It still makes you sad

I know that I like a song when I am lying in bed with headphones on and five measures in, I throw the covers off and sit up in my pajamas and start doing meaningless stuff on the internet with a whole lot more enthusiasm. 

Not that I am sitting around in my pajamas or anything. 

I have bought a few mediocre albums lately and I have been reading a lot of mediocre books. In fact right now I am reading a book about an Algerian immigrant living in France who is researching his father's sordid past as an SS officer and it is boring. Is that even possible? Concrete dreary little details are the coolest most special parts of the world when the right person is writing. And then Boualem Sansal makes an effort and tells a culturally mind-blowing and historically significant story like it is a fifth grade creative writing project. And I wind up on my train ride to work, staring at the 7-day T pass I use to mark my place and fantasizing about expiration dates instead of reading. 

My work schedule is getting better. 

We are talking about the live album. 

Also, WG Sebald found a quote for the The Tanners'  intro that Robert Walser himself wrote about ash, which I love: "If one goes into this apparently uninteresting subject in any depth there is quite a lot to be said about it which is not at all uninteresting; if, for example, one blows on ash it displays not the least reluctance to fly off instantly in all directions. Ash is submissiveness, worthlessness, irrelevance itself, and best of all it is itself pervaded by the belief that it is fit for nothing. Is it possible to be more helpless, more impotent, and more wretched than ash? Not very easily. Could anything be more compliant and more tolerant? Hardly. Ash has no notion of character and is further from any kind of wood than dejection is from exhilaration. Where there is ash there is actually

 nothing at all. Tread on ash, and you will barely notice that your foot has stepped on something."

Take that, vast plot lines!! Meaningless inanimate things win one round. 

This picture is from our show in Chapel Hill. Leon is holding his guitar. In fact right now I am listening to the audio from Raleigh and his electric guitar extension, the part that gives the end of "Come Home" a brand new street-nostalgia-tough-sadness. Which is quite fitting. "Just think you've got that navigational skill from being the last one home and the first one out, you've got stony lungs and a provisional will." Anyway. 

Familiar city

I swear that instead of sitting on my ass for the rest of this chilly cozy lazy Friday night, I am about to wrestle some clean clothes out of my closet and go out foraging for music and people! 

But first, this line from Morante's novel Aracoeli (which I am finally finishing) has been haunting me, even if it is outdated to feel tied to my service-industry profession and small hometown and low bank balance. On well-read vs. well-bred, this is how I feel: 

"At heart you remained always the peasant you were at your origin, even if in time you became able to tell renard argente from renard bleu and a chemisier from a tailleur, and to mix the several ingredients of a cocktail. Et cetera. (Your acquired culture bloomed, generally speaking, only within this hothouse.) In time, to be sure, you learned your way around."

The cocktail irony does not escape me. Merry weekend to all!

 

Preemptive nostalgia

Tour was the greatest: 

I still have the highway in me. And after leaving the window open in my room for two weeks, I have the smell of fall in my sheets and yellow cotton tights on, fall, burning wood breezes, hot coffee, blanket appreciation etc. 

Madge, a beagle mutt, a small dog with a big dog's pretty face, woke me up this morning with stampeding little feet on the kitchen floor above the basement. She has a white lightning stripe on her black forehead. I had dreams all night about work and returning to real life, trays, uniforms, $$$, and so on. The last morning of tour means that dog-time is better than reality-fantasizing. 

Throughout the trip, we built a dashboard army of haphazard claw-machine toys and fifty-cent finger puppets and pooping pig keychains. After a bottle of pepsi, Brian usually set them singing and farting harmonically on the video camera. I have a million pictures but I think I'll take my time putting them up. For now, Dusty, sad because we crossed back into the commonwealth:

 

Cloudy days etc

My goodness. 

I had a nightmare last night that I had to wait on a table of five blond girls sitting on folding chairs behind the line in the kitchen and they were sticking their spray-on tan hands in the half pans of prepped food, asking me what their bill looked like, rolling their eyes at our eight dollar appetizers. 

