$disanpoter

save the world, lose the girl

don't you hate when you discover a band 3 years after they've ceased to exist? good for the bank account bad for the social calendar. on that note, don't you hate it when a song starts off perfect and then...just...isn't? sigh. like i could do better. like this band. they're a little loud for me at the moment but i could like them on another day. one former band mate's started a label and another does cheeky dance stuff so at least it's opening paths to amusement.

i'm going to see this group, the section quartet, tonight at Maxwell's. I've never been there and strings happen to be exactly what i'm after tonight so i'm pretty psyched for the adventure...which is good because i just lost 3 hours of work that didn't save properly and need something to look forward to.

when i said i loved you, i meant to drop my weapons

there's a song i like from a band that only existed for a few years while i was in college. it's called the good-bye song and it's by North House. They won the battle of the bands when i was a freshman (perhaps only regionally; i'm not sure). that title there is a line in it that i find particularly relevant to the way I have in the past and I know many other women also approach romantic relationships. i ended up going out to lunch with some of my co-workers today and the conversation turned towards our various perspectives and experiences in dating. its funny how often talk can turn to dating ideologies among people who profess not to be all that into the whole thing. i guess that just goes to show how much emphasis is placed on it in society (or how fundamental it is to human existence, depending on what camp your in). i'm having very mixed feelings at the moment over some of the comments i made that i don't feel accurately represent the worldview i have now or the ideals i try to live by. i guess that's what blogs are for, for correcting those situations - if in a rather futile way, considering the people who are likely to read this are already familiar with my thoughts and those that are likely to have taken from it a different impression of what i'm about these days will never read this. but so it goes. and just for the record, i no longer date or even sleep with people i'm not interested in talking to, and in fact it's not so much that i did enter into liaisons with people i had no interest talking to as it is that it took my a while to understand the reasons why i was perpetuating relationships i no longer had an interest in...

anyway. that's all on that. hopefully i'll get back to the more interesting aspects of this week later. it's been a rather pleasant week and weekend...(there's not much point in rehashing the rest of the conversation here: not that it wasn't interesting, but as is usually the case with things involving dating and romance 'it's all been done(/said) before'

the uses of un-inspired music

i went to a disappointing performance last night. i'll post some clips from it later, because the artist was a fairly solid performer. it took me a few tries to articulate what was so disappointing about: it was billed as indian fusion, but in fact, turned out to be a series a songs that were all fairly solidly located in one genre or another and merely varied from each other. the first song was heavily pop-y; the next more latin with a smattering of indian drumming interludes; the next heavily indian. so all in all, they lacked the experimentation and interplay i associate with and find intriguing about fusion.
the up-sides of this are two-fold: it's prompted a very engaging conversation on how a listener pursuing new music encounters songs and uses them as nodes in a network to explore versus the intent and merits of the original work, and it reminded me of when we saw the Chemical Brothers and the similar, though more minor, disappointment i experienced then - and in reminding me, got me pursing a well-honed Pandora station on for the south-asian inspired electronica i was hoping for.
In the ways of nodes, it split out along any number of other spokes, as well, so the back current of my brain is enjoying a bit of a frenzy of potentials to be reaped later right now: (the image of which, itself, has reminded me of the tobacco juice glaze patterns from ceramic class which distributes outward in organic tendrils of gradient tone and my excitement about using them on something this session) multiple new station creation for related sub-genres, digging up the junoon concert cd somewhere in my closet, the uses and cases of node-spoke information structures, instrument creation and experimentation...and on.
there were some cool things about the performance. I appreciated the piece where he re-tuned his guitar to imitate a sitar. that rocked. he also had a riff on "I want to be in america" from West side Story that was amusing, not to mention a well-delivered dig.
I may post some excerpts from the conversation later too, because as we all know, my friends are smarter than me and say more interesting things. :)

