Nine consecutive hours of cracker jazz sprinkled with micromanagement, or, damn it's hot in here & not in a good way

A potpourri of miscellany

Stop flashing your private sector parts

[because I care a lot, no photo]

Yet another instance of micromangement, this time from macromanagement, managing to cleave the antiquated notion of decency, for, & cue Vincent & a shadowed pool of near-fluorescent blood, someone's parental figurine w/o the kung-fu grip was haughty enough to be ill, & worker bee, with shameless gusto & hubris, took time off the Vital Task of the hour, receiving an e-slap. Gasp, horror, fuck off.


Death's door

Too soon?


Dead

Left, salvage. Right, the salvageable.

Waiting for Wotan #9

 

"You gave me a fright."
"I thought it was he."

"Steve?"

"Wotan, dumbass."

 

"Pah! The wind in the reeds."
"I could have sworn I heard a fan."

Chick flick

and the streaming winter splinters like a child

[redacted]

Here, had a piece of a piece, but that's redacted, too.
Listen to the tune & thank me after 3:40.

[redacted]

You make me feel like spring has sprung

Gordian.

Alexandrian.

Poop.

Reflective powers.

The Peonage shared a diatribe about the utter aesthetic crapitude that is the lakefront. When blessed with a body of water, flat acres of concrete & steel sans greenery (& the number of benches that can be counted on one hand) shouldn't dominate. No one expects the rebirth of Madinat az-Zahra but come the fuck on.

Like this, unchanged from last year.

At least the Space Casino will save our sordid little burg.

Due the bad angle, you can't see that this is supposed to be saying music = peace or some other touchy feely bullshit.

Pretty --

-- or not.

Mighty ominous.

For the record, yes, the chump in the off-camera guardhouse was sporting a pair of macho authority shades but surprisingly didn't accost yours truly for probably illegal picture taking. I'm like the Gavrilo Princip of Parmastan.

Progress & prosperity?

Now that's progress.

Recession-proof prosperity: porn, booze, & The Man.

Slow burn

Once upon a time, this began with a seemingly-left-field-though-not-as-much-as-you-think introduction to such serious business, the yeah-right apocalyptic stylings of an in-character Charles Nelson Reilly. But if we, & by we I mean me, don't look for an explanation each time there are symbolic volcanoes in vein, seven-headed dragons landing on, cracking the frame of our gas-guzzling rustbucket hearts, what, then?

Sympathy, in the earliest strain of meaning: A (real or supposed) affinity between certain things, by virtue of which they are similarly or correspondingly affected by the same influence, affect or influence one another (esp. in some occult way), or attract or tend towards each other. Obs. exc. Hist. or as merged in other senses. There are two reasons why we don’t talk about something: either it means nothing, or it means everything.

So we let others with that affinity speak, & what the fuck does the above collage have to do with the new Worm Ouroboros album?  

The thing: the letter-of-the-law heavy has mostly vanished. The vast, undulating faux-climax riffs found on Winter, Riverbed, pretty much all of the self-titled debut, are fewer, mythic towns keeping desert highway rumor alive. On Come the Thaw, Jessica Way & Lorraine Rath (with new skinsdude & rarities god Aesop Dekker) drive that horizon-defying road at three a.m. when there's nothing but the sound of constellations & an interior dark continually brought to the fore by the flap of an empty wrapper in the open breeze, the call of a stone flung by a rolling tire, the response of a breath. Or is it through treading the blinking neon grit of sleeping suburbia, a back laced with sweat in the uncomfortable black. Only Withered breaks gravel from nearly front to back with an evident power chord, but to say this album isn't heavy is to confess that you never listened. The spirit is colossus.

Take the opener, Ruined Ground. Expanse built upon the bassline, the mimetic beat of thought, and when the frost on your fields/has claimed its prize/after it's gone/I'll wait for you, alternately sweet & oppressive vocal interplay layer before sparse, plucked guitar drops like a rain that threatens to become a storm, dead as quickly as it was born.

Further Out, the weeds discard broken concrete for the field, the band, as so often, playing with dimension, the notes spaced further apart then returning, the recapitulations never obviously in motion, meandering with the hours because something happened. That undercurrent of grey flows throughout, discernible but out of reach like the mirage of a note you swear you heard. The hypnotic, bass-dominant taciturn throb of Release Your Days nevertheless grasps for a solace in the dark found when alone, among a crowd.

