Hey, did you catch this week's NOVA?  It was offered as a complement to Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia (which I've yet to read) and featured a quartet of the usual Sacksian sad/amazing oddities:  A blind/autistic savant in his twenties who functions on a four-year-old level but can reproduce and elaborate on music after hearing just a snippet; a young man who channels the uncontrollable, random tics of extreme Tourette's into precise bursts of percussion; a woman from a musical family who suffers from amusia -- she hears it all as noise; an unmusical surgeon who, after having been struck by lightning, became obsessed with the piano (and now composes pieces that unfortunately sound saccharine).

The most interesting part comes when Sacks participates in someone else's PhD study on how parts of the brain react to music.  Studying the blood flow with OMGRI scans, the same areas are excited whether processing or creating music.  They get Sacks to listen to and recall similarly metered selections by Bach (which he likes) and Beethoven (which he doesn't).  The latter left almost the whole noggin grey, the former caused great glowing pockets of red, engaging not only the separate parts needed to comprehend pitch, rhythm, logic, and the like, but Sacks' emotional core.  And I thought to myself, well, there is where Annie Clark's characters hide and there is where they breathe.

St. Vincent - The Strangers (mp3)(buy)

"What'll I share, what'll I keep, from all these strangers who sleep where I sleep?"

It's not a bad time for Clark to contemplate how much of herself she wants to reveal.  (It's something more people should think more often about, probably.)  Two albums into a solo career after time spent wearing the robes and enthusiasm of the Polyphonic Spree, she calls herself St. Vincent (myspace) and calls her latest Actor.  Her sad sketchbook cast has sucked themselves into shells of fear and guilt, she builds them inner landscapes of pleasant, layered sounds, frees them with short instrumental bursts.

There's no ambivalence about duality, characters consider their masks necessary; the one song that mentions acting outright does so with disdain only because a cheat is bad at it.  But they've escaped happiness by hiding from wholeness.  They're so committed to compartmentalization that the parts of themselves that lay outside their chosen box have become withered appendages, threats to their definitions threaten their reality.  The proudly promiscuous deny their hearts, wives beg free from their lust, those who can deal with actions but not consequences run run run themselves right into the ground.  They watch birds fighting their reflections while worrying about what the neighbors would think and nuns and such.

Clark's not a theatrical singer, which is both sort of a shame and completely appropriate.  She doesn't have to affect a numbed monotone, she can give them her full, lovely voice without ever seeming too free or distressed.  Clark relies on the depth and contrast of her arrangements to do the dramatic work, and she's pretty fantastic at those.  The repressed bits can be lush and hollow and dark and pleasant, all at the same time, a feat; the breakouts -- Clark's real expressive voice comes from her guitar and her pedals -- can seem relatively apocalyptic.  There's plenty to involve your ear.  (Better deconstructionists can play spot the influences; I started projecting.  I found myself assuming that she liked The Fragile as much as I did, I moved into that record for a year or so, so it makes extra sense for me, here; and because it's been too long since I've listened to any American chamber music I'll just say "Copland;" and I get demented pleasure thinking that little responses in "Laughing with a Mouth Full of Blood" are a nod to "She's Leaving Home.")

Actor winds up limping toward its end.  Though it's a richer effort overall there's nothing as melodically engaging as the best stuff from her first record, Marry Me.  And goddamn some vocal splat would be nice, if just to liven things up.  Maybe it's (again) appropriate to keep the voices stifled all the way through -- the most positive thing Clark can come up with as a cure is reinvention, another round of masks -- but it's not anything more than thematically satisfying.

You know, I was wrong back there:  The best part of that NOVA episode comes at its close.  When you're introduced to all these people hopelessly trapped in their heads, by their heads, the musical expression they've found just seems like an intricate loneliness.  The brilliant pianist seems oblivious to everything but the stream of directions his brain is generating; the drummer has to tap on everything, stops as soon as his action has given him clarity.  Neither seems like they'd ever be able to do much beyond self-amusement.  But no, as the hour wraps the pianist is on stage, in a jazz club, with a band and an audience.  The drummer is sitting with a circle of others who share his affliction, is coaching them out of their individual tics into a group beat.

Shiina Ringo - Marunouchi Sadistic (EXPO Version)(mp3)(buy)

When Marry Me first came out someone suggested, "Maybe this is what Shiina Ringo would sound like if you could understand the words."  Well, yes!  And no!

They share a love of eclecticism and electronic distortion and intricacy, and who knows?  It's still so early for Annie, she's still figuring out who St. Vincent is, it's unfair to put her up against the ten billion things Shiina Ringo has become.  At this point Clark's a candle to Shiina's white hot dwarf star.

The biggest problem Shiina has -- the retarded lack of critical attention in the Western world is our problem, not hers -- is that she created one of the decade's hands-down greatest records in 2003.  Karuki Zamen kuri no Hana, recorded after a divorce and the birth of her son, is one of those pieces of art and pop so absolute that it seems to contain the entire universe.  It's huge, it's intimate, it's a seed, it's a thousand lives.  It gets you talking stupid, which is why I can never seem to get past piling praise on it.  Every time I've put it on over the last two years -- and I have put it on a lot, multiple times a day some days, it makes listening to anything else seem silly -- I just go Wow.  Wow wow wow.

But once you create a record so definitive and complete... do you even need to keep making music?  You can scribble more words and come up with different tunes, and that's nice, but you've covered it.  Even for someone like Shiina, so restless and adept at change, you have to be conscious of redundancy.

So she stopped being Shiina Ringo, mega genius pop star, and joined a band.

The band, Tokyo Jihen, has been successful; they've released three albums so far, and I suspect they've outsold KZK.  Shiina still wrote the bulk of the material on the first two records, but the dynamic was different.  Something -- democracy, maybe -- made them settle into a sound.  There's some good stuff on those records, but they're also depressing for everything that's missing from them.

And suddenly there's a new Shiina Ringo record.  I don't know why (I'm avoiding any sort of press -- as if there's much of that in English, anyway).  Maybe preparing the older material for her 10th anniversary show rekindled the urge.  Maybe just because no one expected it.  Maybe because she hoped expectations would have passed by now.

They haven't!

Superficial Gossip was underwhelming at first.  It's discouraging that it starts off dabbling the same post-KZK sound Jihen dabbles in, upbeat, jazz-inflected, big band happy.  But the record's now a compulsive listen.  The first single is really dull out of context; on the record it's a bracing pause after a crack-up.  The mood is ultimately sort of sad and affirmative.  The peaks are growing higher and the valleys are shallower; there's too much to explore to make a judgment now.

