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Gary Numan “Radio One Sessions”

Somehow nobody told me to check out Gary Numan until Adam played this in the car while he and I and Elaine were on the way to the last day of HBML and to see Ariel Pink in Boston. We listened to this almost every day at work in April.

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Harry Pussy “You’ll Never Play This Town Again”

Gangbuster compilation of live/stray living-in-the-red tunes from the ultimate in hectic crews. I listen to this in the morning on my days off.

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Olodum “Egito Madagascar”

Mike played this for me in Philly in early February. FMU posted it a while back with the plug “Listen with your sternum.” Totally. We listened to this on the way back after the first time we went to the Trader Joe’s in Warwick with Mikey and Walker, and then almost every day for two weeks while Adam cooked me omelette after omelette, morning after morning.

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Peaking Lights “Imaginary Falcons”

Top honors to this one – I listened to it cooking dinner during the first few freezing cold weeks in Providence when I paced between rooms, cleaned, and spent all day looking for jobs on the Internet, and then on repeat the first four or five times I swept and mopped the Cable Car.

Cluster “Rosa” meditations via carpeted basement and wood paneling and drop-ceiling-staring/stars through a barn roof/blueberry picking on the night lakes played mainly (I think) on electronics/guitar/voice. This is the celebratory music that plays as I put a diamond ring on anarchy’s finger and then draw and do whatever I want from 1am until dawn on a Wednesday.

Rangers “Cassette Collages II”

Listened to this for the first time while me and Adam and Colleen cooked dinner in early March. We played scrabble and Adam won. I was digging on this super hard but I don’t think they were!

The sound is a novice in the Ferraro school doing his best to bust pop songs in the master’s all middles, all spliced together, tons of repetition, reverb, and shitty tape sound style. I’m down with the chorus of Osaka (with the AOL IM sound that plays at 1:45 and comes back in at 12:29) and all of Street Smell but especially with the lean-back moment at 12:44 where it plays what will be my ringtone in the afterlife where I get free text messages that can be up to 10,000 characters long. Best played loud on a stereo and listened to while in the other room.

If you’re reading this, and I know you are an internet guy, keep up the good work dude! I play your tunes at my coffee shop at least once a week, and at least one insane old lady who dumps coffee into the plants loves it!

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Brainbombs “Burning Hell”

Evil fucking rock music like a Ren and Stimpy episode where all of the gross-out close-ups are of horrendous acts of deliberate violence perpetrated not with malice but with goofy cackling offhandedness. First time I felt sickened by music in years was listening to “Tired and Bloody” in the car this past weekend. Heaviest band and 100% favorite for getting stoked when I’m home from work to do something else.

US Girls “Live on WFMU”, “Me and Yoko” 7”

I’d been sort of feeling this for a while but it finally clicked for me after I saw her play at AS220 shortly after I got here. Swooning girl group desperation sound blasted through cracked boombox, sounds like sitting in a dirty house filled with garbage, surrounded by bugs and mice and vampire roommates, with all kinds of insane neighbors and drug zombies in the streets, but still trying to express living horror/ecstasy out a small window to a crawling night/glaring moon. “Me + Yoko” from the same 7” is probably the apex of this; “Bits and Pieces” and “Don’t Understand That Man” from the record/live set are right there too.

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Sun Ra “Universe in Blue”

Big Saturn’s return (pun so stupid that yeah, I am totally intending it) on the Sun Ra records in April care of this totally insane blog (find the link for the download there) that maintains links to uploads of most of his discography. Groovy/soft synth and band tunes bookend a slayer of a June Tyson track where it feels like a lion is going to come right out of her mouth.

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Kurt Vile “Live on WFMU”

The #1 Philadelphia song man playing raw. Honorable mentions to the Hunchback 12” and the new solo record but of the new crop this has had the most play so far.

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Oneohtrix Point Never “A Pact Between Strangers”, “Transmat Memories”
Infinity Window “Artificial Midnight”

#1 chillers in the neo-new age synth category all come from Daniel Lopatin’s projects OPN and IW. Insanely he seems to be the only dude yet capable of taking the Boards of Canada acid streaked summer sky/1970 warm winds/looking at and then going inside of a Polaroid with your old friends vibe that’s been around at least since ‘98 and doing something fresh and good with it. Really re: the BOC model, his mode is easy: he strips the beats, stretches the vibe way out, and there you go. Walk around an 80 degree afternoon in full midnight. Drink a cheap beer and become a god. Second track on Artificial Midnight playing at max volume while I mop at 4am, both OPN tapes on repeat for an age.