When We Are Gold truly pushes the low high, Rath's bass taking lead the way a pulse does when the only other noise is crickets, a passing car, shuffling feet. Doom jazz for heshers? Perhaps, but the finest moment might be the last, the denouement of the will-o-the-wispy Penumbra when the instruments fall away, all that remains being a vocal whose final measure shifts heavenward in a moment of longed-for hope. Hildegard could have sung this.

Through all six sprawling suites, the sense, not of simple, direct loss, but of distance, more emotional than physical, is palpable, the looking glass abstraction that mirrors the aural physicality of the album. Fingers are nimble, as are voices & the gently pointed lyrics, less Browning, more Dickinson, laced with folk sadness & weeping torch song bravado. Our apocalypses, & we all have them, are little. So sit back, take a drag, a sip of bitter, have a listen, & let the end burn slow. Living lives of quiet desperation, all is well, for here's the required elixir of quiet intensity to get us through the next moment, & the next.

Waiting for Wotan #8

 
"What do you mean you want some ice cream?"

"Wide selection everyday."

 "What do you mean you're looking for Wotan?"

"Dave sells, why aren't you buying?"

Don't come over here & piss on my gate, save it just keep it off

Margarita master, I find happy in that silly anatomy, you know the one, no, not that one, though that one is one woo, I imagine. This dump's turning into a tumblr 'cause what little (read: a lot) I have to say on important shit can't be said here --

unimportant shit
macro: PTBs do stupid, get gold
middle: PTBs do stupid, get a pat, perhaps a poison cookie
micro: PTBs do stupid, get a slap
P = assuming makes asses, 'tis inherent, so squared

-- I swear if this is ♪ printemps fever, ooh la la, printemps fever, ooh la la la la ♫ I'm gonna go hunting for the snark & kill it dead & bloody; there goes my valuable street cred, syncretising Motor City in the previous fragment. Spring = happy = sad, can't be, bien sûr, 'cause I'd be contradicting myself, which would at least count me among the finest (read: all) humans since the thirtieth century BC, I don't remember how to do that set crap because fuck math. Ideas always sound better until they're splayed on a paper table, but that anatomy's still fun to dig into. Wear goggles, galoshes.

Saturday night's alright for fighting for comp time

As a few of you know from previous messaging out, I think outside the box, facilitating la bibliothèque every Saturday whilst others are doing nothing to push the envelope. FYI, that's my win theme contribution right there, where's yours, you want to be a part of the team, dontcha, not eat our own dog food?

Anyway, the campus is soon opening its doors to various & sundry future cubicle jockeys & greasy, sad food second shiftless. Chez Towering Slab, a certain social climber in middle management & ancient arch-nemesis of the Peonage has shifted the paradigm of the rabble's perspective. As always, don't pass the baton; embiggen & you too can succeed.*

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Conclusion: pardon me, I seem to have caught a case of the chuckles.

*apologies for the lame. Actionable, game changing brandgagers who synergize aren't my thing. Ow, my head. I'm gonna doom out, think of Byzantine empresses tossing water balloons out of flying cars. See ya.

Stellar classification

Waiting in the sun, brain & blood churning out a phrase that rhymes with tree, pen blurting out oh, be a fine girl, kiss me, the end, never, the means, yes, oh yes. I loathe a parade but 70°'s now (mildly) groovy, less armageddon than it used to be.

Sure, bunch of stuff labeled 'fuckery' is still going on, still will, rancid butter n' splattered guts, son, you ain't wrenching the gears no matter what, so go play in the street, have fun, & watch out for rampaging Wheelie Buses, run by Skynet or not.

Even Fucking Chelsea victories canst derail thee.

I give this mood until about ten, then, the return of troo kvlt, baby.

Waiting for Wotan #7

"Don't that motherfucker owe me ten bucks?"

"You know, whenever fuckin' Wotan gets here -- 

-- we're gonna rip off this fucker's head, and tear out his fuckin' soul."

"Wait a little longer, we'll never regret it."