It helped to get an actual CD copy -- which I just noticed is available at a very reasonable price from a third-party seller at Amazon (and is also at CD Japan) -- and it was interesting that the postdude dropped it on the doorstep the same week as Marienbad.  Not that SG's about memory or manipulation or trauma or time -- I'm really not going to know what it's about until a translation appears, and probably not even then.  But that exactitude, that glamour.  With the CD, listening through headphones, there are just so many dropped-in details, so many subtle ways the sound gets tweaked.  It helps to know that this was something she cared about.

But I'm not here to talk about Superficial Gossip!  And that track above is not meant to be representative in any way!(*)  That's a bonus track -- if it weren't it would mess up her precious symmetry.  Also, it's sort of a goof.  And sort of not!  It's in English (sort of) and it's hot and it's ridiculous and I love it.

The song, "Marunouchi Sadistic," originally appeared on her first record.  And there it was a mission statement from an upstart girl who loved her guitar (though I don't think it has any guitar in it) and meant to make some noise with it.  She reapproaches her songs constantly, but I'd like to think that returning to this one, now, means something.  Even when she does so in a Color Me Badd/Lonely Island sort of way.  Ten years later, tacked on to a record that feels like it might be a little about leaving something behind, a little about loneliness, at the end of a CD whose booklet is filled with single-entendre images of a pop star having eXistenZish intercourse with a flesh colored instrument, Shiina Ringo -- wiser, sadder, sexier, sillier -- is again a woman who loves her guitar (though, again, there's no modern guitar on the track) and means to make some noise.

(*)  So tempting to pair St. Vincent's "Actor Out of Work" with Shiina's "Mayakashi Yasaotoko (Fake Fellow)."  The latter has lines like "I'm disillusioned by your ways/Your prancing on a paper stage/The curtain call has come/Final scene, you change your act/And don a grown-up stoic mask/Too late, blow, we're done."

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I'll get to Micachu on the other side of the holiday.  Have a great one!  Blow shit up!

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New Lorrie Moore story.

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"It's Pepsi," she said. "It's for the rats. They can't pee it out. When they drink it, they explode."

*

"When my friends and I left a bar on Allen street to investigate why everyone on the street was taking pictures of the sky and saw the clouds, we reached for our own cameras before realizing, wait, nevermind, it'll be all over the internet in an hour. And it was. I love that! We can just go through life, enjoying it, without feeling the burden of having to document every moment of collective awe. We enjoyed the clouds, and watching the people watching the clouds, and then went inside and finished our beers with total faith that we didn't have to do anything -- everyone else was on this... What strange times we live in, with what strange clouds!"

It's too easy to smack the indie kids around, their meaningless exaggerated praise, the way their supersaturated online presence can make the world feel like one giant Adult Contemporary radio station.  But when it's good, it's good; as we reach the year's midpoint three of the stickier records so far take a lovely, fractured approach to pop.

Apologies for the well-travelled tracks, and I'm sure I won't have anything illuminating to add to the discussion, but redundancy is where it's at now, right?  I'll spread them out over three entries, try to pair each with something complementary.

Dirty Projectors - Stillness is the Move (mp3)(buy)

For years David Longstreth's Dirty Projectors (myspace) project looked like it was doomed to go nowhere better than guerilla avant-garde showcases (not that there's anything wrong with those).  I could only take them in small doses.  Longstreth's holistic pointillism demanded a maximum amount of concentration from his performers and his listeners to bind his work together.  You could be impressed by the level of skill and the extent to which he tried to communicate his perspective, but it was very difficult to remain both convinced and involved.  It was like being at a bad séance, someone relaxes their grip, whoops, no ghost.

Things clicked better on Rise Above, a 2007 reimagining - gimmick, experiment, excuse, whatever - of Black Flag's Damaged that was less a covers project than the sound of light catching dust blown off an old untouched album jacket.  But the source's blunt assertions often proved too potent when delivered with non-cathartic intricacy.  Maybe like being at a great séance:  Aaaah!  Ghost!  Everyone loses grip, turns away.

So here's the new one, Bitte Orca (Longstreth seems to specialize in unfortunate acronyms), and it's something I can not only stand all the way through, it's something I can keep on repeat.  It's something I can sing along to!  It's something I can hold hands with.

(It has nudged Rokia Traoré's record from the top of my shortlist, though it will soon have to deal with a new Shiina Ringo that sounds infinitely better on its 30th listen than its first.)

A couple important things changed, and a couple important things did not.

This record is a relative lark.  Whatever the lyrics may be, it feels - especially after the last album - optimistic.  When the first words on the record are "Look around at everyone, everyone looks alive and waiting" it's completely possible to ignore that they're part of a song called "Cannibal Resource."  Optimism works for this band's sound, Longstreth's falsetto can sound pubescent and naïve, his bandmates' voices ply sugar that ranges from powdered confectioner's to syrup.  When singers settle into asking questions, it's easy to think they are asking them hopefully.  "Stillness is the Move" can contemplate identity and existence without ever feeling lost.

Bitte Orca is just a collection of songs.  It isn't forced to suffer the stress of an overriding concept or the contrived encouragement of a false experiment, and that provides an airy relief against the seriousness of its construction.  And when you have a strong enough point of view - even if it's a holistic one, especially if it's a holistic one - a collection of otherwise unrelated songs are united through identity.

These songs are now held together by more than willpower and definition.  It seems insulting to say that, oooh, there are melodies and riffs on this record, but the ear needs something to hang on while Longstreth twists musical phrases and creates polyrhythms by staggering entrances and dictating interruptions.  A more expressive love of R&B -not new, you can hear it on "Not Having Found" from The Getty Address, in the bridge from "Spray Paint (The Walls)" and the backing vocals on the title track from Rise Above - both gives your hips something to do and allows Longstreth to better utilize his female bandmates' vocals:  Along with esoteric harmonies and drawing-room airs they're allowed to dip into standard doo-wop derived back-up roles or can be encouraged, as Angel Deradoorian does in this track, to go Mariah Carey all over the place.  (It might have helped Longstreth that his band's line-up has solidified, somewhat; he knows what tools are in his box.  He shares control, too; "Stillness" was co-written by co-Projector Amber Coffman.)

