coming down the mountain

A good record, a so-so record, a few odd-and-sods, an awful side project, a non-sucky side project, and two lukewarm comeback records, Jane's Addiction is no candidate for Greatest Band in the World, but damn if much of Nothing's Shocking isn't feeling strangely relevant right now, in part because Farrell isn't being nearly as OMG-So-Edgy as he was on Ritual. With the general culture war absurdity and tribal posturing on both sides, I think I know what I'll be listening to when I get home tonight.

 You know that man you hate? You look more like him every day everyday...

I got into Jane's Addiction slightly later in life, if only because the rock and roll radio in Clevelandia was dominated by nu-metal and I knew that the gratuitous nudity of the cover art would not pass muster with the folks, not to mention some of the lyrical content. Not a whole lot of redeeming social value to be found here.

When we want something and we don't wanna pay for it... 
 My pastor when I lived in Kent was a huge Jane's fan, and we used to jam on these and U2 and Alice in Chains after practicing the music for church, and he dressed up as Perry Farrell for Halloween once when he was in college. The first night I played music with him, I was playing bass at the time and started noodling around with opening lines from this song.

We moved into a new building the last year I was living down there, taking over the space from the local fundie cult that would frequently harass the campus Westboro-lite with tracts strewn in the bibliotheque's queer studies section and signs about Impending Doom. They'd also show up on Sunday nights and tell us all we were going to hell, no doubt due to our college aspirations, piercings, tattoos, and heathen rock and roll music. Murals were painted in the new space, and we listened to Alice's MTV Unplugged, Paul's Boutique, and the Rev comp while making the area look good.

 
I shouldn't like it as much as I do, because it's bloated and somewhat ridiculous. Perry Farrell's a consummate businessman as it is, with a voice of an exuberant little kid spinning twisted tales of drugs and deviance and general weirdness, and I still ask God why Dave Navarro's still alive and Layne Staley is dead, because dude might be the Vainest Man Alive and is still prettier than me despite doing heroin for awhile.

 hum hum along with me, hum along with the TV...
But those jazzy chords at the beginning and the non-stop energy, that guitar solo so over the top yet perfect in context, the way it ends so fast, grabbed me the first time I heard this. It sounded infinitely more vital than anything else pulsating through the airwaves at the time even though this was almost a decade after when it came out. I put this on the jukebox at a somewhat twee-ish indie rock show at the Grog Shop and watched everyone look really confused like what is this guitar playing what the hell?

Such a classic girl, gives her man a great idea
Hears you tell your friends,
"Hey man, why don't you listen to my great idea!"

Oh yeah, how often has that happened? I lived with a guy that summer in a house that felt like The Real World since none of us really knew each other, and there were the two crazy girls, and the frat guy and his on-and-off-again girlfriend. Dan cooked for me every night, stayed up all night playing video games, we listened to a lot of Elastica, Nine Inch Nails, Jane's Addiction and Kyuss and hung out on the porch. It was an extremely hot summer with no air conditioning and no fans. I remember laying in bed listening to 'Ocean Size' drowning out the Kenny Chesney and Ludacris that my neighbors preferred. 

Wish I was ocean size, they cannot move you, man, no one tries

My roommates the next year weren't into this kind of thing, so I'd listen to Nothing's Shocking when I was home alone painting. Having been raised on grunge and the heavier strains of classic rock, I'm not averse to rock star excess if the tunes are good, and this one is just sublime.

They're playing a few days from now, and I probably won't go unless someone scores fantastically cheap tickets but if Randal's got King Diamond for his camp, I've got this...

girlpop

Currently on a female-fronted brit kick, must be the music I've been jamming to and the advent of summer.

Because libraries have to be all relevant and trendy like Borders after it stopped selling obscure stuff I couldn't find and before it bit the dust, the next generation of The Kids will never get to dig through the CDs (though do they still listen to them anyway?) at the local bibliotheque and discover the long-lost no-hit-wonder gems therein. I listened to a lot of Echobelly when I was driving my Sexy Saturn out to the Hell Job In Sticksville and it really hit the spot, that raging against The Man and the perfect bright-but-not-too-trebly guitar tone. Props to Andrew of Armagideon Time for giving me my first taste.

Elastica might have ripped off Wire like it was nobody's business, but it got me listening to Wire, and that first record and some of the b-sides have held up surprisingly well. I put this song on a mixtape for a boy at my lunch table who was into crusty punk, which was something I really didn't know anything about. He liked the song, and got me into Dischord bands, I got him into My Bloody Valentine. We attempted to awkwardly dance at prom and lamented not seeing the Fake Dead Kennedys instead. I haven't seen him in eight years.

I had "Spooky" on cassette and love the Jarvis Cocker duet on "Lovelife" but this one gets the most spins at 5 in the morning on the radio, with a little more accessible songwriting than the first few but not quite as poppy as the last. I always wished the guitars had a little more bit to them, but like saying I wish that certain bands would sing melodically, that's kind of not the point.

 

Jim got me finally checking out The Pale Saints, and this song for whatever reason hits me with the way it builds up. The coda for 'Fine Friend' does the same thing.

