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High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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![]() Saturday, December 04, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Seems Like Old Times meets Dreamscape! Yeah, been a while, huh? Sorry about that.November was such a crazy month, with Nano and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and the Thanksgiving holiday, and me throwing in the towel on Nano and then picking it back up again repeatedly, that I'm only now getting around to writing anything at all, even though my most sacred oath on Nov. 30 was to jump right back in on the writing thing, even if just this blog thing. Even though my Seasonal Affective Disorder-like thing is back in force, due to the dark and the cold and the flavin!, and even though I feel like a fat and unsightly thing, and even though I would like nothing better than to crawl into bed and stay there until, oh, March or so, things are actually pretty fuckin' rad. I'm forty pages away from the end of Suttree, I'm something like, I dunno, 50% into GTA:SA which means there hopefully is an abundance of surprises and delight in store for me, I very much enjoyed The Incredibles in the theater and The Saddest Music in the World on home video (and am super-duper pleased that it was Edi's suggestion to rent it, since I had dragged her to the first few films in the Guy Maddin thingy at the PFA a few months back), and am absurdly delighted with The Milk-Eyed Mender, Joanna Newsom's album I was inspired to pick up after downloading a few tracks that Stereogum (a site I didn't know about until this week) was kind enough to post to get people interested. I was so eager to buy this album after downloading the tracks on Wednesday, I went to Streetlight on Thursday and, when they didn't have it, finally purchased the damn thing at Open Mind Records on my lunch break from Comix Experience. I played the album at the store to the instant and automatic disdain of not just Hibbs and Bennett (Hibbs: "She sounds like Tiny Tina." Bennett: "Dude, is this chick retarded?") but about everyone else in the store who was willing to express an opinion. (Even the chick who looked like a punk/goth Velma, after asking about the album, said, "Ohhhh. I didn't think this could be played unironically!") Only Joel, this guy who is a distressing number of years younger than me and just dead-on in shared tastes (this is the guy who lent me the copy of Ong-Bak) turned to me and said, "Isn't this album great?" It is great, god damn it, even though this woman sounds like, to use Edi's very apt description, like Bjork crossed with Adam Sandler. But she plays harp like an angel (I've always wanted to say that) and there's something about that goat-bleating voice when applied to super-smartly written lines like: And as for my inflammatory writ? Well, I wrote it and I was not inflamed one bit. Advice from the master dreailed that disaster; He said, "Hand that pen to me, poetaster!" While across the great plains, keening lovely and awful, ululate the lost Great American Novels-- An unlawful lot, left to stutter and freeze, floodlit. (But at least they didn't run, to their undying credit.) Which, I dunno, just knocks me on my ass--Bjork crossed with Adam Sandler singing lyrics that could have been penned by Cormac McCarthy? And then there's Peach, Plum, Pear which, through the magic of multitracking, makes the chorus sound like one of the Melanesian choir chants from The Thin Red Line while the rest of the song's a thwarted/failed love story that reminds me of one of Nancy's poems. (That line seems both painfully panderous and ass-kissy but dammit, it's true.) Interestingly, I've listened to people that other people haven't liked and I totally understood why--I became a fan of both Dylan and Morrisey long after I gave up on trying to even understand why anyone would like them--but I honestly don't get why people wouldn't love this. A lot of comments to the entry on Stereogum were like: "Ahhh, you're giving me ear Cancer!" and "the vocal equivalent of being ass-raped by dolphins" or like that. And while I can understand comparisons to Lisa Simpson or Alfalfa from Our Gang, I literally don't understand why, I dunno, that's a bad thing, you know? I find myself on the opposite end of the spectrum, where horseshit like American Idol drives me nuts, with its endless fixation on technique and presentation and where contestants take a song and skin it. So. Yeah. GTA:SA; Suttree; The Incredibles; The Saddest Music In the World; The Milk-Eyed Mender by Joanna Newsom; and of course Edi, fighting her way downtown in shitty ass traffic today so we can look at The Mechanic's Library because she also thinks getting married near a bunch of books would be cool. A few nights ago, we were at an all-night diner and although she all but tackled me to keep me from the CD jukebox, she either genuinely approved of my selections ("Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now," The Smiths; "Message To You, Rudy," The Specials; "Don't Believe The Hype," Public Enemy) or was kind and loving enough to seem like she did. And while I'm old enough to know there's more to a good relationship than whether or not a person is going to take your hand in a diner and bob their head to music with you, it is in itself a wonderful and beautiful thing with a certain amount of power to it. posted by Jeff Lester | 5:03 PM | |
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