Quaristice

The new Autechre album is great, but it's still hard for me to listen to 73 minutes of electronic audio-shrapnel at a time. This probably wouldn't bother anyone who didn't have my full-album listening obsessions.

Dylan seems to have vanished from the Internet. This is unfortunate; I did so enjoy reading her stories and thoughts...

Classes have started. Somehow I don't care. That will probably change after I leave for a week and return to find I can't catch up with any of my homework. Class has always been more stressful for me than research: research, while huge and convoluted, is usually a single coherent entity, while everyone wants me to do a different thing and think in a different direction as far as my classes go, and each professor seems to expect you to treat their course as the only one in your schedule. It doesn't help that my course schedules are usually schizophrenic (in one corner this semester, Bioinformatics and Cell Biology; in the other, Poetic Forms II and Poetry of War), and it becomes extremely difficult to keep track of who wants me to do what by what date, and how that relates to all my other deadlines, and even what state of mind to be in on a certain day to maximize productivity. The ideal has always been to be all things at all times; obviously, though, this is impossible, so I have to settle for either drifting between aspects semi-spontaneously as events warrant, or existing as a compromise of all aspects, both of which cause me to react badly to deadlines. All of which help to explain why during the semester I often find myself paranoid that I Should Be Doing Something Else.

It should be a little more manageable this semester, though, because I am only taking 13 credits (I didn't do terrifically when I took 13 credits my sophomore spring, but then again, I was not myself), and I only expect one class, Cell Biology, to give me any genuine annoyance. It was a huge shock to walk into Cell Bio lecture on Monday and see the lecture hall packed beyond capacity by hundreds of undergrads from all the biosciences disciplines, most of them likely sophomores and juniors, after having been spoiled by a year's worth of 10- to 20-person courses (except Reproductive Physiology, which was a medium-sized lecture, but that was a bad time) of mostly Biophysics students in my own year who knew more or less what they were doing. The guy next to me in the back row texting on his iPhone (one of many current badges of bloated consumerism), the kids stammering obviously half-digested, dimly-recalled facts in response to questions...these are things I thought I wouldn't have to encounter again. It's probably unfair of me to say this now, as I have a couple years' college work on most of these students, and was probably just as stupefied two years ago as many of them seem to be now, at least in Orgo.

As for the other classes...Bioinformatics will be fun. It's with Pat Fleming, who taught me Computational Biology last semester, and who is an extraordinarily good-hearted teacher--certainly far more good-hearted than most of the students at this school, and probably a few of the Biophysics students he teaches. I was surprised to see that most of the faces in the class were unfamiliar, save for Brian and Svetlana, and Brian being the only one who carried over from Comp Bio; it's rare to see non-Biophysics students in a Jenkins Hall class. Poetry of War will be an interesting experience, as I've never taken a serious, analytical poetry reading course. Poetic Forms II should be mostly familiar ground with Williamson--I'm really happy to be able to take one last class with him before graduating. His question of, "so who traveled the farthest over break?" has become an established first-class-of-spring-semester ritual, and for once, the answer was not me with my usual 19-hour jaunt. He asked me about grad school and told me about his father who is a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt (in mechanical engineering, ironically).

Some interesting people in my poetry classes. I keep expecting the old Wmson loyalists--Fox, Anthony, Chunwoo, Max et al--to appear, but they've all graduated. Instead I'm studying alongside Sue and various other characters I'd never expected to see again, having rather awkwardly brushed past each other (aesthetically speaking) in earlier writing courses. Some of them, including Sarah T., seem to comprise a parallel Wmson faction I didn't know existed. Jen P.; I have promised Maura not to show her any of her poems if they turn out to be good. Jana, who virtually shares both John's first and last names, just returned from Spain, and will be a ski instructor next year, and who speaks with really big eyes like she's running a hotel front desk:

"You are applying to grad school? Which schools did you apply to?"

"Ah, science things, actually," I said, exposed for the closet scientist I am. (As a side note, I have a self-imposed rule on not going into the details of any of my "specialized" topics with anyone who isn't into it already. It's not that I felt offended at being asked.)

(Still speaking like a hotel front desk.) "That's so exciting. Good luck with your interviews!"

At which point I thought, you are so outrageously unlike John it has gone from being ironic to hilarious back to simply ironic.

Jess is in my Poetry of War class, and for that I am grateful. If I'm her moral compass, then she's my psychiatric anchor, and it will be nice to have her around when I deal with all of the "real" writers. I've gotten used to having serious conversations with her at least a couple of times a week; we're meeting for lunch tomorrow before she goes to Richmond and I leave on my odyssey.

Jess suggested last weekend we should all go to live clean lives in a monastery; while I wouldn't object to this (religion aside), I feel that I haven't found my tether in life as she has with Thom, and so can't retreat from the world just yet, much as I sometimes would like to. So I suppose I must keep casting myself and breaking against the jagged cliffs of society for a while longer. Oh well. What's another three years?

I Sometimes Lose, Sometimes Really

In a surprising turn of events, my grad school winning streak couldn't last forever after all. (Yes, "surprising" was meant to be sarcastic.) Yale Biological and Biomedical Sciences sent me a rejection email today; or, more accurately, they sent me an email, which linked to my application page, which I had to login to, whereupon I had to click on a third link that finally opened a popup window telling me I'd been rejected. The nerve. If Yale admin were trying to make things easier for the rejectee by making them really annoyed at the institution just before they read their rejection, they did a fine job.

Besides being the first rejection letter I've received, thereby reminding me of the crapshoot reality of grad school admissions, this didn't actually faze me too much; Yale was about on the same level as UCSF, who seem to be responding favorably, on my list, and San Francisco definitely trumps New Haven in most aspects, cost of living and distance from familiar faces notwithstanding. However, it does make me a little more anxious to hear from MIT and Harvard. I care about those schools about as much as I do the rest of them combined, and Boston has been hyped up to me so much as some kind of promised land I fear I'll actually be really upset if I don't get into one of my two Boston schools.

Regardless, all was redeemed mere hours later when I received this message in my Myspace account:

"We get a TON of requests from bands on Myspace doing Noise/Drone/whatever you wanna call it. I'd say over 99% is shite.

Your track that you have up on the page right now is ace! good work.

best,
belong "

Wait, what? Belong? Crafters of October Language? The left-field ambient power duo from New Orleans? The American counterpart to master glitchscapers such as Europe's Fennesz and Canada's Hecker? The people who make the kind of music I want to make, only good? They like? My track? That I made in my bedroom with a guitar, $150 worth of pedals, Audiomulch, a pirated copy of Ableton Live 5, and a few free VSTs? This is insane! This is massive! This is like if Auden came back from the dead and showed up at my door tomorrow to tell me my rhymes was ill! (Though I don't often write rhyming poetry, but we'll overlook that for the sake of anachronistic simile.) Well, maybe not Auden, but one of the more cult-favorite, acquired-taste, obscure poets, none of which I can immediately think of right now.

