Notes on August and September: Actually, I don't think I have any notes on August and September. It's tough to remember everything. Right now my brain is kind of feeling like this, probably because it's 9:00 am on Columbus Day and someone has been pounding nails into a board with a hammer directly below my apartment for at least an hour. Plus a million things happened this weekend, some of them crazy things. It's a Krazy World. Before I got woke up, I dreamed I was at the record store with a stack of shit I wanted to buy--a box of cassettes and some LPs, a huge haul--but then they decided to close for the night and turned off all the lights at once and started to lock up while I was still in there. Then I dreamed I was in school, and the teacher was handing back a spelling test. She handed my test back, I got a C-. She started talking about what we could do to improve our grades, and part of it was that we had to tape the tests to our shirts and wear them until we had taken a make-up test. I thought she was kidding, so I was like, "Wait, we have to do what? Are you serious?" She didn't say anything, so I asked again really politely, like raised my hand and everything, and then said, "I'm sorry, I didn't catch what you said. What do we need to do if we want to take the make-up test?" She turned around, grabbed my test out of my hand, crumpled it up and threw it at me. I think she called me an asshole, too. I don't remember exactly what happened after that. We had to watch a video or a film strip or something, and I may have gotten a little belligerent, because it seemed like there were no rules anymore, or I just stopped caring. I remember trying to figure out when/if I could get close enough to the teacher to spit in her face, and then I started thinking about putting sugar in her gas tank, and tried to picture myself doing it, in the parking lot in broad daylight. I would be spilling sugar everywhere, and she'd be leaving the school, walking towards her car, digging through her purse to find her keys. I could see myself sweating, trying to finish, wondering if I needed to put in a whole sack of sugar or if even a little bit was more than enough, and then hearing her dress shoes clacking on the pavement, getting louder as she got closer to the car, the car I was trying to ruin. Then, there was the constant, barely muffled thud of a hammer.

But yeah, as far as August/September goes, I don't know that I was really stressing about music at all. I had some time off and hung out with my friends from Michigan, bought a bunch of wine, was sick for weeks on end (pretty much all of September), camped out at my parents' house while they were in Europe and Northern Africa, got the worst fever of my life and went totally delirious, thought I was on a TV show and kept dreaming about things stacked on top of each other, like a garbage dump. I almost threw up but I didn't. Speaking of garbage, though -- the new issue of geneva13 is out and it's all about Geneva's trash situation. I haven't read through all of it yet, mainly because I don't want to get bummed out about landfills and local problems being symptomatic of Earth's general fucked up enviropocalypse. It's one of those things that makes you feel personally responsible and completely powerless at the same time. Ugh. But I wrote a column about my favorite garbage songs and it's fucking AWESOME! Or at least, the songs are decent. I made a mix of the garbage songs + bonus songs to be played at the zine's release party, but unfortunately it didn't get played. Not a huge loss, but people could have heard "Trash", "Garbage Can", "I Sold My Heart To The Junkman", "Teenage Wastebasket", "Peanut Duck", "Everything And More", "Born With A Curse", "Don't Bother Me", and "Werewolf", and it could have gone over pretty well I think. Maybe next time.

I'm trying to think of records that came out recently that were good. The new Grass Widow 12" on Captured Tracks is rad. The new Vivian Girls is killer, too. Don't read or listen to what anyone says about it, just check it out for yourself. And..holy shit! Tyler just sent me a Beavis and Butthead ringtone. This is the greatest shit. Uhhhh, what else? Rusty Kelley from Total Abuse is doing some tumblr things. Pretty crazy about Thee Oh Sees right now. Always insane about Fugazi, right now "Closed Captioned (demo)". Speaking of, read this -- roughly the same shit I thought about as I watched Instrument last week. You should buy this T.A.S.K. record or at least listen to "Holy Coffee", too. Fuck, all I can think about is B&B and how cold it is, and how I need to go to Newark and finish mowing my parents' lawn, visit my grandmother, pick up her laundry. I'm going to end this here. No wait, I'm going to end this with "Ice Cream Paint Job"

Tyyyyy-lerrrrrrrrrrts!

1. Came across a book called The Risen Tide of Shit and Failure. '90s hardcore art allegedly, and the cover looks MITB-ish. I ordered it, so if you want to check it out before you buy, that can be arranged (once I get it). Also ordered that Dave Pajo acoustic Misfits record. Might be some good Fall shit, might be terrible. Nick Drake singing "I ain't no goddamn sonofabitch"? Why not.