Longstreth's own vocals have gotten stronger; his all-inclusive approach to sound hunting is as resolute and better utilized.  Whatever consolations he's had to make to achieve listenability, he has not had to sacrifice interestingness.  There's a winning balance achieved when, say, the frantic kora-like lines in "No Intention" are laid over laid-back populist (electronic?) handclaps.  And while people love to point out his West African guitar influences, there's a nice chunk of Jimmy Page on this record.  Steve Howe, too, I think, how uncool and great is that?  Sometimes it's a distraction - it's killing me that I've heard "Fluorescent Half-Dome's" melody somewhere else and can't figure out where - but mostly Longstreth's constantly shifting set of ideas and influences are wholly shaped by his concern, whirl around in something that sounds like nothing but the Dirty Projectors.

And because it has so many facets, it can work in different ways at different times.  I found out this past weekend that it sounds great blaring out of speakers out of doors on a sunny day.

Volcano! - Slow Jam(mp3)(buy)

I don't think Longstreth is without a sense of humor, though in the past I've pictured him as a sad sketchbook Orpheus, dolefully dragging his lyre behind him.  (I've only seen his band live once, when they opened for Jarvis Cocker a couple years back, and they were all business.)  One thing missing from his carefully arranged musicspheres is the room to laugh.

Enter (again) Volcano! (myspace). More obvious, less exact, absolutely unafraid to go over the top.  Longstreth will let his bass and/or drums drop out of songs for stretches; the bass line in "Stillness" sounds more like a coffee percolator.  The Projectors coo their crazy, crazy dream.  Volcano!'s a trio, far more reliant on their rhythm section to carve out space and create fits.  When they ply R&B to their post-punk-derived math-rock it's five minutes of the sound of someone stumbling over his own feet.  Embarrassing, convincing.  "Slow Jam" is the World's Worst Seduction, all elbows and course corrections.  "I just want to freak you, didn't mean to freak you out!"  "Got me hiding the cookies!"  Who writes a pick-up line and includes O. Henry and Bob Dole?!  Who wouldn't go home with this guy?

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Emmy and her The Great have rerecorded a quartet of Internet-weary nuggets for a digital/vinyl "Old Songs" EP that will henceforth be included with copies of First Love.  Included are something I've never <strike>stolen</strike> heard of before called "A Bowl Full of Blood" and personal fave "Edward is Dedward" (currently streaming at her/their myspace).  Details on all that here.

Still haven't heard about a proper stateside release for First Love, though at some point Amazon-US started selling the mp3s for cheap and import copies of the CD for not-cheap.  Neither of those have the xtra tracks, though.

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I receive a disheartening amount of PR e-mail every day, read pretty much none of it.  I understand.  New Bands are the We Will Clean Your Gutters! for the 21st century, it makes me hate everything about music, but I understand.

However.  Over the past few days there've been multiple attempts to get my attention by shoving Michael Jackson's name in the subject header.  "X Band Reacts to MJ's Death!"  "X Label's Bands Share Michael Jackson Memories!"  This isn't enterprising, it is disgusting, and my default reaction to all such communicae has gone from "Mark as Read" to "Report Spam."

*

‘"1901" sounded so small and peculiar in the context of FM radio, it was as if the song were turning its back to me, turning its back on the listener. Or that it was embarrassed to be there, like Phoenix were sharing a bill with Kenny Chesney, propped up in front of an unreceptive audience. Initially I felt bad, because they can't possibly lift the intellectual siege FM radio is under and are doomed to flop in that space. That hopeless resolve, of a band undefeated but unaccepted, was somehow audible as the song wound down.'

*

This series continues to be quality stuff.

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I have both a new laptop and a pledge to use it less than the old one.  Wish me luck.

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"Transformers: ROTF is so long you'll need to wear adult diapers to it. But the movie's pure celebration of the primal urge, and unfiltered living, will make you rejoice in your adult diapers. You'll relieve yourself in your seat with a savage joy, your barbaric yawp blending in with the crowd's screams of excitement... You have a movie that tries to reassure men that they can actually be masters of their reality - but then turns around and says that actually, reality is not real. There's no such thing as the "real world," and the only thing that's left for men to dominate is a nebulous domain of blurred shapes, which occasionally blurt nonsensical swear-words and slang from ethnic groups that have never existed. If you're drowning in an Olympic swimming pool full of hot chewing gum fondue, do you still care if Megan Fox likes you?"

*

Michael Bay's keyboard.

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"To quote Bordwell on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, "ROTF teases us to try to fit its parts into a coherent whole, yet at the same time it provides several indications that such a constructed unity is impossible.... At first it seems possible to piece events together in a chronological fashion.  Only gradually do we realize that the task is hopeless....Transformers 2 breaks with conventional expectations by suggesting, perhaps for the first time in film history, that a narrative film could base itself entirely on a gamelike structure of causal, spatial, and temporal ambiguity, refusing to specify explicit meanings and teasing the viewer with hints about elusive implicit meanings. Critics have too often tried to find a thematic key to the film while ignoring this formal dynamic. Much of ROTF's fascination for the spectator rests in the process of discovering its ambiguity."

(Photo via Ken Foto's Flickr (Full Set))

"Brooklyn, your city amuses us.  We've decided to spare your town."

Ron House is a dangerous man.  Sure, yeah, the head of brushed-back silver hair and the softened torso might under worse circumstances suggest "middle management" or "owner of a hardware store" - "We're just an oldies act," he said at some point during a set that seemed as present and necessary as the CDs he chucked into audience members' faces - but there's a fire in his eye that shows a love of fury and hilarity, a recklessness in his movements that shows a playful conception of where the line between the two lay.  He can be sweet and self-effacing but he means all of it, all of it.

The editor of Agit Reader, a Columbus, Ohio native who'd put together a line-up of bands from his home town to celebrate his website's first anniversary, introduced the set as Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments' "first New York show in... 75 years."  It was nothing but an old band running through old songs, but it didn't feel like that, it exceeded all my expectations.  It's not something I'm going to cross off a checklist and leave behind.

Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments - Half Off (mp3)(buy)

"Do any of the bloggers in the audience know how many songs we've played?"  House came out in jeans (not trendy jeans, not tight jeans, just jeans) and a stretched-out t-shirt that revealed a farmer's tan and he paced and he flopped on his back and he howled and laughed and howled.  He was incredulous when the crowd cheered for "Fire in the Swimming Girl," perhaps afraid that we'd cheer anything, but it's such a lovely and honest piece of poetry that it deserves some noise.  "My Mysterious Death" was the opener, House locking his elbows and joining his wrists and faux-dramatically repeating the song's five-times clap.  "Down on High Street" was the extended closer, with House passing the mic to the crowd and laughing as he let them howl a bit, with guitarist Rob Petric - impressive but unshowy all set long - letting loose windmills.  In between there was "Is She Shy," "Whisper in You Mouth," "Cheater's Heaven," "Rump Government," "Spasm of Morality," and maybe "Outside My Scene."  The band's young bassist stepped forward to dedicate "El Cajon" to the band's old bassist.  The only thing sadder than being an oldies act, House told him, was "being a young person in an oldies act."