I should really stop being so underachieving with my music. Probably my poetry too. Being amateur is easy; it's when other people like your stuff that things get complicated. Hmm...

This entry gets an "eff" label for the Yale affair. However, it also gets a newly-minted "w00t" label for the Belong message. This evening has seen a few ups and downs. And a cupcake.

I Don't Feel Young

It appears I write about music too much. Probably listen to it too much to begin with, but what can I do? This too is a way to go.

Saturday night was John's birthday and DJ gig at the Depot, just up from Penn Station and across from the Charles Theatre. We rounded up a sizable posse to attend and celebrate, which came with its concerns: the specific people present set up several potential situations, of which any combination thereof could have come to pass. Drama in other words, though I don't much like that particular usage of the word.

It was Maura I was most concerned about, what with Jen and John both being there. But it turned out that was the least of everyone's worries. The night started out well enough: John took over from the opening DJs around midnight, and spun some tracks that upheld the mood, even if they were not as club-happy as the tracks the openers played. There was a nice crowd gathered on the dancefloor, and though I knew most of them from various walks of school, there were a few strangers, which is always good to have at a gig of any sort. But then John played Squarepusher's "My Red Hot Car," and it damn near cleared the house; as Song said, I love Squarepusher as much as the next guy (probably more than the next guy), but that kind of IDM is always a gamble in a club DJ set, and in this case, it didn't pay off. People became bewildered and retired to the bar, and soon you could count the people left on the floor on one hand.

From there it quickly turned into Samuel Beckett's dance party. Sterling's girlfriend and her roommate got drunk and asked him to drive them home, and he did, after which he became caught up in some kind of vicious altercation between the roommates (the specifics of which I still don't know of, nor do I have any desire to find out about) and didn't return until 1:30AM--long after he was supposed to take over the decks from John. I found Hannah and Mike sitting awkwardly next to each other on a bench and thought, nothing good can come of this (and sure enough, nothing good did). The quarreling roommate called and demanded John and Maura quit the place and go back to take care of her. When one of the Depot staff hit the fog machine near the end of the night, it felt like trying to pull a veil over the desolation of the floor and the quiet violence of the evening. Call it, I don't know, Waiting for DJ, or maybe Club No Exit.

Of course, none of it actually had anything directly to do with me, but I'm never one to turn down an existential night on the town, or the chance to craft one from a more or less mundane sequence of events. I swear I'm not a sadist. I'm almost always at first sympathetic to my friends when they get themselves in trouble like this, identifying their plight with some element of my own history even when this identity is wholly unjustified, but after they make the same mistake a few times, my sympathy starts to wane. I wasn't always the sarcastic and distant critic of others' lives; I've just been hanging out with the same people too long.

Yesterday I had a conversation over coffee under the heated, enclosed outdoor awning of a restaurant with a very good friend of mine that settled a couple of issues about the weekend and even gave me something resembling a sense of vindication. If certain people are to be believed--and there's every reason to believe them over the others--I must be doing something right. Even if it is slightly daunting to be nominated for someone else's moral compass.

William et les Boîtes à Musique

I have discovered the music of Colleen thanks to last.fm somehow deciding she and Fennesz performed similar music, which they don't, not really. Anyway, Colleen's music is shimmering silence, through which gossamer strands of bells, guitar, viol, and other instruments occasionally find their drifting way. It's very sparse, especially compared to the lush wall-of-sound stuff I tend to listen to, and very beautiful.

Colleen's music reminds me of a more organic version of Slowdive's Pygmalion. This should be considered high praise, since Pygmalion is one of my favorite albums, and Slowdive as a band are my personal definition of beautiful, against which all other things (especially music) aspiring to beauty are measured. While Maura and I were sitting bored in the MVA waiting to renew my driver's license yesterday, we listened to previews of songs on her cell phone to kill the time. I played her a 30-second sample of "Alison" from Souvlaki. She said that it was "you music" and went back to listening to Animal Collective. It's too bad I'm the only person I know who likes Slowdive, except Sarah. I am constantly engaged in a war of aesthetic values with the rest of the world.

Last night I was at a party. Everyone else was already well and drunk when I showed up and we walked to Jess' apartment together, and from there things rapidly got surreal and uncomfortable, so Garrett and I excused ourselves early, if 2AM can be construed as "early." Sometimes I find the greatest incentive to get drunk is to become less disturbed by people around me who have already done so in spades. I'm sure that if I were to write about what actually happened there would be some sort of fallout (yes, I'm looking at you), so I won't. Needless to say, none of it made much sense to me, as seems to be the norm these days. No doubt this would all make more sense if my brain actually understood the concept of "fun."

But. Today I received a letter from Maria. It was a thank-you letter for the song I mailed her a couple weeks back and then some. Of course it was very sweet and meaningful, and it reminded me that this somber song and dance of mine must be getting something right, even if most people I know don't seem to acknowledge it.

Changed the Locks Three Times

My new headphones came in the mail. They are Sennheiser HD280Pros. They are massive and roughly double the volume of my head. I'll see how good they sound in a few days and compare them to Sterling's Sonys.

I am going to talk about relationships. Not mine, of course--haven't had one in years--but those of the people around me. I've watched quite a few of them implode over the past few months. It's like I'm running between trenches in World War I as bullets fly and mortar shells fall all around me and blow my comrades into tiny heartbroken pieces. I feel like I'm going to get some survivor's guilt out of this.

I would like to think I am progressive in many things--politics, instrumentation--but as far as these issues go, I'm old fashioned, black and white, binary. Fall or don't, and it's a matter of intuition. Consequently, certain things do not make sense to me: things such as undefined relationships, aborted reunions, and "I dated him even though I knew he was going to hurt me so we could get it out of the way and be friends" don't make much sense to me, and in fact strike me as ill-advised for the most part.

"But you've never been in such a situation before, so what do you know?"

There are probably at least a few people I know who would pull that card. And it's valid; I've not been through much, relatively speaking, at least not first-hand. What I do know of these dynamics is they cause meltdowns, and have done so recently within my immediate vicinity, figuratively speaking. Which seems to support the conclusions I'd originally arrived at. So I continue to hold my ideals as they hold me (sometimes they're the only things that do). Though if "Just" is the song from The Bends that best describes all the people I know, the one that best describes myself would probably be "High and Dry." Ideals are lousy company, and one can't devour or ignite them in times of hunger and cold. Not that one could do so with people, either. Well, one could, it would just likely get one institutionalized.

Still, there are people out there who can actually sustain these seemingly absurd dynamics, and that unnerves me. It's disquieting to think that people can differ so much on such a fundamental issue as basic human affection. If we can't take that commonality for granted, what could we not disagree and quarrel and bleed one another dry over?

