TUCSON. MAY. 1994.
Somehow between the festivities of the actual graduation ceremonies in the morning, after the pitchers and the families mingling and congratulating at Dirtbags late into the afternoon, between that and the Goldwater-Alexander extended-family dinner that night, i found myself floating face-up in the University Heights pool listening to this CD in its entirety.
The big floor speakers from my poolside apartment were fed through the windows out onto the courtyard blasting sofa king loud i could hear it underwater. I could easily justify the volume because literally everyone in the complex was out attending some form of graduation something or other. And insofar as my dinner plans almost certainly pushing late for, i could justify this excessive luxury-time to myself because i was screwed quite high on all the ### i had taken that morning.
I believe my plan was to intentionally scar this day into my memory in the loftiest way i knew how. The LP had only just come out that week, and i had been singing various chorus' from LIGHTNING CRASHES all during the ceremony as a talisman to keep me grounded. I was singing them just lound enough for me to realize myself as a real presence on earth, but clearly loud enough for Anna to ask, then be deluged with whatever passed for verbal explanations of how fucking great i felt at the time.
This was one of the first times in our relationship when i recall feeling complete & total peace with the Truth to her. About the #### mostly. For i couldnt possibly have known myself enough then to show her the love & open doors i took a full year later to realize.
Funny how things unfold across the boardgame of life. For the woman i was sitting next to in both that graduation ceremony, as well as the dinner that evening, would be the woman who would shape me as a man today.
THE ANGEL CLOSES HER EYES
THE CONFUSION SETS IN (my words, fuck you)
THE ANGEL OPENS HER EYES
PAAAAALE BLUE COLOURED YES
Some time after 10pm.
Jude is asleep, fast in the cocoon of mommy’s north face
mummy. It's well into the 30s tonight. And I'm wondering how to spin to the world
how wonderful a cold jack & ice is whilst huddled around a fire your son
legitimately helped build.
He's done exceptionally. So much so that in the quiet of night, I overflow with fatherly pride. Absolutely none of the mischievous button-pushing I’ve come to accept back in town. He's taken everything in stride and at face value. Bravery in the company of trust. But really, never let me get more then 30ft from him from the moment we staked our claim.
It was only after the sun long gone down & the novelty of a carte blanche bag of marshmallows had worn off that it began to set in for him.
Starting with specific queries into what mommy & Charlie were doing right then. The prescient segue onto the heavy notion that THIS was not home. And home was where he'd rather be. The notion of have no fear: daddy is here was somehow not so slam dunk. It was only mommy’s bag, our tent, and the want & promise of 4 books of Dr Seuss by flashlight that allowed him to accept a day of camping’s beautiful end game.
So here I am: a full 3 score of miles away from a single bar of signal, listening to the sounds of Lost Coast surf, and the ebbing cracks and stickles of that very same campfire.
I am so full of the life right now. A feeling of release, having fulfilled a
dream I've had as long as I've felt a man. A cacophony of favoirites.
9/30/2008
You' re hereby strongly encouraged to get one ping down & pull up LOVELESS on Rhapsody. Listen to it only once.
Note the polyaural textures of fuzzy tremolo and crisp chord progressions.
Pay attention to the meandering on SOMETIMES.
And the reverse low altitude fly-bys on TO HERE KNOWS WHERE.
The mock intro to which is really the outro to TOUCHED, and how the mock intro to LOOMER which is really the outro to ONLY SHALLOW, thus tying their strong structure (for me anyway) to The Beatles' song-strings on ABBEY ROAD. Fuck you ALL they CANT be played out of sequence.
And keep in mind the bridge on SOON is what dragged me into the old ROUGH TRADE on Haight that stony summers day in 1992 whereupon, it could be said, my mind was blown and nothing was ever to be the same.
For soon thereafter, it was the MBV sound that introduced me to the EXCURSIONS IN AMBIENCE series, which in effect was an acid-fueled mental mosh-shove into THE ORB, which coincided with my move to Venice & subsequent envelopment into PORK.
