And what have we been listening to, of late?

Loretta Lynn's latest, "Van Lear Rose", is my thing. Jack White is on the case, as we all have heard, for the song, 'Portland Oregon', which while a great song, could really be about anywhere.
Sufjan Stevens' "Illinois" (or as the entire title really goes, "Sufjan Stevens Invites You to Come on Feel the Illinoise") is in almost constant play on my kitchen boombox whilst doin' th' dish. My conflicted feelings about this in a post to come.
As I write this, I am listening to Caroliner's "Rise of the Common Woodpile", perhaps the greatest (if most obscure) album about the American Nightmare ever made, from a curiously 1860's perspective.
Mouse On Mars' "Glam" fills many of my days. More nice German subliminala, which I can share with so few people: it is both the soundtrack of the voice in your head, and also the dreams of machines.
And finally, the mix for last fall, as revealed here, "what the water wants":
"Ohio"-Coco Rosie
"Claxxon's Lament"-Wolf Parade
"Sister"-Sufjan Stevens
"End of Music"-Do Make Say Think
"It's All Around You"-Tortoise
"Magic Step"-Sam Prekop
"24/7 (Shoreline)"-Broken Social Scene
"Jacknuggeted"-Manitoba
"Antennas to Heaven"-...godspeed you black emperor!
"Rococo"-Cocteau Twins
(side two, for you old-schoolers like myself, )
"Obscured By Clouds"-Pink Floyd
"Waterfalls"-Mt. Eerie
(I don't know the name of this song by)-Sufjan Stevens
"Decora"-Spoon
"This Ain't the Summer of Love"-Blue Oyster Cult
"Introduction"-The Delta 72
"Mississippi Delta"-Bobbie Gentry
"Brace and Break"-The Thermals
"Safe European Home"-The Clash
"Please Don't Touch"-Motorhead
"Windsurf Nation"-Broken Social Scene
"Prospect Hummer"-Animal Collective
"Some More"-Funkadelic
"Cause=Time"-Broken Social Scene

Sometime real soon like, I shall start a secondary blog entirely about music, since not everybody wants to read about it all the time, and besides, once I figure out how to upload all this shit, I can be on Hype Machine, as is My Old Kentucky Blog, which I recommend.
(Good Lord. Now I'm listening to Caroliner's "I'm Armed With Quarts of Blood", which is already an exceedingly unpleasant album in all the right ways, without the-perhaps record-breaking-four bands of looped noise that proceed even the first song. The first song begins with banjo and the shrill-est screaming you've ever heard in your life. I gotta go check what the World Wide Infranet has to say about this combo, though they never released anything on anything other than vinyl, and once recorded an entire album ["Rings On the Awkward Shadow"] on an Edison-era wire spool, which still had 1890's recordings on it, wandering through like ghosts.)
Matter of fact, Caroliner gets its very own posting very soon, too. They are certainly the most unique thing to ever emerge from the American rock scene, and perhaps from the world community of music, as well.
And what have the rest of you nice people been listening to, of late?

