Things she won't appreciate

"I love you so much I touch your eyeballs while you sleep."

Vengence of the Lizard King

Oh no! Jim Morrison's time-traveling clone, The Lizard King, has returned to wipe out the monkey race that eventually spawns Bill and Ted! Will ? (of the Mysterions) and Sun Ra be able to convince Ray Manzarek to come out of retirement to stop him? ALL NEW ACTION!

Amy and Josh show dialogue (old)

Josh: Now everybody likes the Slits. If we had a band, we could be this good. We don't have a band, or instruments.
Amy: I don't like the Slits.
Josh: Well, then, we don't have to have a horn section.

Ann Arbor Two!

Did you know: Some people call Ann Arbor "Ace Deuce" or just "The Deuce."

This is the full mp3 mix I made for Carson, which wouldn't fit on any of your mortal CD devices.

here. Forty songs of rock, noise, pop and folk, including The Rants, Saturday Looks Good To Me, Nomo, The High Strung, Cornish In a Turtleneck, Isaac Schankler, and more. In going through this, I'm already thinking about the music that I left off (I couldn't figure out a way to make Binary Star fit in the mix) and what would go on the next one.

Places drunk guy told me to see in SF

More for my reference than yours:

Truly Med on Valencia between 16th and 17th.
Pancho Villas Tacos.
Aztecha 16th and Market (he swears by the mole)
Sparkies (24 hour "American" food)
Zeitgeist for the Bloody Marys.
Kan Zaman on Haight
Mejouls for tapas or top-off (he swears that if I take a girl there, she'll "let you fuck her in the ass, man, the food is that good.")

Multiple topographies

Greg Afinogenov talks about "topographies" versus "biographies" in this blog post, including the following line:

"Though there may be several ways to understand this or that historical figure, the topographer must commit to choosing one interpretation."

In topographer, he's talking about people who write histories of place (at least, I think he is), and Greg's relying on a post-modern (instability of facts) framework to pose his assumption.

But must this be true? Certainly, given an apatite for abstraction, where each option for transience can be met: the author commits to a single interpretation even if that interpretation includes multiple nested interpretations; no matter the depth a deconstructed text is still a text. Even if that text changes, there's a limit to what can be perceived by the audience, etc.

There is, however, no need to restrict this to topographers (a term I like regarding with expansiveness perhaps because I am not a topographer). Those same restrictions are necessary for biographers—even an imagined biographer who tells the story of a life by reliving that life would be necessarily tied to any one given interpretation at any one given time, especially if meta counts.

Which brings me to a challenge: I would like to see stories of place that encompass multiple sets of facts, as much as is possible. I would assume that this is best handled by multimedia, as different media necessarily imply different perspectives due to material constraints. I would assume that this would be parallel and dynamic, making the restrictions on sets of facts more incumbent upon the practical realities of the audience rather than the work itself—it should be impossible to see all of it at once (tangent: unfair art?). To ideally detach itself as much as possible from a single set of facts, it should invite interaction and mutation.

Perhaps selfishly, I'd think this would be best set in Los Angeles, both because I'm here and because it is a city diffidently aware of the difference between portrayal and reality, and one that (even as it exports them) eschews easy narrativization.

Ann Arbor in sound

A pal asked me about a song from the great Ypsi punk band The Submarines, which I put on a recent mix (which I'll upload here pretty soon). Did I have any more stuff?

Well, yeah, I used to write about local music. I had plenty. So I started putting together this mix, and fussin' with it and fussin' with it… Basically, it's the best music that I found while I was working at Current, writing my column, and that I had digitized. Which means that some of it is actually from before I took over, some of it is from later (because I'm a goddamn cheater), and some stuff just isn't on there (Tadd Mullenix, for example, I had a tape with a fantastic version of Hyped Up Plus Tax… And I'm just not set up to rip my 7"s).

For some folks, though I can't imagine that there's actually a very significant overlap, a lot of these songs were on a CD I gave away for a contest when I was at Current.

And as soon as I get done uploading it, there'll be a longer version, which has a lot more weird stuff on it that just didn't fit on a CD.

Here's the link to the music.

And here is where I swiped the image from.

Funemployed?

I've been out of work a week now, and I'm at the musing point, where jobs like this still seem plausible.

An elderly man needs a caregiver; also he believes he's being persecuted by aliens? Sign me up, jack, even though my bullshit detector's clicking like a Geiger counter at Chernobyl.