auld land syne

The things that led me to the idea of participating in some way with Tao Lin's “write about Richard Yates” publicity gimmick:

2010-07-26T15:43:00.000-07:00

I woke up in bed, buried in the warm light of my blankets and the green reflected light from the building across the way, banana trees. I wasn't hungover, but I was aware that perhaps a normal person would be hungover, and so I tried to count how many drinks I had last night: a half-shot (drank from a straw) of some expensive whiskey while I was at work. Then I went to the Bowery. First I had a Guinness, then I had a La Fin Du Monde (the end of the world), then Dimitri gave me a shot of Powell's (or Powers, not sure). Then I ordered a PBR. Then they closed down the Bowery, and afterhours I drank a PBR and another shot of Powell's. That means I basically had six-and-a-half drinks in about two hours. Leaving the Bowery, I took a cab about two blocks to Stout, but I didn't find anyone there, and didn't remember why I wanted to go there in the first place, so I walked up to 7-11, bought a pizza, walked home, threw the pizza on the floor, and fell asleep. In the morning, after recapping the events of the night to myself vis-a-vis how many drinks I drank, I fell into the vacuum of facebook and stumbled on to Tao Lin's description of his recent arrest for trespassing at a coffeeshop, published in Gawker. As I read the Gawker essay, I was struck by Tao Lin's awareness of social and internal dynamics, in terms of both attentiveness and insight. Also, his memory seemed excellent. Though I do-not/would-not practice his particular philosophical project in the way that he practices it (his project seems excessively anti-poetical, or anti-rhetorical, possibly reductionist, though without a loss of cogency, but with the possible corollary diminution of the construction of piquancy, if this makes sense), I do think of Tao's project as excellent, with the Gawker essay standing to me as proof of the excellence of his life and the quality of his mind. Of course, I was and remain most impressed by his work ethic. This last may seem like faint praise indeed, but, from my perspective (that of laziness, a kind of idle melancholy, the pursuit of one low-level distraction after another [each pursued so as to kill a kind of deeper frustration/loneliness/dissatisfaction]), Tao Lin's practice of awareness seems quite valuable and impressive. Especially interesting to me is Tao Lin's focus, which contrasts with my own in that I think we are both extremely interested in the practice of awareness of the minutiae of our daily lives, especially regarding our lives in the world of people—except that while I simply let my awareness run through me, like water through a paper filter, Lin seems to actively codify and denote his observations, wrapping things up into narrative form constantly, which must serve to make his awareness more complete and also acts to render his life more real. I have made so many thousands of pointless, unwritten, idle observations, that it seems I no longer have the capacity to bring the value of life 'home' to myself. In many ways, especially recently, I am worried that I perhaps do not have as much attentiveness as I am thought to have / claim to have. I think Tao contrasts favorably with myself in this way. I thought about all this while making coffee, sitting at my windowsill smoking a cigarette, thinking about the fact that I had to go to work for a meeting, some “coaching” or some other soul-deadening thing.

At the end of Tao Lin's description of his arrest, numerous Gawker “commenters” appended scathing, putatively witty, (and to me wrong-headed) attacks on Tao's writing style—attacks which were, by extension, attacks on Tao's life at large. I was irritated by this, given my positive response to Lin's essay, though I didn't feel the need to make some kind of comment. I went to Tao Lin's facebook and blog, checking to see if he made any public comment on the viciousness or wrong-headedness of these “comment” attacks. He did not, though someone alluded to the attacks in a comment thread that sprang from Tao Lin's link to the Gawker essay on his facebook wall. It occurred to me that if I were him, I would have definitely wanted to address these detractors, because I am insecure and would hope to get some positive affirmation of the essay's value if it were being attacked. From there, idly browsing, I came upon Lin's Richard Yates gimmick/promotion/book give-away. It occurred to me that I would like to write something in the style of Lin's commentariat-panned essay, in terms of the concrete description of banal but valuable interpersonal things, and I knew that such a project, though professionally worthless, would be fun for me, also, would give me some focus, which might (I reasoned) lead to more focus in my life later on. I was thinking, again, of the night before, the night which was and is at the time of this writing, “last night.”

Last night, The Station was mostly dead, i.e. not busy. (it is a “lounge,” i.e. an open-air club). I work in the French restaurant attached to the Station, and had to stay late to help them with the end of the night food orders. It has been occurring to me lately, because I am lonely, and for other reasons, that I would like to know more about the people who work in The Station. In fact, it seems insane to me that I am so totally disconnected from their lives, that I have isolated myself / been isolated from the not-insignificant human lives that are being lived parallel to mine. Almost without exception, my colleagues in The Station are attractive, charismatic, young, and stuck in-the-middle-of-eventual-failure in their careers as actors/models. But I know very little about them: Nick, the bartender, went to law school and posts extremely conservative links on his facebook, usually sneering our-triumph-is-imminent conservative puff pieces. Justin, the prototypical masculine bar-back is definitely fucking one of the bartenders, but I don't remember her name. I think it is Courtney, but, that could be wrong. Melissa Tiano, an extremely attractive bartender, showed up to the Station on her night off with Jessica, an extremely small-bodied cocktail waitress. Jessica somehow reminds me of a flying squirrel, (or perhaps it is some other rodent, I'm not sure), inasmuch as she has a pinched aspect to her face and large eyes. This in no way makes her unattractive, but she has a kind of idiotic lack of awareness in her eyes, which is not to say that I dislike her or actually believe she is stupid—I have no feelings and cannot make any final assessments about her one way or the other. It is important for me to remember and highlight here that I am sure she lives a complex and wonderful internal life, full of the small tragedies and small victories that mark all of our lives. Besides, it is extremely dangerous to think of other people as stupid or unaware—this is almost always an observation that is seated in resentment, and is usually derived from the stupid mistake of judging with insufficient information. It is important for me to remember and highlight here that if you know someone well, they almost always offer more depth than is apparent on the surface, and really the only thing that matters if is you have a feeling of emotional engagement with them, which, if you have it, demands that you see their idiosyncrasies and patterns of thought and feeling in a way that highlights their value and complexity. Still, it is hard to avoid judging people. To continue the story: these two girls were there with two extremely large Armenian-looking guys. The guys looked like they had money. I said to Jessica, Are you going up to Drai's? She pointed to one of the Armenian guys and said something about they were just out for the night, and then kinda ignored the question, and kinda started talking to someone else in her little circle. For some reason, I felt it was obvious that they were going up to Drai's. I didn't really think about the fact that Jessica ignored my question, because it seemed fully possible that she didn't really hear me, and in any case was with a date and I didn't want her to feel strange by imposing an unwanted conversation on her. I kinda walked in a circle around the people, and asked someone else a question, maybe “what did you do tonight” or “how are you guys doing” or “it looks like you're having fun” or something like that. In any case, whoever I directed these words to did not give me an answer that engaged me on even a basic human level. So, I started talking to Nick and his date, because he is comfortable. He immediately invited me to join them at Drai's, which was, after all, where they were all going. I thought I sensed a stiffening in the aspect of the girls, as if they did not want me to know they were going to Drai's, or, more specifically, did not want me to join them. This didn't surprise me: they must think I'm a crazy asshole, though of course it hurt, somewhat, even as I believe in my mind that they had no thoughts about me the entire time, as I'm ludicrously paranoid, over-sensitive, and over-engaged, and constantly have to dial-down my wounded feelings and thoughts on account of my intellectual awareness that people really do not think about me one way or the other. I am, I think, some kind of creature whose thoughts and social behaviors are so constantly intricate and self-involved, that it is as if all I do is simply hollow myself out entirely, as if I am some kind of spherical fruit and am doing nothing but scraping the surface of my life clean from the inside. The entire time, the large Armenian-looking guys did not say or do anything. They must have been talking to the girls, but, all I sensed was that they were doing nothing and simply standing around numbly. Nick invited me to go with them to Drai's and at first I said no, but, then I realized that I had never been up to Drai's and wanted on some level to see what it looks like. I said this to Nick and he insisted that I join them: he is extremely inviting and sociable. I said that I would enjoy going. Then I realized that I didn't have my wallet with me. I said that they would not let me in, and hung around the edges of the group for a minute longer, Nick saying “well, we should just give it a try!” But by this time my awkwardness and my feeling of being placated or being seen as a 2nd-class social citizen had wormed its way into my brain, so I simply left. I went to the Bowery.

It was dead. Mack, the GM, was sitting in front of the Bowery smoking, drinking Guinness, and talking to his friend, the pop-culture obsessed graphic novelist, Josh. I shook their hands and walked inside. I heard Josh say, “He's more of a germanic character,” probably talking about some actor. Inside, Rick was talking to the bartender, Natalie. Besides this, there were two people sitting at the bar finishing up their late dinner. I started talking to Rick about my feeling that I wish to have more intimacy in my life, approaching the subject through an analysis of the question: “How are you doing?” I would like it if people were more interested in actually describing their internal states, and wish that the performance of banal social niceties could be displaced by aggressive, emotionally not-diffident, actively engaged conversations. I tried to segue from this to an actual conversation about our actual states of being, but, no one wished to make any disclosures beyond Natalie's announcement that she was tired. Rick said that he answers the question “How are you doing” with the response “good” because he is generally a happy person: he enjoys his job, and he enjoys his life. He said something to me about his afternoon, spent drinking beers at a barbeque and eating meat, “tons and tons and tons of meat.” I was thinking about the loneliness that I feel sure he must feel, sitting in the Bowery by himself after midnight on a Sunday night, talking to the young, attractive female bartender, and being ineligible to her as a sexual object. I have seen him “appear online” on facebook chat after 2AM on nights after drinking, and remain on there, online, looking at facebook, clearly looking for some kind of social stimuli or the appearance of something wonderful. It seems clear to me that he is lonely, though I knew I couldn't announce to him that I thought of him as a lonely person. It is strange and amazing to “appear online” on facebook after two AM on a weekend and watch all the people who appear there, clearly looking for happiness, waiting for a message, or a comment, or thinking about the clunky practice of e-seduction, treading water there for a few minutes, reading their newsfeed, and then disappearing into the gray nothing of offline and sleep. I believe there is a lot of loneliness in the world, though this may just be projection. Anyways, after Rick left, Natalie and I talked about our experiences of swimming in the ocean, the nature of fear when you're a passenger versus when you're driving, and experiences of exhilaration we had felt in our lives. Then she talked about a short film she was in. At this point, Dimitri came in with one of the guys from Jackass and was talking about the new Jackass movie. The night disintegrated at that point, and eventually, I went home.

More About Being On Drugs

2010-06-30T22:22:00.000-07:00

When I took mushrooms recently I enjoyed articulating aspects of social interaction that usually remain silent. I have to admit, some paranoia crept in, which meshed with my deep understanding that people “want things.” Unfortunately, when I said that “people want things,” it was taken to mean that I believed there was some sort of overarching “plot” perpetuated by others, when of course I meant nothing of the sort, I was simply articulating the fact that we are doing these things with people because we enjoy people, and there are things we want, social things, which manifest in our behavior, and if you don't want to be here, you can just leave. Another barrier to communication was the fact that I was laughing so hysterically it was hard to keep all of the threads of my conversation cogent in the minds of those with whom I was speaking; I was insanely distracted. Anyways, it went like this: I was aware of people's various desires, particularly their social desires, needs and insecurities, and wished to articulate the constituent aspects of their internal components as I perceived them, as these components manifested in their behavior. When the people doing cocaine returned to the apartment, I was annoyed that I was now required to conform to a pattern of social behavior that is considered appropriate, i.e. silence, listening, courtesy, feigned interest, responding to stupid statements with judicious generosity, generally participating in the insane construction of “group building.” (Much of my night was concerned with analyzing and destroying pointless instances of “group building”). Still, with the cocaine-people, I conformed because I was aware of the consequences of acting in line with my true desires, (my desires being to converse about intelligent and subtle things that interest me), and not the inane things that occupy the minds of your average normal-person/lunatic. There was a man who had done a lot of drugs that evening; it seemed to me that he did not need a lot of reasons to want to punch me in the face; I was aware of my preference to not be face-punched, so I did not attack and analyze the stupidity of his statements. I was forced by convention to stand with arms crossed mildly interrogating the appropriate fringes of whatever inane thing people were saying, a stupid man telling the party that “red, white, and black” are the “true colors of strength,” and in his band and all his art, he prefers to use these colors exclusively, but he also believes that there are “true colors” that are beyond human perception. I was so annoyed by this conversation it was almost beyond words, but, I forced myself to stand there and keep my aggressive comments to myself. Perhaps, in the future, I'll be more active in articulating the things I like to articulate. It seems to me that people often think they can get away with quite a lot of nonsense. I think I would like to simply say the things that I think, instead of not saying them. Also, I'm aware that, for a certain class of person, encountering an unencumbered articulation/destruction-of the unspoken underpinnings of our social nonsense is actually quite respectable and valuable, which would be a bonus for me above and beyond the joy found when one says the things one would like to say. I lay on the bedroom floor in the lurid red light smoking cigarettes and looking at the ceiling while a bunch of very stupid and suggestible people had a pointless conversation about how “serenity” is the opposite of “certainty,” repeating the words over and over as if there were some philological truth to be discovered in the act of re-re-re-articulating them. I was actively making fun of these conversationalists; other people in the bedroom were listening to my comments and laughing. I did not know if the people in the bedroom were “on my side” or even if they agreed with the substance of what I was saying, but, I did not think they would do anything drastic, so, I continued my announcements.

Top 100 songs: Unnecessary Prolixity

2010-01-15T10:52:00.000-08:00

I had a whole essay outlining my metric for choosing these songs, but, this is long enough already, so, let's skip it. Suffice it to say, I'm sentimental and intricately self-involved, and this list does not pretend to be historically definitive, or, even personally definitive (cause that stuff changes y'know).

Brandon thinks this list is "boorish and untimely"

And, on to the not-awaited, completely unrequested epic redux. Download links at bottom.

1.Bon Iver – Re-Stacks

As I've noted many a time, the last line in this song, Your love will be / safe with me is probably my favorite lyric of all time, the way I want to be when I'm most fully my ideal self. This song balances itself with infinite gentleness on the tip of a pyramid, never quite resolving, a phone lifted subtly in the silence of the track's very end. This song has everything a favorite song needs: obscurity, beauty, accessibility. It's just ephemeral enough to let you in immediately, without gorging to the point of saturation.

2.Third Eye Blind – Semi-Charmed Life (album version)

The velvet it rips / in the city we tripped / on the urge to feel alive. I can't listen to this song if I'm not drinking with my little sister. Luckily, we drink together on a regular base, and when the urge to manufacture some enthusiastic nostalgia strikes, nothing suffices as effectively as this piece of adrenaline-laced art for children of the nineties. The four right chords could make me cry, you know. We'll scream it out; we'll wake the upstairs neighbors and the downstairs neighbors from jumping up and down. There isn't a bad lyric here. I'm not listening when you say goodbye.

3.LCD Soundsystem – All My Friends

No song gives me such a simultaneous rush of enervating sadness and happiness. Even though half of the lyrics don't make any sense, somehow this song contains the potential ecstasies of being in the world with people. That's saying a lot. The galloping multi-tracked piano beat and the nostalgia-laced poetry hits me on every level. I wish I weren't as nostalgia-prone / regret-scarred as I am, but I still aspire to James Murphy's I wouldn't trade one stupid decision / for another five years of life.