Woodland creatures for the win

First-fauna-of-the-season hack work, brilliant art haze future folk LP cover, the machinations of Leonardo Leonardo, or a third thing? 2 + 2 = 5.

The braine, halvynge been drayn'd -- prithee, rhyme ys wi'thee, & thou knowst yt

A Commick, poetick miscelany, upon a conglomorated particle of fire, noise of cannon, bathroom literature, braying of asses, and an not-yet-out law'd conceited MP or three, transmited by a quandam citizen of Clevelandia, now resident at Parmastan, to Scribes Sundree, Esq; at their Inter-On-Web, dated the 9th of lousy Smarch last O.S., Windows 7 prob. And also a wormwood and poetick consabulation and altercation upon a conjunction bored, viz. pointless fisticuffs.

Waiting for Wotan #6

 

"We were told that Wotan doesn't drive."

"We can still part, if you think it would be better."

 
"It's not worthwhile now."

"Not as worthwhile as the advent of greasy, sad food."

It's like something out of that twilighty show about that zone

Clever's in Nod. Slab, somnambulism minus the sleepwalking. Zoning out whilst treading neither frosty giant nor gossamer fairy land. Wrote something, then rewrote it, then re-rewrote, then unwrote the first rewrite, doubled the second, folded it into a triangle, thumbed it through a parallelogram, possibly a rhombus.

Sacred tectonic aftermath, three a.m. astronomie ys full of awe & awe-full.

♫ Don't call it a hoodwink ♪

Beware burnynge carafes!

Orthodox rites, or, put down that fattening donut & have some doggerel instead, or, this dump nutshelled

Fenriz says what is this that types before me?

Check this eloquence:
zen New Jersey nowhere,
how now brown bureaucrat --
shocking, a Simpsons' reference.
Next, offspring elder + younger are
cool cats, the sometimes-better-half
half-crazy, half-frustrating.
About me, what would she say,
let's not say. Hey, I said, hey,
Jesusfreak, secular humanist,
each one full of equal shit.
What of democracy, anarchy,
celtic frosted flakes would agree with me:
one in the same. Wait, you say,
no, go blow it out your craw,
the wisdom of crowds
is crowned oxymoron king,
ruling wherever the unwashed sing,
every bus, every train, every shower
everywhere. Darkthroning is sexy, too,
except when I croon. I can't carry a tune
so never sing (it's true) but shoot shoot shoot
flowers, rust, & trees, & hopefully
the Duchess doing a Dio --
shit, almost forgot to self-censor
me, your monkey dancer,
a dancer for boredom
existential. Hardly, maybe, certainly
but don't worry baby,
unfurling, beauteous petal,
at last, here's the metal.

The important things

'tis not blurry, 'tis art.

Non, the Peonage wasn't beating a hasty retreat to the Towering Slab even though, if we took our serious work more seriously, we would have been because we were nearly late for a very unimportant desk shift, but French chamber musick beneath stained glass, intermittent blooms of diffused blue seemingly in tune with chord changes, Dark Side & Oz without dorm room haze, is, shockingly, more alluring than sending faxes & checking in overdue items & the attendant patron bleorgh, but in missing the fourth & final movement of Faure's piano quartet in G minor [ed. note: advertise the full program next time bub], I briefly contemplated the innate silly-nesse of shackling our bodies to The Man's schedule even in the face of the heart & mind enjoying one of the reasons for even sticking around this everydeityforsaken planet, but with equal speed, remembered the third movement, & then I felt better until typing this, now I'm angry again

wait

that's better

until the Duchess pointed out that Holy Warbles got nuked, one of the many villages destroyed in order to save Cary Sherman's face. SOPA, PIPA, & Oompa Loompas, evil, sure, but red herrings. If they want to fuck your shit up, they'll do so, ask Megaupload, & don't foolishly assume your cloud is forever under lock & swallowed key, either. Today, 'tis a non-issue, so. Copyright's a fish, too. Look, art's never been a moneymaker for the majority of practitioners, & the whole copyright gig is a legalese pit that's frankly boring like all legalese pits, but I always try & buy a shirt at the show to add a couple gallons of gas to the band's van, download from Bandcamp, or, since I love the clutter, preferably the CD because scoring a future landfill stuffer is more practical than clubbing baby seals to death in the Canadian wastes.