Archives for posts with tag: music

raincheck

November 3, 10 //

Note the date.
The ticket, not torn.

First time listening to the latest album, I knew I had to see them before the opening track was done:

I dreamed about the few US tour locations with the might of so what, I can do this, do anything, I am an adult! now soon again, Happy New Job, Happy Spontaneity, Happy Halloween, Happy Birthday to Me, Happy Favorite Band for Half My Life and Counting, still staggered by the tracks that triggered and changed me. Still changing.

Ticket, purchased.

Not soon after… knee gone awry. Plane tickets not yet bought, I hoped against hope the twist was fluke, would not take my life. It wasn’t. It did. “Sprained ligaments,” or something, not even six weeks would fix, and I know me pretty well. The pain of so close, so far flung away before the stage, I could not have stopped myself from dancing. I can barely hold back in my kitchen. It would have been a nightmare of tears and joint tearing, permanent damage, maybe, for all my everlasting love.

I have seen them before, in Chicago, 2002, the Greyhound solo to a big scary city I didn’t know a soul in, or need to. Every vision quest starts with a decision, determination, a little bit of crazy, lots of heart.

I didn’t try to sell the ticket, hoping I would be magically healed or dangerously self-destructive, last minute fly to San Diego and burst. But no. I am yes an adult. Thirty years old, today. Gray hairs and acne. Still going through a stage as I limp dance across my own.

They steal my breath and give it back, crush my chest and set me writhing, drink my blood and turn me into light. They taught me things don’t have to mean things to tell stories, the sound of words more telling, instrumental than their meaning, and thingevery thingevery thingevery will be all right.

Maybe some other time then okay?

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monstertime

April 29, 10 //

Narratives

dancing, deepsicks, music, vancouver, writing

Spring is come. I show my body who’s boss, biking top gear, running down blocks, dancing till I drop every jaw every thought chewing out my guts of fourteen hour days of not getting paid to be poor enough, trying to stay awake for the nightlife, a symptom of getting old? a too comfortable bed, but my muscles crave a mission. Go forth and multiphasic cut the floor in angles, step snap spastic, stand stalk thrill.

“Can you teach me how to dance?”

Can you teach me how to stand still.

I miss Vancouver James. He would know what to do, and he would deny it, but he’s better at people. Don’t be afraid to look foolish, is what I want to say. The fear shows and the fear is worse.

Well the Cure’s all rubber necks, hips and broken kneecaps, Suicide Commando, you’re gonna want a fist. But I don’t know how to explain something like “Assimilate,” a darksider staple in Skinny Puppy’s Vancouver. I’d stomp the shit out of that song and awful feelings feeling so far from home and close to where I come from, untamable untellable hell and hearing it now I’m all the none the wiser not dying, you’d have to put me down with a tranquilizer to get me to stop crying.

“Where did you learn how to dance?”

A bowling alley basement in Fargo, North Dakota? YouTube talent shows? Everyone better than me? Alone in my room for years, mostly. The average slice of time I devote to dancing each day/night in my tiny apartment, staining the floorboards with tire-sole scuffs and sweat till I strip to longjohns add it up! the intermission screenbreaks, can’t sleeps, can’t wakes, 45 minutes, I’d say. Give or take. I beat the mouth of my fist into my heartcage, slap the fillets of my abdomen, dance with my teeth, my spine, my spit, my third eye and no self.

Write what you know, right? what you don’t believe in, the reason you don’t know what to do. Until it makes sense. Until you come true.

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you are not dead

March 17, 08 //

Shouts

fake, music, writing, you are not dead

As many of you know, I have enjoyed a long-time, time-and-again collaboration with musician and artist Daniel Reetz of the Fakeproject Corporation of America. After five years of dereconstructing sounds, sharpening words, pushing pixels and losing ground to years-long diversions, we are pleased at last to present You Are Not Dead: A Guide to Modern Living, a project of music and writing to severice good citizens on rightful roads to living well.

I wrote the guide; Dan wrote the music and imaged the manipulations; we both imagined, idead and applied our versions of vision, while a handful of others contributed their talents in small but crucial ways. So gather ’round the tolerated ones and maximize the volume. The project is available for streaming, viewing and download at http://www.fakeproject.com/you_are_not_dead/

Please forward this to anyone who might enjoy it.
Comments to me or Dan (www.danreetz.com) are most welcome.