Wizards, Weed, and Outer Space

Over the Elixir of St. Drogo this morning, we pondered the aesthetics of one of our mutually shared favorite genres, known for its general worship of Sabbath and Zeppelin, downtuned guitars, and vaguely arabesque instrumental passages and a generally kitschy lyrical amalgam well-known to teenage boys who read Tolkien and comics and played card games that involved mages and sages, and in this case, the girls who loved them. As I've gotten older, I've realized how devoid of estrogenic conversation I was when I was younger, because I still don't always know what to talk about in the world of women, and inevitably fall back into geekery of board games and MST3K, debating the merits of guitar solos and quoting Spinal Tap.

It may in part be the cultural heritage of being Parmastani in the last part of the 20th century and growing up on a certain strain of lovable loser pop culture, of acid-drenched classic rock, cherrypicking our favorite bands, deriding the boomers who still prefer the polemics of St. Robert of Dylan. That's completely different of course, because War Pigs has always resonated way more for me as a timeless commentary on the world than any Lennonista giving peace a chance or imagining a world that will never exist.

As a long-haired geeky teenage girl, I got out piles of CDs from the library, delving into genres without regards to cachet of coolness, and along with the spiky noisetastic indieish rock that actually had loud guitars and some teeth as opposed to what The Kids are into these days, found the sonics of stoner-rockdom much to my liking though the only thing close to a mind-altering substance I'd ever imbibed was an ill-advised Surge drinking contest at someone's birthday party because I'm really not too thrilling in real life. I transferred in junior year and spent a year anonymous, listening to a discman and doing my homework at the far end of the cafeteria, holed up in my room painting on the weekends of taking long walks with the dog before finding a niche later on. I like people, but I find I still enjoy the solitude.

Blame it on the Soundgarden, perhaps, and the college radio I listened to while getting my braces done and cutting class with my dad to drive around and listen to the likes of Pentagram as a gateway drug to the drop C, because the acolytes and contemporaries of the rest of the Seattle bands were found wanting. It didn't necessarily have to be earthshatteringly new-sounding, it just had to sound good, have that right amount of heavy low end and trippy lightness of being.

While the Fu Manchus and the Nebulas were a little too testosterony for me, as I'm into neither babes nor bikes, the more mellowed out sounds of Kyuss and Dead Meadow, the soulfulness and murk of Corrosion of Conformity, the sublime sludginess of the Melvins. There is a certain dorktastic aesthetic that doesn't lend itself well to hipsterdom. The touchstones don't involve New York artists, or the usual canonicals. D&D, Lord of the Rings, suburban drugs, wizards, outer space, the kind of things that get emblazoned on tie-dye t-shirts seen on middle-aged women. Kitsch, I guess, but awesome.

Up until the time I was gainfully employed here, this wasn't the kind of thing that most of my friends were into, as in high school, the most underground it got was usually Pantera, and the metal kids I knew in college were into sounds more technical and the indie kids preferred the Locust or whoever if they weren't listening to something more folky or twee. It's never going to be the thing that The Kids are into, if the ones in my world are any indication, and it's not as much a chick thing I guess most of the time, and I've never been one for leafy substances so I feel like that makes me even more of an outlier. At least 50 Foot Wave, Worm Ouroboros and Subrosa still like the low end and don't make me feel quite so alone.

shape and swirl

Your remembrances are like unto ashes, your bodies to bodies of clay. 

While I'm finally getting the hang of the enamels and copper, I've slacked on the ceramics end of things, feeling uninspired and having lost the touch that led to swanky coffee mugs and swirled bowls in the past. I needed to change things up and coming out of hibernation made me want to start fresh this year on the wheel. I've watched others do it, conjuring up graceful vessels from lumps of clay, and was too intimidated at first but I know it can't be that hard, right?



A quick crash course and a small bit of instruction, and my left foot is kicking the the crank that turns the wheel, and I brace my elbows on the edge and push my fingers down into the ball of clay, constantly dipping my hands back into the water to keep the clay moist and turning, smoothing out with quick flicks of my thumbs. It's like playing the drums the way the body has to utilize so many rhythmic movements at once, something so maddeningly simple to execute in theory or in basics, something incomprehensible when it comes to pure artistry.

On my second attempt I end up with a small bowl, more like a saucer with sides really, and subsequent efforts take different degrees of time to allow me to try different shapings, different ways of caressing shape with one hand and shoring up the sides with the other, curving the contours of my fingers to make the curve,keeping my elbows rested and perpendicular. I don't care about making great works right now, but the feeling of the shape forming within my palms, the sense of the ancientness of this form and technique, the elements of earth and water to be tempered later by fire, I feel euphoric lost in this process in ways I can't explain.

brown paper packages tied up in string

....Or rather straunge and vvonderful goods from The Continent. Randal's able to pen odes to sweet tuneage is better than mine, but I'm quite thrilled to have the new Alcest record and both Les Discrets albums (and a t-shirt) because when one makes good art (in this case both visual and sonic). The end of the day cannot come fast enough so that I can go home and sprawl out on the dining room rug in front of the speakers and soak it all in.