4.The Beatles – Golden Slumbers – Carry That Weight – The End

It's probably a cheat to collapse these songs into one, but, no one ever listens to only of them at a time, and they lead directly in to each other, and are (tenuously, I'll admit) linked lyrically, and most importantly, I get to make the rules. The muscular call for sleep against a pervasive homelessness on Golden Slumbers sets the tone; the regret-inflected Carry That Weight bursts into The End's frantic jam and tempo increase. If we're homeless by definition from which the only respite is sleep; the question: Are you going to be in my dreams? emerges naturally. The End, featuring arguably the finest drum solo, riff, and guitar solo of the Beatles' career, finally dissolves into the diaphanous final message, and ultimate philosophy of the Beatles, if only ever loosely implemented: the love you take is equal to the love you make.

5.Josh Ritter – To The Dogs or Whoever

There aren't many songs that inspire in me such confidence of the goodness of life, the inevitability of beauty's return in the face of the failure that undermines everything. Though half of the lyrics reference pointlessly obscure Americana & whatnot (such as Joan of Arc), the other half is pure poetry. A boat that could love the rocks and the shore / could you love me like the crosses love the nape of neck. And who can resist yelling the chorus—I thought I heard somebody calling. In the dark I thought I heard somebody call—no one!!!!

6.Azure Ray – Rise

There aren't many iterations of love that I find compelling. In the face of failure, death, the dissipation of desire, every mechanism (and there are plenty) that steadily tears us apart, somehow this song patches over the sadness, takes responsibility, and emerges with acceptance of loss. Rise is perfectly gentle, resigned, as ethereal as love itself. As everyone knows, romance is tied by necessity to the possibility or the inevitability of failure; somehow, when I'm hearing this song, I don't mind what is lost or the losses to come.

7.Jens Lekman – Black Cab

Loneliness in its purest distillation. The solipsism, arrogance, insecurity, semi-suicidal recklessness, and self-absorption of loneliness. I love every lyric in this song. If I could get away with it, I'd put this on every mixtape I'll ever make. You don't know anything / so don't ask me questions / you don't know anything / so turn the music up / and keep your mouth shut.

8.The National – Fake Empire

Bluebirds on our shoulders. The National's 3rd album, Boxer, is one of the best albums to come out in the last ten years, and the first track is worth the price of the whole CD. A lot is made of the National's curious mix of mythic imagery and personal evocations, and this song brings them together perfectly, a clanging piano melody, the tintinnabulation to end the song, the beat-anticipating drums. No other song so perfectly evokes winter to me, the loss of love.

9.M Ward – Here Comes the Sun Again

Another perfect blend of battle-scarred optimism and serene melancholy. M Ward doesn't say much, talking about weather and driving. This is one of those simple songs I want to play first when I meet someone new.

10.Wilco – Poor Places

This song is a perfect example of what made mid-career Wilco great: meticulous, with a painstaking commitment to concentrated production, a deconstructed melody. Beginning in what seems to be a hospital, over the steady beep of a life-support machine; through four successive changes of modulation and instrumentation, pianos and guitars trading the melody; a hot dissonant fourth carried through the first two minutes of the song, building to the climax two minutes in (which never does exactly resolve), dissolving finally without resolution in a wave of electronic noise.

11.Townes Van Zandt – To Live is to Fly

This song isn't very interesting musically. But is philosophically perfect. I subscribe to every lyric, even if taken line by line it's nothing more than a mess of cliché. Van Zandt's delivery is world-weary and worn-out, and has the unvarnished feeling of hard-earned truth. Risky, inimitable; somehow, I love it.

12.Third Eye Blind – Jumper

I break eardrums singing this. Who doesn't?

13.Bob Dylan – Simple Twist of Fate

Of all the paucity-of-love songs in the world, this has to be one of the purest distillations. Dylan recaps the entire relationship (one night), and this encapsulation, this mix of idealizing memory, instant-and-then-gone expectation, thwarted communication and the temporal nature of desire—ah, it's beautiful. He told himself he didn't care / pushed the window open wide / felt that emptiness inside. I've been there; fuck it, sometimes I think I live there.

14.The Hold Steady – Stuck Between Stations

Massive. So epic, it's heroic. She was a damn good dancer but she wasn't all that great of a girlfriend. And twenty other one-liners. As big as all of classic rock and fully literate.

15.Israel Kamakawiwo’ole – Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Everybody's heard it, everybody's cried to it.

16.Belle & Sebastian – The Fox in the Snow

Who doesn't dig the pure adolescent existential infuriated lassitude of this song? Even now, from time to time, I completely empathize with the boy on the bike: As you cycle round the town / you're going up / you're going down / you're going nowhere. It's not as if they're paying you / it's not as if it's fun / at least not anymore. Not to mention that the melody is achingly beautiful, laid down with fingerpicked guitars, pianos and violins.

17.Jenny Lewis – It Wasn't Me

Guilt is a motherfucker, and Jenny Lewis's lullaby description-of/critique-of/skewering-of her body of self-destructiveness and regret resonates fully with me. It wasn't me / I wasn't there / I was stone drunk / it isn't clear / and it doesn't count / cause I don't care. But of course everyone knows you do. It's still nice to hear someone sing about, though.

18.The Mountain Goats – No Children

It's rare that a song this unvarnished is ironic and bemused. Pure hilarity and unstinting reality all at once. I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow / I hope it bleeds all day long. When you've been squeezed dry of every last drop of concern, and you don't give a fuck anymore, the only thing left is sarcasm and blunt dissociation. Darnielle's classic track is designed to make disaster seem aggressively fun.

19.The Shins – Those to Come

Apparently, I'm drawn to songs that make reference to relaxed morning-after underwear-lounging. Something bad inside me / went away. I could do without the wide-lens existential ruminations on the ongoing nature of human life that serve to close the song, but, really, this is a perfectly beautiful track. The bearers of all good things arrive. Not to mention the melody is Cat-Stevens perfect.

20.The Eels – Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues

Acceptance is hard. Getting thrilled about the state of the world is even harder. Especially when you're reciting a laundry list of desolation, waste, dissociation, insanity, regrets, and failure. But E somehow makes it happen. I like juxtapositions like this. I like feeling grim with the uncompromising truth and excited about the beauty of life at the same time. Goddamn right / It's a beautiful day.

21.Sufjan Stevens – Casimir Pulaski Day

Sufjan is annoyingly sincere. Still, no song reminds me of growing up more than this—probably the most tragic and intricately literary of any song I know. Ergo, no song has made me cry harder (with the exception of Verdi's Requiem, and that was a long time ago), and that counts as a lot in my book. The fact that I have to respect the music, and that it's unambiguously beautiful—well, that's just bonus.

22.The New Pornographers – From Blown Speakers

This song, less than three minutes long, culminates in one explosive, ecstatic moment 2/3rds of the way through. I bang enthusiastically on my air-snares and double-kick air drums. A perfect illustration of tension and release. I can't really recommend it for any other reason: I don't really know what they're talking about, though I've sang the lyrics many a time.

23.Wilco – Jesus Etc.

The definitive Wilco track; a triumph of old-fashioned songwriting. The stars are alternately rising and setting. You were right in both cases. At this moment, genius is the art of taking the unsaid obvious and making it heartrending: Our love is all we have.

24.Cat Power – (Can't Get No) Satisfaction

The funny thing about this Rolling Stones cover is that Chan never actually sings the famous chorus. Quite literally, the listener gets no satisfaction. There is no rock-and-roll in this track: one hears an empty room and a sad woman with her guitar. But this subtraction only highlights the brilliance of Jagger's lyrics, the cynical emptiness at the heart of the rock star experience. Beautiful.

25.Wilco – Handshake Drugs

Best lyric ever: If I ever was myself / I wasn't that night.

26.Jesus & Mary Chain – Just Like Honey

Shoegaze love song. Everyone not bored or offended was rocked into a stationary frenzy of Borgesian nostalgia-for-the-present by the conclusion of Sophia Coppola's Lost in Translation, and, as with so many poetry-vulnerable filmgoers, those trawling Tokyo shots are linked indelibly with Just Like Honey's regret-laced evocations. As with Nietzsche and his friends, my love for this song rests in my inability to qualify it. So I'll stop with the trying.

27.Alexi Murdoch – Orange Sky (EP version)

I prefer the super-slow percussion-and-piano-free EP version of this song (almost impossible to find at this point, though it was featured on a few soundtracks in the early double-oughts) to the over-produced souped-up easy-listening adult-top-40 album version. My heart's been broken / sometimes my mind is too strong. Even if your heart's not broken, when you're soaking in this song, it is. Chalk one up to mirror neurons. Mirror neurons make life worth living.

28.Etta James – Stormy Weather

Etta's voice is too triumphant to let any song wallow in depression, misery-riddled lyrics be damned; a doo-wop piano and sashaying orchestrations lift the track further. I sense a pattern emerging: I like exultant expressions of disappointment.

29.Regina Spektor – Fidelity

I don't participate in the mass-hysteria Regina Spektor lovefest with your average simian-smart neu-indie Grey's Anatomy-viewer, but, if you concentrate when you listen, you'll love this song's perfect demonstration of the craft of meta-love-song, mercifully free from most of the cutesy lyrical ephemera that mar most of Spektor's tracks. The pizzicato strings that comprise most of the musical backings behind warm (if synthesized) horn sections make for a flawless combination of levity and warmth, meshing exactly with Spektor's pitch-and-tempo perfect stairstepping chorus.

30.My Morning Jacket - Golden

A song about driving and wasting time. And being in bars, dreams, feelings, heaven, and other things. If you like driving at night (my favorite thing), along deserted highways (favorite squared), while sinking into self-satisfied nostalgia (cubed), this song is perfect. Reverb'd to the max, and a steel guitar, which aren't recipes for easy-access joy, when hitched to the pitter-patter car-tire beat and Jones' soaring vocal instrument, well, it works.

31.The Mountain Goats – This Year

Ready for the bad things to come. My nostalgia alone would demand the inclusion of this song. But beyond this is a triumphal future-tense assertion of the value of life. My broken house behind me / and good things ahead / a girl named Kathy wants a little of my time. I know of no more uncompromisingly anticipation-oriented articulation of self-determination. And the denouement: There will be feasting / and dancing / in Jerusalem next year. Fuck yeah. One of the most-quoted-by-me and inspiring songs I know.

32.The Strokes – The End Has No End

Not the best Strokes song, maybe, but, it's a long-time favorite for reasons that remain obscure to me. Casablancas delivers subtle insults, that's always appealing. It's got the requisite detached Strokes delivery and the frantic shouting and fuzzed-out guitar solo, too. The source of my “I'm relaxed” mantra: I can do a lot of things / but I can't do that. I recall clearly at 18, listening to this song for ten consecutive hours, and I still dig it when it comes on.

33.Spoon – Black Like Me

Spoon's minimalistic acoustic-symphony aesthetic culminated on the completely effective Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga album. Black Like Me, the album's closer, is a minor masterpiece of the effective culmination of ten thousand minute production decisions: the rotating strings, indescribable interplay of clattering piano and droopy horns, the simple riffs and the tension built, stretched, tattered, and finally resolved in a Day in the Life crashing orchestral melisma. And, for reasons that I don't want to understand, All the weird kids up front / tell me what you know you want is a personally incisive lyric.

34.Sam Cooke – A Change is Gonna Come

Essential.

35.Weezer – El Scorcho

From the perspective of “Rock History” maybe the Sweater Song is more necessary, less contingent (and at least equally ass-kicking) but, this whining, shouting, garbled track is the epitome of a successful pre-emo personal-general description-of, plea-for and consideration-of a frontman's adolescent love, with enough whimsy to avoid the ponderousness and self-seriousness of “love” as commonly construed, while retaining an unparalleled heartfelt shriek.

36.Scissor Sisters – I Can't Decide

This song isn't representative of my tastes at-large in the slightest: a dance-y, angry, bitter, enthusiastic tumultuous-love murder-fantasy. But, you have to dig this ironic takedown of desire, the almost impossible balance of bemused indifference and hysterical mania. And when the chorus comes on, with a big anticipatory inhalation, circus-clown percussive asterisks, fuzzed out voice effects and frantically picked banjos: it's damned catchy and hilarious, the perfect antidote to heartbreak. I won't deny I'm going to miss you when you're gone. Indeed.

37.Shearwater – The Hunter's Star

An underrated contemporary classic of piano-rock mopery. Unabashedly saturated in big emotions, simultaneously sad and lifted, as necessary to me as the Raindrop prelude or the 2nd movement of the Sonata Pathetique. Jonathan Meiburg's eccentric vocal modulations lend a purely musical effect here, deliciously balancing against the warm woodwinds and swirling piano chords.

38.Radiohead – No Surprises

Probably Radiohead will be remembered for their bleak vision of contemporary capitalistic dissociation (and No Surprises' theme of suicidal alienation-resignation certainly participates in that project), but they are equally profound musically, picking out a soaringly beautiful melody from a huge empty space. Strictly to be played after midnight.

39.Iron & Wine – The Trapeze Swinger

A nine-and-a-half minute utterly heartbreaking acoustic ode to lost love, the passage of time, the shambling elegance of life in the world, objects filled with angles of brown twilight. Dylanesque in its melodic repetitiveness, a scale moving endlessly downward, but expanded with the constant addition of subtle instrumental complications: a doubled tambourine here, a walking upright bassline there, untuned box pianos, an entire mad palate of run-down layered gothic noises. Pays huge dividends case of preexisting latent sentiment.

40.Vampire Weekend – Ottoman

The pizzicato chamber strings epiphanies of Walcott appear here in my favorite form, without the annoying piano clanging. Yes, every infuriating bourgeoisie ballroom upperclass reflex is in full jerk here, but, it's so sweet and seamless, full of the confidence of craftsmanship, you can't resist.

41.Tom Waits – Mr. Siegal

Take the violent nihilism of swordfishtrombones-era Waits and mix with the biggest Howlin' Wolf-style bluesy-Americana rollick around the blue guitar and piano, and you've got Mr. Siegal. When it comes on, I can't help but grin, then leer, then conduct the air-orchestra, punching the air. Hearing this song live inspires an irresistible joy, a mandated saunter. If you were me, you sing along like you're really curious: Why are the wicked so strong?—taking up the mantle of unrepentant evil for a walk around the block, feeling the perfect power of unabashed wickedness for yourself.

42.Nick Drake – At the Chime of A City Clock

Weird little beautiful song. Punctuated by saxophones and a full string section. Obscure ruminations on the nature of beauty, urban isolation, death, a blurry protagonist's psychological disorders. The chorus is a brilliant chord progression: ; the entire song is infused with a piquant, resigned inevitability. In the light of a city sky / find a face that's fair / and keep it by your side. Nice, right?

43.Rilo Kiley – Science vs. Romance

Early-period Jenny Lewis was obsessed with the constituent aspects of love, ruminations delivered with a kind of exaggerated vulnerability and self-conscious world-weariness. The cutesy vocal stylings are maybe too twee for some palates, but, her delivery of it's cold out there / but I'm telling you / I'm lonely too, broken chord, minor sixth whole tone scale, is perfect.

44.Mason Jennings – Nothing

No song lends itself to postmodern critiques of meaninglessness and a turning against silence quite like Mason Jennings' pre-Jack Johnson-ing stab at comprehensibility in the face of the every kind of failure, from things unsaid to brown tap water. Jennings here turns to the simplicity of his broken heart, a “new place” that “seems strange,” an unabashed embarrassment. Please know what I mean / When I say / Nothing. Perfect. Plus you can sing along and feel pure happiness.

