Think of Licorices

Timing, asshole, timing. Though it's really not my fault; who calls at quarter to 1AM on a weeknight? That's pretty much just asking for awkwardness. The little things that just can't be blamed on anyone really frustrate me after awhile. They just reinforce the impression of living in the margins. I'm all longhand and prepositions dropped in a world of boldface type, stripped down, scrawled skewed and sideways to make the words fit. Character in search of a script. Script in search of a stage. Seeds of a plot that were never given a place to be sewn.

"When I tried to tell my story, they cut me off to take a break. I sat silent five commercials; I had nothing left to say."

Next time, leave me to my bed. Please.

Anyway. I went up to Hampden today to trawl the antiques stores for anything of worth and/or interest. Part of the initiative. I ended up grabbing a few books from the used bookstore: a book on Chinese poetry (for Williamson), Jessica's book about eternal recurrence, and an Atwood poetry collection. I've never really checked out the poetry sections in bookstores before. I found it to be not so dissimilar to browsing through used CDs: you scan until something catches your eye, pluck it from the stack, flip through a few poems and read them to yourself (analogous to playing a CD and skipping to a random track in the record shop), and see how you like them. It was an interesting experience; I wish I'd had more time and wasn't so desperate to come home for dinner.

I finalized my Best of 2007 mix playlist. By no means did I listen to every new album that came out this year; in fact, for a while I actively refused to find out about new music, because I genuinely resented the trend-chasing, mp3 blog-hounding tendencies of some people I know. I gradually came around to some new music towards the end of this year, but still, there's no Animal Collective, or Panda Bear, or Dan Deacon, or LCD Soundsystem, or whatever, on this list. I'm not trying to define what was good or cool this year; this is simply a summation of what I felt like listening to this year. And that means a lot of guitar feedback, digital ambience, beats, female vocals, white noise, and glitch. Which is the way it should be.

[Track number/Band/Song title/Album title]

1. A Place to Bury Strangers - Don't Think Lover (s/t)
2. The Depreciation Guild - Sky Ghosts (In Her Gentle Jaws)
3. Jesu - Transfigure (Conqueror)
4. The Twilight Sad - Cold Days from the Birdhouse (Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters)
5. Dinosaur Jr - Crumble (Beyond)
6. Wye Oak [formerly Monarch] - Warning (If Children)
7. Thrushes - Into the Woods (Sun Come Undone)
8. Marissa Nadler - Mexican Summer (Songs III: Bird on the Water)
9. Radiohead - All I Need (In Rainbows)
10. To Kill a Petty Bourgeoisie - The Man With the Shovel, is the Man I'm Going to Marry (The Patron)
11. Burial - Near Dark (Untrue)
12. Sally Shapiro - Find My Soul (Disco Romance)
13. Electrelane - To the East (No Shouts, No Calls)
14. Apparat - You Don't Know Me (Walls)
15. The Field - Everyday (From Here We Go Sublime)