All the Best Bands Die.
Speaking of that last heavily Sleater-Kinney laden post, FourAlarmFire now tells me my favorite living band is no mas, as of...now. I checked their site. It's true. I'm sad. Although satisfied, in a way. I mean: I'm confident they won't re-emerge with Todd Rungren on lead vocals.

The acknowledgment of Shite.
Music.
Lately it’s been shite ‘round these parts. No joke. I am one with the Block of Writers prompted by the fact that I just haven’t made myself sit down and think & do the good work here in a good many months. Not an essay, nary the beginnings of a story, ni nada ni nada.

So, here’s a list about music.
It’s from Mister Kermit and the whole fact that it’s about music made me completely excited followed by completely overwhelmed with the impossibility and so I put the whole thing away and months passed. You know. Because, like. Music. It’s kind of a big deal to this one here.

I guess I’ve found the right decade or half-century in which to be born though, in that my unintentional, effortless aural obsession – that one that most people outgrow by the time they’re twenty, has stayed with me my whole life. I realize it’s the Snobby Kids thing but – and I’ve told you this, before – to me, it’s never, ever the t-shirt, but the feeling in my gut that matters. I don’t like sitting around with the kids in the record store; I’d rather be in my car driving away from there, screaming at the top of my lungs with Corin Tucker, hitting the steering-wheel hard but without two-tenths of the cool brilliance of Janet Weiss because, well, it’s a Honda Civic and I’m me and I can’t drum.

All this to say: It’s near and dear, Henshaw. Near and dear and I hate for that to be turned into a competition by snobs. I’m happiest talking about it when that talk can range easily from Supertramp to Destroyer and back. (Hah! I hereby forfeit any membership card I might’ve managed to swipe at some point when no one was looking.)

So, typing as rapidly as possible without thinking too hard—


Questions About Music From Kermit

Seven or Eight or Nine of Yer Favorite Albums

1. Teenager of the Year – Frank Black
2. Wild Gift – X
3. Dig Me Out – Sleater Kinney
4. Brighten the Corners – Pavement
5. Hell Among the Yearlings - Gillian Welch
6. Mass Romantic – The New Pornographers
7. Bee Thousand – Guided by Voices
8. Beat Beat Heartbeat – The Natural History
9. University – Throwing Muses


Seven of Yer Favorite Songs

1. “Hothouse” – X
2. “I’ll Believe Anything” – Wolf Parade
3. “Counting Backwards” – Throwing Muses
4. “Hall of Mirrors” – The Distillers
5. “Sadie” – Joanna Newsom
6. “The Right Hand” – The Natural History
7. “Easy to Be Around” – Diane Cluck


Latest Music Purchased

Bought Master and Everyone by Mr. Will Oldham because it’s been absent from la vida for a good little while now and I miss it.


First Concert

Sha-Na-Na. Spent whole time unraveling my left leg-warmer. Then Billy Joel. Spent the whole time developing the requisite adolescent nerd obsession.


Latest Concert

Um. Damn. Let me think. Some sad band from Athens. Too sad for me that night and I had to leave. Is that a real answer? Before that, The Selmanaires at The Lenny’s, don’tcha know. The exact opposite of the saddest band in the land.


Seven Concerts I Must See Before I Die Or They Do

1. Tom Waits
2. Wolf Parade
3. The Go! Team
4. I’d say Black Francis and/or Kim Deal in some configuration of people strumming and hitting things, only it seems doomed I will never quite be standing in the same room where they are playing instruments. I’ve come to accept this as a fact of life.
5. Joanna Newsom (Again.)
6. Throwing Muses all electriclike. Not holding the breath.

But hooray for the internet, eh? We can all be thirteen years old with our slambooks forever and ever.

The ceiling fan whirs. The street outside is quiet.
It's after eleven on a weeknight, the corners of my eyes are achy from the small glass of wine I had earlier and I have to pee. Bad.

I sit here at my computer/stereo instead. My roommates have all gone to bed and my cat, too. My attention is absolute, though, the house now quiet around me and finally I sit back. The sum total of my work: a list of songs in the perfect order. The Perfect! Order! I tell you. And the perfect length (clocking in at just under 59 minutes).

Making mix tapes(/cds/insert your medium here) is a hobby that has continued, largely unaltered, since earliest adolescence, and nothing has the power to calm and content me in quite the same way. Nothing gives such pleasure as hearing one song melt into the next just the way it should.
That said, my West Coast friend: you are in for the music deluge. Watch out.