The Semester of Angel Hair

While boiling some pasta for lunch today, I suddenly thought of the Haruki Murakami short story "The Year of Spaghetti." I checked to see if it was in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, one of several Murakami books I have with me in Baltimore; it was. This is old school Murakami: minimal, angular, often unflinchingly raw. This was one of the stories in 100% Girl, the (Chinese-only, alas) short story collection which was my introduction to Murakami, and which I found in my grandmother's house at about age 14--the perfect age to get one's soul stolen by Murakami (or Neon Genesis Evangelion for that matter, but that's a separate story). I still don't know who could've bought that book. It was probably my uncle, back in his college days.

The story is about a young man who cooked spaghetti. The second sentence reads: "In 1971 I cooked spaghetti to live, and lived to cook spaghetti." This sentence is possibly the unlikely nexus where the disenfranchised proletariat of the 19th century and the disillusioned young bourgeois academic of the 21st (me, or something like me) coincide. Ironically enough, for a story that promises a narration of spaghetti, the major plot event occurs when the narrator isn't cooking spaghetti at all. He is lying on the tatami staring at the ceiling when his friend's ex-girlfriend calls, wanting some money that the friend (who never appears) owes her. The narrator says he doesn't know where the friend is, and lies that he is cooking spaghetti to excuse himself from the phone, even going through the motions of "[filling] an imaginary pot with water, [lighting] and imaginary stove with an imaginary match"...the works. The narrator concludes his reminiscing with, "At the time, I didn't want to get involved with anyone. That's why I kept on cooking spaghetti, all by myself...Can you imagine how astonished the Italians would be if they knew that what they were exporting in 1971 was really loneliness?"

Obviously not the most subtle of Murakami yarns, but one still has to laugh with him, and at ourselves; replacing "cooking spaghetti" with "going to school and/or work," or "writing a novel," or "discovering oneself and pursuing one's career" (or "doing research" or "recording electronic music," for that matter) instantly makes for a more familiar scenario. A scaffolding to support an inflated, hollow life, which keeps the roof from falling in, but also oneself from getting out, even when one's run out of road and is simply spinning one's wheels. Eventually automation sets in and reflexes and habit engage. The system closes upon itself and becomes self-sustaining, self-fulfilling. Then it becomes necessary to cut loose. You are not your modus operandi.

Specifying the culprit act as "cooking spaghetti" simply reveals the ridiculousness of the whole setup. But as usual, we laugh at the joker partially because he is not as different from us as we'd desperately like to believe.

Is this a criticism of a generation, of a phase, of a way of life? Perhaps, but I'm not sure. Most likely, it's simply another way for me to cook spaghetti, as it were.

Do Not Break

I should stop writing blog entries so late at night. I tend to quickly forget what I had to say, if anything at all, then become tired, and give up with a half-assed entry to show. Not good.

The remix is done. Everything has been tracked, at least, and is more or less mixed. Sterling's helping me recruit the DMC monitors and mastering unit Friday morning to finalize tweaks. So much for the days when I was so impressed I could get a computer to make any sound at all I believed three minutes of drum machine wankery accompanied by a Radiohead piano sample was fit to publish on the Internet. Life gets harder when one starts setting standards for oneself. The remix is good though; I didn't become disappointed by it the moment I finished it, which is a good enough sign. It has 11 guitar tracks, though not all of them are concurrent with each other. It starts out with shimmering ambient drone, works its way through a verse of minimal electro-pop and winds up with a wall of sound rave-up. I don't know. People seem to like it. Andrew thinks I should make a record. I would, but I'm still trying to figure out what I want the software to do and how to make it do it. I've only been at this less than a year, so I'll let myself off for now.

I've been listening to a lot of Ellen Allien and Apparat. I find it funny that I treat a lot of such electronic as almost exclusively head-music, when most things from Berlinette or Orchestra of Bubbles, and maybe even a couple songs from Walls could motivate a dancefloor at high enough volume. Then again, I suppose I treat pretty much all the music I listen to as head-music.

I saw There Will Be Blood tonight. It was kind of like sitting in a wind tunnel for two and a half hours, except instead of a wind tunnel it was more of a drama tunnel, if you will. I think it's comparable to a film analogue of "Like Herod" or "Frankie Teardrop": it blows me away, but it's so intense I might not be able to ever watch it again.

Feeling a little trapped by the present, by my apartment, by my lab, by the walks between my apartment and my lab, by the heaviness of my eyelids. Seeing dead ends everywhere; all this time and nowhere to go, nothing to do. I think my room has begun to mock and asphyxiate me with its familiarity. There's no longer solace here, if there ever was. I seem to have become surrounded with the confusion of others; it's hemming me in, it's got me under siege. Maybe I will elaborate later. Then again, do I really need to?

"Butteriness" Should Not Be Used In Songs

I am listening to Marissa Nadler's Songs III: Bird On the Water again, because it's late, and it's the only thing I want to hear right now.

Last night I went down to Monica's house in Federal Hill to play some guitar. We ended up writing a song--at least the chords to one--and when she asked me what she should sing about over it, I responded, "popcorn," because it was the first thing that entered my mind. And so she made up an entire song's worth of lyrics about popcorn. The most amazing part was that it was an undeniably sad song, as far as the chords were concerned. So it was a sad song about remembering eating popcorn with someone. "You're killing me here," I said, as I cringed into a corner in front of the amplifier and covered my face with my guitar.

The issue with hanging out with older people is the more I do it, the more I believe I should be more like them, especially as I leave that two-decade mark farther and farther behind. And so I'm swept up by the panic that I still don't know what's going on with my life; where, when, and how I will settle down, if ever; why I can't ever seem to find contentment in the present.

Forging ahead is harder than it seems. I realize that my present self hasn't so much supplanted my past selves as buried them in a shallow grave, and if I'm not careful, the surface will rupture. I feel like I should have figured this out sooner.

Two nights ago I had a very strange dream--it was probably because I'd gone to sleep drunk, unintentionally, after returning from Brewer's Art, and then woken up at 6:30AM with my clothes and the lights on, before showering and attempting to go back to sleep (no mean feat). I hadn't done that in a long time; I usually don't like getting that drunk, as it just ends up feeling unpleasant, and I just want to go home, but by that point it's such an effort. Anyway. I dreamed I was stuck in a rather surreal part of Baltimore at the house of someone my roommate knew, but who I don't think exists in real life, or even showed up at all in the dream. Right inside the entrance to the house was another door, and every time I opened this door the house inside it would be different.