2. IDIB's got a couple good things finally: Glass Candy "Geto Boys" 12" and a new Nite Jewel thingie. One-time pressing for the "Geto" shit, if you're still interested (I know my interest in disko shit dropped like a motherfucker). The new NJ stuff I've been hearing has been cool, though.

3. I bought just about everything you told me about. Still waiting on Citizen's Arrest, should be here by the end of the week. Harvey Milk jam is solid, but hasn't sunk in yet. Haven't listened to MK Ultra yet, but it's sitting next to me as I'm typing this. It's right here, Ray, it's looking at me. What do you think of Nazi Dust? I like it after a couple listens. It's more metal than I expected, which is nice. That "South Will Rise Again" comp is kind of stupid, but it reminds me of out-of-town Chuds shows ca. 1999 for some reason, and the Cult Ritual song is worth it. I didn't order that Condominium 7", but I want to hear it. More hXc recommendations, please and thank you! Please pardon my dear Aunt Sally. Oh and I'm still waiting on my Pissed Jeans record, but the guy who took the cover photo (Shawn Brackbill?) is apparently following me on tumblr.

4. I listened to Possessed to Skate yesterday. Suddenly love Spazz and Asshole Parade. Could just be a phase, but what if it isn't?? S. Shootings should happen soon.

5. Did you get 42nd Street Vol. 4?? We should be watching it. Or maybe we should wait until the end of September and do it like balls to the wall Vol. 1-5 . Just an idea.

6. Can I borrow all your Elvis Costello jawns?

Hey, I started a tumblr and you can see it/follow it here. It'll be just like People Mover (music-related things), but with very little writing, which means I won't dread having to update it, which means I'll probably update it all the time. And you can learn things from it, like for instance: did you know the Nation of Ulysses clip I mentioned last September that used to be 1:58 seconds long (or something like that) is now 3:59 seconds long? I thought I was hallucinating when it happened. So there's that. What else? I saw Harvey Milk last night. Fucking incredible. Couldn't help noticing Kyle Spence is phenomenal. Better than the first time I saw them in a lot of ways. Set list included "Merlin Is Magic" and "Motown". I really couldn't have been happier. They opened for Torche, which wound up feeling sort of like Sabbath opening for Van Halen, which actually happened in the late '70s, I think, and which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Never sure exactly how I feel about Torche, though. Also, I bought Salo the other day. 50% off select Criterion titles at Barnes & Noble, as of this past Sunday afternoon anyway. I bought a book about Cat Power, too, and now feel like that was a mistake. I flipped through it at the store and found a couple quotes from Henry Owings and thought "this'll be great!". Later, I read the introduction to the book, which starts with Chan Marshall does not want you to read this book. If Chan Marshall doesn't want me to do something, then I shouldn't be doing it. 30-some pages in, and I know why. Don't think I'll finish it.

That mailbox looks like a droid.
I gotta watch Strange Brew because I've been thinking about it every couple of days for the past 10 years probably, and it's on TV right now. But I also want to say this Grass Widow record is fucking killin' it. It feels fresh as hell. Maybe because it's got twisty guitars like Monorchid but with the The Breeders on vocals? Maybe because the songs are a little crazy, sometimes arranged like scrappy prog songs that have to be done in three minutes, but they're not bowing to math? Maybe because the lyrics are legit good? Maybe because they're from San Francisco but they sound sort of British? Maybe because I like all-girl bands in a way that I can't like all-guy bands (Harvey Milk, et al excluded)? Maybe because this GW song I mentioned before (from their split with Rank/Xerox) is like an early hal al Shedad practice tape with the Vince Guaraldi children's choir? Maybe because the cover of their 12" is a picture of their practice space, with a big blanket hanging on the wall with their name spelled out in patches? I mentioned something in my last geneva13 column about "self-consciously post-punk wild women" being not exactly what I'm looking for (even as I love this Mika Miko song/video). Grass Widow are sort of that, but with heavy modesty and great instincts. You can also hear every note. No fuzz, no feedback, nothing blown out. Some people have to go no-fi because they can't write "Green Screen", I guess.

Grass Widow - "To Where"
Grass Widow - "Green Screen"
Grass Widow - "Out Of Body Experience"

Regarding the late Dash Snow: look at this. Doesn't it make you feel like you're doing literally nothing? I'm not at all an expert on him, I was aware of him, sort of. I bought a zine he did that I decided to never look at again because it wound up being weirdly prophetic and I have no interest in revisiting one of the darker periods of my life. But the guy basically had super powers, and said "fuck you" in a lot of fun and ridiculous ways. The more of that, the better. So, R.I.P. Meanwhile: I'm a big fan of Dominique Young Unique and James Moody. Those songs at least. Oh and Cliff Nobles and Co! Long live 94.1 FM.

