You Can Burn That, Too

There’s this bird out in the park that keeps screaming all night long.

My daily regimen’s been stretching in odd ways; it – and I, too, I’m afraid – we’re starting to look like a Silly Putty’d comic page.  And the funny’s all backwards, the color’s all muted.  What I’m trying to tell myself, now, is that forcing myself to sit x number of hours in front of the computer isn’t producing y amount of work.  Probably an inverse ratio.

There’s a lot of stuff at work towards the this-is-not-workingness (and there are probably similar, whiny entries every few months on here), but the important thing is that I’m not feeling it.  I don’t need to write, anymore.  Which is a problem.  Because that’s all I really needed to do before.  The effort to convince myself I need to be writing... It’s a lot of running on the wheel, and the little pellet that drops isn’t nutritious or tasty or filling.  For me, or for you.  Blogging was supposed to be a way to keep the engine from stalling when work-work was idling; but I’m not going to keep pumping gas in if the thing’s never going anywhere.

Might be time to get out and walk for a bit.

So to speak.

I’m just thinking this out loud, at 2:57am, because I’ve been doing too much thinking in my head at too many 2:57ams.  There’s this huge backlog of stuff I should be writing, should have written.  While I’m mostly thinking (andthinkingandthinking) about the other, more-important, not-online material, there’s some of that, too.  I’ve kept a running list of  abandoned entries.

• 12/04/05 - I Scream, You Scream (Satanicide/Peelander-Z, Mercury Lounge)


• 2/12 - Cutting Out Things She’ll Wear Someday (Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Southpaw)


• 2/25 - A More Glamorous Underwear Drawer (Karen Black, Deitch Projects/Ariel Pink, Knitting Factory)


• 2/26 – Happy At You, Not Happy For You (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bowery Ballroom)


• 3/20 - I Can’t HEAR You (No Fun Fest, The Hook)


• 3/23 - You’re Not Using a Designated Driver (José González, Joe’s Pub)


• 3/24 – Where Ya Gonna Put It? (Aussie Assault, Mercury Lounge/Crash Mansion)


• 3/25 - Trying Too Hard (Mystery Jets/Noisettes/Land of Talk, Mercury Lounge; Love is All, Knitting Factory)


• 3/26 - “A Feature or a Hazard” (Arctic Monkeys, Webster Hall/The Gossip, Knitting Factory)


• 3/30 - Be Mine (Th’ Faith Healers, Mercury Lounge/My Bloody Valentine, Brooklyn Academy of Music)


• 4/11 - “Enjoy?  O.K.!” (Gito Gito Hustler, CBGB/Magneta Lane, Irv...trot, Mercury Oven)


• 4/13 – Pet Me Milk Me Kill Me Eat Me (Gogol Bordello, Warsaw)


• 4/19 – Simple Candy Canes (Cloud Cult, M. Shangai String Band, Pianos/TV on the Radio, Bowery Ballroom)


• 4/21 – Wait and See (Blues Traveler, Rothko)


• 5/2 – (O’Death, Seth Faergolzia(Dufus), Sin-é/Home, Tonic)


• 5/3 - We’ve Got a City to Love (Chris Thile, Living Room)


• 5/10 – Enunciation (Mono/Pelican, Avalon)


• 5/14 – “This One’s a Sing-Along” (Mogwai, Webster Hall/Danielson, Northsix)


• 5/25 – Makes Me Stronger (O’Death, Tonic/Sunset Rubdown, Frog Eyes, Mercury Lounge)


• 6/11 – I Don’t Show These at Just Any Concert (Mr. Brownstone/Hair Supply/Peelander-Z, Bowery Ballroom)


• 6/14 – (Prototypes, Magnetic Field)


• 6/17 – Fuck in the Fire and We’ll Spread All the Ashes Around (Nine Inch Nails/Bauhaus, PNC Bank Arts Center)


• 6/18 – Contextual Obligations?  It’s in This Space That Celebrities Dance? (Laurie Anderson, Chirgilchin, Prospect Park/Saturday Looks Good to Me, Mobius Band, East River Music Project)


• Alexandra and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Gangbang (per #1HS)


• Guy Fawkes Yourself (‘V for Vendetta’)


• Price Fixins:  How Much Will I Pay to See Your Band?


• Post-Post Secret


• Shakira Shakira Shakira

I’ve meant to go back to finish them all.  Really, I have.

For Satanicide there was a phrase I really liked (“stupid fret tricks”).  And I was going to offer that, should they care to, someone could write a thesis interpreting Peelander-Z’s act as an exploration of the immigrant experience in America – and was going to insist they really shouldn’t.

The Yeltsin boys, they were such nice kids I felt like I owed them a write-up; but they were very much a work-in-progress, and when I dug up their main inspiration – The Mommyheads – I was, well, whelmed.

Karen Black – man, that entry was going to rock.  I had great ledes for both Black (“A half-naked prepubescent girl has gotten stuck in the giant shark dildo”) and Pink (“Ariel Pink, in front of a sold-out Saturday night crowd, has been doing nothing but sing ‘Night time is great!’ repeatedly for five minutes.  He decides he’s finished; the audience applauds, appreciatively.  ‘SUCKERS!’ screams someone in the balcony.  ‘My thoughts exactly,’ says Pink.”), but no follow-through.

And so on.  I meant to finish all those; I mean to, no longer.  Promising myself to keep track of all those details was maddening.  The note-taking got silly.  So I’m officially letting them go.  If they come back, well, I’ll deal with them, then.

I’m allowed to break when my shit’s wrapped too tight.

Local H - Summer of Boats (solo, acoustic) (mp3)

This is a new Local H song (via; new album will probably come in early ’07).  Scott Lucas, bless his soul, writes almost exclusively about failure.  While he’s still good at getting good and angry about it, from time to time, the man’s older, wiser, now.  The performance is from a live radio show; it – and the song – have some small problems.  There’s some phrasing that’s off, the singing is – well, he doesn’t have the most exact voice in the world; the chorus (“Life was perfectly sad, it’s perfectly sadder, now”) is cloying.

It had me choking up at its first line.  The rest is sort of perfectly imperfect.  It’s beautiful in a sort of song-next-door kind of way.

I have no idea what Lucas’ “summer of boats” was – I really hope it’s not some sort of variant on ye olde ships passing in the night – but the song is failure and forgiveness, the sound of starting over.  Loss is more, loss is growth.  It’s good to lose, to know how to lose, to get lost.

I’m going to get lost, for a little while.  Hours?  Days?  Weeks?  Dunno.  It’s not as if I’ve ever been consistent, here.  But I need to not do this until I need to do this, again.

As I’ve been keeping irrationally late hours, the dog’s been getting his end-of-day walks through some odd corners of the night.  Whether it’s midnight, or three, or daybreak (and yes, I know Prospect Park is on yellow alert, right now, what with the increased summer traffic and the recent JV-muggings; a cop was going door-to-door in my building, the other day, asking if anyone knew anything about an assault that happened right on our corner (at 9pm on a Saturday night!)) there’s always this one bird in this one tree, screaming its head off. 

Well, not screaming, birds don’t scream.  But the singing is so loud and so raw it sounds like the thing is braying itself hoarse.  It’s not making the noise because we’re out there – I hear it long before we get to the tree, and long after we’ve passed it.  It’s not engaged in some call-and-response with any other bird; it never stops to listen, and I’ve heard no other birds answer.  It’s singing for itself, I think, I hope, and doesn’t care whether or not anyone hears it, or even if it’s singing particularly well.

See you soon.

tags: local h  

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