hmm
01/14/2012 02:54 a.m.
wondering if this will actually show up since my last one didn't...
I am currently Detached
I am listening to hungry ghosts- the man who refused to kill

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aha!
02/03/2009 05:20 a.m.
finally fumbled into my account email and password! welcome back, me:)

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weekly weaknesses
08/24/2007 09:00 p.m.
I need to figure out how to de-stress myself.
The usual guiness and trashy novel didn't seem to help last night; there's just too much folding down on me right now. I don't have much interaction with people from this site anymore so perhaps noone will read this and it will be a note to self. perhaps stress relieving in the writing of it.

Kevin left for New York yesterday morning and it already feels like a week. He found a teaching job there, but it's only a year long leave replacement with no assurance of a teaching job after the year. I don't want to be separated from him for a year, so despite just landing a new job that pays more (not that much more) I'm moving up columbus weekend after i attend a wedding in which i'm part of the bridal party in columbus. We only have the one car which he drove up in, so my mother is taking me in and picking me up for the next 5 weeks, which is rather a nasty throwback to the days when I was not allowed to drive until I was 19 and when i went through the breakdown at college and just sat at home and was chaffeured around for a year getting some semblence of normalcy back. This makes me feel naive, like im shrinking back in my skin unable to bear up to responsibility, not a good feeling when I'm moving away from the only home I've known for 26 years.

My new job is awful and I would go back to my old one if I could, but alas it was a transfer within the same coorporation and they don't let you transfer for 6 months after a transfer. so i'm stuck until i move. They have been so unorganized with my training that I have had to learn by peering over shoulders and begging for help when lost (and I don't consider myself a slow learner, I never really have been).
I can't afford to put in my two weeks early and i need the skills they will teach me for when i move to new york so that i may have an easier time of finding a new job right away there.

I have a bad ear infection, god only knows why it had to arrive now during the most stressful time in my life. Ive been taking a strong antibiotic for 4 days and it has not been relieved at all yet. its only been somewhat bearable with an advil/sudafed concoction every 4 hours. Not only that but I had my first root canal this past week. and they messed it up so they referred me to another office to fix it and put in a temporary filling in the meantime. the filling came out the same day and i cant get in to be seen at the office until sept 10th.

such is the way it goes. Obstacle is everpresent and everchanging, i might as well get used to it.

I am currently Detached
I am listening to sleaterkinney-onebeat

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nobody dreamed you'd save the world
07/08/2007 04:48 a.m.
at times i see you, you silver rider sometimes your voice is not enough

should i muddy my daily life here; should i keep it separate?

im in a nostalgic mood.. i actually signed on to aim for the first time in years; is this a sign of unhappiness? a yearning to return to the past? of course all my 'buddies' have changed names and i dont expect anyone to sign on. hell i even have jason's name on my list still. has it been that long, or was i unable to delete it before?

i think ill be taking a new job soon. not something i really want to do with my life, to be honest. but i dont want to do what im doing now either; i cant wait to go back to school. but i doubt ill like what im doing after that. ive hit a wall here.

this is the part where i express my angst. oh wait, ive definitely covered that.


noone thought youd ever get that far. ooOooohhh


going to chicago soon. going to north carolina soon.

my life goes on. it goes. i go on. and go.



I am currently Detached
I am listening to mix cd; Low and moby mostly

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me+you=one entangled universe
04/10/2007 12:10 a.m.
two objects, two electrons created together are entangled. send one on the other side of the universe. now do something to one and other responds instantly. so either information is traveling infinitely fast or in reality they are Still Connected. They are entangled. And since everything was entangled at the moment of the BIg Bang that means everything is still touching.
space is simply the construct that gives illusion that there are separate objects.

Intention matters. Observing matters. we are touching, you and i, and not through keystrokes or shared glowing screens. [here] *touches your heart*


I am currently Divine
I am listening to chris clark-body riddle

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open windows
03/02/2007 09:20 p.m.
today has been a gorgeous day. Theres just something about having windows open that flushes away sadness or anger. sun streamed into the apartment and the wind cleansed the air. Suddenly Open and Bright. add to that the song thats been on repeat boards of canada-beautiful place out in the country.
sun shining, children laughing music.
s...
namaste all.