My favorite thing about the train ride home from work last night was a paragraph from Aracoeli by Elsa Morante. The gay slightly depressive ex-drug addict protagonist who is traveling to Spain in search of his dead mother is reminiscing about an Italian man who got him an appointment with a respectable female hooker: 

"Somehow, I don't know how, without another word and without any resistance, I allowed myself to be carried off, rapidly, like the cloth of a flag running against the wind behind its bearer. If the flag had borne a motto, I imagine it would have been To be like others; but truthfully there wasn't an idea in my head, nothing but a kind of cry - like a command - exclaiming that today was a solemn day, established for my definitive ordeal."

Not experimental, but goddamn lovely. That's actually how I would describe the whole book, so far. Plus reading it has made me use the dictionary a few times (and by dictionary I mean some nearby person's iPhone). 

Words I have learned: 

obsequious

recidivist

Boring weekend

Right now I am skipping my waxing appointment because I can't drag myself out of bed. My roommates, who I have seen about twice since I moved in May, are puttering about and chatting in the hallways. From the bits of conversation I can hear, it sounds like a parent or two is in town, cleaning around the house, maybe squatting on the floor and putting furniture together. Too much to handle. I worked all day every day this week. My job description is pretty much centered around a constant output of meaningless banter and insincere concern for the well-being of others, so I'll be damned if my first morning off involves a single fake smile. 

Antisocial. 

Peopled-out. 

Heard from the kitchen: "How long have these olives been here? Since May! Silas, you are in biiiig trooouble!!!!!"

Things I should be doing right now: 

1. Laundry

2. Laundry

3. Laundry

4. Laundry

Wednesday afternoon nap time

There is a dishwasher at my new job named Rubens. He is an old man with the body mass of a five year old boy; I am still trying to figure out if he has teeth or not. He smokes cigarettes all the time, always outside with a little cup of sweetened coffee and a hand on his hip. Michelle told me that he likes boys and it doesn't surprise me. I don't know what gave it away, hearing him call his dates "costozo dimais" or noticing that the delivery boys sing out "hi honey" when he holds the door for them, watching at a standstill as each sweaty back descends the stairs behind crates of all things perishable and delicious. 

Rubens was trained to cook last week after one person got fired and another person quit and I started to think that I was the cursed day bartender, the kitchen cooler. Fuck it, money is tight, instead of hiring someone else to work they trained the dishwasher to make the food. So today when I ran downstairs for a bottle of wine, I saw him shoveling food straight from the six-pan, letting it fall from his mouth back into the container, little specks of tobaccoed saliva dotting the shredded cheddar cheese that would see its way onto someone's lunch, someone's burger, someone's last bite. 

I am not tired of smoking yet. 

We have a show tonight, 9PM at Great Scott in Allston. 

From J.M. Clezio's "Le Proces-Verbal": "In case of need they huddled together in a corner of the first-floor room and made love mentally, thinking all the time 'We're spiders or slugs'."

This is another sentence of his that I read a few times: "The peace, thus composed of talk between strangers, tips, parts of evenings joined together without rhyme or reason, could easily be transformed into hostilities, stale bread, scraps of terror by night, and then, all of a sudden, into war, with code languages, passwords, blood, trails of black smoke."

I have an hour to sleep before smiling and singing things and saying hi to people. Believe that. A full fucking hour.  

