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.”