people keep telling me that the good, the bad & the queen is a ‘depressing’ record. but i’ve been given to fantasies about losing large quantities of blood, so it’s hard for me to gague. it’s stoner music without the fantasia. just massive fogs. as far as i can tell, few records in the past year have had more warmth and insularity to them. when the world ends you just walk around and everything’s fine i guess–more or less the feeling i’ve had since i’ve gotten back to new york. a special loneliness. it’s the suspended animation of non-horror: damon albarn et al are deaf to whatever crumbling’s going on, because they’ve still got light and streets and noise to greet. or get lost in. so, okay. blur used to write songs like this but they had a shred of hope nestled in; because they did–“coffee & tv”’s refrain of “oh, we could start over again”–a sunny thought would invariably get wedged in. there was an emotional dynamicism. the kinks were always too sharp-witted to cocede to vacancy. to notice shit you have to have your head up, but tg, tb & tq is blank-faced shoe-shuffling–with nothing at stake, wry brit sociology has finally petered out to the comforts of total disengagement. very modern.

other than that i’ve been pretty much immersed–really, totally obsessed with–70s new music composition. i’ve repped robert ashley enough here; what i hadn’t heard until recently was david behrman’s gloriously inert on the other ocean (even more white-label ‘celestial highways’ meditation-tape lubed than ashley, even) and the fairly brain-soldering leapday night, which has the uncanny feel of doing a shit-ton of very hot, very intent moving through warped trumpet lines and organ clusters, but not actually going much of anywhere. there’s always been a sun but leapday night has been a magnifying glass right above my brain.

elsewhere, gordon mumma and non-i am sitting in a room alvin lucier (particularly, the evasive moans of music on a long thin wire). every record on lovely seems like it could destroy my new new york life, still shaking off placenta.

so, a half-week back into the city and i went to see INLAND EMPIRE just like i promised myself i would.

i can’t really understand people saying it’s “not good” or, more specifically, that not only does the heavy symbolism and signage avoid falling into a readable lexicon to what seems like a taunting degree, but that, well, maybe he’s kinda gone too far in terms of the plotless nightmare shtick.

anyway, few movie experiences have moved me as much. moved me to the point that i was nearly in tears on the sidewalk afterward, not because i was saddened by INLAND EMPIRE but because i had stopped conceiving of experiencing life that was not watching INLAND EMPIRE; the world had become a completely disorienting place. and that sorta hits the spot, why i think that it’s a great movie in spite of the goofy use of the beck song and the graduation of plain ol’ mystery–which is parseable–to black coal incomprehensibility: it’s a completely immersive experience. not immersive because a plot drags you along, but because it seems so howlingly open-ended, like you could just keep watching these discrete pieces fall and never quite form a picture, or staring into one of the four faces laura dern makes over three fucking hours (all of which are more vulnerable, terrifying, and deeply magnetic than laura palmer at her worst).

furthermore, when you don’t really seem to have a narrative aim, horror can be heightened and protracted indefinitely, which is kinda what he does. dark hallways, long stretches of sonic dissonance (the IFC center got almost excruciatingly loud at times), but no catharsis in sight. well, one. and there were ebbs. but really, i ended up spending the last hour with my eyes half-shut. it’s a long, unbearable moan of a film, and it’s ultimately one that you just have to sit there with and feel. some might like it and some might not–and the characterization of lynch as a deeply emotion-oriented, instinctive director best experienced on those same terms is kinda a foregone conclusion. but if you’re on the fence about him (or maybe you’ve been on the fence since wild at heart or lost highway), i’d almost say that this is the one. probably isn’t playing anywhere anymore, but if it is, go sit, stop thinking, and discover your body three hours later–unbearably tight, frightened, somehow changed. two hours after leaving the theater, my phone rang and i almost fell out of my chair.

marnie stern is releasing a record of feverish, eerie noise-pop with lots of guitar finger-tapping today named after a famous shovel, which is only funny because it is digging my ears a new grave, right next to a wide, untended plot for max tundra’s mastered by guy at the exchange, the last record that made me want to break my own teeth just to make sure i wasn’t dreaming.

i’m still settling in & will be back to regular spouting soon.

it is everywhere, i am not kidding

i cannot make it out to watch the dog show. i am more sorry about this than you are. instead,

+

the great question: gold diggers of 1933 or gold diggers of 1935? dick powell, smiling, sexless wonder: i lay in thrall.

by the way, truman mcmath was the cavalier king charles spaniel from little rock, arkansas. he did not make the cut.

from the arkansas democrat-gazette:

“if the tv is muted and a dog or cat comes on, even in a commercial, he perks up. but some movies have irritated him.