My recent life

Grenacha, grenache

Malbec, red, rose, last call

Guiness

Albarino

Woodford reserve

Triple eight, calvados, angostura bitters and nivole

Gazpacho gimlets

Boozy latte runoff

Godello, tempranillo, gargenas

Vineyard, varietal, last call

Homemade beer

Sherry whipped cream

Jameson, maker's, belhaven and turbodog

Fernet

Rye (old overholt or michter's)

Hendrick's

Prieto picudo, picpoule de pinet

Last call, repeat

June is special part two

Nonsensical babbling while at the cabin: 

SUNDAY 10:48 PM: I am drinking a muddy 2005 Malbec from Catena looking at this computer screen while Mally draws in a sketchpad and Brian marches madly around the table in the middle of the room, filling our glasses and "get my dancing on camera because I'm starting to feel the move", silence outside and made beds upstairs. I am resisting the urge to be all, like, retrospective nostalgia summary-making. Fire and furnaces are noisy. I have a hard time writing about the past when it is now; cracked light; sound;

MONDAY 11:46 AM: After bacon and pancakes and french press coffee and with the fire still going, I have a printed green blanket over my knees, the sun in the window, Mally and Brian fiddling with the video camera, the little ivory twist of a smoked joint next to my cup, the fire that needs constant prodding, my hands smelling like dish soap. "If you put your fingers like this and blow through like that, it directs where your breath goes...." Last night Brian, before his thespian existence, had the most hysterical ability to perfectly narrate this scenario while it unfolded: the three of us, stoned, trying to stand up with our hands full, on a small blanket in a sea of poison ivy. And then Shakespeare, standing in front of our makeshift movie screen. 

TUESDAY 11:18 AM: It is an incredible thing to wake up and know that there is nowhere to be. Blankets are all over the place, and books: Mally is curled up with Light Boxes by Shane Jones which makes me happy that I brought it. Brian is playing guitar in the kitchen. Last night, under the influence, we recorded a creepy jam for a long time while a fire was built by Maddy in the furnace and the sounds add a crackling, steel, home-feeling. Brian kept percussion going with sticks on the furnace, while I sat on guitar and Mally on the keys, only breaking to get the lasagna ready, the recorded thinking experience. There was birthday cake for everyone from Mally and squeaky toys in the form of our symbolic animals. Games, charades, acting drawing, Magic Markers, wine, beer, Woodford Reserve. 

3:51 PM: I am full of coffee and ice cream and sunshine. Everything smells like cabin. Wet wood and old fabric, people having stayed here before, blood relations, the neighborhood matrix. We went to the lake earlier and gasped about weird exoskeletons and the creepy echoed call of the loon. Brian, on Italian people: "they, like, worship grapes."

9:49 PM: Listening to Vespertine, bells and organs, Matthew Barney, Brian: "I love this album oh my god I love this album", it may be cheesy to be thinking with misty eyes and fire-warmed feet about another person's album and another person's lyrics but another person's music is what makes you try to do more next time, and more next time, and more next time. Brian grilled chicken sausage while I chopped garlic and Mally did the rest of the pasta and broccoli legwork. Brian had a purple and orange apron straight out of the seventies and the smell of the grill came inside with him. Table questions: best sex ever, worst sex ever, weirdest places, etc. Consensus: what makes sex bad is people who "act" and what makes sex good is loving sex and loving penises and loving vaginas. "There is an animal in the woods right now"

WEDNESDAY 12:59 PM: Last night Mally and I headed upstairs to bed and Brian played creepy music through the grate, snuck up the stairs and scared the shit out of us in our beds, with the lights on. Sitting up a second time and listening to the creaking of the stairs, we decided to get up and scare him, but peering around the door and down the stairs, no one was there but the blue light of the DVD screen in the main room. We tiptoed down and heard a quiet "shh" "shh", (mounting terror) found Brian in the pantry with the video camera aimed out the back screen door, motioning us towards him, we sidle along the stove, Mally holding a broomstick, and at the very last moment he turns to us with the camera and screams in our faces: seeing yourself freak out on film is funnier than you think

4:03 PM: Mally is playing her new song and she has a lovely way of singing quietly and pronouncing the soft consonants; we went to the gas station to buy nail polish and beer and cold medicine for Brian, who is napping upstairs. Ants are fucking EVERYWHERE: I saw one carrying a piece of scrambled egg down the leg of a table and felt impressed, friendly, etc.

