DJ Corporate Synergy

I got the records packed and I'm waiting for a ride to Corporate DJ gig numb two just this week alone. Sellout Summer '05 is in full effect and it's not even June yet. I'm painting myself into a profitable little corner just one door down from the Upper Management Motivational Retreat Rock Band practice space, with the rap song radio edits and the pan-global downtempo wine bar set in the bag. Holla at ya boy for a sonic experience guaranteed to upgrade your retail synergy whatevs.
If you listen half-closely you can see how easy it'd be to make a mashup of Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" over Bloc Party's "Banquet", but if you listen a little closer to each of them you'd see what a waste of "Since U Been Gone" that would be.

Places in America

The George Bush Intercontinental airport is like one of those artist's conceptions of the city of the future where you realize after looking at it for a minute that there's no black people in the picture. Endless flourescent-lit corridors of taupe and grey; the depressing realities of neutral toned high-traffic carpet; proof that Texans shouldn't be allowed to design anything, Texans with money even less so. There are seats by a window in Concourse C where you can sit and gaze at the spectral outlines of Houston's ugly 80s-future skyscrapers muted behind smog, towering over so many trees.
Portland is a living testament to everything the hippies got right, a modern Hobbit shire cupped in tree-lined hills and covered in psyched-out murals. The giant metal Buddha head in the yard down from Krystal's place is like no big deal. Chicago suffers eternally under the Second City banner, always trying to keep up with NYC, but Portland is more comfortable with its place in the world. Its past is on sale in junk shops crowded with homemade folk art instead of being razed and replaced with cinder block condos, and the gotta-have-it trend surfing that Chicagoans use to try to impress our New York friends pales in comparison to backyard parties under flickering 16mm film reels and breakfasts that are even better than the nights before. I could probably live there for three months before the modest pace of life drove me insane. I'm a Chicagoan: the blind chasing of a glammed-out dream is all I live for.
At the food court in Minneapolis/St. Paul International I ate a veggie burger next to one of the flyover state guys that Phillip Seymour Hoffman characters are meant to satirize. He looked like he was built out of potatoes and was still wearing his high school class ring, on his cell phone keeping some loved one posted on his progress from mid-Ohio to a wedding in Fort Collins. As some 19 year-old kid dressed in c.1998 Korn doom-rapper gear walked by the Phillip Seymour Hoffman character stopped mid-sentence, dropped his voice, and let the Middle American on the other end of the line in on the world outside of central Ohio. "This guy that just walked by," he excitedly stage whispered, "has got a nose ring." I watched him watching the Korn kid order a Whopper from the African immigrants who staff the food court's Burger King, and the first thing I wanted to do was to call Jessica and excitedly stage whisper, "This guy can't believe he just saw a nose ring." Instead I went back to my veggie burger and my Source and did what most urban dwellers my age do, which is pretend as hard as I can that my fashion choices and negligible political awareness make me a better person than guys like that.

Animal. Collective.

Seeing Animal Collective I'm never sure whether I want to follow them around on tour or if I just want to follow their fans around, knawmean?, because most of their fans are gorgeous girls who look like they spend hundreds on shoes but buy 3-buck herbal shampoo from the co-op, who'd spend hazy sunny afternoons rolling perfectly-formed organic-grown joints while talking about their ambitious photo projects, which I don't know how these guys pull in such droves of princess hotties looking, as their band does, like some dudes who have just been let out of the initiation basement of some pre-millennial hippie cult and they actually sound like that too, now that I think about it.
Oh wait. That was last week.

Open Letter to the Eyeball Skeletons

Dear Eyeball Skeletons,
Eyeball Skeletons is my favorite new band name. It beats out Indian Jewelry, which was my favorite before, and the Miles Raymer Progressive Blues Corporation, which is disqualified because I made it up. Plus you guys rock and you have a song that has the same name as your band (which is always a good thing for a band to do) and you guys are like 10, and I bet you guys are really cute making crazy rock with your 10-year-old selves. And I am almost positive that if you guys made tshirts for your band that they are totally amazing. I hope if you made tshirts for your band that they have a picture of an eyeball skeleton, because now that I think about it, I'm really curious to see what an eyeball skeleton is supposed to look like. I'm kind of jealous of you guys because when I was 10 all I did was listen to the Doors and wondered why no one at school liked me (ends up it was because I did things like listen to the Doors, which no one at my school got into until they were older and started wearing drug rugs).
Thank you for bringing the little-kid rock.
PS, please get a website and/or a MySpace profile.

