Postmicropunkreggaehouse

I've gotten this bizarre idea into my head that every song on Mew's Frengers is actually about the same person.

Yet another week has ended--this one was a little harder than I thought it would be. Spent two days at the Biophysical Society meeting, saw a lot of presentations that went right over my head, talked with a couple of graduate school representatives, talked to a kid from Brown, which offers another (besides Johns Hopkins) of the only 18 biophysics undergraduate programs in the country. I wanted to go back during the week, since all the professors and graduate students I knew were doing presentations then, but I was too busy and exhausted. Barely slept at all last Saturday night after the gig at the Ottobar before getting up at 7:30 to go back to the meeting; I had to take a couple utterly overdressed naps in the lobby of the Baltimore Convention Center just to keep myself going.

Trafalgar gig last Wednesday at the Lo-Fi Social Club went well. Apparently Eliza, who went to Lawrenceville, but whom I did not know during that time, and who went to Columbia, and whom I met at Columbia when I was visiting Andrew and Nick last January and then promptly forgot about, is now Monica's co-worker at Polk Audio; she showed up at the gig and asked if she knew me from somewhere, whereupon I questioned whether she'd gotten me mixed up with some other skinny, glasses Asian kid. We didn't figure out the connection until a few minutes later, upon which my mind was promptly blown. We played and were tight, although the sound was ass (no mics on the amps, which meant we could pretty much only hear our own respective instruments) and my delay pedal broke (again). The dude whom Monica had written "Killer" about turned out to be in the crowd, which was rather amusing. For "The Grand Opening" Monica sang the entire first half of the song kneeling on the stage (Miguel and I were also crouched down tweaking knobs for the first 30 seconds, but then we stood up), which I have no doubt she borrowed from Carla Azar of Autolux's performance on "Asleep at the Trigger"...whatever, it looked pretty darn beautiful, at least from where I was standing. Deleted Scenes, the second band, was pretty cool, sort of a juxtaposition of Wilco and Talking Heads, and we couldn't stay for the last two bands because Steffi and I were exhausted and ill and needed to go home and do homework (which I didn't do anyway), but it was still a fun time nonetheless.

All in all, not a bad performance for what might be the last Trafalgar gig for a year, or perhaps ever. More on that later. Maybe. If we declassify that information. But I saw that top-secret, low-key, stripped-down Portishead gig on Youtube, and it actually sounded pretty goddamn amazing with only a guitar, a bass, and vocals. Who knows. Every crisis is an opportunity, or whatever bullshit that was.

Saw the Hold Steady on Tuesday. Total spur of the moment. Sarah was the only other person in town who I knew to like them, and she was deathly sick, so I was debating whether or not to go, until the night before, when I realized it was sold out. Taken completely off guard by this, I resigned myself to not going, until 4PM the day of the show, when I got a Facebook message from one stranger Chris J. saying he had 4 tickets he needed to get rid of, because he couldn't make it himself (and that, kids, is the real reason you should list your Favorite Music on Facebook!). I swiftly telephoned everyone I knew who would have a fleeting interest in going to the show; Anna C. ended up coming with me. The first opening band was Hymnen who, despite their atrocious band name, cranked out some rather stunning dub reggae-ambient-jazzy post-punk epics. (I ended up meeting 3 of their 4 members after the show; excellent guys, would love to play a show with them sometime.) Marcellus Hall, who followed, did an alt-country thing with lyrics that made me exclaim, "wait, what?" every time I paid attention to them. The crowd was pretty drunk and went batshit insane when the Hold Steady finally stepped up, blasting through pretty much every one of my favorite songs (save "Chillout Tent"--a tragic omission, but amazingly including both "First Night" and "Multitude of Casualties"), to which I gleefully screamed along, and threw my flannel-wrapped arms up in the air and tried not to get swept away by the multitude, and everyone in the crowd joined Franz on "Chips Ahoy"'s "whoa oh oh oh oh oh oh oh"s and "Massive Nights"' "usually one or two-o"s, and then Craig Finn talked some shit about baseball and asked that hecklers say "please" when calling out for songs, and Galen (who is a much more captivating bassist live than on record) kept sidling up to Franz, often making fun of how short he was compared to himself, and then they steamrolled everyone during the encore with "Killer Parties" and were gone.

Anna and I took a long walk back to Charles Village. I actually hadn't hung out with her in a long time; we talked a lot before and after the show, about school, roommates, Argentina, familial diseases. She still owes me for her ticket.

Friday night, John and I wound up at Sterling's place. Obviously, as soon as I see a bass, I grab it and start noodling, and pretty soon I had an interesting two-chord bassline going, which Sterling slipped a blippy, microhouse-y Ableton beat under; at some point John began tapping on the keyboard. But the real turning point came when, as a joke, I started whispering the notes to the bassline as I played it: "1-1-1, 1-6-1-8-4-5." An in-joke for someone who understood rudimentary music theory. We found it so funny that we recorded it, and then John starting writing some Tom Vek-ish vocals with lyrics about summertime being a girl who gave him the cold shoulder, and then I handed Matt the bass and grabbed his guitar, shoved it through a DOD envelope filter and started skronking some funky reggae chords, and a few fleeting hours later we had a pile of samples which could conceivably be assembled into one long, ludicrous electro-rock song.

Ran into Dr. Gold of Marx, Freud and Modern Critical Theory fame today. Hopkins didn't rehire him, and he told me that he somehow got turned down for all his job applications, even though institutions all over the Western hemisphere are paying for him to give talks. No doubt giving traveling seminars is a decent way to pass a few months, or even a year, but there's something to be said about steady income. Academia's such a cold bitch, it's not even funny. No doubt he didn't fit in here--he described the German department to me as "fucked up"--seeing as he was the only one even remotely touching on modern philosophical topics, and no doubt was vastly less conservative than the majority of faculty at this university. Of course, whether that factored into his employment situation is debatable. We stood on a street corner east of campus for an hour and talked about Asians until the sun was almost down. Quite literally--whether it was Taiwan, the Taiwanese in Taiwan, the Taiwanese in the United States, or whatever. His (Taiwanese) wife called him at one point and asked what she should cook for dinner; "Do whatever," Dr. Gold said, "that's great." I was amused. I'll miss that man; he broke the monotony of the general population around here.

I watched Amélie today with Sid and Rachel C. I loved it. Quite irretrievably and helplessly. Despite my constant awareness of all the things fragmenting the world we live in, and the people we're surrounded by, the feeling of tapping--or at least peering--into the stream of logic that defines relationships between different people and moments in time is something I can relate to. Or at least I think I can. I can relate to finding joy in the details of the inanimate world--for example, sunlight, or the burning scent of a cold day--it's just that, more often than not, I become more obsessed with the weaknesses and the flaws. It can be hard to fit a complete picture of the universe into your head without leaving anything out.

Sometimes, despite all my aspirations to being a critic, I'm just a huge sap. Sometimes I wonder if that isn't one of my better traits, instead of all this edginess stuff. It's got to be some kind of gift to be able to remain idealistic while being friends with all these cranks (here's looking at you, Andrew). I wonder if I should go back to that; I've got so many contradictions, it's often hard to set my priorities straight.

Reading The Children's Hospital again. I might actually finish it. However, I wonder where it will go, what the author's trying to build me up to. I suppose there's only one way to find out.