that's what i'm talking about

The Face of a City Changes More Quickly

The interesting thing about New York is that you can literally watch it change before your eyes. On Saturday I walked all around the Lower East Side, which is rapidly filling up with posh high-rises, and then home to Brooklyn via 4th Ave. and the construction sites of ambiguous purpose that are surrounding (and dwarfing) my apartment building.

Soundtracking this bout of wandering was an assortment of new music purchases: the Ellen Allien/Apparat album, which is the best electronic record I've heard in a while, Bound Stems, who prove (along with Sally, Pelican, Chin Up Chin Up et al) that Chicago is birthing more interesting indie rock than NY these days, the first Durutti Column album, which is a bit more jazzy/noodly than I expected but neat nonetheless (love that Martin Hannet production), and I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, who are good but conventional.

I was reminded that the new Twilight Singers album comes out tomorrow, and this was happy enough an occurence, and then THIS! Now if only I weren't so immediately sick and miserable. I vow to persevere and rehearse like mad tonite - no excuses for missing a whole week.

This has been a little too what-I-did-today diary-ish for my taste. Sorry.

New songs are occupying my mind. They are good, but dark. Working off themes of sexual violence. Which is not enjoyable, but necessary I think. It actually kinda makes me literally ill. But, as they say, I didn't choose the subject, in a sense it chose me. Hope to demo tonite. I plan to eat a lot of pizza.

Note to future me(s): this was you before anyone cared.

Just cuz you feel it doesn't mean it's there.

An unexpected fringe benefit of being up till 7AM with a fever Tuesday night was that while surfing the Interweb I discovered that W.A.S.T.E, the Radiohead ticket service, had released a few more tickets to certain North American shows. I was able to snag 4 tickets to the June 4 Boston show. Very exciting.

If you haven't already, try to track down some of the new live tracks circulating, they're really quite great. Pitchfork has the YouTube video of "Arpeggi." It's amazing.

Mandrake

It's so surreal, returning to work routine after a succesful show. It's not just that my work has no connection to my reality - it has no connection to any reality. It's all smoke and mirrors, fake money and paper waste. It's been the kind of day that takes Klonopin and The Smiths just to get through work. A return to the familiar tropes that get you by - pretty girl on the subway, the scent of spring flowers, tulips at the cemetery.

So Saturday we partied and on Sunday I recovered and watched a documentary about Johnny Cash. I came to a conclusion - our generation does not know what sincerity is. It's part choice and part cultural indoctrination, but when it comes down to it I don't think we know how to recognize sincere expression or to express anything sincerely ourselves. We assume so many alterior motives that we create them, partly because human interaction has been reduced to a series of transactions - business, artistic, sexual, electronic. We transmit, not communicate - messages over email, credit card numbers over fiber-optic wires, diseases through blood.

When I watch Johnny Cash sing, in grainy footage from 1969 - just a man sitting at home with a guitar, casually strumming a new song for his guests, wife sitting by his side - it almost makes me want to give up music, it's that pure and honest, with no self-consciousness whatsoever. We've lost that forever I think. Lost it to market concerns and promotional tactics, to major league indifference and indie elitism. Lost it to the dollar, to the commodity, which renders any artistic/musical act packaged in plastic first of all an object of suspicion, the suspicion of the salesman, whom we just know is trying to pull one over on us.

On the train this morning a little girl was singing, her own made-up song about a dinosaur. I hope no one gets to her, and that nothing makes her lose her private joy.