‘lawrence of arabia drove him nuts,’ she says. ‘he hated the camel and the turbans.’ he was also distressed by the nuns in the whoopi goldberg movie sister act. ‘i think it’s things on people’s heads.’”

few experiences are more human than being at the mercy of weather.

also: please watch this.

destroying truman mcmath: cavalier king charles spaniel pinecrest rock the boat, the most best cavalier king charles spaniel

(look, sorry, i’m in transit, and i couldn’t get to real-time blogging last night. i will try to do it tonight. no promises though.)

says gabrielle, kind enough to have me to her house after months of silence and through curtains of chicago snow just to watch dog show night one: “god, it’s like the formal section of dress barn. nice amulet, lady”–caustic words hurled through bushmills on ice at the ankleless woman promenading flufftoy 2, one of our least favorite flufftoys of the night.

it’s getting late and we are paying a certain kind of attention: this is the dog show.

unlike, say, baseball on tv, the dog show is spoonfed: “this is the dandie dinmont terrier. the dandie was reared in the english hillside where it caught badgers, polecats, weasels, and other rodents. it takes its name from a character from sir walter scott. the dandie is the only dog in the akc named after a fictional character” and not “damn thing’s like a cotton sack with a victorian malady after a lover’s quarrel–someone ho11er @ an abuse counselor!” (incidentally, this year’s is the top-ranked entrant of the show and owned by doctor bill “doctor huxtable” cosby). there’s always an amateur commentator to counterbalance the dog crazies, to tow them in from the edge of breeding rhetoric and lacy poetic musings.

but at the same time, the dog show is a total rejection of science and sport, a parade of inscrutable mysteries. there are no points in the dog show. there are no hoops or balls or goals or finish lines. judges approach the dog. haunches are squeezed, tails fluffed, and teeth checked. they’re looking for an ideal, an ideal not divined so much as engineered through countless dog-fucks in lush pens across the world. this is the dark, circuitous irony of evaluation. we make them like this.

amateur commentator shyly asked, “is there a special challenge to showing a small dog?” to which he was offered a black mirror by suited dog-crazy w/headset 1: “yeah, don’t step on it.” later, suited dog-crazy w/headset 2 said “the eyes and expression are very important in this group because all their heads are the same.” these are the people are in power and they slave to feelings. every year i can barely believe how little sense it makes; every year i try to find some sort of answer that doesn’t cul-de-sac in blank instinct or gut reaction on the part of any LIVING THING staring at another LIVING THING and judging it to be GOOD; every year i try to find solace in the recurrence of the worst sequined frocks or the bonkers helmet-hair trims, the ass-balls of fur on poodles of all sizes; each year there’s nothing.

because when it comes down to it, the dog show is about staring at a dog and loving it and saying that is the best dog. (i won’t even get into what it means to buckle with awe to dogs, the queer mimesis of pet loving, or the ugly blankets of vanity that cover breeding, owning, and luvving on a delicately created species, but.) i wonder if casual readers of music writing feel about me the way i feel about the dog judge; if i look like a fat man with round glasses in a tuxedo, squinting at gait and testicle size, rooting through the fog for a metric. who wants to own up to gnosticism? not the housewives in labrador sweatshirts up in the cheap seats at MSG. they have some mothafucking shouting to do.

i am swollen with anxiety. go back and listen to brian eno’s here come the warm jets and make your bed. “on some faraway beach” works because anything phil spector did below 100 bpm was essentially about death, but death-as-subject usually needs some garnish to be marketable to teenagers, so lo, the paris sisters sang “i love how you love me” and not, i guess, “given the chance, i would die like a baby on some faraway beach.” i cannot find the interview where either jack nitzsche or eno hisself (a lifelong doo-wop fan, unsurprisingly) mused about how the best 50s and 60s ballads were basically about death: the swoon, faintness, buckle, and the splendor.

but eno was also a surging fruit who liked to sing in dumb voices (my softest spot–the coasters, animal collective, tom ze, brian eno). moreover, he had a sense of humor–a violent, paranoid one–tough to track because violent, paranoid humor usually gets dressed in dumber adjectives (cf ‘bizarre,’ ‘irreverent’).

i woke up the other morning with the climax from “the paw-paw negro blowtorch” lodged like a mantra–”send for an ambulance or accident investigator / he’s breathing like a furnace.” it was the first time that the song’s sexual claustrophobia really trapped me–the fear of being outperformed by a mutant who is constantly and irrepressibly setting vaginas on fire on fucking accident. a peerless suitor.