45.The Hold Steady – Your Little Hoodrat Friend

The Hold Steady's work pre-Boys And Girls In America is challenging and (somewhat) abrasive. A huge bar band (complete with two-headed guitar and honky-tonk organ) blasting Thin Lizzy-style jams. And the Craig Finn doesn't sing so much as he slur-preaches. And the songs are convoluted multi-page mythologized poems about adolescent parties, fantasy-images of lost loves, where the fucked-forever mentally unbalanced lunatics and wannabe-hard suburban kids just wading into voyeuristic drug addictions meet. But this shit is just profound, I just fucking love it, even when the mythology would take too much work to figure out. It burns being broke / and hurts to be heartbroken / and always being both must be a drag.

46.Modest Mouse – The World At Large

Did I want love? Did I need to know? Perfect philosophy for your dissociated po-mo-obsessed non-achievement-striving inveterate starter-over. Even if starting over's not what life's about.

47.Neko Case – Star Witness

Star Witness is a perfect piece of songwriting, featuring a definitive and effortless and soaring vocal performance by Case. Definitive understated pop music, unwrapping a tragic love story line by line. A rough causality of destruction is allayed, finding the universe itself at fault: Trees break the sidewalk / the sidewalk skims my knees.

48.Fleet Foxes – Meadowlarks

On an album of perfectly crafted acoustic artifacts, Meadowlarks finds the Fleet Foxes pushes into open spaces, a more straightforward chamber pop elegance. Every movement in this song is crafted to nudge this cloud of arched sound forward: the sweeping hums of the chorus, the modulation in the third verse, the rising arpeggios of guitar at the end. Robin Pecknold's imagery is characteristically pastoral and archaic, punctuated by existential lamentations. What's here is essential: anything else would be gratuitous.

49.The Shins – New Slang

I'm looking in on the good life / I might be doomed never to find. The common and abominable practice of naming the song after the least-defensible lyrical abstraction contained therein so as to lend said abstraction some nascent symbolic heft or generosity is in full effect here. But that doesn't even rise to the level of quibble. New Slang is too perfect to me to bear conversation, so I'll quote it: If you took to me / like a gull takes to the wind. The regret—the fact that she didn't—well, so what? The rest of our lives will fare well anyway.

50.Grizzly Bear – Two Weeks

Layers of indomitable pinking piano pop with all the spaciousness and harmonic intertextuality we've come to expect from Grizzly Bear make for a delightful and almost necessary construction.

51.Panda Bear – Take Pills

Half of this song is a drawn out introduction; the other half is an exultant lullaby on top of a collection of looped sounds, skateboards, bubbling water, washing machines, a subway arrives and leaves. Over before it begins. The sound in this song bounces around a huge open space, as if Lennox set up his microphones in the back of an airplane hanger and sang top-of-lungs across the open space; made to be heard above shafts of light and empty concrete floors.

52.Stars – Your Ex-Lover is Dead

This conceit behind this song has fail written all over it. Duets are miserable; relationships long-since-over are boring; I-win and you-lose lyrics are annoying; salvaging something serendipitous from the larger wastes is some combination of infuriating arrogance and cloyingly simplistics. Plus there's these lavish romantic orchestrations and Sarah Records guitar lines: a turn-off. But, actually, this song is fucking awesome, even if it takes a few listens to groove with the somewhat herky-jerky melody. And the final verse is the purest expression of sane acceptance in the face of the failure of love. I gave what I gave / I'm not sorry I met you / I'm not sorry it's over. You just have to listen to it.

53.Andrew Bird – Tables and Chairs

Songs are good for launching obvious truths to the space of emotional engagement. Tables and Chairs performs this function for me. The lyric Just don't let the human factor / fail to be a factor has always dropped on my ears with the weight of revealed truth, even if it only means that we must be wide in our vision. As I've grown older I've come to appreciate the rest of this song, too. Even the whimsical utopia/dystopia description of a post-financial landscape in the song's second act is refreshingly light.

54.Titus Andronicus – My Time Outside the Womb

You'll spend the rest of your life trying to forget / that you met the world naked and screaming / and that's how you'll leave it. New Jersey garage rock delivered in Conor Oberst's tremulous tones. A three-minute autobiography heavy with epigrammatic existentialism and fear-saturated street-smarts. One mistake is all that it takes.

55.The Eels – Grace Kelly Blues

The actress gave up all her old dreams / and traded up. The Eels are preoccupied with articulated affirmations of happiness to the point that one understands viscerally the shadow of loss behind their surface-level affirmations of happiness. Grace Kelly Blues recovers the ambiguity and disaster, the tragedy of regular life in a series of keenly observed set pieces. When E describes himself: I think you know / I'll be okay it's impossible to ignore his skepticism about the nature of happiness. Yes, but what does being okay look like, in a world this demanding of melancholy?

56.The Beatles – Here There and Everywhere

The Beatles are known as purveyors of love songs, but this is the only one I'd ever play and believe and feel with the same part of my mind that believes in a slow, strong constant iteration of love. That it espouses codependency is secondary: these harmonies are pure love.

57.The Doors – Riders on the Storm

Pretend with me that you've never heard this song before. That's not easy: like Fur Elise or the Moonlight sonata, so ubiquitous, obvious, and saturating, its slick genius is easy to ignore, and that it is weirdly definitive (just of what, I'm not quite sure) is clear to me. A masterpiece of atmospherics, with Morrison's flat baritone (and hidden whispery hissing double voice), noodling keyboards & bass, washed out rain & thunder effects, crazed keyboard solo, glockenspiels; and that riff, fast and controlled and rotating, and then the sinister hi-hats: hyperactive tic tic tic tic tic as fast as rain, the brain-squirming actualized in the track. Imagine George W Bush, bourbon in hand, riding in the back of a huge open-air SUV into a flat hot Texas thunderstorm, while god blasts this track from a height of two-hundred feet. Not to be all crazie-go-nutz or anything.

58.Tapes ‘n’ Tapes – Insistor

Running through this song is a fine wire of high tension. Galloping drums, torn acoustic noodles on guitar, surf baselines, hollowed out, crazed, nonsensical vocals. The chorus demands a fit of shouting, bailbonds, Harvard Square, holding hips, all that. But it's the bridge, whispered and rushed, then muttered, then shouted, yips, shouts, then the vocals are doubled, and it's all over. An infuriated paean to the end of irresistible love.

59.My Bloody Valentine – Sometimes

Washed-out loops of white-noise-distorted electric guitars beneath a simple strummed acoustic line create a canvas of slow-moving sonic textures, achingly slow, adrift. Keven Shields's buried ruminations on love, waiting, hiding, being alone, floors, up and down, are simply countermelodic spikes in the equalizer.

60.The Magnetic Fields – Strange Powers

Stephen Merritt has a genius for love, and an amazing literary talent for setting the scene of love, displaying a flair of feeling. When we kiss it feels / like a flying saucer landing. The basso-profundo of Merrit's reverberations juxtaposes beautifully with the drum machine and jangly guitar, but, the magic of Strange Powers rests in the Merrit's portrayal of the anticipation of love (so superior to whatever might be construed as the real thing)—a world-weary set of cultural considerations and the sweet self-conscious openness of the good things to come.

61.JJ – Things Will Never Be The Same Again

This song seems to exist on a higher plane, a higher register, not deigning to even approach the earth. Clouds of sparkling violins lead us in and out of each verse, vague hiccuping tribal drums, 32nd shakers, a sashaying piano bridge, and a voice that seems to be beamed from clouds, singing about the passage of time. This ship will still sail on / long after I'm gone. I can't resist this kind of thing.

62.Man Man – Whalebones

Hold a tenor sax note for seven seconds, aaaaand, in a split-second, a minor seventh chord broken doing down: BAM: a slow lope of weaving mitzvah-vaude-rock and Honus Honus's 3-pack-a-day croak. But this song transcends its mazey instrumentalizations, offering up a poignant narrative about love & dependency, the bizarre spaces of human need. In a repeated chant above the final verse, a light soprano counterpoint offers: Who are we / to love at all escaping the narrative, implicating everyone in a global frailty.

63.Emily Haines – Winning

Haines in her solo efforts puts together surprisingly a unfeted lyrical portrait of the bizarre little internal spaces that make up much of consciousness, describing complaints, conditions of satisfaction, conclusions, and categories of approaches to experience, if that makes sense. In other terms, this is non-cute slow romantic-era classical solo piano with impressionistic vocals.

64.My Morning Jacket – I Will Be There When You Die

Apocryphally said to have been recorded in an East-Kentucky grain silo, with noticeable tape-hiss and almost painful sudden increases in volume when Jim James supports the high notes. The one-off feel of this recording, the atmosphere, well, that's nothing more than a feature of what would be a great song recorded in any pro studio. But somehow essential; the sparse fragility of these tones are a strange, delicate gift.

65.Regina Spektor – On the Radio

Spektor is so sincere that even when she's singing pure blended nonsense we let it slide, and when she's singing about stuff that seems to mean something, it comes down with the weight of revealed heartbreaking truth. Besides, she knows her songcraft, breezing past the bullshit and lingering on the good stuff, with a simple arrangement that privileges the beauty of the melody without the baggage of mainstream pop's bulky histrionics.

66.Conor Oberst & Gillian Welch – Lua

I'm choosing the 2009 duet re-recording to represent this song. In it, Oberst has excised his voice-cracking crying-into-my-guitar affectations, and the result brings the focus back to the songwriting, which is nothing short of brilliant, a compelling narrative of closely-observed mutually-assured personal and relationship destruction. The poetry is transparent and moving, too: When everything is lonely I can be my own best friend / get a coffee and the paper / have my own conversations / the sidewalk and the pigeons and my window reflections. In my ideal world, the closing recapitulation wouldn't be so re-, but I always thought Mozart used too many codas too.

67.Bonnie Prince Billy – I'll Be Glad

Undoubtedly Will Oldham will go down in music history as a purveyor of death-flecked earthy acoustics. But in this unironic prayer for guidance Oldham gives himself over to god in a moment of earnest purity, and it's the most strictly beautiful thing he's allowed himself to write. The church-organs and steel guitars in the instrumental breaks foreshadow the choral “amen” at the end, a full-throated embrace through the song's final fifteen seconds, a peaceful moment of holy thrall.

68.Imogen Heap – Hide & Seek

Any song this huge and gorgeous demands inclusion, authorial solipsism, overwrought evocations, the sense one is being manipulated, a slew of nonsensical lyrical legerdemains, tear-jerking montages on bad television and legions of appalling fans be damned.

69.The White Stripes – Hello Operator

A duet between Jack and his guitar. Straight-up electric-guitar genius.

70.Rogue Wave – Eyes

Another acoustic solitary-contemplation-of-love jam with requisite fetishization of the other and a distinct sense of interiority. I respond-to and empathize-with renderings of interiority. This comment isn't in any critical, but, for reasons I don't understand, this song makes me think of Christmas. That's important to me.

71.Liars – The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack

Simplicity itself.

72.Portishead – Wandering Star

The bass on this song is so huge and so filthy, I can throw this on at any moment and dig. Also, the record scratches are sui generis.

73.My Morning Jacket – Into the Woods

A good shower head / and my right hand / the two best lovers / I ever had. The song starts with the echoy sounds of children in an aviary, a bouncing organ, and Jim James's trademarked reverb-hollow vocals talking about a “kitten on fire” and a “baby in a blender.” Probably one of my favorite songs in terms of performance poetry, this is staid and straightfaced high-irony deliberate dissociation, laid down above a perfect circus march oompa-oompa . As the narrator invites the wolf into his bed and disappears into the woods, a Russian-thick choir comes on to bade him farewell, cymbals crashing. Just perfect.

74.Talking Heads – Burning Down the House

What really establishes the Talking Heads to me is the lean and muscular nature of their production; though there's no shortage of frantic bongos, flat-80's style drums and impossibly jumpy bass; the sound is sparse and intricate, a light bridge thrown over a open space. The emphatic yelping punch of Bryne's delivery almost compels fist-pumping singalongs; no easy feat over the trampolining instrumentalization.

75.Muse – Starlight

If you put this on repeat it's a song that never seems to end, with these ostionato circular riffs that cap the song on both ends, and that's the way to dig this song. Bellamy's melodramatic vocal tics—usually overweening and syrupy—are here the perfect counterpoint to the saw-steady to-the-point-of-danceable riffs.

76.Nick Cave – Dig, Lazarus, Dig

This frankly crazy scholarly punk about a contemporary Lazarus will knock your head back. It's abrasive, aggressive as unforgivable 1, reductive, with one jagged riff played over and over and over, (with requisite subtle production modifications). Cave describes the best lunatic villain in rock history, trumping even Tom Waits' notable circus of crazies.

77.Ben Folds – Late

Ben Folds' tribute to Elliot Smith somehow carries the plaintive presence of Elliot Smith's project than any specific Elliot Smith song to me. Ben Folds' pop instincts are always honed; and even here, in the middle of an indulgent dab of pure sentiment, they do not disappoint. The line about “your hard-earned peace of mind” has one of the most effective switch-up harmonies I've ever heard.

78.Emily Haines – Telethon

More or less the model of songs I'm guaranteed to love and be slightly embarrassed for loving. Super-slow, thoroughly schmaltz, beautiful, obscure, with a profound little lyric at the center and a chorus that takes you by the throat. I'm going to take my time / night by night. So am I. (Almost falls off the list for referencing Billy Joel, though.)

79.The Decemberists – Billy Liar

Maybe this song is too weird and perverted and literary (does Molloy feel empathy for his Billy Liar? I don't think so.)—but in the same moment a general ecstasy of disaster-laced love appears. There's no desire as piquant as that borne from hopelessness, incompetence and loneliness. But to enjoy this song, you don't have to dig Billy Liar's lyrics (in point of fact, maybe it'd be better to ignore them), you just have to want to hear a good-time good-cheer bit of summery indie pop. And the chorus is eminently singable: that's important to me.

80.Pulp – Common People

Probably too obviously written on a typewriter, this short-story length fantasy about transgressing low vs. upper-class caste barriers via theft and sex is off-putting, obvious, and annoying. And, passionate, existential, frantic, resigned, hopeful, with a lyrical motif that gains momentum like a drunk-driven late-model used truck going down a hill. If you aren't a person who feels the urge to learn lyrics and sing along, it'll probably skip off your atmosphere. Recommended for the oppressed politically-conscious post-emo kids; and me.

81.Madeleine Peyroux – Don’t Wait Too Long

Most optimism is over the top—it's too loud, too bright, it doth insist too much. Not so with this straightforward iteration of a future happiness. These strings of good-faith self-help platitudes may not have any critical mass, but, this understated jazz-pop makes up for its obviousness with an unblemished acceptance of the things to come. I've loved it since the turn-of-the-century Dockers commercial.

82.Beirut – After the Curtain

Certainly one of the more subtle songs that I love, if you can even call it a song. More of an epilogue than anything else. A veiled consideration of habit and freedom. But in all truth, I love it because it's beautiful to me. And there's all those people cheering and clapping. It moves.

83.Madonna – Ray of Light

I can't decide if it's the chorus (And I feel / like I just got home / and I feel / and I feel), or the propelled 64th note tremulous arcs, sirens, crickets, squawks, tweets, and jet-engines that lead the beat, Madonna's wheeling performance, or the mixing—which grabs and skews the track back and forth between the speakers—that make this song so compelling. It's a just fast as fuck, and puts in me in a hyper-manic tight-focus zone. My two fastest minesweeper times have been occurred when this song was playing, and that's no joke to me.

