Kablammo!

So I’ve basically been offered an ultimatum, and it’s entirely up to me to determine which way things will progress. The requirement for the ‘good’ result is eminently doable, I just have to bring myself to do it. Yet sometimes it feels like this is what I’m hearing:

“Sisyphus, if you don’t push that rock up the hill an extra time next week, we’ll take it away from you and you’ll never push another rock up another hill again.”

Faut-il imaginer Sisyphe heureux?

I wish I knew what I wanted. And I wish I knew which is a worse punishment: having my rock taken away completely, or having it replaced with a heavier one.

Here I go again, with the end-of-week shuffle action . . .

1. Weezer — “My Name is Jonas”
   I keep thinking I like Pinkerton better than the blue album, until I actually go back and listen to the blue album again. The cleverness and dreadful melancholy of Pinkerton will always have a place in my heart, but as soon as the opening notes of “Jonas” come in, I immediately forget all that crap and brace myself for an album of unapologetic rocking.
2. Sublime — “By the Rivers of Babylon”
   What can I say, I’m a sucker for acoustic guitars and soulful harmonies.
3. Pink Floyd — “Brain Damage (live)”
   The only thing that was capable of making Dark Side better was rerecording it in front of a live studio audience. Studio audiences suck when they’re perfunctorily reacting to cues in the form of signs that say Applause or some such, but when they’re legitimately enjoying the experience they can have an immensely positive effect, and that’s just one of the reasons why Pulse is so good.
4. Unbelievable Truth — “Home Again”
   Even for somebody as hopelessly obsessed with mopey British bands as I am, this is a goddamn sleeping pill of boring crap.
5. Django Reinhardt — “Belleville”
   Django and a clarinet: what more do you really need?
6. Beer is Bad — “Poo”
   Have you ever seen that episode of That 70s Show where they set up a tape recorder before getting high, to archive all their pot-induced wit and wisdom for posterity? This was a similar idea, and I have to say it didn’t come out much better in real life than it did on TV.
7. Eels — “The Stars Shine in the Sky Tonight”
   It’s one of the closing songs on a double-album, and it sounds like it — for better and for worse.
8. Feeder — “Radioman”
   I bought this album because the title (Yesterday Went Too Soon) summed up how I was feeling at that particular moment (January 2 or 3, 2000). Also because it was in the bargain bin and only cost $2. Then I found out it’s actually quite a good album as well, and this song in particular entered heavy rotation on my mp3 player, which had a whopping 64MB capacity. Oh, to be young again . . .
9. Badly Wooden Head — “After the Party”
   Fucker had two whole albums recorded already by the time he was my age. Sure, they’re “uplifting as a trainwreck”, but more importantly they’re good. Meanwhile I’m lucky if I can pull off one decent song a year.
10. Manu Chao — “Malegria”
    The entire album Clandestino is too good for words, but honestly this is one of my least favourite songs on it.
11. Starsailor — “Talk Her Down”
    Starsailor always walk a fine line between exhilarating and unlistenable, mostly because of their singer’s delivery, which is usually implausibly earnest and shamelessly maudlin, while somehow being even breathier than Matt Bellamy’s. It can be a lot to take, but in small doses it’s often very nice, and this song has a strong enough melody that it isn’t completely overshadowed by the giant sign saying “LOOK HOW SENSITIVE I AM, IS THIS NOT HEARTBREAKING?”

Yesterday was quite a good day; today was not.

I woke up with a sore throat, there was a riot going on, the Suns lost last night, and here it is practically 7pm and I’m still at work and there’s plenty of shit I need to get done by Monday and a guy who should have called me today to make both of our lives much easier never did and this whole weekend I’m already going to be plenty busy as it is and now I got «Ei ole üksi ükski maa» stuck in my head which considering I was exhausted and out of sorts already has made me really just want to go home.

Homne varn on tõepoolest juba kuhjaga täis, ja ei mahuta mitte midagit juurde. Ehk tuleb varna kuidagi suurendada.

The best part of the playoffs last year was watching Barbosa play. Thus far it looks like this year will be no different. He’s a great player and getting better all the time, but more importantly he clearly loves what he does and has a blast out there on the court. (And interestingly enough, we were born on the same day.)