(have to go buy my kitty some food)

I am currently Content
I am listening to boards of canada

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hello
02/26/2007 03:27 p.m.
Kevin was dead on in recomending this album to me. If only I was into them in my younger years, I could have scared classmates by singing one of their anthems for a choir exam. Ha! if only!
So far I've been bobbing along to it for a few hours now and its not getting old.
WOOOOO!!!!! figures i discover them as they decide to go on hiatus.
i have a secret desire to be karen o and Corin Tucker that comes out most specifically when driving to work and showering. it saddens me more than most would realize that i just cant spit out the dirtyrumbling gritty rocker sound. my voice grew up in choirs and hallelujahs and i dont think the vocal chords will let me fundamentally change their structures now. alas! alas!

dear god i would spend all my earnings on cds if i could.
i still have to get the new andrew bird and a few others

and supposedly ben gibbard is working with jimmy tamborello(of loverly dntel) on a new postal service album (at last!!) but no specific date has been anounced yet...*a bit of dribble slips out*




now excuse me, i have to stop stuffing my face with pretzels and hummus and go buy the entire sleater-kinney catalogue at my local borders.
read this and you may be there ahead of me to grab them up:

On Sleater-Kinney | ©2005 by Rick Moody
They came from the Pacific Northwest! They were young, and they had things to say. At first, it appeared that the weaponry, the system, the strategy, consisted of a lead singer who had an uncanny urgency to her voice, more so than anyone since Patti Smith, enough to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. That was the first part of the weaponry, this lead singer, and the second part consisted of a remarkable chemistry between the two guitar players, viz. Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker. One guitar seemed on occasion to finish the other's lines, and vice versa, as if they were performing the medieval form called the hocket. Initially, these were the strategies. It was urgent, it was fierce.
They came from the Pacific Northwest! The second album, Call the Doctor, did things that could not be done on the first. Suddenly there were two voices, not just the amazing lead singer. There was the second voice, with its urbane, sexy drawl, fitted exactly around the first in a kind of contrapuntal exercise that was precisely calibrated to what the guitars were already doing. The noise got noisier. Where the songs had orbited around a certain feminist rage on the eponymous first album, the message got deeper as the noise got noisier, especially on "I'm Not Waiting," and "Good Things," and "Taste Test." Sleater-Kinney wasn't waiting to make the transition from promising girls to women, they were taking, and they were allowed.
They came from the Pacific Northwest, but they were beginning to sound like they weren't from a particular region, but maybe from the entire recent history of rock and roll. Dig Me Out, their first unremitting masterpiece, in which the tempos occasionally slowed, and the dynamics were more varied, all the better to allow the lead singer, Corin, to emerge from the howl somewhat, and for Carrie's more vulnerable voice to be more melodious and frontal than before. Also: a not-to-be-underestimated strategic coup. New drummer! Whereas there had never been a problem with the prior drummer, Lora McFarlane, she did seem to be chasing after the songs sometimes, instead of leading them. Not so with the amazing new drummer Janet Weiss, whose virtuosity and ability to find room for fills anywhere is as admirable and satisfying as any drummer in the punk tradition, etc. Dig Me Out was friendlier, more intimate, but it wasn't any less passionate. They may have come from the Pacific Northwest, but they weren't going to be ghetto-ized there, in the hippie-friendly blue states.
The Hot Rock and All Hands on the Bad One, the albums that followed in 1999 and 2000, consolidated the triumphs of Call the Doctor and Dig Me Out, and this is not a bad thing. The songwriting team revealed that it seemed to have an endless reservoir of those angular guitar riffs favored especially by Brownstein, guitar riffs that managed to sound both playful and funky, in the way that Pat Place's guitar used to sound in the Bush Tetras. This is satisfying, to know that a certain way of playing has innumerable variations. There also began to appear on the horizon a certain devotion to the possibility of melody, hooks, and to the instrumental coloration and variation that might be brought into what is after all a rather simple ensemble (two guitars and drums, with the occasional bass part on the recordings), a tiny bit of piano here and there, maybe an organ part, etc. Of these two middle period recordings, All Hands... with its frank erotics, its laments about anorexia, and its tour-band laments, seemed the more satisfying, evincing particular continuity in the use of John Goodmanson as producer, who worked on all the band's early albums except The Hot Rock.
Which brings us to the second masterpiece, One Beat, and the idea of a Sleater-Kinney television appearance. Or the idea of a Sleater-Kinney spot on some enormous world tour replete with buses and jets and roadies. Sleater-Kinney opening for that famous grunge band. Sleater-Kinney beginning to conceive of itself as a global organization, though remarking on this ambition is certainly to overlook the stunning array of styles and pop-music dexterity on One Beat, from Led Zep style riff-mongering on "Light Rail Coyote" (a song, it is pleasing to know, that is about exactly what it says it's about), to the political consciousness of songs like "Far Away" and "Combat Rock," the ersatz Motown of "Step Aside," in which, e.g., the violence of the world outside, and the domestic responsibilities of motherhood vie with the horn section in one of the funkiest punk rock songs ever recorded. Everything on One Beat reflects the confidence of a band of adults playing music the way they want to. Carrie sounds like Cindy Wilson from the B-52s, or Lene Lovich, and her guitar playing uncannily mimics Peter Buck on Document-era R.E.M. There is wah-wah, there are synthesizers, there are sing-along choruses, there are hints of the blues, and, so I am told, they even started dancing onstage.
