When I awoke this morning, I found a Doors album in my playlist & realized that last night I narrowly averted what would have been my first drinking & puking experience. (Yes, I drink fairly often. No, I've never thrown up.) Apparently, last night I thought "Riders on the Storm" would be a good song to puke to. I also couldn't find my glasses at first. They were on the floor outside the bathroom. After taking out my contacts, putting on some music, and warmly embracing my toilet, I remember thinking "Gosh, it's pretty uncool to yak with glasses on" so I chucked them to the side. Though I was quite drunk, everything was carefully planned. Which means I wasn't quite drunk enough. Thankfully. :)
After splitting a bottle of wine & some subsequent revelry-making down at the War Room Jake & I heard about a warehouse party. We entered through an unmarked sidedoor that was just a piece of plywood with hinges on it. Down a giant ramp we went--an Italian painting looms above us--down into this vast unfurnished expanse of a warehouse. It's a dungeon of sorts, really dark, lots of weirdos & goths & hipsters running around in costumes. A DJ is spinning by the light of a candle / laptop glow on one side. There's a hot girl in a gas mask who keeps bumping into everyone...I don't think she can see very well at all.
Atypically, I blaze through a six pack of Beck's I'm guarding carefully with my feet as I dig the music. At one point, a girl starts dancing up on me, so I dance back, and then she tells me I'm a good dancer. Only her voice is a little too low. "Wait--did you just dance with me because you thought I was a girl?" he asks me. "Yeah," I say to the guy in drag, "because of these things," as I grab his boobs of crumpled paper. He runs off--very offended it seems. I can't stop laughing about this little encounter.
It's official: allmusic is for dumbasses.* You can either believe this quote unquote authority who gives Bevis Through the Looking Glass a dismal 2 out of 5, or you can go listen to "The Shrine" (track four) for yourself:
i come home from a hard days work at the death machine i light the incense and kneel down on the floor lipstick, coat hollow torn up postcards i know you won't be there
What does it all mean...isn't this guy at all curious? Eighteen minutes of amazingly eerie noodlings, a reading of the KJV Genesis 1 in the middle, and a really weird whisper at the end about a shrine. Did the guy even listen to the record?
* The tipoff for me was their total misassessment of the Blonde Redhead catalog. "La Mia Mita Violenta" is one of their best, but amg rates it the worst, in addition to towing the party line of oh early BR is just Sonic Youth derivative stuff, which I've never understood & I believe keeps people away from albums 1 and 2--both great albums. Maybe I'm missing something but I think it's theoretically impossible to be similar to Sonic Youth (perhaps thus vague amg language like BR "takes their cues from" etc. whatever that means).
I've developed a new method of playing the organ which I call cuttlefish style. It consists of putting your fingers in front of your mouth & leaning down to meet the keyboard. You then wiggle your fingers around murkily. Sometimes you change colors to match your surroundings.
Dream in which I am reading a book on my bed and look up in time to see a screw in the window frame remove itself slowly and float across the room. A small Asian guy appears at the window. It was a Jedi mind trick, I realize, as he climbs in. "What the hell are you doing?" I scream at him. This is an outrage. I start hitting him in the head but this has no effect.
He grabs a cd off my desk, says he's claiming it back for a friend. No, it's a cd Joe gave me, I tell him. I even open up the liner notes and show him Joe's writing inside. Besides, I point out, just because I have this particular cd doesn't necessarily imply that it's his friend's cd: they could have made 10 copies, or even 15.
He isn't listening. He starts fading from visible to invisible & is now poking around the room. He lifts up my Kermit the Frog coffee cup.
In despair, I begin running frantically around my house, which only has three rooms. Each time I enter a room--even if it's the same room--a totally different scene confronts me. Once, I enter a bedroom containing 2 copies of my grandpa and 2 copies of me. Reality has come totally unstuck, there is no sense to be made of anything at all...I am on an acid trip inside a dream.
Dream in which we're all crowded down on the edge of a grassy ledge. Two girls nearly fall off, but I catch them by wrapping my arms around their legs. They are grateful. Everyone around us is rubbernecking to see this crashed cop car stuck nose-first into the ground, and I pilot a small remote controlled hovercraft down to take pictures. Where is the blood?
The crowd dissipates. I am running across the field with one of the girls, a tall blonde who matches my stride, and suddenly it becomes newspaper boy: we're hurdling over hedges and logs with our lead and trail legs perfectly in sync. I am in love with her, she is a mystic saxon gazelle to me.
Bad vibes, when strong enough, can make you do just about anything.
It goes like this: we're at a club and we see three chicks dancing by themselves. We're three, they're three, it's early. There's a one-to-one and onto function in other words. We move in to engage enemy forces.
Things don't go so well for either Jonas or Jake--one gets the cold shoulder, the other realizes he's got the grenade & will have to jump on it. The chick I'm dancing with seems cool. I play it cool. Things are cool, until I start to talk to her, and that's when the bad vibes started to kick in.
I need a break, so I beg off for a drink & grab my buddies to see how things are faring. Not so good they tell me. Then I realize the girl has followed me over--there is a counterattack underway, she asks me suddenly & really obviously what I do for a living, so I tell her: I'm a gravedigger.
She believes me for a while until I stop caring & I slide off into sarcasm. It becomes a joke. Then I see that I've made things worse for myself--my evasiveness and lying has made me infinitely more interesting. Jake & Jonas keep looking doorward and I use this as an excuse to escape her, but not before she tells me she really likes me ("I can see that" I say, surprising even myself with the coldness embedded in this remark) because blah blah blah. Jake is fending off an even stronger counterattack as we start for the door.
"Where are you guys going?" the blonde girl asks Jake. "Maybe we'll join you."
In reply, Jake lists off as many different Capitol Hill bars as he can remember, strung together by the word "maybe." We walk out the door.
And at this moment, Jake & I look at each other like fellow escaped convicts & start running. It's a full-out sprint up the street, around several corners, until we're sure we've lost them. We finally stop outside a convenience store, wheezing from the exertion. I've never ran from a girl before--have you? It's an exhilerating experience. Try it, you'll like it.