YO! Briefly noted: new geneva13 is out and buyable/grabable. It includes yet another music column by me, four pages of things I think are totally pretty good, including: Dum Dum Girls, Brilliant Colors, Onna, Milk n' Cookies, John Lurie, The Stains, The Nerves, Pat Graham, Hot T-Shirts, and Albert Ayler, and some other stuff. Things I did not get around to or sort of forgot to mention were Ancestors and Real Estate. Maybe next time. Also, you should check out this Summer Mix, courtesy of the guy from City Center. Girl groups, etc, so it's definitly worth it. Oh and did I ever mention Ian Svenonius on Dissonance? Totally awesome, and longer than this, but good in a lot of the same ways. Be sure to go to the 1 hr. 36 min. 18 sec. mark to hear "When Love Calls Your Name". Listen to the Congos track after it, too. And turn both them shits way up. Listen to Josephine Baker, too. Buy this Parasails tape if you can. AND: my friend Kaci was an instructor at the Willie Mae Rock Camp For Girls this past week in NYC, and you can see some photos and thoughts about it here. I guess she got an eye infection, but she also got to work with Allison Wolfe. You gotta take the bad with the unbelievably great sometimes.

First podcast coming soon. New posts coming sooner.

ps: Beauty Pill's back and it feels so good. Talk about timing.

Sky-scraping afro in the bloom of youth.
Everything that could be said about Michael Jackson's death has to have been said already. Of the very few eulogies I read, my favorites were Rob Havrilla's and Maria T's (be sure to check out that Detention song, as well), because they spoke the truth while saying two completely different things. People loved MJ's music and people thought he was a fucking weirdo, and most people thought both at the same time. I don't know if that's complicated or very uncomplicated. His music was so good and he made people so happy, and his personal life was so unorthodox and made people so uneasy, and the feelings at both end were so extreme and couldn't cancel each other out, and I think it gradually just wore everyone down, maybe MJ included. That's speculation, though, and there's nothing grosser than speculating about someone immediately after their death.

My MJ shit is this: The first album I ever bought with my own money was Bad, on cassette. I was in 2nd grade and I watched TV all the time and taped songs of the radio. I would lay down on my bed and listen to "Dirty Diana" on my walkman, really not understanding what it was about. There was a girl named Diana who wasn't nice? I had no idea what any songs were about at that age. I just liked stuff. The year before it was Los Lobos' cover of "La Bamba". A year later I would ask for a copy of Appetite For Destruction for my birthday. As time went on, I was neither a Jackson loyalist nor did I have any serious problem with him. I didn't end up like Corey Feldman, as this awkward guy who likes MJ way too much and makes Rock and Roll High School Forever. And I didn't end up like this dipshit, who made a 7-part documentary that hinges on something a 12-year-old would make up as a joke and questions that start with "I axe you". I watched the making of the "Thriller" video and thought it was kind of interesting, but also kind of long, and honestly I liked the "Billie Jean" video better. I laughed when, in 4th grade, some kid said "I pledge allegiance to the flag that Michael Jackson is a fag".

Years later, my uncle gave me all his old records, squeezed into two old Ernest and Julio Gallo boxes, and I was psyched to find copies of Off The Wall and Thriller. I put "Rock With You" on a mixtape for my friend Melinda because she liked it so much, and I realized I liked it, too. I saw part of some terrible biopic about him, and this scene where he's in a hospital bed and Lisa Marie Presley is there and she tells him something like, "This isn't going to work..." and then she walks out of the room. From that point on I just felt bad for him. Things were never going to work out the way they should. He was doomed and I knew it.

When I found out he died, I thought of two songs. One was a demo version of "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" from the special edition version of Off The Wall. It's Michael, Randy, and Janet, sounding like they're goofing around in a furnished, wood-paneled basement. Someone's clanging on bottles and there's a false start and they all crack up. It's fun and ideal, even as a kind of rough draft with a crazy collapse at the end, and without those great string parts. The other song was Beauty Pill's "You, Yes You", from their You Are Right To Be Afraid EP. If you listen to it, it's pretty obvious why. It was written several years before his death, but didn't seem incorrect. As part of a full-on, irony-free love song, it made sense. Who wouldn't understand this? Beauty Pill's strengths were (are?) in their warmth, their dry sense of humor, their willingness to tell it like it is, and their modesty. They were a talented band who were either misunderstood or never got their due (I don't remember reading a single review of You Are Right...), and they wrote a song that will always feel strange now that MJ is gone for real.

