more tokyo police club.

their single "nature of the experiment" (source).

its catchy (which is not a condemnation, dammit) and tough, but NOT rough or even close to anything -core as seems to be implied by the few scarce-y reviews i can find (which seem to be written overwhelmingly by Indie followers and not Rockers, which is maybe the problem). wow this broad-sweeping-generalization, It Is Said, People Say, irresponsible-"journalism" thing is kind of fun.

hoo-ha so the guys who stole both my roommates' laptops (dont ask) ate some of our cookies; the chips ahoy box was a little short. seriously.

tpc/welcome to brooklyn

saw tokyo police club tonight at this place called The Syrup Room (oh, golly, realm of utter abandonment off the morgan L thats a little skeezy & a lot full of puddles lack-of-drainage-hope-this-isnt-sewage-im-high-maintenace rah). they apparently hired someone, or goaded a somewhat older, almost-intimidating almost-stocky friend, to stand outside the door to this warehouse to greet every passerby - or every Oh You Know The Type passerby with $8 in her wallet, because honestly theres NO other reason to walk this street - with a howdy-do "its in there," end of sentence, end of story, end of conversation (save for the momentarily confused grunting "oh" "um" "hunh" sounds), because seriously theres no other way to find the arbitrarily-named Syrup (a door among doors, but maybe with a little bass vibrating through the cracks in the sidewalk). as for TPC themselves, im totally impressed. it was really intense (k: "you look like you want to stab both eyes out") but not in a performance-, emo-, rock-out-intensive sort of way; it was just really good, really solid, serious (and seriously good at grit and minors) sort of rock, solid the way its hard-but-fun to pick a single off a really excellent album, solid the way it platonically Should Be, you know, right.

theres a reason i dont talk the music talk after all, and though i feel somewhat guilty about making k leave after their really pretty short set without even hearing the uhhh "headliners" i guess thats what theyd be, "the ballet" oh no wait "land of talk,"as im sure she would have enjoyed going out for more than an hour or so, one i wanted to get back because my neighborhood is NOT the best & as it turns out im BAD at finding my way back from the M oh block-and-a-half, and two i finally figured out that thats just about the only way i can enjoy a show (well, its one of many constraints, saving the possibility of being half of one of those really, atrociously annoying couples, one of whom would always be embarassing the other if they werent both blinded by their everlasting love, gloria estefan, etc, and really, who actively wants to do that? [not the everlasting, i mean the blinded] i think - i hope - it just sort of happens, it victimizes): basically, to admit when im exhausted or bored or cant take the Scene any more and go home, no regrets, no feeling the need to milk my $8 for all its worth, no overdosing on nicotine to keep myself awake. because ill do that on the way home as part of looking Purposeful and Aware and generally do-not-fucky, because one im nervous anyway & two on the way out i got more than enough Hey White Girl, Hey Whitey.

maybe im uptight but im actively gentrifying so hell nuh-uh im not too comfortable with that, there it is, so be it; as h. said that van (oh, god the van) my mom rented is the giant, fantastic (in the fairy-tale sense), white, virginal, take-no-prisoners beast of gentrification so maybe we might scrape a little paint off the roof in the pathmark parking garage (the clearance bar may SAY 6'6" but who the fuck reads them? youre supposed to clear the clearance bar, right? which we did, with flying colors) but lo, youd better just move, sugar (unless of course youre an already-gentrified concrete ceiling, in which case you win).

i keep pretending im just here as an experiment, not-for-real, a test subject who happens to have a lot of film and a little time to kill. exactly what im protecting myself from remains unclear. but with a good nights sleep (ah yes, back to sleeping; its great how some experiences translate almost directly into reassurance and confidence when you most need it) and cabinetsful of groceries (the scraped roof was for something, after all) so i can cook and, like i said, a few rolls of film AND tv on the radio tomorrow im very, very excited, and not as weepy/stressed as i thought, and my room is really very nice; turning out to be in fact cozy and not just cozy-euphemism-for-incredibly-fucking-small.

good, good. i want to keep things the way there are, so full with possibility, so unclosed-off, so im-almost-there where i can feel through the barriers like sisters, like patience, like theres nothing to judge, like theres a past that tells you only that theres a future, that, if youre good enough, and do your own, there just will be, and even if theres not there should have been, and well all know it.

the problem with sleeping being that a fresh start erases so much, so much of the old one(s).

what if i (whiny voice) dont want to start over.

moving.

moving makes me nutty. im a weepy mess.

oh, oh - but things are so good - so good - and i wonder what i did right, and, even now, still!, i dont trust it. weepy mess, runny mascara, i still cant eat this fucking bagel from this morning, the three hours of that drive never even hit my consciousness (where did those hours go), and ill bet therell be lane lines running through my exhausted dreams tonight, working themselves out.

time to call in the reinforcements.

