a shame that we don't revere them the same way that we do, say... roxy music. maybe humor doesn't belong in music. maybe that's why was not was ended up, essentially, a one-hit wonder.

so with that, i guess i'll go play some records in that hotel bar. just call me murph, the murph-tones are off tonight.

these words fill space

2008-06-18T20:57:00.000-07:00

post. post post post. i haven't died. well, parts of me have, but now's not the time.

this is just to keep this blog active. it's been over a year since i said anything, and way, way longer than that since i've said anything worth listening to... in so far as this blog's concerned.

i will be back. soon.

dilbert jokes still aren't funny.

2007-05-14T21:03:00.000-07:00

so tired. so very, very tired.

and really, for no good reason at all. ok, so i did start the new job. yeah, i finally broke free of the stupidity and downhill trajectory of the record store. i'm ashamed to admit how long i spend sailing along in simplicity, not challenging myself, not giving myself a moment of opportunity, finding myself uninspired and generally bummed... well, i'll tell you anyway. it went on for a good 7 years. and i should have left... well, six years ago. pathetic.

but that's how it goes, especially if you're me. so i popped me head out from up me own arse, and applied for a few jobs. and wouldn'tcha know it, like that i found myself working for someone else. everything was looking up. there was promise and hope, if i only had 10 minutes to kind of sit down and think about it.

my life is a constant running around, pissing on the fire that's directly in front of me. i think about long-term strategy for about three minutes before i fall asleep, and usually while having some strange lucid dream of eating sidewalk-vendor falafel and tripping over small lizards, spazzing myself awake in an instant, just before i konk out and saw logs.

so like i said, i said yes to this job, without even really paying attention to what it was, where it was, and what kind of life i was trading up for. when i was i kid, i played a video game called "berserk" that had a cool feature; you could hit a button called hyperspace or some such shit, and it randomly put you in different places on the board. if you got yourself in a bad enough situation, you'd hit that, and sometimes you'd end up in safety, and sometimes you'd end up right next to the bad guy with the electrowhomper gun, and so, it was a crapshoot. well, i hit that buttton. i'd call it a lateral move.

my new job pays better, but it's a long ways away. my new job is for a company that's moving upward, but it's in a department in which unless i prove myself as brilliant, i could languish forever. my new job is for a cool pro audio manufacturer, but it's staffed by mullets and ponytails and guys who still believe in guitar solos and the power of a fully operational pair of cargo jeans. my new job doesn't have near the dimwits and mouth-breathers as customers and co-workers, but it does require staring at a computer inside a cubicle. all in all, it feels like a lateral move.

and nobody there knows a damn thing about disco.

i did meet a good guy who i carpool with, and so that makes it better, he's coached me through a lot off the stink and foolishness, and i do get to play with some cool toys. and yes, it pays better, but most of that will go to my new car and so on. my exposure to customers/co-workers on meth has dropped considerably. i still can wear this ugly ass ol sweatshirt to work, and no one blinks an eye.

but, i gots to get up sooper early in the morn. and just like that, i'm so goddam tired i can't function anymore.

pretend i said something funny to wrap all this up.

more fun with guns!

2007-04-16T22:32:00.000-07:00

whoa-kay. who heard about the ugly shit that went down over at virginia tech this morning?

so far, thirty three dead. that's a little outta fucking control.

go ahead, look up. i bet you can't see thirty-three people in front of you. i'll bet you can't walk out onto the sidewalk and see thirty-three people out there. i've been awake for seven hours, and on capitol hill for five, i'll bet that if i shot at every person i've seen so far today, i couldn't have killed thirty-three people with my rookie aim.

thirty-three. not only is that dedication, that's efficiency. it's also a sort of record, for things here in the US.

so, how many d'ya spose have to fall in an incident before the NRA members/gun-luvahs/useless death apologists say... OK. this is gone beyond reason. double today's count? triple? the century mark?

it's true. you can't put the poop back in the horse. you can't unlearn people on how to make a gun (or a bomb, or a crossbow, or a... or a...), you can't bring back the innocent bystanders, and sadly... especially in this country where any affront to [insert random thing that you love so damn much you are blinded by it's uselessness] is an affront to your freedom, you can't make an argument strong enough that guns are fucked up, and there are too many of them out there, and they are too easy to get.

i fear my government. i have a legitimate worry that martial law will be declared near the election... i've got enough belief in conspiracy to almost expect some sort of "terrorist catastrophe" near election time, especially if the current administration doesn't like the way the wind is blowing. boy howdy, we've seen some strange things in the last number of years, and i wouldn't put anything past them. and dammit, if the tanks start rolling through the streets to quell the "insurgents", then yeah, i'd rather have a gun than no gun. but i don't have a gun. and i certainly don't have a gun big enough to defend myself against the national guard. and if i did... well, it's a certainty that i'd be dead in less time then it would take to load said weapon. so... what's the point anyway?

in other words, the right to keep and bear arms is basically useless. handguns are especially useless. unless you find yourself defending the rights of psychos to go and shoot up fucking high school and college campuses, town diners, post offices, and afterparty crash-shacks, you honestly gotta concede that while, yeah, it's a pie-in-the-sky dream, this country would be way better off if they had never figured out a way to make a gun that was any shorter than your arm. and doubly better off if the only way to kill someone was with a blunt object, a sharp object, or a clever ruse on getting them to jump off something really, really high up.

sorry. i do this everytime some poor sap gets gunned down for no fucking reason at all. carry on.

so it goes.

2007-04-11T21:26:00.001-07:00

Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, "Why, why, why?"

Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.

so long and thank you to the best author i knew.

"Where is home? I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father and uncles and aunts. And there's no way I can get there again."

they say amazing things happen when the brain shuts down. i hope his old, bonked head of his gave him one good last feeling of home before he expired.

i want to say that i learned about life through KV, though i would rather say he was confirming what i was experiencing.

"everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt"

fuck you, lawrence alloway.

2007-04-10T22:53:00.000-07:00

dork around long enough on the internet, and you'll be damned if it isn't just like television. the possibilities are endless, and yet we all end up looking at the same shit.

being that mtv quit doing it's job fifteen years ago, it's up to youtube and the like to actually distribute videos. this week, half of america seems to have caught onto a video of alanis morrisette doing a painfully (but predictably) cathartic version of that ol' black eyed peas classic "my humps". played at a glacier's pace and sung in sickening earnest, alanis robs schtick that seems possibly funny to anyone the first time they see it, but increasingly less funny if you have seen it done by other, better acts. let's be honest: steve allen probably ripped it off from someone else. recontextualizing bad music does not often make bad music better, or wittier. it's just stupid.

also making the rounds this week is a video homage/cover/parody of nine inch nail's "hurt", probably made more famous via johnny cash's cover. well, this time around, it's a version as sung by kermit the frog. and yeah, it's got a pretty poor kermit imitation, plus you get to see kermit emote over an acoustic guitar, shoot up, jerk off to pictures of miss piggy, and even fellate rolf the pianist/dog. hm.

now, "my humps" is a bad song, and i think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone to argue that. "hurt" is a pretty bad song too, but that's mostly because trent reznor is a tool, and most times i question his ability to identify a natural emotion. alanis bobs and weaves between self-righteousness and irrelevance, and kermit and his acoustic guitar? well, i suppose the lesson here anyway is pop-culture juxtopositions are increasingly tiresome. post-modernist mash-up directives feel old before they've even been created, mostly because the brain can predict the outcome without actually having to see the result. look around long enough, and everything seems interchangeable. thanks to tools that can manipulate modern media, reinterpreting is a goddamn cinch. and if it's so easy, why bother?

our boy george carlin said it, many years ago: "nail two pieces of shit together that have never been nailed together before, and some asshole will buy it".

it's the bees knees.

2007-04-09T20:51:00.000-07:00

i went a good fifteen years without a worry about bees. last year, yellow jackets infested a dead log in my backyard, and i got stung at least eight times, pretty much every time i mowed the lawn. hurty.

the bubblemen were a side project of love & rockets, they had a bad song called "the bubblemen rap" in which they donned bee costumes and well, rapped. the chorus was "don't rock... wobble". twas crap.

everybody seems to think that love and rockets' best album was "earth sun moon", and i'd have to disagree, i think it's the worst. too much god. i heard "mirror people" on KEXP today, it didn't age all that well. "no new tale to tell" is a catchy tune, but it's a juvenile pile of shit. i heard it described as "psychedelic existentialism", to which i had to add "performed with the wit of a fourteen year old".

me, i liked "express", especially "yin and yang the flowerpot man" and "life in laralay". no, they didn't have a firmer grasp on their lyricism on that album, but i thought the songs didn't sound nearly as dehydrated. at the time, i didn't have much of a perspective on their debt to glam... i only really knew glam as a bowie-stage, and a few poor examples of it like the new york dolls or roxy music. lately, i've been listening to a lot of t. rex, which entertains me to no end.

i've also developed a bit of an obsession with an awesome mountain of one edit of ian hunter (from mott the hoople) song called "bastard". (it can be found here, for a little while anyway) listened to it every morning for the last week. reminds me of billy squier's queenie disco-rock. helluva riff.

billy squier. gayer than a bag o' dicks. i just read that ian brown (best known from stone roses) is teaming up with steve and paul from the sex pistols, and heading into the studio. don't know where that could lead to. it stands to reason that johnny rotton/lydon/mr. filthy lucre was the carnival act tacked on to serious bands. sheesh, bill laswell, steve vai and ginger baker played on pil's "album"... and let's face it, jah wobble, keith levene and martin atkins were no slouches either.

enough. more later.

the little ipod headphones are telling me to go to L.A.