Strangely enough, disturbed as I was by this door (strange spaces have strange effects on me), I was more worried about making it home to meet up with Sarah for lunch. What's stranger is that this was actually an appointment I'd made in real life; she called while I was at the Wye Oak show at Talking Head on Friday to say she couldn't make the show, then said we should hang out sometime this weekend, which surprised me. We had steamed eggs and home fries--it's vaguely annoying how we have the same taste for most everything and always try to say the same thing at the same time--and talked about science, creativity versus the appreciation of creativity and how one does not guarantee the other, driving stick (neither of us knew anything about it), the works. It was a good meeting between friends. I don't know what role she plays in my life right now; not so long ago I felt like she was the last person I'd feel strongly enough for to moan about in my remaining time in Baltimore, and now I can barely stay interested enough to finish this paragraph. Maybe it's just late. To be honest, she makes me feel quite stupid sometimes for not knowing anything nor having anything to do, and it's hard to stay enamored with someone who has that effect.

I'm bored with Intersession. Nothing happens until nothing ceases to happen, and even then, it does not necessarily translate into something happening. I'm getting a little panicky and a little anxious to get out of here. That's not productive; I'm stuck here for a while, and I should find some better way to use my time.

"Inspiration" in Chinese = "Spirit Feeling"

No, really. I can't just make this stuff up. Well, I could, and you'd probably believe me--but I'm a little more conscientious than that.

Last night my roommate found me in my room hunched over a toy glockenspiel sitting in my lap with a microphone pointed at it. He smirked and backed out while I yelled, "what? This is serious!" I was working on a remix for a band about town who are somewhat friends of mine. (On a side note, while big acts are big for a reason and it's often exciting to listen to the zeitgeist hype music everyone is amped up about, it's very lovely to like bands small enough that you can talk about day jobs with them before and give congratulatory hugs to them after their sets.) I've got the overall song arrangement and pretty much all the percussion done; it will probably end up something like a combination of Four Tet (he and Apparat really inspire me a lot these days) and Kevin Shields' remix of Mogwai Fear Satan.

This is really the first time I've worked on music with a deadline and the expectation that someone else is going to hear it, respond to it, judge it. But I'm beginning to realize how different working on music alone and in a vacuum is. There's no pressure and no limitation, but sometimes that can be a bad thing. I used to think J Mascis' maxim of, "if anything's possible, why do anything" was a load of nonsense; now I'm beginning to think of restrictions and impositions as more of a nucleation site where reactions begin, as the point where pen first meets paper and one says, "this starts here."

I played a semi-gig on Tuesday with Jess' friend Forrest who'd come down from Vermont with a $25 acoustic to sing rustic folk songs, most his own, some by Leonard Cohen and Michael Hurley, in Steffi's candle-lit living room to an audience of about 10 kids, all of whom I knew, as Victor and I accompanied, he on violin and I armed with guitar, distortion, delay, and reverse reverb. I had never heard any of the songs, save one, before playing; the goal, as in most group improvisation, was to respond to what Forrest played in whatever way I could with whatever I had. Unlike jamming to write songs with my old band, however, here we had definite songs to play along to--nucleation sites around which Victor and I played, giving us a direction so we could figure out how to get everyone there. It ended up being one of the most fun and relaxing musical experiences I've had; I did a lot of crazy stuff, such as bending echoing, dissonant tones with the whammy bar, bowing with a drumstick, etc. Such immersive textures are what I live for, but one needs a catalyst to give it coherence.

Of course, in the absence of collaboration with other musicians, one needs to impose one's own restrictions in order to be productive. Possibly the most counterproductive freedom of all in a solo situation is the freedom to let oneself off the hook: to abandon an idea when one feels unable to develop it further, or when one decides to hold out to see if a "better" (often actually meaning "more easily workable") idea comes along. This is the same thing as when I find myself unable to start writing a paper or a poem, I think. To get back to the remix, for the first couple of days I was working on it, I was troubled with the feeling that it could sound like anything, really--I made a beat, but I could've made another, and so on. In the end, I forced myself to decide on a basic rhythm, and arrange all the essential verses and choruses in order first, then layer everything else on after that. It's working pretty well so far; I still don't know what the end textures will sound like, exactly, but now I know I need a quiet thing here, a loud wash of noise there, and so on.

In summary, I guess this is not the sort of divine-inspiration, fully-formed-piece-pops-into-mind kind of route one might think creation takes. Rather, it's like waiting for a tiny scintillating shard of inspiration to emerge semi-spontaneously from the primordial muck of possibility, then latching onto it for dear life with full knowledge its trajectory might lead nowhere and leave one hanging in a void. It's a little absurd, much like most endeavors in this life seem at the outset. Call it existentialist inspiration.

Oh My Stars

UCSF Biophysics called last Friday to invite me to interview. I'm scheduled for the weekend after the Vanderbilt interview. Seems I'll be missing all of the beginning-of-semester parties...

The right side of my AKG K81DJ headphones is dead. This was probably a long time coming, considering the cable's already broken once and been repaired with a grafted segment of 1/8" cord courtesy of Sterling. Time to get some new headphones, though knowing me, I won't be confident enough to choose a new pair until I've spent the rest of the week reading online reviews.

This past weekend, Andrew, Emily, and Nick came to visit. They drove in from Jersey on Friday evening. I took them out to Dizzy Izzie's (first time I'd been there too; burgers were cheap and decent), after which we came home, drank plenty of whiskey ginger and Baltimore's pride--National Bohemian, went to see Soul Cannon at the Ottobar where I had yet another engrossing conversation with Anna D., drank more, went to a party at Mike's place, drank more, wandered over to Jessie's where I fell asleep on the couch playing guitar shortly before we decided it was time to leave early.

It was strange seeing the boarding school remnants and the Johns Hopkins regulars in the same place:



What was also strange is that we spent most of the dialogue this weekend talking about nothing. Andrew somehow brought up the first real conversation he and I ever had, which occurred behind the Kirby Arts Center at Lawrenceville, one evening sometime near the middle of 11th grade, right after we saw Emily play the heroine of a student production of Antigone; it was that evening he confessed to me his (now long-lost) love for Emily, which began the whole Emily-Andrew affair that would last through the end of high school and beyond, and my peripheral involvement in it. That was the first of a two-year-long series of intense conversations about life, school, music, people, girls, etc., in dorm rooms, beach houses, front seats of cars, and smoking sections of diners, that would come to define our friendship.

And this weekend there was none of that intensity, not with Andrew, nor Emily or Nick, with whom I also had very substantial interactions back in the day. I talked to Nick a bit about careers and life after college, but the rest of the time was spent on irreverent jokes plucked from the menagerie of the absurd. Maybe it was just because we're older and can't take as seriously the things we took seriously five years ago. Maybe we could not celebrate our reunion and reflect upon it simultaneously. Maybe one can only have one single such close friend at any point in time, and the role is passed from person to person as one passes from location to location, phase to phase.

