Saturday, June 30, 2007

Everybody’s talking about the stormy weather


Listening to a large amount of Guided by Voices and Sonic Youth of late, alongside early morning immersions into a recording of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring I appropriated from a relative, has renewed my appreciation for the “rhythmic strumming + sonic dissonance” formula.
A friend suggested that Teenage Riot is really about a rock star’s jealousy of no longer being able to summon up the idolatrous imaginings of teenage rock star fans, as if being the object of people’s adulation is bastardized in comparison to experiencing someone/something that creates dopey-eyed adulation in you. This gets complicated in that there would seem to be a kind of self-created distance in the performer-looking-down-on-the-crowd, plus Sonic Youth and GBV seem to be clear examples of groups who eschew the hierarchical stage/audience spacing. Music is once more steeped in meaning for me, after an odd period where it was just a collection of soothing/grating sounds.

I have a wedding to attend tonight. Once again, a close friend has made a good choice for a lifelong helpmate. That "helpmate" made me cringe too. The females of my acquaintance have yet to begin the pairing off process, which suggests something about either the quantity of such acquaintances I have or maybe they all share a peculiar affinity for not yet getting married. The one exception was married in HI and is now a mother. A-ho!

Friday, June 15, 2007

ONslaUght


I no longer live where i used to live, though I still live in the same town. I no longer work where i used to work. I now work for the government in a forest it owns. This involves a lot of time in intimate proximity with a chainsaw. Yesterday i felled two largish ponderosa pine staubs for a field test. If a tree falls in a forest as a direct result of actions you’ve taken, the echo of the impact tends to resonate deep within your GI tract.

The lady on the computer corral to my left is expounding on the virtues of a website entitled "stop hospital infections dot orje." She has a large bruise on her right calf – purple shading to gray then a kind of muted mustard yellow. I want to ask what the hell happened, but this is not good library etiquette. I am guessing it’s not from an infection. A week and a half ago the river flooded. I was evacuated from my old apartment and took up residence in the bunkhouse three days ahead of schedule. It is a bunkhouse only in the most general terms. Two roommates - one a Choctaw from Oklahoma, the other a triathlete from western Montana – who dislike each other and seem to want to communicate aspects of communal living they find intolerable through me, conduit-style. I never had the child of divorced parents experience; perhaps this is the next best (? - you know what I mean) thing.