Blogging about what is happening.

Yeah, dude. I'm trying to imagine what it's like being someone who searches out items from Vice's DOs section to buy for money, even ones that (I remember being, at least [I have fallen behind on my Vice clippings archive (every article and each individual DO and DON'T [you have to get two issues to clip each one] sorted by date, and into POSITIVE, NEGATIVE, IRONICALLY POSITIVE, MAYBE IRONICALLY POSITIVE BUT I'M NOT SURE, and SUFFICIENTLY PORNOGRAPHIC ADVERTISEMENTS folders)]) were sarcastic to begin with, and the effort to make myself that vapid is making my ears pop.
Our show last night was good. We dj'd before, in between, and after Tristeza and L'Altra, so the night went sort of HYPE, mellow, HYPE, mellow, CRUNK'D, and we bummed out fancy dudes wearing expensive eyewear trying to chat chicks up over the searing 303 solo in "Higher State of Consciousness", but Tristeza gave us a shout-out from the stage, told me and Hopper we were like "European", and offered us another gig with them, so that's kind of rad.

Soundclash: Crunk vs. Indie Stoners

Tomorrow night you should get super stoned and come see Tristeza, and then get dance-ably drunk and throw down to the sounds CoCo and I will be spinning. I'm following her Metallica with Trick Daddy and Gwen Stefani remixes. We will fight over who plays M.I.A. and we will be the best djs in the world, I swear to God.

Something to blow the candles out over.

Do you love me $35 worth?
Good.

Give It To Me

Do you have an audio file of the acapella of "I Just Wanna Love U (Give It To Me)"? Because I need one.

Mixtape 1/23

Brian Eno - "Baby's On Fire"
Pioneer Monitor 8 headphones
Wilco - "Color Me Impressed"
the Replacements - "Color Me Impressed"
Bob Dylan, Paul Westerberg, the Beatles, et al - "Positively 4th Street"
Tony Millionaire - Sock Monkey volumes 3 and 4
Magnum 44 permanent marker
Basic lights (in a box)
Fuji CoolPix S3100 (with the 16MB SD card and all the pictures at the bar)
Rancid - "Salvation"
M.I.A. - "Galang"
the Stooges - "Raw Power"
Lifter Puller - "4Dix"
the ATM receipts
T.Rex - "Mambo Sun"
Jaks - "Damn Bloodsucker"
Antioch Arrow - "Lady Is A Cat"
Lifter Puller - "La Quereia"
the Guinean bootleg over "Are You That Somebody" that I heard in the cab last night
Atmosphere - "Always Coming Back Home To You"
the Beatles - "Her Majesty"

In a far-off distant galaxy.

I'm reading Derrick Jensen's A Language Older Than Words. I'm about halfway through it and I have a lot to think about re: the dominant patriarchal Western society's degradation of non-white, non-male, non-human life, and spec. the real possibility that I may need to 1) allow myself to open my internal life to people close to me in order to appreciate the friendship/community neccessary to a spiritually satisfying life and 2) move to New Zealand to live in a communal house with some Maori, but right now I'm just going to drop this excerpt that I read last night and then re-read and re-re-read to make sure that the words on the page actually said what they did:
[Father George V.] Coyne [Director of the Vatican Observatory, speaking on the Vatican's participation in the construction of a state-of-the-art celestial observatory (coincidentally on sacred Apache land)] said the Vatican is involved in this project in order to seek out extraterrestrial beings which "might be brought into the fold and baptized," and defined the protocol necessary on contact: "First of all, one would need to put some questions to him, such as 'Have you ever experienced something similar to Adam and Eve,' in other words, 'original sin'? And then you would have to ask, 'Do you people also know a Jesus who has redeemed you?'"
The power of faith astounds. To, first of all, believe without a shred of doubt in a ghost with superpowers who tells a little man in a ridiculous hat that millions of people should, for instance, not use condoms because they are evil, and to further believe that this idea is so powerful and right that it may very well have occurred to forms of life in distant galleries, blows my fragile mind. If we encounter ET life we should be asking more universal, less fairy tale-ish questions like, "How did evolution work to build life on your planet," "How does your understanding of mathematics compare and contrast with that of the human mind," and "Have you independently invented the four-on-the-floor 808 beat?"

Signal To Noise

So WIT and Avenue D and all of those coke-chanteuse female-fronted electroclash bands took the anti-professionalism of Bikini Kill and stripped it of the politics at its core, and took Debbie Harry's Cold Sexy Bitch With A Microphone pose and turned the irony of it (the irony which made DH's stance more about power than pin-ups) all the way up until it doubled in on itself and negated the message, and so now we're stuck with these second-wave polectroclash Noise Is The New Thing bands of girls playing keyboards half-assed, and flailing half-choreographed in wigs and fuck-me skirts with no greater goal or desire than to be at the center of a group of dudes' attention for a half hour, and sometimes it's like watching the past two decades of women's progress in the underground music scene lying down to die.
Also: I would recommend spending an amount of money something like half of my year's earnings on digital musical equipment and staying willfully ignorant on how to use it as a great way to say, "I am a child of privilege and I am literally unable to give a fuck," without having to use any words.