Not to say it wasn't a good time, because it was. We made ourselves comfortable, drank until we were warm, chatted, laughed, and were generally merry. It was just a long way from the evening five years ago, or when I got drunk for the very first time in front of a towering bonfire in rural Virginia and said to Andrew, "we're like brothers, and if everything else in the universe just went to hell right now, I think we'd still be brothers." I've experienced enough such transitions to expect them.

Gertrude Stein Said, "That's Enough"

Seeing the review of the Idlewild best-of, Scottish Fiction, on Pitchfork Media this morning (yes, I read it daily) reminded me of when I first encountered this band in high school junior year, about five years ago. This was all thanks to Kevin, the balding aged hipster who managed the CD collection of the Bunn Library at Lawrenceville. This was the guy who helped my roommate Mike produce his doomed 606 zine, and who lent my high school band Paper Jet Fighter a four-track tape recorder on which to create our first, last, and only "record": a hilariously incompetent instrumental EP, and "soundtrack" to our friend Skye's home documentary of her year abroad in France (though the only song she ended up using was one I had recorded entirely on my own, playing bass, guitar, and drums; imagine, if you dare conceive such an embarrassingly inappropriate thing, Mogwai coming through a transistor radio as well-groomed American high schoolers, future International Relations majors and investment banker aspirers sauntered through a Parisian evening), recorded using a single dynamic microphone suspended from an XLR cable that was wrapped around a ceiling pipe, which actually produced amazingly quality drum sounds (think The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin). Thanks to him, in addition to the usual non-offensive fare (Beatles, classic jazz/pop, etc.), I had free access to albums by Interpol, Lightning Bolt, Liars, Joy Division, The Microphones, Low, Cocteau Twins, et al...and Idlewild's The Remote Part. I woke up every morning to "You Held the World in Your Arms" for most of that spring (I have a 7-year and running habit of using my CD player as an alarm clock). I don't even have to pull out the CD-R to recall it all: the stratospheric lift of the doubled guitar and strings on "You Held the World in Your Arms"; the head-lowered charge of "A Modern Way of Letting Go" and "I Am What I Am Not"; the saccharine adolescent melancholy of "Live in a Hiding Place"; the lofty receding spiral of "Stay the Same" and "Scottish Fiction." A few months later I bought 100 Broken Windows from the Princeton Record Exchange, colloquially known as Prex, and latched onto that for a while. That was a time of simpler music and simpler pleasures, such as lounging in the library's sun room with a duct-taped CD player between classes. But it was also one of the most confused stages of my life, still trying to recover after a couple of cataclysmic events, stumbling between unfounded crushes (including a girl I knew from grade school in Minnesota and had seen for a few hours when I ended up back in the Twin Cities suburbs the prior Thanksgiving, and a girl I simply saw in detention), etc. Then again, if it weren't for airy delusions, I might not have gotten through the first half of that year.

I used to be more innocent, but all I remember now about being more innocent was how much harder understanding the world was. Heck, I didn't even understand Loveless. If I'd been confronted with The Disintegration Loops or +47 Degrees... back then, I probably would have had a seizure. Things still defy my sensibilities, but at least in an understandable way, if that makes any sense.

I got the date of the Biophysical Society meeting wrong; it's actually February 2-6. The plan is now to fly to Los Angeles on Feb. 2, be at the meeting in Long Beach until the 6th (where I will hopefully hang out with my biophysics freshman seminar TA Izzi, who graduated four years ago--really the "archetypal" attractive biophysics TA), meet up and crash with Granger the evening of the 6th after everyone else goes back to Baltimore, fly from LA to Nashville on the morning of the 7th, interview at Vanderbilt until Saturday the 9th, and fly from Nashville to Baltimore, hopefully in time to hang out with friends that night. It'll be a cross-country trek of Kerouackian proportions, though by plane, and sans drugs, hitchhiking, orgies, and most manners of decadence. Of course, the catch is that I will miss my entire second week of classes; though at this stage, who really cares? I spent a lot of money on plane tickets today that I won't see again until I get reimbursed after I return from my trip in February. Then again, it's not everyday I get paid to fly to random cities I've never been before, so I'm happy with the situation.

Several of my friends from Lawrenceville are visiting this weekend: Andrew, Nick, and Emily. They're three of the people I was closest to in high school, and I'm really excited to see them again; I haven't seen Andrew in over a year, Emily in three. Andrew and Emily were never far from the core of any tale we had to tell, but that's another story. We used to have pseudonyms for everyone back in high school, when I wrote in Opendiary; our predecessors, Ben, Vladic, Karam, Nabil et al had invented a whole deliberately opaque style for chronicling their exploits, presumably to prevent against school admin discovering incriminating evidence (generally speaking, our predecessors were much more vice-bound than we were), and we followed suit more or less, mostly to seem smart to ourselves and each other.

Anyway, now that they've finally decided to interrupt their big-city snobbery (Andrew and Nick are in NYC, Emily is in Philadelphia) and visit Baltimore for the first time since I moved here, I will be taking them to shows and parties. On each of Friday and Saturday nights there is a show and a friend's party to go to: on Friday it's Anna D.'s friend's band Soul Cannon at the Ottobar and Mike's party, and on Saturday it's Thrushes for the umpteenth time (though a first for those three poor suckers) at Metro Gallery and Danielle's party. Talk about fortuitous coincidences; the burden of being an entertaining host, which I'm not, has been mostly taken off of my shoulders.

On the flip side, I'm also somewhat regarding this as an opportunity to prove myself. It may not sound it from all the frayed ends I document here, but my mundane, daily life is pretty together: this apartment is unusually clean for the residence of two college guys, is stocked with food that's actually healthy, I rarely find it necessary to eat something I don't cook myself (though I always welcome meetings with friends as excuses to hit up One World, Carma's, or Paper Moon), there is a futon (dubbed "Futon of Lost Souls" by Yuli) and jumbo love seat for guests, etc. I go to work during the week and Farmer's Market on Saturday. Generally, I'm pretty good at taking care of me and mine. Contrast with when I visited Andrew and Nick's sublet summer after sophomore year; I could barely find a place to step between the littered books and spilled pouches of tobacco (this was mostly Andrew's doing; Nick's room was an oasis of order), and the only thing they had to eat was ramen. So much for being that kid in a group of high school friends whose distinguishing trait was never knowing what was going on. The greatest fear with hanging out with old friends--particularly groups of old friends--is always that I will fall prey to old flaws and past vulnerabilities. We'll see how this works out.

As a final note, I am in need of a revolutionary act to settle my mind upon. Any ideas? I have a couple, but I'm not telling.

N-ville

I received my first graduate school interview invitation! It was from Vanderbilt University's Chemical and Physical Biology program. Most CPB prospectives have their interviews during the weekend of February 7-9, but that's the weekend of the Biophysical Society meeting in Long Beach, so I think I will try to schedule for the weekend after. It seems I'll be missing a lot of the second and third weeks of class...