If there were only the six albums described above, Sleater-Kinney would still be one of the most reliable, most creative, hardest rocking bands of the late nineties, which was not a period, after all, noted for much good rock and roll. They aren't a metal band, with tricky solos and lots of complaining. They aren't an R&B band with a canned drummer and a lot of come-ons. They don't rap, at least not yet. If the movement from Sleater-Kinney to One Beat were the whole story, it would be a great story. They came from the Pacific Northwest, from the land of hemp and used bookstores, and they conquered the world.
But this isn't the end of the story. Now, before us, we have The Woods, which appears in the Sleater-Kinney catalogue as opus number seven, and like many things with sevens on it, it features an itch, a need to try new things. Sometimes people get scared by new things, which is one of the reasons people are disappointing. This is to say that you should not be afraid of new things, dear reader, which in this case amounts to a really much more ambitious idea of how the studio can be used, like on the massive upsurge of guitars in the children's book parable "The Fox," which opens the album. The drums are recorded with a panoramic quality they have never had before, and there's Corin wailing in such a blood-curdling way that you would believe anything she told you, and all she's telling you is "Goodbye, little fox." This is the first difference: studio smarts.
But studio smarts is just a means to an end. It doesn't imply that longtime Sleater-Kinney fans will not find what they love, namely the strange, delirious interlocking guitars and the way Carrie and Corin seem to finish each other's lines, that doesn't mean that there aren't a bunch of great melodies. But it does mean that it's okay to have guitar solos. Yes, perhaps no development on The Woods is as indicative of the grab-the-rock-world-by-its-throat thrust of the album as the guitar solos. Everybody knows that Sleater-Kinney was never noted for guitar heroics. Well, if that's your version of the story, start here with "What's Mine Is Yours," a two-chord number in which the two guitars pick-up the opposite ends of the rhythm, in just the way the singers alternate verses, until, at the 2:13 mark, the song breaks out into an awesome silence, after which Brownstein's Hendrix-style guitar solo, replete with backwards sections and wall of fuzz, erupts, lasting an entire minute before the drums return. It's as satisfying as the ear-splitting second half of Sonic Youth's "Mildred Pierce," or the Ira Kaplan wall of sludge on Yo La Tengo's Painful. And that's not the only guitar solo. There are several!
If guitar heroics are not enough, there's an ersatz jazz number. "Jumpers," in which Carrie and Corin sing unison on the verses in a way that resembles Petula Clark. There's a nice keyboard part, too, and the lyrics are about California, about the Golden Gate, and about, yep, about jumping from the bridge, and there are A, B, and C sections, and there's no real chorus, because the new ideas of The Woods also include new ideas about song structure, like that there doesn't have to be a chorus in the usual place, and you can solo whenever you feel like it, passion is the thing, emotion is the thing, art is the thing, and art can knock you out, disorient you, unsettle you.
And there are the drum rolls on "Steep Air," and the insistence that the listener "please go away" on "Entertain," which features Carrie's desperate shouting, and there's a catchy chorus on "Roller Coaster," and the way Corin sings the words "cherry tomato" there, and the feeding-back of guitars on the out-chorus, and the incredibly sweet and beautiful and unadorned ballad by Carrie, "Modern Girl." Never has purchasing a television sounded like such an integral part of contemporary romantic experience, never have a sinisterly droning synthesizer and a harmonica seemed like such appropriate bedfellows, and never has the shift from the present tense ("My baby loves me") to the past tense ("My whole life looked like a picture of a sunny day") seemed so telling.
The album closes with an improvisation, recorded in a single, unedited take; that's right, an improv, which serves as the linkage between "Let's Call It Love" and "Night Light," just like on those old Grateful Dead bootlegs, or maybe like in those Led Zeppelin shows from the seventies, a big inflammatory guitar solo passage, with tons of noise, and why you ask, why is this necessary, why even connect the two songs at all, well, because they connect two halves of the experience of human psychology in these rather dispiriting times, these dark ages, the first half, "Let's Call It Love," being the totally outrageous and very sexy desire part of the story ("A woman is not a girl/she could show you a thing or two," or: "Let's call it my royal flush, I'll show you what to do with it,"), the second half representing the domestic impulse: "How do you do it/This bitter and bloody world/Keep It Together and Shine for Your Family." And the ligementary connection is the inarguable greatness of the instrumental passage, sort of like the over-the-top soloing in "Whole Lotta Love." In fact, rarely has a band digested the influence of the Zeppelin catalogue in such a creative and diabolical way. The point of the improvisation is that it sacrifices everything to feeling, it throws everything onto the fire, in the name of provocation, the better to illustrate the kind of Dionysian/Apollonian opposition of Carrie and Corin, the enraged, the outraged, the unignorable, and then, differently, the tender, the melancholy, the gentle, each of these things in each of the players, always completed ornamented and augmented by Janet's amazing drumming.
They came from the Pacific Northwest, but they won't be stuck there. They want history, they want time, they want art, they want to deal with culture, they have demands, they have needs, they have vision, they have aspirations. And now they have The Woods.
I am currently Feisty
I am listening to sleater-kinney One beat

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