It all started with LOVELESS.
Nothing short of a SMITHS reunion could loft this anticipation higher.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7440658.stm
I recall roughly around 1997 when i first attempted to get my Flight Simulator logged on & fly with other people around the world. Somehow the real-time aspect held more gravity when flying around faithful renderings of landscapes & somewhat accurate reproductions of meatspace urban centers. I banged right then onto a prescient posibility.
If my Flight Simulator could receive so many packets of data representing the other guy's actions in HIS Flight Simulator, then why couldnt it tap into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) or any other National Weather data warehouse and get all that information?
Think of damn-near real-time hops to circle whatever hurricane is sweeping the south. Or a tornado. What about a volcano? Or any damned weather pattern or earth based phenomenon of interest.
Even something as mundane as trans-oceanic shipping lanes could be compelling in their own way when you realize the digital ship your buzzing 1242 south-southwest of Honolulu could very well be within 30m of its actual location in meatspace.
Sure the locations of these artifacts could be parsed in real-time, but all these in-world objects would need to be rendered in real-time. But i'm figgering that if the data warehouse has the position of the ship, it knows the name, owner, size, etc. From that, its simply an additional call to ?? database to obtain rudimentary schematics based on the class or manufacturer or year-built.
Why stop there? And why limit this to flying around within a game?
When everyone & every thing they have is fitted with a GPS signal, then therefore the locations of these in-world items is ubiquitiously known. Some genius out there is going to found the company that wrote the code that renders all of that data into a display. Slap a silly avatar on all your friends. Obtain 3D models of every building in the city they're walking around. Gather data (anonymously of course) from every vehicle that passes them, and render them doing so. Throw in the aforementioned HD doplar weather data. Throw in the exact time of day to generate proper shadow casts and ray tracing (for known surfaces). Throw that all into an intuitive UI and let users put the camera where ever they want
Over ten years on, this door hasnt begun to close.
I read this about the TAOS HUM. Got me recalling something from my past which is very much like these hums heard/felt thru-out the Earth.
It was Spring 1995, my first as a resident of Los Angeles, and i was eager to pit my Tucson-bred penchant for stoney hikes with the urban-nature wonderland of the Santa Monica Mountains. It was only a month earlier that Phil Rohr had introduced me to a mine-shaft set a 1000 feet or so at the back of a mountainside cave. It was drip-filled with Evian-clear water, and i was deeply fascinated. Like a boy discovering anything patently dangerous, all i could think about thereafter was to return to it & play with it.
So the next moment i had free was a Friday off early. Parking the old green Jetta at the top of Altadena @ the gates of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, i spindelled my way up a fireroad. My topo's told me this road would drop my into the canyon where Phil had shown me the cave. i had a backpack full of rope, my scuba lights, and a fair amount of weed.
As i headed up though, my attention was repeatedly taken by the vantage of a Los Angeles basin in late afternoon. It was the magic hour, and from that altitude, i saw the whole of downtown unfold & twinkle into west side & the coast. Stopping repeatedly to gawk at this, it was with some prescient wisdom that i decided to cancel the remainder of the trek, which was almost certainly going to have me hiking down & into a new canyon by night, perhaps sleeping there.
So after collapsing on a ridge & finishing dinner opposite the sunset, i witnessed something down below in the sprawling JPL complex; something so profound to me at the time, that i'm not sure merely explaining it does it justice.
There were these massive round structures, 2 of them, tight next to each other, with some metal infrastructure & piping in the center between them. Slightly rounded at their tops, they looked easily to be the size of any of the big petro tanks in Point Richmond, but only about 10-15 feet tall. I thought they were water storage tanks.
It all started when rotating saftey lights lit up on top of and all around the structures. The faintest sound of a human voice over multiple PA. Then, at the center of the structures, an abnormally bright set of lights started on, then off. On, then off. With a slow & even rhythm, these lights were steady for 10 beats, faster for 10, quite rapid for another 10, then solid on. This cadence of lights was the visual warning cue of an approaching event, not unlike the self-timers on our cameras. Then the lights went out.
