Hitched.

I am not a person who really likes audiobooks. You can’t hold them, they don’t weigh you down. You can’t glance back a few words, you can’t observe the careful and considered placement of commas and semicolons. You don’t have to struggle to turn the page of a crowded train that jostles it’s riders back and forth like liquid in a glass. In short: Audiobooks remove the wanting, I guess, and the frusturation and the dirty mechanichs of writing that make reading one of the baser pleasures of life.

I realize this puts me in a severe minority, to say something like “I enjoy the pre-modern version of this because it is more difficult.” is a vaguely lunatic statement. But that’s that, it is what it is. So, moving on- While I feel like novels are a particularly bad application of the audiobook, I’ve recently become really fond of authors reading essays. Hence, The David Foster Wallace audio project. Wallace is a spectacular reader of his own work, it’s roping linguistic coils looking less messy and more zen when he reads them out loud. It’s become a huge distraction to the point I left my headphones at home today for fear I’d squander another hour or two letting him tell me a story.

As far as life advice, I stumbled upon this yesterday and it has followed me since, begging me to put it into practice without any real advice in that regard:

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I have been trying to update more, but it’s become clear that I essentially built this template for someone else.

Anyway, favorite thing of the week- I went through about 40 iterations of this video. I liked this one the best. Sick shred master action around 1:40.

Even though you will like this I am tempted to file it under “Niche Spectacular”. Jangly brit-pop ala The Wedding Present? CHECK. Girls playing guitar? CHECK. Dueling, shout-y vocalists? CHECK. Spazzy Superchunk-y melodies? CHECK. The sum effect is a little bit like. If you melted a pound of cheddar and tried to serve for dinner, you’d be all “Oh, gross” on the outside, but you know that shit’s going to be so good.

Black Wax from Best Before Records on Vimeo.

For a length of time when I was kid my father was a Party Clown. Long from being truth at this point, it’s degenerated into a kind of trivia, falling into that genre of factoid that’s meant to both spur a conversation of it’s doldrums and explore something deep and true about ourselves withour actually having to admit to something deep and true about ourselves. I told this , uh, factoid to someone yesterday and realized that I had absolutely no information about it’s chronology. I do not know when he took up clowning or why, what spurs a person into this profession and what keeps them at it. That’s not meant as a transgressive comment, I’m assuming that being a party clown is as much an art and a compulsion as being a weeknight Jazz guitarist or the sort of person who sells oil paintings at craft fairs. It just means that it has been for so long such an amusement that I know almost nothing about it.

And most people don’t poke at it. Aside from the sloppy cliche of, you know, “Oh, I may look funny on the outside, but inside I am a tortured artist and/or a whirlpool of pain”, the most frequent prodding was to somehow get him to don his make-up for the first time in 15 years and come entertain us. I never relayed this desire. I can be bad at anticipating outcomes, but I am reasonably sure that getting my father to dig up the corpse of his old hobby so that he could entertain a bunch of stoned college kids was unlikely to end in a net-positive.

Anyway, it was in this spirit that I felt a weird and awkward kinship with the Great Zuchinni, a man who makes over a $100,000.000 a year wearing a diaper on his head. The Washington Post, whose archives are a fantastic resource for weird, touching non-fiction, has an article about him. There’s a Q&A follow-up that’s a must. The article is more than 3 years old, so I was wondering what happened to the guy after the article was published. His website still exists, but that’s all I can find.

The article, which spins in equal turns the absurd and the tragic, is worth the 40 minutes or so of your Monday morning that it will require.

I could, and will, do a round-up of the sudden glut of 8-bit hip-hop floating around the more recessed corners of the internet, but in the meantime:

http://www.shotthen.com/2009/02/04/8-bit-hip-hop-medley/

Time Magazine, not usually a bastion of thought-provoking, progressive journalism, has published one of the most interesting, uh, “Spirit of the Times” articles in awhile. The Top 10 Ideas That Are Changing the World Today - It’d be easy to jot down a few freebies (Uhhhh green technology uhhhh saving money uhhh organic food), but this list shows some real forethought and research.

For the lazy:

1. Jobs Are the New Assets
2. Recycling the Suburbs
3. The New Calvinism
4. Reinstating The Interstate
5. Amortality
6. Africa: Open for Business
7. The Rent-a-Country
8. Biobanks
9. Survival Stores
10. Ecological Intelligence

Amortality, The New Calvinism and Recycling the Suburbs are my favorites. Although, Recycling the Suburbs has been around for 20 or more years. It’s just the glut of grossly over-large chunks of commercial real estate that’s turned it from a fringe solution into good, common sense.