84.Leonard Cohen – Famous Blue Raincoat

You're living for nothing now / I hope you're keeping some kind of record / yes. I'm not sure if this interpretation is borne out in established rock criticism, but I can't help but see Cohen's variously damaged characters/auters as exploring some kind of ideational apocalypse, the endgame of a bizarre bohemian experiment, its damaged narrator's flattened monotone reflecting his stunted traumatized internal states. The dirgelike quavering backup singers set the song up perfectly, too: here is a frozen motionless blasted madness.

85.Franz Ferdinand – The Fallen

Probably the loudest song on this list. Lyrically, a bunch of Jesus-in-Manhattan party-animal romanticized self-destruction tropes and random lines thrown in there as filler or to buttress some incomprehensible symbolic paradigm. I yell all the lyrics I can understand, I mumble the rest. So they say you're troubled boy / just because you like to destroy / all the things that bring the idiots joy. How could someone like me not appreciate that level of deluded self-protecting arrogance?

86.Aimee Mann – Save Me

I loved this song before the lyrics actually applied to my life. I loved this song when I was in high school, when I didn't know my ass from my heart, and would have announced my studied boredom and superiority over any considered study of the complex length of adult life, the minor emotional mazes that are simply built-in with the passage of time, the incredibly fraught oddity of living more than a few years as a person without the excuse of ignorance. If that makes any sense. Plus, it's a really good song.

87.Donovan – Colours (long version)

Beautiful. Featured prominently in Rules of Attraction. (You remember....the scene where the girl and the guy are getting ready for class, meeting serendipitously in the hall, falling in love, all that). As in every case, I prefer the slower, more sentimental version. If you don't know, now you know.

88.Dr. Dog – The Breeze

Songs like this one often come in to my life and burn out just as quickly. Unremarkable dust-in-the-wind existentialism on Crosby-Stills-and-Nash classicism. But I like the lyrics completely, the advice-for-the-weary, a balanced combination of hopelessness, awareness and acceptance, so rarely linked in life or music; like one of those poems or a life-changing essay: you just have to revisit, reify it to yourself, every now and then.

89.Serge Gainsbourg – Cargo Culte

I don't speak French, and I have scarcely a clue of what Serge Gainsbourg is talking about in this song (yes, talking: there are barely ten sung phrases on the whole album) beyond his love for Melodie Nelson and ritual tribal fantasies. What is clear includes grimy electric guitars, layered chromatic scales, grinding baselines, a full chorus shrieking open syllables. Too much slow-burn fun to bemoan the loss of any meaning in translation.

90.Tony Bennett – The Good Life

The most irony-saturated song I've ever heard—not bad for appearing fifty years before our oft-lamented contemporary golden age of irony. All the more heartbreaking for its world-weary awareness. A sly elegy for isolating freedom.

91.MGMT – Kids

I don't know how the lyric take only what you need from me can sound so victorious. Get up, y'all.

92.Elini Mandell – Moonglow, Lamp Low

Required: the bourgeois apparatus of relaxation: tea, a day off from work, a deckchair outside, music on-demand. This song is a dose of a simple mood; in fact, is so simple and earnest anyone could write it. But that's what I like about it. If Sinatra had sang it, it'd be a “performance” buried beneath an orchestra, but who wants that? This is music for a stripped down mood; execrable “soft jazz,” demanding of cool air and a refrigerator full of drinks through the glass doors in the house waiting.

93.Norah Jones – The Nearness of You

A classic rendition of a gold standard.

94.Underworld f. Radiohead – 8 Ball

This song isn't going to end up as part of the official Radiohead canon. That's okay. The lyrics don't add up to anything that even remotely hints at meaning. It's pretty much a chill-out house track: not your usual recipe for preferred heartbreaking moments of crystalline beauty. Somehow, though, it works to create an awareness of the goodness of life, a hyper-lit bit of fascinated hope. Proust's meditation on the madeleine this is not, but, a similar first-person access to happiness is constructed here. Going on and on with this nonsense description of random people on the city street. A subtle build-up over eight minutes, guitars coming in like rain, the chords resolving and the beat drops, and suddenly the whole is more than the sum, access to the immediate.

95.Coldplay – Clocks

It's probably not fair that Coldplay is as huge as they are, but the reverbed piano in this song is like light breaking through clouds, wind through rolled-down windows.

96.O.P.M. – Heaven is a Halfpipe

In large part, you can count on the songs on this list to provoke one or another specific emotional response in its purest distillation. Usually I enjoy the ideal forms of contemplativeness, outright despondency, or tenderness, as I find these experiences most fraught with bubbles of unlabeled meaning. Only rarely do I dig a song like this one, whose sole purpose is getting dumb, straight rocking, twisting-out mad happiness. I don't skateboard and rarely smoke drugs; I don't care about “the man” when he “fucks” with the “shit” I want to do; and I don't condone skipping biology. But I'll stand out a sunroof going down Main shouting joy when this comes on my itunes clone.

97.Jason Mraz – I'm Yours

To complete the irresistible-irritating trilogy I present: Jason Mraz's mega-ubiquitous I'm Yours. In contrast with other songs I hate to love (on account of the company I'd share, or those evil little popsong tics that drive me crazy), here the lyrics are front and center of my ambiguity. For starts, Mraz sings the word “scootch,” as in scootch on over closer dear. Ugh. Nor would I follow that ghastly phrase with the equally cloying and let me nibble your ear. Cringe-inducing. But! Beyond that, I'm Yours is a trenchant plea for immediate love, built on nimble wordplay and an overdose of truisms, which are always fun when set to music that seems to animate.

98.Green Day – Warning

I get why it's easy to sneer at Green Day's uncomplicated pop offerings. I sneer, all the time. I sneer while I'm getting down and grinning like some kind of glue-sniffing idiot. The hummingbird part of my mind wants to hear this song at least once a year: three chords, a rhythm straight out a punk-obvious drum machine and all a sudden I want to shout. On the line between desultory adolescent anthems and heavy-handed postured political statements, Warning is almost meaningful, only slightly self-righteous, 100% everything that's wrong with convenient language of pseudo-intellectualism. What? I can't justify it. This song is crap. It's infuriatingly bad. Such good infuriatingly bad crap, though.

99.The Eagles – Desperado

I know where the Eagles stand in the continuum of artistic merit: somewhere narrowly in front of the Backstreet Boys and a critical light-year behind the Beatles. I'm not proud of having committed the sin of soft-rock. Like so many songs on this list, I enjoy this song for what it tries to be, for pretending to stand-alone, irrespective of history, for flailing pathetically toward sincerity. (Even if it is an easy mass-communicable sincerity). I get that it's played out, (except that it's not played out to me). Sometimes I'm moved by it. That's it.

100.Okkervil River – Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe

This song probably doesn't deserve a spot on this list when you consider the fact that every time I turn it on, I'm trying to decide whether or not I hate it or love it. The singer's voice is annoying in full emo-rock mode, and the lyrics that aren't inept make no sense. (Or, rather: they're so scattered so as to obviate any careful parsing). But it's really passionate. Really, really passionate. I'm always won over by this approach: even if you're out of your g-d g, as long as you say it with conviction, really commit, you know, you can't fail completely. How do I not give props to that?

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[102 tracks; 597 MB; compressed in .zip]

My Year in Youtube Uploads

2009-12-31T05:17:00.000-08:00

I embed these only for the sake of inclusiveness.

Boston: A retrospective

2009-12-31T05:14:00.001-08:00

Things I didn't like about being in Boston:

not writing anything substantial
not getting a job
not successfully procuring a new copy of my driver's license
eating low-quality processed foods
not meeting anyone in the spirit of human equality
wasting hundreds of hours watching internet-tv
fighting with darla
having the world's craziest 28-hour-day jet-lag vampire narcoleptic schedule
stooping to embarrassing lows in order to smoke cigarettes
living in a house full of cats and getting cathair on my clothes
living in a house without scissors and not being able to trim my bangs

Things I liked about being in Boston:

the weather (I always like the weather no matter where I go)
the crowds of hot girls on Newbury Street
learning the subway
watching all of House and Star Trek: Voyager
sitting on the patio
writing my droll post-hopelessness blog
starting to play the piano again
the makeshift coffeepot
walking in the street late at night
the Boston Public Library
the pleasure of smoking em when you got em
the top 100 song list
staying up until you pass out from exhaustion
walking down the block and around the corner to sit on the sidewalk in the dark orange light to steal wi-fi

Somerville

2009-12-31T05:09:00.000-08:00

Darla and Elena and I stayed up late tonight. Most of the conversation was a rehashing of our summertime talks about philosophy, touching on the anti-postmodern argument, dissing the multivalent theories of truth, reaffirming the “Deep Background” of external reality and sense-making, the value of living insofar as it is possible in the “desert of the real,” despite the various failures of knowing and the ultimate meaninglessness of any edifice built to support a life. I praised Elena's steadiness, her mostly un-idealized approach to living in the world: work, school, friends, consistent romance, pets, steadiness. We drank coffee and smoked cigarettes. The cat at the screened-in window paced the sill and mewed insistently, conveying its impotent feline irritation at our incomprehension of its demands.

Finally, after talking for several hours in the close dark of the patio, we took a walk in the street. The night was pure velvet, warm, with layers of moving air passing through the branches and up the asphalt. I walked into the night barefoot, carrying my laptop as a portable boombox, chasing and being followed by one of Elena's escaped cats. We listened to sentimental music, hoping to experience the always-unexpected profoundity of emergent nostalgia, the thrill of specific iterations of beauty, that rising of directionless happiness, washed by submerged waves of deep feeling. Following along with the music, Darla and I occasionally lapsed into meandering accompanying harmonies. I stepped on a slug and screamed in an undignified manner. Passing the houses, we looked at and talked about the grainy dull of orange mercury lights and black dapples from summertime-heavy trees.

At the end of our walk, we stopped in the street and played an ad hoc game in which we picked up broken crabapples with our toes and tried to fling them down the street. It was fun, and we weren't even drunk.

In the Train Station

2009-12-31T03:59:00.001-08:00

A large public bathroom. Shiny tile floor: a slick, seminal sheen; black and white tiles in ugly symmetries. The middle urinal is covered with Caution Do Not Use sashes, bright swathes of wide yellow tape. The floor is covered with a thin skin of puddle but there is no sound of splashing as I step across the room. Sighing, I release my piss. The water boils in the bottom of the urinal. Invisible flicks of launched urinewater splash on the floor, rippling in specks on the floor. This is art, I think, thirty percent ironic, thirty percent sincere, and forty percent drunk. In particular I enjoy the caution-taped urinal, the contrast of bright yellow tape in a long, dull, empty Manichean bathroom.

Orderly arrangements all over in this train station. Long rows of chandeliers. Tiles in the floor, connect-the-dot angles of red squares in a sea of gray. Benches: human-oiled, gouged walnut, endlessly smoothed, pews with armrests.

Train stations in small metropolises are devastated and overlit. Everyone is tragic, desperate, heightened antiglamor, staring at old arcade machines, rows of pamphlets for local casinos and support-groups meeting in churches.

Ostentatious 1980s-era security cameras are perched in every corner of the room. A fat man in a large t-shirt pushes a stroller, walking in circles around the station. A woman with a massively beaten face—an exalted slew of bruises—sits beside her man, their raised cones of hair lopsiding the symmetry of the long benches. Even the prosperous-looking elderly couple who sit (relaxed in their chairs, flipping through real-estate all-ad newspapers) may be sneaking cheaters, casual in a lifetime of lies. Why not?

People move slowly down long staircases. The escalators are abandoned, blocked off with more plastic caution tape, permanently undergoing maintenance. A cheerful ticketsalesman in a uniform, telling lies about his children—a young doctor and a young professor, of course—smiling and making mild comments. What astonishes is the banality of these human people; they wear drab colors, or neon, they're fat, or skinny, they look entirely normal, hideously unfamiliar, moving into the train station, carrying bags on tiny wheels, wearing dirty white hats, thin pink plaid blouses, grey t-shirts and baggy blue jeans, utterly normal, with sharp little jutting pharonic beards and close-cropped hair.

The elderly couple engages the fat stroller-pusher in a brief dialogue about his child. They compliment its cuteness, its docility and patience. My mood is even. I'm listening to the new Electric President album, drinking rum and coke in an aluminum can, looking at the long shards of reflected chandelier light in the dented woodstain of the pew-benches. If I may be honest, it seems that the last eight years have been marked with disquiet; with an anxious inauthenticity. I'm tired of being the way I've been; I'm tired. I'm ready for what's next. I'm ready for what's next.

On Drugs

2009-12-31T02:12:00.001-08:00

this is a thing that happens inside theoretical things. Cops THEORETICALLY come through the door,

I force the others to leave. But yet I wish to get others. I cannot use big words now. That annoys me. At least I can say that I am annoyed. Insanely, I correct the typing mistakes that I make now. That is insane. It GOES AGAINST THE BODY. I used those words for emphasis. I have to plug in my computer, not because the battery is dying, but because I am obsessed with plugging in my computer. This focusing that I am making myself doing is very interesting. Why do I focus the way I want to focus

after nonsensical ramblings of this so

I want to laugh hysterically.

I cannot focus. I theorize this is because.....

my essential nature: I wish to understand things. I feel desire, i.e. I laugh,

and I want to CONTROL this laughter

personally historically, this would be a thing

I feel my desires manifest phsycially.

Similarly, music hits me and I feel it ina physical way. My previously “mental” appreciation is become physical..

I like the smoke.

I am smoking. I like to describe the things that are happening. Somehow typing and smoking are easier than typing alone.

I am waiting for the cigarette to die out because it pleases me to sit here, in the warmth, TO SIT

clearly, in the future, the value of this document is IN WHOLE, to document my insane feelings of being on this trip. I do not want to be meta, but I am meta. Insert here HILARIOUS LAUGHTER AND SO ON. I am really out of control with this laughing.

I like this music a lot and I wish that other people could hear this music with me.

This is why I like writing: I wish to share the things I enjoy about life with others. In this case, music.

I am glad to be on these drugs. I enjoy in a shameful way the way I will be faced with these 'ARTIFACTS' of my doings and typings tomorrow. I am laughing about this.

Writing is about editing. I believe that. 'the state I am in' by Belle and Sebastian.

That idiot told me that “i bring a whole new energy to this place.”

those two girls go into the room to have sex. I wish to talk, so I call grace, putatively to answer her query about wherther I am going to fuck buttons on sunday, but, truly, to communicate with her in some circular and hilarious fashion as I find now approrpatie.

Girls from the next room are yelling at me. They are saying “yes” and so on in response to this laughter. Presumably they are therese and alex. (who I wish to call “that girl”)

wow, I am also feeling visuals. I think the word 'WOW” is less of a mental approach to the world. It is, instead, a word that is amenable to 'guttural' or 'visceral' or whatever. Maybe that's why we say it.

I am struck by an urge to make a phone call to brandon. I pick up the phone and then set it back down because I could just as soon sit here IN MY OWN metaphorical feces. The people in the next room are being very “physical”. They seem to be hitting the wall with open palms. They are being noisy.

I am like the character in Borges

thank god I do not have the internet on this laptop because then I would disappear into the internet, randomly wiki'ing one thing after the other.

I am suspicious that the other people, in the other room, are not having sex, but are instead engaged in some social activity....i understand that this is paranoid, and demonstrates my deep need to 'FIGURE SHIT OUT' and

yes. That said it. I giggled, re-rereading that line and understood that my....
wait.

