“being a decent human being isn’t enough to make someone fall in love with you, it’s the bare minimum to be expected of you for how to exist in a world with other human beings.” — Isabel with the home truths for Nice Guys™.
“I’m a survivor of different things. But survivors can recognise in each other the same sort of cold burning thing underneath them.” —
John Darnielle, on wanting to marry Judy Garland as a child.
In that same interview he mentions spending a lot of his time and effort on trying (struggling, actually) to be a good person, which makes me feel somehow validated because I do too. Maybe I can grow up to be John Darnielle after all.
I just found a(n empty?) cigarette packet lying on the ground near my pre-lecture sitting bench (it’s outside in a low-traffic area with trees around it). My first thought was that I should pick it up and put it in a bin on my way to class, and I’m going to do that, but then I thought what if one of my fellow students, one I haven’t met yet, sees me carrying and/or throwing away the box and assumes that I smoke and so they never strike up a conversation because smoking is gross (sorry, it is) and we never become the greatest of friends? Or it could lead to one of those cheesy mutual-misunderstanding plot lines, at the conclusion of which we get married.
Oh well. Time to go to class.
andrewtsks asked: ...of course, Radiohead's In Rainbows was also only announced 10 days before its release. Maybe you just didn't have enough time in which to build it up way too much in your head.
Yeah, that’s what I meant! I probably didn’t express it well as I was not taking the necessary steps to manage my horrible attention span while writing.
I’m not sure what the solution might be, though. Is it even possible for me to return to a state of not knowing when my favourite bands are about to release things? There’s no way I can not think about hypothetical future albums, even if I do stop looking at everything about music on the internet (which I can’t imagine myself ever doing). I guess I felt like music occupied my thoughts a lot back when In Rainbows come out, but compared to my current state I was completely oblivious then.
Tricky. Maybe it’s time to ignore most of the current music I’m already aware of and go digging through the past for a year or two.
[video]
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-03-04) -
Notably lower numbers for almost everything this week, a trend that will probably continue. I’m in one of my phases of wanting to listen differently, and at the same time I’ve started doing more exercise and gone back to study. Uh, and I’ve spent way too much time playing Saints Row 2, of all things.
I have a “Pretend Shuffle” smart playlist1 that I like to listen to while walking or whatever, because my usual album-oriented listening is incompatible with exercise for reasons that aren’t interesting enough to enumerate. Uni work and reading draws me to non-intrusive instrumental music and (sometimes) noise, which tends to run long — sometimes I might only get through two or three tracks in an hour. And, well, last.fm didn’t scrobble all the times I listened to Plain White T’s “Hate” on the radios of hijacked virtual cars.
But here’s what did get scrobbled (written in fits and starts while listening to Perfume, in the gaps between reading about Perfume, because One Week One Band is ace):
After giving myself a while to recover from “Hood”, I finally listened to Perfume Genius’ 2010 album Learning. (I haven’t yet been game to launch into Put Your Back N 2 It.) I really like this, although I’m yet to have anything intellectualised to say about why. “Mr Peterson” is especially, hauntingly sad and lovely; it’s also the track that most reminds me of Illinois-vintage Sufjan Stevens, and like Stevens’ work of around that time Learning resists being broken down into individual songs that I can get to know for themselves.
It’s music to listen to quietly at night when I need to feel alone. It makes me feel as though I could crumble completely at any moment — but I don’t.
A few listens into my time with Animal Joy, I’m finding myself reacting the same way I did to The Golden Archipelago. There are songs here that I love, and when I think about the prospect of seeing them played live I despair of Australia2. But my attention wavers while listening and ultimately I end up thinking “well, it’s no Rook”.
I’ve been thinking about this over the last couple of weeks, because it bothers me, and I’m not sure I can think of a single time a band I’ve loved has released a new album that I haven’t felt at least a bit disappointed by. Even the Mountain Goats are not safe from this: I like everything they’ve ever done, recent material included, but there’s no going back to the way I feel about We Shall All Be Healed or Full Force Galesburg.