Honorable mentions so far to Group Bombino “Guitars from Agadaz, Vol 2″, the Fantastic Magic untitled tape I downloaded from a blog that is neither the CD-R or the 7”, the Sun Watcher tape, and Sun City Girls “Torch of the Mystics,” which I listened to as I drove into Providence on Day One.

The last few months of work-work have been extremely productive (re: especially a near-complete redo of the Mark Dion site, which I produced a ton of work for and did all of the building with Lord Whimsy art directing; a game I did some video work on for discoverychannel.com; a Flash project I produced with Hall Media crew), but as my two main, long term office projects both coincidentally end exactly as camp starts, and as our project management and workflow methods have evolved to the point that there isn’t even so much sidebar/cleanup work for me to do anymore anyway, the time to call it a wrap seemed perfect. I enjoy my final Beer Thursday at Lime Projects after the Dion install on the 20th, and what a mighty and beautiful two years it’s been. My infinite thanks and debt and permanent salutes to Laris and Kendra from every desk and city I work at from here out.

In conjunction with leaving my job, I decided it would be productive to move out of the random house and see what’s up in the world. I’ll be in Philadelphia until June 30th and then will be traveling and at camp until the end of August. After that is anyone’s guess. Feel free to contact me if you need work done; pretty much wherever you are I can come to you.

I haven’t worked on very much of public interest since band tour, other than a slow moving book/cd project that documents that move. If you want a copy of it, it’s still in development hell (which really just means done by mid-July), but you can have one for free if you get at me before I print them up. Otherwise, I’m in the middle of a fellowship application for a writing program in the fall (marking the first time I’ve drafted anything in probably four years), and am generally enjoying the early summer via bike/Men’s Group as much as possible before the hot street doldrums and mosquitos roll in and I head out.

In normal totally boring recounting of the week’s efforts news, I spent Wednesday with Lexie at the bar, Thursday in Newark airport with Susy, Friday at my old house on 43rd with Jon and the Team, Saturday with Ben and Mike at the Wiese / D. Charles Spear shows and eventually the train bridge (word to Chris Bee Mask who lives here now and gave me his new killah tape), today at the Magnet City thing downtown and then in my slippers and long weekend yawns. Tonight I’m going to see Matthew from Charlottesville’s band; I guess those kids all live up here or in Brooklyn now.

Horizon items =
- Ospreys / Robedoor / Pocahaunted / Natalie Wiseblood / Woods June 28th.
- Ospreys / Wilde Stallions C60 on wether’s new label
- New book in July before I go, as above
- I will be in New York June 11th-15th on camp/nonsense business
- One or two new website ideas, maybe for sooner, maybe for later

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So yeah. I’ve just been out cruising the old roads, rolling around in my 1995, cruising hard with my hair blowing in my 2003, overdriving a pitched up White Album through some kid’s Peavey in Savannah while my friends think it’s funny to pretend to open the jar they keep their pet Black Widow in. This is a long one with pictures.

Dali king, Tufts Library

Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday

Yesterday while I was driving to work, local public radio baroness Marty Maas had local public radio mutt Dan Gottlieb on her show and she kept asking him if he was ready to die.

There’ve been oceans of blank these past three or four weeks. I’ve been whiskey-washed and soaked in beer five times over, straight wilin’ my way through the March. I shot beams straight through daylight savings time, ruptured the Internet, rearranged entire houses full of furniture with my mind and pretty much didn’t document any of it. I’m doing a horrible job of keeping a blog, but that I do keep one at all speaks, I think, to a need for me to mark time in the gray waste when there’s nothing going on more than to an impulse to document, keep track of, or explain the actual retarded goings on of my mid-20s “wild years.” It’s not like I don’t remember everything that happens anyway. (And double-anyway, I don’t know, who is this for anyway? My kids when they finally get up the guts to look up their old man on the internet wayback machine in the year of our wishing we covered our tracks 2028?)

Mike and I went to the Wissahickon and we drove back listening to that George Thoroughgood song everyone knows. I tell everyone that when I heard it for the first time on public radio when I was in fourth grade that it made me want to immediately go out honkey tonkin. This remains the case even now.

