July 3rd, 2010 — Music, tAYUMGP
listen to Prana Ferox on Grooveshark
I'm not allowed to read the works of Philip K Dick too close together. This self-imposed rule dates from the time I read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time-Slip, Ubik and A Scanner Darkly in the space of about a week, and subsquently struggled to convince my brain to operate in the manner to which I had previously been accustomed. It turns out to be quite difficult, maybe even impossible, for me to read much PKD without feeling as though I've taken a rather large quantity of rather bad drugs, or perhaps become a paranoid schizophrenic. Perhaps both!
Art is dangerous.
"Prana Ferox" is not the kind of destabilising influence that I'm forced to ration, but it does capture a certain something—and encourage said something to take root in the listener's mind. The notes that would have been the first draft of this post, had they been coherent or structured enough to warrant the title of "draft", tried valiantly to describe the certain something using words in all caps inside square brackets: [ALL IN] [THROW CAUTION TO THE WINDS] [READY WILLING AND ABLE TO GO COMPLETELY OFF THE RAILS].
The excerpt from a self-hypnosis tape that leads off the track assures us that we will "wake up in the morning feeling gloriously alive, with the firm conviction that the problems that disturbed [us] in the past will now disappear, disappear, disappear into the midnight of our consciousness". The song's narrator would certainly like to believe it. We have arrived during the aftermath of an unspecified but apparently explosive event, and things between our narrator and the "you" he has left fuming upstairs are by no means okay, but he is downstairs checking on the makings of some bootleg whiskey, thinking maybe if he fixes his attention firmly enough on the future he won't have to deal with the past and its inconvenient consequences.
He is out of luck. Everything that has happened has happened, and it's all fuel for what will happen next. The violence (emotional or otherwise) of his experiences just makes them all the more propulsive. We don't get to see the big explosion, but we know it's coming. He is turning water into whiskey and life into rocket fuel.
My initial misinterpretation of the song's title created a mental association I have never been able to undo. The crude translation of "prana ferox" as "fierce breath" recalled a conversation from several years ago, in which a friend and I discussed the effects of sleep deprivation without the bravado and one-upmanship that usually features in conversations of that nature between nerds in their early twenties. He made a passing reference to the unshakeable conviction that comes to the exhausted-but-wired: you are burning things with your eyes.
Listening to "Prana Ferox" leaves me feeling a little bit like I am breathing fire.
February 22nd, 2010 — Personal, This Year
I've been going back and forth about what to write about 2009. There's a part of me that would like to write candidly (and regularly) about what goes on in my life and how I feel about it; people sharing stories of their lives produce some of my favourite online writing, and the idea of being a little bit more open and accessible is increasingly appealing.
It turns out, though, that it will take some significant brain-shifting for me to feel comfortable with (or even capable of) that kind of thing. I'm not even sure it's an effort I want to make. I used to write things that I couldn't talk about, but these days I'm both better at talking and head over heels in love with Real Conversations. I'd much rather converse with you specifically than plaster myself all over a public space and hope that you notice.
That being said, last year was a fairly extraordinary time for me, and I would be sorry to leave it entirely unremarked.
I moved cities once and moved house three times, the last time to move in with the most awesome housemate imaginable. I got a job, then got the same job in a different city, and I got good at it quickly. I ended a relationship (one of the most sorely testing experiences of my life so far), met wonderful new people, and worked on reconnecting with wonderful old people (with varying degrees of success). I was sick for the entire year, and I stopped holding my breath and hoping to be well again soon.
I listened to the Mountain Goats excessively enough that even I feel faintly embarassed about it, while struggling to be interested in new music and seeing almost nothing live. I set myself a goal of reading 52 books in the year, reached it quite early, and then burned out spectacularly. I played a few excellent computer games and saw a few excellent films, which rekindled my dormant interest in both.
Most importantly, though, I did a lot of thinking. And I do mean a lot.
The relationship saga taught me a whole lot. I learned that it really does take two to tango; more specifically, the effectiveness and quality of any communication is always going to be partially out of my control no matter how good a communicator I become. I learned that sometimes disengaging completely is the best (and even only) sane option, even (or especially) when it means letting what feel like hurtful untruths go unchallenged. I learned that sometimes you just have to let people do whatever they have to do, and get on with what you have to do.
Incidentally, what is with the romanticisation of terrible, passive-aggressive, co-dependent behaviour in popular culture? Oh, things are terrible, there is no reason to think they will improve (especially since we are not doing anything to change anything), I don't even like you very much a lot of the time, but ~it's love~ so we should stay together? Fuck that noise.