There is something about other people. Am I interested in them, or not? I seem to be trying to form some “universal” theory about myself, access some

people come from the next room. I am distracted from my earlier task of changing the music which annoyed me. “take my breath away”

I get up and put on a song by the beatles. The people disappear because they are annoyed with my incessant and arrogant solipsistic questions. I badger them.

Let me describe this experience: there are people here, and I tell them to change the music, and they do it. I do not think this 'MEANs' anything....they simply “want things' from me.

“i am exremely suspicious,” I say to the red-girl

“it shows,” she says, looking at me as if I am insane.

Therese has disappeared. “are you having fun?” I ask. She thinks that I am displeased with her efforts.

A few minutes pass. Thesere kisses the red-girl.

“i do not want things,” I say.

My Year in "Realizations": Nihilistic Sententiousness Edition

2009-12-31T01:36:00.000-08:00

1. Nobody likes to admit that they are a bad person. Somehow, even as one's failings are being described with a tedious Socratic inexorability, in the absence of mysterious self-condemnation, it's easy to think: I can't be all that bad, and in fact, I'm not that bad. There are two reasons for this: first, and most obvious, you simply can't give up on yourself; even suicide is an expression of a perverse self-interest. And beyond that, the whole concept of “bad” and its corollary implied framework is nothing more than vague nonsense. On some intuitive level, we comprehend the flexibility of moral concepts. As for me, I shake my head, tell myself that I'm an idiot, tell myself that in the future, when things change, I won't make the same mistakes, that's all, they're just mistakes, not an expression of a deeper and more inevitable problem, some moral hideousness. It's just a few lapses in judgment here and there, bad habits, forgetfulness, non-problematic humanity, even at its worst, nothing more than the pitiful eruption of stupidity at the junction of desire and frailty, perspectivelessness and headlong motion.

2. a harvard education is ornamental

3. Life will never be solved. How deeply do I wish it were, somehow, a problem, a puzzle, something amenable to understanding and contemplation. Instead, understanding and contemplation are merely beautiful within themselves, hobbies (in a sense), lovely little habits, but, in themselves with nothing to do with the larger thing, because nothing has anything to do with the larger thing, there is no larger thing, nothing to be done, nothing to be said (with the possible exception of do your work, but, still, workers aren't guaranteed anything).

4. me: you know what I realized?
the people on seinfeld often
Brandon: what's that?
me: should lie
they should lie.
Brandon: they should lie to whom?
me: but they don't.

5. i just realized that it is destructive to your typing score to backspace and change the mistakes you make.
lowers your score, and it still counts it as a mistake.
i'd say my normal typing speed is something like 50 or even as low as 40
i can crank it up, you know, but,
typically i don't.

6. while postmodern critiques are very important, they aren’t salient to the point that everyone should throw everything out the window. postmodernism is like the last and least important thing that a person really needs to know about.

7. most critical decisions one makes in life are made a). without real comprehension of the import of the decision on the part of the decision-maker, and, b). without a real interest-in or an awareness-of the complex variables that motivate the decision.

8. realized that a life lived for oneself would end up with hopelessness, or even more meaninglessness, above and beyond the baseline level of ontological meaninglessness that everyone has to deal with. But at this point, I can't remember my actual reasoning behind that conclusion, if there was any.

9. Satisfaction is ephemeral at least, and irritatingly glutting in large doses. But dissatisfaction chafes; you must balance a view of your life between regrets-averted and dreams-yet-to-be-fulfilled. It's not easy. Post-ironic happiness is an exceedingly rare bird.

10. if you're ignorant, your ignorance annihilates even the possibility of awareness of not-ignorance, the strange pleasures of complexity and distance at the end of a pursuit of awareness.

11. Laziness precedes hopelessness; not vice-versa.

12. The most important "realization" I've realized, the truest truth I think I know: Change—be it for good or bad—is the seat of feeling. Written here, it seems small and tautological and pointless and possibly insane, if not obviously incorrect. In my mind, though, with an elaborated, almost infinite definition of "change," it looms over life and mind as both axiomatic and practical.

13. Realization-I-had-years-ago-and-also-now: everyone is more or less childlike in their essential psychological simplicity; even apparently powerful "individuals" are powerless, that is, determined etiologically.

14. Crappy realization about myself: my urge to listen to new music directly correlates to the existence of other people for whom I can play this music. When there's no one in my life I wish to impress or educate, when there's no one with whom I wish to share special things, I don't tend to seek out new, socially useful stimuli. When in absence of people-I-wish-to-cultivate, I don't feel the artistic impulse to self-expansion. I'm crap.

15. No life is static; even lives oriented actively against the flash and crumble of change are pushed inexorably. The bare fact of change is met with the flexibility of mind on every level: researchers probe the mental mechanisms that enable us to differentiate between our family pet and a thousand junkyard dogs; things retain their continuity in our minds, if seen or imagined, if standing or walking, in the afternoon light or the morning, when the dog is a pup and after it attains its majority. Contemporary philosophers, these virtuosi of the self, are similar, interrogating their experience, sorting through stimuli, mapping memories as they are formed, charting their minor mental earthquakes; weighing epiphanies as they occur, trying to find common-denominators for incidents of wonder and beauty.

16. The inevitability of motion is the identified culprit for many deep pains, manifesting in tragedies as a longing for the past. We are wrenched as our constructions crumble; we feel dread, the tearing of the roots of the mind from thousands of days packed hard underfoot. The obverse is equally apparent: the inevitability of transformation is the last hope when life goes awry; when the momentum of everything that we cannot or did not control heads us off the road and into various ravines; the possibility of escape remains; the inevitability of failure is balmed, if temporarily—the sky is glimpsed through prison bars. The mind lurches against the flat facts: remembering the limitless freedom of childhood, returning to the thoughtless contentedness of lolling dogs laying in the living-room sun; we remember love and moments of unfolding possibility, in a floating twilight of vague fantasies and an amazing foreknowledge of future success and the unlimited freedom that we have, our own, for one or two moments.

17. The highest expression of the dynamism of life is the urge to freedom. In America on a Saturday night, streets dry and wide between buildings, the kids stream from bar to bar to hot dog stands and taxi cabs, young and attractive, looking at their friends, stunned that they’ve come this far, happy or at least available to life's wonderful possibilities.

18. Paltry realization #1: we're in the real world. STDs and meth teeth. If you don't believe in causality, you don't believe in anything.

19. We are all very deeply within our own lives. This means that we aren't capable of seeing with our emotional eyes, so to speak, the ultimate emptiness of most of our concerns. “How good we have it” is the least accessible “true” "fact," 99.99% of moments. Most of the time, we are just people. Living our our lives. I understand this.

20. Two parts: 1.I had a strong sense of shame about myself and my life.
2.I was had paranoiac delusions and/or philosophic beliefs about myself and others to the effect that I “knew” “immediately” that “everyone is alone in life” and is “floating” on a “sea of pointless desire.”

21. Annoying realization about myself: I have been capable in my life of an astonishing paranoia, hyper-vigilance, which I'm constantly controlling, the way one contains some kind of animal, a beast, an opponent in a wrestling match, an abnormally large industrial dump-truck, a wheelbarrow full of bags of cement dust going down a hill, a boat with waterskiers behind it in a crowded lake. I wish to seem off-hand, breezy, and indifferent, and in fact am, most of the time, and have succeeded via indifference and exuberance and a kind of intellectual condescension about decorum to occupy this blessed state of indifference most of the time, except for moments when I'm not breezily indifferent, but in such moments especially I work to remain socially indifferent, which doesn't work: I'm sure I'm widely understood as sensitive and easily slighted and, by way of consequence, am known as weirdly insecure: another one of those smash-mouth judgmental lunatic pussies.

22.Am always presenting schema or vague proofs or entire new vocabularies by which I intend to show that the concept of “friendship” or "love" or any social term as it is used shorthand is hoopla, fallacy, weakness, nonsense. And the interesting irony of this is that at the same time I want deeply to love everyone and express this love: I have a deep joy before them, I want to possess them, want to understand them, want to abuse them, cajole, argue, watch, dominate, ignore, leave unexpectedly; I want to convert them, play them music, take them into locked buildings, drink alcohol, share cigarettes, dance, create out-groups, analyze out-groups, destroy out-groups, moonwalk on the fringes of out-groups, articulate our vast mutual superiority over these out-groups.

23.I don't think about them when I'm gone.

24. realize that if I don't finish Swann's Way by the time I'm old, I can safely say that I wasted my life. Not that I won't waste my life on many levels. Practically everyone wastes their life on the level of risk and art and time. That's fine, kinda: things being what they are, ontologically, everything is wasted inasmuch as everything is arbitrary, or inasmuch as everything passes away. But, unfortunately, I've wasted my life on the level of basic human interaction, which is different from any grand collapse or Van Gogh ear slicing or small-business bankruptcy, a happenstance much more tragic, because the failure is so banal, because everyone should have happiness in the world of people, everyone should have the habit of vulnerability and fun and time and mutuality, which I never have, and never have had, mutuality, I mean, and by that I simply mean: I never seem to be with people equally in the same place feeling the same things. Or something.

25. Imagine the saddest and most profound novel, with a collection of phenomenally brilliant and tragic characters, a thousand poems, fragments, sheaves of thoughts, observations. Well, what's even better than that superlative collation of distilled beauty, is that it all came from one person in the world, a writer, one who struggles in the world, through weeks and hours, arranging, collecting, considering, making money and spending money, yearning, within the world of desire, power, hierarchies, reading book reviews, saturated in the world, inescapably one's own self.

My Year in Wasting Time

2009-12-30T22:54:00.000-08:00

google chat

chain rxn

Mini-Putt

lurking on comment threads

Ginormo Sword

reading about politics

Making Quantified Life Spreadsheets

Watching TV on my Laptop

Drinking Unnecessarily

Darla and I compare our guilt

2009-12-30T15:29:00.000-08:00

Darla's guilt:
Being an American
Environmental Issues
Her class ranking in the world
Her health
Political apathy
Taking more than she gives
Not respecting her friends
Not doing the dishes if someone makes dinner
Wasting time
Sleeping in
Drinking too much
[regret] Not talking to more people

My Guilt:
Being in relationships where I have the power
Letting people down
Not calling or writing / Not wishing people happy birthday on facebook
Wasting time / wasting my life / not writing
When cars stop for you at crosswalks in cases when it would have been better for everyone if they would have just gone on and let you cross right behind them.

New Orleans

2009-12-30T03:46:00.001-08:00

Energy

2009-12-30T02:49:00.000-08:00

This morning, a washed-out high-altitude blue summer sky. I'm sitting outside the coffeeshop beneath an arbor, birch and cottonwoods offering shade, little bits of cotton floating in the air around me, tumbling back and forth on the flagstone pavings, rising and falling in a thousand tiny directionless drafts, moving like slow fireflies, bits of ash from a bonfire, rising and falling very slowly, describing circles and spirals, back and forth. Listening to the Field cover of “Everybody's got to Learn Sometime.” It makes me feel as if whatever had been bothering me is already safely ensconced in the past; as if I've “learned” something critical about being in the world. But of course I haven't learned anything, and nothing really has changed; epiphanies are still simply disconnected emotional artifacts, entertaining, pleasurable, but, worthless. When good things happen, there's no real way to make those good things mean anything, there's no way to get the good to continue; I have no method for the creation and sustenance of actual good feelings. I'm talking with my sister:

—I appreciate religious people, I say. —They have something I lack, a little less clarity, a little more magic. I appreciate that, you know, their ongoing expectation of mysterious transformations, magical occurrences, using words that don't mean anything but which somehow contain a whole host of things, possibilities, you know?

—Sure.

—The question is, as I see it, should I start taking anti-depressants?

—Well, Brian did say that you have 'bad energy' and that you're a negative person, possibly the most negative person he's ever met.

—He said that? Hmm.

—Yeah.

—I've been too hard on him.

Durango is a small town framed on all sides with the tops of mountains. Crowds of badly-dressed hippies, bicyclists and off-road customized Jeeps, Ralph Nader bumperstickers on Subaru wagons, recycling bins, solar panels, backyard greenhouses, compost gardens. Here, lights are turned off in empty rooms, people are self-conscious consumers of organic, free-range foods; “sustainability” is on everyone's lips, alongside an omnipresent discussion of “energy”—good energy, bad energy, coal, solar, the sustained existence of energy, this last a contemporary neo-religious causal catchall, a vaguely scientific religion, the physics principle of the Conservation of Energy having been somehow transmuted into a justification for the continuation of our lives as we know them, something to cling to, death-defying. I inevitably reply:

—Who cares if the energy in the universe remains constant? If I die, my identity will be utterly dispersed, which is the only thing that matters, because I won't be around at that point to take comfort in the conservation of energy in the universe.

Somehow, no one accepts this point. The universe takes on the qualities of your typical deity: dispensing mysterious justice in the form of karma; maneuvering people toward some putatively purposeful end, because everything happens for a reason, of course. Then these proponents of the universe begin in with hysterical anti-Christian rhetoric. It's embarrassing for everyone involved. I feel deep embarrassment.

What I Monologue About When I Monologue About Love

2009-12-30T02:23:00.000-08:00

—Love...

—Love??? I don't like that word. I mean, I love it, I think about it a lot, but. It's easier for me to talk about love in terms of desire. Sternberg describes love as “commitment, intimacy, and passion.” That's good, he does a good job, it almost seems like he's speaking authoritatively about a real thing, but, basically, I can't account for all the ways people use the L-word,

—The L word.