THURSDAY 11:07 AM: How do I make myself practice more and by more I mean, like, all the time? Now there is sun and heat into the cool cabin, doors and windows open, call and answer between guitar outside on the blanket and the birds in the trees. This morning I woke up and did the dishes and thought "why is it so hard to clean my own room?" 

FRIDAY: I can't stop thinking about how in the real world I spend more time scheduling things that doing things

June is special

I am going to New Hampshire for five days. There will be no internet. There will be a lot of instruments. 

And wine! And bourbon!

Vinyl macht sexy

Uh, so, I realized when I was thinking about what to write on the Wighnomy Brothers that whenever I blog about some music that I have heard and liked, I don't so much mention the sounds themselves as how sexually attracted I am to the person who has made the sounds. 

Gabor Schablitzki. 

I first heard of these dudes when I went to see the subpar documentary Speaking in Code. Love at first sight. Listen, listen, listen to them. While Soren is really good at humping records and throwing ice at my cleavage, Robag Wruhme/Gabor Schablizki is responsible for making me a convert. I take back all of the jokes I made yesterday afternoon about pacifiers and ecstasy: the Wighnomy Brothers at the Middlesex Lounge yesterday were brilliant. Go here to read an article that has articulate quotes from the man behind the music. 

Robag: if you come back to Boston and need someone to rip that V-neck off, give me a call. 

His adorable enthusiasm (see: heart-shaped formation with hands while playing that only someone from Europe can pull off) almost makes me feel guilty for objectifying him. Not guilty enough. The sounds, the sounds! Google them! Listen!

Moses and the marvelous thing in the world

I had a conversation with my new landlord in Spanish this morning and I'm pretty sure that when he asked me if my father was from Spain I said yes. Nodding is easier than explaining in a language I barely speak that my father is from a viciously dysfunctional Pentecostal Puerto-Rican hole of an apartment in Philadelphia where two of his sisters haven't left the house in twenty-five years. In any case, my new landlord is old and intimidating and Italian. He says God bless you in a way that makes me feel guilty for masturbating. Still, I like my new apartment. There is a porch that gets great sun angles, a beautiful garden downstairs, creepy religious icons on a stone pathway and no sign of the city sanctioned trash barrels. 

Some lightbulb jokes from my humor theory class: 

How many Jewish-American princesses does it take to change a lightbulb? 

Two, one to pour the Diet Pepsi and one to call "Daddy!"

How many Harvard students does it take to change a lightbulb? 

One - he holds it and the whole world revolves around him. 

Predictably, I think these jokes don't apply to me. Also according to an essay called "Jewish Jokes and the Acceptance of Absurdity", laughter is a part of what is godly. "'I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight,' says Moses, and when he does turn aside, God judges hum to have done something special. Not every human being turns aside to look at marvelous sights. This is implied in the fact of Moses' extraordinary suitability for God's purpose, a suitability detected in Moses when he turns aside to look at the bush. If a human being does not turn aside to look when a marvelous sight, there are two possible explanations: either the sight does not strike him as marvelous, or, however it may strike him, he does not care to look. In the first case he has no awareness of the marvelous in the world; in the second case he has no appreciation of it. Moses has both." 

That pretty much sums up my definition of 'a cool person', anyone who has both. And since I just blogged about God and Moses and for some reason I keep capitalizing "god" even though I am a noumenally skeptical human being, I leave you with this gem: 

What's the hardest thing about walking on a beach full of dead babies? 

Hiding your erection. 

(That joke is dedicated to the thirty-five episodes of Law & Order SVU I have watched while "studying" for my exams.)

(Oh hey internet! What's up? I missed you.)

Dead brain cells

Before I was distracted, now I am overwhelmed. 

P.S. My birthday is next month; does anyone want to wind up in Portuguese prison with me? Or in a hot air balloon? Or making the ordinary rounds? 