A Dollar A Box

I'm doing some simultaneous cooking and cleaning, and I've ended up setting the mop and its bucket near the stove in a way such that I need to step over and around it in order to check on the Rice-A-Roni, but I'm too lazy to do anything to fix it, and I'm in fact so not into moving it that I'll sit here and write about it on the internet instead of fixing it.
Item 1: "How'd We Make Tootie Fruities Taste Like Froot Loops? We asked consumers in a nation-wide survey, and they say Tootie Fruities taste like Froot Loops. We guarantee you'll agree!" I like the Tootie Fruities box. I can't decide if I like that they spell Fruities more properly than Froot, the tug between the part of me that respects the correctness of it versus how kind of schoolmarmy it is compared with Kellogg's more whimsical variation leaves me confused. But there's a blue kangaroo in Wayfarers with an orange baby kangaroo, named Cool Blue and Li'L Oaty, most likely by a production artist who was given under two minutes to create and name two mascots who will never be used for anything beyond the box containing the product itself. Cool Blue's leanback pose and Li'L Oaty's "Fuckit" gesturing indicate two trademarked beings perfectly chill not in spite of, but because of, their disconnect from any context at all. "Don't sweat it, dude," they're saying to me. "Who needs meaning when you're this fucking cool? Liberate yourself from seeking a place in the world around you and you can kick it like us, all stoned out on contextual freedom." Maybe, dudes. I don't know. I also like how the response to "How'd We Make Tootie Frooties Taste Like Froot Loops" completely avoids answering the question, a question that the box poses to itself and avoids. Also, Tootie Frooties are on sale for a dollar a box. They do, in fact, taste like Froot Loops.
Item 2: The new name of my solo project is Black Magic Threeway.
Item 3: Rice-A-Roni is also on sale for a dollar a box. And while I was blogging about Tootie Fruities my Rice-A-Roni was busy boiling down into a thick, porridgey mass. Cool Blue's telling to not to sweat it, but the shit kind of makes me want to puke.

Definite lurking feeling.

I was just walking back up Western to my apartment after an ill-fated and unneccessary trip downtown to show up at work when I was not actually supposed to show up at work, and this guy came out of the Litehouse. He was forty-ish, black, chubby and bearded, and he was chatty. He asked me how my weekend was, told me it was a tough day to have to go to work, told me to have a nice day, all in this too-high squeaky voice that gave me the creeps. Maybe it's the lack of sleep or that for some reason I can't figure out he reminds me of the preacher from Poltergeist 2*, or maybe it's the paranoia you get when the new Mario single has been on repeat in your brain for most of a week nonstop, but I have a definite lurking feeling after talking to the dude that he has managed somehow to steal my soul.
*Which I can't figure out, in part at least, because the preacher in P2 is white, tall and thin, and this dude was not singing creepy hymns or trying (as far as I can tell) to kidnap me in order to harness my powers for evil.

How much longer are we going to hide under the covers?

I see some striking parallels between the way this society treats sleep and the way it treats sex. Both are sinful activities, associated with one of the Seven Deadly Sins (Sloth and Lust). Both are associated with the most powerful biological needs. Both are supposed to be a taboo topic. Both are supposed to be done in private, at night, with a pretense that it is never actually happening. Education in sleep hygiene and sex hygiene are both slighted, one way or another (the former passively, the latter actively opposed). Both are thought to interfere with one's productivity - ah, the good old Protestant work ethic! Why are Avarice and Greed not treated the same way? Raking in money by selling mega-burgers is just fine, and a decent topic of conversation, even a point of pride. Why are we still allowing Puritan Calvinist way of thinking, coupled with capitalist creed, to still guide the way we live our lives, or even think about life. Sleeping, whether with someone or alone, is a basic human need, thus a basic human right. Neither really detracts from the workplace productivity - au contraire: well rested and well satisfied people are happy, energetic, enthusiastic and productive. It is sleep repressed people, along with the dour sex repressed people, who are the problem, making everyone nervous. How much longer are we going to hide under the covers?

From the sleep blog Circadiana.
(via BoingBoing.net).

Friends, enemies, and assholes, and where they all meet up in the middle.

Losing friends
Losing friends
You got nothing to lose
You don't lose when you lose fake friends.

-Joan Jett - "Fake Friends" - Album (Blackheart/MCA 757, 1983)

I've lost a lot of friends before. I've lost them for reasons of geography and time; because I drank too much or not enough; because I'm an asshole; because I was a stoner and then because I stopped being a stoner; for a while I was just pissing people off to keep myself entertained when my ego had outgrown the little pond I was living in. But I've never lost the closest friend I've had for the past decade over a girl, which is to say I am only just now starting to live the existential late-20s life that bad movies are made of. If movies tell us how to live our lives (they do), I guess now I'm supposed to go on a long solo road trip to discover first the Spirit of America, then Myself, then True Love, possibly with whoever plays the Patricia Arquette characters now. What I will probably do, though, is continue to sit around my apartment, where the stench of cliche is overwhelmed only by the metric tons of bullshit people keep dumping in my lap, and work on my genius projects. And I've got my cat. If she tries to ditch me she'll starve to death, which is just the kind of friend I need right now.