They didn't play "Half Off."  They didn't play so much!  Come back!

TJSA wasn't the headliner.  Times New Viking (myspace) was, and House affectionately said that they deserved it.  "We're old and they're young and we're so fucking jealous..."  When TJSA got dragged out for an unexpected (by them) encore, they waited for the younger band to join them.  "Bottle Island" featured a trio of drummers who rotated around the set; one of those was TNV's Beth Murphy, an unlit cigarette hanging on her lower lip.  Some drunk (I'm assuming he was related to the magazine) came over and tried to light it, seemed to singe her hair instead.

House left the stage asking us to stick around for the younger band.  He called them "the best band to ever come out of Ohio" after he'd just spent a whole hour proving otherwise.

*

"The hardest job in Columbus, Ohio is following Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments," TNV drummer/singer Adam Elliott said at the top of his set.  It was unavoidably anti-climactic and I didn't stick around for much.  I have seen them before and they are fine, and seem to be serious about what they're doing; you could do just as well, yourself, but they are fine.

They went on way too late, after midnight, because the early openers were given way too much time.  El Jesus de Magico (myspace) were stunning at the start, a slow psych noise jam saturated with creepiness.  But a frantic second number squandered the atmosphere, a broken guitar string killed the momentum.  The Mad Scene (myspace), the only non-Ohioans in the line-up, probably deserve some sort of respect because of their pedigree, but having weathered a performance I find it impossible to give them any.  Painfully dull and at times borderline incompetent, all specifics about their performance were pushed out of my head by thoughts of suicide.  Each new song became God Hates Me, every lyric was God Hates Me, every chord was God Hates Me-diminished-7th.

*

Howard Tate - Get it While You Can (mp3)(buy)

Howard Tate (myspace), legendary soul singer, ups and downs, gone and back.  The new material might not have the punch, but his long, sad story's only dug the old stuff deeper.

Tate's an odd looking man, a little round head on a big round body, a hairline that starts on the far side of his ears and rises into a half-crown.  He's not the exciting, charismatic showman some of your classic soul men have been.  He is humble, possibly because he's been humbled, he is apologetic because he is kind.  He pulls out a new song, says without emphasis, "See what you think of this."

He's recorded three full albums since an enthusiast's manhunt found Tate preaching at his own church in New Jersey.  (He calls himself an apostle, holier folks can debate semantics.)  That those records aren't very listenable has nothing to do with the man's voice.  He's always relied on his producers for his material, and even when reunited with Jerry Ragovoy, the man who penned Tate's strongest stuff, the songs and their production haven't felt necessary.  His latest, 2008's Blue Day, has a single interesting track; "If I Was White" is Syl Johnson's watered-down retake on his classic "Is it Because I'm Black?"  It's an interesting choice because Tate's not an angry singer.  (There are some gasps near me when he slips Bush and Cheney's names into his cover of Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927.")  But "White" comes dressed in the tired comfort of a used, clean sound, gets reduced to a shrug.

That's not the new song he plays here, for us.  He sings a different Day track, "Improvising," and when he does so he dons specs and consults a music stand for the lyrics.  He does so without noting the irony.

It's unfortunate that no one's found the skill to capture Tate on disc, now, because he's definitely got something to say and the ability to say it.  He takes amazing, unexpected chances with his falsetto.  He's not just grateful, but helplessly sincere.  And the classic songs he recorded for Verve in the sixties - songs that duck cruelly in and out of print, "Stop," "I Learned it All the Hard Way," "Baby, I Love You," songs later made more famous by fans like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin - aren't trotted out for pure nostalgia's sake, they're relived.

His best song, one of the best songs ever, "Get it While You Can," is so much better here than it was on record.  Because it's a song that gets bigger the more you have to look back on, it's an old man's song.  With no pandering and zero bombast, Howard Tate had me in simple tears.

Also at the BBQ:  Jacob Blickenstaff Photography, Sonic Parthenon

*

For those of you who don't know, the "Big Apple BBQ" is a temporary performance art piece wherein a dozen or so giant truck things with restaurant names on them encircle Madison Square Park and pump out food smells.  A corps of volunteer actors fills the benches and tables around the park all day pretending to eat food prepared off-site.  Visitors to the exhibit are invited to wait in snaky lines in front of the truck things, lines that never ever move, until they decide they are tired of doing that.  Then, they go to the long running performance art piece known as "Shake Shack," where the line is slightly shorter and moves slightly faster.

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It's excellent practice for New York's Foodie population.  If this recession gets good, you'll see all those same people lining up for free soup, using $5,000 cameras to snap pics of stale bread and government cheese.

Government cheese!  How long has it been since you've heard a good government cheese joke?  Man, I miss those.

*

Stunned by Michael Jackson's death.  Not only was his pop inescapable for a good chunk of my adolescence, his pop cultural presence was.  From syndicated reruns of the animated 5ive to The Simpsons to that bit after The Simpsons where he went crotch-grabbing tire iron crazy to the 3-D House of Epcot to the torture scene in Three Kings to a horde of jumpsuited Filipino inmates.  He crossed boundaries - allegedly, of course, some he should not have - in ways that seems either unlikely to be repeated or unlikely to be noticed, now, yet one of my fondest memories of his career was the liberating moment Nirvana knocked him from the top of the charts.

It was a big mess of a life, and who knows what all was going on upstairs, but I do hope he found some peace in there somewhere.

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I hope Justin Timberlake did not wake up this morning with a renewed sense of purpose.

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I had The Poster.  I don't think I'd ever watched a full episode of Charlie's Angels, but for some reason I had to have that poster.  She was so pretty, almost as pretty as Daphne on Scooby-Doo.  I was six years old and in first grade and she was tacked up above my bed.  When my best friend from school slept over once he climbed my headboard and kissed her, with tongue.

I just thought she was pretty.

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"Know About the Amazing Connections Between Art and Insurance"

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Fe Fi Fo Fums - I Just Wanna Boom Boom Girl (mp3)(buy)

One minute thirty-eight seconds, including false start!

