It's Been Too Long...

...but that doesn't mean I have forgotten about you. Or music. Or going to shows too much. June was overwhelming, and I could have dropped so much money up at those ticket counters, but I didn't. Just a few bucks here and there for the bands I was truly convinced I needed to be in the presence of. Boy Least Likely To had synchronized handclaps, which was a plus so definite it almost overwhelms everything else, but they are all-around good showmen, so of course there were other things, like their cover of George Michael's Faith.

And of course The Mountain Goats. But did you really need me to tell you about them again? I didn't quite think so.


It takes a strong man, baby, but I'm showing you the door.

And I Won At Tetris

Who are these kids anyway, I'm wondering. The one with the feather dangling in his left ear, so hypnotic I can't help but watch it sway and flutter over his near pefectly arched shoulder. Yeah, yeah, delicate wristbones and the like, yeah, he crosses his legs so neatly and his hair falls just so and jet black. When the rest of the band gets up on stage, he is only in the background with his little Casio. The lead singer is long haired like a woman but has the narrow waist of an anorexic teenage girl, and he's got the most expansive yet slim pair of close fit bellbottomed pants I think I've ever seen on a man in real life. The drummer has an Eastern European mustache and goes shirtless. The bassist has a gold sparkly top fitted under stripes with a classic collar, and tan canvas pants that hug everything.

Even with my penchant for guys who dress like they're still twelve year olds, and like it's still 1970 something, this is almost too cool for school. And when you look around of course it is. The pinball machines are ratcheting and dinging madly in the background, and every bleached and feathered girl has a dark brown bottle with her bright nails wrapped around it. There's alcohol and arcade games, and a band that plays about five songs but they're all super long and wailing with every drop of pent up energy the band can coax.

Hipster central, I got it, Ground Kontrol, yeah. I mean, these kids could rock but oh, the scene was almost too much for me. I have a nagging feeling my metal loving friends wouldn't be to fond of this place, even with the raging band. But then who's too cool for whom? The non-contrived scruffy sorts who wouldn't dig this polished up crowd of sleeksters? Or the shiny kids who put on their own show in this jam packed room? The crowd is still just bobbing their collective heads, except for a few interspersed more tattery sorts who full on flail shaggy haircuts in classic metal worshop. That's not really fair, is it? When the band is giving you so much? How ironic is all this, anyway?

Jinx Removing In The New Year

We have this thing, him and I, and it's only in wee mornings crack of dawn or just after midnight, some message on a cell phone or just the voice and a note saying there's something close we know.

Blew twelve and kissed the thirteenth finger.
"Rabbit, rabbit," on the first.
I hold my breath.
Did tricks I hoped you wouldn't notice.
A superstitious hyperrealist.
I'll make you mine.

And it happens only in important months, on the first of December where our birthdays are, and then in little minutes of January when we know there's some great and terrible year stepping big black boots our way, and what's it gonna be? But at least we have our shared nostalgia, lettered in mix tapes and extravagance , me in a parking lot with rain all around and the static in the tape, listening to Jawbreaker for the first time in a car now sure dead and gone.

Lovesong

Moving boxes shelving books is my idea of good honest work, and we all go out there and bum around the shipping floor getting shit done, and everyone brings cds so that they're piled up top of the changer, and whoever's putting on music in the morning just grabs six or so and throws them on. Hodge podge eclectic, of course, and I've learn to let the music run like water off my ducky strong back, and sure, maybe there's accordian, or sure, maybe there's the Go-Gos, nothing much to me. So I'm in my little den of order, rolling carts of reciepts and books around me, scanning scanning blip blip blip, and somebody's put the Cure on, and I just about die, because it's really not fair. You can't just put the Cure on. That's not how it works. At least not an entire cd of Robert Smith & Co. It's too much for mortal souls to handle. Throw one song on a mix, or something, but hearing him and them so much in one day, like you'll never know when they're gonna come on the overhead, but then they do and he's saying "just like heaven" and you're back there touching heel to ankle and dancing back and forth on some rubber mat put down so nobody strains their back, because you can't not dance to the Cure, even if you barely dance, and then he's singing " however far away" and who could help it, really, all I can think of is every stupid shared moment of skin on skin, some bright morning with squares of lit sun, some dark night lamp or nothing glowing"whatever words I say" and sure, sure, I believe you again "you make me feel like I am young again". You know everyone else is doing it, too, see here how we're all sort of silent when the Cure comes on, like everyone's about to cry but maybe, just maybe, we can get through this song so scan scan scan and check an ISBN, but then so thwarted because the cd changer skips and stammers to another song, but, oh, "pictures of you" and kill me now, right now "looking so long for the words to be true".

She's Chosen To Believe/ In The Hymns Her Mother Sings

In case you were going to, you close ones, you dear things to me, or even just vague whispering things that come somewhere in contact with this, please don't forget about Iron & Wine. Listen to "Fever Dream", or "Teeth In The Grass", or any song really, let it just play in the background while you bathe, or when you're drinking something warm, or just sitting staring out some fogged over window. You don't even have to listen, I suppose, if you don't want to, if your ears are broken for just today. Just go to Passing Afternoon and read the lyrics, see the way they are on the page, and that should be enough, even if the font is simple serif and the spaces are simpler still. I think his words make me remember that I do have a soul, as much as I forget that space is occupied, and how much work such things take, and how precious pearly they are. I could swear, if it made you hear me more.

Papa died smiling
Wide as the ring of a bell
Gone all star white
Small as a wish in a well

Seven Songs For Seven Singers (Memetastic)

"list seven songs you are into right now. no matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're any good, they must be songs you are presently enjoying. post these instructions in your journal, along with your seven songs. then four other people to see what they're listening to."