In other news, I badly want the Heat to lose and I got a shameful amount of schadenfreude from Shaq fouling out in Game 1. I didn’t think it was possible to match the combination of Shaq and Kobe in terms of smugness and a sense of entitlement, but apparently Kobe’s share in that equation is roughly equaled by Dwyane, Zo, Payton, and Walker, when you add them all up.

Two weeks ago I felt happy to be alive, at peace with the world, and generally more content—with life in general, but also with myself—than I had in a long time. The proximate cause for this, of course, was reading Jailbird and God Bless You, Mr Rosewater back-to-back and essentially uninterrupted. In other words, I had Kurt Vonnegut to thank, and I was quite appreciative.

So it was that, a few days later, I decided not to mourn his death.

Was it sad? Of course. The death of an inspiration, a hero, an artist cannot but be a sad occasion. But Vonnegut’s is a legacy to be celebrated and, after all, he is up in heaven now.

As it is, I was lucky enough to be left with the following:

Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail.

and

God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

I think he wouldn’t have had it any other way.

So while I wasn’t upset to learn of his death, what did upset me was finding out he spent the last few weeks of his life suffering from severe and fatal head trauma.

Over the course of a rather enjoyable evening[1] last night, I managed to get in a conversation about Vonnegut. Naturally, once I made my way home[2] I had a tremendous urge to read some Vonnegut, since it had been quite a while since I’d read anything of his. (In the past two or three years, other than a few articles and such, all I’d read was Welcome to the Monkey House (yet again) and Mother Night.) Upon looking at my bookshelf, though, I was suddenly reminded that during the heady days of my near-obsessive Vonnegut mania and evangelism, I’d managed to lend out the bulk of the books that I owned, and I had only a vague recollection of who the recipients might have been.[3]

So it goes.

Anyway, I settled into reading Jailbird (that and Rosewater were my only choices, and Jailbird won the coin toss), and immediately remembered why I love Vonnegut’s writing so much. I also immediately remembered the fan letter I’d once started writing to him, the one that will probably never be written or mailed, though the sentiments it was intended to articulate were and still are entirely sincere.

So it goes.

Anyway, upon reaching Chapter 1 of Jailbird I was thrilled to discover that this was the one with the guy who would sit quietly and periodically clap his hands three times. So my initial disappointment at not having Breakfast of Champions at hand was immediately replaced with delight that I was able to read the book I’d subconsciously wanted to read even more.

Anyway, I just wanted to cite a couple of excerpts that seem particularly apropos or something:

The tragedy of the planet was that its scientists found ways to extract time from topsoil and the oceans and the atmosphere—to heat their homes and power their speedboats and fertilize their crops with it; to eat it; to make clothes out of it; and so on. They served time at every meal, fed it to household pets, just to demonstrate how rich and clever they were. They allowed great gobbets of it to putrefy to oblivion in their overflowing garbage cans.

And:

“You told a fragmentary truth,” he said, “which has now been allowed to represent the whole! ‘Educated and compassionate public servants are almost certainly Russian spies.’ That’s all you are going to hear now from the semiliterate old-time crooks and spellbinders who want the government back, who think it’s rightly theirs. Without the symbiotic idiocies of you and Leland Clewes they could never have made the connection between treason and pity and brains. Now get out of my sight!”

* * *

[1] There are a lot of things or activities that I am indifferent towards, or don’t particularly care for, but will do or take part in to indulge someone else. There are comparatively few that I actively dislike. Many forms of dancing (and ‘dancing’) fall under the former category. Last night, though, I came to the conclusion that being in a throng of people bobbing vaguely to the rhythm of a shitty R’n’B song is decidedly in the latter. Other than that, though, I had a great time.

[2] As I exited the Metro station in the wee hours of the morning, I was slightly dismayed by the little cold things that kept landing on my face. Until, that is, I finally realized they were snow and became overjoyed.

[3] But then, even if I knew exactly who had them (which I actually do for a couple), it seems kind of strange to go up to somebody and say “Hey, remember that book I lent you 5 years ago? You know, the one I completely forgot about? If you’re done with it I’d like to have it back.” Like it’s somehow presumptuous for me to want something back even though it’s mine and (as I recall) I even wrote my name in it. Of course, my real concern could just be that I might have to give back the books I’ve accidentally stolen from their rightful owners over the years. But what are you supposed to do when, a few weeks after lending you a book, the guy drops out of school (or something), disappears off the face of the earth, and you never see him again? And I didn’t even finish reading that book (at which point, incidentally, I immediately lent it to somebody else, as if it were mine with which to do so) till last month, which was about six years after I began it.