like a harpsichord reincarnated as a woman

i just described a song as this to a coworker. actually i described it as "buzzy like..." but nonetheless, it amuses me and it is too. check it out and tell me if you disagree: (beth orton, "stolen car") http://www.pandora.com/music/song/beth+orton/stolen+car

acorns and other obscure memories

i sat down this morning and put on my "Slinky" pandora radio station - which, i've not yet succeeded in cultivating effectively yet - and had the sudden desire to hear Unbunny's "Transformed" again. I miss it and i haven't had access to the album it's on for a while now. Before, as is the case with many people and their favorite songs, both when i wanted to hear and wanted to avoid that song, it had to do with the song's association to events in my own life.  When i first encountered it, I related so strongly to the concept of love it developed: "we fit together like oysters and pearls, or the way that an acorn is loved by a squirrel." I wanted that fit. I thought I felt that fit. This morning, though, it came to mind as a memory of its tone and pacing, the lilting frolicking melody that makes possible the kind of poignant up-beat quirkiness I love about it. my wanting to hear it wasn't entirely divorced from my appreciation of the world-view it creates, but it wasn't about it being <i>my</i> worldview either.
i had a similar moment this weeked, actually. i was on a bus last weekend crossing from the columbia area over to the upper east side trying out in my head the sound of narrative that actually set down the story of makeItTrue like i wasn't one of the people it happened to. it's hard to explain how this afternoon was a departure from my previous reflections on those two, three years but it was. for one there was a strong narrative drive, the same feeling of forward movement that was there when i wrote denoument. too bad i was no where near a span of alone time to follow up on it. then it got me thinking about that piece and how i don't have it anymore. here's this thing i wrote that actually won something, but i myself may never read it again. that's kind of sad, isn't it. it's a trend though, in my life. like the baccalaureate speech. i'm never going to get to revisit the logic of that either. the speech, at least, i remember the beginning of - i couldn't even remember that for Denoument. Instead I remembered the beginning of some drivel i wrote in high school (they were both written in the second person): "You will ask me how we came to be talking about this in the first place..." suckishness.
...anyway. now, my slinky radio station is playing brassier versions of songs i like when they're a bit sultrier - and i've learned some things: i like eartha kitt on the french songs that take a bit of huskiness and mellow it out, and i enjoy the humorous one that progress at a fast clip, but diamond's are a girl's best friend doesn't suit her at all. it turns her purr into a strained closed sound. now it just featured a very quick hit the road jack that again had none of the shadowed tones i appreciate in that song.
the thing about makeItTrue. if I could do it successfully, is that it really is a powerful example of how sincerety and innocence and good intentions can go so disastrously wrong.

dispatches

Malcolm Gladwell, in the Tipping Point, extends a hypothesis of productive human inter-connectedness as a result of the combined contributions of three types of people - one of which is the Connector. For the other two, read the book. This is a role I make no claims of inhabiting. My aunt is a Connector, and an amazing one and person at that; I merely have a brain that inherently seeks to match-up incoming information not immediately relevant to me with the person(s) i know of who might find it most useful or valuable. It's a just a spin-off mechanism. That said, if i've tagged you on this post, for at least on of what follows, I had you in mind [feel suitably appreciative here]:

• thursday 23 Aug (tomorrow!): McNally Robinson (independent bookseller with stellar selection and equally exemplary attention to interior design and layout) hosts authors in the up-and-coming literary magazine New York Tyrant. check it out. live the dream or just talk the talk. the wine they'll be serving is sure to help with the latter.
• also of note at McNally Robinson,
  
  • book group focusing on International Literature (tell me, does this surprise anyone?)
  • spanish language discussion group, for those of you who have the good fortune to read borges, cortazar, and the others in their original words. every saturday at noon. led by the former owner of a bookstore in Montevideo.
  • 9 Sept 7pm fiction writing workshop: standard gotham writer's workshop free seminar. i may have attended one when i interned there; either way i remember them being fairly solid.
• intersting tidbit on evolution: in his foreword to The Deep Hot Biosphere, Freeman Dyson mentions a hypothesis extended by the author of the book and ultimately confirmed, that at one point in the history of the world the poles flipped by 90 degrees. This event corresponds with an explosion in the diversity of evolution. niftiness, no?

