jimmy

Sometimes fan videos can be pretty good. This is SØLVE’s “For Worse.”

I wasn’t particularly close to my dad, so I don’t know why his birthday always feels so big to me. My mom left him when I was eight and took me here to LA with her family, and really that was it save for several visits I can count on one hand. Throughout high school I was so angry with him for basically abandoning me, and then he died a couple of weeks before my high school graduation which suddenly turned that anger into a sort of malaise-esque pall of regret.

It’s not like I’m sitting in the corner wallowing in a pool of my tears or anything dramatic like that. There’s just an extra bit of sadness today.

He would have been 75 today, so most likely he wouldn’t have made it this long. So I guess there’s that, right?

Brendan and I are starting a new podcasting venture, “Werewolf Pod Mitzvah,” a 30-Rock podcast where we watch and discuss every episode of what Brendan says is the best television comedy of all time. I had never watched the show, so you’ll get to hear a person discover the show as it unfolds. Think of something along the lines of “Gilmore Guys” but not as cloying.

In starting this up, I’m forgetting just how much busy work is involved in setting this up. First there is getting the domain and website settled. Then there is making the podcast art. Then there is submitting the applications to get it on iTunes and Stitcher. It’s a slow process, and I just wish there was a way to snap my fingers and have all the administrative things be done.

But it’s getting done, slowly yet surely. Of course work gets in the way, but aside from whoring my fat ass it’s the quickest way to get income right now.

It was dark and raining when I woke up this morning. Meaning the morning commute will take longer than usual. That I have a commute at all meaning I have to go to work. All of this points to pain and misery.

But when I get to work, I’m still buoyant from the weekend. It was odd really, this fire of joy and optimism that was burning inside me. That almost never happens anymore. Even as the sun set and the work day was coming to an end, the indignity and trauma of work didn’t dampen that optimism. I was a little more tired, sure, but not beaten down.

It’s quite amazing just how refreshing that show at the Complex was. Here I am two days later still harping about it.

Last night a world opened itself to me. Re-opened is probably a better term. It was the first time since I moved back to San Pedro back in 2010 that I went out and saw live music performances. I went over to the Complex in Glendale to see a bunch of projects perform in the Renegade Hardware 2 benefit.

I actually feel ashamed it had been that long. For the first several years I was busy with the Dodgers and the Kings and whatever sports came my way. Then, of course, there was The Grandmother. But now that I’m unshackled by these restraints real and imagined, I realize I can do these sorts of things again.

It really was a night of revelations, that with each passing second I was in there little bits of information embedded in the air in the sounds would transmutate into the energy waves and implant themselves in my brain. For the first time in a long time, I’m truly excited by music, excited by the sounds being made, excited by the journeys these artists are taking.

When I walked in Artifact Corruption was onstage performing. It is really breathtaking to see a shirtless lithe figure on stage banging away on an oil barrel and other assorted metal bits augmenting his beats. Immediately I remembered watching a band play a tiny upstairs bar in Santa Barbara back in 1998 or so called Fifth Column Fetish where one of their instruments was a big 5-gallon water jug filled halfway with broken glass and smashed with a microphone. While that was simply noise, Artifact Corruption incorporated that into the beats creating an aggro-noise wonderland.

Next came on Dimensional Dryft aka Falling Skies which really reminded me of the stuff cEvin Key was doing in the late 90s with Download and his solo project. It made me sad that I couldn’t appreciate it back then. But here I was bobbing around to the beats and completely engrossed.

Databomb made me wish I had taken some acid and was able to sit down right in the middle of the floor and just let everything blanket me. Actually I envisioned everyone just sitting around communally all on acid/shrooms/whatever just tripping to the sounds in unison.

But of course I came to see SOLVE. It’s very rare that I get to watch something live that I just discovered in the very recent past. Even when I was going to shows all the time at the Smell in the mid-00’s, that never happened. There it was on stage, the chants, the beats, the music, the sublime. One thing I missed about going to live shows is how the entire building shakes in the onslaught of sound. What was more evident in person was seeing how the music was a journey of transformation.

It was just past midnight by the end of his set, and my ass had already turned into a pumpkin. I left and unfortunately missed Fractured Transmission and WASTE vs. Vuxnut.

It took me a couple of hours to calm myself and finally fall asleep. I really feel like I’m in my early adulthood again with the same doe-eyed naivete. I’m almost sickened by myself.

It’s so tragic that without the energy and will to get my face to look normal, this is what I really look like. And Wifey couldn’t really care.

This was taken the Saturday after Thanksgiving. When I had lunch with this group of motley fools.

On this road trip, I realized just how much of a solitary person I am. I don’t like to describe it as “alone” which implies a sadness and a longing to be around people. I like being by myself. I can keep myself occupied with things that don’t involve another person. In the six days I was on the road, not one moment did I feel sad or lonely or bored. It was actually probably the best time I spent in 2016.