All things gin

1. Dear Diana, 

Love,

Alle

2. Important question: 

A beard, a forearm, a Hendrick's martini and a cigarette are all drowning in the ocean. WHICH ONE DO YOU SAVE? 

Rumored canoodling

I just read the first few pages of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I am in the mood for such things. "He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke." In class last week we analyzed 'God God' for a long while. My professor is stylish and attractive and wears black v-neck sweaters and speaks with a beautiful accent and she giggled when admitting that she watched the interview of McCarthy by Miss Oprah Winfrey. She quoted some Oprah-like questions and everyone laughed in their desk chairs. I am going to try to read the 280 pages I have left before going to bed. 

My lady of the telephone.

On Monday we tried some Luxardo maraschino cherries while complaining about "mixologists" wearing white chef's coats and carrying around shiny business cards. At the same time, the bartender who trained me last night made up a nice little beverage with muddled candied ginger, Fernet, and Michter's Rye. Tasty. The internet told me that because of its ingredients, "a number of home remedies call for Fernet-Branca, including for the treatment of menstrual and gastrointestinal discomfort, hangovers, baby colic, and cholera."

It seems funny that there is a 'home remedy' for cholera. 

Ah, yes, anyway, goodnight. 

Pooped, etc.

Right now I am brain-dead, wearing pajamas, watching the worst crime investigation show ever made (except maybe CSI Miami), doing a pathetic little load of laundry, wasting time and hating LA criminals/FBI bad guys. I started writing this post by making a log of the long seventy-two hours I just spent working and drinking and drinking and working, but it's just not worth it. Sloppy. Heated debates about Michael Corleone. Clear shots big enough to make a sorority girl gag. Wandering around on the street, pouting, being obstinate, being obnoxious, blah blah blah. 

Since no one wants to work brunch at my job and I already work it every week as a waitress, I am being trained behind the bar. It is a thankless shift but a good skill. So please please come in and have a bloody mary and I will entertain you and feed you chorizo and house hot sauce and juggle and walk behind the bar like I am Austin Powers going down a fake escalator. We will high-five each other a lot and I will get drunk faster than you do. And then at four o'clock, I will get off and we will tear up Mass Ave until all of the Cambridge cows come home. Or whatever. 

I had some good musical ideas on Friday but have killed all of the responsible brain cells since then. Yesterday I couldn't think of the word "boardwalk". Maybe vitamins will help my vocabulary out. On the up-side, I have heard some unbelievable stories in the past few days involving everything from a little girl's bike with pink paint and broken handlebars to a bottle of champagne shattered in a Wonderbar bartender's hands by his crazy ex-girlfriend and her empty Heineken bottle. These things really happen. 

Not touching a drop tonight. 

That's what I said. 

Mortal kombat

We were lucky enough to share a stage on Saturday with a lot of ridiculously talented musicians. Like, so talented it makes me want to throw up. Among many others, these guys make me crazy: 

Dietrich Strause

Jane Lui

Pete Matthiessen

Please go listen to their music. 

I waited tables for thirteen hours today without sitting, except for a minute after I stole a cookie from the kitchen and sat on the floor by the bathroom to wait for the cutlery to be washed. We had little egg painting kits at the bar and when I was finished with work I had a few greyhounds and painted the creepiest little easter egg ("scary manatee"). There were a few others ("transvestite with collagen injections", "alien pirate", etc.). 

Happy jellybean cocktail day. 

Happy chocolate search party day. 

Happy I can do the bad thing I stopped doing for a little while day. 

Recording and, like, yeah, you know, stuff, etc.

This is what we have been making. 

"I Want My Dignity Back Pt. 1" = pop central for people who drink too much. 

"Roadkill" = creepy folk murder mystery. 

"Sing It Low, Say It Loud" = epic melodrama about being a fuckup. 

"Bones" = we play on. 

Have a listen!

Come see us play. I will buy you a drink. 

Do you remember how gorgeous this movie is? 

