IF I HAD TWO MORE HOURS, I WOULD MAKE A FLOW CHART

For you entertainment, my impression of Pitchfork Media's editorial process:


Step 1: Find pop-crossover indie 1st album everyone loves and dances to naked. Review. Call it unqualified hyped in accordance with the "inverse popularity-coolness law"—defined by hidden inverse popularity-coolness equations, for you theoretical physicists ;-) Score it a 6.3 for effort.

Step 2: Wait until everyone's enthusiasm dies down. Spend the next two years falling in love with indie 1^st album. Do feature on indie band. Find out secret of crossover appeal. Select every song for “Tracks” playlist.

Step 3: Impatiently unwrap indie band's 2^nd album. Review. Tell us it betrays everything that made 1^st album THE FUCKING MASTERPIECE it is. Tell us how listening to 1^st album was like STARING INTO THE EYES OF ANGELS and listening to 2^nd album makes you want to quit your job. Not because you're mad, because you're bored. Score it a 6.3 for effort.

Repeat

*****

I kid because I care, P4k.

Tracks tonight: Equal Dreams by Rewards (ft. Solange (indiegueststarqueen) Knowles)

MY FAVORITE THING ABOUT THE LAST POST WAS THE TITLE

I found a pair of binoculars tonight and sat out on the porch to look at the moon and stars. When I was a child, I used to on a small telescope. I don't know what happened to it--whether it was sold in a garage sale or stuffed into one attic after another every time we moved. My dad set it up and tried to sit with me once so we could conquer the universe as a dynasty. We were much closer then. I found the optics too involved and after a few days just carried around the finderscope through the backyard for its decidedly simpler use as a--help me out here--"monocular"? It lent verisimilitude to playing pirate captain anyway.

That's the bourgeois childhood for you: Dad buys your admission into an obscure interest just to try out, spends a few hours telling Mom "maybe he'll grow up to be an astronomer," even though you don't like math, and the next week he's buying you a soccer ball, a chemistry set or a calligraphy pen. 15 years later you can't find any of it at playtime.

*****

Mom and Dad took good care of me as a child. Girlfriend and Como-Friends take pretty good care of me now. I miss them, so I drew a picture for their fridges. Can't wait to see you guys next week.

(all heights and hairstyles approximate)

Tunes tonight: Father, Son, Holy Ghost (leaked) by Girls

IN THE PAST WOMEN WERE WARRIORS AND MEN CRIED ABOUT THEIR FATHERS

This is a photograph of a famous cave-painting from Lascaux, France. It was painted by a cro-magnon 16,000 years ago.

Looking at this painting, particularly the line work around the hooves, I am moved by the particular choices that the artist made. It strikes me that he was not merely portraying something that he'd seen, he was dreaming of it. I can't help but to think of the artist--sensitive to the point of frailty, long stone-trimmed bangs swept to the side--and what concerns may have weighed on his shoulders. Did his father regard it as a waste of time? It could have been graffiti--cave paintings tend to be found in the least accessible of areas.

Did the artist have to paint in secret?

*****

On an (un?)related note, I'm beginning to regret the loss of my innocence--which is to say that I regret that I do not have it to lose again, violently and repeatedly, until the end of time.

Tunes tonight: Kanye West vs. The Notorious B.I.G. - Suicidal Thoughts Runaway (White Lotus Mashup) by Hypetrak  

THOMAS DID NOT REALIZE AT THE TIME THAT METAPHORS ARE NOT TO BE TRIFLED WITH

This is Heather, one of nature's ever-changing mysteries. It affects every single one of us every single day of our lives, yet we know almost nothing about it.

Heather--now that's something we'd sure all like to do something about.

*****

I'm reading through some old writing and thinking a lot about my long-lost muse, the bright young woman in the photograph who once possessed the uncanny facility to remake me from the marrow into who I really am. I still think about her every time I write and try to make her laugh, impressed.

It isn't easy settling back into writing from Dad's house. Sometimes, very late at night, I see him awake wandering silently through the house to check up on me without being too intrusive. It is a rare experience, watching an old man sneak. I snap momentarily out of the writing delirium knowing I've awakened him hammering on the keyboard and whispering spooky lines in the dark just to nail the tonality like, "the spell is broken... the spell is broken... the spell is broken."

The spell is broken, cyberfiends. Good night.

Tunes tonight: You Forgot it in People by Broken Social Scene and parts of The Unbearable Lightness of Being are playing in my head like-enough to a love song.

LICHENS, ENTROPY AND TRANSNEPTUNIAN OBJECTS and what they have to tell us about the meaning of life

"the Obama administration should be focusing on jobs for the American people, not encouraging foreign governments to utilize abortion as a means of population and deficit control.” - Boehner on latest (admittedly fucked) Biden-gaffe.

You see, as a politician, you never know which news stories Mr. & Mrs. Adam Voter are going to see and which ones they are going to miss, one can only fathom, to have monthly heterosexual sex in the dark for the purposes of procreation.


That means you have to work in the Message every time you're asked for a quote, no matter how far-removed the topic.

Welcome to soundbite culture.

Going to try to wrap things up in the lab early tonight. Bon nuit, cyber-amis!

Tunes tonight: Bon Iver - Bon Iver and Bright Eyes' debut, Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground.

FROM THE LAB

Another late night writing "sesh" by the pool. Every night these start a little later than the night before. Every day I wake up a little later in the afternoon. Only a brilliant diagnostic or twisted conspiratorial mind would think there is some sort of connection.

I'm back at Dad's house in Arlington because Mom appears to have left. We've known this was coming for a long time, and I know, kind of, that it has nothing to do with me. Even so, even at 25, there's something about hearing that you mother won't be coming home that makes a kid feel abandoned--that makes you want to cook something, and fold the laundry and clean up after yourself and say "Look, mom, I can do stuff now! You don't even have to take care of me!"

Look up: that right there is the pastel blue of pre-sunrise. That sound you hear is the dawn chorus of birdsong. Today I'm going to sleep until 5, do some work, then go shoot some pool with my dad.

Tunes tonight: "Machine Gun" by Jimi Hendrix and the Portisthead record, Portishead.

DON'T SLEEP WITH SCIENCE

I had a dream last night that I was trapped in a hadron collider facility with a handful (minus a finger or two) of white men who were trying to kill me.

Finding no other weapon at hand, I snatched up the experimental Heisenberg Uncertainty Gun and ambushed my attackers. The gun sprayed like a super-soaker a torrent of large (maybe one inch-by-one inch) blurry pixels which clung to any surface they touched. I nailed them all, but in my delirious celebration I spilled a few of the pixels over my left hand.

Things got bad from there. As I quickly discovered, the pixels only existed on my hand while being observed. Anything that my hand touched while observed would lend its color (so obviously its essence) to the pixels, Photoshopping it permanently and very painfully to my hand. So long as no one looked, I could use the hand as normal, but the pain would not go away. Every time anyone looked, fresh swatches of color--of the lamp, of the air, of my face--were blurrily affixed to it forever.

When I finally awoke the pain stayed with me fading slowly over half an hour.I rubbed and rubbed until it went away and I could sleep again.

Dream with me at your own risk.