1. Damien Jurado- Just his voice. And the sound of his older stuff. I forgot about the year when I got into him so much, wheedling burnt copies of his cds out of people, passing off my fake i.d. at the Blackbird to see him smoke a cigarette, sing a few songs. I love that man.

2. Killers-Smile Like You Mean It: Finally, finally, after hints dropped so wide they could have paved the whole damn street, my roommates and neighbor bought me the Killers cd, thus (hopefully) putting an end to my propensity to gaze dramatically off into space and bob my head whenever their songs come on overhead at the bar. Imagined quote from the band: "Hey, guys, what do you think we should use in between out chorus hook and lyric hook?""I dunno. Howabout a bridge hook?"

3.Pixies-UMass: Because Frank Black loves to hear himself say stuff, and so do I, so even if I can't figure out what it all means I still get to stutter out the lines and feel like a badass ("like cap-i-talistssss, like comm-u-nissstss, like lot-sa thingsss, you heard about.").

4.Mountain Goats-There Will Be No Divorce: Is very haunting, sort of, Portland, sort of, and it talks about rain and radios and the hair stands up on the back of his neck and he delivers all the words in a soft way.

5. Gwen Stefani-Luxurious: The song I thought I'd never like has now wormed its way into my nonsensibilites through the gentle pull she gives to the lyrics at the line "E-gyptian cotton." A week ago, this would have been the Harajuku Girls song, chosen simply for its chance to allow me to annoy Kenneth by saying "Super Kawaii (that means 'super cool' in Japanese)" in a mock Japanese schoolgirl intonation.

6.Mr.Bungle-Sweet Charity: So damn catchy, Mr.Patton. So very damn catchy, and then there's little harmonies, and, like, seagulls and shit at the beginning. And just thinking of the title gets all the instrumentals stuck in my head, the bonging bass line and the the string section.

7.Vashti Bunyan-Lookaftering: Is an album, not a song, but I think about it all the time, and I don't even own it. I want it, though, pretty badly, and I want to sit and have some Kenyan tea and listen quietly with a blanket.

Standing At The Top Of The World

It has been so long since I've been to a show that I've enjoyed for something other than the sheer experience of it. I saw the gypsies, and they were loud and colorful and brightly took up the field of my vision. I saw the jazz show, and it was that well-worn experience of a room of people bobbing their heads real cool like. Both good, both notable events that I am glad I attended. But I felt no need to stay for either. I could have been for thrity minutes and still left happy. Once I saw the glint of instruments and the way the lights reflected off of manic bassists and madly grinning drummers, I was good.

What's nice, though, what entirely made my evening and then some, was getting to see an artist I love but had forgotten about, and thus an artist whose every song brought waves of fond recognition and an intense desire for an encore. A couple years back, getting into Damien Jurado sort of made the soundtrack to my summer. A couple of the boys I was close to were deeply passionate about the man, so there was no shortage of discs pushed into my waiting hands and from there into the cd burner, and from there into the car stereo. I really liked those songs. And I knew a lot of them, putting them on mix cds and then empathizing furiously with a few others. His voice has this real pleasant timbre, where it's easy to sing along to, and it's earnest and sometimes he raises it just a little and so it's like he really means it, you know? His songs are so well put together I could just die in little author-worshipping puddles all over the living room floor. His record label (Secretly Canadian) does describe him as Raymond Carveresque (oh he of the sparsely gorgeous middle class short stories), but for the life of me I am almost certain that I had already figured that out all by myself and was describing him as such before I even read their blurb. Take with grains of salt.

So I had seen him a couple of times (at least) already. Once before I was twenty-one, sneaking into the Blackbird with Patches and standing only slightly thralled, slightly worried but exhilarated to be in the smoky venue (you should all know by now, most venues are smoky for me). We had talked to Damien beforehand, Patches asking him to play a song, me shaking his hand. How it pretty much went in those days, me tag tag tagging behind my friend's more perversely gregarious nature. The other time I saw him was at Berbatis, the same venue as last night, and he was just him on a chair with a guitar. Patches has a tendency to turn on his most favored artists after he sees them live and they let him down by being just constructs of flesh and bone and mortality, but I live by breathing in and out the presence of the bands I love. I remember that the show was quiet, and the songs were close to what they are on the album, if not considerably slower. I remember being pretty glad when he added a little beat by rapping his knuckles against the body of the guitar. In other words, not what one would paint as impressive. Just a good little show with a guy I like to listen to.

Which is why last night was only like the best thing ever, a salve of goodness that reminded me about all the things I really do love about my favorite bands and about filing in to dark places, getting my hand stamped, and standing in one place for hours at a time . Damien was mustering a full band behind him, the guys from Delorean backing on drums and stuff, which meant these songs from "I Break Chairs" totally got played, and as much as I was loving the sweetness of the milder songs and we were all lines crosslegged on the floor in front, I had to get up for those songs, because the snares and beats were constant and good, and Mr.Jurado was doing what a good live artist does, and letting himself go above and beyond the constraints of the record they produced, stepping back from the mike and strumming furiously, or yelping out his lyrics louder and faster. I eat that sort of thing up, man. I was so happy. Every song just about was one I knew and liked deeply but had totally skipped my mind, and so every time they'd start in on an intro it was like a present wrapped in goodness, to me, from them.

And then I coerced the Voodoo guy out of a doughnut, even tho' they were closed and baking for the next day. Good man! Because the smell of sweet fried dough was wafting through the crowd, and we kept tapping each other and making little signs that were like, hey, we thought they were closed, but don't you smell the doughnuts too?