One of the things that peeves me is when people think being solitary is horrible. One of the co-owners of the company I work hates seeing me eat by myself during lunch. Usually I have a book or a crossword with me, so I’m fully entertained. She always asks me why I’m sitting by all alone. I tell her that no, I have the puzzle or the book, so I’m perfectly fine.

I’m guessing this all goes back to my childhood. At New Year’s my aunt asked me about going back to my old neighborhood in Zachary, LA. She asked if I went to see my old friends. I realized that I didn’t have any friends there growing up until I was 8. Well, there was Brandon who lived several houses away, but we didn’t become friends until we ended up going to the same school in first and second grades. What I remember most was playing by myself in the backyard, imagining games, kicking off the tops of ant hills and running without getting bit, pretending I was Chi Chi Rodriguez with the putter.

So yes. The solitary life is the one for me. At least right now.

I was reading something Henry Rollins wrote in his LA Weekly column recently, and he said that with the whole Trump thing we should just drown ourselves in music. And I’m more than happy to do that especially since I have an unsatisfying desk job. As I’m listening to all this great new music from musicians like Kanga, SØLVE and Dead When I Found Her, one essential part that is missing is the album art.

Part of consuming CDs and records and cassettes was having the liner notes open in front of me while the music was playing. If there were lyrics I’d follow along with it. If it was just the art, I would sit and stare as the music enveloped me. Sure, the music is as accessible as ever, but it’s much harder to fully embrace and absorb the music.

I guess if something comes along and really knocks my socks off, I’ll buy the LP if it’s available to get the album art that way. But it’s just not the same.

I know I’ve said I will never sleep with anyone who has abdominal squares, but they sure do look pretty don’t they? Don’t worry. I’m not changing my mind on that — too many bad sexual encounters with guys with abs for me to renege. But they’re fun to look at, like little porcelain dolls or antique figurines that are just too precious to play with everyday.

Gawking at the cover art aside, I’ve been listening to SØLVE’s album The Negative a lot at work today. In the low volume, it’s this engrossing mix of beats and drones with some vocals barely audible that can make for some good background.

As I got home and actually listened to it at a proper volume, the immensity of it hit me. It opens with a soundscape which envisions walking around at night in a desolated world. “Out of the darkness into the fire,” Brant Showers sings in repetition during the opening song “The Negative (Perspective 1)” as the soundscape changes into a slow driving beat that illuminates the shadows. “What Remains” follows with a driving chase accompanying the chant “Eat you alive, I will eat you alive.” If only…

As you listen through this album, you hear these intricate sounds and beats mixed with repetitive almost-chanting vocals. On his Bandcamp, Showers writes his mission statement for SØLVE:

“SØLVE serves to express concepts of self-reflection and spiritual conflict/exploration through alchemical and hermetic ritualism. The process of breaking down to rebuild is an extremely personal and often discouraging path towards addressing faults and limitations, and digging deep within can often reveal the aspects of ourselves that we are not always prepared to discover.”

We can see where he’s trying to get to, and it’s pretty arousing to hear his journey. This is music that gets me hard and keeps me hard. I don’t know about the alchemical and hermetical, but there is something a bit magickal brewing for me in here. “Let the light divide you and breathe it into me,” Showers sings on “The Negative (Perspective 3).” See? Keeps me hard.

It’s not as subtle and esoteric as COIL, especially the later-years COIL, but sometimes you need something a bit more direct. Sometimes you need just need a good hard fuck rather than foreplay and teasing.

Bandcamp

The air tasted heavy in Louisiana. While unseasonably warm the three days I was there, it was a familiar swampy warmness. Rivulets of sweat forming on my brow while I walked the levee walls of the Mississippi River bank in the Capital District at 8 pm; as I was standing in the Second Baptist Church cemetery in Jackson where my father and older sister are buried; while walking from where I parked underneath the interstate to Parrain’s where I had dinner my final night in Baton Rouge.

Things are changing there, even from when I was there last time in 2013. In my “hometown” of Zachary, they are building an Americana. Actual sit-down restaurants have sprouted up on the east end of town out by where the Wal-Mart is. In the Capital District, they are trying to transform it into an actual city center with nice restaurants, shopping and open spaces.

But it also feels familiar. Maybe it’s all the romanticism and nostalgia I feel for the place, but I actually do think I could live here again. As I was telling Tyson the other day, I know visiting for 72 hours is a completely different thing than actually living in a place. But that’s the thing about these little vacations, you get to ignore reality and just get to bask in the romance of it all. Although, to be honest, I don’t get this feeling from any other city I have visited, not New Orleans, Austin, Vancouver, Seattle, Oklahoma City or San Francisco. Just Baton Rouge.

One thing I realized on this road trip was that I need to create more. Whether good or bad, it’s time to create create create. Whether it’s words, music, pictures, smut, what not, I have to create things. Must must must.