I know I’ve written it before, but hell son:

Your heart might break but the show goes on because if it stops, you starve.

 …and that’s all I have to say about what happened tonight

———————

Moving on, I’m taking some temporal liberties in saying that ‘Today’ I learned about it, but the new Janelle Monae album is distressingly good. I had one of those weird Saturdays where there’s, ya know, no drama (always a watershed moment for me); I just ended up at some really good parties I never expected to be at. Drinks and dancing and great bands and new friends and stronger connections! Awesome time.

 Anyway, the big single from this album had been stuck in my head all weekend, and it took getting a flat on my bike and having to hoof the last two and a half miles back home to actually listen to the record in it’s entirety.

 Maybe it’s because I had enough alcohol flooding my bloodstream to be qualified as no longer human, or maybe it’s because I hadn’t needed to just ‘walk and listen’ to an album since the last Future of the Left offering, but I was convinced by the time I got home that music like this should be taught in schools. Or played in utero. Anything but the relative obscurity it’s destined for.

 Seriously though, check out this chick just crush a stage:

 There’s performances and there is being a showman(/showwoman?). Shaquille O’Neal once famously said “Put this in print: my name is Shaquille O’Neal, and Paul Pierce is the motherfucking truth.”

 Well, if I could borrow the phrase, my name is Shaquille O’Neal and Janelle Monae is the motherfucking truth… but with a cute face, killer eyes, and what appears to be a kinda slamming body. Oh, and all the natural grace of Gregory Hines with a dash of James Brown and the self-aware cool of Dwayne Wade. And the first 3 Suites of a 4 arc concept album under her belt. And shit loads of money. And executive producers with names like Nate “Rocket” Wonder and Control Z. And also she’s younger than me.

 Fuck, just writing about this is getting me depressed and inspired at the same time. Download it illegally here!

-diggy

 I have a bad habit with music… okay two bad habits with music; the first that I’ll illegally download (three bad habits) tons of music that invariably gets lost in the shuffle and I never really get around to giving it enough time; the other is that when there’s some kind of seminal band that everyone else has heard of/adored and I never got around to listening to, I’m to embarrassed to give it a listen. Eventually, I have a flickering moment of humility, ask someone what all the hub-bub was about, and listen to it for little more than my own personal edification. Then feel like an idiot for not having listened to it years ago.

 So today I learned that the Dismemberment Plan’s “Emergency & I” album is pretty great, and has the greatest second half to a record that I can remember. It’ll go up there with Converge and Jay-Z as something I should have started listening to years earlier, LCD Soundsystem and the new Titus Andronicus record as something I had to get harangued into doing on my own, and my perpetual loneliness and lack of a bike helmet as evidence that I have no capacity to learn from past mistakes. Download illegally from HERE.

-diggy

What I’m Listening To, Pt. 6

“Don’t Look Back Into the Sun” - the Libertines

Last one of these I’m doing. Heading on a mondo-road trip, so we’re gonna change the format again. Gotta keep changing directions if I want to keep up the challenge, the excitement, no?

 But as to tie it into things (and prevent Andy from just booting me off the blorge), today I learned about the Taman Shud Case, which is….guys, seriously: Capital F Fascinating.

 Here’s the thing though: like…what does it matter anymore? There’s no human element to cracking the case on something like that. It’s 60 years old, the only people who get any closure are the detectives and scholars who spent so much time trying to pick away at it and make it make sense. And keeping with the honesty kick, does anyone care? Does anyone lay awake wondering who this guy was, or where he went to school, or what his sisters were like? Does anyone care that this human being is dead, and that he maybe and horribley outlived his mother? That he had poker buddies, or a dentist? Nah, it’s just a big great mystery that we all went to delve into. For the edification of our own intelligence, and for the satisfaction of classic Human curiosity, we focus on the glitzy smack of wonder and adoration.

Ya know, there’s a lot to be said about self-reflection. A lot! That shit’s important. But you can only learn about the present and past what’s already been done or decided. I know that’s a heady sentence, but it’s the notion that (the impersonal) you become a historian of your own expeiences; one can spend their life categorizing the who and what and why, and not thinking to move forward and just persue a new thing. Hey man, I swear: you can do both!

 What is it that makes us want to kick around the bones of a crime scene and figure out how it could’ve happened 60 years later? *METAPHOR ALERT* Is it the same thing that compells us to dig around in our own lives, in our own failed experiences and not think about the “why?”, when the answer can be defined as simply as “Because. Because that shit goes down sometimes. Please look around at what’s going on now, please.”

 I’m rambling a bit. I’m gonna close this up. God, Andy’s so annoyed with me at this point. Let me not tie this thing together snugly:

 ”She will never forgive you, but she won’t let you go, oh no.”

 No. No she won’t. Lay the bones to rest and close the cover of that book. The past is…gone. It’s done. It’s had it’s say, and it isn’t moving from it’s position. Deal with it or ‘fuck off’, because the past is the most stubborn and hard-headed thing you’ll ever have to deal with. Set in it’s ways, uncompromising, bound to follow one track, the past forces you to accept it (or not), and allows you no opportunity to change it (or not).