2007-02-26T23:43:00.000-08:00

well, i suppose it's time to tell a tale or two.

i got nothin'.

and it's been that way for a while. oh, here and there something mildly interesting takes place, but i look around at the big picture... bubkes. work, the dog, the gentle love of a good woman, this and that, time in the jeep, a drink and such. the author exhales a resigned sigh. where is the... adventure? some folks, well, they claim adventure as their middle name, though i was pretty sure it was "farley" or "william"... the first name of a patriarch, like my own "robert". yep. disco boy bob perkins. with a name like that, i could stalk someone on myspace.

so, let's talk about music. first, let's talk about the how; girly-girl made christmas all that much more lovely by springing for the big ipod. 80 gigs of music, at my beckon call, all packages in shiny black and chrome. my best efforts have only left it half-filled, and that's probably just fine, because at this rate, it will play music for 15.3 days without repeating anything. those kind of choices can confuse, and my own DJ tendencies can be frustrated by the shuffle function, which at times can pick way, way better songs than i could have programmed (beaten by a machine with the brains of a digital wristwatch? motherfucker!) and at others, play inappropriate outbursts such as andrew w.k.'s "party hard" directly after such delicate mood selections as harry nilsson's cover of randy newman's "love story". so, best to listen to the shuffle feature with a thumb on the advance wheel. that's a minor complaint, i really can't say enough good things about the mighty mighty ipod, it goes everywhere with me, and i find myself using it at any given opportunity. i find that the little white headphones also keep the dirtbags from trying to talk to me. remember, i work on capitol hill, so there's never any shortage of dirtbags.

so what's been rockin', and what's been shockin? i've recently discovered the quirky genius that was warren zevon, and i'm currently repeating his "desperadoes under the eaves" from his first album... during a time when everyone was high on the good life in L.A., warren was pretty sure the bright beloved sunshine was out to get him. along the same lines, "mama" cass elliot's "california earthquake" predicts her untimely demise... only she was sure the ground would swallow her whole. there's a joke to be made there, but it's low hanging fruit. and since we're talking songwriters who found fortune in california, i've been checking out judee sill, a talented junkie ex-con who could have ran alongside joni mitchell in the lady-folkie championship... she was actually the first artist on geffen's asylum label, but lack of support and nurturing left her confidence shaken, and she literally disappeared after two records, and OD'ed in the late seventies.

i got this oddball record at the store called "a mountain of one" that doesn't have shit for info on it, but it's been glued to the turntable. sort of a mix of the late last gasps of the prog sound in the early eighties and and "faith"-era cure.

you know who was really fucking good, but you'da never known it? scritti politti. yeah, he sounds like the most fey, limp-wristed haircut nancy, but he wrote some really brilliant songs, with completely bizarre lyrics. here in the states, he'll always be remembered for "perfect way" (which charted quite high in 1985) but even that offers "you want a message, a confession you wanna martyr me too.. you want a margin of error for two", which, you have to admit, is pretty solid for synth-pop. but it does get way better than that. the guy attracted the attention of miles davis, worked with roger troutman, and ignored the silliness of the biz for a good 8-10 years before coming back and making "anomie and bonhomie" a criminally underrated soul/hip hop album that closes with the sublime "brushed with oil, dusted with powder", a strange song about getting arrested in... well, again it's another song about L.A. i've been tempted to buy his latest "white bread, black beer", but i want it on vinyl, and the import copies are up near the $30 mark.

i'm cutting this short. i've stared at the computer for as long as i can. we'll continue this soon.

surprise!

2006-12-11T23:18:00.000-08:00

i haven't been feeling all that hot, lately. it's pretty much related to lifestyle and stress, if you want to call what i go though "stress". but my neck and shoulders and the tiny little threads that shoot up into my head hurt. and i've been getting more and more headaches. it's a combination of old age, and just plain ol' not taking very good care of myself. and, being a bitch, i complain.

so girly girl, bless her soul, decided to give me an early christmas gift. a sooprise, if you will. she told me to be ready, not to make plans, told me to dress comfortably, and drove my ass over to eastlake. now, here's what i was hoping my surprise would be; an unanticipated visit from pedro and a nice breakfast. pedro ain't coming home for the holidays. no dice. what i got instead, was a visit to a spa, where i would be getting a professional massage.

i'm not really one for massages. i have odd issues, which is no surprise to anyone around me. i'm not automatically comfortable with strangers hands upon me, though i can work with it. i'm not a fan of the whole dribbling water and "new dimensions" style music that loops on the cd players of massage therapists, nor do i care for aromatherapy, so spa/studio spaces put me off a bit. my real issue though, is in the lube. i hate... hate... feeling oily. it's an aversion i've had since i was a child. oily, sticky, slimy... all reasons to get in the shower. quickly.

so, fuckin' a. surprise! yeah, girly girl would love an unexpected and free massage. me... i have to be delicate here. my lady is trying so hard to help me feel better, to do something for me that i would never do for myself. gotta love that, right? so it's time for the game face. i know that it will be certainly more good then bad, but as soon as i understand what i'm in for, it's all i can do to start thinking about when it's going to be over. i'm treating it like a trauma. "i can get through this... i can get through this..." i've got the wrong attitude. i also can't do a damn thing about it.

but i do it anyway. and it's really not that bad, but it's really not all that great either, which is a drag. i feel good for about 40 minutes afterwards and honestly post-all-that no different than had i skipped the whole shebang. i think the only way i could really get into the healing rub is if i had it done daily. but then again, my body is a mystery to me. i don't feel alone in that assessment. i was fortunate enough to have been born with a body that required little attention, i eat what tastes yummy, and rarely do any crazy high-impact activity, and yet i still stay thin and coltish, and frequently like i just woke up. i used to be able to skate all day and drank all night, but i'm just fatigued nowadays, and for the first time in my life, i think i might just have to work a little at all this.

untitled playlist vol. 2.

2006-12-07T22:49:00.000-08:00

i'm not going to act like i'm mr. blues guy. all i know about howlin' wolf are facts. the same stuff you would read on his wiki page. i don't even own a howlin' wolf record. but i came across "smokestack lightnin' (dogshit version)" out there in the ethers, and i gotta say a fell into a four day trance trying to get my head around why this song is so compelling. what i came up with was this: the modal melody, the repeating pattern became a bit of a playable mantra in my head, and i would find myself beating it out on stuff for weeks after the trance. it goes a little somethin' like this:

boomp boomp CRASH!
boynie bown bu nunna nunna nuh, nuh-nuh, nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh
buh nunnuh buh nunna nuh, buh nuh, buh nuh. (repeat often)

and then the recording. i love the distortion. i love the max-outs. i love the solos. i love the chord change. anyhoo, i think it's pretty much perfect the way it is, though i feel like i'm going to have a hard time programming this into a set.

cti records put out a couple of nina simone records at the end of the seventies, and from all that i've read, she didn't really love these recordings. shame, because there were some great moments on them, all coated in that brilliant cti fm radio sheen. this is her version of randy newman's "baltimore", and i think with the bluesy skank and thick strings, it's the perfect compliment to a melancholy vibe. randy newman's a weird dude, a songwriting relic, really, but like harry nillson (who did a great record of only newman's songs) his songs are oddly engaging, like little mysteries that you have to listen to frequently just to take it all in.

this is a demo version of "everybody knows this is nowhere", classic neil young. it has a similar vibe to "baltimore", a dissatisfaction with location. the grass is always greener. or something.

if i had it to do over, i probably would have taken this song off. this is pale saints, a band i've been yammering on about for years. as a former drummer, i always like odd time signatures and the weird things you do to fill them up. it's later 4ad stuff, so enough said about that, but it's aged pretty well, considering it's now nearly fifteen years old. anyway, this is "hunted", off the flesh balloon ep. when you thing about it, that's kind of a gross name for a record. i really like the sound of the snare drum in this record, especially when they blast it with the reverb gun in the fade out.

i could write a whole lot about low, but it's well covered ground, and by much better scribes than i. this is "hands" off of the transmission ep, and it's good as hell. this song in particular, is a bit of a jam, as far as low are concerned. listen for the dripping water in the quiet parts. maybe it's just clever recording, but my favorite low tracks always sound as if their instruments are capable... no, insistent upon making a whole lotta unruly fucking noise, the type that feels like you got the wind knocked outta ya, and it takes all the power and concentration superhero musicians low can muster up to keep them tame and quiet.

and because we had talked about it in the past, i then included low's cover of "long long long", which, by now, is just as awesome as you hoped it would be.

you run into the risk of painting yourself into a corner by putting on back-to-back low tracks on a mix cd, and it takes a pro like myself to get yourself out. here i used rub n' tug's "sea men", which is a slow balearic boogie monster, created to sound as if it came out and tore shit up on the white island back in '82. rub n' tug are eric duncan and thomas bullock, a former wicked sound system guy and all around professional head. a couple of years back they put out a compilation on the eskimo label that was truly the business, and included linda law's "all the night", a track that hasn't left my dj bag in a long time.

"aht uh mi hed" is some of that classy shuggie otis shit, one of the first songs to utilize electronic drums, even though they sound like they came from the old organ that sat out at my grandparents. shuggie really should have been more famous. i really wish he would have joined the stones. my cousin used to be in a band named "shuggie". ah well.

i listened to "in a beautiful place in the country by boards of canada a million times before i heard lyrics. of course, it's just the same thing over and over, but i think it's funny that i can listen to a song dozens of times, and then one day, i hear something completely unexpected later on. usually, it's just a little bass pattern or a flange on a guitar solo, not something as obvious as human speech (vocoded though it may be), but still, it's the little discoveries that keep you coming back. that's why reviewing stuff off of one listen is damn near pointless.

i was walking the dog the other night, and "it's alright ma (i'm only bleeding)" came on the ol' ipod. i let the dog off leash and sat in the park and really listened to what billy preston brings to it, and now i've gotta give it to him because in my mind, it's his song now. it was a drag when he passed this year, and as these things often happen, i listened to a lot more of it because of it. the man was awesome on keys. and to help prove it, i included a demo version of "dig it by the beatles, from the really good quality "as nature intended" bootleg. preston's little vamps are great. we all know little minutes of this edited into the final "let it be" release, but this is a nice full version not commercially released.

and because it has to end sooner or later, i chose sooner and finished this off with "saguaro" by a small, good thing. this is off of their em:t release. they had some really good records on the soleilmoon label (outta portland!) and have lots of previous recordings under the o yuki conjuate name, frequently on staalplaat. ambient high-lonesome cinemascapes with samplers. spooky, but comforting, a small, good thing live up to their name, and it makes a pretty good way to end a mix. oh crap, it ends horribly. that's the risk you run when making itunes mixes.

untitled playlist vol. 1

2006-11-28T22:44:00.000-08:00

it's been a while. i got nothin'. life is great, for the most part.

since i got nothin', i'll just review my own stupid little ipod playlists... the first will be from a couple of cds that i burned off for my good pal rich.

oh, damn. first up is "companion" by dennis wilson. among the last few of his "finished" songs... this hints at how good he could be, even when he was at his drunkiest. a sort of loose brazilian percussion thing around it... ever since i heard "pacific ocean blue", i've been trying to almost single-handedly promote dennis among friends to the same sorta hindsight-acclaim brian's been basking in for the last 10 years, and i'm not sure it's working. everyone i try and spring him upon describes him as either untalented or depressed (or both), but i would disagree on both counts. i think the 70's were gonna be remembered as the dennis years, iffn' only he'd clean up. well, that and a little bit more help (and a lot less sandbagging) from the rest of the beach boys organization would have been good as well, instead of regular fights with world-class asshole mike love. but, i'm now guilty of crediting someone in the imaginary "bonus round". i've always quick to call bullpuckey on that: being dead does not excuse you from the potential of truly horrible work. jimi could have ended up joining mike and the mechanics, janis could've co-written "we built this city" with grace slick. we'll just never know, now will we?

lord, how i wish i was around when "in the light of the miracle" by arthur russell was created. it's hard to pinpoint when it was made, but i'd guess sometime in the mid-to-late 80's. i'm a particularly big fan of the looseass agogo bells that dance around in the stereo field. and it's so long. i love it's odd lyric, like all arthur's songs, it speaks of uncomplicated pleasures and innocent intentions. i wish i had known about this when it came out, i would have played this nightly. dubby, meandering... true trance music. and to think that had things just been a little different, he would have had ended up in the talking heads. or so i've read. alan ginsberg described russell's music as "buddist bubblegum-pop". arthur was a real new york artist, and like many of them, he died of the big disease in 1992. "miracle" sounds to me what arthur must have felt growing up camping in iowa cornfields on late september evenings.

