Party Time

I just got back from a birthday party. My friend Jordan. He's not a close friend. He turned 22. Gosh. Young.

I will turn 30 in a couple weeks.

I skateboarded to and from this party.

On Skateboarding
How I long for the long flat smooth streets of the suburbs.

How I long for my lack of joint ache with every push of the board. For the lack of pulsing feet after a ride.

Maybe I don't really long for these things. Maybe I just miss them. Am nostalgic about them.

The party was pretty fun. I just got finished telling John we needed to stop staying up late, and then I go out to a party til after midnight and on my way home think of wishing I could go out more. I'm 30. I want to experience more. Soon I won't want to. Maybe. Who knows how it will go?

At the party, someone said that Michael Jackson had hung himself. It was pretty believable, though I didn't believe it. Someone finally called their mother to get some verification. According to her, he had not killed himself.

Also at the party, we talked about where we were for the world trade center attack. It came up because during the Michael Jackson rumor, we all thought history was happening.

Also at the party I heard about someone's installation/thesis for the School of the Art Institute grad program. So we also talked about missing academia.

Today I rearranged my apartment a bit. I'd recently started getting a little down on my apartment because of its lack of natural lighting. But today after changing some stuff around, I had a more positive feeling about the place, so that's good. Sometimes we can change our world in little ways so they feel better in big ways.

Anyway, I moved my closet from one area of the apartment to another. This made my number of shoes look INSANE. As I moved my stuff, I realized I would need a new shelf for a place to put my sweaters in the new closet location. Not 15 minutes after this realization, I was in my studio and a guy came up to my door (my studio opens out onto the street and there's a big gate there so I can have the door open and still be secure). He came up and told me he was selling a black metal shelf for 18.32 (to buy his baby girl's asthma medicine; he brandished an inhaler for me to see as he said this). He was moving from an apartment across the street to somewhere "up north." I gave him a twenty and had a new shelf. He helped me carry it from across the street. It seems like the universe keeps handing me things lately. I hope the luck (Karma?) continues.

I won on ebay a vintage microphone amp. The Amp was made by an Italian company called Geloso. So far the only information I can find about this company is specs for items more recently manufactured than this one. It's hella old. Anyway, I can't wait to use it, but I don't really understand how to power it. That's how old it is. I also don't know how I'm going to hook it up to my computer when the time comes. Either way, I think I'm gonna have to make some cool sounds with this stuff I'm finding.

Also today for lunch I ate at the Wendy's on Division. This young kinda overweight hispanic kid kept coming up to me and telling me that I worked there. When I said I didn't work there, he told me I did and that I should take off all my clothes and go out into the street. Then he told me my skateboard was his, not mine. Then he brandished his fist toward me and his mom shooed him toward their table. He brandished his fist the whole time I walked away from the Wendy's. It was very cute.



So, my birthday is in a couple weeks, as I've mentioned. I think I want to go bowling. Anyone have an opinion about that?

Someone at the party I was at said I should announce it on friendster. That sounds like a good idea. That would be some party.

Threadless

Everyone's heard of threadless.com by now. They have this really cool deal where you can be in a club where you get a limited edition t-shirt every month. {speaking like whisper}: What a great gift that would be. It's the gift that keeps on giving.

OK, I'm tired and tired so that's all.

Nostalgia

I've been having all these nostalgic moments lately.

Seeing Interpol at the Aragon - a venue I hadn't visited for a show since almost high school, it seems.

Running into random high school chums on Friendster and Myspace.

And then there's been the dreams. They've been interspersing the haze of my late morning sleeps. Most recently, this morning, I dreamt that I was at this campground I used to go to (Jellystone Park, in Portage, Indiana) except I wasn't with the people I used to go with. Instead I was with some people from high school. One who was one of the people with whom I've recently started conversing from back then, but the other was just this totally random guy who I swear I haven't even thought about. His name's Frank and he was on the swim team with me freshman or sophomore year and I had a pretty big crush on him (well, big for not realizing I was gay until a year or two later) and an even bigger crush on his even bigger brother.

In the dream, Frank and I are rooming in the same room on different bunks. It's more like a dorm than a campground, but whatever. We are laying on the same bed at some point and some heavy frottage commences. He talks a little bit about how much sexual tension we had between us in high school and then he gets up and grabs a towel and some condoms and tells me to follow him. We go to the communal bathrooms and he goes into one shower and I into the other but as I walk in, someone is walking out. I am all like, "whoa!" and back off and the kid just kind of looks at me. I look at frank who is naked and in the shower and sort of beckoning but at the same time definitely doesn't want this kid to know what's going on and sort of shakes his head no and says forget it. I'm disappointed because at this moment I realize it's something for which I've been waiting 14 years. Then I wake up.