Pretty much the best band name/song title/running time combination one could ever hope for.  The Fe Fi Fo Fums (myspace) were a recentish (2006-8?) Seattle wha?-fi garage-punk band that wrote punchy songs like "Don't Bite Me Baby, I Got the Boom Boom in My Blood" and "My Baby Got the Boom Boom" and recorded on Boom Boom Castle Records.  Member/label-runner Jesse Lortz went on to form The Dutchess and the Duke, a band I've never listened to because I confuse their name with The Bird and the Bee and who wants to listen to that shit?

(The FFFFs also have a song called "Fuck New Wave."  Who records a song called "Fuck New Wave" in 2006?  That's like calling a track "You Know That Your Future is Still Ahead of You" and imploring people to vote for Thomas Dewey in the lyrics.)

If you're tempted to dismiss, from the title and from how everything's been sort of fuckety-fuckety around here for the past week, "Boom Boom" as simple shorthand for sex, you're wrong.  It's more than banging bodies or pounding pulses or a blunt call for traumatic stimulation.  Boom Boom is that ethereal something-something that makes all existence worth its bother, the unspoken kinetic connection to all beings and forces in the universe that makes you simultaneously aware of your biology and able to transcend its limitations.  Boom Boom has given rise to great cultures and laid waste to others, it has added voice to great works of art and rendered false fictions mute.  Moses brought the Boom Boom down, Byron whipped it out between thunderclaps, the Little Rock Nine took it to school.  Boom Boom is in you, it is you, it's bigger than you, it's less than 140 characters but it's too long to Twitter.

Bob Log III - Bump Pow!  Bump Bump Bump Pow!  Bump Pow!  Bump Bump Bump Baby!  Bump Pow!  Bump Bump Bump Pow!  Bump Pow!  Bump Bump Bump (mp3)(buy)

I guess so!

Anyway, I have not seen the new Transformers film.  But I was woken this morning by a gang of (no doubt) well-meaning, hard-working men in the employ of the landscaping industry who were using what little available light existed at that hour to assemble such machinery underneath my windowsill that, when activated, created a motorized din of steel-on-pavement which resembled nothing so much as the scream of ten thousand innocents who had, after having lost their tongues at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, been loaded on to transport vehicles and driven into a metal/meatgrinder.  The excitement of the fuel and overheated parts didn't create an odor so much as the feeling that a pair of garden hoses had been thrust up each of my nostrils with a slight vacuum and an overfilled gas tank and a mad man with a matchbook at the other end of the tubes.  I am in wonder at the human body and the vast multitude of ways it has to eject unpleasantness.  I did not know my hair could scream!  Or that my urethra could cry!

Photos from the 27th Annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade:

• Page 1 (Favorites)
• Page 2 (Kids, etc.)
• Page 3 (NSFWish, etc.)
• 2008 Mermaid Parade pics
• 2007 Mermaid Parade pics
• 2006 Mermaid Parade pics
• 2005 Mermaid Parade pics

Others' 2009 pics on Flickr and via the Coney Island Message Board

Urrrrgh.  Who's the joker that said I should give this crap (myspace) a chance?  Stop it, stop it, stop consuming limp ninth-rate tripe and playing with bored, broken toys.

If you have that much time to kill do some community service.  Read to old people.  Assist in the upkeep of your local public spaces.  Milk an orphan.  Answer my calls to the suicide hotline.  Something, anything, just back away from the bad music.

Electrik Red - We Fuck You (mp3)(buy)

Song of the Year?

Don't know the names of the four women in Electrik Red (myspace), don't know if I'll ever have to learn them.  Weird to say about a record that rubs your face in female empowerment, or maybe not; the recording industry's long history of dudes behind the boards and chicks at the mic can lead to entertaining who-did-what post-coital yanks.  Maybe some day some fan will seek to reclaim ground on behalf of Naomi Allen.  (There, I looked one up.)

For now they'd be another anonymous quartet of R&B hoochies - thankfully not one dominated by a Charlie's Angels hair color casting - if their record didn't pop and scorch with such identity.  That comes courtesy The-Dream, producer du moment, who released the not-as-good-as-this Love vs. Money under his own moniker earlier this year; he co-created of Red's songs, most with writing partner Christopher "Tricky" Stewart.

Which means that "We Fuck You" could be a female-voiced song about feelings of male victimization or some such shit or not.  How to Be a Lady: Volume 1 is mostly about sex (Pt. Deux will probably cover place settings and such), and often sex-as-power, but it provides enough asides - like that point in "W.F.Y." where she starts deciding what you can wear, or that throwaway Michael Jackson Whooo! - and dizzying contradictions that it becomes more than something you'll ride once and leave behind.  It grinds foul-mouthed assertions against tender moments.  It throbs all over the universe; starts in the jungle, spends time south of Saturn, winds up (as apparently all things must) next to Lil' Wayne.  ("Blondie's "One Way Or Another," but R&B and in space" doesn't quite cover it, but that's the line that made me buy the album, so thanks.)  "We Fuck You" makes demands on to infinity, it's a military parade, it's a club, it's a lecture.  And it's all the more interesting because it's an assembled package; it hits that spot where people putting things in other peoples' mouths becomes questionable and exciting.

It's a giant strap-on dildo of a record and I love it.

Betty Davis - Anti Love Song (mp3)(buy)

This is all Betty Davis.

If you hear the words "Betty" and "Davis" together and think Jezebel or Kim Carnes, you're wrong, you're wrong.  If you think, "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night," then you're part right.

Bigger than any shadow, Betty Mabry married Miles Davis and wore him the fuck out.  She released a trio of amazing, stupendous, marvelous, exciting, edge-of-galaxy, edge-of-orgasm funk records in the early 70s and then went into seclusion.  If you don't love her, you don't know her.  Soul Sides' Oliver Wang, who wrote the liner notes for the recent deluxe reissue of her first two records (already back out of print, mp3s (1, 2) are available) and who's doing the same for an upcoming pressing of her "lost" fourth album recommended this article and that article.  You should probably just do whatever you can to get the music.  It will throw you down and beat you with a turquoise chain.

"Anti Love Song" - which doesn't need to be anything more than a bassline and Davis' nail-scratch vocals, the rest is distraction - goes from great to Good God as it tears away its self-concern and gets generous.  When it comes to losing control, she's less afraid of losing herself than devouring someone else.  Hot Holy Yowza.

