Year End Playlist 2012

The music that made life a little easier to comprehend through 2012.  I told ya I was gonna put it together.  Got my "nyaahhhhhh" face going.  But seriously, this is what brought me through.  Instead of going by statistic logging I decided to go with the actual tracks I flagged through the year.  Sometimes the song you listen to the most is not a real indicator of what hit you the hardest.  I really do believe this is an accurate reflection of what punched my heart in the nuts through last year.

Dec  RJD2 - Moonlit Skies Go
Nov Skrillex - Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites Go
Oct Lo-Fidelity Allstars - Valentine Boast Go
Sept El-P - Stay Down Go
Aug War - Baby Brother Go
Jul Bjork - Pluto Go
Jun Aphex Twin - Waxen Pith Go
May Tosca - Oscar Go
Apr School of Seven Bells - Loveplay Go
Mar Starkey - Eris Go
Feb Kinny and Horn - Sacred Life Go
Jan Paul Murphy - Soul Call Go

This is the official tax return for 2012. The books have been, after a fashion, balanced. Five months late, but better late than never.  I feel pretty good about it.  Making next year's list, I can already bet on it, will be Death Grips.  I know I'm behind the curve of music, but I don't care all that much.  I'm just happy I have time to digest everything that comes across my plate as thoroughly as I care to, and that's what's up.


///Death Grips - "Guillotine"  ace high, chuck

Tired, Music, Studio Dust and Weekdays

I'm tired.  A lot of people are.  Just kind of beat.  It's not the usual beat.  The common beat.  You know the kind of beat I'm talking about.  The beat that runs from Sunday into Monday because you didn't do anything and you got tired near the end of the day because of all the things you didn't do, but didn't spend the energy to not do?  Is that the right way around?  Spent the energy to not do?  It's not that kind.  It's the kind of beat that comes from doing stuff and dreaming stuff with equal gusto.  I was going to say passion, but I feel like passion tends to connote a certain amount of emotional sensitivity that tends to drag meaning away from doing stuff and bend the beat toward a beatnik kind of over sensitivity that screams I spent my day doing nothing because doing nothing was better than doing something I don't believe in.  Whatever that means.  So I'm tired.  Just tired.  Days full of doing and nights full of doing and not enough doing to go around.  What it do?  I don't know?  What does it do?  Give me a few weeks and I'll tell you.

I'm tired though and it gets aggravating.  First world problems or something like that.  I never thought I would find myself whining to myself about transcribing my voice recordings.  I don't want to sit down and type at my computer, but I don't want to sit down and write down notes and write out stories with pen and paper either, but I don't want to transcribe my recordings because, as it turns out, that's kind of harder.  I've never said "what the hell did he just say" in reference to myself so many times in a row.  Doesn't help that I lost my data cable for transferring them to my computer.  And I could buy a card adapter, but I bought a shower curtain instead.  It's weird.  Am I dodging myself?  Probably.  Do you know how hard it is to do that?  Not very.  I'm easily distracted.  Especially when I'm tired.

I have a hard to stifle desire to make music.  Write songs.  Emo guilty.  I don't know the first thing about writing songs, but I can learn.  Task locked after a way.  I would say everyone is, but that's just not true.  Pretty sure I'm not waiting for anything specific.  I'm trying to turn routine into stability, but it feels like the only routine I can maintain with any faith is instability.  It's what makes me a good fighter and a bad fighter at the same time, because even instability can grow predictable.   I kind of had a little crisis mode thought track down on the low lying channels that worked its way up to the high line and caught fire across circuits.  What if I'm not a writer?  What if I've just been fooling myself for a decade?  And then I thought: well, it's been a pretty fun decade, set backs not withstanding.  Maybe all you have to do to live, the secret of life or something like it, is to do what you love and let everything else orbit it and sometimes you spend time on Titan and sometimes you stink up Venus for a little while and sometimes you dig ditches on Earth and go visit friends on Mars before swinging out to Saturn to ogle and then do some time on Io when you know when you can't be trusted to do anyone any good.  Anyway you cut it though the sun of desire still comes up and you put your helmet back on and check the pressure and the panel and kick on the boosters and go.  I don't mind that.  I don't think I don't mind that.

