josh blog

Ordinary language is all right.

One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.

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12 Dec '04 08:22:25 AM

Doing something, anything, enough, that it can go on for thirty or forty minutes or an hour and captivate or distract or lull me enough that the foremost preoccupations that press down on me are temporarily lifted - that's what the records that have filled my time lately have done. I don't really hear them, as such, but I do put them on and hope they don't wear off too soon. Or that their effect is not soon dissipated. It's been harder to do this with pop albums, but less commercially successful genre-limited records seem better suited to hourlong statements of consistency, to mining the same territory. I'm not quite sure how it shakes out: Petey Pablo and Keren Ann come out as pop albums, Nico and Muddy Waters and maybe Ted Leo as genre albums, even though Petey and Keren Ann are well ensconced in identifiable places.

It's so hard to shake the impulse that things have to mean something (which impulse gets in the way of letting them mean something when they damn well feel like it).

12 Dec '04 07:39:15 AM

I value more than is revealed in my actions; this is a constant source of frustration, isolation, and disappointment for me.

11 Dec '04 11:09:39 PM

'got a water hose and the thing you wind it up on'

!

10 Dec '04 04:32:21 AM

Did Ted Leo just say 'bourgeois'?

Sigh.

10 Dec '04 03:30:29 AM

Low provoke more lazy reviewing than most any of the music I like. Slow! Oh! My! God! It is slow! They are slow! Hey! Slow!

8 Dec '04 08:52:12 AM

I don't see how John could ever get sick of all five thousand songs on his new iPod; I've had mine for a few months or so and 3551 out of 5200 of the tracks I share between iBook and iPod are still unplayed.

7 Dec '04 08:05:27 AM

'a teenage love that didn't feel no hurt yet'

7 Dec '04 01:36:43 AM

'Why, Doctor Wong, what brings you here?!'

7 Dec '04 12:47:36 AM

The spy-guitar shit on Britney's Toxic seemed to have vanished once I listened to it for the first time on my decent headphones, and the bendy bassline gained prominence.