If It Sold Out Too Fast, You're Too Old

Dinosaur Jr is coming through town tomorrow. They are one of my all-time favorite bands: their albums accompanied many an endless Baltimore summer, and they're one of the two or three bands whose music can automatically make me happy. As a kicker, my hero of bass guitar, as well as one of the few honest dudes in rock music (others include Ian Mackaye and Steve Albini), Mike Watt, is opening for them.

Too bad it's sold out. (So is the presale for Sonic Youth at 930 in DC, but there's still the regular sale tomorrow.) My bad, really, should've just gotten tickets right when they went on sale. But the truth is, I'm just not as vigilant anymore; shows don't register on my mental radar as much as they used to, dates grow fuzzy (both concert dates and current dates). The days are long gone when I woke up at 7AM for presales and planned my calendar around concerts in blocks of 2-3 months. That was pretty much how I spent my college years.

I remember when I first came to Baltimore in 2004, I was so overwhelmed that bands I knew only through listening to albums repeatedly as I simmered in suburban New Jersey ennui were playing right! here! in my same city! (or DC, or Towson) that I went to basically every single show with a band I'd heard of and liked, or that one of my friends had heard of and liked. I saw bands early on that I wouldn't begin to comprehend until years later. I saw one of the very first Dan Deacon shows in Baltimore in fall 2004, weeks after I moved here (for reference, the gushing Pitchfork review of Spiderman of the Rings, by Baltimore operative Jess Harvell, begins: "I first saw Dan Deacon play live in August 2005, just after I moved to Baltimore..."), though I came away with a take-home message of little more than wtf-was-that? (Which is why I'm not a Pitchfork reviewer, I suppose.) For those more inaccessible shows in DC, I would beg my friends who had cars to come along and drive; or take the train and wait around until 3AM for the first Amtrak of the next day back to Baltimore, which cost another $17 and once resulted in two of my friends and I falling asleep in the quiet car and waking up halfway to Wilmington, Delaware; or crash on someone's couch, after a couple friends moved to the area. All in all, I went the distance, and on a regular basis too.

That mostly ended in the past year or two. Partly because I fell in with friends who got even more consistently excited about shows than I did, until I burnt out. Partly because I started playing shows of my own and onstage goings-on very rapidly lost their mystique. Partly because I went into a prolonged paralytic freak-out that I spent so much time, money, and energy consuming the creative product of others while producing so little of my own, and attempted to reorient my ego through isolation. And, most recently, because I stopped bothering to do things without M.'s company; being single, it was much easier to say to hell with it, let's go nuts, nobody cares when we go to sleep!

Not that I attribute my decline to any kind of imposition from anyone else. The kids at the shows never grew any older or less enthusiastic; it was all internal, it was all me. And I feel more and more that no part of that will ever return. Not even in New York City. It's not just about music. I can't complain; this is real, this is serious, this is what I wanted forever. But something is being lost. And that sense of irretrievably abandoning something I used to embrace gives me pause, all good intentions notwithstanding.

Range Life

First of all: this. (And more specifically, this.) I know I promised my sanity that I would never live in New York City, but of the prospects I had, this seemed the best opportunity to get into some serious theoretical biology. The fact that it is 3 hours and $30 round trip from Baltimore gave it an undeniable edge as well. And hey, if I'm going to let the Devil City have its way with me, might as well be when I still have my youth and wits about me. Sort of like being in a band, or being a beatnik (both of which, incidentally, are common in NYC), or something like that.

I'm (slowly) reading a book on complex system theories (emergent phenomena, self-organization, nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory etc.) and starting to regret not having studied this kind of thing from the start. It's the only scientific concept I can remember actually getting excited about, and the only one I know of remotely having any philosophical relevance; a spiritual agnostic such as myself is always wanting a theory of how components can spontaneously produce more than the sum of their parts. At least that is the way it seems to me right now.

Metaphysical hot air aside, I'm really quite lazy these days. I got this 1985 Fuji road bike, I ride it around and haven't crashed on it yet. I write Pd patches while waiting for experiments to run, granular loopers and spectral delays I can barely keep under control. I played a headlining ambient gig at the Hexagon where the only audience was the other musicians on the bill, who were French, polished off an entire bottle of whiskey and an entire bottle of schnapps, took off their shirts and made out with each other during my set. I might be starting a laptop-guitar-pop duo with writer-Joe-met-on-a-bus-used-to-be-in-Scout. 50% of what I listen to consists of Pavement's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Stephen Malkmus, that pathological slacker, is my bard these days. I can't wait the month until I leave my current job. My PI is new faculty, which means he pushes himself as well as anyone working for him, and I have learned from my time here that I hate pushing myself, only slightly less than I hate getting pushed by others. That is perhaps my deepest, darkest secret: I never care about (most) things people assume I care about as much as they assume I must.

For Waiting, For Chasing

There. I tried to get away, you know. I tried to restart blogging--don't know if I can still call it that, the word seems to have taken on several different implications, none of which particularly applies to what I do here--on different terms. I tried writing an esoteric entry. I tried writing an entry in iambic pentameter. Neither of these things panned out particularly well. Fact is, I can't seem to keep this going if I take it too seriously, if I don't keep it on an effortless, almost unconscious level. Even if that means the stream of consciousness sometimes dries up. So it is.