The French and the Germans and the nerds.

I went to both M83 shows last week, too hyped up to not be let down, too much imagining getting high and being swept completely away on their waves of majesty and sorrow, too much actual French-guy bass-humping. Seriously, bass players: humping your bass is not a "move". If any audience member has ever watched a bass player crotch-wrestling their instrument and imagined "What if that was me there instead of a large guitar?", then something is wrong with our society on a whole.
So M83 was a let-down, but nothing wouldn't rock compared to Ulrich Schnauss, who opened. He had a laptop and a keyboard and played the third-loudest parts of the sequenced songs. Sitting at a table with a computer, concentrating through his Germanic haircut, he looked like a zoo exhibit labeled "Nerd".

Photo Pope Op

Yesterday, in front of the Catholic church on State and Chicago, in front of the news vans and next to the flag-waving altar boys and priests holding their hands high, there were groups of laypeople holding signs with words magic-markered on them and pictures of Benedict XVI from the newspapers' front pages pasted to them. Two women's signs caught my attention. One was a picture of the new pope with a message proclaiming how he will "protect women's dignity". Another didn't have a pope photo, but it had a drawing of a collar and read, "We don't need a collar to bring about change". If you don't catch the irony of the first sign, you can read Jack Miles's remberence of how Pope John Paul II's respect for the dignity of women affected his own family (second half of the article), or you can just imagine having the activity and destiny of the sex parts of your body being in the hands of a man hundreds or thousands of miles away from you who is supposed to know nothing of the nature of bodies' sex parts and who has never and will never meet you or probably has no idea what living your life in your home in your country is like, and just feel that dignity was over you. As for the second sign, it has a lot in common with the "MO DRMA" license plate I saw today, both saying in their own stunningly proud ways that, when life presents you a plateful of shit, one should eat it clean and tip generously.

Engineers all over the world.

Hi. I am a zombie who has just applied lip gloss.. That's a joke, actually. I don't really wear lip gloss. What I am doing in this picture is trying to get feeling back into my lips after kissing ass on the Fader dudes all night long. (Hey homies! We still down for that Big Audio Dynamite retrospective? Holla at ya boy!)
Hi. I'm not entirely sure what's going on. Have you seen my panther tshirt? This is actually the exact same face that I'm making in my new Illinois state identification card. It is a look I've patented called "0.5 Seconds From Now I Will Realize That My Picture Is Being Taken".
You can't really tell from the picture, but here I am doing a new dance move called the Cease And Desist, which doubles as an actual legal notice of copyright infringement. I'll let you know when I've finished choreographing my next move, the Notice Of A Restraining Order Limiting Stipulating That You Have To Remain No Less Than 150 Yards From My Person At All Times.
Perfect Panther's at the Fireside "For Real About The Bowling" Bowl tomorrow (April 14). There will be new songs. Maybe a new haircut. Possibly jams that will change your life. Who knows? For about a second I felt a little conflicted about playing the Fireside after them basically putting the shaft on the Chicago punk scene before I remembered that I'm only in this game for the cash.

The metal show that wasn't a metal show.

I went to the Pelican show tonight. I saw, by far, the most high heels I've ever seen at a metal show. Pelican was too quiet, so instead of being snatched from the earth and being taken to the disorienting and pretty place that Pelican usually takes me (Pelican being, like Mogwai, almost entirely dependent on mass volume to succeed in a live setting; both bands are put together by fully mundane, normally-looking guys, and lacking spectacle to enthrall their audience they rely on pure presence to carry the viewer from spectation to transcendent participation with the music in a way that is not only mental, but emotional and even physical. Mogwai opening their set in Detroit 2001 with "Come On Die Young" at a literally staggering volume is one of two instances that a performance has been so overwhelming that it's brought me to tears. The other time was seeing Poison performing "Every Rose Has Its Thorns".) so the only real entertainments I had were looking at pretty girls and watching indie kids reacting to the guy in the Sepultura shirt who was engaging in full-on serious headbanging. You could really just reach out and touch their discomfort and contact embarassment at the spectacle of someone rocking out that unashamedly in public, swinging his perfectly straight, shining head of golden-blonde hair without a second of concern for composure.
Only metalheads and girls who ride horses have that kind of hair.