This would normally go in the dream blog, but it ties so closely to the catalyst that made me remember the dream just now that it became a post about something more. I'd just walked out of Alliance Baker and there were these guys outside on skateboards. One of them attempted some trick of which I do not even know the name and the board landed with the board facing down and that loud -SMACK- was such a familiar noise it just seemed to be like Proust's Madeleine and evoked a veritable novel of emotion. Just like that -click click- of a skateboard buzzing down a sidewalk, still perhaps one of the sexiest sounds to ever stir my loins. I don't know what it is, but it really has this visceral effect on me and I get a chill.

Add all that to the fact that it feels like Spring today, and - more importantly - SMELLS like Spring, and I'm sort of high on memory today.

And so here I am doing my 21st century form of journaling so I can keep this memory of memories from forever being lost.

Internet Hibernation

Things have been pretty hectic at work and I haven't had much Internet time. For this I apologize and I feel it sorely.

Friday night I went to see Interpol at the crappy Aragon Ball Room. I had this weird flashback to seeing Jesus Jones there back in the day. I also remembered very distinctly a how I felt so social there at the time. I was in high school and there were a bunch of people there I knew. It was pretty fun. It sort of brought me back to that time. This time however, I ran into several customers from my store, which was kind of neat. Sort of a more adult experience to be sure. Unfortunately, I had to miss Washington D.C. band, Q and not U, because I was working. I guess since I've never seen them live, though, that this wasn't the best venue in which to introduce me to them live.

Here is an audblog of most of the song "Slow Hands." I recorded it for JF, as it is his favorite Interpol song and because he's special.

The following night I went to see Make Believe at The Bottom Lounge. Make Believe is the newest incarnation of Cap'n Jazz, one of my favorite bands from the 90's. Tim Kinsella looked pretty much the same except now he smokes, sports long messy hair, and wore this crazy Jim Morrison-like shirt. The bassist and guitarist I'm pretty sure are original to Cap'n Jazz, though the drummer was definitely not Mike Kinsella. Of this I was a little disappointed. I always thought Mike was a phenomenal drummer, though this guy held his own pretty well. Standing next to me and JF in the audience were these guys around my age who seemed to be as much reliving a Cap'n Jazz show as I was. It was pretty great. The one guy had the 90's emo dance moves down just right and it was a little contagious. I guess it was a weekend of semi-nostalgia in that I was revisiting old things with new twists.

Opening for Make Believe was a band called Ume. They were dangerously close to sounding like early Sonic Youth. But I didn't care. The singer/guitarist also slightly resembled Kim Gordon. Though the bassist did not really look like Thurston Moore, the two of them had matching wedding bands on, and their cd sleeve (yes, I bought a CD) indicated that they shared last names. Weird. Anyway, they had a lot of the punk rawness of early Sonic Youth but I think her Guitar skills weren't quite on par with Moore's. All in all, though, I liked them a lot and would see them again.

Speaking of nostalgia, though, the singer reminded me/looks a lot like this girl I knew in high school. Interestingly, I'd just bumped into her profile on Friendster like early last week, so it kinda freaked me out.

I went CD shopping yesterday for the first time in about forever. Here's my list of new acquisitions, including the two I picked up from the show.

• Azita : Life on the Fly [C-] (I had thought this was going to be weirder, so I gave it the benefit of doubt that my preconceptions soured my opinion, but I almost feel like this was a D+. I'm not sure, but I think this is the same Azita who used to date Elliot, the sound guy from Fireside. She also used to be in the band The Scissor Girls back in the nineties who were this riotous noisy riot grrrl band. This cd was all about mellow folksy stuff. Azita matured? Maybe it's not actually her. I mean, how many Azita's can there be?


• Isotope 217 : The Unstable Molecule [B] (I first heard them off some comp and every time I've heard that song, "Kryptonite Smokes the Red Line," on my iPod list, I've loved it. The other tracks on this album aren't quite as good as that one, but I still like it tremendously. Sort of a nu-jazz kind of thing.)


• Make Believe : self-titled [A-] (What can I say, I'm a sucker for Tim Kinsella and crazy dissonant guitar and arpeggios and finger tapping. I felt a little jipped when I realized there were only 5 songs and I paid a full $10, though. Bitches.)


• Ume : Urgent Sea [C+] (Liked it but didn't love it. As I said, hints of Sonic Youth, but only Sonic Youth can do Sonic Youth. Listening to the CD, I was reminded of the one most annoying thing about her singing style, and that's that she often followed her guitar too closely. It always strikes me as amateurish when a singer follows the guitar during the entire chorus or verse and she did this quite a bit. I still liked her voice and the overall energy though.)


• Camera Obscura : I love My Jean (not yet rated)


• Laurie Anderson : Life on a String (not yet rated)


• Sonic Youth : NYC Ghosts and Flowers (not yet rated)


• Cheer Accident : Introducing Lemon (not yet rated)(been wanting to check this out for a while)


• The Beta Band : The Three E.P.s (not yet rated)


• The Detachment Kit : Of This Blood (not yet rated)

I'm pretty excited about all this new music. I've had a good day today of starting to listen to it.