"kilimanjaro" i thought this kind of carried the "companion" vibe along. i didn't know shit about giants, and for the most part i still don't, other than this is sly stone's old drummer. he teams up on a couple of records in the 70's with herbie hancock and carlos santana, among others. i've never actually seen these records, they could be rare as rocking horse shit, or i could drop by jive time tomorrow and see a mint copy for eight bucks.

if you know shit about nazareth, you know either "love hurts" or "hair of the dog", the only two nazareth songs fm radio will ever play. both of those songs suck. i'm pretty sure that this is a non-debatable point. not many people know this shit, it's hot fucking leather slimey scotch leather disco shit. yeah, i'm talking about "waiting for the man", one of the few songs i actually have a hankerin' for performing. ain't no possible way i could imitate the nasty bon scott-howl of dan mccafferty, i just think i could take it to a different place, that's all. and you'd think it was hot.

rinder and lewis were almost-faceless disco producers. actually, i'm sure they were a lot of things to a lot of people, but for the sake of today's song they were st. tropez, and on this here track, they performed "belle du jour". i don't know french for squat. so, the vocalists could be reading the manual to the studer two-inch tape console, for all i can decipher. i'm sure it's damn-near-medical sex talk, but only the french would know. i'm just all about the strings. any day, it's going to get sampled by chingy or jadakiss or some other corncob, and i'm a-gonna be pissed. this is the sound of beautiful cinematic disco inspired by coke rails the size of dog turds.

ooh, "why can't we live together" by timmy thomas! it's a classic! hell yes! apparantly, there's a million covers of this, but i'm really only familiar with two, the original, and a likeable but hilarious cover i heard by a guy who i'd bet money was a black american serviceman in germany in the 80's, not unlike the milli vanilli guys, or that schmuck from snap! that story is neither here nor there, cause this one's the original. awesome drum sounds, it reminds me of the presets on grandma's organ (ooh, er). hm. i wonder how they did all those drum roll sounds at the end of it?

girly-girl doesn't like "oriental nightfish". i've spoken often and at length about the value of linda mccartney, and this is a good example of why she's the shit; everything about this song speaks to the clever songwriting skills of ol' pretty boy paul, and linda... well, she mighta came up with the concept, or maybe she wrote some words, or maybe she picked out the chords, or for all i know, she played every note, the point is that for some song that probably was just a forgotten b-side, it's catchy and enjoyable even if it sounds like it was hammered out in 8 minutes. cool little flute thing, too.

beefheart! this is about the most pop that captain beefheart and his magic band got; "my head is my only house unless it rains". it's got a nice groove and a sappy lyric. and marimba. you can't lose!

i don't know how we got over here into krautville, but "seeland" by neu! ain't a bad place to be. produced by conny plank, this one can be found on the "neu! '75" record, as good of a krautrock record as can be found. i had a neighbor friend who was into this type of stuff, and being that he was also deep into d&d and boris vallejo art, i assumed that kraut and prog stuff was essentially pussy repellant. it may still be, but as a man in a committed relationship, i can now explore beyond the wizard's sleeve without locking the door and drawing the curtains. and it's pretty good. i find i'm partial to songs with rainstorms in them, they remind me of a bad david gates record my dad used to listen to when i was a kid.

"sail on sailor" comes from holland, one of the beach boys uneven mid-70's recordings. like "up" by r.e.m., or "bloodflowers" by the cure, holland is forgotten or at least ignored. it's also unfocused, out of touch with the majority of the fan base, and a last indulgence of unfettered creative freedom by the bands before the butt-ass ugly truth is faced: "nobody cares what you have to say anymore, now shuddup and play the hits". all the big bands get to face this moment some more readily than others. when the stones tour, they know you don't want to hear 10 songs off of their new album, it's time to drag out "satisfaction" again, and they seem cool with it. rem fought it, the cure fought it... but guess what boys, your time is up. now get out there and play your 1985 classics, and we'll close our eyes and remember a time of skinnier bodies and tighter skin.

damn. every mixtape's got something stupid that you wish you could take off, and in this instance, it's "nao vou fugir" by ive mendes. i love this song... but it doesn't really fit the mood i had going there and it sticks out like a stubbed toe. the "brazilian sade", or whatever. i do find myself playing this often, or at least not skipping past it when it pops up on the ol' ipod. again, it's pretty, but i imagine that plenty of white schmucks in tailored shirts keep this one in the changer in hopes that girls will be impressed with "world music".

and this ministry song ain't really right for this moment either, but it's still a good song. "the angel" is from "twitch", a oft-overlooked ministry classic. keith leblanc behind the midi wrangling, and that's good help right there. leblanc might be the most overlooked drummer/programmer of the 80's. sugarhill, and tackhead, and then even his own records. i like that guy, i'd like to slap him five. i always tried to copy his patterns when programming those crappy mid-80's japanese drum modules and it drove me nuts when i couldn't get it right. there were some big ministry fans around where i grew up, but i never really heard anyone rock this one.

if you are my age, then you undoubtedly heard "mammagamma" in yours or your friend's parent's cars. in the fancypants suburb that i hail from, this was the test album for every blaupunkt in the volvos and audis and porsches for miles around. the alan parsons project's biggest album was "eye in the sky" and this was found over on the b-side, right in the meaty middle of it. of course, most of the album was polished stalker-divorcee fm radio fare (a preview to that whole "every breath you take" thing) , but hey admit it: if this shit came on a nightclub soundsystem whilst you were all twisted up, you know you'd have to go out and do a bit of a head-nodder boogie groove to it. it's got that going for it, undoubtedly.

verdi cries

2006-09-07T23:00:00.000-07:00

as mentioned in my previous post, i'm a fan of smoking. maybe it's the fire ritual. maybe i just like being stoned. ah hell, it's all of the above, there isn't much about it i don't like. and, as advertised, i'll do things stoned (or in the pursuit of getting stoned) that i'm usually much smarter about. this, again is one of those tales.

i can pinpoint the day, it was august 10, 1989. it was one day before my sixteenth birthday. i miss the old days, when every birthday is a milestone of one such sorts or another. sixteen is a big deal in this country, because sixteen means drivers license time.

it was this hot august day that the 10,000 maniacs were playing a concert the arlene schnitzer concert hall in portland, oregon. i had been brought along as not only the birthday boy, but also as a casual fan to natalie merchant who could pass as hardcore... i'd actually heard the first album ("secrets of the i ching") and could name a few songs beyond "about the weather". however, bear was a huge fan. yeah, bear loved that shit. in fact, it was just about here where one could pinpoint bear's left turn from club traxx into natural fiber neo-hippy barefoot shit. either way, he knew all the words, and found natalie's six-year-old boy's lisp (lyrics like "kristina's fair" turned into "kwistinayo's fayah") charming. i think bear bought my ticket. thanks, bear.

and we had crew. if memory serves; rich bachelor, bear, myself, and young jay were prepared and ready to roll. we assembled and made our way to beautiful west linn, oregon to pick up bear's then girlfriend, a plucky thing with impossibly fascinating curly red hair. she, sweet as beans, lived on a hill with her parents, in a neighborhood that bordered on two suburban worlds. she drove a 1975 yellow volkswagen bug. before that, she drove an early 80's economy model BMW with a bauhaus sticker. she used to babysit in my neighborhood. her house was built in the mid-60's, yellow big and boxy, with few windows and minor treatments around the yard. a nice suburban compound. a few years earlier, her's would have been the end of the road, and beyond that, pine trees and pathways and deer and spots to illegally dump your lawn clippings.

the late 80's had changed that... now that grove of suburban wilderness had been shaved down for beige and babyshit brown mini-mansions all lined up with minimal yards painted brown with fresh barkdust. we used to drive into these neighborhoods at night when they were being assembled and steal all of the lumber and supplies for our skate ramps. kids like me scoffed at those houses and the people who lived in them... new money. no pop, no style. i grew up in the era of brady bunch houses...tri-level spreads with avocado fixtures and mirrored countertops. these new things looked like two story neo-colonial sarcophaguses for white people.

well, the spunky red head had to prepare. put her face on and so forth... so me and the boys were sent down the street so she could shower and primp or whatever in peace. we were directed to a neighborhood "park" a block or two away, and so off we went. and there it was, a nice new modern playground in the middle of a cul-de-sac, empty and bored, just waiting for assholes like us to show up and do something stupid. we rarely disappoint. we climbed to the top of the structure, and lit up. we swung from the tire swing. we slid the slide. we yelled silly shit at each other.

i'm a funny looking guy now. back then, i must have looked like a circus clown. i'm silly tall, and skinny like i'm twelve. back then, i looked like some sort of comical pirate, doo-rag, punky ripped clothes goof. streetkid style. aquanet hair wings. but i'm not the only one. the bear is probably rocking some ape-drape/makeup combo, looking somewhere between paul king, michael hutchence, and philip oakey. rich bachelor is his impeccable self, sartorially tidy, but sprouting a long blonde ponytail so long that it's presence implies a rebellious commitment not often seen in the 'burbs. young jay looks like beautiful trouble, the kind of kid you keep kicking out of your daughter's room on late summer nights. a perfectly fine young man who won't look you in the eye. in short, a long slow look shows we mean no real harm, but taking the time to look feels like an inconvenience. what we failed to take notice of was that all the insta-shitbox houses all faced into the little park that we decided to pre-function in. as all of these whiteys settled down to their dinner, they all got a view of four strangers lighting up in their otherwise quiet little playground. what did we think would happen?

well, we had dicked off for about twenty or so minutes. i don't remember who noticed them first. but there they were: cops. parked at the edge of the playground, maybe a hundred or so yards away from us. someone, not me, but someone decided to be pre-emptive about the whole deal. it was agreed that we were getting the boot, so we walked towards the cops. i wrapped my rig and my leetle tiny stash in my bandana and walked towards the cops with the blood in my veins turning cold. i was sure i was cooked: i wouldn't see the show, i'd get arrested for possession, i'd have to get bailed out of west linn lockup from my dad, i'd be the laughing stock... i'd probably have to go to some silly-ass intervention. i remember a long walk towards the cops. by this time, i was good and stoned, and working on my best excuse, trying to sound like a man you could believe in. fuck that. we were asked for ID. the cops took an extra long time to do everything, baiting us to hang ourselves with our stories. i remember young jay gave the cops a debit card for ID, because that's all he had in his wallet with his name on it.