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how to watch a lunar eclipse

February 27, 08 //

Narratives, Photography

deepsicks, family, home, minneapolis, music, now + zen, politics, school, street art, swoons, victoria

I inherited a tripod from one of my new roommates. It is basic but serviceable. I know there’s no way my camera will catch the moon missing, but the February 21 lunar eclipse is a good opportunity to take out the tripod and practice unmoving.

Speaking of (un)moving, things have been good here in Victoria, BC. I like my job a lot, am learning a lot and am struck pleased by the fortune of the whole arrangement: not just the experience from work and the observation of the library unschoolable—politics, policies, lumbering bureaucracies—but the chance to delay graduation to reflect on what I’ve been learning. These two years have gone so fast. I look forward to finishing school, but even more so, now, knowing I will be prepared.

Plus the custodian looks like Ronan Harris, and that can’t help but make me happy, every morning resisting a squealing salute. And a student union vendor serves the most amazing curry wrap and spicy daal with mango chutney dollop. I add one packet of pepper to remind me I’m a Midwesterner and swoon over the entire meal.

I have been homesick—and strange, to feel it now for Vancouver, the rogue, in addition to Minneapolis and the lingering Fargo ties that bind. Over Christmas Ben introduced me to Sims and P.O.S., a couple of Minneapolis hip hop artists I never had the chance or mind to get into when once upon a time we shared the same neighborhoods. Now I’m tuned in near nonstop, all the Minnesota and Minneapolis references—landmarks and mentalities—making me miss, heart, home sicks. Check out the song “Hot Monotony” and not reel full-body seize fall down, I dare. I’m also completely in love with “15 Blocks” (Sims mp3 download from doomtree.net). Sims and fellow doomtreer Mike Mictlan play the Aquarium in Fargo on March 7, two shows. At least half my brothers are going, and god. I wish.

I text the teenage ones about the eclipse, as I bless their Saturday nights, rib their Valentine’s remind Mom’s birthday is tomorrow, try to make it special. Be good brothers and be good sons. I can send SMS internationally via Skype but the tech does not permit them to respond. This removes the question of whether they would.

When I talk to them on the phone I feel my age plus ten trying to recall being seventeen and the things I thought and did. More clearly I remember the things I didn’t do. Straight-edge, solitary, defined by an excess of absence. It doesn’t haunt me but it doesn’t help much, either.

So. How’s school.

Super Tuesday in Canada, alone, was the positive pits, previewing the expatriate election aches awful sure to multiply, divide me. I love my old precincts, neighbor feller citizens, I love the caucus vote voice, the sheen in our eyes knots in our throats with the ropes wrapped tight, one more year to month week night our hopes the halos we beat the apathetic with love your freedom to question your freedom. Love the decision between a black man and a woman. Love this festering wound up toy nation, a superpower out to lunch corrupt, incorrigible, where the only thing we have to fear is no fear. Ask not what your country can do for you, tell it.

I’m ashamed when ashamed and when having no shame, trying to shine light for curious Canadians so quick to cut down my scarycrow nation then horrified they might have done something wrong. Might have offended, might have hurt my feelings.

You can’t imagine what I feel, or how you could hurt me. Silly.

And I know I’m wrong, stumbling over totem poles, First Nations art.ifacts all over campus, so proud of the heritage you slash we destroyed, fall over the words proper to name aboriginal indigenous “we were here first” but I wouldn’t know the face of it—the faces of First Nations, I see echoes but no peoples—I wouldn’t know my own, before my parents were born? before forefathers stole theirs slash we slashed theirs. Rocking on our heels with quaint ideals, ideas of hell and healing.

Like the admission of shared guilt is what I want to shut us up. To bring us closer together.

Huh.

