Strange and Unproductive Thinking -or- You Tell Me

The Internet is Too Much With Us…

Is this just my own way of gettin' wistful, or something... over some deluded psychosis, born from Internet-cooked paranoia and early-onset-curmudgeons, -that I feel rattled. Rattled. The table that was set with my friends at each chair seems to scatter itself clean. Steady temblors, ever-surging, up and around, from the digi-world, the taskmaster inside our crystal balls telling us of the next event, the next happening, all of it happening all at once –

-We  have no chance, (do we?) no hope, to catch our breaths as we sluice down the cascade of status updates, leap-frogging link after link to keep up on what just happened, which famous person just died, what new lie the politician pushed, what new song that one new band just put out from their brand new album that more than half of your friends have already heard …and yet you haven’t yet… what’s wrong with you

– Not fast enough, friend, keep clicking; no, ...no sense in reaching out to grab your plate at the table, no sense in worrying how the place mats and platters and tea-cups of the friends around your table get slowly rattled out of place, out, away, along the thin, failing tablecloth and towards the edge, off of it, shattering down somewhere below – as they, themselves, your friends' smiling eyes morph into the two-dimensional avatars of profile pictures, their correspondences snipped down to two sentences…And maybe I'll check it on my phone, when I stop the car.

I’ve invited you to the event:
Come sit with me and listen to a record… Let’s listen together, share quips and appraisals of the sounds and lyrics, the ambiance and the effect. I am hungry to listen, made tired by what Daniel Burnham called "this great hurry of my life..." -by running to see, to hear, to see that again and hear something else now…
RUSH--
...
FURTHUR

Give me more to squeeze through, more than the crevice of time I have to shoulder-and-shimmy through, from one day job to the next, between grocery-grabbing errands and the gym, between family visits and, oh yes, enough sleep at night? More than just this amount of time to take in a work…more than just seeing you at the side of the stage… Hey, how's things?

I am over St. Vincent. I am over Florence. Wilco and Feist were already given enough smirks and snarky cast-offs by a laundry list of ostensible culture-zines and counterfeit critics that I let their latest albums dwindle down my playlists…Das Racist are on magazine covers and what should that mean to me? One of these days I’m going to sit down, proper, and listen to that damn Laura Marling album – but then, what about Lana Del Rey?--am I to fall for it and bite on that hype, ...will I be left behind when she turns out to be the real thing? And then there’s that new Future Islands album, the swayed fan in me is anxious to hear it – and why do I feel what could be the inklings of weird tears of half-joy and half-unhinged, when I hear supernatural/melodrama-freak-show director David Lynch singing, with an aching passion, over a techno-pop track… "I'm gonna have a goooood daaay today..."

~

How mad we all must be…
I feel for you musicians… On your end, there is the work, the writing and the recording…but then also, inevitably, the keeping-up-of-appearances, the shows, the concerts, the steady status updates to firm up your Presence… But then there’s the releasing… Look at how much, how fast, so many many many others are putting their stuff out there – how it must be a battle to not let that eat at you…as I, myself, here, am battling against a disenchantment born from the farcical flurry of hey-hey-look-at-this, this is it, the one you need, the best thing ever…across the boards, blogs and tumblrs...

The next thing, the current thing… Music news writing is just too much to reach for on a national scale. Turn on your crystal ball and type upon it – a cluster of gaseous glowing orbs, these blogs, are more than ready to tell you about the latest, the latest what – Odd Future? Skrillex? Or the 50^th anniversary of the Rolling Stones? It's already posted, friend. Check it.

Is the rest just noise?

~

Don’t call it a freak out. Don’t call it a comeback.

Just taking a nice morning, here, with some music… (listening to some new demos by Ypsilanti-based songwriter Matt Jones and his group, the Reconstruction, as they chop and churn out a warm, brisk ballad, tidal-wave drums, swooning strings and percolating banjos accommodating their howling chorus  – “What’s it Say? What’s it Mean? I don’t know – you tell me!”)

So what then, this is just…a reaffirmation of an unwritten mission… to lose myself in whatever piece I can find – whenever I can find that time.

That song might be your song – I’m not going to stress out and try to coerce fate – if I tumble down to the table with my headphones on, at just that right time, -if I strut out into this infant winter air with my ear buds in and yours is the one – then I’m going to tune out all this, all of this worry and all of this digi-dread…and get lost in the work.

Some people go camping and sleep outside. Others go fishing. Some go to the movies and others might crochet.

I’ve just always listened to music. And tried to feel every sound, timbre, wave…

Tried anyway. Will continue to…

What’s it mean? I don’t know…you tell me…