and i remember: the cops tipped their hand. they weren't going to do shit with us. they just wanted us out of the neighborhood. clearly, some jackass didn't like their dinner view being ruined with wild looking youths smoking the environment in their quiet burg, so they called cops. it was suggested to us by these cops that we would do much better to go home and wait for our girl to get ready indoors, lest the neighbors freak out again. the blood in my hands returned to normal temperatures. we would live to fight another day. we were directed back to the house, and we started walking in that direction, slowly, with cops watching us intently.

it was here that i fucked up. like a flash in my mind, i remembered my shitty little lamp-part pipe and dime bag wrapped in a bandana, at the top of the play structure. surely, the cops would see it, seize it, and come back to the house and arrest us... something must be done... right? i'm an idiot, and i say out loud: "oooh, i forgot my bandana". rich and jay shoot visual darts at me, literally... hate shoots from their eyes. looks that say "no, dumbass, you didn't forget anything, keep walking!". and as soon it's out of my mouth, i can't put it back. my first thought is: way to verbalize it, dumbass. my next is: well, you're screwed now, you can't be all "no, i guess it's not important, i'll leave it there!", because that just looks way more suspicious. so i turn around, and go to grab the shit. and i walk. slowly. while my friends turn, wait, and stare. that walk took forever. and i climb up that structure, look out on the little cops, and my little friends, grab and stuff that shit into my pocket, and turn and walk back towards them.

i mentioned this in the last entry, but it's really worth noting. this shit sounds boring, until you do it with the stoned wonder of a sixteen year old mind. everything is lush, it's a beautiful summer night. in that walk, i think a million thoughts, notice the smell of freshly cut grass, the way my socks are stuck to my feet, the cool of the shade as i get to the edge of the park. at any given time i could bust out with an "oh wau man" moment, but the pressure is on. i see everything. i hear everything. but i'm stoned, and my subconscious is the only thing directing me. i get back to my crew, still staring daggers at me. we walk the block or two back to red's house, with cops slowly following us. i don't think anyone said a word the whole way back.

beyond all that, i don't remember too much during the night. i remember that tim finn opened. i remember a purplish/blueish background. i thought the drummer looked like the singer of midnight oil, a band i'm not fond of. ol' bear and red sat in front of us, and i remember thinking that he was a corncob because he cried during the performance. i'm not above an emotional moment during shows, but... never ever not once for 10,000 maniacs. get a hold of yourself, pussy.

there is no truth behind the gates of eden... (squeeee!)

2006-08-30T18:03:00.000-07:00

my pal rich recently posted a brilliant story of teenage drug use and random catastrophe that left everyone only slightly worse for the wear. it led me to think of similar experiences, so why not, let's hear a couple.

i'm a fan of the marajuana. i'm not the only one. most of my teenage years were spent either trying to get stoned or finding dumb things to do while stoned. being a half-clever kid, we came up with some pretty good stuff.

one night, the thought came to a few of us to go to the local nickel arcade. this was in the late 80's, actual video arcades were really a thing of the past, nintendo was better, cheaper, and portable. we had weed, a borrowed datsun wagon, and a few bucks. a night of air conditioned darkness punctuated by the glow of video from refrigerator sized machines sounded fun and easy. why not?

the pretty boy had the car. a model citizen, he was smart, good-looking, and respectful. and christian, though at the time he seemed to be trying to shake that. he picked me up at the local elementary school, where i had compulsively snuck a pull or two off a one-hitter. the ol' brown wagon had no stereo, but pretty boy had thought ahead: he provided what could only be described as the most comical portable stereo ever. circa 1968, it was about the size of a attache case, used 12 d cell batteries to power it, and boasted a single 3" speaker. it sounded worse than a telephone receiver. the pretty boy had recently discovered bob dylan ("did you know he's a christian?") and was playing "the gates of eden" over and over again. the only frequency that lil' tape deck could really accurately reproduce was the harmonica blast ol' bobby lays out after the chorus. it made me laugh uncontrollably. the pretty boy would imitate bob's mom every time it played with a "yeah! blow, bobby, blow!".

next, we went to pick up the genius. my best friend for years, this guy's a mess to describe. suffice it to say that he was down for adventure, wherever it may be.

so, we scoot over to the wonderland, which is housed on the property of a large mall. it was night, the pretty boy didn't want the stench of weed in his car, so after surveying the scene, we decided a walk around the back of an abandoned restaurant located right next to the arcade. light up near the grease trap, or what have you. so we did.

and it was beautiful. i pine for the days when strong herb really put me out of my head. nowadays that i'm all growed up, i'm stoned, but i could waterski, negotiate a bank loan, drive the car with my knee while cleaning a spilled milkshake and text message my boss. but back then, it packed a wallop, and i liked that. soon enough, me and the other two are stoned and giggly, and paying no attention to anything around us. just burning one, and that's all we care about, life is fun and giddy, and the night is a blank canvas for us to paint with our teenage "oh wow man"'s and so forth.

but that changes quickly when we are ambushed from either side of the building. one moment, i've got a pipe to my lips, and in a quick flash of uniforms, badges and k9 units, i'm up against the wall, both hands up against it. two authority figures and a dog. i've only got my brain to help me out of this one, and it's coming up short. i can hear the terror in the pretty boy's voice as he's asked for ID. i'm the furthest away from the other two and the cops. it's dark, and i can tell there is a dog near me, but my stoner vision is starting to distort, and i can't make heads or tails out of how things changed so quickly. the genius has an attorney for a mother. often, it's irritating. now, any time the two authority figures ask a question, he responds with "AM I UNDER ARREST?"

the genius is directed to get up against the wall, right next to me, while they grill the pretty boy. they are all smart ass, asking where he came from, and if he knows how much trouble he's in. i'm hoping silence will reward me. the genius asks over and over, insistently: "ARE WE UNDER ARREST?" i shoot looks over and over, silently imploring him to shut the holy hell up. secretly, i'm fascinated by moments like this, time slows to a crawl, and you go deep into your mind looking for a solution. i always come up short.

"ARE WE UNDER ARREST?"

i finally make solid eye contact with the genius. we're on the same wall, hands on it like we're trying to push the place over. he slowly looks back, and something catches his eye. he's better trained than i. he pulls a hand off the wall and says "you guys aren't cops, are you?".

i'm at a loss. i don't even know what to do, cops or no cops. the genius gets a good look at the badge. MALL SECURITY

"you guys aren't even cops. fuck this, we're not under arrest. let's get the hell out of here". the authority figures, in my mind, shrink by about a foot each. the dog changes from a german shepherd to a border collie. unfortunately, the pretty boy is still being harassed and is moments away from weeping openly.

mall security. they try and enforce some sort of big-manisms, telling us they have the right to detain us until the "real" police show up. the genius acts like he doesn't even hear them. "screw you guys. pretty boy, let's go. these guys can't do shit". i'm surprised when no one lays a finger on us as we turn and walk away. they promise that if we ever come back to said mall, we'll be arrested for trespassing. the genius grabs pretty boy by the jacket, leading him out. we walk back to the car. all the while, mall security is threatening us with all they have left; we'll report your license number, the cops are on their way, you'll never shop at this mall again, etc.

we left that mall, fully shook. still so stoned. we drove back to our own neighborhood, screaming, pounding the roof of the car, listening to bob dylan so loud that it was nothing more than a distorted conversation. afraid to go home, we drove around the construction of the new housing developments, spinning circles in cul-de-sacs, trying to release the adrenaline we were pumped full of. the pretty boy went home, and the genius and i skated back to his house, where we listened to jesus and mary chain's "psycho candy" over and over again, trying to chill out.

not long after, the pretty boy gave up the dangerous life, and fully invested himself in christ. he married a ecuadorian girl while on a mission, and i lost touch with him after that. every so often, the genius and i laugh about that night, and i admire his ability to rise above fear and confusion, no matter his state. in the last few years or so, i understand that moments like that are not my strong suit, and i've come to grips with that.

coming up next, the goofball story about the night before my sixteenth birthday, the night of ten thousand maniacs.

is there a particular size of sign you are wating for?

2006-08-29T23:52:00.000-07:00

i'm an idiot. got just enough brains to be dangerous. mostly, dangerous to myself.

i run a record store. that in and of itself makes me stupid. what kind of life could i hope for? pissant wages, sullen and irritating customers, a dying industry. but enough about the big picture, let's talk about tonight.

tonight, just a couple of hours ago, our store was robbed. i was sitting on my ass, waiting for the time to go by, my co-worker was printing up a sales report from a computerized cash register. a guy who's been milling about the store comes up and asks my co-worker for change for a buck. the exchange is completed, the cash drawer is closed. the guy then lifts up his shirt and shows a gun tucked into the waistband of his pants to my co-worker, and tells him to "empty the fucking register". being a computer based system, he has to use a mouse to click the "no sale" icon, which freaks out the robber. that's when i notice something is amiss. the drawer is opened, he grabs the cash and runs.

this is why i'm stupid. after being told not to, i run after the guy. and i keep running. the guy goes a couple of blocks, and i'm still in pursuit, cell phone out, calling 911, giving descriptions and directions and so on. this dumbass robber gets into his own car, which is diagonally parked in front of a 4 way stop. i chase down a car, and convince them to block this guy in for a moment until i can see cops in the area. the robber starts his car, he's flashing his lights, honking his horn and revving his engine. my good samaritan gets out of the way, at the same time cops enter the area, and soon enough, there is a chase. i found out later that this guy tried to shake the cops, but eventually buried his car into a light pole about a mile or so away. my co-worker was summoned to give an i.d. on the guy. his night is over. by this time, i'm shot up full of adrenaline, pacing, swearing like a sailor, ready to punch or be punched.

but eventually, the go juice wears off, and i'm left questioning why i did what i did. it certainly wasn't to save my stupid-ass record store $800. i could a shit about being some sort of hero. i'm no vigilante. i'm not what you would call a brave man. the needle on my meter that shifts between right and wrong isn't finely calibrated. so here's what i got left: i'm stupid. and tonight, i might have gotten lucky.

i've thought about this before, everyone has. i think that i am completely capable of dying in a fucked up and unexpected way. i've had many, many dreams that end with me looking up and saying to myself, in the minute moment allowed to think such thoughts, "ohshitthatcarscomingrightatme!". blam. awake and spinning from the pillow. many times, with the "car" part of that exchanged with "meteorite", "tree" or even "cannonball". let's put it this way, if i had been shot tonight, it would be a quick story among friends: "he got shot chasing an armed robber". people would roll their heads back and say "ooohhh." i could see myself being hit by a drunken hipster losing control of her valiant and putting it up on pike, takin' fools like me out. i could see myself getting whomped by that gracefully aged falling tree, while out on a peaceful hike. the meteorite, a little more far fetched, but these are specific dreams i remember. and that reminds me that i should walk into situations with my eyes a little wider, and bend at the knees in case i need to ninja jump.

i learned a couple things about my neighborhood constabulary. cops act pretty quick when they hear about "armed". the officer i talked to was surprised the sergeant allowed them to give chase, considering it was during the first rain in quite a while, just after dark. it turns out they were really worried about him running into a house and holing up.

odd night. i'm pretty much over it all, now. that store sucks. between this and that other thing that happened a coupla months back, i'm done caring, and i gots to, gots to get a new career.

i told you i was hardcore.

