Kablammo!

I just realized the horrible situational irony inherent in sitting in a windowless office, a drone working for the Man, and blasting Rage Against the Machine on my headphones.

I’ve had this recurring dream, or perhaps more of a recurring setpiece, that’s never exactly the same but always involves some kind of trek through a gargantuan and entirely disorganized library, really more just a building full of books than a library in any meaningful sense. The architecture is always vaguely forbidding with a sense of former glory — the kind of thing that wouldn’t look out of place on some kind of Very Prestigious University campus — with lots of coffered ceilings and magnificent staircases, and walnut paneling everywhere. And, of course, books all over the goddamn place, with not a shelf or a card catalog to be found. Books in every nook and cranny, books filling corridors almost to the ceiling so you have to climb up the pile and crawl across if you want to get through, books of every shape and description. Sometimes the point of being there is to try and find one particular volume, other times it’s just to get out the other side of the building, but in every case it’s more about the journey than the destination — going through, over, around, under, past these enormous stacks of books.

Anyway, last night it showed up again, and I mentioned to somebody in the dream that it reminded me of a recurring dream I get.

I can travel through time, but only in one direction.

1. Towa Tei — “Son of Bambi (Walk Tuff)”
   Kind of a hodgepodge, really: a simple looped ostinato on the bass, a vocalist excitedly shouting reggae-inspired nonsense, and a sitar. So I guess this could sort of be a harbinger for Thievery Corporation’s entire career: combining Jamaica with the mystical East through a filter of samplers and synths.
2. Rush — “2112”
   It takes a certain kind of conceit to make a 20-minute rock song, and it takes an extra-special kind of conceit to concoct a grand science-fiction mythology for your 20-minute rock song, and to include a lengthy segment consisting of a guitar being tuned. I get it: ‘guitars in space’ was a hugely popular theme (or ‘concept’) in the 1970s, but come on.
3. The Shins — “The Celibate Life”
   As with a lot of other Shins songs, the vocals are so thin and so far down in the mix that they serve almost as more of another instrument than as a vocal, and as with a lot of other Shins songs, it works.
4. Rodrigo — Concierto madrigal: Pastoral
   “A literary or artistic work that portrays idealized rural life.” That sounds about right. If you’re ever scoring a film and need to convey “idyllic”, you can’t go wrong with this piece.
5. Cake — “I Will Survive”
   If you’re going to cover a song, you should make it your own; and that goes double for songs that are incredibly well-known. The Cardigans, for example, did a cover of “Iron Man” that was amazing because it was nothing like the original. A cover like that shows that the original composition has legs of its own, and a particular innate beauty above and beyond the original performance. This is one of those covers. Incidentally, it also has one of the best basslines in recorded history.
6. The New Pornographers — “From Blown Speakers”
   This is really an exquisitely crafted song. Among other great things is the way it tiptoes around and teases you, building up the pressure until it turns what would have been a rather ordinary chorus into a magnificent climax.
7. Violent Femmes — “Add It Up”
   This song is so anthemic because it’s so straightforwardly and guilelessly human. That, and it’s a musical Catcher in the Rye—an ode and a paean to the Platonic ideal of adolescence.
8. In Flames — “Another Day in Quicksand”
   A good bridge can completely transform a song and make it vastly better and more interesting. See, for example, the bridge in this song.
9. Blur — “Song 2”
   Apparently the self-parody in this song was too subtle for us in America, since this was Blur’s only hit here and we seemed disappointed that nothing else of their sounded remotely like it. Fuck it. It’s a great song, and if its greatness stems from its tongue-in-cheek nature, so much the better. I can enjoy Spinal Tap’s music unironically, so why not this?
10. Radiohead — “Scatterbrain (acoustic)”
    My immediate reaction upon hearing Hail to the Thief for the first time was jubilation that Radiohead were using guitars again. I can’t play this song, but it’s reassuring to know that I at least play the right instrument for it. (Yeah, John Mayer can play “Kid A” on guitar, but he doesn’t count—he’s the exception that proves the rule.)
11. Wolf Parade — “I’ll Believe in Anything”
    Wolf Parade are like a house of cards with a trainwreck on top. They sound like they could fall apart at any moment, and while the slapdash/lo-fi vibe can get overbearing at times, it’s also the source of their power. If they were stable, they wouldn’t be interesting; if they collapsed, they’d be a perfectly ordinary disaster. As it is, their disaster is still waiting to happen.
12. The Esquires — “Mustalainen”
    The CD of 1960s-era Finnish surf music this is on is one of my prize possessions.

I had just been thinking that the main riff from Black Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf” would make a great loop for somebody to rap over, and now I realized that the Beastie Boys already did that, over twenty years ago, in “Rhymin’ & Stealin'”.

What do you know.

• The other day I was walking down the sidewalk, and a guy was coming the other way with his 3-or-4-year-old perched on his shoulders. As we passed each other, I overheard a brief snippet of their conversation. The father told the child, “…then you say ‘I’ll beat you up!’,” and the child dutifully repeated “Ah be chu up!”
  Did I mention this took place at around 11pm?
• I should marry the AFI Silver cinematheque, since I seem to love it so much, or at least become a member so each film becomes slightly less expensive. I’ve seen four movies there in the past three weeks, and probably at least a dozen this year, all of them very good.
• As it happened, I got in to work early yesterday, and thus got out early as well—early enough to hightail it over to the abovementioned cinema in time (or nearly in time) for a 4:30 matinée showing of And Justice For All. I’ve always enjoyed going to the movies by myself, and it turns out that what’s even better than that is being the only person in the room, and having what amounts to a completely private screening on a full-size screen. (And what’s even better than that is getting a pint of NELSON from the concession stand before your private screening.)
  I was enjoying the act of enjoying the movie so much, I almost forgot to enjoy the movie.
• In other news, I’ve reached a new level of complacency and consumer-whoredom. Not only am I not spending this week in a tent in the woods, but I also recently acquired a half-stake in an LCD HDTV. So it goes.