Everybody loves an Anachronism

"I dearly wish I had more articulate insights to offer. My thoughts, I am sure, will be greatly eclipsed by the remembrances of so many other bloggers who were Reagan Republicans from the outset."- Mark Maness, American blogger, circa yesterday.
Well, I wish you had some articulate insights to offer too, Mark. But you don't.
Like most of your postings, one could easily remove most of the words and insert "waah waah" and not change a damn bit of the informational content.
The posting I'm not bothering making a hyperlink for (the Liberal Media! What did I tell you?) was celebrating the career of one Ronald Wilson Reagan, known for some reason in his radio days as 'Dutch', a strange apellation for an Irishman.
The posting was in response to this genuinely deranged guy named Mike (who hosts a darkly hilarious little freak fest named 'Mike's America' in blogland). Mike is seeking the warm thoughts and recollections of good Americans concerning the years of the Mistah Raygun there.
Okay, quick one. The President has just been shot, and I'm in fourth grade in eastern Oregon. The lesson has been interrupted by the radio being broadcast over the school's P.A. system.
Perhaps they are seeking to have some sick atavistic moment remembered: most of the administration there has childhood or at least early-twenties memories of JFK going down in Dealy Plaza. Perhaps they want us all to remember "where we were when Dutch got his" or some shit. What they got instead was an overwhelming cheer.
My teacher actually went so far as to yell, "YOU'RE ALL HORRIBLE PEOPLE!" over the din, but the damage was done. And besides, maybe he was some sort of fool who immediately loves and respects authority (something I'm told that we all did around here before Nixon, or after Clinton, or something...), but Reagan's policies never did a damn thing for the farmers of Oregon, and it was reflected in the lust, of its children, for that senile old fucker's blood.
Oh hell, let's take it a little farther, yes? They weren't even his policies anyway, really, were they? No, he was just the happy, smiling, idiotic face that whoever was running the show at the moment decided to put on it. I don't think the man ever had an idea of his own.
He'd been making the same damn speech for years, for Westinghouse, originally, about the evils of Communism, which never had any chance whatsoever of making any dent in this nation, and those who say so are hucksters of the silliest sort. When a few of his fellow rich Southern Californians noticed that his speech never seemed to get old among the rich and paranoid, they decided to edit it more along the lines of The Evils of Big Government, and suddenly this professional liar had a second career.
On the few occasions that the Great Man To Be was allowed to wander off script, he (as Governor of California now, for some reason) said, "If they want a bloodbath, they'll get a bloodbath." The people he was referring to were peace marchers opposed to Vietnam, who I suspect weren't necessarily bloodbath-centered.
Ah, but I've read many an account from the MSM (that's Mainstream Media to you lucky souls who don't normally read right-wing blogs), and I've seen what these 'peace' protestors do! They riot, and they clog up traffic real bad! And when the whole thing with the tear-gassing is over, the media dutifully reports that a 'peaceful protest turned violent', always suggesting that it was elements of the movement of people-excercising their legal right-and not the police, who pretty much have the guns and the means to start the violence, and always do.
Mistah Dutch was very good at removing the whole Nixon stigma of even-Republicans-wouldn't-drink-with-this-guy. "There you go again," was this genius's greatest contribution to political science (and whaddya wanna bet that Peggy Noonan wrote that one, too?). Quite so, sir! How dare people ask questions of one so unimpeachibly...Nice Seeming as yourself? He just put people so nicely at ease that well...All they could do was make fun of how old he was, junior league, and find legal reasons why most of his cabinet needed to be removed from office, major league. We had a cute and cuddly grampa presiding over the genocide in Nicaragua, El Salvador....Oh, I must not be a spoilsport, I know. This will make me a Not Reagan, since I'm talking about actual things, and not some silly image only swallowed by the least-thoughtful. See? Not fun, and so not something we may think of!
He loved Jelly Bellies! He loved 'em so much! He loved those little...Uh, why should you fucking care? I dunno, but it was considered news during that period. Be a good American. Rename an airport.
And those who can't think so good give his ass credit for the fall of the Iron Curtain, or some such shit, swallowed by the least-thoughtful. Okay, without getting too far into it (a necessity, post-Reagan)...They destroyed their economy trying to keep up with our insane military proliferation, which we entered into based on inaccurate intelligence from ex-S.S. intelligence officers and various U.S. Senators who understood that we'd never be able to keep our economic good times going post W.W. II if we didn't have anything to be scared about, i.e. something new to potentially go to war with.
These wise fellows understood the conventional wisdom that war makes economies sound. On a short term basis, was the part they didn't notice, but god bless 'em, right? Anywho, the Russians, always a bunch of bellicose idiots themselves, took all our silly fucking saber-rattling pretty seriously, and ran their asses into the ditch trying to keep up with us.
These days, their nation is a fascinating and warm-hearted experiment in what happens when a large country with pourous borders is run by a lethal combination of organized crime and the remains of the secret police. Yeah? Well, at least they ain't Commies, right?
Okay, Dutch said "Tear down this wall..." Nope. Not even there. That wall wouldn't have even been there had Kennedy not been such a war-mongering piece of shit who made it clear to the Soviet of his day that he'd be glad to go to war over what remained of Germany. Cheap grandstanding. Typical. No wonder children like Mark and Mike love it. It's just like the movies.
Nope. Nothing to say about the guy, except that his handlers who were really running the show were far more evil. Mind you, if there really was a god like most of these crybabies think there is, that wouldn't be a good enough excuse. Hell, we even noticed it at Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem: 'I was just following orders' may sound nice to you, but in the eyes of the world, and the eyes of this fictional god-thing the rest of you seem to like so much, It Is What It Is, that is to say, A Mewling, Whining, Inexcusable Lie.
Punishable by Death. And, the cute old lying fuck-ass smily murderer is dead, after many years entirely unclear on where he was at all. His fate is the same as any human's, and in fact, compared to many of them, he got off easy.
And now the American Chief Executive is not to be questioned, especially concerning War. I don't blame that on Reagan, but on Johnson (who was also surrounded by people who lied to him). Who do I blame? Oh, those nice people who live down the street who think that it is a far better thing to be sheep led to the slaughter than it is to ask a simple fucking question, every now and again. They've made a religion of it, casting doubt yet again upon that whole concept.

