Loved Despite (Or Because) Of Great Faults

I'm at the studio right now, working on a record that will probably earn me less people walking up out of the blue at the Rainbo to comment on it than the picture of me on Cobrasnake where it looks like I'm staring at my friend Anna's tit. (For the record I was so spaced out by the 5am snapshot that if I did even see her exposed boob I never realized it. Not that anyone cares.)

The nighlife pays off.

Once again I said F's on the outdoor music festival and just hit the afterparties, but this time it was work. If the career aptitude test I took in high school had offered "Clubs Journalist/Photographer" as an option (my test suggested "Taxi Driver") I might have figured out sooner that making small amounts of money for staying out until well into the morning partying and yelling at people through a megaphone on the back patio of a condo neighborhood apartment is really kind of an awesome job. As it is I'm going through a club kid renaissance at age 28, although on a considerably nicer scale than the converted-shipping-company-offices-turned-ecstacy-dens that passed for clubs in Kalamazoo 1998.

Summer steez, not summer breeze.

My mix tape is up at Nylon.

The Intonation Afterparties Almost Killed Me

I missed out on Intonation Fest, but I don't really care. I didn't miss out on the swarms of indie girls in from out of town, trolling the afterparties for Band Ass. One girl at Redno I couldn't hear over the music, so she had to repeat it to me in single-word-yelling mode: "OH. MY. GOD. YOU'RE. IN. OUT HUD. AREN'T. YOU." You can imagine how bad I felt letting her down. I helped Liz pick out the famous people in the crowd and she told me how three seperate spiritual healers told her that she is basically going to give birth to the Chosen One. If you look her up and down and think about it for a second, it almost makes sense.
The night before, the Constantines show at the Bottle was balls-deep with Intonationers showing up already hammered. The vibe in there was heavy on the LA/NY indie rock networking with a distinct streak of county-fair-outdoor-concert hedonism running through it. When everybody was holding their arms in the air for the Constantine's breakdown/breakthrough part at least two couples were totally doing heavy public makeouts. I was mostly busy just trying to keep my shit together; Craig had hunted down some guys who would smoke us down and they ended up getting us so high that Craig was afraid of wearing a hat. Between that kind of hysterical retardedness and the effect that the Constantines's live show has on the cripplingly stoned, I was just barely holding on. Not so bad that I couldn't chat up a couple of label people, though.
The Constantines played the song that's made me think more about music than anything else in recent memory, a dead-on cover of Elevator To Hell's "Why I Didn't Like August '93", a piece of three-chord perfection that makes me think (first) how I have become one of Those Guys whose favorite songs are by obscure side projects of not-even-really-indie-famous bands or like the first ABC Diablo seven-inch and (second) how I still can't quite believe that I have an Eric's Trip tattoo. I'd like to word up Brennan Sang for sending me the mp3 of that cover by the Constantines, for remembering a time like a decade ago when I was nuts over the original and for realizing that I probably wouldn't hear it otherwise, since the idea of buying the Believer's music issue (which bonus cd includes that track) makes me want to projectile-vomit blood all over the walls.

They looked like a combination of "I can't believe you just did that" and "I think I just found a dead rat".

If anyone sees Kanye around, could you tell him that I think I have his copy of Double J's hip-house classic (?[!]) "Bless The Funk" and that he can have it back if he wants. I dropped it at a party last weekend and everybody looked at me like I had just diarrhea'd into the talk-over mic. I don't think the kids are ready for the hip-house revival yet, and I'm not sure that I'd want to be involved in starting one either. Actually, tell Ye that I'll trade it for one Roc-A-Fella charm, production on one song for the Perfect Panther album and one exclusive for my mixtape. Who knows, maybe "Bless The Funk" is like his Rosebud or something.

They don't stop selling liquor when things go bad.

Slept through another historical tragedy today. This is becoming a pattern, getting the word that our world has forever changed while I'm wiping the sleep from my eyes and trying to get out of my another-dream-where-I'm-trapped-in-a-mall-with-talking-animals late-morning/early-afternoon headspace. The morning the towers came down I was in a borrowed futon sleeping off a drinking binge with my girlfriend. We got the news from the futon's owner when he came back from class, waking us from a dead sleep at 2 pm. The tv coverage was already in recap mode. Which isn't as bad as my friend Neil. He was living in Brooklyn at the time. During that morning when everyone in NYC was scrambling to locate their family and friends, no one could get a hold of Neil. Eventually around 1 someone got him on the phone. He'd slept through the whole fucking thing. Something about me feels the need to commemorate the important things that happen during my life in the way I feel proper in order to get the maximum amount of Meaning out of each. I mourn dead rock stars with solitary drunken wakes. I wait for the wind to turn my spiritual weather-vanes in the right direction before I let myself put on the important songs so that they always keep their power to underline and italicize certain hours and minutes of my life. I don't know what I expect from history, maybe a phone call ten minutes before the event, "Mr. Raymer, it is essential that you wake up and turn on the news by 8:56. There is something you must see." I know I'm asking too much. Sometimes there's History In The Making and sometimes there's just terror sex on the couch.

What you can learn from someone who shits in a box.

The cat just tears across the whole length of my apartment, up onto and then off of the arm of the couch, getting some just serious air, and the goes right past me and the cat charmer toy that's supposed to be the point of this whole game, and buries herself under the pile of press materials on the living room floor. She pokes her head out with her ears cocked to the side at their most devilish angle, just looking like, "Fuck structured goal-based entertainment. I'm doing me." She can drop some serious knowledge, especially coming from someone who eats out of the garbage.