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We drank a case of Mexican beer that Amber bought, two cases of yuengling and a case of delicious Magic Hat HI.P.A. before the wells ran dry. We’ve been godstorming in a more quality, less quantity way = Davey plays with us now, and Mark Price came and hung out the other night too. Susy calls this phenomenon Men’s Group. Meanwhile, dozens of 11×17 sheets get covered, I go into and out of the office, and life grinds on.

–+–

I had a long reverie the other day about an early argument I got into with my dad. I feel like I can figure out when it was to the year based on family vacation memories (maybe my mom will leave a comment and let me know) – it was the year of Altered Beast, when we went to the arcade every month, put a collective dollar fifty up in that machine, and rose from the grave to save Zeus’s daughter in two player mode. (Non-losers should maybe note that $1.50 is not a lot of money for two people to spend on a complete trip to an arcade, a fact I took weird pride in. We’d spend the rest of the $5 he changed to quarters on the skeeball, and I would buy plastic ninjas with the tickets. In the story that I told with them at home the black ninja with the two swords was the hero. He hid and watched the infighting between the reds and whites from on top of the ottoman and he swooped down on his grappling hook to finish them off when they’d worn each other down.) One Sunday that year, my cousins and I were playing Altered Beast in my gramma’s basement, and mimicking the wolf beast’s power, I did a lot of diving into the couches. When I got home, I said I could fly, and my dad told me it was impossible for a man to fly. I told him I had been doing it earlier in the afternoon. He got out an encyclopedia that showed a picture of a fish with wings (and I remember laughing and saying “Look at that fish with wings, that’s crazy” and immediately realizing that what I was claiming was, to him, exactly the same thing) and the text read “Man cannot fly.” We went back and forth and he eventually agreed to disagree. I asked him if he would read to me (we were reading this killer pink book of Norse mythology, with fucking Odin losing his eye to Mimir so he could know everything happening the previous week) and he said he wouldn’t because we’d wasted all of our time arguing.

Should I just scan my entire journal from 4th-8th grade, annotate it, and post it here? I feel like I should.

My brother emailed me earlier this month to let me know he was doing jumps from Australian cliffs. I miss him dearly and my wish is that he will run and take a leap and be surprised to find that he can carry himself up and disappear into the sun.

–+–

Kurt Vile

I went to see Kurt Vile + xNoBBQx a while ago. NoBBQ was horrible, Vile ruled. Going to see him with Sunburned and Davey tonight. Tomorrow I am working on my video all day. I think I am going to Assateague Island this Friday and then to my parents house for easter.

Mostly sure I mentioned already that Ospreys is touring with Davey or Tenspeed from the end of April through the beginning of May, our first tour in eleven(!) months, re: I went to camp, Mike bought a house and went on poster tour, etc. Massively stoked to lay down all manner of styles in all manner of territories. Definitely sure I mentioned that I’m working on a video. I was going to post a part of it here but seriously why would I do that when it isn’t done.

Dali spade, Tufts Library

Massachusetts

Me and Suzanne

Advice column

Wissahickon

Working on a video

Everything you can learn from yourself is already inside of you

At home with my dogs, February y.o.o.b.w.hz., 1808

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I saw Forrest Gump for the first time last night. Bonsky used to say “seat’s taken!” all the time and I never knew where this was from. The part where he runs across America over and over was a pleasant surprise.

I had a dream the other night that I was at my gramma’s house with my cousins, standing on the old plank back porch circa I don’t even know, early 90s, standing under the tin roof where me and Maria were when we saw the bolt of lightning strike a few yards away by the pool, and we were looking out into the field. The entire dream was just this: that the field was still there. Earlier when I went into our kitchen, my heart skipped a beat and I wondered suddenly where Robyn’s old cutting board and the old shelves with all of the pots and pans had gone. Last week at my gramma’s, even though the field has been gone since I got back from camp, my disgust was fresh at the fact that the paths are gone, gone, gone. When we were in the Wissahickon yesterday, we reached a sign that read “INDIAN ->”. Since it dictated that we turn right, we stepped over it and went forward. Eventually we arrived at the foot of the above statue, placed a little over a hundred years ago on its hill. Across the river is a sign that points up the hill toward it, and even reading it the statue is hard to spot. The sign says, “According to legend,” super absurd, I know, “the Lenape chief is watching his people move west.” I’m going to build a small statue to the naked indian when I next visit home, and hope, according to the legends, that I’ll find him in some western fields and finally get to ask him about all of the things that’ve been on my mind since last time.