Unsurprisingly, the first thing I did after reading Vanderbilt's email was check if Forget Cassettes would be playing in their hometown of Nashville anytime soon:



Alas, they are not. At least now the "Death-by-Communist" threat level has decreased.

Selections From the Pants Game

Diamond invented a game whereupon one replaces a word in a phrase (usually a band name) with the word "pants." Behold:

Band names:
...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Pants
I Love You But I've Chosen Pants
Explosions in the Pants (Ew.)
My Bloody Pants
The Velvet Underpants
Pants Parade
Pants of Canada
Pants Collective

Song names:
Elephant Pants
I Might Be Pants

Film names:
There Will Be Pants
The Science of Pants

What If This Is Permanent?

No, seriously, what if?

I wrote my first functional Pd patch yesterday. It is a triple ring modulator (Sterling: "Wait, your first thing in Pd wasn't a delay?"); nobody who knows what a ring modulator does will be impressed by this feat, but it's a start. Basically, there are three sine wave generators oscillating at the fundamental, first, and second order overtones of a single frequency, and the input signal is modulated with each of these waves in parallel before going to the output. As expected, it ground my guitar signal into a heap of vaguely resonant noise, but I actually really liked the sound the test signal (also a sine wave) made when modulated, especially when I was changing the frequencies of the carrier waves. So maybe I'll control the carrier wave frequencies with a simple LFO. And then try to control the test signal with my keyboard and an adsr~ object. Perhaps this is how most madness begins...

Talked to my mother on the phone yesterday. She said she probably wouldn't be able to make it to my commencement ceremony in May, because my brother will be taking his high school entrance exams a couple days after (more or less the time it takes to fly from here to Taiwan, accounting for time zones), and she feels she has to stick around to help him prepare. She didn't show up to my high school graduation either, but a couple of family friends she knew since before I was born came from Wisconsin in her stead, also visiting their son along the way. But she said yesterday she didn't know if they would be willing to show up this time.

I was upset. I lay in bed and talked with a pillow covering half of my face. This surprised both my mother and myself; after all, it's only practical, and my family is nothing if not practical, and I hardly gave a fuss about high school graduation. The prospect of walking alone, going to the reception alone when every last one of my classmates will be surrounded by their families, and then spending the rest of the evening (and most likely the next day or two) alone while everyone went to big celebrations and other such events with their families, was somehow a little too much to accept. Also, I don't naively think "my friends are my family" anymore, as I did in high school, and even if I did, it would be impossible to continue thinking that while they were with their families and I was with no one. Finally, this isn't like high school, where I wandered around for three years and wound up with a diploma. I worked hard in college: I stayed up doing homework until 6AM, sleeping three hours and waking up again to go to 10AM lecture; I spent entire summers in the laboratory; I had to rebuild my self-confidence and motivation to keep doing science after they were all but obliterated sophomore year. Graduating will be a monument to something that actually had been at stake.

My mother said she thought I was the type of person who liked being left alone with his work and preoccupations; and the funny thing is, a lot of the time, I am, but not all the time. In hindsight, it seems less like I didn't care for any of the rituals that come with "normal" family life as I simply went without them. I spend too much money flying back and forth between America and Taiwan and am always tired and dazed when I go home, so we don't go on vacations when I'm home, not to mention I haven't been home for over two weeks at a time since freshman year, due to research and a general disinclination to be in Taiwan. I don't spend a lot of time on the phone with my family because the 12-hour time difference means my mother's always calling me as I'm going out on Friday and Saturday nights, and my brother can't ever seem to find anything to say. I don't have extended family gatherings because I don't have an extended family: on my mother's side I have my grandparents, my uncle, and my grandparents' relatives from previous marriages whom they left behind on the mainland during the war in 1949, and whom I have never met, and we're all but detached from almost all our relatives on my father's side (which is a whole other story). In general, our family meetings with relatives tend to come off as courtesy or obligation rather than bonding through communal experience.

I guess that's why I enjoy the school year so much: I feel like the other students and I are all on the same plane, trying to figure it out for ourselves in a strange city, in a strange world. But commencement will be the one day in four years that I can't hold onto that illusion, or even sit out a week or two until it returns, like I did over winter break.

My mother said she thought I was the type of person who liked being left alone with his work and preoccupations; and the funny thing is, a lot of the time, I am, but not all the time. I said maybe she could fund some sort of dinner party I would arrange and formally invite people to, so that they would be going to a gathering for their own personal interests, instead of to celebrate my college graduation; she thought that was possible, but then I thought more and was upset that I should have to bait people into caring about my graduation. I asked whether I should have been worse at being on my own so she would've paid more attention, which was a genuinely stupid thing to say, the kind of asinine non-question that only very upset 15-year-olds ask, which I suppose I was, except for the part where I was 21. Besides, that's not really what I want, to be fussed over; sometimes I truly do need to be alone, and sometimes I truly cannot tolerate it.

Finally, my mother said she honestly had not anticipated this reaction from me, and that she would try to get my (notoriously flaky) uncle or someone else close to the family to come. Now I feel guilty for being a lousy child. (Which, oddly enough, is a sentiment I remember feeling back when I was actually a child--for a practical atheist, I sure undergo a lot of Puritanical self-flagellation.) I didn't want to go home for winter break, and she didn't force me; now I want someone to come to my commencement, and she's going to try and find someone. If that doesn't frame me as an utter jerk, I don't know what could.

It's my brother's 15th birthday on Thursday; I should call, and also tell my mother I'm sorry, that it's OK if nobody comes to commencement, that I understand ritual significance must yield to practicality. Good Lord--Ben is 15. That's how old I was when I left home for Jersey. If my experiences are any indication, the roller-coaster is just beginning.

"What's this? Tits?" -A. A.

To do list, in no particular order:

a. write Sterling's art school reference letter by Feb. 1
b. email Geoff to find out when he's coming back to the lab
c. run over the paper draft (again) with Mikhail and Kalina
d. buy a book for someone and give it to them
e. give Sterling his present (this will probably have to wait until the weekend)
f. straighten out the pay situation with the Materials Science admin
g. email UCSF to make sure they got Bertrand's recommendation
h. mail Maria her CD once I get her address

I am writing this list on the blog instead of in my planner as I usually (sporadically) do because when I grabbed my planner from my backpack (i. order new backpack to replace old one which has 2 gradually-enlarging holes at the bottom) I remembered it was for 2007. That made me chuckle a little bit.