SAUCY rah rah i have less and less conception of why people do the things they do doot doot ... also id be really happy if you come to see me in new york ill be there wednesday. come. visit. add to the inexplicable.

revelations:

once upon a time, there was a certain gent whom i casually referred to as the MSLT, partly because acronyms are a lot of fun (stringing random consonants together and then trying to pronounce them usually is), and partly because i felt the overwhelming urge to indicate what a Melodramatic, Solipsistic Little Tool this kid was without being so bold as to just say so. in the intervening years id forgotten about this delightful habit, making this soul in his present incarnation the OYIFATAB ("Oh Yeah I Forgot About That Acronym Boy"), or, better still, the MTAWRITSEAAPALNB ("My That Acronym Was Really Inappropriate, Though Still Eerily Apt, And Perhaps A Little Negative Boy"). which actually has more vowels than id like, but so it goes: mmm-tah-rit-see-pal-n-bee.

i really like my new sewing machine, but i seriously need to work on my skill with darts; either i grow pointier boobs or i figure out how to avoid that fake-nipple-in-the-fabric look.


the catch-22 of my right-now favorite ignorance being: some questions are impossible to ask if you dont already at least sort of know the answer. i really want to know not why some things happen - things tend to happen at general will, especially if they make a lot of sense on paper - but why do they keep happening, once you realize that the theory isnt translating? if, in other words, things arent as good as they could be, how long do you ride it out to see if some day you can achieve the ideal? at what point do you let things (friendships, friendships that accidentally ..., pseudo-relations, real bona fide Relationships...) just die their miserable little deaths?

what in hell are the intentions?

isnt that what we all, ever, always want to know?

id like to slap some sense into many, many people right now; i know im being tooled on, and fucked with, and on, and around, and all sorts of fucking prepositions, but i usually at least kind of know it, and kind of condone it (in this tacit little agreement of mutually beneficial fucking-with -- although im pretty good at grudges despite my catholic aspirations, so chances are ive had to sit back & give you some kind of consent somewhere along the line, not to mention im unemployed & have a fucking lot of time on my hands to think about these things, so really youve probably done something to piss me off and unless youve seriously paid your dues, ive probably had to actively, vaguely pretend i ahem oh just didnt notice, oh-my-egos-infallible-anyway-who-cares, GET IT TOGETHER, ASSHOLES, no but i seriously am working on that saintly sort of socratic ask-the-right-questions autodidacticism-for-dummies thing;), but sometimes its just people being idiots, just not thinking before they fucking speak, or act, or commit, or imply, thats when its really a fucking issue (about 25%), and the sense-slapping becomes really the operative action here.

ugh. and here id thought id started avoiding the sucked-dry, so-soulful-im-soulless, sensitive bastard types.

i could just out with my intentions most of the time, but that wouldnt clarify so much as "scare," "foretell impending doom" or even "induce agony/incontinence/obscene amounts of pressure/embarassment/fight-or-flight instinct" or maybe even if im lucky some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, but given that im not generally an optimist that wouldnt, generally, be a good thing.

{oh, and that asshole in colorado? mostly, i like it when people get what they think they want. plus, ive always thought that square plates are really satisfying.}

two goals for the immediate future:
one, to return at least to the realm of parametric hinting, probably the only form of subtlety i know, if not a wholesale plunge into the realm of Embarassing Honesty;
two, no fight-picking, no defensive sarcasm, no penting-up, be good (ok, at least better) to your mother, appreciate the glories of celibacy, get up at a fucking reasonable-r hour, read the paper more often, reconcile yourself with relative meaninglessness or at least try to move past those Wrong Things. and drink, of course, as much coffee as necessary to do all this. you can even have it with sugar. mmm.

wt

The Wrong Things: they are the opposite of missing; theyre too present; theyre supposed to go away and you wont miss them. but there they are being saucy, and impossible in their very utter should-have-ness. cant now, not without a very very good excuse.

o.

it is a war against serifs, those tacky little hangers-on.