The phenomenal thing was the depth and breadth of thinking about relationships that got triggered. I am capable of some pretty determined and sustained introspection, and my lack of spoons meant I had plenty of time to spend with myself. One of the more significant revelations was that I have always been at my happiest when single.
That says a few things to me, but they all fall under the umbrella of "Hey! I think you've been doing it wrong!" I am, after all, the common factor in all my relationship and non-relationship periods. So I gave myself some mandatory time off to think about it all: a year of being absolutely not allowed "relationship stuff", to be extended or not depending on how much I could figure out in that much time.
It has been brilliant. Having that explicit rule has not only given me the mental and emotional space to re-evaluate what I want in relationships and how I should approach them, it has also made me feel much freer to interact with people in whatever way feels most natural. I am still not sure what will happen when my year is up, but I am confident that whatever it is will be good for me.
Other things that I spent lots of time thinking about last year include: post-ironic appreciation; a large set of ethics- and 'ism'-related stuff; identity; mortality; and, most of all, sincerity and the pursuit of happiness.
By the end of 2009 I felt happier and more like myself than since ... well ... ever. Certainly since long enough ago that whoever I was then doesn't really count as the same person.
2010 so far has only continued this trend. People continue to be awesome. I have rediscovered music (recorded and live) in a big way. Urges to write more and take more pictures and travel more and have more conversations and cook more new foods are gnawing pleasantly at me, and I am even okay with not having the energy to act on most of them.
It is good to be alive.
January 1st, 2010 — Music, This Year
For a good half of this year I could rarely bring myself to listen to new music. It had been a while since I devoured recommendations from Pitchfork and the mp3 blogosphere, but now I was just not interested in hearing new things. I would try to listen to them and realise that I wasn't even listening properly, let alone enjoying the experience.
The most notable side effect of this condition was the amount of Mountain Goats that I listened to.
Leaving aside the year's two new Mountain Goats releases, which I'll get to in a moment, there were a handful of their albums that I really got into for the first time. In chronological order:
Get Lonely (2006), which I may have heard described as "spending a long time at the bottom of a swamp". Not the sort of thing that has clicked with me in the past, but I discovered this year that sometimes all one can do with an overwhelming feeling that one is suffocating at the bottom of a swamp is wait it out with some music that feels the same way.
Full Force Galesburg (1997). Wow. Just wow. This is now on approximately equal footing with We Shall All Be Healed as my most dearly-beloved Mountain Goats album. It is very close to perfect.
The Coroner's Gambit (2000), which had slipped under my radar until I happened to listen through it in a year saturated with reminders to consider mortality. "Elijah", "Baboon" and "Alphonse Mambo" are high points, but the whole thing is somehow very different to its individual parts.
Finally, Zopilote Machine (1994), a late entrant propelled by my sudden discovery that it is not just a "Going to Georgia" vehicle after all, and Nothing For Juice (1996) which I was tricked into exploring by the Awesome Yet Unfinishable Mountain Goats Project and which turned out to be marvellous.
Actual New Music From 2009!
All that being said, there were four new releases this year that I can call my favourites. They are also the only four that I have paid any sustained amount of attention to, but never mind. In alphabetical order:
Eyedea & Abilities - By The Throat
Hip-hop and I have never really gotten along. I have a huge amount of respect for the skills involved, but it's pretty rare for me to find even a single song that I can connect with. Imagine my surprise when I heard the title track of this album, liked it a lot, went to listen to the whole thing, and liked that a lot as well! I lack the vocabulary to explain what I like about it, but with luck it will inspire me to learn.
The Mountain Goats & John Vanderslice - Moon Colony Bloodbath
I am not a fan of John Vanderslice. For a while I found this EP kind of alienating, and I blamed it on "the Vanderslice taint". Then I remembered that he produced the Mountain Goats' We Shall All Be Healed, which I love almost more than anything, and was forced to reconsider. Suddenly, I no longer liked only the John Darnielle-centric songs. Repeated listening really fleshed out the theme, and by the end of the year I had listened to those seven tracks a total of 276 times.