The Group Interview and the Inevitable Letdown

I went in to interview for a Retail Position today. Set up in a conference room at a downtown hotel they had set up an SAT-style spread of tables and applications and pens. We filled out our apps and went, four at a time, into Group Interviews. I hate Group Interviews and tend to perform terribly in them. One reason behind my terrible performance is the fact that the Group Interview is bullshit. Bullshit, in fact, is the essential component of them in that you are generally judged in that situation based on your ability to edge out the competition in giving the recruiter the stock overeager-jobseeker answer to any of her questions. "I could be very passionate about your product," "I love doing etc.," etc., etc., which is basically toy, and I just can't get into it. The other handicap in my Group Interview game is my tendency to dedicate energy and attention I should be focusing on the Group Interview to contemplating my co-Group Interviewees with deep, horrified fascination. I should have been concentrating on coming up an interesting, maybe humorous, response to our interview question when I was rubbernecking the glasses-and-goateed IT dept reject after he told the Group he was a dj, trying to figure out what the fuck a dude in crosstrainers and a J Crew button-down spins (I'm thinking soulful house). The real deal-breaker was the fact that I was interviewing against a tiny and cute Asian girl in a sweatshirt with a teddy bear head patch sewn on it. If you're interviewing against an adorable Asian girl, you're basically fucked to hell. No doubt she has a great resume and will make an amazing employee, but the fact is you would kill a man if she tugged on one of her pigtails and asked real nice.

AM Gold on FM

I had it all wrong.
I was busy trying to write a manifesto for 2005: The Year Of Keeping It Gangsta (it's all about embracing cold assholism in order to handle your business, a sad script flip on 2004's attempts at rediscovering naive hippy bliss while awaiting a massive Kerry victory and consequent American Re-Enlightenment) and listening to All Eyez On Me on headphone blast and making fuck-you faces at my computer, but what I should have been doing was driving Jessica's car around listening to 97.1 The Drive. So then I did that. Fuck, dude; you can get so wound up in angry knots that you forget that sometimes the meaning of life is cruising and getting mellow on some crucial Cat Stevens/Doobie Bros./"Little Wing" rock block with a hot chick and a hamster riding shotgun.

First worst ideas of the new year.

Not only am I almost 28 years old and still living off of buy-one-get-one-free Jewel brand frozen cheese pizzas, and not only have I been suffering the past two days from pizza mouth burn (Surface cheese temperature isn't what you have to look out for; it's the submerged, potentially napalm-y sauce layer you need to worry about), but now I am suffering from secondary pizza mouth burn, a burn on top of an existing burn, which is infinitely painful. Plus I had to wake up this morning at 6am to remove my cat from a pair of plastic grocery bags it had tangled up in digging through the trash to eat frozen pizza grease-soaked paper towels. 6am is a good time to look your paper-towel-eating cat in the eye as you pull garbage off of her and ask her, "Are you like this because I raised you? Why are you like this? What is wrong with me?"
MOSTLY UNRELATED: I have this terrible sinking suspicion that somewhere someone in America has named their band after some aspect of the tsunami disaster. The certainty with which I feel this makes me feel immensely depressed. The fact that I have, in the past, invented two hypothetical bands, The Nightclub Disasters and Porch Collapse, after headline tragedies only makes it worse.

Thank you for 2004, kinda.

New Year's Eve I saw a sludgy and great metal hardcore band play in a kitchen. Then I DJ'd off of someone else's iPod for a sweaty, drunken, bouncing group of Kill Hannah fans and hangers-on, my most successful set yet in terms of audience movement due to Greg's electro-new-wave-filled iPod and the party's love of electro-new-wave styles. Yes, I guess the party was chanting my name, but I can't help but think that I should be doing things to make sure people chant my name more often.
Thanks 2004, I guess. I won't say we had the best time together, but you weren't the worst. You gave me a couple of new friends, a couple bad, Jada's "Why", a drastic haircut, the break in "Slow Hands" and the intro to that one good Phoenix song. The bright white Converse trend. Animal Collective live. Blazing the shit out of some rock band sets. A couple of good drunks, a few bad. A couple of Dick Cheney impressions. I figured out how to drop "Y Control" off of "New Health Rock" and blended that into "We Need A Resolution", which might have been the best thing I did all year. Oh, but then again, 2004, you were kind of a dick sometimes. Honestly, between you and Ohio, I got pretty pissed off. And there was that breakup, the panic attacks, and the fact that you were the third year in a row that I failed to live up to my 2002 New Year's Resolution, which was the deceptively simple, "No more drama in my life." Maybe it would be best if we didn't talk anymore. And no, I'm not going to add you to my Friends List.
Peace.