It must be time for penitence

Chronic Town. Released Augst 24, 1982.

Five simple songs:

1,000,000

Stumble

Wolves, Lower

Gardening at Night

Boxcars (Carnival of Sorts)

I’m attempting to eschew nostalgia in these reviews. We’ll see how I do. Listening to this album again, almost non-stop for three to four days, I’m amazingly impressed.

It’s a lot darker than I remembered, with only Peter Buck’s (I refuse to say ‘jangly’) light guitar riffs to pick the album up. Otherwise, I’d think this was a Joy Division rip-off.

Listening to ‘1,000,000′, the opening track, I was struck by how much it sounded like a cheap copy of early R.E.M. It’s the boys working it, doing their best, but you get the sense that the fills and breaks in the song came in because they were thinking, ‘uh, what GOES here?’.

Next comes ‘Stumble’ which JM Stipe famously kicks off with the word, ‘teeth’ as he bites his chompers down. An ok, but sort of boring song that doesn’t live up to the potential of Bill Berry’s opening beat.

Wolves, Lower is where the record gets GOOD. The super clean opening riff, Stipe’s little scream. ‘Suspicion yourself, suspicion yourself, don’t get caught’. Brilliant.

From here out, the nature of the band is pretty clear. They have the drive and the desire. They have the hooks and the beat, but they don’t yet have the talent.

For you regular ‘Dirt’ readers, it will come as no shock that I enjoy a little time alone. Thankfully, I’m left handed, so nobody shaking my hand ever has to wonder. The right one is pristine.

Chronic Town is a lot like a wonderful jerk off, but without the grand finale. You feel the pressure build all through the album. And the suspense gets greater and greater. You tense up. You feel the pressure build. You want to take it over the top. Thankfully, Chronic Town leaves off in that wonderful millisecond after release but before climax - the exact moment of zen when it comes to self love.

You sense that Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe want to take it further, but simply can’t. They don’t have the ability yet, and each song is born of the frustration of not being able to finish what they started. But it’s beautiful.

It’s a brilliant debut by any standards and, had I heard it in late summer of 1982, I’d be pretty fucking psyched about what was to come next. What was beyond the moment of epiphany? Murmur. Coming up soon.

THE event of 2008

So, a friend turned me on to Hulu recently. For those of you not in the know, it’s basically a website that gave reason to the WGA writer’s strike. You can watch loads of TV shows and movies, but they all come with commercials. So tonight, as I started to watch The Usual Suspects, I was offered the option of watching a movie preview, and then the film sans commercials, or the film with commercials. I took the preview, and holy christ am I glad I did. We’re in for a treat people.

Fuck yeah Tina Fey in a starring role.

When someone knocks on the door, you should answer it

I’m pretty excited. I’ve been crazy busy with project after project. For the last two or three weeks I’ve been thinking, ‘Christ, where does all my time go’, but it’s been going into good and legitimate things. Score one for a good guy.

I finished (actually finished) three new sets of interview questions. Dave Eggers take #2, Steve Martin, and Jenna Fischer.

Doing them again, after such a long absence felt really great tonight. Drinking a couple of beers, and thinking maybe Steve Martin will point his browser on over to IfPthenDirt was pretty cool.

Still many things left, but it feels like good starts have been made. Sleep well.

When I hug you, I’m not sure how hard to squeeze

In honor of vague posts written while sleepy, I have to say that today was a BIG DAY, or at least feels like it was. Sheesh!

I can’t really go into too many details, but I’m working on a super special secret project I hope everyone will love. I know I do. I’ve finished a bunch of it, and as soon as it’s mildly presentable (tomorrow?) I’ll be letting you all know.

Until then remember that an obsession with the past is just a gadfly.

Please God, I can’t be dead yet. I’m only 32!

OR

How I Caught the Gypsy 

If you’ve  ever stayed at the Marion House, odds are at some point you’ve gone across the street to, well, I don’t want to NAME it, because then a curse will be placed upon me. I’ll just point out that gypsies didn’t have houses, and this place is run by two Lebanese women anyway.

