One Day Things Will Happen Here Again

...And one day I'll post more music. Things have been crazy, busy out the frame. Basically, this summer has become what last summer intended to, sans a camping trip yet. There needs to be a post that goes into detail about it, as well as my senior year, and I've got about two weeks to put that together (I've been working two jobs, one of which was temporary and just ended). There will be stories of unions (yes, unions), weekends, catastrophes, triumphs and why existentialism doesn't seem to be a good basis for movies in my opinion (also, probably some ignorant opining on why the thought of existentialist fiction annoys me in the first place).

And Daniel doesn't deliver...

      Title in reference to the fact that I've decided on uploading some obscure 60's garage/baroque pop instead of the previously promised garage rock comp. Why? Eh...people who love the genre will hate me for this, but as I thought about it, I realized that if I was going to make a modern garage rock comp I would inevitably be sticking to the same five-or-so bands (Ko and the Knockouts, The Dirtbombs, The Detroit Cobras, The Gories, et. all of Detroit...) and as a result of my fearsome allegiance to a particular scene I couldn't do it in good conscience. Yet. I say this as if the whole of Detroit could give a damn about some guy from memphis' "fearsome allegiance" to its garage rock.  
      Anyway, (and this may very will be the first time I've used more than one paragraph in a blog) I recently finished Dostoevsky's novel "The Idiot". Scenes from the book haven't stopped playing themselves out in my head. I'm always amazed at how he conveyed such intriguing and weighty ideas without resorting to the kind of expoisition that detracts from the development of the characters. At least that's how it seems to me, and in closing the back of the book over the final page I felt as if I had known the people in the book, and like them, I was set to begin a new and less compelling part in life. Myshkin is one of my favorite characters in any book, and by the story's end, I felt more emotionally bound to his fate than I had realized. I think, and I know how superficial this is, it was because I saw so many of my good intentions, so much of my conscience wrapped up in his character. I can't claim to be a Myshkin, and if anything I lived the past year in a sort of unconscious (but debaucherous nonetheless) antithesis to his ideal, but I have always been a good, trusthworthy friend who understood self-sacrifice and humility as a part of that equation. I see the end of the book as almost perfectly analgous to my sophomore year of college. Naivety and trust have more frequently than anything been my undoing, and I guess that's the small-town sheltered way of things manifesting itself in me. Despite that, I can't help but feel committed to the sincerity I was raised on. Perhaps I need to find a more functional balance of it. Maybe it's because of my own romantic experiences, but I don't exactly hold a traditional view of the relationships between the characters. I see Natasya Filippovna as a much more viable foil to Myshkin than Rogozin. The ultimate nature of her character is an incredibly accurate portrayal of the relationship between the sinner and salvation - Rogozin presents her with a choice, and that's it. It's the reality of her character that makes her so powerful, in my opinion. Whether someone can truly judge her in light of her circumstances is an entirely different matter, and I feel Dostoevsky's grey area here is profoundly true to life, if not intended to make a statement about our capacity to truly judge any sinner.

Status Update...