The Vienna trip was great. I got to meet Jess' family (except Flannery, who was in Germany and whose bed I borrowed for the night) and Thom's mother who may or may not work for the CIA. I liked Jess' father particularly; it's easy to see where she got her capacity for intellectual observations and obsessions. On the way to the Des Ark show we listened to the new Marissa Nadler (who played before Thom's old band Little Wooden Men once in Vermont, although it was at some bizarre backward/sadistic venue where the headliners played first(!?)) album. We took the Metro across DC to get to the show, which was in St. Steven's Episcopalian Church in Columbia Heights. We missed the first band, but arrived just before Bella Fea (unsure of spelling; can't find on Google to confirm. A shame; they were really very good) started; they kicked it with a tight, jagged post-punk power trio attack.

Vijay and his roommates Ian and Alex showed up after Bella Fea's set. Then Des Ark played, and thankfully Aimee Argote had brought her drummer Ashley, so they played a mostly-electric set (not to say I don't like acoustic sets, but I knew their band sets were a spectacle to behold), and while it was somewhat haphazard--Aimee was plagued by borderline wardrobe malfunctions and a locked hand--they were still one of the most energetic bands I've ever seen. And the technique--there's no way anyone could convince me I'm anything less than an above-decent guitar player, but many of Aimee's riffs I could only hope to pull off with total concentration, much less while singing and ricocheting from one end of a ring of DC scenesters (there was no stage; they played on the church floor) to the other. That is, if I could even write them in the first place.

But the real surprise came when Ashley sat out and Aimee pulled out an acoustic tenor guitar: she told everyone in the church to sit on the floor and shut up (and good Lord, did some of those kids need to shut up, not to mention take a shower), which nearly everyone did. Then she proceeded to turn the set on its head and play a stunningly delicate, affecting acoustic micro-set. I've never seen anyone choke up singing their own songs. I was annoyed by one of the kids who remained standing at the edge of the crowd and smirked his way through these few songs; sure, smirks are an occupational hazard of taking oneself as seriously as Aimee was obviously doing, but when someone's doing that good a job of it, I feel one should try to have respect. Then they finished with one last electric song. And I left with an olive green Des Ark shirt (j. pay Jess back the $10 she spotted me for the shirt).

Then we all went to a bar where Alex's friend worked and stood in the back room by the pool table drinking Old Chubs and downing sweet potato fries. In all a good night.

Now I should probably go take care of what items from a. through j. I can. It would be easier to get through them if the people I'm supposed to be working with were around. I'll take care of the emails first, even though I really dislike writing them.

(k. get a new planner)

Hatter's Day

Went to farmer's market this morning. This means that I was approached again by the guy who's there every week pushing underground communist newsletters. It doesn't help that my messenger bag, which was given to me as a gift by my friend CPS in Taiwan and is so convenient for transporting glass half-gallon milk bottles to and from the market has "Revolution" written on it (it actually says "Red Revolution," but "Red" is in Chinese; and this was, ironically, designed by the students of and issued by a Taiwanese high school); this means I'm greeted every week with, "would you like a revolution for your revolution?", sometimes more than once.

Communism is something I haven't completely made up my mind about; having read some Marx, I agree Stalinism and Maoism can be succinctly described in Internet-speak as "you're doing it wrong," but I'm still torn between self-declared far-leftism (by American standards, anyway) and the undeniable knowledge that nobody has yet designed a socialist socioeconomic system that is sustainable for a society of indefinite expansion and diversity.

In any case, I bought some coffee and (finally!) an electric grinder, so it was worth the trip. Come to think of it, it's always worth the trip, even when it means I only get 5 hours of sleep the previous night.

I'm going to Vienna today. Not the one in Austria, but the one in Virginia. Going to see a Des Ark gig with Jess and Thom. It should be fun.

Maybe Des Ark needs a bassist?

Maybeland

Maybe it's just because I'm awake at 4AM (again), but a strange thought just passed through my mind: I live in Maryland. Not only that, I've lived here for the past three and a half years. Though obviously that was short enough a timespan to allow the realization of "I live in Maryland" to still come as a surprise, at least at 4AM.

Obviously, I've needed to remember what state I live in for various practical reasons; the issue, I think, is that I always think of myself as living in Baltimore, rather than Baltimore, Maryland. Whether by its inhabitants or outsiders, it seems that Baltimore is always regarded as an entity unto itself, instead of as a component of the larger Maryland system. Whether one is talking about the ghetto and the crime rate--inflated to quasi-caricature proportions by The Wire etc.--or the demented hysterics of the Wham City music scene--elevated to near-mythological status by Pitchfork Media etc.--Baltimore seems to have a mind and spirit of its own. The very name carries a character, a philosophy; the word "Baltimore" has become a law unto itself, and in the words of Neil Feather, it's "like a sick joke; you either get it or you don't." Sometimes one gets the impression Baltimore doesn't so much exist within the state of Maryland--or even the country--as alongside and separate from it, and the insiders and outsiders gaze upon each other as though at their own reflections in a funhouse mirror, and shrug symmetrically.

Which is all an illusion, of course, and I understand the truth in a cerebral way, but it's easy for me to forget there are rural expanses out to the west, and blue-collar communities, and naval cadets up in Annapolis (among whom is my high school friend Adam), none of which are very distant in the grand scheme of things. The illusion is compounded by the fact that I haven't really been to many places in Maryland outside of Baltimore, Towson, and Washington DC if it counts; in fact, I rack my brain to think of any. There was that one time I auditioned for a band in the suburbs, Lijuan's wedding in a suburban church, and that time I went to a Chinese restaurant with some of my mother's friends, but those were only for a few hours each. I've never been to College Park or Annapolis, though I know people who lived or live in those places. This really isn't right; it shouldn't be this hard to get around, even without a car. I wish it were easier to have the time and means to explore.

All in all, this is significantly unlike when I was in boarding school in New Jersey; although I spent most of my time in the Lawrenceville-Princeton-Trenton area, obviously, Andrew and I drove to various places around the state, including the shore. Also, the central NJ nexus was much more an example of the general state of New Jersey than an exception, at least compared to the relationship between Baltimore and Maryland.

I'm actually sort of excited for this semester and for all the traveling that will hopefully take place. The trip to Long Beach for the Biophysical Society conference the second week of February is already a given. Also, for grad school interviews, I'll be visiting some cities I've never laid eyes on: Boston, San Francisco, perhaps Nashville. I haven't felt wanderlust in a while; I wasn't particularly excited to make the move to Baltimore three and a half years ago, and the move to New Jersey was even less of a conscious decision. In fact, I can't remember the last time I was truly excited to see some place new. I know I went to Pittsburgh and Cleveland last week, but there's something different to that: because I was with the people I usually hang out with, and spending most of the time partying at their houses, it seemed like more of the same, but in a different location. Maybe things will be different if I'm more or less traveling solo in a new city on business (in the loosest sense of the word)?

Of course, all of this is moot if I don't get interviews from any of the grad programs. But then I will probably be booted back to Taiwan after I graduate, get nailed with mandatory civil/military service, and die fighting the Communists. So it's not really worth thinking about for now.