The night after MJ's death I saw Jonathan Richman at the Bug Jar. He strode up to the stage and immediately started playing a song called "When We Refuse To Suffer". It was funny and he was doing these dances and spinning his guitar, but it was also kind of heavy. I had watched E! the night before and Arsenio Hall called in and said things about working with MJ that weren't suprising and then signed off by saying something that didn't make sense. On CNN, I watched Gideon Yago talk about MJ being seemingly "on something" when he interviewed him a few years back. MJ's kids don't have a dad anymore and people are just saying whatever, and I guess Neverland will be open to the public at some point, with a Michael Jackson corpse dipped in some kind of preservative plastic and placed in a glass case for people to look at. What if he had just made some cool songs, and when he was feeling weirded out by everything, he just stopped, took some time off, didn't take pills, took care of himself, and relaxed mostly? What if he just kept making demos with his brother and sister? I wouldn't have listened to Beauty Pill over the weekend, I wouldn't have had to listen to guys at work struggle to make a joke out of a mega-star death. It could've been different.

Beauty Pill - "You, Yes You"
Beauty Pill - "You Are Right To Be Afraid"
Beauty Pill - "Copyists"

Whoa, videos to make you feel better: The Choir Quit and Hausu. Can't stop thinking about Grass Widow either! Seriously can't! New geneva13 is out NOW, too, but isn't yet available in the store. I'll keep you posted. What else? I gotta eat dinner now, I'm starving. Sorry if this was long and unnecessary!

I love to hear your sweet voice, but not all the time.
Whoa, some belated things from like a month ago. I should've just blabbed about these right after I killed time driving around Canandaigua lake, while kids straight out of '96 style-wise were looking at the apartment I'm in the middle of leaving. But then I got home and they were gone and I was like, "I'm gonna have a beer." Anyway, first off: Middle America. What's up with them? Is it just me and Tyler listening to them? Or is it me, Tyler, the guy from Home Invasion, Fashionable Idiots, and Pennsylvania dudes? Or is it like a lot more people than that? I have no idea what people listen to. I'm fucking old. I also don't know that many people. If I was at a house show and people started talking about Middle America, I'd be like "Middle America! NICE!" and then I'd probably just stand there. There's not much more to say about Husker rage and spooky cover art that doesn't tell you anything. Doesn't it look like it's from a weird PBS art special? Or a museum you went to as a kid that shows up in your dreams every once in a while? Listen to the singer's voice and the guitars overheating and picture the one band in town that's slaying all the others.

Middle America - "Anxiety"
Middle America - "Scraped/Paranoia"

And then Los Mockers! I heard this at my friends Kelley and Kyle's house sometime last year, right before we went to Tap & Mallet and drank what we called "black metal beer" but was actually a beer called Wizard's Winter (I think?). Actually, Kyle wrote about this record on his blog and hit a lot of nails on a lot of heads. He somehow works in Daniel Desario. Actually, if you look at the comment section under his post, you'll see the same story I just told you. Whoops. This record is so good, though. Look at them on that cover, they look like Menudo! But they sound like the Stones! And they were from Uruguay from just the right era and the singer's accent is great. Wait, watch them here. Jesus Christ! I listen to Little Steven's Underground Garage all the time and I've never once heard Los Mockers (or Milk n' Cookies, or the Make Up, or Pussy Galore, or...). What the fuck? Enough with The Oholics already. Original Recordings is like 17 straight hits and it's widely available, so they have no excuse. Here are three songs that are as good as anything anywhere:

Los Mockers - "Every Night"
Los Mockers - "All The Time"
Los Mockers - "Sad"

I looked at the Wooooo page today and started reading all that Franklin group/Bohemian Grove shit. Yikes. I didn't know anything about either of those things but I had this idea for a movie a while ago that would've basically been that whole story, only it would've been set in England and it wouldn't have made any sense. Wwwweeeeiiirrdd. Aren't politicians gross? Isn't Joe Scarborough gross? I don't know if I mentioned The Hairy Posse's take on "New Song" before, but here it is. Oh and Esther Phillips doing "Home Is Where The Hatred Is". The mix I got with my first ever Teenage Teardrops order is in heavy rotation. So is that Vaselines thing that just came out. I'll talk more about that later maybe. No new posts for at least the next week (I'm moving and having cable/internet stopped and restarted again). My only means of communication will be my phone and old fashioned letters. It's a good feeling.