Like Trying to Hide the Daylight From the Sun

I'm sitting at my favorite musical perch of all time – a small, concrete abuttment at Stubb's in Austin, Texas, watching G-Love, Special Sauce, and the racial divide of the country play out in front of me. I should have known from my arrival: out of work and in search of free parking, a homeless man helped me parallel park a few blocks up. “Thank you,” I told him, shaking his hand through the passenger side window.

“Thank you for not spitting on me and calling me a nigger.”

I blinked. “Why the hell would I do that?”

“Plenty of folks take it upon themselves. Probably because I'm homeless.”

“Well, fuck that.” We live in an ATM world, so I handed him a twenty. “Thanks again, and please: go do something that makes you feel good,” I tell him, echoing the words of the friend who'd bought me the ticket to the G-Love show: please, go do something that you think is fun.

( And yes, the G-Love show is definitely fun... )

Okie dokie, this is an exercise in gonzo journalism or a Lester Bangs-inspired indulgence.  iTunes is set on random, and I'll write about whatever comes up for however long as the song lasts.  We'll see if anything of interest shows up.  A caveat: there may have been a little bit of whiskey involved in the decision to embark on this enterprise, and it's still flowing.

( A thousand words about random songs )

And I think that lyric might have been it for me.  Wow, that's a thousand words of self-indulgence.  Fuck it, post it, be done with it - that's the joy of music, it's the catharsis. 

So I've been rummaging around in my music collection lately (feeling just a little guilty about hitting 100 plays on the Broken Bells album when several of my favorite artists didn't have a single play count due to new laptop) and clicked on Hot Hot Heat's Make Up the Break Down, which I hadn't listened to in ages.  Reminded of how much I liked them, I went to Wikipedia to find out if they'd been up to anything in the last few years, and I discovered that the artists in question were, in fact, Canadian. Walking among us.  Undetected.

Cue the creation of a new playlist with all of my old favorites: Our Lady Peace, The Weakerthans, Finger Eleven, The Tragically Hip, a few Joni Mitchell and Neil Young songs that don't drive me nuts - hey, I didn't know I had a copy of "The Safety Dance," and why yes, I do want to dance - Bif Naked, now that takes me back, damn, don't have any of my Moxy Fruvous on this computer, I'll have to pick up some when I go home next. 

( But I never hear this stuff anymore... )
Anyways, just wanted to express my deep and abiding love for our giant frozen neighbor to the north.  That's all.

Finally caught Alice in Wonderland last night and am trying to figure out if it worked.  (I read it as an attempt to finally make Campbell's Hero's Journey work with a sexually mature female in the Hero role - I'm pretty sure it fails at the very end, but it's going to take longer to pull the various threads together)  There's a lot more of this meta, but I'm still sorting out some of it, may or may not ever actually make it up here, but a few pieces that I felt like sharing right off the bat.
( Attempts at giving Campbell's Hero a Woman's Face )

( The Queen of Hearts and Sex )

( Soundtrack Allusions and Connections )

 

This week's going to kill me.  God, I miss sleep. 
( Some quick observations from the express elevator to crazy... )

Okay, about that sleep thing...