Things...did not find "some screwed up way of working themselves out". July 13th came and went without a call from any potential employer, the class I'd hoped on taking started without me, and as a consequence I will almost certainly be an extra semester or two in college. The week has kind of trudged along without any sense of direction, and in the absence of accomplishing my goal - something I expended a majority of my time and energy on - I can't help but feel that the thunder has been stolen from my summer. There's one month left, I'm stuck in Martin with fewer than $30 to my name, and as a result of having spent so much time in Memphis over the past few years (as well as a few bad romantic decisions), my circle of friends here is limited. My mind's at work though, running at a frantic pace, trying to salvage this summer - to make use of some of it's wreckage. Some part of me though, is fixated on all this could have been. Before I left Memphis, I'd started getting closer to several people who at some point had written me off, or me them, and the possibility of establishing relationships in those circumstances is always exciting to me. I'm really doing my best to shove that to the back of my brain. Goodbye to all that, right? Most of my thoughts are fixated on the next few weeks - making something of them, that is, and doing my damnedest to get this school thing straightened out. Still, my circumstances (and i know they could be much worse), feel at times like a backpack filled with bricks, one I can't take off until at least one aspect of the situation resolves itself positively - this says a lot, because over the past few years I've become the sort of person who can come out on the back end of some disappointment relatively unscathed, focusing on the good times I've managed to accumulate. I just don't know that I'm used to things unraveling on this sort of scale, especially in the face of a future that would appear to be a messy blur. More hard work is needed. Once again, and I say so very tired of it, I need to grind it all out and ultimately hope luck winds up back on my side in the coming year. I'm more realistic now than I ever have been, and that's a positive I suppose. Anything I do will probably be accompanied with a fall-back plan or two. To worry about things playing out in May or December of the coming year might seem ridiculous, but I think most senior years are defined by a stressed-out nervous excitement. Anyway, I've been wanting to go camping, or find some excuse to spend a lengthy period of time out in a woods unfamiliar to me, and I might direct my attention to making that happen...ah...if only I had more than $30 right now. I attempted this last summer, with a group of about twenty people, and as it happened, none of them knew anything about what they were doing. My brother, Jeff (a friend of ours), and I wound up setting up tents for other people in pitch blackness after having begged the group to get started while we still had light at our disposal - swimming was top priority, though. The majority of these people also spent an entire day sitting around the site talking about video games instead of being out on the lake/enjoying what they had surrounding them. I would replicate the experience only to get as drunk as I did and piss people off as hilariously. There are a lot of good days left, I believe. I just have to figure them out. The music this time should be no surprise to anyone.

Go Outside (Or Get Contemplative) 

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=BRV4O9M8

Description: 22 tracks that mix the outdoors-y with the introspective. I'm actually cheating here because this is a mix I made for a friend (Jen) over a year ago and never got to her (before I knew about megaupload). It's a pretty good soundtrack to that mess I just wrote, by the way. Next time I really will do that garage rock thing I've been promising.

Recommended For: Jen and/or Hiking.

Another lengthy, aimless post.

Have not and probably will not ever get tired of "Life in a Northern Town". I say that because the track showed up on shuffle about ten minutes ago - somewhere between "Night Crawler" by Judas Priest and "Late Freight" by Dave Hamilton. Strange, I know.  Anyway, it sort of got me thinking. A lot of ironic, hip, and very cool people have directed their hip, cool, ire at pop music. I've been at shows/places where scarf-and-square-frame-glasses clad people have elaborated on their dislike of pop (more notably hip hop, though) because "Itz dumb and corporate", perhaps not realizing that their favorite acts (or acts these acts looked up to - yes the goal is to be redundant and messy here) took influence from well-established bands like The Beatles and Pet Sounds era Beach Boys. In fact, having the latter invoked in your Pitchfork review seems to be GOLDEN. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not pop's defender coming to save the day, nor am I jumping out of the woodwork telling people to leave it alone, and least of all am I laboring under the delusion that the behemoth of corporate recording needs any real protection. I'm just saying that it seems kind of ignorant to opine on music in such a way that discounts just about everything that ever charted and that typically applauds Motown while forgetting it was a major label. Yes, the corporations are evil, the masses are easily manipulated, and hit singles come from a hit single factory. Also, the lyricism is often inane...and I'm putting myself in quite a Rogerian hole.  However, as reality would have it, many of the people responsible for these songs wind up with relatively average jobs and relatively average incomes after their involvement - yeah, a lot don't, and you can ultimately file this section under "stuff that no one cares about", but it's worth noting that not everybody that releases a major label single or even charts reaches Bon Jovi proportions. I also feel it's a bit small minded to think that nothing good can come from a process that gave us Johnny Cash, Simon and Garfunkle, and "All Along the Watchtower". To think that the industry has become more evil over time seems to be a bit naive as well, considering how little artists were once paid and how heavily they were whored out, and to think that everyone involved in the process is some soulless machine seems wholly incorrect (speaking of, please contrast with "self-absorbed-pretentious-art-douche"). I guess what I'm getting at here is that maybe, just maybe, some genuinely good, human things come out of the machine that are totally worth listening to between bouts of scene-hopping. Perhaps people should be less conscious of how well their "guilty pleasures" will be recieved or how interesting the artists listed on their facebook will make them seem. A totally unoriginal conclusion, I know, but for someone whose tastes span a spectrum as broad as mine, not at all unexpected. In my opinion the point is to relax and enjoy, not clique off and judge, but that's just me. Anyway, this long, dramatic post was basically meant to preface a mix I just made of some of my favorite lesser-known pop tracks. 