2006-07-06T22:05:00.000-07:00

i've got a lot of other things that i should be doing, so i'll do this instead. i haven't done it in a while, and there are stories to tell. first, i'll start with this, it happened a while ago:

girly-girl stabbed herself something fierce. i'm at work, and girly-girl is making us dinner, i'm just about to come home, and i get a call, and she's freaking out, crying, screaming on the phone "i've cut myself, i got to go to the emergency room now!". and i of course panic and drive like a moron across town to the e.r. when i get there, she's doing better, i arrive just as she's entering triage. see, what she had done is... she's making guacamole, and she's removing the pit from an avacado. she's seen this trick on the teevee, where you pop the knife into the pit, and it sticks and you pull it out. only, they use the big knife, the one with weight and power and manuverability. she's got the paring knife, little and squirrelly, and she slips and she puts that thing right into her hand. wait, better, right through her hand. straight in the upper palm between the first and middle finger, and out the other side between the knuckles. and when they finally go in to clean that baby through and through, it looks like this:

a little mess of stitches in the palm and a couple on top for good measure. it looked painful, but it's healed up pretty good, and there's no musculature damage or pain or loss of movement or nerves. but it's a hell of a stigmata. and it's a good reminder to respect the good knives. and it was a nice precursor to pain, because in a few short days after that episode, she had all four wisdom teeth removed. and i have pictures of the aftermath of that, but i'm not going to post them because i love her so. it ain't pretty. pretty funny, but not pretty. she swole up bad. but she did get good pills. and it was a good thing, because i was going to need them. why? because shortly after that, she was leaving me, abandoning me for a month long european vacation.

which is partially why i've not done squat here in a long time. it's not been a particularly inspiring time. i don't particularly feel talking about it, so i'll muse random.

how many of these modern rock bands have the sack to admit that they were more influenced by the fixx than they were by joy division?

fireworks get old quickly.

if you were kenny lay, and knew you were likely going to prison, would you eat a double cheeseburger at every meal? i think i might.

how do you know when it's time to get a new wallet? does the money have to fall out of it?

you know how i make it look so good? clean livin'.

nu-era baseball caps are so worn out, i can't even handle it.

shouldn't james brown really be dead by now?

i used to think that sarajevo might be a cool place to live. i don't know, it still might be, but for some reason i doubt it.

my dog has a cut on ear and i seriously don't know what to do about it. chalk up another reason not to have kids. they say you get the instinct for it, but i say better safe then sorry.

the market for records on ebay has taken a dump, just when i really need to unload some stuff. so awesome, being me.

"china" by china is a really cool song, but a total bitch to google.

my computer totally locked up on me a couple of days ago, gave me quite a scare seeing that it's just a month or two out of warranty. i was sure it was down for the count, and i was sure they'd charge me an arm and leg just to look at it. destitution turned to inspiration, i dug around in it's guts and fixed it. didn't cost me a thing either. it was one of the few sun-glistens on an otherwise steaming pile of a week, and you know why? yep, you guessed it: clean livin'.

saturday, in the park

2006-05-03T21:34:00.000-07:00

don't get me wrong... i'm not some goofball hacky-sack playing phish fan. you won't catch me among the hippy circle doing some abstract rhythmless dance to some shitty jam-band, nor can i be found tooling around in a microbus with loads of bumper stickers alluding to my sobriety. so, with that said, while i do smoke a handful of weed, the date of april 20 goes rather unnoticed by me. i couldn't give a shit. yeah, i smoke, but i don't need a holiday to show solidarity with a bunch of damp and stinky natural fiber high schoolers. fuck them. i'll smoke the weed out, but don't count me among the politically stoned. i'm hurt, angry and depressed, and i'll smoke when the mood strikes me, not on some imaginary holiday.

on the other hand, if a bunch of those self-absorbed, whitey weekend warriors wanna get together and skin up, i couldn't give two shits. there has got to be something more important to prosecute.

on the one hand, these kids were properly warned. on the other, you gotta respect the civil disobedience of a useless and outdated law. but no matter which hand you look at, this shit is unreasonable. this is boulder colorado... the same place where the jonbenet ramsey case goes unsolved, unprosecuted.

ack! strawman.

point is, the boulder police should have better things to do then send someone out to a college gamefield to photograph a bunch of kids for the purpose of later harassment. oh, and if that wasn't good enough, the local constablery will be happy to hand out $50 fucking dollars per person that they can confirm the identity of. fuckin' a. attention coloradans, you're municipal police squad just handed out $10,000 in reward bait plus time spent on surveillance plus any time spent on prosecution... you get the idea. and for what? who's hearts and minds did you win over? were any valuable lessons taught? y'all feel safer now?

the overwhelming burden of trying to assess all the shitty shit around us into one ball of evil i can get my head around.

2006-04-21T20:53:00.000-07:00

i just got back from the hometown. things done changed, but it's probably more me than anything.

i finally got to meet my little girl thing, the baby pictured a post or two down. she was sweet and smelled nice, and was even kind enough to smile a bit while i was around. her folks know exactly what to do, which is great, because just being in the same room with her makes me feel unprepared and dangerous to tiny fragile things. at least i know that i'm ham-fisted, unexperienced and stupid, and embarrassed by it. nowadays, it seems like that's the type of shit that gets you into power.

i've been wanting to talk for a minute about the experience of being an american, cuz it's got me worried. but i can't. i can't help but feel like me, my friends and neighbors, and those out on the street haven't changed, but everything else around us has. and by changed, i should specify: gotten reeeel fucked up. everything that can go wrong, has. everything beautiful is being or has been destroyed. that which was once part of us all, for better or worse, is fractured and marginalized. it's almost too big to talk about. i mean everything. american art, discourse, ethics, attitudes... it's all changed so much, so quickly. i sometimes get a bee in the bonnet and want to write about the war, or our national leader, or the state of corporate affairs and global influence, or any ol' damn thing, and i just become so fucking overwhelmed. everything sucks. everything is in jeopardy, nothing is certain, even for a minute. and for all the self-serving profiteering weasels, everything is coming up roses. and they don't worry about the damage, cuz they'll be dead soon, but not soon enough for me.

and there is no sign, not even a clue or a promising lead, that this place will be in any better shape when i leave from when i got here. and not only is this place eating shit in a disgraceful style, the us of a is either shitting upon everywhere else decent or it's providing some glossed over plastic homogenized culturally bankrupt model for other nations to aspire to. this world could have been heaven, but we made it hell.

but you already know all this.

well, i used to try to be amused, and now i'm just disgusted.

the girls, they love to see you shoot.

2006-03-28T13:31:00.000-08:00

this was an especially depressing weekend here in seattle.

from everything i can tell, the shooter was a well-armed outcast with few to little ties to the party scene. i'm guessing that he intended to carry out his violence at the party, but couldn't get his nerve up. then, after hanging out at an afterparty, he decides that "now" is the time, and he ruthlessly cut down six people and himself.

i suppose that it could have happened anywhere, just as easily at a sonics game or an a.a. meeting or a post office. i suppose that since i once had ties to the rave scene, it's a bit more of a drag that it had to be tied to a party, but it would be just as sad if it happened at a gym, cafeteria or office. all age events have enough trouble here in seattle, and this will make it even worse, but i don't feel bad for raves, i feel bad for those dead folk's families.

i've been thinking a lot about gun control. i used to think that guns were pretty much useless to the average citizen... the notion of using one in self-defense is odd to me, because the overwhelming majority of people who are shot get that way long before they realize their attacker has a gun. one person with a gun usually means innocent people get shot. two people with guns usually means that twice as many bullets in the air, and if you catch one, it doesn't really matter if you were on the side of good or evil, you've still got a hole in you. i think americans think that "guns for safety" will play out like a movie, where good can out-draw evil. as said before, most people wind up shot long before they can fetch their weapon out of their purse, car, safe, closet, or from under the bed.

on the other hand, i never thought that the government, and it's effect on social differences and politics, would bring us to where we are now. who could have thought that things could get so bad, so fast? how much worse can they get? honestly, it's not too difficult for me to imagine an imminent war between the haves and have nots. i can visualize a "pre-emptive, first strike" government declaring the right to invade my home, or an entire community for that matter, with the intention of arresting or detaining me simply because i am vocal against them. it's not unimaginable to see a revolution in our time. for that reason, i completely defend the right of the average citizen to arm and defend themselves.

and this is where i'm conflicted, because i don't believe that a glock and a 12 gauge will do any good against a police state or martial law military. in fact, the simple act of using them to defend myself against those would certainly, without question, guarantee my death. i see no reason for the average citizen to own a grenade launcher, but sheesh... me and my neighbors and some deer rifles vs. the other side of a culture/class/civil war? what's the point? and how much to i want to think (or in this day and age, talk) about these fears short of joining a militia, sending up flags in the spy division of our government, or just making myself sick with a fear of everything bad coming to a head?

gun control. my dad always says "you can't put the poop back in the horse". we got tons of guns floating around in this country, and there's just no way we're just going to come to our senses and melt every last one of them down. it's sad that that sick, stupid fuck had to go and get himself an assload of them to load into his truck to go and use on a bunch of otherwise innocent and ignorant ravers. it's sad that every pissant powder dealer keeps one near to keep the competition in check. it's sad that there are enough of them floating around that little kids find them in nightstands and accidently shoot themselves or others. it's sad that sawed-off little shits walk around at night with them tucked into their waistbands, secretly hoping that someone pops off to them so they can pull that shit out and make the world grovel at their feet. it's sad that folks like me see our country spinning so far out of control that they get one just to even the playing field against the cops and the policy enforcers. it's sad that people live in so much fear and helplessness that they actually consider buying one just to defend themselves from all the other scared and helpless people who already have one. but what can you do?

australia sounds nice.

you're just a baby baby girl.

