You’re forgiven, if you forgot about how this webpage is meant to be telling a specific Story — or if you forgot about the thing altogether. The last three entries have been transitional bits and pieces, the most recent of which is more than two months old. That entry, for its part, was meant to be a “proem on rock,” a brief preamble before getting back into the no-nonsense business of hard, objective bloglifejournalism. I never followed through, instead seeking refuge from the cold in my cozy dorm room and the Virgin Islands, in which places I wrote a small book’s worth of analysis of and criticism on everything from Kafka to hip-hop, middle English poetry to contemporary music and law.¹ Now I’m back, and instead of continuing the Story, I’m here weaving yet another strand of connective tissue. This is akin to placing an “Interlude” after an “Intro” on your record, a dim move that even a glue-sniffing, wife-betraying asswipe like Usher wouldn’t make, and yet here I am, insulting Usher like he’s the damn fool.²

Who’s the fool? Well, there can be more than one, and right now I’m owning up to my place at the table. I want to write the Story, to revel in the fond memories and exorcised demons, to get it out of my system already, and yet I’ve done a historically awful job of keeping up. A New Year’s Resolution probably can’t make my track record any better, but a guy can try — although things only seem to be ramping up, with ever-increasing band duties, a growing freelance writing palette (yes!), a new stride in my academics,³ and more than I care to even think about right now. But 2009 was a quantum leap from 2008, The Worst Year of My Life, and if I can keep vaultin’ in oh-Ten, it’s gonna be a damn fine year as well. I’m amped.

What were we talking about? Oh right, nothing: and New Year’s, kind of. It was a decent Eve, though couldn’t help but pale in comparison to some recent ones.⁴ I spent some of the afternoon on a freeway while reading Hunter S. Thompson and listening to Usher’s Confessions, which attentive readers of Soymilk Revolution and careful listeners of music will by now know is a bad album — one of the most syrupy logs of shitschmaltz I’ve ever forced myself to ingest — and I spent some of the evening walking around NYC’s snow-dampened streets, wet like a descending mountaineer’s defrosting nostrils. Relentless wind chills pierced my woolen exterior with ease, making me yearn for the shabby, clotted veins of the city’s arterial subway system, the relative warmth of still air and collective body heat. My modest desires were appeased several times over the course of the evening, affording my friends and I not only warmth but also the occasional platform jazz solo, improvised music for an improvised crowd. During this time I was writing furiously in my notebook and thinking about how Hunter S. Thompson’s hilarious brand of Gonzo journalism is perhaps the earliest form of “citizen journalism,” especially as seen in his On the Campaign Trail ‘72 book, really especially as regards Edmund Muskie and the drug Ibogaine. Hm.

Musical collaborator/good friend Zach and I spent some time with friends in a friend’s apartment that night, discussing the difference between the Bolt Bus and the Chinatown bus. Zach paraphrased what I had said on a Chinatown bus earlier that day, unaccredited, in noting that the Bolt Bus is simply the Chinatown bus for white xenophobes who don’t like hearing a small Asian woman scream about how the next departing bus is on its way to “D.C., Washington,” or “Delphia, Philly.” I continued my pilfered thought by pointing out how the various Chinatown bus companies are actually often owned by rival gangs, a sort of Triads vs. whoever-the-fuck-else deal that appears at least sufficiently sane on the surface but is actually heavily steeped in a competition so fierce that the businessmen and women involved are liable to kill each other for your tattered $10 bill. However, I had to admit that the most dangerous things I’ve ever witnessed in all my years of Chinatown bussing is a fat urban couple who filled a blast radius of twenty seat aisles with a stench that smelled like fried chicken via fiery, vengeful asshole, and a hook-up between two friends of mine that I wouldn’t have imagined ever hooking up, at least not on a bus. So perhaps those Chinatown buses aren’t all that dangerous, after all — though those two things happened on the same bus ride, to tell you the truth. If nothing else, that’s a little fucked up.