The legal drugs.

If you ever feel like you want to extend the feeling of being at the ass end of a weekend-long drug binge without having to deal with any of the inefficient euphoria and hallucinations a drug binge entails, I would suggest you check out Lexapro. It's a cunning little anti-anxiety/depression drug that does its work by distracting you from the second-to-second dread of existence by giving you painful non-stop jaw clenching and dreams that your pillows are made out of squirming masses of algae that may or may not be alien and may or may not be somehow risen from the dead. I have my reasons for never becoming a strung-out coke whore who's cross-addicted to PCP, but there's apparently no reason why my lifestyle choices should keep me from feeling like one.

Have you stopped caring yet?

If you're really curious about what I've been up to, you can just read Hopper's blog and you can get an actually not-too-bad idea of what I do. I'm like the co-star in her sitcom. Eventually I would like to be the Very Special Guest on a Very Special Episode of the Internet. I can give the Internet a lecture on why it doesn't need crystal meth to feel good about itself or why it should man up and pay for its girlfriend's abortion. One day.
Last night's Farewell (Temporarily, At Least) To Drinking was a total letdown. I have to start taking pills so I can start going outside without feeling massively uncomfortable, and these pills mean that I can't drink. The big blowout involved me sitting at the bar, almost too tired and too bored to lift the glass to my mouth. I drank some fancy tequila in my apartment, but that was mostly because I felt I had to.

Dead battery on the dirty desk.

Dear Livejournal,
My laptop battery is dead. I am about a week behind in my internet porn viewing. There is a mathematical model that proves that once you fall behind 8 or more successive days on internet porn, it is mathematically impossible for you to catch up, so I guess I'm basically screwed. Thanks computer. Thanks, math.

Dang, Christina!

So number one, Workplace Soundtrack Blogfuck Series Uno (possibly the most ambitious and important project in the history of the internet) has been dereailed by the running beef between my hard drive and the rest of the computer. We will be back this weekend, back with a vengeance.
Number two, I really did not mean to bump into Christina Milian, especially to bump into her so roughly. It's just that I don't look at where I'm walking a lot of the time, and she really is kind of magnetic in a literal sense, so I couldn't help it. I did however give her an on-purpose cocked-eyebrow-and-smile combo, because if there's anything funnier than pissing off a celebrity it is to mack on them after you piss them off. I meant to spit more serious game at Christina Applegate when she came in the day after that, but girl is looking a little bit roughed-up these days.
Number three is that I have to take off now to go take care of some catsitting and the attendant liquor-and-food-raiding activities that go along with the job.
Number four: please listen to Demon's Claws' self-titled album (Dead Canary Records, DCR004).

Tegan & Sara - "I Hear Noises"

Before this month all I knew about Tegan & Sara was that they were Canadian, sisters, and either lesbians or had a lot of lesbians as fans. And that they are totally cutes.
Now I know that they don't actually make the earthy pop-folk typically associated with lesbians or people who may or may not in fact be lesbians or may or may not have some sort of lesbian fan base. They instead make, at least in the case of "I Hear Noises", songs that press Rentals-style three-chord pop stratospherics against slinky/stuttery almost-Chrissie-Hynde vocal lines in a way that is kind of hot and might even be sexy if it was possible for Canadian bands to evoke sexiness in songs.
This song is the one for this month, the one that I get a little amped for when the song that precedes it comes on and I get even a little coiled up and ready to sing along with it and rock out to it on the sales floor in a way that might be embarrassing if I gave a fuck about how cool I come across in the eyes of dozens of roving packs of Midwestern moms/daughters and bad-hair-decision emo kids. Each month I have one song that does that, and they tend to be hook-intensive pop songs by predominantly female groups. We will discuss the reasons behind this trend in later entries (spec. Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" and the George Michael single), but basically I have the same psychophysiological reaction to pop music as 13 year-old girls and club-crazy gay men.