I've been trying to figure out what I need to do to find my music again.  Wherever it is.  It's not on notes between lines and bars and what have you.  I think that ship has sailed for the time being.  Not that I can't do it.  I just get pissed off hearing ridiculous compositions by people years younger and I know I'll just tear it up, spit on it, crumple up the spit on shreds and bean someone on the sidewalk with earbuds in their ears from my window, correcting for wind.  I'm still pretty good at that.  "Hey, douche!"  Smack.  Kind of a counter productive talent.  I can also flick a cigarette with 75% accuracy from two yards.  Bigby would be jealous, if he were real.  In a fight between Bigby and me I would totally win, or at least be the one still able to walk afterwards, cuz I would kick him straight in the dick like five times before he hit the ground.  I've been trying to find my music again though.  I used to play trombone and that little plastic flute thing that could only play eight notes, and that other thing.   Viola!  Not well though.  Music programs in sixth grade didn't teach you how to tune them.  I'm pretty sure my sixth grade music teacher was on pills most of the time.  She just sat at her piano, over weight, with ratty, burned up, lye blonde, wisps of shoulder length hair, playing chords and vaguely answering questions.  Didn't help that I was perpetually terrified of popping my eyeball with a snapped viola string.  For some reason I never got over that fear and the even greater fear of facing my parents who would say something like "this is why we didn't want you playing viola!  and staying after school!"

I don't get why they cashed out when their investment was practically over.  They pretty much took a steaming dump on every extracurricular I chased and then wondered why the scholarships didn't come rolling in like publishers clearing house with ten entrants instead of 10 million, because that is basically what scholarship competitions are.  Do people even realize how much nonsense has to go right to win that crap?  It's gotta be something on the scale of lower tier pro sports or Division three sports.  Is there even a third division in the NCAA?

I have a vague idea of the direction I'm going to have to go.  Samples.   Lots and lots of samples and loops, but also keyboard and MIDI instruments.  I already have some of the tracks laid out in my head.  That's the easy part.  The hard part is the hours and days and weeks it takes to get it laid out on my computer.  I'm going to do it though.  And I'm going to pick up reading music again in a few years.  Or, I should say, a few years after I start doing that because I know the time will come when I can't find the sample I want and the realization will dawn for the second time, dawning first here, that it will ultimately be easier to create the exact sound I'm looking for instead of looking for the sound already out there and bending it to my will of production.

I'm getting behind though.  Behind on the various projects.  Time is at a premium lately and I'm trying to restructure my time expenditures to better reflect the end times of another year.  The heady days of Summer are gone the fuck out the door, nigga.   Time to start burning the winter fat and make something real that I can hold up to my eyes and review and turn over and do better again.  Masturbation is not that thing.  When the hell did I start masturbating so much?  It's gotten to the point where I have to check my hand for excess lotion before I go out in public.  That's not healthy, right?  That's the other problem though.  Two hours a pop is way too long for masturbatory purposes.  The pursuit of the perfect orgasm is a waste of time because I know where it is.   That little switch in my head that says "alright, just pick one and let's get through this," broke a long time ago.  That has teamed up with my easily distractedness and my absolute focus on making the best iteration of an experience or nothing at all to explode my masturbation budget into a time deficit that sucks the rest of my day into it like a hole in the space time continuum.   You've got a problem when you wake up and think "alright let's rub a quick one out before breakfast" and you're washing your hands at lunch time.  Defeats the purpose of waking up, dude.  Get it together grouch.

My studio is accumulating a disconcerting amount of dust.  This needs remedied.   Soon.  The itch to produce something, anything, is getting unscratchable and we are not under any circumstances doing crack again.  With crazy people.  To make up for it.  That's like asking someone to scratch an itch on your knee and they punch you so hard in the cheek they blow one of your wisdom teeth out.  Sure, the itch is gone, but damn.  I would have gone to see a dentist for that shit if I knew you were going to do that.  And second of all, I thought we agreed on "not the face."  It's cool, though.  It's not.  I have got to get my creative hands dirty doing before they turn on me.  Operation Danny's Attic, the Outride missions.

I've been getting excited about weekdays.  For televisions sake.  It's a fine time of the year.  Sports, cartoons, sitcoms.  New episodes of this and that.  And then it occurred to me why other people don't necessarily get as excited.  They're taping it, or catching it later online.  Technology sucking the fun out of life.  The death of the viewing party.  DVR killed the video star, would be an ironic throwback title to it, if ironic is the right word.  Maybe dated fits there too.  Sad times.  Remember when Seinfeld episodes were still new?  People probably had to VHS them and before they could do that they had to master their tape machines and make sure their television was on the right channel.  I wonder how many people taped Friends by mistake and shot themselves in the face in their bath tub with a glass of wine balanced on the side by the bubbles that same night.  I'm not saying Friends was that bad a show or Seinfeld was that good.  They were just that far apart.  After the Seinfeld finale I'm sure Monday night suicides probably spiked for a few weeks and then dropped dramatically.  What do you mean the saga of Kramer has reached it's conclusion???  Can't remember the last time I used three question marks in a row, but I'm sure my computer could tell me.  I've got to clean my studio and fire up the factory.  They may not respond to coaxing, but I'm fed up coaxing with words.  It is time to put the boot to them.

Anyway, the point is, there's a lot of work to do and the work doesn't care how tired you feel or where your identity crisis lies or how you feel about what you think you might be terrible at or good at.    Until you do it, you're going to wish you did and once you've done it you're not going to think back and say something like: "man, I wish I hadn't spent so much time caring about and doing something I care about and enjoy doing."