Pop is Actually Good:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=9US29QNX

Description: Eleven tracks of good pop music. All from the 80's because I think that production values from that era are among the most offensive to any person that dislikes the "genre". These almost all come from the UK, as well. No real purpose for that other than it's what I'd heard the LEAST of at the time of putting this together, and hopefully they'll have some of that "new-song novelty" for others. 

Recommended For: People who are afraid, but not too afraid, to take baby steps into something they've spent a long time writing off.

Introspection for the long haul.

First, the music. I've been pretty sloppy about putting these together, but basically, the idea is you click the playlist file in the folder and either listen or burn. I had something specific in mind with the track order in each of them, but it's no big deal I guess. Anyway, for this entry we have: 

Sermonizing Nihilism

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=VWN0N6H3 

Description: 10 tracks completely worth spacing out to. The title decsribes it better than my typing another paragraph would. 

Recommended for: People who are normally used to listening to densely produced music and need a break.

A friend of mine recently wrote about Nihilism. From an emotional perspective. Truthfully, it was more of an existential crisis he described - he discussed questioning the worth of his experiences, of his impact, and of his direction and expressed an overwhelming sentiment of purposelessness (the humor in my typing about this on a Friday night while listening to "Re-offender" by Travis is not lost on me). He specifically requested that I not sermonize at length on Nihilism (I do that), so I found myself instead warning of the dangers inherent in the marriage between philosophies and those brief, intense emotional states people find themselves in. I guess that was pretty decent because honestly, in all likelihood, the last thing a person in that shape needs is to be taken hold of by "the nothing". But is it a symptom, or a source? Having had my share of dissociative-depersonalized moments (I often think I could look a Mack truck in the face and doubt its reality; don't even get me started on old photographs, either - this will probably be an entry in the future and maybe i should edit out this lengthy digression), I know a fair amount about doubt and nothing. Truthfully, the basis of just about every argument I form comes from deconstruction and doubt, ultimately embracing uncertainty instead of nothingness. So where am I going with all of this loosely connected thought? Back to the question of symptom/source. First, source. Perhaps the "nihil" is natural in some sense (see how I brought my personal considerations into play?) , a part of a collective solipsism-syndrome, a part of comfortable distance from the naked-dirt reality predating the industrial revolution (I'm aware of the ridiculous generalities I use here - I'm glossing over the surface of something). How would anything just mentioned relate to that "nihil"?  It's a possibility that the subconscious doubt of a reality's truth would go hand in hand with the question of its worth, I think.  As a symptom, I see it most clearly as a comparison complex. Vague questions of why we're here (for those of us who believe there's a "we" and a "here")  plague us to varying degrees until our death. In juxtaposing that against standards of acheivement, service, purpose and a few billion stellar people, we become miniscule. We look to ourselves and all of what we have been and could be and think "nihil". As our great plans verge on the meaningless, it's hard not to see it that way.  Everything I've said still seems distant from my friend, and from those introductory sentences.  I guess the best way to wrap it neatly would be to say that his experience served as a prompt for me in evaluating how I see the emotional experience in the philosophy.

I changed tone a lot here. My ideas were frequently disconnected.They were even at times out of order. This was not an argument or an assertion. It was a meditation.

Another All-Nighter For The Books.

