moonviewing

Concert Reflections, vol. 2

Second night: better than the first. Fewer asinine guys in irono-mullets, more rock. It was all-ages, which I think improved the energy basically because the people on the floor were less fucking drunk. Akimbo was good, A Storm of Light was good, Converge was good, but Neurosis was less a band than a force of nature.



At the end of the first show, Scott Kelly, after screaming the last line of "The Doorway" headbanged into the mic three, four times, and on the final hit the microphone broke off and flew into the crowd and blood was streaming down his face and it mingled with sweat and dripped onto the guitar and he crouched above it and ripped its strings off as a huge dissonant primeval interval of feedback rose to a profound roar.

A Storm of Light, Converge, & Neurosis concert reflections, vol. 1

A few things:
1. Fuck, i hate hardcore kids.
2. The lead singer of Converge had his balls directly in my face about five times.
3. Neurosis fucking crushes everything.
4. A Storm of Light was also badass.
5. Steve Von Till is my guru.
6. Apparently the thing to do if you're a hardcore kid at a show is to throw both your arms up and alternate between clenching your fists and semi-hugging the person in front of you, while violently thrusting your pelvis in sync with the music.
7. I'm not joking, this happened to me all goddamn night.
8. I hate being covered in sweat when very little of it is actually my own
9. The fact that you're wearing a polo shirt and tight pants and have tattoo sleeves and a pseudo-mullet does not mean that you are cool. It means that you look like a retard.
10. Fuck, i hate hardcore kids.

More on this subject later.

Í Gær

The wind picks up and I'm taken back to when we used to sit outside by the water tower, before it became a repository for potentially carcinogenic cell phone transmitters, and we would sit and we would look. We drank beers, the wind blew and it was February and freezing but we drank regardless, holding them in blue hands savoring the internal warmth. We would drive to capitol hill for the beer, to a convenience store that didn't card or maybe just didn't card us, and it was a trek and had to be done with more than one person, someone to buy the beer and someone to circle around the block because there was never any parking. When we were done we would carefully stack the empty bottles back in their case and leave them for the maintenance crew to pick up in the morning. We always said that when we turned 21 we would buy a full case of beer and leave it with a note, thanking whoever cleans it up for picking up our trash for four years. We still haven't yet though.
I remember being fifteen or sixteen and trying to smoke weed at the water tower in the midst of a downpour. Her first time, and we felt like seasoned veterans even though we had only smoked maybe seven or eight times before. The rain came down at angles and the wind howled and we huddled for warmth, coaxing the flame from the lighter.
On my sixteenth birthday party, the water tower had some type of violent rupture, and sprayed water in a graceful ten foot arc from the side of the top disc, cascading down onto the grass. We ran through it and I had had four or five beers and felt as though it had happened specifically for me, a birthday present.

Thank you, mr. Earle

Me, I wasn't even tryin',
you could say I was content.
She went through my life like lightning,
blew out the other end.
And I still taste her kisses, smell her perfume in the wind,
and if I could you know that I would do it all again.

Dulcinea

I have this vision of myself as a person who writes a lot, or at least semi-regularly, but I'm starting to realize that my carefully constructed self-image is more fiction than I'm comfortable with. So: an attempt to remedy this.
I put together a turntable and amp in my room the other night. Fueled by a strange, driving compulsion, at about 2 in the morning I disentangled the forest of cables around my parent's Sony phonograph, older than I am by several years, and lugged the thing down into my room. It's surprisingly difficult to silently carry archaically heavy equipment down a flight of stairs, and I probably woke everyone up in the process. I love the weight of dated electronic equipment though; something in the gravity of it makes me feel like it has more substance, originating from a simpler, more well built time, when things were actually constructed with the intention of repair, and a long lifespan, not just replacement in 2-3 years. Really though, whether my curmudgeon-ly ideals have any grounding in truth I don't know.
It's interesting how much more depth vinyl gives an album. It's difficult to really explain, because it's kindof an obtuse, audiophile/nerd/dork concept, but it gives the music this profoundly deepened impact. Vinyl has a smaller total range of sound than CDs or other digital media, but the way that it operates, as a steady stream of sound, rather than binary snapshots, makes the music more real in a lot of ways. It's almost as if, relative to a CD, the sound is squished, but instead of just becoming smaller, the excess shoots fathoms downwards, becoming a tangible sound-thing that you can almost sink your hand into.
I dunno, I find myself drawn to older things lately. Not ideas necessarily, but materials, aesthetics, substance. Simple guitars, natural finishes, raw woods.