*

Four on the floor.  Um. (via)

*

The Leighton Meester sex tape is empirically, epistemologically real, or something like that.

(photo via christheobscure's Flickr)

I no longer want to fuck Emily Haines.

Metric - Gimme Sympathy (mp3)(buy Fantasies)

The Beatles or the Rolling Stones?  Oh Emily come on.  Who are you now?  My dad(*)?  The Grammy Awards?

You and me, Em, we've gotten old and maybe a little wise and oh so dull.

Metric (myspace) released its fourth album Fantasies this past April and it is candy, their most consistently listenable and least engaging work.  The urge to reconcile gooey insides with hard shell leads to sweet licks with no crunch.  Its dimmed bulb wrapper seems a negotiated surrender, the record reeks of practical ambitions.  It's a substantive switch from the resentful retreat that Emily Haines' fiery inner idealist used to make behind asbestos exterior, spitting sighs and cooing condemnations at the unchangeable Other.  Those were the fantasies, how could you not fall in lust?

Metric - Succexy (mp3)(buy Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?)

Ass, ass, ass.  God, do you remember the war?  What good times those were?

Haines (with partner Jimmy Shaw, whom I don't mention as much because I've never wanted to fuck him) illustrates the failings of the information era, piling juicy fractured potshots on shifting sands of broadcast blurt, driving a dominant message through with catchy chorus.  The ability to glutton on choices absolves us of the responsibility of making them.  Looking up at the end of a catwalk from an easy chair with a channel changer, war is just another faddish option, one we can be sold on the same way as we're drawn to any other product.  Short skirts, promises of popularity, assurances of missions accomplished.

One of the things Haines did so well on 2003's barbed wire-laced Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? and 2005's Live it Out was take up half-considered attacks on easy-but-necessary targets - war, sexual politics, capitalism - with abandon, then abandon them.  From "IOU:" "Every ten-year-old enemy soldier thinks falling bombs are shooting stars sometimes but she doesn't make wishes on them.  When she wishes, she wishes for less ways to wish for, more ways to work toward it."  It's vivid enough to pass along concerns, it's maddening that they never cohere, and when she shrugs the whole thing off, it's incredibly sexy.  It also complements their simply sectioned music, which isn't so much loud-soft-loud as cold-hot-cold.

Metric - Hand$hake$ (mp3)(buy Live it Out)

Little girl has something to say about the big big world.  By playing fickle and naïve, she summons a casual boldness that can get at truths measured and mature arguments cannot.  "Hand$hake$" is one of my favorite Metric songs, and I don't even think anything in the first half sticks.  Maybe the sirens.  It gets going when it stops and thuds out its incomplete argument.  "Buy a car to drive to work.  Drive to work to pay for this car."  I know you can, duh, drive your car other places too.  But it's an easy illustration of how a cycle of consumption can suck life into one long tail-chase.

(Another thing Haines does so well is drag down exclamatory stuff - "bop-a-da-das," "la la la las," "yeah yeah yeahs" - with fear and/or sadness and/or sarcasm.  Again, sexy!)

The band went on break after Live it Out; its unreleased first album, Grow Up and Blow Away, came without touring support in 2007.  Haines released a solo record that seemed designed for intimacy (her backing band was called The Soft Skeleton).  Some of it was intimate - "Winning" is a thing of beauty, simple and honest and generous - some of it still addressed societal concerns (the scale making the politics of domestic life, over-reliance on mediation, etc. more personal).  When I saw her perform at Joe's Pub against a backdrop of recut Guy Maddin clips she was less chatty than she gets with her big band, and though the songs were sad and sometimes angry she seemed content.

*

"Some of us just have to be exactly who we are."

Eight of the first nine songs Metric played at Terminal 5 came from Fantasies, and the set started with a promising fake out.  "Twilight Galaxy," one of the record's more contained numbers, was given a Theremin-noodling intro from Shaw and a lengthy coda filled with hot bursts and cold pauses.  Haines' vocals were dramatically distorted, but impressively present given the cavernous venue.  As she echoed, "Keep doing it wrong, keep singing along," it seemed like the band had found a way to graft some tension on to its hollow new material.

That didn't last long.  The effort was there, Haines bounced around in a wifebeater and a pair of black jeans with a pair of surgical cuts at its knee.  She posed and sweated and smiled a lot.  The band sounded professional (though Haines had trouble getting near the notes on "Sick Muse"), looked like they enjoyed what they were doing.  Probably more than they should have.  The very deliberate beats and patient hooks were so straightforward they never took on a second dimension.

The few old songs they treated us to brought depth of attitude.  "Empty" was vicious.  Haines still does the same hands-on-hips headshake, but however rehearsed her tirades may be, repeatedly screaming, "The world doesn't owe you shit!" at the audience is brave stuff, these days.  She followed with a tirade on how given "a whole world of ideas," some people just got "on the highway" or craved "a little life off to the side with your friends."  She spat the word "friends" out with such contempt I wanted to crawl up and kiss her right there.

She either underlined or undermined "Dead Disco" by following its final lines - "I know you tried to change things" - with the words, "Sad but true, sad but true."

And so, "Gimme Sympathy," which cites some dead rock and roll (even the song's central argument is outdated, people just hit "Download All" and put their shit on shuffle) while ignoring its own advice ("stay away from the hooks, all the chances we took," she sings as the song veers sonically toward "Mr. Brightside").  "Sympathy's" genesis, Haines told us, was the subway ride the band took together from Brooklyn to Madison Square Garden in 2006 when they opened for The Rolling Stones.  It's not the first time Haines has lyrically dropped the Stones - "Paint it Black" appeared in "Combat Baby"...  but this whole song's an alarmingly useless, purely circumstantial reference.  Unless you consider the backstory's destination.

The new record closes with a track called "Stadium Love," and Haines introduced it last night as "a national anthem" for the dual-citizenship band, one born from a post-apocalyptic dream she had about cheetahs and cheeseburgers and shit.  Whatever.  It reads like a mission statement, like the band wants big spaces and mucho adoration (Haines would ask for a show of lighters and cell phones during last night's encore).  It sounds just like you'd think any song called "Stadium Love" would - oversized, mechanical.  It's the aural equivalent of a movie that Steven Spielberg produced but didn't direct.  It's *batteries not included or Transformers or some shit like that.  Fantasies' songs are skin and frame, they don't have the muscle or curves or soul.  There's nothing to want to fuck, nevermind anything with which to fall in love.