I've been away a lot these past two months. Been out of town virtually every single weekend. What was all that for? Visiting PhD programs. That's right, turns out second time's the charm; and in retrospect I was lucky to not have gotten into grad school last year. Gave me time to fall in love with M., as well as think about what I actually want to do in--but that's getting too much into the kind of faux-aspirational academic tech-speak I've had nauseating quantities of recently.

Rather, let's talk about how I met an old high school cohort (we shall refer to her as EJAG) in Philadelphia last Friday and proceeded to discuss comrades past and relationship commitment while getting loaded on exotic beers. Or how strange it would have been to our 16-year-old selves to see us there, her tapping on an iPhone and about to go to law school in Nashville, and me--by God!--drinking alcohol. That was the Great Mystery of my high school graduating class, really: how EJAG went from a ne'er-do-well punk dating the school's (second?-)most notorious drug dealer (who also happened to be my mentor for a year or so, in things that did not include drug dealing), eyeliner and vodka and stickered bass guitar and all, to well-groomed, well-adjusted, well-personally accessorized, if still hyper-literate...I guess the word would be "prep," though a signature personability still set her apart, over what seemed like the blink of a summer. (It was this personability--or what seemed like it--I suspect, that kept her doorstep filled with young literati boys during her rogue years.)

I never did figure that one out. And when I asked her about it that night, all she responded with was a laugh and, "I was a fucked up sixteen year old." But I've made peace with that particular Great Mystery. As well as various others. In fact, most of high school now seems like a Great Mystery to me, a murky sea over which I hurriedly sailed. Certain people, certain failed relationships were Great Mysteries as well. Once upon a time, nostalgia would've forced me to return to these overlooked depths, to try and infer what happened, what went wrong, what did so and so really think about such and such, and when they said this, did they really mean this; but nostalgia is shockingly powerless in my present life. (Otherwise, I would no doubt write a lot more.) Amazingly, it seems I'm finally learning to let go and stop asking why.

And that's kind of disturbing, in a way. It involves making peace with a lot of atrocious certainties of reality. That kind of peace brings a silence that can be chilling. Want to know what my greatest dream is right now? It is to be a househusband. To commit to caring about myself and one other person and not be swayed by happenings in the rest of the world. I'm now OK with letting questions go unanswered, problems go unsolved, the human race go unsaved. If I could cure cancer instead of cooking dinner and playing with the cat tomorrow evening, I'm not sure I would. A BA in Biophysics isn't worth a good spiced cider recipe. I'm heading into hyperbole here, but you get the idea.

So that's more or less what my life is like right now. Traveling, trying to care about science (just enough to wish I had majored in physics or math instead), and getting as much domesticity in as I possibly can. Being sick, but getting healthier. Drove to DC with M. to see the Mountain Goats, her favorite band, in a historic synagogue. Turns out she likes to boss me around when I'm driving, but this is partially due to the fact I can't drive very well, so I suppose I'll allow her that, if only begrudgingly.

Possible future locations!:

1. New York City
2. Philadelphia
3. Chicago

Thoughts?

We've Arrived

Last night as my girlfriend and I were sleeping, a cat (he belongs to my roommate) woke us up by climbing around our heads. I'm pretty sure this means I'm living the fucking dream.

Not much to tell. In NYC, with headache, for a certain practical reason. Not feeling terribly talkative but wanted to brag.

Last Night's Film

Why I am telling the story of The Lives Of Others is to show people how they could behave given such a situation. And these situations will arise again. You don't have to have an absolute dictatorial system. It can be within the confines of a school, or a hierarchical business organization, or whatever, that we will have the chance to display a similar kind of heroism—to put it simply—as [Wiesler] is displaying. It makes it too easy for people in criminal organizations like the Stasi or the Gestapo if you say that—once you're a member of that group—that's it, you've lost your humanity, you're morally dead, it's over, there's no possibility for you to redeem yourself. You can always change your ways. It's much harder when you're in an organization like [the Stasi], which is why a character like [Wiesler] deserves so much admiration. Which is also why I was pretty angry when people accused Steven Spielberg [of humanizing Nazis]. They said, "Look at all these millions of Germans who behaved like monsters and you choose the one good German, Schindler, to make the film about." But I think that is still the right approach because it is exactly these people that we should be looking at and saying, "This is how you could behave and don't you be forgetting that."

-Florian Henckel von Donnersmark, director, interview with Michael Guillén re: The Lives of Others

Rain, Tuesday, Coffee, Cynicism

A brief history of human civilization.

The Year in Glimpses

In roughly chronological order. Not quite up to Time's par, but, you know...

Old Gilman Tunnel, pre-renovation.


Hut stained glass windows, pre-renovation.


Hallway full of biophysicists, Long Beach, CA.


Last two: San Francisco.


A Place to Bury Strangers at Rock 'n' Roll Hotel, Washington, DC.


Holy Fuck at the same show.


My Bloody Valentine at the Roseland Ballroom, New York.


Audience during the 17-minute noise outro of My Bloody Valentine.


Hearts.

In retrospect, I suppose I had it pretty good.