—That's what I call it, I mean, it's an important word. I don't use it lightly. That word has serious consequences, maybe as much as the N-word and definitely more than the other L-word. I mean, I'm twenty-five. At this point, relationships start to get serious, come on, I start throwing the L-word around and people are going to get hurt, not to mention adding to the general confusion, this is serious business, people's hearts, for lack of a better word, and you've got to be really careful. I've done what I can to avoid the stupid misuses but, there's no way you can avoid all the ways "love" and the way people think about what love...all these ideas are actually guiding people's real decisions, fucking people up, I can't account for it. Is the love an old man has for his wife the same as the love he felt when he first met her? What's the difference? To me, there's an important difference there. We're talking about human life, not fantasies, or images. You should know what's going on, be aware, track the developments in your emotional states, you know? Christians talk about storge: familial love, eros: romantic love, and agape, which they think of as spiritual love but which I see as general human love, or even a kind of general political love, but which isn't really love as much as it is concern, at least in me, maybe I don't have as much love as I should have. Maybe there's one brand of love I'm forgetting. And the whole love-as-neurochemical-reaction thing is obviously uninteresting, simply because though we're scientifically aware of the presence of certain chemicals in the brain when someone provokes in us a strong desire, we still know nothing of causation and nothing of maintenance, not to mention all the first-person cognitive manifestations of those chemicals. Iris Murdoch said perhaps love should simply be defined as when you're always down to spend time with someone else. And, in a different book, she says that love may follow from a deep, unaccountable mystery. All that's interesting to me. People always talk about the difference between love and in-love, and that's a huge, devastating difference they're describing there and of course we all understand what it means when they say that, they mean, 'I don't really care anymore.' The first is general appreciation and concern—the second specifically includes desire, it's personal, in that way. That's close to where I'm at, at this point: I can't say anything about love, the word is overburdened, bogged down with centuries of bullshit, idealized nonsense. When I'm talking about love, I'm talking about sustained desire, desire at the highest level. Of course, when you're in it, it seems to have legs. But later you realize that it didn't. So then you go back and you change the words you use to describe that experience. I haven't really worked the eventual fading of desire into my thoughts, because, I can't imagine wanting to be with someone without simultaneously having a serious, ongoing desire for them. But I haven't been married for ten years, either. So there's that to think about. Basically, when I talk about love, I'm always talking about the romantic love. I say I love you to Mom when we get off the phone, and it's true, I love my mother, in a way, in a way, but, I say it just because it makes her happy for me to say it, and I want to make her happy, and not bog her down with a bunch of philosophical bullshit. It's easier to talk about familial love, anyways, it's not as complicated, and everyone knows what's going on when you say I love you in a familial context. When I was younger, I used to say it was love when someone was unreplacable to someone else for a certain period of time. And in a way, that still works for me, though there's nothing about desire in that definition, and a good definition of love by definition includes a discussion of desire. From a purely philosophical perspective, it is clear that love, like everything, is inextricably and necessarily one-sided, a feature of your individual experience—if I feel love, my partner don't have anything to do with it, that's my love. Solipsism, maybe. And of course, when we talk about love, we have to ignore solipsism. But maybe not, maybe it's random instances of one-sided love everywhere. And you can see that I can't quite integrate the whole self-sacrifice aspect of love as the word is commonly used. Maybe at this point we should think about love in terms of desire and knowing. You know someone, and you desire someone. Obviously, the desire for them means you want to know them, that seems important to me that it happens like that. Love. The most intense moment of desire, what we used to call a crush, when someone is totally obscure to us, we don't even know what the fuck is going on, or who they are, even, it's desire at that highest level. The knowing is just a bonus, it's a nod to the ongoing nature of the desire. Then you have to think about the whole power aspect. I don't know anything about love as regards power, except to say that love, when it's most intense, is probably also associated with simultaneous levels of insecurity and uncertainty. Of course, no one wants to think that their love is motivated by insecurity, people want Twilight-style love, though almost everyone who thinks about it eventually agrees that insecurity, and, in particular, the urge to possession, is the insidious part of romantic love. It's a trade-off in that way. Maybe love is just a moment, that's how I break it down, most of the time, I think: maybe it's a moment when you feel the greatest anticipation, an irrational but overwhelming certitude for future happiness, you're convinced that the world is opening itself up. When that feeling is connected to desire for another person in a sexual way, bam, that's love, that's the moment of love. But, maybe love is ongoing, it's something you do. We should stop using the word. Except that it'll disappoint people, and mislead them. So you have to use it, you have to thread that needle. That's it, that's all.

2009-12-29T14:21:00.000-08:00

My Most Visited Websites of 2009

2009-12-29T11:28:00.000-08:00

1. Google
2. Gmail
3. Facebook
4. news.yahoo.com
5. Talking Points Memo
6. en.wikipedia.org
7. Pitchfork
8. NFL Sports on Yahoo!
9. Crooked Timber
10. Rivals at Yahoo! Sports
11. flickr
12. yglesias.thinkprogress.org
13. Mediafire
14. Youtube
15. usc.rivals.com
16. fivethirtyeight.com
17. andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com
18. Sports Illustrated
19. Hipster Runoff
20. Isohunt

My Year in Desktop Modification: The Evolution of a Confounded Artistic Style

2009-12-29T09:47:00.000-08:00

Talking to Traffic

2009-12-29T04:23:00.000-08:00

Leaving. I love the feeling of leaving, whether after destroying everything or making it all right—leaving is a sweetest release, a giant "fuck it! fuck it! fuck it!"

Arrived in Baton Rouge after a very long drive through the southern states at high speeds along wide freeways. Smoked seventeen cigarettes, drank two liters of Mountain Dew, a 32 oz green Powerade, and 72 ounces of various flavors of coffee and gas station "cappuccino."

There is no pleasure quite like that of driving a long distance by yourself. It combines elements of meditation with the unfoldings of constant stimuli, and as such, offers constant avenues for exploring the vast internal spaces of mind and thought, a compression of life itself, swinging wildly between tiny points, climbing from star to star on the suface of your mind's planetarium. One has no focus on which to project one's intentionality beyond that of the low-level reflex required to pilot the car down the road: no television, no music, no reading, no talk, no narratives, no point on which to orient one's considerations: your whole life is as open as you can make it be. Which turns out, of course, to be a surprisingly paltry set of spaces.

I think about my deceased father and his life of almost instinctive, migratory travel, flight to various nowheres via highway. His self-description centered on a penchant for remininscences, a nostalgic consideration of one or another episode in his complicated interpersonal life, his articulations always focusing on paltry mostly-imagined successes, always an obvious bulwark against some invisible body of unacknowledged failure. How did his thoughts structure themselves? Thoughts of friendships, churches, houses he would have liked to build, fantastical little semi-feigned scraped tickled and teased bits of passion toward one or another man-made phenomenon, courthouses and monuments; dreams semi-fulfilled at best, alternately confused and grandiose beliefs about himself and his life. Am I destined through my mistakes, my weaknesses, my own set of "confused and grandiose beliefs" to follow his irresolute dream-deferred life?

I follow thoughts of my father into a consideration of the past. At first, I think about the immediately proximate past: Boston, the trip with Darla, my life in California, the relationships I had when I was in California, almost all of which is dissolved now for better or worse in one way or another. Human entropy. I regret the part I play in destruction, but fear demands I move on.

Random thought: it would be good to take pictures of every weird town name or street sign that recalls some other, more famous place. For instance, Hollywood FL and Paris TX. I could really be a world-traveller in the limited sense of having a photo album full of smiling self-portraits in front of fake place-signs.

Random thought: At this point in my life, I am not inclined to imagine the future as it may have been; nor am I inclined to imagine it how it may be. My deep belief in failure demands that I do not stoop to the destructive release of fantasy.

What about the past? Last year on this night, I was happy. Full of a complex observant attentiveness: walking down my street at 2 AM, smoking and drinking coffee. The thunderstorms had blown over and the sky was completely clear, packed with stars. All around me, in each corner of the valley's bowl, storms of sheet lightning were still flickering silent in the distance, big flat flashes behind the mountain horizon. The weather was beyond perfect—summernight cool, not at all cold not at all muggy, layers of blended warm and cool going through the valley, fresh and still, a clear sky, and silent lightning in the distance from every angle. Walking down the road, lightning blinked through the sky; walking home, the mountains were flickering in the distance. The most perfect night I'd ever seen, and I knew it when I saw it. It is gone now but for a series of vague images and the resonant remnant of cool evaporation and electric air, the silence of cars on the highway. It is gone now.

After awhile, your driving-self degenerates to shouting and paranoid/hopeful speculations about the traffic. Is that BMW SUV going where I'm going? Why are we both going the same speed, side by side? Will we drive side-by-side all the way through Tennessee? What if I stop, will they stop later, and then in the morning after they stop and I stop and we both have started again, will we be beside each other again? And so on ad infinitum.

I've been on dozens of highways and through dozens of states. Why the elaborate parks on state lines? Who are they trying to impress with these elaborately maintained "Welcome Centers"? Everyone knows Mississippi is terrible.

Racist bathroom graffiti and oddly fetishized comments about the desirability of "black pussy" and "big ass."

Eventually you end up cursing and talking to yourself in tightening circular Rama Rama Rama spirals. Talking to traffic. Wishing it would storm so you could stop beneath the great square awnings of a gas station and feel the poignancy of rain falling, infused colors & smell of oil on the road, the heat dissipating and the summertime rain.

Driving into Louisiana, the clouds are pink and light and intricate; immediate though far away. Going where I'm going, I am incidentally chasing the center of a distant thunderstorm. An all-of-a-sudden awareness (all 'worth-it' things are sudden) comes: I'm driving down a perfectly straight road through a forest of tall heavily-boughed trees; I'm aware of it. A pure and perfect moment. The road actually presents itself to me as a "highway to heaven," as evil as such a phrase is: a thoroughgoing moment, complex, highly differentiated, durable, reverberant.

About

2009-12-29T04:17:00.001-08:00

—Bored insipid douchebag wriggles against the inevitability of submersion into bland American life, takes off, hits the road, spreading cynicism and stifled life everywhere, infecting everyone.
—That's you?
—Yeah. Zombie.
—Doesn't sound interesting.

Kickin' it with Chris Balint

2009-12-29T04:12:00.001-08:00

Sat in the fruit-tree and vineyard garden at a table drinking coffee watching the Perseid meteor shower after a punk rock show. Mosquitos feasted.

We had the kind of conversation one would expect between two passionate and intelligent diametrically opposed theorists/social critics/aesthetic-self-constructors. My heartfelt and cynical avowal of post-postmodernist intentional-emotivistic power-oriented desert-of-the-real social-constructivism contrasted nicely with his passionate idealistic conspiracy-theorist mystical memetics/emergentism good-energy municipally-mobile good boy styles. He said that he wanted to be offended and challenged. I said he didn't really want that. He said that my most particular skill is a grasp of rhetoric. I claimed to have an instinct to philosophy. We compared our respective information addictions and traded forgettable insights into the human condition.

Noteworthy aside: over the course of the day, I got into two full-speed bicycle accidents. In the latter, I t-boned Chris' bike as he turned in front of me. The former, I crashed into a curb and tumbled into a lawn while attempting to ride no-hands style.

Massive, Crushing Happiness (in four parts)

2009-12-29T04:01:00.000-08:00

1. 3 AM. We sat on a deck that smelled of old barbeque, burnt meat and coals, sitting beneath a patio umbrella laced with little while christmas lights. Eating a feta-topped salad and watermelon and drinking water. Darla's friend Ari described me as "snide and skeptical" while quickly couching this denunciation in a brief peaen to the virtues of "giving people a second chance."

We talked for awhile. Ari said that he had stared into "abyss of alcoholism" but staggered back. Darla commented that I wasn't really "bringing it" and went on to say that she was "so far convinced" by his perspectives, especially given my "misery" and what that must imply about my worldview. I suggested that I am "miserable" because of "social failings" on my part. Ari opined that I no doubt blame others for these failings. I said I didn't think so.

2. We drank beer on the streets in Cambridge. My left contact lens was hurting very badly and had hurt badly all day, so I spat it into the gutter. I couldn't get into any bars because I lost my driver's license.

Justine talked at length about desire, sex, and love. She ate three bowls of stale white noodles before vomiting all over the couch and then passing out. Darla fell asleep on a couch. We woke up at 7 AM and walked through the streets of Cambridge. In my visually impaired state, the morning light and the long shadows were particularly beautiful.

3. At the rooftop party, I spent the night talking to a girl I found attractive in the dim light. (Kay). After several hours of talk both alone and in groups, I went to her apartment, where we stayed up talking to her roommates. In a state of extreme inebriation, I began to pontificate about power and insecurity. She told me that she thought that I thought that I was irresistible. I said she was wrong and set about ignoring her, smoking cigarettes and talking about music. After everyone else went to bed, Kay and I messed around on her couch but she didn't seem motivated by sexual desire, a state which always annoys me in potential sexual partners. She went to her bedroom and passed out. I stayed up for another three hours, reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, eating cream cheese on spicy croutons, smoking cigarettes and drinking water.

4. When I arrived at the building in which the party was apparently taking place, Darla suddenly stopped answering her phone. I was stuck on the street, waiting. I called Darla fifty or perhaps one-hundred times in a row; she did not answer. After awhile, Darla came down and let me in. She had been doing sexual things with Justine and complained of "smelling like pussy." When I entered the party itself, I was disappointed: the party consisted of Justine and Darla displaying blacked-out-drunk exhibitionistic sexual shenanigans while four meat-headed Boston-flavor rednecks watched and made comments. Listening to a Phish concert on blown speakers in the dark of the rooftop.

At Darla's invitation, Ari the Zen Buddhist showed up. I said hello to him, drank two shots of Jamison and stole a full pack of cigarettes off the table and left. Justine was on her knees in front of Darla's chair, lifting up her shirt and kissing her neck.

Trip to Maine

2009-12-29T03:56:00.000-08:00

Darla and I went to Maine today.

We "hung" with her "friends" and talked. The "conversation" was unremarkable and the weather cold. I drank a Guinness and listened to their witticisms and fond reminiscences of people & places I don't know.

After awhile, everyone went their separate ways; we drove home. At home, I made several sandwiches with honey mustard & sliced beef.

Darla and I discussed my "problem" at some length. I hoped our conversation would be marked by the emergence of profound feelings or decisions, anything to pave the way out of my irresolute hopelessness, but, despite my greatest efforts at “manufacturing” “joy,” no epiphanic or purposeful feelings appeared. Instead, I made a few muddled remarks about the "implications" of "meaninglessness" before surrendering to the inexorable logic of contemporary life, the avoidance of pain, the necessity of building relationships, working hard, and planning for the continuance of the passage of time in light of the continuity of the formation of emotional memory. This "surrender" doesn't contain any plan for rebuilding, and I knew I would continue doing the non-things I'd been doing.

I stayed up all night watching episodes of House.

The Darjeeling Limited - A Soliloquy

2009-12-29T03:52:00.001-08:00

I have before me a copy of Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited. Elena presented it as a “fucking beautiful movie” before she disappeared for the night, leaving it to rest on the coffeetable. I look at the DVD case, check to see which actor received top billing (Owen Wilson, it turns out), read the cover, noting the effusive blurbs and the prestige of the newspapers & magazines from which the blurbs were excerpted, the one-paragraph pitch, enticing to the indie-inclined netflix subscriber, analyzing the effectiveness of the cover art on myself and making an approximate estimation of its effectiveness on others, what our respective reaction might mean about both myself and others in turn. I consider the film as it is presented. I've seen the movie twice, once distractedly, once attentively. Not consciously, somehow inevitably given the amazing amount of time in life, the accessibility of knowledge and my penchant for gathering information, it so happens that as time has passed, I've accrued an enormous body of knowledge about this particular piece of pop-art. At some point in my life, I've read the summary of The Darjeeling Limited's reviews on metacritic, condensations and complete expositions, pithy evaluations of astonished joy and manufactured disgust. Further, I am aware of the place of the movie in the socius at large; without effort, I am aware of a spectrum of assessments; the people with whom I've discussed this movie, their opinions and my opinions of their aesthetic acuity. I've browsed blog-borne ironic takedowns of clichéd Wes Anderson fans, brutal dismissals of twee-art & the easy pseudo-profundity of silence & ambiguity; friends have quoted epigraphs from the film to me and then discussed what it might indicate that we have the reaction we have, considerations of this movie as it exists in a continuum of Wes Anderson films and other films by similar filmmakers, this exploration of the privileged disaffected—less a consideration of the upper-bounds of high functioning autuers and more a bathetic evocation of the failure of constructing a continuous life, the bankruptcy of any contemporary spiritual paradigm, with class-conscious cues designed to evoke simultaneously the ecstasies of envy & superiority. These thoughts take place inside my mind within the space of only a few moments: I drink the rest of my coffee, open the refrigerator, remove a beer, thinking thoughts all the while, pop top, walk to the porch. A cat escapes and scampers to the basement, a fleeting feline glance over its shoulder holding the anxiety of its limited freedom, ears perked, a dank basement to explore. Stay down there if you want, I tell the animal.

Depression

2009-12-29T03:13:00.000-08:00

Listening to loud music at four AM. No one is home. Fun stuff.

Got up, ate toast covered with "Country Crock" & a generous layer of can-crumbled parmesan cheese. Two pots of coffee.

One of the girls came in and lifted the cigarettes from the coffeetable. She lit one on the gas stove without hesitation and stepped wordlessly outside again. In the same room, we didn't say anything to each other, and then she was gone.

I need to meet people I like. I have theories about this and everything. I've learned to ignore them.