Then the hum. It was a frequency far lower then anything i'd heard before or since. It was felt far more then it was heard. It was coming from the earth. It was coming from deep within. And its proximity to the rhythmic sequence of warning lights down @ JPL was undeniable. Barely audible; one of those sounds you think you hear, but somehow only confirmed by cocking your head or shifting & freezing your body for a few moments.
But it was there; This was happening. It was unmistakable once i allowed myself to
accept that it was a concrete & constant hum. And within about 30 seconds, the low rumble
began to fade. Once gone & confirmed
silent, i was at once struck with the realization that this was clearly an experiment
being conducted by the geeks down at JPL.
But what?
Are the hums people hear thru-out the world also the result of deep-earth experiments?
Best of 2007, summed up solely upon Play Count, yet in no particular sort...
ALBUMS
BAND OF HORSES :: Cease to Begin
I will not apologize for how naturally well these hicks perfectly fit the notches in my musical tastes. Nor will I apologize for my low-grade addiction to adverbs.
RADIOHEAD :: InRainbows
Only thing more beautiful then my surprise with how traditional and accessible this release sounded, was how I frak’d up the $/£ conversion and paid double. Deserved.
FIEST :: The Reminder
Sucker for the woman with the lungs. Double word score for the Canadian thing. Slight demerit for shilling for Jobs. Demerit cancelled out by that damn Busby Berkeley video.
TEMPO NO TEMPO :: The Get Down
Solid reminder that you should see as much live music in as small a venue as possible as often as possible.
SILVERSUN PICKUPS :: Carnavas
Yea, from 2006. But I discovered this in 2007 and I loved this. So frakin’ keep sneering at me and my low-rise Chucks.
ROGUE WAVE :: Asleep at Heavens Gate
Regardless of what you think of them now, reminds me of the good-vibe repeat-playability of when I first heard Shins.
PANDA BEAR :: Person Pitch
Far and away the most original clutch of new songs all year. Even if it did sound like a long weekend locked in Brian Wilsons bathroom with 4 parts Roland, 5 parts blotter.
GABRIEL YARED & UNDERWORLD :: Breaking & Entering soundtrack
Best most elegant pairing since Holmes and Soderbergh.
DARJEELING LIMITED :: Soundtrack
Andersons’ prowess with music patched & mapped to edits & slowmo is undeniable, regardless of how the film sat with you. The album is by itself wonderful, and at times, a nice blend of plucky old-world and culturally grating.
ULRICH SCHNAUSS :: Goodbye
What My Bloody Valentine might have sounded like if they did heroin. Oh, wait… Nevermind.
KILN :: Dusker
On Repeat, best music to which you should read No Country for Old Men during a 5-day jaunt from Houston to Austin to San Antonio then back to Houston.
TEGAN & SARA :: The Con
Again with the singer songwriting chicks from O Canadia. And identical twins? With sleeve tattoos? [scurries off to bathroom]
UNDERWORLD :: Oblivion with Bells
Not as solid a post-Emerson release as 100 Days Off, but an incredible package of songs. There’s a low-fi theme album in here somewhere. I just haven’t yet sussed it out.
KINGS OF LEON :: Because of the Times
Made me want to throw a half-emptied jar of moonshine out the speeding window of a maroon Caprice with a black door. Had me revisiting in-car volumes not heard since TURN ON THE BRIGHT LIGHTS.
RICHARD BUTLER :: Self titled
Old pipes & general homely-dood from Psych Furs/LSL. You grew up to this mans voice. Listen to what the man does with a home studio and all the free time those royalty checks must provide.
SINGLES
FUJIYA & MIYAGI :: Conductor 71
INTERPOL :: Rest my Chemistry (anyone else get those distinct traits of Pixies Where is my Mind?)
AMY WHOREHOUSE :: Valerie (insert however much credit to Ronson you wish)
Some disappointments:
BLONDE REDHEAD :: 23
