I've been on a reading marathon this month. I've been in bed with the flu for ages, and there's nothing better than getting stuck into a book to pass the time between nose-blows and pill-swallows. So far I've consumed 'The Dharma Bums' by Kerouac, 'The Idiot' by Dostoyevsky, 'In Memoriam to Identity' by Kathy Acker, 'Survivor', by Chuck Palaniuk, 'Nostromo', by Joseph Conrad, and about five others I have returned, and can no longer remember.
So I've been marinating on words and sentences, and books and blogs, and about just what it is that makes serial confessors of us all, out to tell the real story about what it was like to lie on the couch and watch tv all Tuesday night, and how we felt and what we thought. Some of us want to show off, because we're insecure, and we think if people saw what we get up to (and with whom), that we'd be universally loved. Some of us fake it, and imitate those who i just described. Some of us are bored shitless and want to just talk to someone, even if it's post/reply/reply. Some of us want to help others, with the benefit of our knowledge. Like "Don't watch the movie 'Closer' with your partner. Just don't. Pandora's box is actually a digi-pak." Some of us are asking for help. Some of us are a bit of all I have mentioned, spiced up with a dash of something extra, to keep it individual.
I'm a bit of everything. I offer and ask for help. I like to show off, and I wear my insecurity on my sleeve. I know I definitely like telling stories. But I'm not in a position where I post when I don't want to. I do this for me alone now, and it feels a lot better that way. One of my ultra-famous blog friends sent me an email the other day cursing the expectations having a popular blog can put on one. She'll work it out though, she's one of the smarter ones.
I've found my favourite posts have been totally overlooked, with nary a comment between them, when some of the most unthought out, 'please the fans', lowest common demominator posts have garnered the blog equivalent of critical applause. I scratch my head to that. Now I know how Jim Morrison felt...no wonder S.J.X. calls me The Lizard King.
Speaking of 'The Doors of Perception', I just read that too. I'm Aldous Huxley's number one fanboy, I think he's incredible. I just about blew my pants off with joy when i read how he thinks we petrify the Universe with our words. Because it's true. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing...I look at it as 'verbal photographs'. If you want to relay to someone a visual experience, we pile words on each other to attempt to recapture the moment in a code that they can decipher internally, hopefully imagining something approximating what you saw in their own minds.
It's amazing how 'static' words, ie: they don't move once you've uttered them, can represent moving things. If I say I was riding my chopper through Fitzroy today (I wasn't), you picture the wheels turning, things going by, me looking intensely rad, all that good stuff. The words don't move, but they give you a verbal jumping off point. from which to recreate the complexity of the scene in your own mind. Or how someone can write a joke 500 years ago, and you can read it today, get it, and laugh. Someone who is long dead came along and made you laugh. I love that. So as much as Huxley kinda curses words out, as a poor alternative to real experience, if you weren't there to see the experience in the first instance, then they have to do. And they do okay, otherwise people would never have bought 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy, or even 'The War of the Worlds' double album (which kicked major amounts of ass back in the 80's).
Right, so words don't measure up to actual experience. Nothing controversial there. Words and pictures would get you a step closer, and sound and pictures even closer still. I never understood people who said "turn off the tv and read a book". I always thought we should throw out our books and just get better tv. Don't get me wrong, i dig the personal experience of reading. But I never got into the fact that when you read, you are basically hypnotizing yourself (that's why you get sleepy dum-dum!), by moving your eyes back and forward, back and forward, baaaaack aaaand forwaaaard...
All tv should be 3-d, and there should be a maths channel, a history channel, all those channels, so you could learn about important things, while eating froot loops on the sofa. People totally get off on nature and documentary shows, and travel shows, and anything that basically takes them on an adventure out of the lounge room, and into the world at large. I like those shows where they recreate the pyramids, and dinosaurs, and proto-mammals, and Studio 54. If there was a 'how maths works' channel, I'd be glued to it 24/7. because as far as I'm concerned, maths is the deepest and most unknowable entity in the Universe. Coz I can't do it. My girl is like a 12'th-dan black belt Sifu of maths, and she could kick your ass off by telling you all about the different types of triangles there are, over breakfast. I know there's an equilateral, and an isoscoles, and that's about it. But Sunny could tell you all of them (like that 'scalene' one i know nothing about), and what they're good for, no problem. That's why she's my girl, and you're not. I know all the girls out there are kicking themselves right now, rue-ing the day they walked out on maths class.
There is another girl in my life right now, and I want to introduce you all to her. Her name is Sally Seltmann, and she's the singer/writer of a musical experience called 'New Buffalo'. Now, before all you indie music nazi motherfuckers out there tell me she's been around for ages, and blah blah blah, i already know that. But like all the best things in this world, i didn't love it until it had worked on me for a few months. First song i heard was called 'Recovery', and they had it on tv here in Australia. I thought it was great at first, and I would hum it to myself whenever I was doing the dishes or cleaning the toilet. I like a clean toilet, so we're pretty much talking every day here. Anyways, I was recording a demo with my band du jour (Disgraceland) last week, and my friend Toby-Wan Kenobi loaned me a cd of theirs called 'About Last Night'. The first track was called '16 Beats', and it is easily my favourite song of 2005, hands down (even if it was released in 2001). It's so innocent and naive, yet fully knowing, infused with rainbows and glaciers and ponies and warm sweaters and beech trees and synthesizers with colouring books and pop magazines all over them. It's the aural equivalent of falling in love for the first time, on a farm on Lake Michigan, in a room with fake timber formica panelling all over the walls, under a brown corduroy blanket, with pink bubblegum on it. God alone knows why magazine editors ask me to review cd's for them, but they do. Apparently she's from Melbourne, and works with the drummer from the Dirty Three, Jens Lekman, Tim Simenon (Bomb The Bass), Rae Howell, Beth Orton, and her husband Darren Seltmann from The Avalanches. No wonder I like it so much.
I am utterly devastated to recall New Buffalo played the Northcote Social Club recently, and I didn't go and profess my neverending and undying love to she-who's-name-I-am-yet-to-Google. It's probably just as well, it could be a little frightening having some 6 foot 2 tattooed longhair trying to goose you in the ass when you're trying to sing a song in front of paying customers. I wouldn't really do that. I'm a gentleman.
Anyway, go listen to 'About Last Night', and buy it, and shut your eyes and enjoy what could have been if Chan Marshall from Cat Power had been given a Nord Lead instead of a guitar, and schizophrenic dementia.
In other news, today is a very special day of celebration, as I have finally, after three long years, paid off my computer.
This post is coming to you freehold, without taxation, and with luv 4 eva...from your friend in Australia -
-this is knifey, from 'the internet'.
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