What can I say? Sunday is the only day that works. I had a fine conversation with Brian this afternoon while I drank my coffee and had my fake sausage and cheesy eggs. I listened to all of the radio shows and did twenty five pages in CX Cult. I have less than 75 more to go before it’s done, which means I did between 250-300 in the first month of the project, which isn’t really bad by any means but less than half of what I had planned. When this book’s done, it’ll represent the first 17% of a proposed 2000 drawings for a video I’m doing for later this fall.

I also finished installing a new patch on my jacket fashioned from a sleeve of my favorite blue button down shirt, which I had worn in all seasons of the past six years. I got it at Bryn Mawr Hospital Thrift with Zach one January afternoon of my freshman year of college, and I decided one afternoon about a month ago that I needed to retire it. I think it was the only material relic from those days still surviving in its original form in my daily life. It may be the last shirt I bought for myself, which is incredible. Little scraps of it are around my bedroom floor.

Around five I convinced myself that I needed to go to a show tonight, to see Pippi Bone Dust’s band VVLTVRE and Jared’s band RAWAR (both in caps? I don’t know). I did these four discs beforehand re: trades/gives and realized a way better way to build the CD boxes themselves.

Private Idiot #8-11

Best part of the day by far was the total paralysis that overcame me as I tried to leave the house around 7:30pm. I had my coat on, my backpack completely packed, my pant leg rolled up, my bike rebuilt and the tires pumped, and as I started to go out the door I froze in my tracks for three minutes. I walked my bike back to its starting point at the wall, went into the kitchen and had a glass of water. I drank it on the couch and thought “Do I need to leave the house,” and I kept thinking “No of course not, I can stay home and work.” This kind of sudden overwhelming agoraphobic episode hasn’t happened in about three years. Sitting on the couch, I was able to summon the energy to leave by arguing to myself that I would not allow myself to work or enjoy myself if I stayed in, because I would continue to regret not going out despite the fact that I didn’t technically need to or even particularly want to.

The ride was nice. I took my bike apart when I went to Boston whenever and hadn’t yet put it back together, re: the weather has been terrible for two weeks/I have been too busy watching Forrest Gump. Traded Jared a disc for a Wet Cement disc; gave Pippi a disc and bought one of her shirts. I got back and wasted the rest of the night, but I didn’t feel too bad about it.

At home with my dogs, February y.o.o.h.v.a.s.v., 2008

I’m not doing a great job of posting these on Sundays.

Last night me and Mike were in the middle of the usual records/beer/board games Gray House flop-out that horrendously replaced the ultra-productive December/early January videos/whiskey/drawing mode (what can I say other than that we apparently enjoy having many, many titanic godswars more than we enjoy having anything to show for our stupid days) when it started snowing and Mike decided to take the dog to the park.

Despite predictions and the observed weather that prompted the move out, There were no clouds in the sky. We stayed in the park for a frigid hour and watched the first eclipse I’ve seen in probably ten years. I remember standing in the spring night in my boy scout uniform watching Hale-Bopp and thinking, shouldn’t there be some sound or something for this? Shouldn’t there be some great clap that shatters windshields and sets off car alarms in order to draw everyone’s attention to the fact that the universe is indeed fucking gigantic, and check it out the moon is disappearing and then turning a weird red? I drank my beer and paced to keep my feet warm. Mike tried to get his dog to climb up onto the playground’s fort. Cops idled and watched us from the edge of the park – their tire tracks in the frozen mud shone in the red moonlight. The dog chewed a plastic water bottle and its crunch echoed loudly. We had a hard time setting up the board for game three when we went back inside because our hands had frozen.

Earlier, Amber bought me beer because I drove her around. This somehow seems relevant to my being able to linger in the park for an hour, play three games of godstorm and have what may or may not have been a killer Bavarian Kings-style band practice (to be decided). Even earlier, and this is only tangentially related, Davey joined us to drink 40s and plan a band tour (and play two games of godstorm).

Even earlier, Sunday, I was at my parents’ house. I riled up my baby cousins at my gramma’s, scared my brother John and played video games without thinking too hard about the big issues of the day. I beat my dad in chess twice (which feels weird, re: he used to constantly destroy me when I was 10 when we last played, and the game itself always felt like such a raw ego vs. ego Chronus/Zeus thing especially now re: our general disagreement on almost every matter in the world, not being used to having my weird family position validated by winning, feeling weird about getting older/my dad getting way older (he was only eight years older than I am now when I remember him at his youngest), etc.). I missed my brother, who is in Australia, and who I can’t call on the telephone. I watched many Hollywood movies and walked on the banks. I finished watching the Mighty Boosh and have, as ever, been drawing.