2006-03-08T19:14:00.000-08:00

this here's my girl.

actually, she's not my girl at all, she's the product of two of the finest people on earth. but she's got my name. and she's beautiful. she was born this morning, bright and early. i can't help but wish she was mine.

her name's alex cameron, and i love her already. i can't wait to meet her.

congratulations to the happy family, and congratulations to me, because this might be as close as i get to being a padre.

trying to be tough in a pop music world.

2006-02-23T22:28:00.000-08:00

i have an affection for the limp-wristed.

my first solid memory of realizing it was in junior high; listening to the smiths and feeling awkward and guilty. see, at that age, appearances are everything, and i was working hard to be hard. punk rock, industrial, and noise, the more abstract and unlistenable and difficult, the better... as far as i was concerned. it probably had something to do with the fact that i was over six feet, but didn't break 130 lbs. but those smiths, man... you couldn't deny it. gentle melodies, cascading electric and acoustic guitars, and the moz, what with his silly lyrics and falsettos. hell, my mom liked 'em. plus, i loved the fact that poor old morrissey just couldn't create a proper chorus, he'd just lay a "la la la la la di aye" or some such shit right over the top of the catchiest section of the song. awkward and retarded, just like i was.

of course, in the mid 80's, (at least here in the ol' usa) there was no short selection of catchy semi-underground sorta fey or at least sexually ambiguous bands to choose from. i can't help but remember a sad, stupid week-long obsession with the dream academy (famous for "life in a northern town", lately referred to by pedro as "the most mormon song ever written"), and not being quite sure if i could publicly admit to liking a band that had oboe solos. sheesh, back then, you could fall in love to any of number of records by japan, echo and the bunnymen, the cure, the teardrop explodes, tears for fears, the call, the church, the psychedelic furs... i'm missing an unignorable number of the others, but the point is, it was the era of that cusak jackass standing in your front yard with a ghetto blaster over his head playing peter gabriel, and it was obviously effective. so much so, that i can't help but remember quite a number of top-40 bands of that era really selling out to love, if not groping. it was howard jones and thompson twins, even with the electric guitar bands, it was the era of the power ballad. i think i teased pedro mercilessly for finding chris deburgh and double records in his collection, shit, even that sort of dreck was on the menu. it was the era when phil collins was getting paid. of course, i wouldn't ever let myself get that overly femme shit like culture club or spandau ballet... i mean really. it took a long time before i'd even listen to orchestral maneuvers in the dark, and only then because a friend pointed out that the early stuff came out on factory and was dark and techy and wasn't the sappy john hughes shit i knew best.

yeah, don't even get me started on depeche mode, then as now, i'm convinced that there are two divided camps for the synth-pop dance scene, those who thought that the mode ruled (bitches! nipple pinchers! erasure fans!), and those who found all that leather faux-disco s&m crap goofy, and worshiped at the alter of new order, a band that left your balls and your better sexual instincts intact. the folks who loved the mode back then now love "trance". enough said on that subject.

no question the love song will always sell, but is now like it was then? well, for one, i'm not fourteen. also, i have no idea what's being played on the radio and i'm pretty sure the mtv don't play any sort of music at all anymore. furthermore, i've heard all about this "emo" but no one seems to nail it down with any authority, so just when i think it's elliott smith and ray lamontagne, it's actually bands fronted by fifteen year old boys in trucker hats and pyramid spiked belts who think that punk was invented by other bands with non sequitur words and numbers in their names. whatevs, i'm sure it's no better than listening to soft cell in 1986. so to answer my own question, i dunno. this "emo" seems to be popular, but there's never been a shortage of well educated white kids singing about love troubles, and it seems that if you do it in anything other than a baritone, use literate references and enjoy the black keys, there's a strong possibility that you will come off like someone's got your balls in their purse.

so now i'm listening to ol' belle and sebastian, who define the limp-wristedness pop for our era. boy howdy, did i love this band when they first showed up. and then they released record after record, and i'm not even sure if they're any good anymore. i keep referring to such-and-such as "the new record" when two more have come since it's release. slow down kids, and let me try and absorb an album fer chrissakes! but i'm not here to discuss the carpet-bombing release schedule of b & s, i'd really rather talk about their moments of brilliance.

i was driving from portland back to seattle the other night, and i was thinking of songs that i could sing for my bro's not-yet-born daughter, and i was struck with "you're just a baby" from the first record, which is about the furthest thing from a lullaby imaginable, but apt none the less. and i dialed it up on the ipod, and found that it was in my range. and then i started thinking about "the rollercoaster ride", and "seymour stein" and even "this is just a modern rock song". i love the idea of bouncing a cute babygirl toddler around the room (with nobody watching, of course) and singing "i don't love anyone" with conviction. no matter the lyrical content, it's fun to sing to babies in gentle inflections and speech patterns, and it made me think of all the other toothless songs and bands i fell in love with, and now here we are. darla records. built to spill. the american analog set. the pale saints. saint etienne. heavenly. so many hundreds more.

for better or worse, i learned a sick amount about music from paul mccartney's "ram" album. when i was a small child, it was the only record i was allowed to put on the turntable (it was probably already scratched) and so i played it every night while my family ate, from as soon as i could choose until the folks could no longer stand it. and for that reason, i can conjure up the details of "long haired lady" or "ram on" or "back seat of my car" in my brain at a moment's notice. where does that leave me? lovey-shmaltz. bittersweet moments of earnest love, sung to either no one in particular, or a specific person i've never met and can't relate to. soft, easy going chord changes played on guitars. johnny marr could peg me as a mark from a mile away.

so an acoustic guitar, an idea no more grand than "gee, yer nifty" or "why don't you like me anymore?" or "i'm so clever yet girls don't respect me!". it's a recipe for success, and i seem to be a customer. that said, i do take some pride being able to smell the authentic shit through the headphones. just like "the dude", i fuckin' hate the eagles. i may like some bitch shit, but at least i got that going for me.

get at me dogs

2006-02-16T22:43:00.000-08:00

this one, as you might have guessed, is for the dogs. i just read a post that described the loss of a beautiful labrador pal, and it made me sad, for not only the dog, it's owner, and the grand scheme of things, but also for myself, currently trapped in a difficult relationship with a messed up dog. but first, i'd like to post what i wrote about reo, a dog i loved who died of cancer unexpectedly last year:

i really liked that dog. he was supposed to be mine, you know. the way that things happen, he showed up just when my attention should have been on my old dog, amber. it was with regret and reluctance that i left him with moms and pop. i always wanted a weimeranar.

he was loads of fun to take to the dog park, and i liked the way he paid attention to you. amber would look at you and play if you asked, but reo really watched your every move. amber didn't get along as well with other dogs. i liked the way reo was easy going with everybody else. the way he stared at you, it seemed he was so emotionally involved, i felt like it would have been so difficult to leave him at home when i went to work. plus, at the time, i was living with two roommates and we had the smallest of backyards. a dog like reo was better off... well, with folks like my folks. they had the yard, and there was always someone around.

when reo first showed up, i took him for a couple of weeks, because moms and pop drove down south for their palm springs visit. he and amber were so funny together. reo out-sized and out-muscled my old dog by nearly twice as much, but he was very respectful of the old lady. she really bossed him around our apartment. he wouldn't eat until she was done. he kept a respectful distance of her and me, especially when i would first get home from work and could pay her some attention. in a way, it sort of broke my heart, it was like he knew who was the important dog in my life, and he was respectful of that. i sort of imagined him as an orphan, and still, he was like "i know i'm not your first choice...and that’s ok, I guess…"

amber died last spring. it was one of the hardest things i've ever had to do. in retrospect, i put it off for too long, but that's the type of thing that happens when you grow attached. i still miss that funny old dog. that will never go away.

but it wasn't long before then that i realized how close reo had grown to the folks. replacing amber with reo quickly evaporated as on option. girly-girl was probably the first to point out that reo liked me, but didn't nearly care as much about me as he did pop. i think i best remember my mom promising me that reo could "come home" with me whenever i wanted him. she told me that they were "taking him for me until i was ready". it really wasn't all that long before i realized how things were: this was really their dog. reo was really all about the folks, and taking him out of that environment would have just confused him, just like he must have been when he first arrived at that house in lake oswego.

better than that was how much they liked him. i really loved it when i would see dad and him go anywhere, if not just up to the store or bank or whatever, and he was pleased and excited to take reo, just as reo was really ramped up to go anywhere as well. i remember a trip out to an auto parts store when reo came along, and i really noticed dad's pride in such a well behaved, honestly good-hearted dog that was just so pleased to be invited. it didn't take long to know that there would be no prying reo away from them. of course, they are gracious people, and if i had really acted like i wanted reo, they would have given him up for me, but there would have been an insistence on extended visits and such...

so, it was all for the best. i never really saw my dad as being someone who could be connected so deeply with a dog... but it certainly happened, and i'm glad. reo really was the type of dog you could be proud of. he was handsome, well behaved, smart, and dignified. my grandmother always called him "a gentleman". he demanded enough activity to get dad out every day, and that was really good for the both of them. i hope that he decides sooner, rather than later, to try another companion.

i should say this: reo was a much better dog around dad than me. i don't have the time or wherewithal to keep a dog up on his paces, and reo was certainly better seasoned with dad's constant attention and direction then when he was hanging around me. i think that that training with my pop was good for the both of them, and i hope poppa gets to doing that again soon.

reo was totally unexpected in all of our lives. we didn't ask for him, he just sort of showed up by happy accident, and really enriched us, and made us happier in this fairly shitty and depressing world. things don't really seem to be getting better in any leaps and bounds for any of us... so any sort of pure, unquantified pleasure, any real and true love, any creature that can keep you smiling while all the rest just sort of gets more and more unbearable... well, it's just so wonderful that we can hardly take full account of it. until it's gone, i suppose. there is so little pure joy in this world... so much other pleasure costs an ugly price, so when something so rich and easy and right and simple comes along, it's about the best thing ever. and when it goes, especially unexpectedly, it hurts so damn bad, it's like god himself kicking you in the nuts. sorry, mom.

i hope that we never get over this sort of thing, because it makes us all aware of how much enjoyment can be gained from “the little things”. that includes the relationships we all share. that being said, I love you all, and I hope that never goes unnoticed.

i have a photo of reo sitting right in front of me, in front of this monitor. He looks up at me with his pensive, sad doggy face, but I know that he was happy, even though his long ears, jowls and nose would never give it away. to my folks, you did a great thing for him, guys, and as much as I loved him, I loved you for doing what you did for him. let’s do it again soon.

i never really wrote a eulogy for amber, but i should have. it was all a little too painful. when i put amber down, i drank myself into an unbelievable stupor and slept on a good friend's bathroom floor for the afternoon... and then woke up stone cold sober just as the sun was setting. after that, i chose not to think about it, and though it still hurts, i think i'm better for it, at least i thought i was.