The Mountain Goats - The Life of the World to Come
The Life of the World to Come was my most anticipated album of the year. My first reaction was mixed: some tracks were disappointingly inconspicuous, one was eerily reminiscent of a Barenaked Ladies song, one made me cry uncontrollably the first time I listened to it and has continued to have a similar effect since, and a couple of others landed on me just as hard. I still don't have much of a sense of it as a cohesive whole (much like Heretic Pride or most of the pre-4AD albums), and I think that if I did not have such a strong sense of John Darnielle the person (rather than just John Darnielle the musician) I would be able to maintain a greater emotional distance from it; as it is I think Darnielle is a genius but listening to this album too much (or perhaps at all) constitutes very poor emotional hygiene.
Windmill - Epcot Starfields
A vocalist who sounds like a weird hybrid of Tim DeLaughter and Kimya Dawson. Piano and strings by turns sparse and lush, warm vocal harmonies and cold synthesisers. Lyrics with a tendency towards the bizarre. This album did not stand out when I first heard it, but I keep coming back to it again and again. It is a very pretty, if sometimes affected, album about a very small person in a very large universe.
New-to-me Music Not Actually From 2009!
Bright Eyes - I'm Wide Awake It's Morning
I had previously written Bright Eyes off as some kind of ridiculous, bleating, self-indulgent emo nonsense. Thanks to a recommendation from How To Be So Real, I checked this album out and was blown away. Sorry, Connor Oberst, I misjudged you.
The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America
Another previously-written-off band! What am I, some kind of reformed music snob or something? The Hold Steady's other albums still don't do anything for me, but Boys and Girls in America perfectly captures a reckless, full-throated, self-destructive kind of youth that I can romanticise from a distance without ever wanting to live through.
Manchester Orchestra - I'm Like A Virgin Losing A Child
One of Stefan's best recommendations to me ever (so it is in very good company). Standout tracks are "Where Have You Been?", "Sleeper 1972" and "Colly Strings". It's good to let go and just be emo sometimes.
Mission of Burma - Vs.
I sought out Mission of Burma, among other bands, after reading Our Band Could Be Your Life. This was the album that stuck. It's good to listen to really loudly. I think I need to make an effort to listen to music really loudly more often.
Moscow Olympics - Cut the World
This is a strange little EP from a Filipino (I think) dream-pop/new wave/post-punk group who somehow manage to remind me of New Order, Sonic Youth and the Pet Shop Boys simultaneously. I am not sure how "good" it is, but it broke my listening-to-new music drought for me. And I do really like it.
Oops
This is only a part of the post I had intended to write today. As it has grown somewhat large, and my self-imposed deadline for writing something approaches, I will leave writing about the unmusical aspects of 2009 until another day.
For those of you who have made it this far, I am pleased to present my soundtrack to 2009 in pseudo-mix-CD format:
Driving Through Ghosts, or, Don't Mistake Proximity For Fate.
December 21st, 2009 — tAYUMGP
listen to Resonant Bell World on Grooveshark
[0:00] - [0:27] - Blunt, primitive acoustic guitar. No need for anything else. This is one of the things I love about the Mountain Goats of days gone by, no matter how much "better" their records may have become since. The indie music world is stuffed full of guitarists who aren't great guitarists, but John Darnielle might be the greatest of them.
[0:27] - [1:26] - The narrator berates the object of his affections for her failure to behave like a normal person should behave. He is sarcastic, yet seemingly resigned; this is probably how things are going to be for a long time yet. There is an outbreak of violence, threaded through as always with affection, or attraction, or whatever these characters always have to tie them together, and it's still hard to believe that he really minds.
But I don't care about all that. What I do care about is this next part:
[1:27] - [1:30] - "Between you and me", Darnielle sings. What Mountain Goats fan has never felt a Mountain Goats song speak to them on such a crucial, personal level that it can only be a direct communication from JD himself?
[1:30] - [1:31] - Next he appears to drop the performance altogether in favour of a wry, conversational aside. If previously we were glowing with the illusory sense that John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats has something to share with us and us alone, now he is right on the other side of the room and we are positively incandescent. The upper-register vocal straining vanishes, and he admits: "it was — it was really exciting."
It is worth mentioning that the saving grace of many an horrific situation in the Mountain Goats catalogue is the exhilaration, or camaraderie, or just plain good things that Darnielle's characters find despite (or thanks to) the fact that everything is terrible.
[1:32] - [2:00] - More arms-length criticism and hyperbole, but I think we all know by now that there is not going to be an ultimatum, or an apology, or indeed any consequences at all.
[2:00] - [2:11] - This is the kind of broken-record moment I can really get behind. For the first time, the song feels like its title. It conjures up the feeling of being so inescapably a part of reality that you are practically vibrating with it. Like a confused human version of a singing wine glass , or a concrete slab being broken up by a jackhammer.