The cats are running around the apartment, a frantic kinetic expression of feline athleticism & happiness. They bite each other, rise on backlegs and shrink down within themselves, moving slowly, bat at each other's faces, squinting at each other, wanting to spar but at the same time afraid of getting hit. They dash across the apartment and hide under the bed. A moment later, they're lounging in the center of the kitchen floor, spread completely.

I like cats, in a certain sense. I like them for their affectations and their psychological simplicity. The feigned complexity, indifference. Like children, adults, anyone.

Morning thunderstorms of life-affirming size and gravity pass over the city, rattling the windows, loosing a cinematically steady rain on the streets and rooftops and grass. The usual poetry of water on landscapes applies here, the moods all shaded gray, infused with heightened (albeit directionless, artificial) profoundity. I woke intermittently. Marveling at the progress of my hangover and soaking in the somnolent unreality of dream-worlds: the hollowed-out, uncluttered particularless nature of dreaming. My dreams all seem to be shot in brown rooms with tall ceilings and pure sunlight, full of open spaces and minimalist architecture. I buried myself deep in bed throughout the entire morning, trying to stay in these beautiful spaces, hoping to follow the narratives of my dreams to their natural ends. This is inevitably a failed enterprise. In dreams as in everything, meaning is always deferred endlessly.

Darla directed me to help her clean the car. This we did. Otherwise, I spent my day playing with Legos (putting together some abstract Lego art on a cratered Lego moonscape), watching Jarmusch's Cigarettes and Coffee (infuriating waste of time), playing two games of pool (I won both games), smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, &c.

This in addition to my usual salad of blog-browsing, reading, media, pseudo-intellectualizing, ruminating pointlessly and forgetting instantly while staring at things. Consumed “Glass Castle,” a leading light in the bizarro abused/starved/inexplicably-mistreated trainwreck-childhood-memoir genre. After hundreds of pages of descriptions of horrific familial tortures, the last page reads:
The author now resides with her husband, also an author, in New York and Virginia.

I realized today that the way I am now is the way I'll always be. This was not the first time I'd had this realization. Now as before, it didn't impact me in the slightest, and I continued along blithely doing the horrible things I'd been doing the whole time.

I want to party tonight. I will so do, and yet, "hate everything," i.e, feel nothing. Every party I've ever attended required a systematic mental neutering in the name of comity, all for some slight chance of back-slapping in-group world-champion mutual-masturbation.

I get up and walk through the kitchen, open the back door, light a cigarette. The people there are talking enthusiastically about their acid trips. I've never taken acid. I listen to their involved descriptions of one-time visual hallucinations.

Sitting alone in the scalding light of the living room. For reasons I don't comprehend, I start reading about Mixed Martial Arts. Attempting, in my feeble way, to access the purity of war, the pared-down immediacy of winning-losing, rules, absolute judges. Perhaps. I read sportswriter's editorial speculations about individual MMA fighters and the future of the pay-per-view MMA business model. This continues for a long time. The same way.

I Can Describe My Coffeetable

2009-12-29T03:03:00.000-08:00

Eating, standing up beside my coffeetable, dipping a spoon into a heavy cast-iron saucepan. The "Bold Flavor" of Bush's Baked Beans.

Watching 500 Days of Summer. So far it seems enjoyable. I can describe my coffeetable and watch at the same time without missing anything.

On the tall round table on my covered patio sits an empty Pepsi 0 and empty Bud Light can which both serve, alternately, as my ashtray. An empty champagne glass. A half-full coffeemug with a grandmotherly line of fake gold plating around the rim and dead moth floating in the eventually-evaporating pool of coffee. Three plastic water cups molded in deep shades of colored plastic. A novelty highball glass shaped like the leaning tower of Piza half-full of cheap still-cold carbonated white wine.

Spent the night reading blogs and editorials, watching formerly viral youtube videos and thinking about intellectual things. Took a shower and thought about aesthetics. After I emerged, dried off and got dressed, I sat down at the patio table and wrote some sententious "preliminary" "thoughts." (All thought is preliminary). (I am the king of sententiousness.)

Talking with Jesus on Hollywood Boulevard

2009-12-29T01:54:00.000-08:00

It's always bad when you're smoking and you feel like lighting up another cigarette. It is, of course, a sunny early afternoon in the city, with the usual crowds of tourists, aspiring actors trying to sell guided tours to stars' homes, standing, staring, holding stacks of pamphlets or star maps, sullen with failure, watching tourists pass, not even bothering to speak, distracted, whistling, scratching their heads, self-conscious, looking for obvious tourists, fat men in long t-shirts, shorts, and sunhat, wife in tow, camera bag around their neck. No, no, no, the tourists say, rushing off to their own brand of bland touristy adventure, air conditioned hotel rooms, congested streets. A skeptical-looking man with peroxided hair and a muscle shirt walks down the sidewalk with two large green parrots on his shoulders. The gaunt, 6'5” perfectly-bearded, long-hair photos+tips Jesus imitator sits down at the table next to me, free from his usual burlap robe, out of character, off-duty with his LA Weekly and a cup of coffee, Ed Hardy sunglasses and Ed Hardy t-shirt, hideously scarred and horned warped toes and nails, as if he's walked Galilee to Jerusalem a thousand times. He pours his coffee over a cup of ice and sips, chewing ice, flecks of milk in his mustache. Marilyn Monroe (one of four Monroes who frequent the boulevard, twirling all day long above the warm-dirty blast of a subway vent, white dresses growing dingy in the street air) walks up with Elvis (I think they're dating). They stand together at the corner. Elvis gladhands tourists: Wherya from, while Marilyn spins.

I sit down and talk to Jesus for a little while. Kevin, his name. He discusses the vicissitudes of celebrity/hero impersonation, the various reactions he gets from tourists: catholics, muslims, mexicans, atheists, thoughtful evangelicals who ask him if he's right with God. He says, “Really, I really need attention. It may not exactly be the attention I want, but, it is plentiful.”

Back in the U.S.S.R.

2009-12-29T01:35:00.000-08:00

Jordan and Jordan's girlfriend (Taylor or Tay) and Jordan's friend (Zach or Kyle or Jake) sat around at the pool today. Taylor's mom appeared and cut Jordan's hair. I gave her a glass of wine. Soon other people appeared. I hauled beers from the fridge and passed them around.

I was drinking wine and beer. I was drunk at this point. Suddenly I was talking to some people I didn't know in the parking lot. They were showing me their new car. It was like a sports car, they said, like a muscle car, they said, fast, but light. It was some kind of Cooper Mini with suicide doors. They invited me to look at the interior of the car. It was interesting. I said enthusiastic things about their purchase. I invited them to join our party. Some of them joined, the rest climbed into the new car and disappeared. I shook everyone's hand and bade them enjoy their evenings, grinning, for some reason, feeling wonderful.

Derek came. We went to the dock and went "shark fishing." Code for standing around and doing nothing and drinking beer. Drinking Miller Lite and Bud Light and Natural Light. Wine also. I did chicken fights in the pool with Jordan's gf and Jake and Jordan's little brother, who suddenly showed up at the party with his dad, the latter of which stood silently, watching the scene from the deck and drinking beer. Later, I dove into the pool with all my clothes on and lost my cigarettes. I was blasting the White Album over the outside speakers and into the neighborhood and singing along.

In a paroxysm of ecstatic inebriation that marks the beginning of the end of the formation of memory, I found Jordan and Taylor on their patio and stood there with them in the dark above the street telling them the secrets of life, smoking, slurring my words. The lights in the pool threw a bright green into the sky from deep in the ground. Helicopters and jet-planes were passing through the darkness of the night.

Coming Home

2009-12-29T01:27:00.000-08:00

Darla says,
—You're writing everything down, eh?

—Yeah. You better get used to it.

I put on a song and lean back in the passenger seat. She talks for awhile in high rhetorical style about “kitsch” and “camp,” competing definitions of crucial terms, artistic intention, the role of capitalism, the public nature of art, what is pornography. I talk about how coffee makes me anxious these days, announcing that I “can't drink coffee anymore.”

Familiar low green hills rising out of nowhere, ridges, rises, meadows, studded with asymmetrical evergreens. I sit in silence for a long time before weird guilt takes me over and prompts speech:

—Hey, I'm sorry I'm being like this.

—You seem extremely somber. Like you're going to burst into tears, or destroy something, or distracted.

I purse my lips and look out the window.

The sun is down now but the the sky is still a pale blue. The freeway, four lanes, a light gray concrete, going up a long, steady rollercoaster climb, totally empty of traffic.

She changes lanes. The car rocks on the minutely undulating road. John Darnielle singing tinny on my laptop. We pass a slow-moving double tractor-trailer covered with a seemingly random profusion of yellow and red lights. The landscape whizzing by: broken down outbuildings, a tattery red barn, an old paint-peeling farmhouse with twin satellite dishes bolted to a tin-roof awning. At the crest of the hill, a vista: neighborhoods and open green spaces spread out for miles, lit windows, piles of rocks, a burnt forest (all the trees decapitated and bare). Horses in a plastic-fence makeshift corral.

—You should read me what you're writing, she says.

I look at her and open my mouth and close my mouth and blink.

I look in the passenger-side window: my washed-out reflection and the startlingly clear reflection of hundreds of heavy passing pines.

—I've really been digging scenery and driving lately, she says.

—Scenery's nice, I say.

—When we get to Boise, I wish you'd hang out with Greg a little bit.

—Yeah?

—He's really ripe, ripe for change, but, he lacks exposure. I described my opinion of you to Greg a little bit. He's very excited to meet you. He thinks you sound very cool.

—How did you describe me?

—One of the ways is that you have a strong disdain for socially lazy people. People who don't give a fuck about knowing what is going on their lives, their relationships. I told Greg you were very demanding, you're demanding to hang out with, you refuse to let people queef around, you want to get to the bottom of it. Which sometimes causes people anxiety, but, in the long run is more worthwhile.

—Get to the bottom of what? What long run?

—I don't know. Life. Everything. The constituent aspects thereof.

—Huh.

A moment passes. I tap my fingers. —I suppose I agree. Sadly. But.

—But what?

—Never mind.

A minute passes. Darla exclaims:
—I've been feeling exceptionally light lately!

—I feel heavy.

—It's funny how we're different.

—Yeah.

Passing now through the farmfields of the Palouse. Rolling hills, seemingly too steep for farming, a billion shadows, small lakes in troughs in fields. You can almost see a tractor tipping over at the crest of a hill. Mud feet deep. Canals cut through the mud. Furrows in fields like an endless Japanese garden over a thousand undulations to the horizon.

Quitting

2009-12-29T01:20:00.000-08:00

I sit with Lenny and Therese and listen to them talk to each other. They are brilliant artists and dedicated alcoholics. Lenny has the habit of talking directly over the top of everyone else, attempting to anticipate the direction of the conversation and trying to jump ahead, and always getting it wrong, or, with weak-willed people, actually guiding the dialogue in insane little directionless circles, to the point that no one has the first clue of what is under discussion. It's an infuriating occurrence. I lay on their paint-soaked Persian rug, having given up on communication. I'm watching the ceiling fan spin, looking at the paintings on the walls, the recessed lights. They have each outdrank me six to one. They are talking about quitting drinking. I know that Therese is thinking about ending their relationship. Lenny knows this too, though he pretends not to know. He says,

—You're worried about stopping drinking. And baby, I am too.

—That's not what I'm talking about. I can quit drinking, with or without you. I'll quit, I have to. Before I met you, I didn't drink. I wasn't clean, but I didn't drink. It's a different kind of high. Before, I had a precise, sharp, controlled high, and I was in control of my high. Now...

—So you're saying it's my fault.

—I'm not saying it's your fault. I'm responsible for myself. I'm going to quit, that's all.

—I am too. Hey. Did I tell you how much I love this woman? She's an amazing woman. Babe, don't worry, the next six weeks, we'll get through it together.

Therese squirms on the bed and musses up her hair and puts it in front of her face.

She says,
—I'm not sure I want to quit drinking...with you.

—Whoa. That's a harsh word. What does that mean? Are you giving me the heavy hand?

—I'm not giving you the heavy hand, I'm just not sure I want...to do this any more.

She puts her head in her hands and shakes her hair slowly from side to side. Lenny crawls over and puts his hand in her hair and says,

—I love you, too. Baby, I love you too.

—I...I hate the way you love me, Therese says, tentatively, testing out the words, watching them drift in the air. Lenny sees them floating, and he looks into space as if he is sounding out the words, thinking it through. He stands and walks across the room. I sit up and watch. I look at Therese. This is a crucial moment, for them. Lenny looks at me and then looks at Therese. He says,

—I don't give up on love. But maybe we should. You know what, I should end it. I don't think I should keep going. I don't think I should hang on, if that's how it's going to be. But, I don't let go of love. Babe. Baby.

Lunacy

2009-12-29T01:19:00.001-08:00

Today, Darla brought her friend Cindy over, waking me up. It was 2:30 in the afternoon. She said she wanted to go to Taco Bell. I agreed to go.

Darla drove. Cindy was laughing inappropriately at a conversation she seemed to be having with her self. I didn't like that. Also, Cindy stood outside the car texting while Darla and I were sitting in the car, waiting. I didn't like that either. When she got in the car, after another earsplitting cackle, I told her that she was a lunatic. She disagreed vehemently, and articulated that I was the lunatic. I tried to explain what I meant by "lunatic," hoping to open a dialogue about the nature of "lunacy" and the challenges present in arranging social personae with the expectations of social interaction and the pressures of interpersonal need. She did not want to discuss these nuances.

When we arrived at Taco Bell, I did not want to go inside as I was wearing a pair of ratty sweatpants that I'd borrowed from Darla and I prefer to eat fast food while driving or at home, not in the greasy, soapy, weirdly dirty and clean spaces of fast food restaurant dining rooms. We continued a discussion of Cindy's lunacy. She said that I was not interested in anyone's emotions but my own. She was becoming hysterical. Darla told me that I should not have my claws out. I whispered for Darla's benefit a few of the brutal claws-&-fangs insults I had chosen to keep unarticulated. We agreed that I am not wholly evil. I said that if someone called me a lunatic, I would like to know what it was my interlocutor meant by this. Cindy showed no such interest in such things, which was decided by me to be yet another aspect of her lunacy.

Morning After

2009-12-29T01:12:00.000-08:00

Morning after with Colin and Shaun. A beautiful spring day in Hollywood. Outside the opened glass door, I can see the limp ends of a long weeping willow brushing back and forth with the warm wind. Beyond that, across the street, a square modernist apartment building, painted in vertical stripes of green and tan, with little square windows. The tops of trees, just rising to the window, are filled with caught light.

Colin walks out to the balcony, looks out at the street, then comes back inside. —Are you online?

—No, I say.

—What are you doing?

—I'm writing about you, obviously. What are you doing man?

He walks into the bathroom.

—Colin?

—Hold on.

He walks back to the balcony, cellphone to his ear. James, it's Colin, I was thinking about going out tonight to a couple of different places, give me a call back if you want to do something.

He paces. —I don't know, he says to me, what are you doing, dude?

—Dude, I'm not doing anything.

—What do you want to do?

—Dude, [I pause, scratch my nose, brush my hair off of my forehead]. —I don't feel very healthy. I want to feel healthy.

—What'd you say?

—I want to feel healthy.

Colin, walking around the apartment in little circles, to Shaun: —What's he saying?

Shaun, from the bathroom: —I don't know, I don't know where he is.

—I want to feel healthy, I shout.

—I don't know what that means, Colin says.