now, i have a whole new set of problems, and his name is jack. jack is a year and a half old weimeraner, and he's been with us for a little over two weeks now. jack was a shelter dog, and we are his third home. for all of the bad behaivor he displays, we speculate that he thinks that no matter what he does, he can expect the situation to change if he waits long enough.

he's pretty and strong and fun, as it were, but he's crazy and he's driving me crazy. i'm used to dogs that look you in the eye. you could probably break a 2x4 over jack's head and his tail will continue to wag while his head does a constant swivel for what interesting things could possibly be happening next. he pays me no attention at all and is constantly causing me worry. if doggies have a.d.d., this dog should be on a ritalin drip.

first, all the bad shit: he jumps, he freaks out, he's a total spaz. as soon as you wake up in the morning, he's trying to jump up on the bed, or put his paw in your face, or he's scratching at the door. he gets into the laundry and runs around the house with girly-girl's underwear in his mouth. he doesn't know any command other than "sit", and he only does that when he wants to, or you push down on his butt. he slobbers all over the place. if he gets away from you off-leash, he ain't coming back until he's damn good and ready, and even then you have to jump out after him just to get a hand on his collar. he eats out of the cat box. he's afraid of a slick spot on the kitchen's linoleum, and if he ends up on the wrong side of it, he cries and barks until you come and get him, and even then he flails, all paws in different directions. he's no good at all on a leash. he nips at your hands and clothes in a effort to get you to play with him. you can raise your voice and grab his muzzle, you can scream no over and over again, but his eyes dart about and he pays no attention to any type of discipline. he antagonizes bigger dogs at the dog park, and then runs aways when they get fed up. he tries to sleep on the couch. he tries to chew on everything, from the plastic crates that house my records to the stone fireplace hearth. the concept of "fetch" is completely lost upon him.

now, the good stuff: he has yet to empty his bowels in the house. he is fairly respectful of the cats, but probably only because they have both slashed him up good. he only barks when he feels trapped, and as far as we know, he doesn't bark in the house when we go to work. he has yet to destroy anything we care about while we are away. he sleeps through the night. he is pretty to look at. he doesn't shed. he's always happy when you come home. he's got me going out for serious walks at least twice a day, and it's giving me more energy.

and so, where does that leave us? well, i believe that in a few years, he will be the perfect companion. but it will take work, so so so much work. we are enrolled in obidience training, that starts in two weeks time. we continue to try and endear ourselves to him, in an effort to show him that we are the ones that love him, feed him, entertain him, and we should be respected.

and that's another painful part of this: i really wanted a dog to love and to love me back, but he couldn't give a leetle bag of poop about me; he's all about girly-girl. she talks to him and his tail wags, she goes to work in the morning and he cries and won't come back to bed to sleep by my side. whenever i tell him to do anything, he looks at her to see if he really should obey. i can't win. i feed him, walk him, pet his dumb doggie head, and all his attention goes to her. and i feel good for her for that, because she wanted a dog too, but i really wanted a new pal, and he couldn't care less if i shat or spun circles.

so, we'll keep on going. like i said, i think jack's got plenty of potential, but i sure would like a little reward now. just a little something to be hopeful for. i can't help but think of amber and reo, and how they were both so eager to spend time and have fun and play ball and just enjoy being around me. those times just seem further and further away.

there's one in every crowd, for cryin' out loud...

2006-01-21T02:02:00.000-08:00

if you happen to find me on myspace.com (and i hope you don't), you will see a random list of folks that i hope to "meet". i've met a few of them. i use it as a list of inspiration (i don't really care that much about meeting anyone at all), and i sincerely hope that the list grows to a million miles long, and that you... yes, you, yer own name gets on their sooner or later. anyway, a name that i've had on there since i've started it is that of rodney bingenheimer.

if you haven't seen it, i wholly recommend the documentary "the mayor of sunset strip". it's a documentary about rodney, a strange little southern california byproduct of fame and admiration and starfuckery, and one of the few examples of people who do what they do for love and curiosity and passion and maybe a few other reasons that we'd rather not dwell upon, but those which reside in us all. but we'll get into that in a moment: rodney is most famous for being either a: an extremely influential dj on kroq radio in l.a. (he broke everyone from bowie to blondie to x to the smiths to coldplay on american radio), or the extremely well connected creator of "rodney bingenheimer's english disco", arguably the first "punk" club in los angeles. he knows everyone, and everyone knows him.

i learned about kroq a long time ago, when what was then called alternative radio came to portland. at that time, there were college radio stations nationwide, where pasty stoned kids played whatever would freak out the status quo (but probably never the band "the status quo", unfortunately). portland did not have such a station. we had kboo, which as far as i know, is still there and chugging along, trying to cater to just about every segment of the minority demographics... and really pleasing no one in particular with a hodgepodge of news, ethnic interest, comedy, local affairs, and finally... if there's some time... music. anyhoo, around the same time i got out of high school, a strange radio station popped up on the am dial, and played a relatively bland mix of "college rock" and raw album versions of songs that really gained their popularity from danceclub clientele and dj's. i was impressed enough with this "new" format (understand that as bad as it was, it seemed to be a giant leap forward in portland's bland oldies/top 40/country radio landscape) that i asked anyone who would know about it, and everybody finally referred me back to kroq, out of los angeles. my only other point of reference for kroq was fucking "less than zero" by bret easton ellis, in which he referenced ol' rodney on the roq. horrible book. horrible author. aw well.

anyway, i knew this guy was pretty much the man when it came to servicing the masses about the sorts of bands that should, by all rights, be entrenched in our own national musical heritage. yeah, rodney was (and is) the west coast john peel. but there is a whole lot i never really knew or could imagine about the guy. radio has an amazing ability to hide characteristics of people, and yet reveal sides of people that you would never pick up upon by sharing a drink with them, or running into them with your car. f'rinstance, by all accounts: he's like the nicest, most earnest guy in the world, frequently to his detriment. ain't a person in this movie with a cross word about him, and while that's not rare in a documentary or biopic, his ability to get close to people who would otherwise walk across him like he was common carpeting would leave you to believe he's more than just a boygroupie that hopes the starlight reflects back upon him.

i suppose that what interested me most was this: no matter the scene, there is always room... no wait, there must always be one lone fella that just, by all rights, shouldn't belong... and yet, the scene seems to spin around them. the catch is, there is only ever room for one. the scene, no matter what scene it is, has the usual grip of manipulators, promoters, pretenders, also-ran's, competent competitors, mavericks, den mothers, wheel greasers, opportunists, scribes, and haters. you've met them, you know them, you are one. you studied how to become one. folks like ol' rodney though... you could hope, and train, and aspire, but it'll never happen for you, for one thing, there's only room for one, and second, if you try too hard, you don't deserve it. weird. i guess the magic just happens.

rodney's still on the roq, tucked away on sundays from midnight to 3am. and that radio station that sounded so new to me in 1990? it's still there, and boy howdy, it sucks, for lack of a better term, out loud. aw, hell, it stunk then too, but it was a big deal for me to hear bands like ride or teenage fanclub or even husker du or camper van beethoven on radio. as far as the rolling stone-reading mainstream is concerned, that sound went from college to alternative to some sort of mall approved punk and is now crossbred with whatever white kids think might scare the old folks at home. radio's crap, and as long as i've been alive, it's continued to serve it's purpose: $$$. but it's still good to know that in little pockets, out there somewhere, there are earnest people like rodney, required by scenester law to drop in and do their job for the love of new music.

on now: fat freddy's drop "cay's crays" from "based on a true story"

i surrender you to the cops.

2006-01-13T12:42:00.000-08:00

there is a moment. anyone who's ever been in love knows it. hell, you don't even have to be in love to recognize it. any relationship; friendship, sex, work, casual aquaintence. it's really rather unmistakable. the moment when you resign your efforts in love, and give up. you see the inevitable parting of ways as a small, chugging dot way down the highway, you have no idea if it's big and noisy and painful or if it's sleek and elegant and simple. you aren't positive when it's going to arrive, but make no mistake, it's coming for you. it's not going to turn around and go back the other way, it's just a question of whether it runs over your foot or vaporizes you and turns you into soup.

i remember that exact moment in every relationship i've been it. i remember it well with the little blonde anger pixie. it was a minor fight, and even though she swore she was giving up those lucky strike filters, she stomped down to the porch to smoke. i sat in my room and there it was. the moment spoke to me and it said hey, you may do this for a while longer, but ain't no way yer gettin' married, and sooner or later, yer gonna leave her. and right i was. oh sure, it took two more years, but we finally went our separate directions. i also remember it with ol' damaged goods. she had just been fired from her good job, and wanted to take a job as a cocktail waitress in a seedy, shitty karaoke bar that she frequented and i hated hated hated. that moment was there, only i thought i could skate for a while longer. on christmas day, she called and announced that she was shacking up with a snowboarder lifty, and that she didn't love me anymore, and wouldn't be coming home. we both recognized the moment, but she decided to do something about it.

yeah, i'd really like to go back up that river with you...to find the things we never thought we'd lose. that's the radar brothers right there, and in simple slow songs they talk about the many slow, deliberate ways we stumble through life. the best part of any relationship is the time for when you move through your lives together, without doubt, sure that you will never lose the optimism, the hope, the interest, the commitment. once you have, it's damn near impossible to go back to the way things were. or, as pops likes to say, "you can't put the poop back in the horse"..

the radar brothers plod along at the same pace throughout damn near every song they play, and people who are less endeared by them then myself seem to think they sound like they've been woken up after a twenty minute nap instigated by dozens of bong hits. acoustic guitars, clever songwriting, obtuse lyrics. i live off this stuff. not long ago, a friend sucked all the songs off my ipod into his computer. a couple days later he mentioned he couldn't understand how i could listen to so much music that moves at a glacier's pace.

round and round i go, you twist my heart, you watch the race. how many cars can ride the way, have it twisted for relations sake? so once you've reached that moment in a relationship, it's now just a question of how long you can go without doing something stupid? i'm an uncaring, selfish type of person, so frequently i can go a long time, just treading water, just spinning around. until something better shows up. this, of course, is cruel and stupid, and it's typical of the type of romantic life i've lead. everyone's a victim, so there are no victims at all. we are all guilty.

and that may be the message in the textures and lyrics of the songs of the radar brothers, a sort of helpless, we do what we do because we know no other way sort of feeling. they'd probably sound stupid and unnatural playing fast or angry, or disjointed or funky. for some strange reason, there seems to be a reference to water in every song they play. maybe it's the california coast near where they practice. however, they don't sing of a bright sunny wave, it's more often a song of "underwater culprits" or "an ant floating in milk". maybe it's a pre-natural vision of death, like charlie's (from the excellent and underrated pacific northwest band pond) assertion that his death, though he not knows when it will occur, will be drowning.

the inevitable is a difficult thing to face, and god knows i can ignore and procrastinate and act like i'm above it, but that feeling gnaws in your mind as you try and fall asleep, and worse yet, it changes the way you act towards your beloved. after that ugly moment appeared to me, ol' damaged goods saw right through the smoke screen i launched, my "everything's cool" attitude is and was painfully transparent. assertively, she decided to jump ship and hop on the first smiling hardbody that made himself available. can i blame her?

yer fed up with the make up...

