warmer

It’s been over a month since my last update. I would love to regale all with tales of fantastica, but not much of celebratory or even noteworthy note’s been going on. Joy’s concrete but diffuse and too tied to the dark too deep, especially when I’m out of it.

Saturday morning I got up at eight-thirty because I wasn’t tired anymore. Started listening to the new music thrust upon me or taken upon by myself to take on. And tore around my room looking for some words I scrawled on a scrap at work the other day, a string at the time true but essentially meant for later, hoarded for reference because they come so few these days—words I can recognize as coming close to coming close. They’re gone.

I go to work and come home and apply for new jobs. A year has passed in the Real World, and I want to go back—as though the make-believe, too, wasn’t really fantasy, a realm of imagined interactions, triumphs and consistencies. “I do not want this” is a mantra with nothing affirming I realize nothing trying not to desire anything and wondering if that’s possible or even… desired.

In the long run, this will be a short standing still. I know. We regard the past like we’re wiser now. Guide or hold or shake hard the younger self making the same mistakes, avoiding decisions and running like hell from maybe miracles that yes, take time, yes, take faith blind crippled, weightless uncertainty to crutch/clutch then walk again away from this, and not alone. To see. I’ll live longer than I admit to myself now. What will I confess at a century? What will I regret.

Not this weekend filled with getting done and new music to move me, including Skinny Puppy’s long-in-coming The Greater Wrong of the Right, a surprisingly danceable disc. Though only given a few listens, I find it closer to the ohGr project than previous Puppy albums—I don’t know how Ogre pulls off that quasi-emcee jive, but he’s proven himself a veritable rhymesayer. That is to say: though his vocal stylings run the gambit, for a few songs he’s not singing screaming growling hissing roaring, he’s rapping.

I’ll have to swing this observation past some industrial aficionados (could be heresy, like that’d be so terrible)—I just know of nothing like it in the genre. Given the raves of my roommate, they were sumthin else in Chicago a couple weeks ago. The show being a midweek affair, I stayed home boring. With hope they’ll pass through the Cities next fall… *crosses fingers.*

I also delved into the Umbrella Sequence‘s Sparkler Cliche, Prince’s Musicology, and Franz Ferdinand‘s self-titled not-what-I-expected but thoroughly impressive and already grown in deep goodness. Unugh I love new music. Lastly I gave in to curiosity and picked up a disc (used—Razorblade Romance) of love-death Finnish metal band, HIM (His Infernal Majesty).

I swoon. Can’t help it. Ridiculous and great, the growlly yet crisp guitars and rhythms with catchall melodies intoned with/by tragedy is the definition of guilty pleasure—and I am so guilty and so so pleasured. Guy expounds his love pain death life agony and kills himself and his girl/boyfriend in pretty much every song—it is so wounderful. How can you go wrong with lyrics like “the colder your touch, the more it turns me on” and “it’s not our fault if death’s in love with us (whoa-ah-whoa, whoa-ah-whoa) / it’s not our fault if the reaper holds our hearts”? You can’t.

Also this weekend, I explored the old U of M art building, finding reference to nymz and myself feeling better going where I know I shouldn’t be.

I appreciate art but have never been good at drawing or painting or sculpture. I just like to put things together, which works well because I never throw anything out. I also rescue garbage and peruse junk shops. After months of no ambition and initial artistic misdirection, I finished my rendition of the Last Supper, constructed with a Saver’s decoration standby and two dollars worth of photocopies. I call it “The Last Supper” *nudge wink grin.*

It’s right above the kitchen dining table like proper. Earlier this week I also made a shadow box (for lack of better term) of my brother. It’s something to examine closely (the representation—the life) to fully “get,” but here’s a couple shots for the overall effect:

And finally… Minneapolis floorpunchers, nurse your hyenas to health! The Blood Brothers are back at the Triple Rock on July 2!!! Oh hell yes.