Allow me to beat a dead horse: I do not play as many video games as I used to. Or, at least, I’m playing them on different devices now. My time with the screen-hogging, explosive, DAY ONE ZOMG, blockbuster is nearly at an end. I just don’t have the time or self-confidence to whittle away my hours being called “faggot” on XBox Live. I do not derive any particular joy from beating a game and then stepping up the difficulty level so that I can take longer to beat it again, but this get angrier in the process. I am not now nor ever have been an achievements whore. My primary gaming devices are a Nintendo DS and an iPod Touch. I am the person currently dismantling the big-budget gaming paradigm.

So when I sat down to squeeze in a few hours of Resident Evil 5, I had forgotten entirely about the fact that you can’t move and shoot. Or stab. And you know what? Okay, fine. It’s history/habit/realistic, pick one or 3, whatever. But it’s worst sin is that it reminds me that I am holding a controller. That I’m piloting a man.

If the hobby is, in its deep heart of hearts, about escapism, then the stop-’n-shoot of Resident Evil 5, with its big, huge action set pieces, is essentially unforgivable. More than being annoying, it just makes me feel like I’m playing with a toy.

Carry on.

Grizzly Bear:



Grizzly Bear:



Grizzly Bear:

I’m not a big fan of linking to leaked records. It feels vaguely uncouth. But the new Bonnie Prince Billy record leaked and I wrote this up quickly for a SUPER-SECRET record sharing group I’m a part of and then I figured I’d done all that work that I may as well pass it along here. You will enjoy this, I think:

http://rapidshare.com/files/203110458/BPB-B.rar via http://bolachasgratis.baywords.com/

Bonnie Prince Billy is a weird guy. When he’s not being America’s best unsung musician, he’s starring in music video parodies with Zack Galafinakis or showing up on Wonder Showzen. It is essentially impossible to reconcile the gothic Americana end of Will Oldham with the insatiable prankster end. Via Wikipedia:

“Will Oldham is known for his “do-it-yourself punk aesthetic and blunt honesty,”[1] and his music has been likened to Americana, folk, roots, country, punk, and indie rock, although Oldham is dissatisfied with these labels: “I don’t think it’s roots music, though it’s definitely influenced by Western popular music.”[2] He has been called an “Appalachian post-punk solipsist”[1] and is notable for his unique voice, which has been described as “a fragile sort-of warble frittering around haunted melodies in the American folk or country tradition.”[1]“

All of these labels drive me insane because if he had never flirted with “indie rock” labels, he’d just be called an American folk artist. And a fucking great one at that. Beware is his newest album, and so sayeth The New Yorker: “He intends to promote the album with singles, a photo shoot, and a handful of interviews, if only to prove that record promotion doesn’t really work, at least not for him.”

Last year’s “Lay Down in the Light” just sort of came out. It wasn’t really announced, there was no tour. “Beware” feels like a more ambitious “Lay Down…” in tone. It isn’t nearly as deep-deep dark as his earlier works, nor as chilly and sparse as “The Letting Go”. There are a lot of people playing a lot of instruments on “Beware”, occasionally chiming in for weird group sing-alongs. It certainly betrays a good deal of fore thought and careful arrangement. For what it’s worth, this is not his best album, but it’s certainly his most accomplished and most listenable effort in years. If you have even a slight interest in country or American music, you’d be well advised to clicky-clicky the linky-link.

Some interesting Bonnie Prince Billy materials:
The New Yorker article on him: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/05/090105fa_fact_sanneh?currentPage=all

The video for his stunning cover of the Everly Brother’s “Ebb Tide”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpUIsmv3AGI

On Conan ‘o Brien with Matt Sweeny, his brother Paul and ANDREW WK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St7uDJG0vSc

My favorite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS-Ip3aRay0 , being interviewed by two clueless television personalities.

We liked Coraline for a bevy of reasons, not the least of which was teeny-tiny mixed-media sculpture that deserves it’s own NICHE SPECTACULAR post. But nothing made me as happy as the completely unexpected appearance of a 30 second John Linell song. I once joked that They Might Be Giants’ greatest hits was all the TMBG that I ever needed, but even a small piece of music like this is a tremendous reminder of what completely incredibly songwriters they are.