I couldn't think of a lamer way to start off an entry, but it's an easy out for that first-journal-in-a-long-ass-time awkwardness. I still haven't discerned a clear purpose for this account - I've been think about posting links to mix-CD's I make somewhere, and this might just be the place.  That being said, I'll go ahead and try it out: 

Some 90's independent music I burned for a friend:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6ACQQ46C
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=3YWK709Q 

Description: The person who requested these was a girl, and likes girly music. That being said, they both have some stellar tracks that can be enjoyed by anyone. Both span genres from pop to cow punk to twee to psych , and even some bossa nova from one of my personal favorites, Jim Ruiz. 

Recommended For: Everyone who likes relatively chill/spacey music. 

A 60's psych comp I put together for Mia:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=X0MU5DKJ  

Description: A mix of obscure psychedelic tracks from waaaay back in the day. These are all really well picked and capable of making you trip right the hell out. A couple of 'em are somewhat well-known, having appeared on much beloved multi-disc sets like Nuggets, but most come from long out-of-print albums and tiny-label reissues. This type of music was my hobby for the past year so definitely worth the whole ten minutes it takes to download. 

Recommended For: You. 

I think I'll follow that up with testing out my other possible plan for this - a place for personal thoughts. I recently spent this past year employed at a law office as a clerk and runner. It had been my intention to use the job as a means for paying for living expenses and a summer course. I worked late almost every day, and when I'd finished everything, I'd always ask my supervisor(s) what else there was I could to to help out. I busted my ass picking up slack for an alcoholic paralegal, and when one of our others left, I stressed the hell out getting that shit done, too. All for $8.50 an hour. Coming back to my apartment exhausted every day, I couldn't help but feel like I had it made, like my plan had been set in motion and my hard work was destined to make it succeed. I was wrong. The reality of it was that the alcoholic paralegal was also mental. I saw the signs of both her obsession with exerting control, and her tendency to do so in arbitrarily hateful and senseless ways. This was the type of woman (and by "type", I mean she actually did this) who would see a homeless person asleep on the sidewalk and call the cops to get rid of him - just so she could laugh at how she had exerted some sort of power in the world. So, it almost seems logical that she would lie to the head of the firm (which is what she did) about me being a bad worker, and use her 30 years of experience in the field (and 50 some-odd as being a crazy bitch) to have me "laid off". Knowing the lies she told about me, I wouldn't be surprised if it had been both her and the head of the firm's intention to have me work through the fall and spring, and then fire me before the summer started so they could have their more experienced $10 an hour guy work both jobs during the summer. I'm not sure if the latter makes that much sense, but regardless, these people were idiots, and regardless, I was left without a job just as finals week began. Having seen my master plan fall apart like that, I'll venture to say my performance wasn't stellar. I had to leave my apartment, and without money, let go of my social life. Since then it's been a rocky road of countless job applications and let downs. As I type this, read it, and think to myself  "What in God's name have I had to be happy about in the past three months?"  I consider hope. The hope that maybe tomorrow the phone call I get will be a good one, the hope that maybe all of this will fix itself in some screwed up way. The hope, I suppose, that time won't betray me. I also have a lot of things to be thankful for, but the negative direction my personal goals have gone in has been nothing short of emotionally stifling, and so I rest on hope.

There's no such thing as an awkward first post...

When your focus is on music.

They recorded/existed between 92-94 and released singles on Audrey's Diary, A Turntable Friend, Bus Stop, and Spin Art record labels. They were Rick Durgin, Bryan Hanna, and Andrea Troolin. This particular compilation, Recommended for Diversion Seekers, was pieced together by Grimsey records in 1999. Musically, they were a mixture of understated vocals, subtle but beautiful lyrics, and soft, intricate guitar work. It's great stuff if you're into the lighter side of things - very good stress release. My favorite songs are: Hayley, Won't Find It, and Paler (listen to the lyrics). They were The Bomb Pops. Edit: Rick Durgin and Brian Hanna went on to work with The Legendary Jim Ruiz, if that means anything to anybody. Andrea Troolin is responsible for Grimsey records.