Anyway, purchasing anything at TGHC is a total and complete crapshoot. I’ve gotten one coffee for $1.50 one time, and then two for $3.50 the next. Worse are the (amazingly delicious) breakfast sandwiches. A bagel, a bunch of eggs, some cheese, and a fantastic sausage patty, all for some amount of money, usually just about as much cash as you have in your wallet.

One time, I went over asking to have 4 to-go coffee cups for a gag at poker night. It was explained to me that ‘they’re expensive’ and I was charged  $5.

But their sammiches are really where their adopted nationality comes in. Once, it cost me over $18 for 2 breakfast sandwiches (one w/o meat), a coffee, and a gatorade. See, the cost of the sandwich is nowhere on the menu.

A couple days ago, I went there with a friend. On the way, I joked, ‘What do you think they’ll charge today? I guess $8.63′.

Sure enough, the sandwich and coffee came to $9.01. It’s a bagel sammich for pete’s sake. The following is an almost word-for-word recollection of what happened next:

ME: Um, how much is the breakfast sandwich anyway?

OGL: (speaking very loud and fast) Its450forthesandwich1formeatand2forcoffeetherestisTAX

ME: Oh….(doing math in head) Well,  um, if the sandwich is $4.50, and the meat is

OGL : (cutting me off)THESANDWICHIS450THEMEATISADOLLARTHECOFFEEIS2ANDTHERESTISTAX!

ME : Ok, it’s just that tax is 8%, not 30%.

OGL : (visibly annoyed) Ok, FINE, I’ll redo it on the machine. (pressing keys very slowly) $4.50 for sandwich (click), $1 for meat (click), $1.86 for coffee (click), and TAX (click) comes to…….

At this point she goes quiet, and refuses to look me in the eye, as the register shows a bill of…….$7.88!  I paid her then she went in the back to make the sandwich. At this point, I was delirious with joy at having CAUGHT her.

When she returned, she was asking very loudly, ‘How do you think that happened? What could it have been? I don’t understand!’

But I knew what she had done. She hit the tax button three times, not once, and I told her. She denied it, but I knew that she knew it too.

An Obsession With the Past is Just a Gadfly

Ok, so a word of warning, operation, ‘30 days of Gabor’s’ is in full swing, having just returned from happy hour.

But, I’ve decided to put some energy into a much larger writing project, which is still taking insane shape in my head which is nice. In the meantime, however, I may end up writing less here, though I’ll try to throw snippets up occasionally.

Also, I’m going to attempt writing song lyrics soon. Those are def going up here. Maybe some haikus too.

In the meantime, if you need entertainment, go here. There are a lot of jam bands, but if you can get past that, you’ll find Billy Bragg in ‘82, Fugazi in ‘96, Mike Doughty and Elliott Smith.

And, to round this out, I’ll give what I’ve come up with for resolutions so far for 2008.

1. Open a Bookstore

2. Have at least one drink at Gabor’s every night in January

3. Don’t drink at all in February

4. Put out a 7″ with Will under the name, ‘The Gestetners’

5. Actually work out, at least for a little bit

6. Get a mix CD onto the jukebox at Gabors

7. Have the best mustache at cinqo de mustache

8. Be proud of myself

9. Visit every member of my family, where they live

10. Fix my ear problems

There you go. Bitches get stitches.

It’s so much more amazing than I could ever have thought

Short Sunday AM post. Still recovering from whirlwind extended east coast trip, but the exciting part is the revamping of p–>dirt. Added interviews with Dean & Britta, Peter Bagge, Mac McCaughan, Ian MacKaye, and Owen Ashworth to the newly redone ‘interviews‘ section.

Still plenty of interviews out there, and now that I’m back I’ll return to the ‘3-a-week’ plan, and see what hits. As always, interview suggestions are welcome and encouraged.

It was the blurst of times, or, The Joy of Comix

Today I thought it would be nice to partake in my favorite weekend combo of record and comic shopping. And since I’m in Boston right now, it seemed right to go hit up some of my favorite old haunts. I lived in Boston from the Spring of 97 through the fall of ‘99 and had a route of bookstores, record stores, and comic shops I frequented.