and there is, of course, the confession of “driving me backwards,” where he winks, his voice sounding throttled by something much larger than himself: “that’s just like me, i gotta be craaaaayyyyyzy,” a tack in the seat of people pigeonholing aforementioned ‘irreverence,’ a knife in the side.

i will wriggle out before gushing a long-winded lament about how new music so desperately lacks a good sense of humor, ESPECIALLY ‘vanguard’ music (i told caleb the other day that i would happily read wire if they were even occasionally funny), how simon’s year-end piece is right on about a new fetish for the apocalypse but neglects the possibility that we could acknowledge the horror, the horror with some sort of angle of the mouth. nobody who compared tv on the radio to eno acquiesced to that crucial gap. (i first saw tvotr four years ago in greensboro, north carolina. michael, unusually rowdy for a public place, moaned “PEARL JAM” and “COLLECTIVE SOUL” between songs.) anyway, i am on the edge of colorful crumples lately, so little of this will make any traceable sense.

new visual mixtape: old actresses becoming hysterical in the back of cars. because i have not tried lexapro.

at 6 am on monday i will move. tune in on monday and tuesday for REAL-TIME PBW COVERAGE OF THE 2007 WESTMINSTER KENNEL CLUB DOG SHOW–“LIBERALLY PEPPERED WITH SEX.”

from now on this blog will be exclusively about the riddling pathos of dick powell

Why would I even bother writing about Fall Out Boy? Funny week, last week. Well, Fall Out Boy are kinda ghastly, really; behold! spaghetti in the bathtub; or, like a kid with poop, I surrender, disgusted and bug-eyed curious. And never have I so felt the strange vice of adulthood—me, 24—until I caught myself at home frying eggs with Fall Out Boy, a band I’d’ve never given a passing ear to when I was target-audience age but now find “compelling” in my own aimless, chinstroking, misguided way.

No. Bad. But I did it. So.

Fall Out Boy don’t want a scene, which is its own kind of beef, and nothing makes a scene like beef. Nice try, Fall Out Boy. The organic growth of social movements is many, many steps ahead of you. Fall Out Boy know their audience: self-important teenagers who warp their hysterical and absolutely normal libidos into a new, guarded forms of bad poetry. They Like Long One-Liners with Capital Letters because they always seem important on paper and sound dramatic if you say them and then part your lips just a little bit while turning your head to the side quite slowly.

Hair-metal bands and more muscly new wavers—Anthony wonders when FOB will stop foofing around and record “Jessie’s Girl”—were both big fun. While FOB are more or less their musical equivalent—well-funded landfills for monster hooks and monster choruses and slightly less than monstrous but nevertheless able to connote some acceptable level of rebellion guitar crunch—the content and context is different. Dom says that Infinity on High is their New York hip-hop record in all but sound. I see what he means. FOB like to boast. But they also like to employ contrived glosses on misery as a guiding force for their cocks. This new, pitiable angst is kind of boring, actually. In some bad light, Kurt’s suicide is a tattoo to FOB’s magic-marker moustache.

Anyway, Dom posits emo as the only real organic rock scene going right now, which I find terrifying and weird, but somehow plausible. I’m reminded of reading Our Band Could Be Your Life and feeling like I missed the days where it was neato and progressive to align yourself with a scene—like Calvin Johnson and Ian MacKaye—whereas now, bands are running from it like cats from water. Sad, really, but this is what I meant about the Klaxons: all the scene-forming feels out of control, more of a journalist’s opportunity than a movement, more an arms race (in the words of FOB). I give up, I promise.

Welcome to PBW’s hot night, Fall Out Boy; welcome to black tea and Arkansan snowfall and television documentaries about seal pups and the teats they suckle—welcome to all of Terry Riley’s tape loops playing in a room without a television. Here is a day at home with the paper, here’s a peeler for those potatoes, here’s an unironic conversation, and here is a game of Scrabble where, no, neither “cunt” nor its more point-winning variant “kunt” are allowed.

If I could possibly ignore all the things in the world that hurt my heart instead of feeling doomed to notice and devour them, I think I would be a complete person.

subquestions not addressed in text but pondered in hard darkness: do i miss being a teenager? if yes, is what i miss really just sleeping with teenage girls? do i still lust after teenage girls? do i identify with fall out boy? why does insecurity so often cause people to hurt one another? should i distance myself from my mom?