First Sentences of Months: 2007

Hey, why not, everyone else is doing it.

January.
Newark, New Jersey. One of my more favorite airports. Sitting in the lobby of the local Best Western where I'd spent the night.
[I figure three sentence fragments make a whole sentence.]

February.
Hit a new low today: Overdraft fees for overdraft fees.
[Obviously not the best time to be had.]

March.
And so two weeks of terminal velocity came to an end this past weekend, and apparently when I told my mind I could finally relax my immune system was listening in, because Saturday morning I woke up with my throat so sore I thought I wouldn't speak for the rest of the day.
[Discounting the first, survey, entry. As you can see, I continued to have loads of fun.]

April.
I feel like I'm settling into a brand new era of electric guitar, possibly catalyzed by a renewed investigation into texture and noise, which simply aren't as easy to explore with my "other" adept (I use the term loosely, as can be seen in the awkward grammar of this sentence) instrument; the 2-year bass fascination phase has abated, if only temporarily.
[Back to the long sentences. I think this is after I dropped X-ray Crystallography and started getting bored.]

May.
Earlier this semester I mentioned my very attractive Biological Physics TA, Corinne.
[Why, so I did!]

June.
It's been a couple of weeks.
[Lame.]

July.
I've been away.
[Obviously, slacking off for the summer. Or maybe life itself slacked off for the summer.]

August.
21. 21 is such a hyped number.
[That was for my 21st birthday. It appears I was quite indifferent toward it. This was one of those melancholy drunk entries.]

September.
I ain't getting laid, but I'm going to grad school.
[Which was actually the entire entry. Referring simultaneously to getting a nice score on the GRE and getting rather frozen off by a friend of Hannah's whom I met at the Den, both of which happened on that day.]

October.
I should sleep more; late nights spent trying to forcibly realign my Circadian rhythm always leave me blank the next day.
[Some truths are eternal. These truths are usually a pain.]

November.
I'm not sure who left that note on that last entry--the one that said, "vulture."--nor am I sure what it's supposed to mean, but if it--as I suspect--is meant to imply that I wait for bad things to happen to people I care about so I can fulfill my own selfish desires, the only response I can think of is...someone doesn't know me very well.
[I still don't know who that was.]

December.
One of my better-kept secrets is this: when people ask me if I'm happy, if I'm sleeping well and eating well, often I don't receive it as benevolent well-wishing (though I know damn well it is), but rather as additional sources of pressure for me to be happy and stop half-assing meals and bedtimes, and I want to tell them, you know, if I could be happy and well-adjusted, I would.
[2007 didn't end as miserably as this makes it seem. This just goes to show I don't usually blog on my better days. Maybe that should be a resolution? "Don't just blog on sad days."]

Instrument

This is what I dreamed on the first night of 2008 under the influence of many consecutive days of drinking and staying up until 4AM:

I lived in a small village or town in the mountains. Near the village, there was a canyon, narrow and deep, with a swift creek running through the bottom. Across the two sides of the canyon hung a network of heavy iron chains, criss-crossing the thin air between the sheer stone cliffs like a colossal spiderweb.

I would climb out onto these chains into the heart of the metal web in the middle of the canyon and deliberately entangle my body in the chains, suspended hundreds of feet above the canyon floor, less like a spider and more like a fly. Then, I would twist my body and my limbs, jostling the chains to produce jangly tones that resonated within the canyon, and I could coordinate my movements to produce tuned "notes," melody, harmony, and eventually music. It was as though the chains, the canyon, and I had all combined to form one colossal instrument of geological proportions. And I was apparently a virtuoso of this "instrument"; dangling in mid-air above a plunge to certain death, trapped in chain-link metal webbing, and free-spinning in 360 degrees around each of three different axes while "playing" orchestrated combinations of "notes" felt utterly natural in my dream. The music's movement was the instrument's movement was my movement. I was a guitar string. I was a saxophone reed. I was the wind in church organ pipes. I didn't "play" the instrument or the music; I was all these things.

Anyway, it seemed that the music I made with the instrument was quite beautiful (though I cannot remember what it sounded like, exactly), and the townsfolk enjoyed it immensely. But one day I either decided to stop playing the instrument or start playing music on it that was different from what I had played before. This made the townsfolk very angry, and they formed a mob to drag me out into the wasteland and put me to death.

Jet Black

Lasts of 2007:

Last t-shirt worn: Sonic Youth shirt with Expressway to Yr Skull lyrics
Last drink: German "Oktoberfest" brew
Last book read(ing): Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return
Last record listened to: some fucking impromptu mix John made
Last CD purchased: Low remix album
Last film watched: The Matador, starring Pierce Brosnan
Last decent photograph taken:


First decent photograph taken in 2008:

First record listened to in 2008: Slowdive - Souvlaki
First TV program watched in 2008: Radiohead's Scotch Mist webcast

I'm at John's house in Pittsburgh. It's always interesting when 50-something parents ask their 20-something children for joints. Affluent white suburbia is something I will never get used to; it seems David Lynch and Ang Lee may have been right about some of their "dark undercurrents" ideas. I destroyed the toilet in John's basement by first breaking the lever when I opened up the water tank to flush the malfunctioning toilet and then shattering the ceramic tank lid when I knocked it to the ground after lifting it.

I called many people this New Year's Eve: Jess, Thom, Sarah K. (why did I do that?), Andrew, Caroline, et al. Cheri texted me, which came as a surprise. My high school roommate Mike called three times tonight to tell me he missed me and the last year of high school, when we roomed and had a band together, was the best year of high school for him; I almost cried, and probably would have, if I could still cry. I thought we left Lawrenceville with him hating my guts, but I suppose you never know with these things. Maybe I will miss this, too, in four years' time.

2007 was okay. It was better than 2006, which was one of the most miserable years I've had the misfortune of enduring in my time. I accomplished a few things I didn't really expect to accomplish, especially as far as academics go. But 2008 shall be better, and I won't heed any pessimistic opinions otherwise (particularly that of Maura, who still thinks her life peaked with the 310 E. University scene in 2006). I want to be kinder to everyone. I want to be capable of a kindness great enough to put myself at risk, and I want that to matter.

People are watching The Science of Sleep downstairs. It's one of my favorite movies and I've been meaning to see it again for a long while, but the general plot of two people who are so perfect for each other it's almost cruel when they don't end up together is a little too relevant for comfort this close to 2007. At least for me.

This time next year I'll be in a different city. I'll be dreaming different dreams. I'll be chasing different loves. I'm a nostalgic, but I treasure the tears that come with nostalgia, instead of attempting to avoid them. But for now...

Maybe this year is the year. Maybe it's not. Either way, I will try my best to enforce gentleness and beauty. I need to stop being so tired all the time.

Kiss hard on the lips and say that this year will be better than the last.