Nic-arrest

There's one sorted. I managed to quit smoking in the middle of a horrendously intense work week.
Wanna hear about it? Oh hell; stay a while! Lessee, now where were we?
Ah yes: last week, about this time, I was on day two of the big move. The Oregon Ballet Theater decided to move their warehouse to my neighborhood-about five minutes from my apartment, actually-and I was immediately thrown into the intense frustration of the career warehouseman. We gotta get this stuff off the truck. But there's nowhere to put it. Build some shelves. There's nowhere to build the shelves because there's all this stuff off the trucks all over the place. Fine. Why didn't someone realize that maybe building some shelves first, before all the stuff arrived, might have been the better plan? And why are we all getting paid so little?

Whatever day that was, the Tenth rolled around, and I decided that I'd been serious in choosing that date at random to stop consuming my beloved Nat Sherman Havana Ovals. I mean it, too. I loved them.
Not just mere addiction, folks-though it was certainly that as well-I genuinely loved smoking. But I was sick of the whole feeling like death thing, and besides, I kinda promised some people. I've always said that was the worst way of going about enforcement, but in this case it worked.
The vitamin supplements I was taking worked well, though they made me piss like a Slovenian show pony...Bright green, too. Like Mountain Dew, it was. But I broke nothing, did not go insane, and to this day, do not jones for the damn things. I can even sit there with other people at a bar who are smoking, and not feel like a damn fool for not joining in.
Because well, that would sort of be counter-intuitive, wouldn't it? I mean, the only friends I can think of right off hand who haven't stopped smoking of late are the Tulsa Kid and the Only Ms. S. They both have Morning Hack so damn bad, I can only assume it's ocurred to them.

Even more strangely, MacBeth herself added the counter-intuitive punch: she wasn't one of those who only smoked while drinking...She needed a beer to go with that smoke. She's started a new job, and basically so have I, and we both quit smoking that shit in the last week. An award of some sort is called for here.
I like all my co-workers. They are all sorts, as is the nature of the game. Only myself and two others were available for the entire seven-day run, and I myself took a day off at day six. It would seem that I am no longer in my mid-twenties, or something, and can 't just push my body without end. I have also taken the liberty of requesting the Reverend Doctor (Mahatma) Martin Luther King (Junior)'s birthday off, which caused the rest of the crew to ask for it off. That wasn't my fault. If they wanted dedicated staff, they'd bring us on full time, and pay a decent wage. As it happens, we are what they can afford, and for our part, we recognize our profound bargaining power.
More actual stuff coming up. The internet sitch in my bldg. continues to be stupid, but I'm tryin', friends, and gawd knows there's things happening that need comment.
Sit tight. I'm fittin' ta' ride.

and here we are

I want to say howdy, as I haven't had internet access in my building, of late. Now, there is a bouncing new laptop in my life, which is cool, and a whole new handload of problems.
These things are labor-saving devices, and at least in a wi-fi heavy scene like Portland, somewhat easy to use. That doesn't change the fact that the design flaws inherent in these here beasts make it frustrating to do the easiest of tasks. Mind you, it's about time I learned how to do all these things.

Ne'mind. We're not gonna talk about compooters. How about thoughts concerning goals for the upcoming baby 2006 here?
I really am going to quit smoking this time. Melatonin, St. John's Wort and various vitamin supplements on board to help, so I don't go through the violent mood swings (laughing jags, crying jags, punching and kicking things) I went through on the cold turkey plan. This means less time in bars, and less time drinking, I suspect.
Ride the bike more, drive in cars less. Learn to re-embrace the rain, basically.
Finish writing a novel.
Get a colonic. I've been sitting around, between sporadic work periods, for the last year or so. In this time, I haven't bothered eating well at all, and have been sedentary, to boot. I gotta clean out this food baby I've been growing here, then get back to daily excercise.
In addition, I'm going to rebuild the bottom half of my mouth.
There's some family stuff here, but that's classified. There have been a few border disputes of late, almost causing me to go to limited war on one side, and also some developments that trouble me on the other, making me unclear on how to proceed.
Figure out what's next. There is life beyond this city, and the Lady and I keep talking about where exactly that might be.

It occurs to me that I don't really have anything to write, at the moment. I just wanted to get back in the saddle, after being silent since the Sixteenth.
More to come when I actually have anything worth saying.