One of those things that “bloggers” do, I guess… this is what came up when I put my mp3 player on ‘shuffle’. I’ve taken the liberty of writing briefly about each song as well, rather than just providing a list.

1. Ratatat — “Everest”
   I loves me my Ratatat, I do, but the best part of a Ratatat song is always the ending, when they suddenly change around the beat you were grooving to and turn it into something bigger than the whole world and suddenly you find yourself stomping on the gas pedal or gyrating your entire body against a big heap of sand, depending on the particulars of your circumstances at the time. This song doesn’t do that, so while it’s quite nice it’s middling at best in the Ratatat canon.
2. The Beatles — “Paperback Writer”
   Great song. But man oh man how I loathe the early days of stereo. I’m sure that, at the time, it was all kinds of cool to be able to play around with different channels at all, but there’s absolutely no reason to put every instrument hard left or hard right. It sounds terrible and it’s very difficult to listen to.
3. Elliott Brood — “President”
   Elliott Brood are the original “death-country” band, but this song has too much country and not enough death. Anyone can play banjo (though admittedly the Brood do play it quite mean), but when I listen to these guys I want to hear some screaming too. That’s why I like Tin Type better than Ambassador.
4. Mew — “156”
   As with every Mew song, this one requires multiple careful listens to get to the bottom of. As with most Mew songs, this one is well worth the trouble.
5. Evan Dando — “My Idea”
   A nice enough twist on the standard wistful post–break-up song; he doesn’t necessarily want to get back together, he just wants people to think it was his idea.
6. Sublime — “5446 That’s My Number / Ball and Chain”
   Dear lord I’d forgotten how goddamn bass-heavy Sublime mixed their early stuff.
7. Miles Davis — “Freddie Freeloader”
   I like
8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience — “House Burning Down”
   See “Lucy”, below, regarding “…the worst excesses of 60s psychedelia”, and know that I was not talking about this song (some other songs on Electric Ladyland, though…). The intro is certainly all kinds of trippy and effects-laden, and is definitely an artifact of its time, but it’s also the work of a master craftsman with unsurpassed familiarity with the tools at his disposal. And the rest of the song ain’t half bad either.
9. Men at Work — “Who Can It Be Now?”
   Probably the best song ever written about having an unknown somebody at one’s door. Not only is it incredibly catchy, the lyrics are brilliant as well. I can’t explain why lines like “If he hears, he’ll knock all day / I’ll be trapped, and here I’ll have to stay” appeal to me so much, but they do.
10. Carole King — “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”
    Don’t get me wrong: Carole wrote a lot of very very good songs, and this is one of them. She just wasn’t the best performer. When she lets herself go, she’s phenomenal, but most of the time you can hear the timidity and trepidation.
11. The Beatles — “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”
    My opinions about this song, both positive and negative, are very similar to my opinions about the Simpsons episode where Homer gets a job with Hank Scorpio. Taken on its own merit, that episode is a masterwork: full of hilarity, an instant classic, and since become constantly referenced in the vernacular. In a broader context, though, it opened the floodgates for a storm of derivative, self-indulgent, self-referential crap to follow. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that episode was when The Simpsons jumped the shark. Continuity had never been important, but with this episode it just flew out the window, never to return again. And they’d had celebrity voices before, but I feel like this episode was the beginning of the revolving-door celebrity cavalcade that the series has been reduced to. “Lucy”, on the other hand, merely paved the way for the worst excesses of 60s psychedelia and other such crap, and lent the entire genre an undeserved air of legitimacy. I can’t decide which is a graver sin.

Jenny 3:15

I can’t believe it; this is ridiculous; what is the world coming to; etc.

They jacked up the price of my morning cup of tea from 58¢ to 70¢—that’s a 21% increase! And even worse than the outrageous markup is the fact that I’ll start getting change in nickels now. Pennies I can deal with, and I get perverse enjoyment from the fact that they’re worth more as commodity metal than as minted currency; but nickels are just a pain in the ass.

I guess I’m just lucky that I broke a dollar bill this morning instead of having exact change ready.