So: I have been reading things and thinking things and making songs up even when I am walking from place to place, and today I got a coffee and started some reading before work and couldn't focus because it was sunny and the magnitude of ecstatic joy and consciousness that consumed me was just disgusting

But: I am also exhausted

And: as a result I hate other people

Everyone keeps telling me I am "not acting like myself". And that is mostly because I am complaining a lot. But a part of me is like WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN. Really. Like, I am myself. No matter how I am acting. This is how "myself" acts when "myself" is tired and worried and excited. 

Me: Yeah, I mean, I just feel a little stressed out with school and work and music and finding a new apartment.

Other girl: Just take some time off!

Me: What? 

Other girl: Just take a week or two off and get some rest!!!!! 

Me: I can't just 'take time off' from school and work and music and finding an apartment. 

Other girl: Why not?!??!?!?!

Me: _______________________________. 

Ideas that depopulate the world

After reading Herzog for one class and Naked for another, I have a hysterical half-Jewish, half-Greek "school-is-bullshit" internal monologue inside my head right now, fanning the flames of my every anxiety. I need a million dollars and new pants and an apartment and a cup of coffee and more shifts at work and more days off and more time for music and better bedclothes and a legitimate attention span and emotional maturity and a raincoat. There is a new part to a song that I have been humming but until the old songs are crystallized I feel like I can't put any words down. My fantasies are getting more and more ridiculous. Instead of thinking of "the best day possible" I am thinking of "five years from now, when problems have been extinct for so long people forgot the word ever existed". Somehow, my schedule is always fucked. I feel like my brain is a little puffy lap-dog that shakes when the floor creaks and whose toughest bark sounds like bad brakes on a wet road. Anxious. 

Epic percussion conceptual destruction of Anne Bradstreet's "To My Dear And Loving Husband" for the production of our song "Sing It Low, Say It Loud":

1. Muppet drum, beaded thing, Norton Anthology of Literature. 

2. Preparatory 'fuck shit up' face. 

3. Title page test rips. 

4. Mic placement, final warm-up tears.

5. Still rolling, terrible early-American literature destroyed, sense of satisfaction. 

Technologically reproduce that, bitch (Work of Art in the Age of)

My attempt at a jumbled theory insult, unsuccessful, confused. 

I'm just saying: rips have here and now, they have the mark of the history to which they have been subject. 

I am delirious. 

Will someone walk me home? 

Anamorphosis

Interviewed.

I am moving next month. 

Yesterday, the person I wrote about here walked behind me and when I changed directions he turned around and walked behind me more and when I went into the T station at Harvard Square he went into the T station too and stood about fifteen feet away from me for ten minutes and then walked out of the T station. If he ever does this again, I am going to march right up to him and ask him to be my friend. He can let me borrow his brain cells and I can show him how to follow

talk to girls without making them feel like their life is in danger. 

Rashomon at seven, who's in? 

My bed is on the floor

I saw Peter Broderick play music last night. I keep trying to write something funny and meaningful about how I am going to crouch under the piano bench when I play now, or about how he reminds me of Tim Riggins and I'd give a year of my tips to see him naked, or about how his music puts a feeling in my brain that stills me and moves me and makes me so sad. But it is too much. I have listened to the album "Home" seven times all the way through. Today. So far. 

This is him with some Efterklang people: 

But he also does this: 

 Yes. 

Right now Mally and Brian are in the "fancy studio" in Waltham where we have 24 free hours with Carlo Libertini for his final project and for our accidental EP special thing with a life of its own. On Saturday we did a strong 12 hours of work, with one bathroom break each. But today I am stuck on campus, waiting for a screening at 7 and trying to figure out if people are giving me dirty looks because the music in my headphones is too loud or because I am giving them dirty looks first. 

I don't know why but in all band pictures I feel the need to "shhhhhhhhhhhh"

Does that have a secret meaning? 

I really want a loop machine. And a violin. And Peter Broderick.