People apologize for the size of the city. I must be real bored. They fail to recognize that I recognize (and that they might realize, too) the city has a history and an actual downtown where people work and shop and eat and play. Vic has its dislocated shopping malls, sure, but there is a downtown sector, core. The city has gravity. The city has old people and homelessness and hippie bohemians. “Home of the newly wed and nearly dead,” I’ve heard time and time again. Early blooms, hoarse British accents, blood on the sidewalks, pomp severed circumstance. I buy packs of noodles and sleeves of spices from the oldest Chinatown in Canada. In two hours, five times I am verbally solicited, asked begged bullied for change.

I’ve gone dancing a few times. Victoria likes its Top 40, its teenage drinking dancefloor dryhumps and asymmetrical haircuts, fat sneaks skinny jeans and hopeless screenprint collages of birds and skulls and bullet swirls. I did manage to find the house-heads. It’s been awhile, too long, since those indefatigable, predictable but hailed, true, beats blew around me. Not me over or away—every time a song dips dark, dirty, I howl the revelation, revolution, but invariably the tone turns bright. Forgivably. But sadly I am without an industrial fix.

Yeah, so, the transit sucks, I’m bikeless, and seafaring is not a lark but a journey. But I enjoy myself. I love the houses, the mosses, the impending spring everyone keeps promising me’s amazing. There is plenty to take my hand and shove.

So how do you watch a lunar eclipse? You take the tripod inherited from your new roommate in the city you know hardly a soul in and set up outside in the dead-end street courtyard and suddenly you’re part of the show.

You must be here for the moon.
We’re all here for the moon.

What about that phone pole, how’s that working for you?
Not working so well, thank you.

I thought it was supposed to turn reddish and brown.
Hmmm.

And so Victoria strangers chat me up. Shoot me down. I make the mistake, apparently, of not reviewing or learning anew everything scientifically culturally humanly possible about eclipses, lunar and solar, planetary alignments in general, telescopes, time zones, and high-powered lenses, stellar phenomena and the forecasted skies of every city you can name in North America, go! You should also make this mistake.

People bike past and nod, stroll by and smile, tumble from their houses and shout where is it, tripod woman! Show us the waaaaaaaaaay!

I show them the way. I twist the camera dial until dark is brought to light and the lights burn too bright and I think about the people I love and miss in other parts of this night hundreds to thousands of miles from me but looking at the same neat thing happening and though the tripod’s purpose is for unmoving, I walk into the frame and leave my ghost.

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heir to the era, et cetera

January 29, 08 //

Site News

internets, music, writing

Fist-twist the huhhhh? out of your eyes and gaze upon the new empire. The front-end of deepsicks is now powered by WordPress, “semantic personal publishing platform” eXtraordinaire. In less loftiness, I got some new blog software. It’s neat. It’s mighty. It will allow me to do things hitherto impossible or too arcane to figure out and program on my own, like RSS feeds and tag clouds, plus make super-handy tools like categorization and search.

I didn’t plan for this to happen—this massive whoa migration down to the timestamp, the archival hat on should I retain this broken link, keep this mistake, typo judgment turn of phrase I recognize for what it is dull! pretension, abuse of swift language, refrain from refrains and slanted shallow wisdom.

It just happened: about time and a total accident. Tinkering with the Rising to fix the b0rked commenting (it’s fixed!), I stared intently at the interface and imagined what it could do for deepsicks. Mind, this was also after wrestling to no avail with RSS. I knew it’d be a huge undertaking, with free time sans school or not, plus… scary. This is an old site, creeping up on six years. I can learn new tricks, but can it? Silly or not, there’s pride in 1.0. It’s all math, but it seems more logical (math logic making things happen, not reasoning logic that rightly declaims ridiculous doing things a million times instead CSS mapping them in automagical).

Possibilities are endless with scripts, but probabilities are known with what I know. I’m obviously no Luddite purist—lookee this big thing I did!—but I can’t say there hasn’t been a learning curve. I cannot begin to relay my frustration with the WordPress editor: what you see is not what you get, and that’s fine, that’s what I expect, crazily enough, but when I can’t rely on the coding mode to give me what I want—when it changes what I input—that’s a problem, a big one. That said, I am learning new things, and that’s always exciting. Though I don’t let on much ‘round deepsicks, I have became a fantastic library science nerd. To be fully engaged in my own information production, classification, organization, preservation and dissemination is, well, really freakin cool.