Call it a cold start.  I don't know how it ends.


///The Flaming Lips - "Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung"

Dry Motor and What It Is

Creeping creeping.   Creeping up on you like silverfish in your bedspread.  The anxiety has been hilarious.  Awful.  To the place on the scale where it ceases to be funny and "haha, that scared the shit out of me, but now I know I was imagining things, so I can laugh about it because no one was here to see it" and becomes "hahahaholyfuckinggodamnit, just get out of my head."  Balls of string, almost, that get knottier and knottier with each passing sunrise and then a glimpse of something that might have a been a flicker of spider's webbing in daylight is grown into a hunched fistful of glitter black something that makes you stop and look with both your eyes to make sure you are moving and not it and then the words come back in like crowd dialog in vapors and the whole morning there is no fix on what it is that smells like gas.  Get out of my head.

Creeping sense of rage.  A little bit of task lock.  There's no transition between the time fixitive and the free base of writing.  Well, I shouldn't say there is none.  There is none developed.  It's been a very long time since I had to generate one through my own channels.  Normally I hit the mechanical hard lever contacts and everything changes over like a locomotive switch track.  Or has the potential too if I can get the charge high enough to arc the distance (the switch doesn't always close).  What am I talking about?  So I haven't had that.  Oddly enough, or typically enough, smoking grew tightly threaded to production.  I quit smoking.  It is not at all tempting to go back to smoking in a bid to make writing easier.  That's a back blown lock.  Explosive decompression.  Sorted.  A bridge designed into the process I took toward quitting, but a necessary effort at sabotage, because I knew I'd never quit if I didn't hack myself.  I'm not sure if that's coming across, but you get the picture.  Things have been harder to do, is the bullet point.  For good reason is the second bullet.

I find myself outside the gates of my skull, mornings, looking in, trying to smell them out.  Where they've been and where they plan to go next.  Hard pressed not to cut myself.  An inexplicable taste for it, really.  You come to the moment.  To it and then back around to it.  Someone asks if this is it.  Don't be so hard on yourself, you're having a good time, Jack.  Necking with yourselves.  Across from you there is also you and they are talking their way around you like you're not even there.  Don't be so hard on them.  Without us, they would have died a long time ago.  And someone asks if this is it.  What is?  Through space and time, not in that philosophical, flowered hill top, poet staring at the stars nonsense, through actual manipulation of distance and the passage of time there has been an answer.  The distance problem.  Too close and then too far.  With no sense of balance.  The old states.  The newer state is orbit, not quite to deep space.  Where I belong.  A place void enough that violence drives nothing and no one away because there is no one near enough.  Sort of thing.

It's weird.  Wanting closeness.  The other part of what it is.  Mechanical maintenance demanding space to allow for irradiation.    Power on.  Wanting closeness and knowing it is exactly that which has the horsepower to turn the entire engine over in a fraction of a second.  Blow your skull apart.  A finger at a time.  Division, I suppose, is difficult.  Fragments.  It's hard to understand.  To put my thoughts around in a way that cuddles with the chemistry and wraps it up in something cool under force of touch.  Maybe nature.  I have to remind myself to not be alarmed.  Panic buries absolutely.  What it is: I can want it and have it sometimes.  Under specific circumstances.  Limited instances.  Hard wired for... something.  I dunno.  What it is.  Is weird.  Living within it.  All you have to do, if you really think hard about it, is understand enough of what you are to project beyond the black shaped box inside your head.  Before you can count to three you are the same as you and me.  Inside of there.  Developing ways to convert binary emotion into all the flavors of the analog rainbow.   Access rights, never found.

I'm trying though.  Ten days at a time.  One day at a tear.  Three tears ripped off at a clip.  I don't know.  Plus warning.  star streaming.  always always always dreaming.  of a perfect chemistry.  Get out of my head. I still have pictures to make.  Stories to write.  Music to make.  Too much to do.  I am me and you are you.


///Sneaker Pimps - "Water Baby"  sport is love and blood is sport

Thought Problem

Problem solving: you have to do laundry to go to work later. If you do laundry you won't have energy to work.To get energy you have to floor.  Flooring requires energy which is already low.  You can buy underwear and socks but that will take the energy and time you wanted to use to floor our you could hand wash but the same problem persists.  Plus if you hand wash you won't have time to both floor and cook and will crash at work and if you floor and then cook you won't have time to hand wash and dry so the only answer is floor then cook then eat then go buy underwear and put it on at work?

I don't know.  What I do know is that if sally has two apples and takes two more from mary, mary should probably give her "the peoples elbow" and while she does that the train from cincinnati to new york will be three hours late because electric trains don't smoke no matter which way the wind blows. And ain't nobody gettin no sleep today.