So I took the orange line up to the red line, and then the red line up to Central Square. Even when I lived in Boston, Central Square was a point of some controversy. For ages it had been sort of a radical hotspot/grungy part of Cambridge, but in the late 90’s the funky bookstores were getting kicked out to build condos. I was saddened to see one of my three or four record stores had shut down. Across the street, Looney Tunes was still active so I went in and poked around. I didn’t find any records, but did pick up a Glenn Gould biography for $2, which I’m terribly excited to read.

I kept walking up Mass Ave into Harvard Square, and was saddened to notice that my OTHER favorite record shop had shut down, and is now an eye-glasses place.  Walking further down the street, I realized the shitty townie bar (who’s name I’m forgetting right now, but was something like, ‘The Hammer and Nail’ and where I used to play darts occasionally until someone was stabbed with a screwdriver) had closed down, and was now a chain of some sort. Walking even further, I discovered that Toscini’s (I think that was the name, I might be off) Ice Cream wasn’t there anymore either.

Obviously, and you can see this coming, I got pretty nostalgic for these places I remember so well and so fondly, and which no longer exist.  It was capped when I went into Newbury Comics to discover they no longer sell vinyl at all, and then crossing the street, saw that the other vinyl shop (where Damon Krukowski used to shop, and which was my favorite of all) had also closed, and I think is now yet another coffee shop.

None of this is shocking. It’s just that when you live in a place, it changes gradually and you don’t notice it so much. But when you revisit a place after many years it is radically different, and a little sad. It would be like if you ran into your high school girlfriend, and not only was she married, but she had four kids and a PhD, and you’re sort of remembering when she wore knee high argyle socks.

Everything was made better, however, by spending an hour pouring through comix at Million Year Picnic, one of the fines comic shops in the US, in my humble opinion. I picked up a Jeffrey Brown comic (feeble attempts), three Peter Bagge comics (apocalypse nerd, and hate annual #6), and I FINALLY bought Seth’s Wimbledon Green.

So I’m opening this up to you all, since I know many of you have moved around a lot. What place are you most sad about changing? What place has been most different when you went back?

How much more of this can we take? How much more is there to take?

Well, I gave it a week for the 50 amazing moments thingy - mildly well received, though I really like that 2 of the comments referred to paintings. That’s nice. I should’ve added almost anything by Jasper Johns to my initial list.

Anyway, am feeling somewhat restless of late. Also, the anxiety of waiting for interview responses is starting to drive me a bit mental. In the last month, almost a dozen have gone out, but to date with no replies. Now, I know I can’t be upset or anything, but still I’m so anxious for responses. Of the eleven out, three are to people who had agreed to do them. We shall see, we shall see.

Couple of strange things this week. First, this fine blog was linked to from a porn site. I admit I’m saucy, but……actually the creepy thing is that whatever droid picked up the link did so because of the story I wrote about my brother. So I was linked on a blog about ‘brothers kissing sisters’, which disturbed me.

Also, in the last two days, people have found this site by searching on, ‘people fucking’, ‘living the dirtbag life’, and ‘time to fuck’. Do I really swear that much? Ugggh.

I had intended to write a story tonight, but do believe that will have to wait until tomorrow. Unless I do one late late late after a few beers. Though, I should say that, like most everthing, I rarely write better when drunk. While drinking, ok, I’ll buy that, but not while drunk.

Ok, that’s all for now. Oh, except I had another interactive idea. What are the songs that you’ve ‘given’ to another person, and which you cannot take back no matter how hard you try. I’ll kick t off. I once put ‘America’ by Simon & Garfunkel on a mix tape for my lady friend in high school. We’d listen to it over and over again. I cannot hear that song without thinking of her. Fondly, it’s true, but examples of songs you can’t listen to out of love, anger, fear, hatred, whatever are perfectly welcome.

Because I Said So.

I had an idea today, while riding the mall shuttle. Well, actually it came to me while listening to ‘Holland 1945′ by Neutral Milk Hotel for the 792nd time in the last 100 hours.

There’s something about this song. It just grabs and rips at me. And it got me thinking, as things often do, that if just once in my life I created something as beautiful and, well, GOOD as that, I could die happy.

So, I got to thinking about making a list of ‘things that are so great I wish I had done them and could die happy’.

I’m opening it up to all of you. I’ve thrown in Holland 1945. What have you got?