Maybe this is just how it’s going to be. The process of discovering an album can never be the same when I’ve had to wait for its release, with all that time to think about what it might be like and whether it will measure up to the hopes and expectations I can’t help but have.
In fact, as I typed that last sentence I realised that there is an album that floored me when it came out, even though I already knew and loved the band: Radiohead’s In Rainbows. It took me completely by surprise at a time when I thought they might just not release any more albums … so maybe the anticipation thing really is important.
But this is getting a long way away from the Shearwater I listened to during this particular week. I like the new album just fine but I suspect that, like The Golden Archipelago, it will fall out of my regular rotation and I’ll just keep listening to Rook and Palo Santo all the time.
The last several weeks have seen me leaning more and more towards Merzbow, but I hardly have any of his stuff. I’m not even sure why I have this album with Boris (Rock Dream), given that Boris have never interested me. I do have fond memories of listening to it at my old job with some new headphones that had just been delivered, because when my boss saw the new headphones he wanted to listen too. “This just sounds like white noise to me,” he said, and so I put on some Dvořák. Unsurprisingly, recorded classical music wasn’t as loud as Boris and Merzbow so he turned up the volume, and equally unsurprisingly I forgot to turn it back down before switching back again. Slapstick punchline. I’ve told that story on Tumblr before, but who cares, it’s not like I had much else to say about this. I like the 35-minute “Feedbacker”. I kind of want to download the Merzbox.
3. Low (13)
I probably listen to this much Low just about every week, but they’re usually obscured by obsessions of the moment. Not so this week.
Ferndorf is so wonderful, and I literally do not know how to go about listening to more of Hauschka’s work. Youtube surfing seems disrespectful somehow. Not because there’s something wrong with listening to songs on Youtube, per se, but this isn’t really songs. I’m even reluctant to listen to songs made available by Hauschka on Myspace or wherever3.
5. Ulver (12)
I think I’ve decided to keep listening to Bergtatt and Nattens Madrigal and just leave everything else alone. Am I missing out on anything amazing by doing so? It’s possible, but I think I can handle the risk.
1 GB of “randomly”-selected music that I’ve had for more than a week but neither listened to in the last six months nor ever skipped, either unrated or 3+ stars, not from live recordings, and less than six minutes long. ↩
Shearwater have never toured here and it seems unlikely that they ever will. But still, I said that about The National back in the day and look what happened there. ↩
Myspace still exists! I know, I was surprised too. And also still logged in, somehow. ↩
“Our red kitchen counter isn’t just a place for food any more, it has become something of a canvas, and I am always studying the objects on it, trying to see if there is something interesting there, something that grabs me and perhaps allows me to frame the ordinary in unexpected ways. To me this is the beauty of photography: to see the world with new eyes, to not be jaded by our ordinary surroundings, and to in fact find moments of delight in them. It is a challenge, and one that often goes against our instincts, but a challenge that I find always worth while.” —
This is why I’m studying photography. (Emphasis mine.)
My plan for today is to catch up on four weeks’ worth of One Week One Band posts.
I can’t even imagine what this will do to me.
I miss everybody.
So, I start university next week. I’m doing four first-year subjects, which is only a standard full-time load. And I’m not sure how I’m going to have time to do anything but study.
One of the subjects, in particular, seems likely to eat me alive. It’s one of the core practical photography subjects for my major, and the amount of work I’m going to have to produce in twelve weeks is quite intimidating. I have all sorts of interesting ideas for awesome things I can do for the assignments, but I have to shoot film for this subject (ugh, vegan angst) and I have next to no experience with that (haven’t done anything with film since I was … ten?). And there are so many assignments!
Once semester actually starts I should have a better perspective on everything; I haven’t studied at all for a long time and I’m probably overestimating how much time and effort certain things will take.
But right now? Yikes.