2006-01-05T13:53:00.000-08:00

s'true that this thing has been irritating me. i'm here for different purposes. this shouldn't be all me me me.

when i first started this, it was inspired by the discovery of how these things work and the writings of one very talented writer who can create something thought provoking yet quaint like he's blowing his nose. i figured i could do the same. fuck that. i can't. or maybe i can, but i can't do it by imitation. i've got other things to talk about.

and with that, i'ma leave this post, and move on to what moves me. it's the music. that's why this is called disco backache, it's why i'm disco boy, and it's what i know best. and it'll be chock full of lyrics and mumblings and non-sequitors and the odd rant here and there about something damn near useless. and if i'm doing my job correctly, i'll always tell you what i'm listening to.

right now, it's "boyfriends and girlfriends" by low. and it's good.

for anyone who cares, i'll leave this: i'm four days into the rza plan, which means that i'm not smoking weed, and i'm not drinking, and just to kick it up a decibel, i'm trying to avoid caffeine, red meat, grease, sugar, and gluttony in general. it's going fine, it always does, but it has become more pointedly obvious to me that drugs don't make me act a certain way, rather that my bothersome traits get to me most when i'm fucked up. in other words, i really wish that i was a scatterbrained lazy ass because i smoke, not because i just am. truthfully, i don't want to have to feel like i should self moderate, but it's the only thing i can think of to do in order to try and change my behavior. ah well, at least i'll detoxify for a while.

now it's "long long long" by low. it's so goodass good.

today i didn't even have to use my AK

2005-12-21T14:30:00.000-08:00

i always get to do what i want. it's a life of privilege, i suppose. aside from being the first born, there's also the unignorable fact that i'm white, over six feet, and sort of pretty. folks clear the lane for you when you got that going. so, generally, what i want to happen seems to when i want it to.

except this year. this holiday season, i'm going to alaska. where it's cold. to be around my girlfriend's family. this is not how i would normally choose to spend christmas.

actually, truth be told, i couldn't give a shit one way or the other about christmas, but everyone around me seems to like it, and i like almost everyone around me, so i buy into it to a degree. i couldn't care less about christians. or religious people in general. i'm not all giddy about westernized retail success either, so all of this holiday business don't impress me much. but, i do like the smell of pine trees and christmas cookies are good good stuff.

but do i want to enjoy that in a climate that (last i checked) barely climbs into the positive numbers? hells no. i'll be around a variety of girly-girl"s family members, some in better shape than others. there's also a wedding that we are attending, one of her cousin's. so, for those of you keeping score: bitter cold weather, a stranger's wedding, and awkward meta-family obligations. for as much as we'll spend on plane fare and lodging, we coulda gone to sao paulo. oh, well.

see, here's the thing, and i know i don't mention it nearly often enough. i love me girlfriend. and while the shit in alaska seems to be rising on a daily basis, she has dutifully gone and visited, nursed, coached and coddled family many many times while i stayed here in mild pacifica, enjoying the run of the house and the lifestyle of excess and drinking that can only happen when your true love leaves town. not only that, but she has worked as hard, if not harder, to endear herself to my family, she makes the coupla hour trip down to p-town regularly with me, and has done all of her girlfriendly duties that make her a shining star in the old folks eyes. and have i done the same for her family? not even a little bit. so, that considered, i knew it was time for me to make an appearance. and tomorrow, we leave to make that appearance. bluh.

i've complained about this to anyone who would listen, friends, family, strangers in bars, and most importantly and stupidly, my girly-girl herself. this will be my last long-faced look at the trip up north. from here on out (at least until our return), i'm going to get my game-on attitude together, and make it look like i'm having the best time of my life, discovering the roots and truths about the girl i love. i'll grin so hard it will look like i'm trying to break my teeth. i might just shoot a rainbow out my ass. and i'm going to try and be as nice a guy as humanly possible.

and when i get back home, kick my shoes off, and plant myself on the couch, i'm going to drink, drink, drink. and maybe, when all is said and done, i'll be able to look you right in the eye and say, "yeah, alaska... we had a great time."

mom and pop... they will fuck you up... for sure.

2005-12-03T00:03:00.000-08:00

my folks are in town. i'm lucky, because the folks, they rule. good folks, love to see ya, never get down on ya. good folks.

everybody who has folks probably thinks it's the strangest relationship they've got, and they're probably right. if you want to get really gritty about it, it's like: half of one, half of the other one, and you fell out (or got cut out) of one of them. you've also probably based your life's expectation and road map of theirs, and whether it's at the front of your mind or not, theirs is what you are up against.

sad but true: i can't live up to ol' moms and pops. they did it all with class, grit and style. life isn't what it promised them, but who's is? they are honest and true and they do just slightly more than they should have to, to make this a better world. i shit you not: my dad doesn't break the rule of law. he don't want no trouble. he understands the right way to do things, and he does it that way, the best he can. i can't do that. i don't really give a shit about the letter of the law, just the spirit, and sometimes (many times) i don't even respect that. my folks are like the best neighbors in the world. friendly, helpful, interesting, unobtrusive. me? i'm unobtrusive to a fault. as your neighbor, it'll take me six or seven years just to get your name right. i keep my shit tidy, but i don't want people knocking on my door, either. mom would make you a quiche.

so, tough to live up to, yes. by the time that they were my age, they'd been married fourteen years. that makes my head hurt. i am way, way behind schedule. not really, but damn... some times it can be a little weird. and i'm myself considered a "LTR" type of guy. i deeply suspect that could possibly be the worst part about me: i suck the life out of otherwise promising young women. and it takes a long time, three or four years on average. i've been told that it's painful.

mom says i'm hard on girls. gee, ya think? mom would never be that sarcastic, but she would laugh at it, which only serves to make her that much better. mom and dad appriciate a joke.

so, mom and dad, and and breakfast. wish my sister was here.

they call me greasy choirboy.

2005-12-02T00:10:00.000-08:00

creatures of habit are possibly the worst creatures cluttering up the planet, and i should know, because i am among the worst. the habits... compulsions... self-destructive behaviors... well, i'm not suggesting that life would be better without tradition and curiosity, but fer fuck's sake; some days i feel like bill murray in groundhog day. i guess lots of folks must feel like that now and again, otherwise, that movie wouldn't have made any money.

i'm at the end of my weekend, in which once again i did among the least possible, but the most predictable. i farted around in record shops, and on the computer. i laundered, i tidied up the kitchen. i sat around watching television. i smoked a bunch of weed. i moved a few records around. i slept in. i ate thai food. i watched a wet, useless snow drift in cotton ball-sized chunks down onto the ground, only to disappear into the slick pavement. i rarely stepped outside. the closest i got to exercise was a brief jaunt down the the driving range with pedro and the steely surf animal.

here's what i didn't do, and this is why the rza plan will be welcomed in january: i didn't make a mix cd, write a song, do the obligatory christmas shopping, cook a fancy meal, skate, jump off something tall, pay my bills, organize a couple of record sets, do any situps, clean ye olde jeep, talk to moms and pops, fix my website, invite some new friends over, paint the kitchen, find a new dog, stretch, vacuum, get a haircut, clean out the storage, get a passport, or go surfing with the surf animal. he needs a better name than that. whatever, all it means is that i had three unencumbered days, and i didn't impress myself worth a shit.

the rza plan is a stupid plan unless stepped up this year.

it's no secret that i can waste all kinds of time burning my brain with mild forms of fun. i'm a wash and wear sort of substance abuser, so i could probably be a burnout year-round, without any sort of self-censorship or concern. but for chrissakes, just because i like chocolate cake doesn't mean i eat it every day. actually, if you are me, it does. it's that whole habit thing. it ain't gonna destroy me, it will just make me feel pathetic about myself, and that sort of attitude, well, it takes you exactly to where you think you deserve to go. so, with that in mind: i don't smoke weed for the first six months of the year. years ago, i was reading an interview with wu tang clan's rza, and he spoke of doing just that. (by the way, do you know your wu tang name? pedro's is auxillary priest, which is just about this close to perfection) well, i thought that i could use a little self-regulation in my life, so i started to do the same thing. it's got it's good times and bad, but it works for me.

and this year, i'm going to try and get my drink habits nailed down too. sobriety is an amazingly overrated state, but i really need a change of scenery. so, i intend upon not drinking for that first six months as well.

i can do anything for six months. right? yeah. will it make a damn bit of difference?

i'll run it up the flagpole, you'll salute, and we'll see if we can't get a few others to follow.

2005-11-30T17:11:00.000-08:00

like the uncarved block, the blank spiral notebook, or the freshly stretched and unpainted canvas, this is probably better left untainted, unmolested. but, like many other things in my life, i'm here to fuck this up too.

i discovered this by chasing down the writing of one of the most talented people i know. one of the brightest, most astute, and clever people i've ever had the pleasure of hanging near writes here. i may link him up, but that would go against my better judgement, mostly because i have a tendency to write drunk, and jeez louise, i'm not here to embarrass anyone but myself. maybe i just yank this whole thing later when i get the nerve, maybe i turn this rope into a noose, maybe i confess all the things i don't say to anyone ever, or... or...

anyhoo, holiday time again, and it's during my long thanksgiving weekend that i traveled back to my hometown and by odd coincidence, connected with a few old friends, one of whom directed me to this site. 10 years. it's a long fuckin' time.

i used to be the baby. or, one of the babies anyway. long looking up to the cool kids, i wormed my way into their good graces, and they taught me all the basics, how to talk shit and still hold the upper hand, how to make an apple bong, how to use hair mousse and not look like a complete poser. i never learned that last lesson, but they were my crew, and even though they still teased my hair now and again, i always held them in high regard.

but things change, and now i'm the old fart. i've stuck around far too long in this creepy crappy scene, and i'm easily older than my coworkers and clients by 10 years. i still look like a kid from a distance, but stand close enough and you get the impression that i've been ridden hard and put away wet.

so fuck all that. it was good to feel like the kid again, get the good natured dutch rub, drink and eat heartily, and wander around the neighborhood in the cold night. aging is a bitch, i always imagined that i'd do it with style and ease, but my truth seems to indicate that it ain't easy no matter what you do. my knees hurt, i get winded walking up a flight of stairs, and i'm starting to develop the hipster/grover-from-sesame street body.

oh well, at least i never got a stupid tattoo.