[2:12] - [2:36] - I love the way the Mountain Goats never shy away from the instrumental outro, even when it's just solitary, determined guitar hammering at two chords for another thirty seconds or so.
December 5th, 2009 — By Request
These five questions come from connikins over on Livejournal. As they are nice small questions (rather than Things that take me a few hundred words and therefore a period of weeks to cover), they jump the queue. To hell with continuity. According to the rules I am supposed to ask five questions of anyone who asks me to. I kind of hope nobody does.
1. If none of the clothing in your wardrobe was allowed to be black (or a dark enough shade that it is pretty much indistinguishable from black), what colour would your wardrobe predominantly be?
Grey. Wearing white stresses me out and no other colour is sufficiently neutral. I really dislike wearing blue, and while green is my favourite colour (and I like wearing it) I think it would be a bit too weird for me to wear mostly green most of the time.
2. Are you a music elitist? How do you deal with other people having vastly different music tastes to you?
I don't think I'm a music elitist at all. I used to be. I looked down my nose at music that I didn't get anything out of, especially anything I could decry as shallow and packaged. A few additional years have improved my ability to tell the difference between my subjective opinion and objective truth, as well as teaching me to appreciate a wider variety of sounds and styles.
I tend to be really happy when people that I admire or get along with share my taste in music, and a little bit sad when they don't, but people whose tastes are vastly different to mine are fine by me. There are certain things we are unlikely to be able to share, that's all.
While I am given to saying things like "anybody who doesn't like The National has something wrong with them", the defect I refer to is "being insufficiently identical to me". That is really not something I can hold against anybody.
The other day at work I saw a guy trying to buy Britney Spears tickets on eBay. I knew he had seen her perform recently, and said something like "more Britney tickets, huh?" He braced for ridicule - and, indeed, someone nearby overheard and began to make fun of him - but I had just been making conversation. As I said at the time, if one of my favourite artists was playing in Melbourne you can bet I'd be after tickets.
3. If you only knew a person in passing, what do you primarily judge their personality on? (eg. How they dress, how they talk?) How do you judge if they're worth knowing or not?
That's a hard question to answer, although it's something I actually think about a fair bit.
Part of the problem is that I really don't tend to "judge" people, or categorise them as "worth knowing/not worth knowing". If I observe someone behaving in a way that I find really unpleasant I'm likely to divert my attentions elsewhere, and if it turns out that their interests and values lack any appreciable common ground with mine I will probably not pursue closer acquaintanceship, but I really appreciate the opportunities I get to interact with people who aren't necessarily "my type of person". (This is one of the reasons I like my current workplace so much.)
The thing is that I love people. I really like the way my initial sense of somebody gradually fills out and changes as I get to know them better. I'm rarely surprised by people, because I don't have a fixed idea of who they are supposed to be; I just accept that everything fits into their personal timeline, which I will never see all of. Stuff that I don't understand makes sense with context that I don't have, and every new bit of information leads to greater understanding.
I've wandered a fair way from the question, I know. It's very difficult to put my finger on what it is that attracts my interest. Part of it is an intuitive sense of commonality, I think; I've lost count of the number of times I've felt drawn to somebody, only to find out (days, weeks, months or years later) that we share a predilection or a perspective or a particular kind of formative experience. Another part of it is individuality; even complete strangers sometimes give off such a strong vibe of being themselves that I practically want to follow them home and listen to them tell their life story.
Back to the question again! I suspect that my strongest sense of someone's personality, especially if I know them only in passing, comes from non-verbal cues. Body language, facial expressions, small reactions to things going on around them. That doesn't tend to affect whether I want to know them or not, though, it just affects the ways I might interact with them.
4. Is insomnius a reference to having insomnia?
Sort of. When I was signing up for my Livejournal account a few years ago my sleeping patterns were in much worse shape than they are now. 'Insomnius' as a handle wasn't a direct reference to insomnia, but it was a collection of sounds that seemed to fit pretty well with the person I felt like at the time. I'm sure my general lack of sleep had something to do with that.
Since then I have used it for pretty much everything online, and for me it has become quite removed from any meaning other than 'me'. I get a bit surprised when people connect it with insomnia. Sometimes I wonder if I should use something else, but as a signifier it has become about as strong as my given name (which I would also struggle to change). Besides, having trouble sleeping seems likely to be a feature of my life for some time yet.
5. Do you remember that time you put the spoon in the cup?
Like it was yesterday. Oh, man. Good times.