 In short, the Past has got nothing on the Future.

-diggy

What I’m Listening To, Pt. 5

“Fields Shorelines and Hunters” - M83

 I earned myself a Man-Walk today, which I found out are actually distributed like Tommy Points by Andy. Andy points? Apparently I earned it by growing up exactly enough to learn how to Not Know What the Fuck I’m Doing. But enough angsty shit, Andy told me “yes, drink” and “yes, walk” and “yes, maybe think a bit…not too much. Dude, you think too much. Everything’s a meta- with you, and you never le…”, and then I stopped listening because I was distracted by something I saw.

 I asked him if I should listen to music while I did it, and he asked me what kind of ambient city soundtrack I would be losing out on. I was walking along the Kent Ave. wharf-y area in Williamsburg and told him the only thing I could hear was the squawking of hipsters, so Andy told me to drown those fuckers out.

 Anyway, halfway through a four Loko later, this is what I was listening to. And this is what I was looking at:

And this is what I was thinking about:

-diggy

What I’m Listening To, Pt. 4

“Wave a White Flag (demo version)” - Elvis Costello

 Sometimes you have to apologize for all those times you get really drunk and tell everybody the truth.

-diggy

What I’m Listening To, Pt. 3

“Oh Yeah” - Housse de Racket

 Hi. Me again. How ya doin’?

 Listen, I just wanted to say that everything’s alright. I know that sometimes things seem quizical/odd/terrifying. I know you worry about me, but hey…c’mon. It’s me. I’m fine. You’re fine. We’re fine.

 Today’s probably the first proper day of Spring wherever you’re reading this. It’s warm, mate, warm. Birds and girls all flitting about, everyone’s in a good mood. I can say with no amount of uncertainty that if you’re reading this, someone loves you. I mean, it’s me. I love you if you’re reading this.

 Things can’t be all that bad, can they? We’re all still here, on the other side of what always seems like Interminable Winter. Here we are! All together! No one’s gone. And look at how much there is sitting in front of us: so much! Man, I’ve got about a million more adventures in me, and I’m gonna try to see how many of them I can plow through during this good weather. Hey, I love that winter builds up our fortitude and thickens our skin and works out some of that fat from around our bellies.

 But it’s for this: the good weather, the good moods. You get to high five yourself when you survive, Oh Yeah you do!

 You ready?

 C’mon, here we go. Allons-y! It’s gonna be great.

-diggy

 What I’m Listening To, Pt. 2

“Lion Eats the Wildebeest” - The Lovely Feathers

 Oh sweetheart…oh, oh sweetheart, oh Painkiller Jane. I love you for your espirito sanctu; you were a child of long blue and white sundresses and garden patches. As a kid your dad held your hand when you crossed streets, so you never looked both ways. Just up into his eyes. He’d never lead you across the great expanse of a City Street without swaddling you. You’re his, his baby girl. The whole vast city cowers before his command. He is/was/will always going to be there, he’ll always keep the bad ones away…the job of men.

 Why would it be any other way? His/He’s Job to your (holy) spirit? The father, the daughter and the holy communion? *chomp chomp*

——-

 Jane parts her hair, parts it like water. Enough on the right side, the rest can be on the left. Left behind is freedom, because control seems right. Heathens call this time the early 20’s. Heathens and terrorists with their dynamite and gel-caps. One never understands why such would undermine a beautiful society, but terrorists are terrorists, are they not?

 At least there’s a system to deal with the detritus, amiright? 

——-

  We grow and learn, Jane. You learned and then grew. You ate and grew *chomp chomp*

——-

——-

 Oh buoyant reality! Oh, oh minty reality!

 O O Piece of mint and Gelt and Felt and felt.

 Twee and tweak and meek and burlap. Why do you escape her so?

 What about her delicate feet disallow her from stepping on you?

——-

 ”I don’t understand why such difficult terrain desires to be so impossible to traverse”

         -Everyone

-diggy

What I’m Listening To, Pt. 1

“It Was Only Love” - The Cribs

For the entirety of this week, my portion of What I Learned in 2010 is going to become What I’m Listening To in 2010. Up there will be the music and down here I’m going to either write a little essay about it or (more likely) write whatever the hell I want to.

 Why? Primarily because I couldn’t think of any decent puns related to the Ides of March, so I scrapped an entire column on the death of Caesar. But also because I’m sick of Tumblr and wanted to change up the format for a bit. What better way to share your thoughts and feelings about incredibly intimate things than by assuming that someone else has recorded a 3-minute pop song that encapsulates it for you? I’m gonna go use this extra free-time to go get a haircut.

-diggy

Today I learned not to ask a stupid question.

Ohhhhhhhhhh, shit. No, no I didn’t. Didn’t learn that at all. Oh well.

-diggy