Though not a Luddite purist, I am still a purist, and aimed to keep the look and feel essentially the same, at least and especially for the main page. There may be subtle to radical design modifications in the future, but the main thrust for now is putting everything in place, so I can manipulate it as I please when I please. The content itself has changed little throughout, and I did leave in mistakes and links to four-oh-fours. Why change the past to pretend that the world has not in fact moved on?

Though I’ve long been a fan and still am of some things being difficult to find, I aimed to make the navigation more intuitive and comprehensive. Old pages that do something interesting or require a different format have been redesigned and upgraded; the text-based take-or-leaves were gathered up lovingly and given to WordPress to mind. I still have some relinking to do with these latter pages, and bear in mind the perpetual browser compatibility battle. As always, deepsicks looks best in Firefox. I did my best for Internet Explorer but after awhile (several hours) you have to bite your thumb instead of your tongue: Micro$oft, die. I will not waste my time.

So what’s with this RSS I keep talking about? Here’s a quick intro and links to get you started, if you don’t know much about it. RSS advocates always emphasize how it’s for people who use the web a lot. Though I guess that’d be me, I don’t use RSS for the sites I visit often and that update constantly, like news sites, but rather for obscure stuff with great-while updates—like deepsicks, and the Fakes and Andy Filers of this mad world. Because the posts are few and far between, I don’t check these sites often, but when they do update, I want to know about it, and immediately. So git yourself a feed, and a reader if you don’t have one, and never be slow-on-the-draw, left-in-the-dark again.

My feed link is posted on the right-hand side as “RSS Uberalles.” You can also get RSS feeds for individual comments. Do note that in feed readers you can often read entire posts without visiting the actual site. I would not recommend this for deepsicks, as some content, like photos and associated text, will not display properly or at all in a reader alone.

Regarding comments, I’ll be experimenting with the moderation levels. Comments are currently held for approval but only to filter out spam (which I’ve already received a great deal of while working behind the scenes). Any legitimate comment will be posted as soon as I receive notification, and after your first approved comment you can do it at will without my checking (I am unsure if this is based on approved IPs or emails… I guess we’ll find out). I apologize for the inconvenience—better than looking at ads, though.

That’s about it… and of what’s unexplained, I’m sure you’ll figure out. I’ll be working on authenticating the links of redesigned pages over the next week, but I don’t anticipate much trouble. Email me or leave comments if you have suggestions, or to point out any tragic flaws. Praise and glory’s also good. Personally I love how the new features betray and celebrate the depth of the site. The archives, broken down by month, allow for visual digestion of longevity. The tag cloud at a glance reveals the snags and wonders. Oh yes, there are “rants” and “angst.” I’m not proud, but you don’t have to be proud to be honest.

And yet I am proud. I am so proud, I have never been as proud as I am now.

As I trenched through the years gone by, I raided the music folder time capsules, too. System of a Down, Avenged Sevenfold, Tiger Army for crying out loud stomping out shouts, my god all these songs and sounds I hadn’t heard for ages, through my headphones once more through the pixilated memories, connected to the stories at the age of forever was it so short ago? the early aughts of writhing through moshpits, writing up rhythm, just look at the tags. Music. Shows. Dancing.

I am convinced my life could not have turned out differently. I believe it if belief can occur without clinging, without making me fixed instead of fixing the impression I’m time and again spiritually broke and spirit broken and what’s this “turning out” business I’m still burning, I’m still bleeding up. Bent double, but backwards, blown away.

“I didn’t plan for this to happen.” How could I.

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it was summer, now it’s autumn

November 7, 07 //

Narratives, Photography, Shouts

halloween, internets, journeys, libraries, music, school, victoria, writing

Some happy news to share: I got a co-op job in Victoria, BC, from January through April, working at the University of Victoria. This was rather unexpected, as I was looking forward to my term two courses and shucks, graduating (already!) in April. But the job—working with UVic’s institutional repository—was too good to pass up. I will be moving to Victoria at the end of December until at least the end of April (you may recall my visit there last December, with the Mounties and the wax museum , oh my).