This week is almost over and I have no plans for the immediate future. Tonight I’m going to drop in on my old roommates at their show. I’m going to have band practice a couple times and work on finishing drinking the beer. I’m going to try to go to the park. And on.

And now on to the normal crawl, L.I.F.E. on a pixel, life on a bristle, life on a sheet: things I did, thought and ate, January 6th, year of our wonder and sorrow 2008.

While I made coffee or possibly lunch (Sunday meal plan = dinner: pasta with trader joe sausage sauce, lovely cheese, fresh onion/peppers/mushrooms; breakfast = granola + yogurt; lunch = ??; also had two glasses of tang, a sip of a root beer float, three beers), Bonsky said, “Tom, you thought it would take you twenty minutes because you have no sense of time.” We were talking about how I went to Kinko’s to make that zine up above thinking it would only take me twenty minutes to go in, print and get out, when it took upwards of two hours.

After reflecting on it (during Alphaville and Training Day mostly, both of which are terrible movies), I got to thinking that maybe the issue isn’t so much one of time lapse, but more generally of primarily storing experiences in impressionistic ways rather than in emotional or empirical ones. This seams to speak more fully to the ways I think about reading, listening to music, cooking, traveling, and so on. Not that I don’t perceive time in these things, but I do find that time (and emotional response, and empirical fact) often distorts around the more prominent forms of memory, i.e., light, color, temperature. We can talk about it maybe.

Asked for examples of my not being able to perceive time, Bonsky went on to point out that I often used to say I would be over “in a little while” and then not show up for three or more hours. I think this is more just my being socially untimely and cluttered than my not being able to understand time, but I’m including this point of his so you might form your own opinion.

At night I went to see the mighty Blues Control and everything shuddered back into place. I always know when I like bands and when I don’t, but sometimes I forget when I straight up love bands. Total jammers. Check these dudes outtttt!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ten years ago I was a creator on the Discworld MUD. I had just “met” Larissa Sky, while Jeremiah and I had already worked together on at least one major project. Good heavens.

Next in life = planning a tour to New Orleans and back.

I have an art show in three days that I am getting moderately stressed out about because I haven’t worked on anything in days and have nothing done.

I drove home to Philadelphia after eating chicken cutlets and gnocchi at my gramma’s (as before). I drank black coffee and drove as quickly as I could. When I got in, I unloaded my things into my room, cleaned a little and went to Mike’s. We had band practice. Ellen lives there now. Then we went to the show.

The show was us, Davey or Tenspeed, Morsbergers like Machine Guns and three units from Birmingham AL – Dick Neff, Important Eagle, Mugu Guymen. IE played tapes and reeds, DN played drums, a custom synth and a Chippendale vocal mask,  and MG played drums and distorto guitar. DN played a song with Davey at the end and that slayed. All solid dudes who we will hopefully visit. Our set was a little rugged – first one played on our micro amps setup at middle volume. Feedback and sustain didn’t work as expected and there were some weird mid-set problems as a result.

The difficult influence of Providence RI’s Fort Thunder art collective was highly apparent in the musical and visual styles the AL crew brought with them, possibly championed furthest by DN, who screened the green yellow and red bleeding monster crazy lines weird letters show poster with clear flying hard line crystals, and yeah, played fast drums with a loop dealie and a mask on. I’m not going to write an essay about this influence and its obvious continuing role in defining a certain branch of fringe art and music just now, but let this be a placeholder for when I decide to.

Also, let me be clear in that I don’t mean to front on DN or any of these dudes by calling them out or whatever on invoking FT in their shit, consciously or not (I mean, the poster for this show was still totally tight). It’s totally okay. My interest and concern is for what comes next (in noise music and young art) in this so-called movement’s path, since we can only (presumably) print bleeding ghost monsters with weird letters on our show posters for so long.

I ate one and a half odwalla bars at the show. We ate delicious burritos beforehand. At the show, Rosa and Pumpkin ran back and forth, back and forth, kicking up a royal racket. I drank organic orange juice and some odwalla strawberry juice and had a sip of coca cola even though I can’t stand soda.