Year End Playlist

I almost made it out of 2011 on my own. That statement is a huge exaggeration. It wasn't even close, but I'm getting there. Still spent as much time in the depths of space as I did in 2010. A lot of it took a lot of time to remember and reconstruct. To allow the construction of a playlist. Last.fm and scrobble helped a lot. There were several dead spaces of weeks where I was nowhere to be found and they were like wildlife tags, homing beacons to where things really fell apart and even that negative space, the nothing, could tell me a lot about what I was listening to on my headphones, apart from my desktop and sometimes here and sometimes gone internet connection. Wild.

It was difficult and joyous combing through the year week by week and trying to sum up months in a single song. Here it is, though. The music that made life a little easier to comprehend and, frankly, live through last year.

Jan 2011>> Menomena - Muscle N' Flow Go
Feb 2011>> Björk - Wanderlust Go
Mar 2011>> El-P feat. Camu Tao - Oxycontin Go
Apr 2011>> Mono - Mere Your Pathetique Light Go
May 2011>> Matthew Dear - R+S Go
Jun 2011>> Hot Chip - No Fit State Go
Jul 2011>> The Black Angels - Better Off Alone Go
Aug 2011>> Gorillaz - To Binge Go
Sep 2011>> Mouse on Mars – Circloid Bricklett Sprüngli Go
Oct 2011>> Cold Cave - The Great Pan Is Dead Go
Nov 2011>> Lo-Fidelity Allstars - Weather 2 Go
Dec 2011>> Daedelus - You're The One Go

This is the official tax return for 2011. The books have been, after a fashion, balanced. The door is officially closed on what was a year of unexpected highs and grim marched lows. Looking forward to doing another one, but no promises. Hopefully something there connects with you, but it is, kinda selfishly, mostly a record for me. Validated parking? In a way, yes. But hopefully, it'll paint the year, my year, for you.

Massive thank yous go out, regardless of what it is, to the people who left and came back, the people who left and never did return, the people who made life great, and the people who made me wake up some days with that twinkle in my eye that said "today is going to be incredible." Extra special thank yous to the people who got me out of doors when I least expected to be called out, to the people who shared drinks, and the people who made sure, as I went down in flames, that I had somewhere to land where there would not be any collateral damage to other lives. Thank you to the rescuers, and the warners, and the policemen and policewomen without badges, the damage controllers, the picker-uppers, and the cheerers. The shooters and the hand claspers. It was a transformative year like few before it. An enlightening, disheartening, nearly dying more times than I would like to admit go at being more human than the human I was the year before and I'm sorry it took so long to put together for many a several reasons I don't need to get into right now.

I'm happy it's over, but more than that, I'm happy I'm alive to see it go.


///múm - Dancing Behind My Eyelids ...see the fog on the horizon

Compound Eye

You know those weeks where you can swear up and down you own something, but you can't find it because you or someone you know or maybe someone you don't know borrowed it and never returned it to you or it turns out you never actually bought it in the first place because you dreamed the whole thing and woke up so seamlessly that the thought was sewn into the fabric of your memory permanently and you should by all rights, as far as the chemicals and salts zipping around the fatty little lanes and straightaways in your head can tell you, have it somewhere in the place where you live and within reach when you need it. Which is right now. Just a week of "I need this right now. Where is it?" Just wanted to tell you that yeah, you're not crazy. I know those weeks too. For me though, and not to say I'm super more specialer than you, it's been a month.

I can't seem to find my eye for pencil work. I lost it somewhere. I know I had it. I can look back at all the things I did with it and can still sort of fuzz out with the tool that's now occupying the space it used to occupy, but the series of functions and processes that composed my eye hand connection for pencil work have absented themselves from the factory floor. Which leads me to believe that they were taken. There's been another glaring gap in the work force. Physical production has tailed off dramatically. While it is good that I have managed to keep everyone on task doing constructive things instead of building destructive implements of and components to a machine whose sole purpose is a Rube Goldbergian mechanicide. There has been that one missing thing and I think I know the exact face that would have packed something like pencil work into his bag before checking out without notice. Which is fine. I can live with that. Everyone else still comes to the table and as long as I can have dreams that wander and fly with the child and can cross at will and am not building myself into an elaborate and immediate and quite possibly explosive self death, the rest is water under the gravy cake.