But this I do well.
La vida has shut down this week but for two things: work and sleep.
The rest of the day is a haze in which I just wish I were asleep: tandem pounding just behind eyes and above the base of my skull. My best hours go to my job.

This is good. If my work hours were not my best hours, there would be high hell to pay. See, I’m filling in for our morning person this week at Small Publication, which means I go to work at 3:30 in the morning. Which means I get up at three. Which is completely insane. When I shot three years or so of my life down the tubes working at a coffeeshop here in town, I got up at 5:30 on many days. Now 5:30 feels late. 5:30 feels like an hour of luxury. I have grey hairs at 28. My sisters didn’t; nor did my mother. I wonder if I get a new one for every hour of sleep I rob from myself in my twenties.

There’s something else too, though; something more. The hour I get up, I am without the usual a.m. comforts: No sun, no Renee Montagne on the radio and no other people on the roads. I get out of bed, make the coffee, wash my face, dress & go, and by the time I get to work, I’m alert enough that I’m yelling back at the prerecorded talk radio I listen to on my drive in; I’m making insane jokes for me, only. There is no one else at the office; what I’m in charge of there is mine, too. I feel like it’s Time to Make the Doughnuts but I feel those doughnuts fricking matter. There’s a heft to my hand as I hoist up the morning papers on the stoop of the office and swing open the door. Take my five good hours.

Crazy Sam’s: Where the Sacred Is Profane ! !
...and Wishes/Horses
“We’re not gonna teach a book about the Bible; we’re gonna teach the Bible!”

That’s from a principal in West Texas whose school is planning a Bible education class that’s sparked some criticism. As it’s planned, the course uses just one text – the Bible itself - and critics say it doesn’t actually teach the history, art or literature contemporaneous with or related to, the Bible (the whole reason the course was ostensibly proposed in the first place.) It just teaches the Bible. You know, like the guy says in the exclamation above, which I wish found more surprising or shocking.

And of course Mr. Principal, he wasn’t Jewish or even like, Episcopalian. Okay, so my fact-checking is shoddy; he mighta been Episcopalian; all he said tonight on All Things Considered was that he is Christian. He is Christian and yes, he’d like to convert all the students in the school if he could, but he wouldn’t because it’s frowned upon.

The thing is, I don’t know too many Episcopalians out there who are that fervent in that gorgeous doublespeak we’re so familiar with here in la Cinturon de la Biblia: The “I want to convert the whole world!” followed by the “But this is separation of church and state.”

Only in this country, I tell you; only here is a thing called faith so commonly shilled about like a freaking carnival gimmick sold to you by some mustache-twirling carny who gives you his sales-spiel while, all along - all along- declaring out of the side of his mouth to the twenty other people who’ve gathered, that he’s not selling a thing, no sir, no.

And let’s look at that word: faith. You’d think that’d imply that no one can sell it to you, that it’s something that just comes to you in some beautiful, noncorporeal way. A light from the sky. Something discussed in quiet voices echoing along the tall, stone halls of buildings with solid foundations, foundations built by ancient, silent men. Men with calm hearts. All those clichés. That it’s something you either have or don’t, that it’s something solemn and solid or not, but either way it’s not a cheap word. Not insubstantial like that plastic ring you chose from a box of prizes when you were six because the man didn’t guess your weight correctly. It’s a beautiful word, becoming uglier by the day.

And this
A smart journalist told me recently that if you find yourself reporting on something you hold strong personal opinions about, it’s a good idea to keep a notebook separate from your reporter’s notebook. In this second notebook, you scrawl all your deep, dark opinions. So I guess this is it. My notebook in which I’m totally, nakedly honest. That was part of the original idea, anyway. Except that I’m intentionally (though not very) vague about my workplace and I never, ever mention real stories I’m working on or anything that happens in the offices of Small Publication, even though those are some of my best anecdotes, the ones I’m just itching to put down and make this spot a thousand times better and more frequently updated than it is.

But no. I mean, think of what could happen! My god, why, I could become the subject of those stories you hear, like that women who gets fired from her job because someone discovered it was she who was writing those scathing accounts mocking her coworkers on her wildly popular, deliciously wicked website that just keeps crashing now, the public demand is so high and since she’s been fired she’s found her real calling, anyway: she’s off with that book deal, now.
Oh yeah. Right now she’s out with every single one of her friends at Kennywood, using that lifetime parkpass the place sent her once fame hit and she said it was her favorite place in the world on the “Today” Show. Free funnelcake for all, now that everyone knows her real name and she’ll never have to worry about a paycheck ever again.