Workplace Music War

I really wanted to go more in-depth about Northern State yesterday, but Blogger was jacking up and I don't have the patience to deal with that. You know.
But so that song is on the soundtrack at my work, along with some real miserable garbage and a few gems tossed in here and there to keep employees like myself from clawing our eardrums out. So I've decided to spend the rest of February, or as long as our current workplace soundtrack stays in effect (possibly into early March) blogging daily reviews of songs from the 2-hour DVD that loops nonstop throughout my workday. 2 hours per DVD x 40 hours per week working x 4 weeks a month = a deep understanding of each and every song on the thing that ordinary critics can't hope to touch. Here is entry number 2 in the Workplace Soundtrack Blog-ation:
Shine - "Explosive" (audio clip available here [You should really listen. It's incredible in a fashion.])
This is what nouveau riche Miami real estate golden boys think their sexmaking sounds like.

Thank you.

Quick Note About Rap:

"At The Party" by Northern State is the worst rap song ever. It is worse than "Addams Family Groove", any rap song performed by cartoons, Rappin' Grannies, animals or babies with computer-animated mouths, or the Game. It's like some suburban AP student's idea of a wacky and inventive class project but something's gone horribly wrong and people take them seriously, and the worst part of it is that music magazines can only cover two female MCs/groups per fiscal year [it's a legal thing], so every piece on Northern State is a wasted opportunity to cover Jean Grae or Psalm One or any other woman who actually deserves praise and pay for what they do on a microphone.

What is going on tomorrow night.

Tomorrow night I'm taking a break from my blossoming modelling career (look for me starting March 1 on the side of the bus that takes you to your crap job downtown [mine too!]) and plotting to throw blindingly hot parties with Hopper in order to go out and get famously drunk in celebration of my 28th birthday. We're partying it up at Stella's on Western Ave at Walton in Chicago's infamous Ukrainian Village. Gifts of Winston Lights, rechargable AA batteries, and 2 Live Crew 12"s are encouraged. I am also registered at Barney's and at the Citgo station on Western.

#1776 with a bullet

Booyashaka.

Wheels

I'm feeling totes eem today, so I tried to OC it out and listen to Earlimart, looking for the Elliott Smith that reviews I've read have lead me to believe spoons inside the grasp of their music, but for as much as Earlimart approximates E.Smith melody-wise, their lyrics are fucking terrible and what really makes Mr. Smith's songs important are the lyrics which are so Right There with you when you're sad or drunk or thinking about stabbing yourself repeatedly in the chest. What I realized I was looking for is the same thing that millions upon billions throughout human history have sought and found in religion, which is the invocation of something far greater than themselves and the submission before a power beyond the reaches of their comprehension. Which is why I've been listening to Black Sabbath on headphone blast walking around in February piss-rain, genuflecting, in my head and heart if not in actual physical practice, before the multitracked Living God of Tony Iommi's SG-through-Marshall-stacks power chord, and letting Ozzy be the paranoid head-twisted Christ for my internal torment.
My birthday is Thursday.

Soon the days went passing into years
Happiness just didn't even come so easy
Life was born of fairy tales and daydreams
Innocence was just another word
Was it illusion?
- Sabbath, "Wheels Of Confusion"

Freedom, apparently.

"The federal government and a powerful local Republican congressman have been pushing for years to fortify the 3 1/2-mile stretch of border just north of Tijuana, Mexico. Their plan is opposed by California coastal regulators and environmentalists who say it could harm a fragile Pacific estuary. Now supporters may be getting closer to victory. A provision in an immigration bill expected to pass the House next week would give the homeland security secretary authority to move forward with the project regardless of any laws that stand in the way, and would bar courts from hearing lawsuits against it."
-From Wired

"The last weeks of 2004 saw several explicit warnings from the antiwar Right about the coming of an American fascism. Paul Craig Roberts in these pages wrote of the “brownshirting” of American conservatism—a word that might not have surprised had it come from Michael Moore or Michael Lerner. But from a Hoover Institution senior fellow, former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, and one-time Wall Street Journal editor, it was striking."
-From The American Conservative. For real. American Conservative magazine is basically calling the Bush Admin. pseudo-facist. That's how fucked up shit is right now.

Breakdown of the usage frequency of the word "freedom" in Bush's State Of The Union addresses. 17 sentences in 2005 used it. Breakdown overlapping usage frequency of "freedom" and "irony" in Bush's SOUs. O sentences using the word "irony".

Who is this person who is marginally more of a loser than I am?

Who the fuck sets eSniper up on auctions for Antioch Arrow records?