Yesterday and today I felt great, which leads me to believe I’m only happy when I’ve dug myself into a hole, or when I’ve made things far more complicated than they need be.

Alright, so it happened again. I suppose the question, then, is what is the pattern here and how can I try to forestall it from happening again.

It’s happened when I’ve been getting more than enough sleep; and when I’ve been rather sleep-deprived.

It’s happened in the depths of winter; and at the peak of summer.

It’s happened when I’ve seen my path drawing to an end, confronting me with a bewildering horizon of choice; and when I’ve seen a single unbranching track stretching off to infinity.

It’s happened alarmingly soon after I was sure everything was going to be fine.

It’s happened when I’ve been a slacker extraordinaire, and when I’ve been at my most diligent.

It’s happened when I’ve been drinking like a fish, and when I’ve been sober for a long time.

I wish I felt more upset about it, but I just want to take a nap.

Sleep was a long time coming last night, though I was exhausted. Today I decided to keep start a diary, but not a dream diary, rather a diary of the meaningless shit that races through my mind when I close my eyes. More often than not, it’s completely inconsequential and its relation to my waking life is tangential at best. Maybe airing it out will help it go away?

I should note that what follows is a largely unedited and entirely unfactchecked transcript of a representative sample of the random crap that evidently kept me awake last night.

• My relationship with money is abstracted to the point of absolute absurdity.
  There’s a line in a book, I think, which may have been by Vonnegut. It seems like the kind of thing he’d write. To paraphrase horribly, I am absolutely amazed that people are willing, even eager, to give me actual goods and services in exchange for slips of paper. Except these days it’s even more bizarre than that: the slips of paper aren’t necessary, and I can get goods and services in exchange for basically showing somebody a round-cornered plastic rectangle, which represents slips of paper. And it turns out the rectangle itself isn’t necessary, either; I can type a number into a website (whatever the hell that is) and get merchandise delivered to my residence. The number, of course, represents the rectangle, which in turn represents slips of paper. Some websites let you take it even another step: a checkmark or radio button which represents a number, which represents a rectangle, which represents slips of paper.

  So what do the slips of paper represent? (I.e., how far down do the turtles go?) It seems the slips of paper—and this may have been what Vonnegut(?) was getting at—don’t represent anything, really. There was a time when they represented bits of shiny metal, but in this day and age they represent nothing more than an implicit promise by the maker of the slips of paper not to print too many more slips of paper at the same time. And that promise is the enabler and the driving force behind our entire economy (whatever the hell that is).

  Could it be, though, that the slips of paper represent something more important, such as my own precious time and energy? Absolutely not. Well, perhaps in some kind of detached, purely rational sense, I can draw up some kind of relation between time spent and slips of paper (and in fact one could point out that I have entered into an agreement essentially stipulating a specific number of slips of paper for a specific amount of time); but viscerally, it doesn’t feel that way at all. Part of that is due to the miracles of direct deposit and electronic banking, which mean that slips of paper are often, in and of themselves, massive inconveniences that I have to go out of my way to even access. Everything is just numbers on websites, and the causal relationship between doing stuff and having the value of a number on a website change seems tenuous at best. It seems to correlate pretty well, but somehow it doesn’t feel causal.

  In short, I didn’t used to know where “money” came from, or understand the value of a dollar, or any of that; and people suggested that I would quickly find out when I started working to support myself. They were wrong. I still don’t know where money comes from, and I still don’t understand the value of a dollar. I’m aware that that’s a tremendous, tremendous luxury, and I suppose I count myself lucky for having this particular type of ignorance.

  But seriously though, I can just click my mouse a few times and end up with boxes full of books, CDs, DVDs, microphones, and whatever else my little heart desires. I just don’t get it.

• Criminal Justice: In what does it consist?
  As a course of study, I mean. (Note that I have not researched this at all; this has all been pulled straight out of my ass.)

  The first thing I thought of was “theories of rehabilitation”, predicated on the assumption that rehabilitation is a goal of ‘criminal justice’. This largely unsatisfactory answer led to two other questions: (1) What are the goals of criminal justice? and (2) What is the history of criminal justice? (Note that the questions, and their answers, are inextricably linked, or so I assume.)

  A list of goals of criminal justice, I should think, would include deterrence, retribution, and rehabilitation (sometimes, but not always, in that order). The relative proportions of the three would necessarily depend on cultural and social mores, as well as available resources and a whole host of other factors. Hammurabi’s eye-for-an-eye justice system clearly has a minimal focus on rehabilitation; and perhaps rehabilitation as such didn’t even enter the equation until [temporary] imprisonment became a popular approach to punishment.

  Can retribution really be considered just? If I steal your checkbook and rack up tremendous debt in your name, I can be ordered to pay back the money. But if I paralyze you from the neck down while driving drunk, can I be ordered to make you walk again? What if I raid your pension fund, embezzle until your employer is insolvent, and scatter the money to the four winds?

  What proportion of Criminal Justice studies is philosophical?

There was more—a lot more, on both of these subjects and many others—but I think you get the idea. Rather, I’m tired of writing.

I’ve been spectacularly unproductive and unmotivated at work for the past week or so, and it’s really starting to bother me. Just can’t focus, and I feel like I’d rather be anywhere else in the world. Summer’s in the air, is it that? Did I burn myself out by actually doing my job satisfactorily for the prior two months? Why am I navel-gazing and making vague excuses?

Anyway.

I’ll finish writing this later, maybe.