(*) It is amusing that Metric and Art Brut both stumble over the same references, and how they warp them to their particular needs.  Respective takes on Bobby Fuller:  "I fought the war and the war won!"/"I fought the floor and the floor won."

Also there:  BrooklynVegan, Dry Paint Signs, fend magazine, Get Glucky, Little to Contribute, Love Schack, Misty Boyce, Papermag, What Did We Do Before Chucks?

And hey, the Bowery Presents people have their own blog now.

And and hey:  It looks like the band is on a new Craig Ferguson tonight.  Wonder when they taped that one?

*

Now that Haines has dead space where her venom sack used to be, who's gonna hawk some tuneful spitballs at The Man?  Why not Ollie Stone and her Oohlas (myspace)?

The Oohlas - Lemmings Anthem (mp3)(buy)

The Angelino outfit dropped full-length Best Stop Pop in 2006 to not enough acclaim.  Earlier this year they snuck out their Chinchilla EP; the BPMs are up, Stone - who shared vocals with bassist Mark Eklund on Pop - is fully in front, their 90s Alternative Nation sound (think: Belly) is fuller and angsted out.  All four songs are winners, which makes the thing feel unfairly short.  New album soon please?

You could argue that the timing's wrong for the whole Let's Mock People Who Actually Have Jobs thing, and Ollie's really railing against irresponsibility and lock-step thoughtlessness.  But there are fewer people who have jobs than there have been for decades!  Their numbers are down!  Attack!  Attack!

*

Moon (trailer) is a solid little science fiction film, resists being overwhelmed by effects or bombast.  Starts off echoing Silent Running and 2001, finds its own niche.  Fine use of emoticons!  It might run out of ideas a little soon, and might not summon up the sympathy it needs to finish, but worth at least a rent.

This was among the coming attractions and looks awesome:

*

"Including a shot of John Turturro in a G-string."  Too much meets the eye!   Too much meets the eye!

*

No one other than Joe Mantegna should provide the voice for the titular character.

*

What #iranelection has taught us about Twitter:  People who are actually experiencing something important can use the technology to communicate it, people who are not experiencing anything but the technology can use the technology to congratulate themselves for having the technology.  Or for watching Phish.  #interestingamericanfail

Though I can't help thinking that "Twittering Iranians" has to be a smaller niche group than Animal Collective Bros.

*

This WSJ story about the Sufjan Stevens listening party is basically this Village Voice story about the Sufjan Stevens listening party, only four months late.

*

"Crowd-sourcing killed punk rock."

*

If Celebrities Moved to Oklahoma (via)

*

"Gene Simmons begins to weep silently while rubbing his crotch."

*

OMG Matthew Fluxblog raped Tiny Masters of Today with his pen!

*

"I can't help taking brief note of an important, startling, and subtly trangressive art installation that is currently on view in the middle of Times Square. It is called What the Hell Are Those Lawn Chairs Doing in the Middle of Times Square, and the artist is a promising neophyte named Mike Bloomberg, aka "His Honor." Bloomberg has already drawn notice for works such as Three Bankrupt Banks on Every Block and Eurotrash Condo Towers Everywhere. If public acclaim continues to mount, he might be able to give up his day job."

Unlike Tower Records, I have no emotional attachment to the Union Sqare Virgin Megastore.  I didn't work at Tower when HMV and Virgin siphoned away their prestige and their consumer base, though it did bother me to see how it affected my old place of minimum-wage slavery.  Brand loyalty.

I stopped by to dance on Virgin's grave last week when everything was 50% off; unfortunately, 50% off their sticker was still more than most internet pricing.  Today everything was 80% off and out of the few remaining racks I pulled out...

Micachu and the Shapes - Jewellry

Alena Diane - To Be Still

Extra Golden - Thank You Very Quickly

Mono in VCF - s/t

A Band of Bees - Octopus

Anathallo - Canopy Glow

Larry Norman - Rebel Poet, Jukebox Balladeer:  The Anthology

Mark Olson & Gary Louris - Ready for the Road

Endless Boogie - Focus Level

Hail Social - Modern Love & Death

Detroit 7 - s/t

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - s/t

Richard Hawley - Lady's Bridge

Toubab Krewe - Live at the Orange Peel

The M's - Real Close Ones

The Odds - Cheerleader

Nikka Costa - Everybody Got Their Something

...for a total of $62.21.  Including tax.

Some of these are discs I'm either familiar with and had planned to (legitimately) get anyway at some point; almost all of them are known quantities.  The only exception  (assuming Detroit7 is the Japanese band, which I'm not sure it is) is The Odds, I just liked the cover.  I kept thinking I should be grabbing more things based on random attractions to artwork and band name curiosity - what the heck is a "The Number 12 Looks Like You" - but (a) I'm always afraid that every band I don't know is going to wind up being emo and (b) more valuable than the money I saved with all these is the time I'm going to spend listening to them.

Because the store's been thoroughly picked over at this point, there's not much in the way of rare finds.  What's left is stuff bought in quantity that hasn't been picked at enough.

Albums I already own that were available for much less than I paid for them:  Butch Walker's Sycamore Meadows, Melinda Doolittle's Coming Back to You, The Preacher's Kids' Wild Emotions, Obits' I Blame You, The For Carnation's The For Carnation, Vulture Whale's Vulture Whale.

Some PR rep keeps e-mailing me to mention the band Iglu and Hartley, so let me say that there seemed to be a ton of Iglu and Hartley CDs available.

After all that I went to see Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments and Ron House chucked a free copy of his solo CD right into my forehead.

(photo by Joel Treadway/cringe.com)

First, you're going to have to agree with me that the following is one of the greatest songs ever written.

Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments - My Mysterious Death (Turn it Up)(mp3)(buy)

Else you can't be my friend no more.

Columbus, Ohio's Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments was a lo-fi punk band in the ‘90s, when "lo-fi punk band" meant you recorded great songs cheap.  Now "lo-fi punk band" means you deliberately obfuscate mediocre crap no one would care about were they actually able to hear it.

Anyway.  TJSA!  On the back of the nasal bark of Ron House (late of Great Plains, "the most amazing band you've never heard") and the quality riffage of guitarist Bob Petric the band built a small catalog of bizarre, insistent gems.  They contrived, they cared:  They would sing hilarious and grotesque fictions, they would sing songs of personal outrage, they would attack everything like everything depended on it.  "My Mysterious Death" is sung by the song itself, you create its life every time you press play.  It's been spanked it, it cries, it doesn't have a chance to do anything but huh-wha? before its mayfly life fades out.  It wants to be heard, turn it up!