Buuut still. It is just a little annoying. I have no idea where they go. As the administrator I usually just have to sit and wait for them to come back. The kid wanders. That's the only one I have to actively chase down, because who the hell knows when he'll get back. Plus I don't even know if it's possible for them to get hurt out where they go and come to and from and with him I take no chances. That's the main member that helps keep everyone else relatively in agreement. But enough about me. I tried to draw some flowers today. Flowers in the shape of a scorpion for an idea for a tattoo. This is what came out:



Frustrating. Not even close to what was laid out in my head. I felt like strangling my hand for it's insolence, but that wouldnt have helped any of us. Well I might have felt better for a few minutes in the same way Stalin felt better for having people shot, but we all know how that ended. Happily ever after. If by happily you mean breathlessly paranoid. And if by ever after you mean with little warning and thankfully not a minute or second longer. So I'm not going to have my hand shot. This time. I'd probably have to hold the gun with my mouth. Maybe rig up some kind foot pedal operated jig, because old lefty can't really be trusted. They've been friends too long. Might give him the tip off and righty might skip town to Istanbul.

Well anyway. What now. Is the main question. I don't know if I can't draw. I think I still can. That drawing I did before did not turn out nearly as I saw it in my head either. I hope this disconnect isn't a sign of some medical nonsense. I'm not going in for that. I got enough medical nonsense to try and ignore without thinking about having to have new medical nonsense to try and ignore on top of that. But enough about me.

I think what could also be happening here. An alternate theory of the origin of man, if you will. Is that our dear escapee is still at work and still down in the factory toodling away at this and that project behind my eyes and ahead of spine, but the actual tools and processes and algorithms he is using have changed without my direct information. Which is possible, I suppose. In fact, I assume. In fact, in fact is one of those things I just try not to use in writing and it always comes up, so I will not use it again in here so I can think about - whatever. The point is, he is still there doing his damnedest to turn plans and prints and raw blank ingots of multi-ton steel and walls of marble into frescoes. Frescoes? Really complicated and beautifully simple objects of vision transmitted from my head to yours through the medium of the manipulation of space, material, and radiata and what I am expecting to see is really him trying to do the job with the new tools and processes and it is amounting to trying to build houses with like a complex multistage artisan bread oven instead of hammers and nails and measuring tape.

So instead of the end product being something that it should be had I not so strictly enforced my vision on myself - a ridiculously awesome bread house, shiny and golden and all crazy twisty gorgeous sitting on my coffee table, it ends up being something close to my vision, but ridiculously not - an impossible to inhabit, but human sized house built with beams of sagging bread and weird warbly walls and a floor you can stand on for about two seconds before you fall through from the upstairs straight on down to the dirt floor basement.

I think my eye for black and whites and penciling and penning is changing, or maybe already changed, to an eye for colors. I thought I lost my eye for color earlier this week because I was trying to see what I wanted to see in terms of line work and then overlay the colors I wanted it to appear in on top of that and I couldn't get past trying to envision the lines. I thought that meant that I was having trouble seeing how the colors would fit and thus couldn't fit the lines to the colors. Now I think the problem might be that I can see the colors without the lines and trying to fit the lines to the colors is something my tools and processes are unprepared to do.

Which is slightly exciting. I don't remember when we talked about it before, but when I first started sharing art I told you I was a pen and pencil guy and usually never screwed around with coloring things because I had no eye for it. I guess I've been working at it long enough to change that and hadn't realized it until now. Unless there is a third explanation. A third theory of space and time and the god particle if you will. I could just have regressed. I might just be worse at drawing and art than I was before. But fuck that. I'm greatness.



///Mouse on Mars - "Circloid Bricklett Sprungli" you know I don't have an ego that big. My ego is so small to understand how small it feels you'd have to feel this song turned up as loud as it'll go and turn the bass up as high as it goes and picture yourself sitting on the nose of a Saturn V booster, tall as a skyscraper, firing the energy output of a dozen Hoover Dams out of it's enormous backside in more flames and vapor than you've ever seen in the widest Arizona sunset you've ever laid eyes on and on top of that tower you look back and there's nothing behind you but the shrinking blue disk of a half moon Earth and the blackness of space so wide it makes you dizzy just to blink. That's how little my ego is as I'm blasting through space, trying to understand the world and teach myself to be okay with the fact that I may never really have a place to land.

Space Is the Place

I took some breaths today. It felt good. Space will always be the place for me. She's holding together alright. I'll keep riding her till she does break up across the sky. But in the meantime I'll do other things, between barrel rolls and sky writing. More power. I know I shouldn't, but I also know that the shouldn't is based on... whatever, I'm not going to get into it now. More power. I'm just gonna lean back and enjoy the gravities and the throttle response and watch the stars streak like chalk behind a rocket powered eraser. Watch the memories tail away like headlights in the rain belted to tires breaking loose and for seconds free of the mechanics of purpose and spinning away. Enjoy.




///Mouse on Mars - "Presence" come down, friend. Do I really need to tell you no? Yes. Then no.