A lot of other things happened that New Year’s in New York. For the occasion I became an insatiable vortex, into which-whom disappeared two hot dogs, a papaya smoothie, three slices of mysterious and delicious defrost pizza, three courses at a decent Chinese restaurant, cheap boxed wine, a 600-calorie bomb in the form of a Crumbs carrot cake cupcake, a fair amount of Jack Daniels, a bullshit “les petits” bottle of Evian and two novelty-sized slices of fresh pizza, in that order. I also spent the two hours before, the moment during, and the half hour after the turn of the decade watching a jam band play, of all things.

It was a southern rock/gospel-influenced jam band, so I guess that was interesting. I’ve never been much for jam bands — it speaks more to the side of music I could give a shit less about (intense virtuosity) and less to the side I couldn’t love more (direct, moving songwriting) — let alone when it costs me $50 to witness, but the strange bastards onstage had their moments. The crowd was also intriguing: I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a more varied crowd of people at a show before, the vast majority of whom seemed to be genuinely enjoying the hell out of the proceedings. People of all creeds and races, heights, person-genres, et al: a rotund little midget who was swigging ale and grooving to the band almost entirely out of his field of vision; grey-haired folks who were not there because of younger relatives; the kind of scenesters you’d more commonly see owning the dancefloor at a fashionable club somewhere;  and a very, very cute young woman in my immediate vicinity who was dancing her heart out and has left a small impression on my mind that will probably recall itself every time I am faced by the prospect of a jam band again for at least the next few years of my life. Which will be damn infrequent, lord willing.

For the most part, I tried to focus on the music but couldn’t keep those kinds of thoughts out of my head. And the music itself inspired more than enough thoughts on its own, thoughts like:

“Jam” music presents the rock band as pornographic, orgiastic release. Each musician is given a moment in the sun to play with his or her self, and after a few vamps and runs of auto-stimulation, the whole lecherous lot unites and gets off together in a great big communal climax. To their credit, they can come many times without going limp — though from certain perspectives, it would look as if they weren’t ever too virile to begin with. Whatever.

Listening to a jam band play is like reading a paper by a pretty smart kid who nevertheless refers to his thesaurus at least twice per sentence. It’s easy to dig on the pyrotechnical vocabulary and the florid prettiness of the individual elements, but the sum is far less impressive than any of its given parts — or even the potential of what each “author” (literary or musical) could be doing with what he or she’s got going on. This is why so many fans of this kind of music can listen to one of, say, Guided By Voices or Weezer’s best records, scratch their heads, and spit about how it “doesn’t do anything new.” It misses the point entirely, not just of the music in question but as far as I care music in general — though perhaps I just never inhaled enough Cali ‘dro to get the point of jam music, and nobody’s got anybody to blame for that except me. Different strokes for different bloats.

Blokes, I meant. Folks. Willis Jackson? Speaking of differing tastes, mine have been changing a lot recently as far as music goes. I still love most of the shit I’ve been loving for the past few years, but in general I feel like I’ve been experiencing something of a “genre awakening.” I like reggae now. I love dub, and in the past few weeks I think I’ve been starting to appreciate hip-hop on the face of its universally acknowledged merits and not just the occasional overlaps it has with my more entrenched musical tastes/leanings. My Last.Fm, if you can find it, is pretty ridiculous…If it tells you anything, my two favorite releases of last year are by rap-punk bastard child P.O.S. and mainstream star/gender- and genre-bending pop thing Lady GaGa. I’m either broadening my horizons or losing them entirely.