I don't want to talk about this band too much because I love them so hard.

Selected lyrics:  "You're the center of attention for the first time since high school detention."  "My name is on the negative guest list, even when I pay I can't get in."  "Let me whisper in your mouth the wrong words, baby, the answer's on your tongue."  They're so good that you're often able to overlook their affinity for puns.  (They have a record called You Lookin' for Treble?  They have lyrics like "listen to my diatribe, I'm dying to try ya."  I mean how low how low how low hello can you go?)

I have been known to keep 1995's Bait and Switch on repeat so long neighbors call the cops.  That smell is me, people, leave me alone, go about your business.  But they were, alas, another band I thought I was doomed to never see.  I first heard them a couple years after their last record, No Old Guy Lo-Fi Cry, was released on Bob Pollard's Rockathon label in 2000.  House released an acclaimed solo album in 2002, and since then, squat.  (Mp3s and mail-ordered CDs are available here.)

BUT!  Apparently the band has been playing some home town shows recently.  A web magazine I've never read of, Agit Reader, has brought the reformed TJSA to Brooklyn as part of its one-year anniversary.  This Saturday they'll be appearing with Columbus, Ohio's Times New Viking - a band that might not share the craft of their forefathers, but with song titles like "Imagine Dead John Lennon" at least shares a caustic sense of humor.  That's at the Bell House, tickets are here.

*

Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments - When the Entertainment Ends (mp3)(buy)

That show's not part of the Northside Festival, currently running amok in North Brooklyn.  Created by The L Magazine, I expect that the festival will be just as involving and packed with quality content as The L Magazine.  Just kidding!  I hope it's good!  Though I won't be going to any of it.  It's chock full of bands I don't have time to pretend I know about right now. Maybe I'll pretend I know about them sometime later.

(There are actually several bands of whom I've said positive things here, Shilpa Ray, Screaming Females, Ponytail, Tamar-kali, Endless Boogie, etc.  O'Death is playing an afternoon show at M-HOW that is unfortunately at the same time as a for-free not-part-of-the-festival-either performance by Howard Tate.  HOWARD MOTHERSWEARWORDING TATE.  I posted a plea for the JellyNYC people to bring him to a Pool Party some time back; I missed him in December at Joe's Pub, will not miss the BBQ.  Like the man says, get it while you can.  Howard Tate!)

Several local bloggers who have showcases - maybe those be just as involving and etc. as blogs just kidding - and you can go to their sites where they'll encourage you to check those out:  Battering Room, Bold as Love, BrooklynVegan (Indie, Metal), Ear Farm, Gothamist, Jinners, Music Slut, Music Snobbery, Pop Tarts Suck Toasted.

*

I did not go to any of The Mummies shows.  I probably should have gone to one of The Mummies shows.  What's lower than lo-fi?  Undead?

*

I missed Fela when it ran off-Broadway with Antibalas and actors and stuff.  I'm sort of allergic to theater.  I'll get another chance to miss it when it comes to Broadway.

*

The latest Craig Ferguson puppets clip was again silenced by YouTube because of the music.  (This time it was Jason Mraz, who might have been offended that Ferguson misspelled his name.)

Anyway, the dude who's been upping these to YouTube has basically said Fuck It and started his own blog.  You can see last night's song-and-dance there - it's charming! (bonus peek: behind the scenes) - and should probably just go there from now on for these.  Of course he's on Blogger, so that'll probably get raised, too.  I've got no patience for the dipshit corporate copyright whack-a-mole.  (They do stream shows at the CBS website but do so three or four days after they've aired when no one cares anymore.)

*

Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments - The Internet is Bad Pot (mp3)(buy)

This dumb blue page had its five-year anniversary last month - first is paper, second is paper, fifth is spunk... just kidding, it's all paper, for irony's sake - and I didn't note it then because it wasn't noteworthy.  More important is that today's the second anniversary of when I started telling people I was going to shut the fucker down.  Lucky for no one I'm the world's longest Slinky Dog of intention and effect.  We'll get there, I promise, salut!

Not to get contemplative and shit - plenty of time for that when we heave the thing off a cliff - but something struck me weird about statistics the other day.

This page (whatever it is) isn't what it once was (whatever that was)(*); there's good and bad about that - Jesus, remember back when I could be funny?  I miss that - but one of the things that made me most happy was the realization that I don't want anyone to read this.  It was less a matter of wising up and realizing that no one should be reading this - and no one should be, some of you have been here more than once, I can only say that I'm very disappointed in you - than realizing what I liked and didn't about other things I've read.

I mean, it's kind that people bother.  There's so many other places to send your eyeballs!  So many webazines and aggregatorers and blogs and tumblr blogs and, my God, the tweets.  Or, if you like well-researched, well-written, thoughtful things from knowledgeable people who have interesting things to say, someplace that isn't one of those things.

At its best this site has been a dirty secret you shouldn't ever tell anyone about shhhhhhh.

So it feels like it's been years since I've done any Look at Me! stuff, and though I've never been good at keeping track of page views and uniques and whatnot (**), the feeling that they're drifting toward zero gives me an immense amount of personal satisfaction.  When I go in and see how many Google Reader subscribers this thing has and the number has slipped I think Job Well Done.  Statistically speaking those things are just likely to go up, what with more people spending more time online.  It takes a great deal of effort to swim against probability like that and I'm the goddamned pink salmon of fucking Internet righteousness.

I'm happier when things are down.

But:  I recently set up a Twitter account.  I am not advertising that fact, I have no intention of ever using it.  I was mostly grabbing the URL so someone else couldn't, I decked it out in pretty pink posies, I stole a profound thought as a placeholder.

And suddenly there were people following me.  A couple were people I know or Internet-know, and that's cool.  Most were bands to whom I'm never going to listen and PR companies with whom I'll never bother.  All existence is now about self-promotion, life is pretty much the sound of someone's dick in your ear, I get that.  It's why I avoid stuff like Twitter and Facebook in the first place.

But then that small number of followers WENT DOWN.  And I found that MOST DEPRESSING.  And I'm struggling to figure out why I find that depressing.

Maybe because they got the joke?

(*)  Though it will always be ugly and blue, God bless.

(**) I do have a fascination with how people wind up here, though.  Whether it's Google searches or links.  When this page wound up on The New Yorker's blogroll, I was confused and flattered.  When it was added to Teen Vogue I was fucking ecstatic.  I mean, Teen Vogue!  It's every girl's goddamned dream.