Gate, Gate, Pāragate, Pārasamgate, Bodhi svāhā.

Fuck this.

Seriously, fuck it.

W. E. W.

Oh sing with me a hymn,
for the light that has dimmed,
For the heart that no longer beats.
Even until death,
When nothin' else is left,
And the pain has finally ceased.
Oh and the sun will never shine,
On this cold dead heart of mine.

Sing with me a hymn,
For the body that's grown weary,
For the voice that's forever stilled.
My lips will utter praise,
Until the end of days,
For the space that cannot be filled.
And the sun will never shine,
On this cold dead heart of mine.

Oh I will be your roof,
Your shelter from the storm,
Your footing against the wind.
I'll mend for your my dear,
Them hopes that have been torn,
And I hope our paths will cross again...

Fiskr, bátr.

Ah need more variety in mah picture takin'

As goddamn American as apple-fucking-pie.

Moving Forward.

When Push Comes to Love

Go, go where you may,
and do, do what you will.
I'll see you again on a sunnier day and
I know I'll love you still.
I can't seem to understand,
but you've got my heart in your hands.

The dawn's early light
has now faded to grey.
The ashes from the fire we had last night
have all blown away.
And I can't seem to understand,
but you've got my heart in your hands.

You're a rainstorm, a fire and a trainwreck,
all wrapped up in ribbons and lace.
You're a fistful of roadside flowers,
arranged just so in a dimestore vase.
And I can't seem to understand,
but you've got my heart in your hands,
Well you've got my heart in your hands.

-William Elliott Whitmore

Tarantula Hawk

I am putting off writing nine pages about hunter-gatherers.

LISTENING TO: 明星－神様の舌打ち。

It's hot outside. I need to mow the lawn. I've mowed it twice already with the push-mower that I borrowed from our nextdoor neighbor (a nice, aging hippie named flip, whose lawn is pristinely manicured), but it hasn't really been able to penetrate the seven inch grass shield that formed during our (my) inattention to the lawn during fall and winter. The backyard isn't so bad, but I'm actually worried about cutting away the front lawn and finding the remnants of a tiny insect civilization. Bodies, rent in half by the rusty, unflinching blades. Weeping beetle children. A partially demolished 1/200 scale high-rise.

I haven't taken any good pictures in a while. There are a couple of places in Bellingham that I think would be pretty cool, but I hesitate to go tromping around the semi-industrial neighborhood in the middle of the night with a camera and a five foot tripod. Bellingham seems like somewhere where people would call the police if they saw that. Or I'll just get mugged. I dunno. I need a burly(er) friend to go take pictures with.

NOW LISTENING TO: Naglfar - Into the Cold Voids of Eternity.

Virginia

Man, what the hell?

Goddamn.

Rusty pickups are my muse.

I meant to post these two weeks ago, but was stricken by a strange inner-ear infection that has yet to fully recede, so I didn't.

I went to visit family in Hoquiam (google!), which in addition to being a fairly nice drive (past Oympia, anyway) resulted in some pictures around my Grandpa's house:





It was weird to be driving around in my mom's (relatively) new car. I felt like I should have been in some primeval Dodge, with moss growing up the running boards and a huge diesel spewing particulates and black smoke from the decaying exhaust.

goddamn residual issues.

CLEARLY, I MUST LEARN TO APPRECIATE WHERE I AM, WHEREVER IT MAY BE.