What the fuck is this interlude supposed to accomplish, anyway? And what kind of aesthetic dolt/delinquent make his interludes as long as his real tracks? (Or, in my case, posts — the last ‘real’ one being “Nights It Came Together,” about half a dang year old now.) Well, this has gotten me into the swing of writing about myself again, which is something I suppose. More to come soon? Maybe. In the meantime, I’m still writing for one of the top 20 most popular newspapers in the country, and am now just beginning to write for one of the top 5 coolest music websites in the world. I’ll show you some clips soon! And no, I’m not going to share the new Spoon album with you! haha lol

Holy hell, this Outkast album is good. What’s crazy is that I’ve always felt Big Boi is the lesser half of the group, but man, Speakerboxx is so on point. It’s an old album, dated 2003, and I guess that’s pretty old by today’s hyperactive sociocultural torrent-standards. I just experienced what my dad calls my first “geezer moment” the other day, when I was hanging in the Order Room of my friend KJ’s house, where his little 14-year-old squash prodigy, future electronic drummer brother Ian was cruising the net hard. It was a Saturday night, roundabouts 11pm, and the little dude was video-chatting with the scores of friends he had online at that very moment. He hopped into one chat with a group of young teen girls in the neighborhood, took some unflattering screencaps of them mid-sentence amidst some stifled fits of laughter, then X’ed out and blew down the information superhighway to yet another girlcluster somewhere else on the Mainline.

“Do you still like Andrew?” he asked one of the young’uns. She blushed, tossed her hair and admitted that her thing for him had faltered ever since he lost his eyebrows in some unfortunate prank that involved sleeping bags and duct tape. “Let’s get him in here,” Ian replied, and soon Andrew was flown into the chat, flustered and indeed eyebrowless as a newborn baby. Ian put his computer on mute, snapped a few more screencaps, quickly assembled an awkward collage of Andrew and the girls and a few Google Image’d hearts in Photoshop, uploaded it to Facebook much to the assembled company’s chagrin, then exited the digital carousal with a mischievous laugh.

Back in my day, online conversation was limited to text, and although some of us Skype and videochat nowadays, it’s not the same kind of social function that the young teens and tweens of today seem to have made out of it. It was the first time I, or KJ, ever felt like we were a part of “the older generation,” and it was a fascinating and frightful little sensation. I’m old enough to get into bars legally, and I guess that’s pretty damn old…Life speeds up, time gets thinner, and I need more of it than ever. Let’s see if there’s any magic left to be found in this strange new world.⁵

2010 is still green and fresh, but some pretty unreasonable things have happened already. For one thing, I’ve taken a $100 swig of a $1700 bottle of cognac, and breathed a fire so damn potent and strong it had women two and a half times my age hitting on me the only way those kind of women at my age can do — horrifyingly.⁶ It was some damn good cognac, though, and the moment made not a damn lick of sense, which has me thinking that 2010 might just be the Year of Unreason, or at least the least reasonable year of my life thus far. Could this be the start of the Decade of Unreason? Don’t touch that dial unless you’re trying to rip it off.

don’t pull the thang out, unless you plan to bang.

1. Some of that “small book” is among the best stuff I’ve ever written about anything. I’ll show you sometime, especially if you ask! [↩]
2. I recently listened to his Confessions album, and the vitriol’s still fresh. What a maddeningly crap record. [↩]
3. 6 classes and 6 A’s later, all I can say is: take time off from college if you’re considering it. A rebirth, in more ways than one. [↩]
4. 2005 was spent in all-white threads, atop a skyscraper with tons of family, a live band filling the 75-degree air some 25 stories above the Rio de Janeiro coast. 2007 was spent watching the goddamn Jonas Brothers lip-sync a mediocre pop song on “live” TV, but that was at least book-ended by some great sex. And 2008 ended with a party surrounded by colleagues and friends with whom I had recently become very close and appreciative of, which was heartwarming in its own way. 2006 was weird, now that I remember it, but also involved a girl that made me pretty happy at the time, and at the end of the year that’s all one could really want. [↩]
5. I’ve got it, don’t sweat. [↩]
6. These women are what I now call “grinchy.” Talk to me in the streets or on the lines to find out more about this phenomenal new slang. [↩]

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