—It's the difference between shouting in some girl's ear in some loud, dark room, and, I don't know....Going out to dinner with six people and talking about public policy...or something. The first choice doesn't feel healthy.

I lay down for awhile on the floor, head on carpet, looking at the blue floor and the white walls.
The light in the room is nothing short of perfect: gauzy, diffuse, with open windows showing big patches of pellucid sky, blocks of light. The entire body of air over the city is moving gently toward the sea. The light is transparent, hanging in startlingly clear patches of blue between apartment buildings and treetops: palmtrees and weeping willows frame the light, light streams.

Colin walks past, shirtless, now, for some reason.

—You took off your shirt, I say.

—Yeah. Shirt's off.

—That's good, man.

Mississippi Studios

2009-12-29T01:08:00.001-08:00

I arrived in Portland and went to the Neon Indian show at Mississippi Studios with Grace. We drank 16 oz cans of PBR and witnessed a crashing, blasting, heaving scene. Mississippi Studios is narrow and deep like a shotgun house, with a three-sided bar in the center, crowding everyone toward the stage. Upstairs, a narrow balcony overlooks the stage, and crowds of people line the plexiglass bannister. Grace and I walked a long ways to get to the show. Once there, I had a really good time; a local band, either Tigercity or Guidance Counselor, was finishing their set and rocking straight to beat all fuck beneath incandescent white lights; seen from above, dancing bodies were flying in a sharp-contrast super-hi-lit boil. I was happy to be in Portland. It was one of those brilliant moments when the fantasy is actualized, movie-esque: everyone looked the part of studious 50% counter-culture conscious, the gender distribution was almost even, this platonic form of Hipster Concert Crowd: thick-glasses, white tights, the combination of mod-and classic thrift and elegance, ironic slouchiness and understated dressed-up. Neon Indian's set was forgettable, somewhat muddier than their album, but, energetic and well-received; I danced the whole time and, when it was over, felt that I could say that I had had a good time. After the show, Grace and I walked home, talking the entire time in the wind and the cold and the dark.

Cafe Was, 1:02 AM

2009-12-29T00:53:00.001-08:00

I'm upstairs at the Mezzanine bar on the second floor of Cafe Was. Three round tables are occupied by members of part of the apparently happy Los Angeles elite, paying $12 a drink, standing behind their girlfriends at the long bar. In the dim candle ambiance, they squint at drink menus by the light of iphones. A couple steps to the curved railing, leaning over, looking-out at the dining room twenty feet below—a bird's eye view of the VIP booths and the grand piano and the top of the piano player's head. The piano man plays a wonderfully percussion-free ballad cover of The Cars “Drive” to unanimous acclaim, we listen and look around, looking for witnesses, hoping to verify this unexpected pleasure in other people, talking about it, pushing back the heavy lavender velvet curtains, watching the slow spin of the piano and the gliding waitresses. Steve Shane, the bartender, wearing a good-boy early-high-school 1950's haircut, a red polo shirt and a blue leather skinnytie pours me a tequila-heavy ginger margarita. Mirrors; bottles of liquor stacked in a bookshelf lit with hidden orange lights. A silver absinthe dispenser with silver gargoyle ornaments stands tucked away at the end of the bar. Steve Shane says,

—Those people at 603 think they're fascinating.

—Are they?

—They certainly seem to think so.

—I don't blame them.

—Who could?

—We're all so fucking fascinating.

—Each to themselves.

—I have a taste for truisms.

—That you do.

He turns back to his work: Grey Goose White Russians in old fashioned glasses.

I clocked out and printed my timecard and signed the piece of paper we're told to sign. For a long moment, I stood at the server station, leaning against the countertop, looking at the floor, listening to the noises of the restaurant. I felt a rising tide of indulgent, sentimental feelings, that random interpolation of thought and feeling into the fabric of life, the intersection of vague desire, vague loss, abstraction, deep currents of a directionless emotion coupled with a kind of omniscient generosity, and knew then I could do some good writing for a few hours, if I seized the moment, if I sat down, if I thought about it, if I tried. If I got down and acted like things are important. The importance of things is not lost on me—the things that are happening now, even if they are to be “marred” by what seems like “failure,” are really the most critical things. Everything that happens to you is important, of course. But, even if I'm a million miles away from myself, or so fully within myself so as to vanish, I'll never get to be twenty-five-six again, alone, alternately battered and triumphant, sensitive and hard-nosed and self-segregating, intense and interrogating, unguarded to the good and bad things to come. Quite like this. Who's gonna pay attention / to your dreams, the piano man sings. I stared blankly at the floor for a long time, feeling sorry for myself, feeling profound, while people rushed past me, entering orders at the touchscreens, bumping through the bright-red colored swinging doors, carrying food from the clinically-bright kitchen into the wan, uber-romantic patches of flickering orange and yellow dusk.

Albums of 2009 Y'all

2009-12-29T00:49:00.001-08:00

1.Girls – Album

Like love itself, this album resists easy description. I suppose this is why every critic insists on droning on and on hermeneutically about Girls frontman Christopher Owens' fucked-up upbringing when introducing this group. The artist is dead, you guys. But these songs are alive. In a subtle way, as much or more so than the other feted musical decision-makers on this list, Girls creates pure songs. There are no accidental decisions on the album. Which is astonishing, given that Girls writes songs from the heart of a ragged, ocean-distorted, surfy lo-fi, shoegazing aesthetic straddling the line between desperation and total confidence, laying down intricate but not effete distorted indie-rock, broken tenor vocal-cord Elvis Costellan affectations, pure music: songs about love.

Ultimately, Album is an exploration of not only love, but the attempt within one album at containing the emotional and musical germ at the center of the entire history of rock-pop-songs-about-love, what-love-songs-are-about, bringing along all the emotionally fraught wreckage that follows (broken hearts, elaborate fantasies, bold intentions and thwarted desires). On the surface, the level of notes on a staff, chord-progressions and printed lyrics, this album is full of simple tautologies. On the level of practice, this basic set of as-fundamental-as-it-gets ingredients is simply essential.

2.Franz Ferdinand – Tonight

Speaking generally, I don't have much aptitude for rocking out. But this album makes me rock the fuck out. Not to mention geek the fuck out, gawk the fuck out, slack-jawed, air-drum and shout the fuck out. This Glasgow-based trio's third album brings the killing-it with ironic one-liners and dancey grooves and on-the-beat euroguitar—and one virtuosic songwriting decision after another. (Track four somehow encapsulates every iteration of love I've ever thought I felt, all the way down to “Yes I love you / I mean / I need to love.” I spent all of February walking Sunset to work shouting “You're never, never, never, never, / You're never going home” and all of July playing Katherine Kiss Me on the piano.

3.Micachu and the Shapes – Jewelery

This album expresses a lunatic savantism, a cartoonish ADHD collage of sounds roughly lumped into song form. You can almost see the cloud-of-dust expletive marks dialogue-bubbles standing-in-air illustrations as two hundred sonic ideas are wedged in to every two-and-a-half minute track. Consider first single “Eat Your Heart.” It starts out with a fat purring hip-hop beat, bird noises, a meandering line of distortion equally composed of electric guitar and a wordless vocal squall in Mica Levi's slum-bred Anglican. Okay, so, kinda M.I.A, you think, with some distorted guitars...no, wait, stop, here comes the next idea, a hooky acoustic guitar fed through a electronic filter and a tumble-down the scale melismatic melody that's completely out of its mind, but, surprise of surprises, and this is the point, it works, it hangs together, waw-waw pedal, tambourines, xylophones, handclaps, hands mashed on an organ, broken glass—a galumphing gallimaufry of pure pop goodness. What lifts Micachu above purveyors of random garage noise-making trash-can-banging improvisers is the seamlessness of the songs: every insane decision is anticipated and integrated and clearly understood, purposeful—one imagines hundreds of hours rehearsing in some dingy apartment, the scourge of the neighbors, maybe, but who wouldn't want to party with these savants?

4.Casiotone for the Painfully Alone – Vs Children

Stripped-down cassette-blurry simplistic four-track doo-wop marching dirges with repetitive piano lines and clunky drum-machines; Casiotone frontman Owen Ashworth's run-down overtone-laced baritone, intoning with a literary media res in a disconnected first-person about his character's various unsuccessful crimes, dilemmas, addictions, parents. So simple that it's easy to ignore—that is, not deliberately obscured and not particularly layered—certainly a rarity in this year of droney lo-fi and/or sparklingly overpacked productions, the unmistakable of bedroom-twee disguises surprisingly incisive songwriting, an understated and offhand talent for clear sight. This is a guy who is engaged with beauty in the world, overcome by it, run down by it, overdosing on it. I don't particularly care about the “meaning” of the album's arc—that doesn't emerge organically except as a post-hoc conceit, and fuck albums-for-critics. What makes this album is the flat, depressed melodies, the sense of life as small and broken and real, communicated.

5.Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

An almost-viral blogpost featuring “merciless” indie-band stereotypes laconically pigeonholes Phoenix fans as “People who don't listen to enough music,” a sentiment that almost works for me, given that I know people who hardly listen to any music who really dig Phoenix, and Phoenix are in commercials and movie trailers, and they're really slick and celebrity-ready. But these guys have serious chops beneath their teflon musicianship and intricately empty lyrical evocations. Each song or chorus blasts in with a ready-for-the-floor electro-fuzz and chill-out buzzriff before evolving into Thomas Mars's stuttery-pinched-falsetto lyrical patter, guitars and drums that seem to be playing the same notes, indistinguishable from each other in their function on the track. I can't say anymore. It's slick, and somehow, that's a compliment.

6.Animal Collective – Meriwether Post Pavilion

For those who actively follow the wonderful world of “serious music,” Animal Collective's ascendancy to the top of the pop pantheon was obvious and inevitable and expected, and when serious listeners heard Meriwether Post Pavilion, we were ready. This album's prismatic Beach Boys melodic sensibilities distilled-lifted-scattered through ten thousand laptop computers, swooping, sweeping, describing a huge space, made to be heard in large rooms full of light. They describe it with terms such as “crossover” and “massively successful” and “hit” and so on. To everyone else—most people, unfortunately—Meriwether Post Pavilion is, if it is anything, only a mysterious artifact from a field as obscure and involved as continental philosophy or some incomprehensible foreign sport: interesting, intricate, maybe, but not immediate. That sucks. Every time I'm stoned I feel the urge to put this album on, to dig its joyful, transcendent, with people (one of life's great pleasures), but, I always stop myself, because I doubt they'll get it, I expect cringes or indifferent bafflement. I want to explain to them that “I just want to leave my body for a night,” and play In the Flowers and talk about the shimmering melody of My Girls and the transition between the first and second track. Or, I want to play Summertime Clothes, which, despite the vocoderish underwater filter and the industrial zooms at the bottom of the track, is interesting and intricate in the best possible way, with a massive hook, “I just want to walk around with you," a thrilling best-of-all-worlds-blast.

I admit I have some beefs with Animal Collective's lyrics. For instance, regarding My Girls, I can't decide if “I don't care about material things / like social status / I just want four walls and adobe slabs ” is the product of stupidity, irony, or simple indifference—social status is certainly not material—a house certainly is material—this kind of thing irks me on a skeletal level. Also, the first verse of “Brothersports” sounds to my ear like a justification for guys giving blowjobs to guys while thinking about other things. Which is crazy weird. But these are minor quibs. This album is a muscular victory lap.

7. Bill Callahan – Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle

Bill Callahan's occasionally sumptuous, unambitious dinnermusik soundscapes are obviously crafted in the service of the life of the mind, featuring morose one-liner after morose one-liner, quiet, open intellectually ambitious obsessions with limits of thought. An infuriated philosophic ambiguity infuses Callahan's soft-rock acoustics, and that's what I like about it. It may be somewhat unnecessary to sing about atheism, but, when Callahan sings it, you know, somehow, that he's got a point, he's coming to this by way of necessity. And sometimes his philosophical problems are necessary: it is no mistake that his dream-bound Rosetta Stone of All Meaning is only a set of nonce syllables. So far from the content-free arbitrariness of 99.9% of lyrics: Callahan's music is in service of a thought.

8.The Pains of Being Pure At Heart – The Pains of Being Pure At Heart

Craftsmen of the Field Mice-revivalist variety, with a sound camped in the center of the über-sincere archetypal drum-machine bedroom-band jangly classic indie pop sweet-spot, occasionally verging near to shoegazey gauze, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart is willfully retro. I mean, they're aesthetically simple, but, their charms are not simplistic, akin to a Flannery O'Connor short story or a well-made urn, or something else. The why-i-like-these-guys taps into my mainline vein for music highs: good songs; melodies that emerge naturally, played like they know what they're doing.

9.Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest

10.Yacht – See Mystery Lights

11.JJ – Nº 2

12.White Rabbits – It's Frightening

13.The Mountain Goats – Life of the World to Come

14.Islands – Vapours

15.Akron/Family – Set Em Wild, Set Em Free

16.Fuck Buttons – Tarot Sport

17.Various Artists - Dark Was the Night

Disc 2

18.Heartless Bastards – The Mountain

19.Lightning Dust – Infinite Light

20.Dan Deacon – Bromst

21.Yo La Tengo – Popular Songs

22.Camera Obscura – My Maudlin Career

23.Flaming Lips - Embryonic

24.Sunset Rubdown - Dragonslayer

25.The Bird and the Bee – Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future

harmony

2009-12-29T00:49:00.000-08:00

A commercial for an online dating service. Attractive actors sit together in an airy loft, speaking of their feelings for each other, mouthing the time-honored tropes of ideal romance. They are connected deeply to each other; they spoke on the phone for six hours and could have spoken for far, far longer—they began a transcendent dialogue of fripperies and flirting that will carry them through the space of age, regret, loss, desire, and will, it seems, lift them above the machinery of death itself. They offer this via voice-over narration while we view a dramatization of their first meeting, touching hands in an appropriately dusky everyman café, the fragile ribbons of their minds leaping together, intertwined, at once and for all time. Their love is described as “passionate.” Suddenly, “the past doesn’t matter.” Their past lives are retroactively assessed as hollow—memories of childhood and adolescence are marred by the fact that their perfect other was not present! What makes their relationship, their marriage, so phenomenal? Compatibility. The twenty-seven factors of compatibility, so far beyond a little blurb and a photo. Well I've got some compatibility for you

Sleepovers

2009-12-29T00:36:00.000-08:00

“She gets in my car,” he says, “and just starts blabbing. I like that.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I hear you. There has to be talk. It has to come from somewhere.”

“There’s nothing worse,” he says, “then when a girl sits there and doesn’t say anything.”

“That happens to me a lot,” I say.

“That's a mistake,” he says.

He goes on to describe her racism, her articulated distaste for the poor, her self-consciously sin-bloated tales, doing blow in New York City with a former boyfriend who was, by narrative necessity, to eventually drop out of school and spend time in rehab. Such a cliché, I say.

“Or something,” he replies. “She tells me she has lots of one night stands, then quickly adds that she doesn’t actually have sex. Just sleepovers, I guess.”

“That’s insane. That's beyond belief. That can not be worth your time, or anyone's.”

“I know,” he says.

“You won't fuck her,” I diagnose. “Not happening, you know this.”

“I know this,” he says, sighing, wistful. “But, she talks, she sits there in front of me and tells me these stories, man, and, another thing, she laughs at everything I say. Literally laughs at everything I say. Like a crazy person, she laughs. A hot girl, just killing time, telling stupid stories, laughing, how am I not up for that? It’s better than sex,” he sighs, satisfied, contemplative, positively post-coital. “Infinitely better.”