confusion is good when you’re talking about music because it means that your preconceptions about whatever it is you’re listening to were off and that often points to a situation where you’re actually hearing something “new” in one fashion or another and who doesn’t like “new”? especially because in musical terms “new” not only offers the opportunity of specific discovery but also the possibility of expanding your sonic universe in general because once you open up to something there’s often no way to close the door and then you’ve got a bum’s rush of new musical ideas on your hands and that’s where the magic happens. i mean it would be easy to rest on one’s laurels and just listen to the same sort of stuff over and over again for factors of familiarity and comfort but you know what they say, familiarity breeds contempt and the only people who need comfort are the afflicted so if you want to avoid both or either situation then you’d better get to expanding.
i bought the first public image record when i was 13 or 14 and was hoping to get a very sex pistols-ish sound from it but ended up getting something else and it sort of threw me and i’m still sort of thrown. i’ve come to decide that i don’t necessarily LIKE it all that much but i do appreciate the fact that PIL was trying something new and to me that’s almost more important because when you like a band that’s an isolated thing but when that band broadens the range of what can be done you might literally reap YEARS of listening challenges and enjoyments from other quarters.
another band i sort of skipped on “getting” the 1st time around is the fall, and they sound something like this:
but with the fall it was a little different because i didn’t know what to expect. i heard “bingo masters break out” on a punk comp i got when i was a tyke and i liked it but it was over my head at the time and it took me ’til i was in my 30’s to really come around. which is good but too goddamned late in a certain way. because it’s never to early to get your mind cracked open.
enough about music though, i’ve been in a funk, sort of a bad one, and par for the course there’s not a lot of specific culprits but instead a vague kind of all-consuming dread. i guess that’s what they call “depression” and as usual it’s a draining experience, motivation fades and you start the day with a crappy outlook that makes too much effort seem ultimately kind of pointless. this is why i haven’t been writing lately, this sense of incoming and inescapable doom. and it’s fucked because i know exactly what it is(even though the causes remain nebulous) but can’t do anything but pop a few meds and hope for the best. and let me just say that when you’re taking meds for depression and you still get depressed you really start to question the effectiveness and long-term outlook of this approach. not to mention the fact that i feel like something of a guinea pig taking all of this shit with little knowledge of possible side effects because the literature on this stuff usually lists everything from sleepiness to insomnia and from dizziness to diarrhea. spell check tells me that last word is spelled wrong but i think it’s spell-check that’s off the mark on this one.
wookie is also depressed and we were hoping that our depressions would generally get staggered so that at least one of us is functional at all times but it doesn’t seem to work like that, goddamn it. i’m hoping that getting up at 4:30 this morning and sitting down to write bodes better for the day effort-wise and hopefully even outcome-wise. i’ve been reading every dennis lehane book i can get my hands on, he’s the guy that wrote mystic river(which i will recommend) and he has a series of these sort of hardboiled mysteries/thrillers with these 2 private dicks that are really pretty good, funny and dark and psychological and violent. i’ve been shredding through a lot of the stuff wookie recommended that i read(i’ve been out of the literary loop for years) and it’s been fun, that 5-year reading hiatus really came to a crashing halt when i picked up pelecanos. unfortunately i’m a lot less adventurous with fiction than with music and have been sticking with gritty sort of detective stories but it’s been fun. i remember kamins told me once when i was considering moving in here that the only arena i was adventurous in was music and that the rest of my life was spent well within the boundaries of my comfort zone. as usual he’s probably right but his taste in music still sucks, so there.
infinity trigger art 