That's it for the dispatches. There was another, but i've forgotten it. I've had to finish this up at work, too, so i'll have to add the rest of my thoughts on the things i've been reading later.

all forks lead to lola

I shared an amusing Eartha Kitt song with Esan and some others when it cropped up on my pandora station. He came back saying he bets i have Lola playing on repeat. This alludes to the T-shirts i wanted to make up that had !#/usr/bin/lola  and a vertical row of !# s respectively.

the comment prompted me to shoot back the retort that i hadn't yet figured out how to hack the pandora algorithm so that all forks lead to lola (that's not really possible). what's funny about this is first came the comment, then came the 'oh...hmmm...i didn't realize my awareness of the algorithm was part of how i interact with it' musing - and then a brief imagining of what kind of voodoo song ratings might actually lead to a convergence of selection pathways rather than a divergence...

as for lola...i wish. sigh.

slow pick interludes on the acoustic guitar

do not a folk-rock following make...

so i've been listening to Z100 for the late morning. i'm doing mostly data entry at the moment because we've got a large set of crappy data that just can't be accurately imported into our new system using some kind of parsing rubric (this by the way, bites. sucks. blows. and hugely, but so it goes). i figured it was a good opportunity to re-expose myself to the mainstream. fergie's got a song that's apparently popular "Big girls don't cry." It's a far cry from fergilicious, but someone needs to tell her that no matter how soundly her writer has placed the sound in the folk rock/light rock niche it just doesn't fly. even i, who can't help but stop and listen to some nice acoustic thrumming was impatient for the end.

on a high note, i was amused by the attempt - then i was further amused by the 'hey (hey!) you (you!) - i don't like your girlfriend" song that followed. now that's an entertaining throw back to an 'older' sound.

also, i've been told to check out a band playing at housing works in a few weeks. so i'm looking forward to getting home and looking them up/checking them out.

oh - and the "hey there delilah" song. that's just a solid quality tune. i like. you should listen to it.

(and don't think that i'm missing the ridiculousness of me acting like these are all as new to you all as they are to totally out of touch me.)

hope and stasis

i'm listening to Dido's "Do you have a little time" this morning. It seems like an appropriate selection today, though i'd be hard pressed to say why. There have been times in the past when i've felt exactly what she describes in it toward one person or another: "if you should stop for a while you will find me standing by, over here at the side of your life." If anything, I feel like the person she describes - only without anyone waiting around on the sideline - and amidst a fog of others in the same condition. (and of course now, this has prompted an image of us all as atoms bouncing around and occassionally passing off electrons to eachother). Perhaps it's that a feel more and more like I, and the people i care about, are on both sides of that situation, and this song condenses the poignancy of that opportunity cost into its simple words and the heavy inevitabiliy of the orchestral line.

anyway. i'm sombre today. life is hard. i feel blessed for the recent good things that have come into my life: new friends, new acquaintances, new opportunities and new exposure points for long standing interests. i feel at peace with the possibilities of maintaining a rich and rewarding life that serves some value to more than just myself, but it's been very hard going getting to this place. and it makes my heart ache that we are often so alone (or feel so alone) in our efforts to get there.

word. love

so i'm supposed to be writing my personal statement for grad school but instead i'm going to write about how f-ing brilliant jason mraz is. no i'm not. but i will. i will after i get this personal statement done. until then you should all sit your selves down and listening to "geek in the pink"  with its deliberate incorporation of old school beats and instrumentation and it's juxtaposition of hip with hopelessly unhip. it's witty and bawdy and flippant. it's great. sigh.