As a consequence of taking four months off to work full time in a city on an island famous for its stunning springtime flora and British sensibilities, I will be delaying graduation by eight months, until December 2008 (the summer course pickin’s are always slim, so I’ll need the next fall term to get my money and mind’s worth). Though enthused about the prospect of free time sans homework and related school stress, in addition, of course, to gaining invaluable professional experience while making a considerable killing, I am less pleased with the reality of life once again hacked into four-month pieces. How much longer do I need to learn that everything is temporary. Until I get it right? it wrongs me. I’m choosing it, at least the artificiality. Four months here, four months there, get far and never close. But it may be that making these decisions—a layer of choice over the truth of inevitability—keeps me from the danger of realizing I’m not in control of anything.

In the meantime—that is this time, right now—I am overwhelmed by what I must accomplish in the coming weeks, such as renting out my Vancouver place. Finding a new place to live in a city I won’t be able to visit until I actually move there. Finishing up the current, ever-crushing courses, all within the month because at the beginning of December I’m going to NYC for a two-week practicum at the New York Public Library. I am ecstatic and daunted, naturally. About everything. Completing the term, laying to waste logistics and arriving, there. The big apple to my mini. The can’t stop won’t stop city that never sleeps. I have never been, and I’ll be staying with Anna, the sorely missed. She’s promised me frolics, jaunts and restaurants to die for. We shall go dancing. We shall “do it up.” We shall kick a hole in that city that will heal instantaneously but leave me forever marked.

Following that, I’ll be in the Midwest for the Holledays. I’m unsure of Minneapolis dates, if I’ll be there at all. :/ Fargo will be no less living out of a suitcase, but I suspect I shall be tired of the kindness of couches, burdening of friends, and thus may keep it short, if not nonexistent. If I do wander through, it would be starting December 17th for a couple-few days. I will keep in touch.

Here’s the annual Halloween card. I was Prometheus, damned to perpetually have my liver torn out by a fluffy bald eagle. It was the first time I ever made guts—I was quite pleased, especially considering I came up with the idea, bought the materials, assembled it, applied it and was freaking out my bus driver on my way downtown dancing all in under four hours. The guts are crepe paper souped up in maple syrup and food-coloring fake blood. The next living dead event I attend will definitely see me a gutty zombie.

My birthday followed not far after. Twenty-seven feels older than other degrees of relativity, different, no turning back, especially when I don’t want to. Uncaring that I can’t. I have developed a dent in my face—a crevice between my eyes, all but unnoticeable to others now, I’m sure. This hollow collects shadow that with the cleft in my chin and the groove in my lip where the angel went shhhhh! cuts my face in half. In five years, it shall be distinctive. In ten, dramatic. In the years following that, my whole face will cave, and this dent will no longer be special. A shame. I think it’s beautiful.

So… with a bit of chagrin, and horror, I’ve come to realize I sink more time in Facebook than here. Quantity can’t beat quality, sure, but it feels like deepsicks is always playing catch-up, especially with general news. Maybe it’s because Facebook is more fun, what with the interaction and opportunity for the gibes, games and glory to spill over into the meatspace. Different spaces function differently, no doubt about it, and there can be no comparison, really. But I mention it as prelude to the hope that free time in Vic will afford me the chance to pull d6 outta the one-point-oh. Nothing too fancy (considering how I already broke the rising), but an RSS feed is long overdue, and it’d be nice to have deeper integration among my web playgrounds, especially within this one.

Deepsicks is not more true. I am beyond confused by questions of authenticity and my own authority to assign it, even to myself and my own creations, in closed systems, secrets that don’t know they’re secrets. But it is more something. More less, more or less, the edge of experience I otherwise dare not describe.

On an unrelated, random note, I’ve been heavily listening to Nine Inch Nails’ album Year Zero, which, incidentally, I definitely feel too old for. Even as a teen, I bit my tongue tucked in the corner of my cheek. But this, somehow, snuck up on me. Feels good to know I can still be knocked down by a piano, remastered times a million distortion and lyrics unconvincing but shouted oh so just oh so right.

Yeah.

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raincheck

monstertime

you are not dead

how to watch a lunar eclipse

heir to the era, et cetera

it was summer, now it’s autumn

brave empire

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