in heaven

Real Emotional Trash

2008-06-23T08:17:28Z

As of right now, I am great.

I just want this to be here.

I am updating my livejournal.

_instereo @ 2008-05-26T13:46:00

2008-05-26T20:46:57Z

I want to scrawl other people's words over everything I own.

Ed Kranepool

2008-05-06T08:03:14Z

New York Mets first baseman Ed Kranepool was asked if the Mets had a chance of winning the World Series before the 1969 season started. He said "The Mets have as much of a chance to win the World Series as Man has of landing on the Moon."

"He's only seventeen and he runs like he's thirty." -Casey Stengel, on why he kept Kranepool on the bench in 1962.

How Yo La Tengo got their name.

Double Dare

2008-04-22T02:58:02Z

If I could make music it would sound like this right now:

Pho-toes.

2008-03-15T21:34:55Z

Hello internet friends and enemies alike,

I caved and bought a flickr pro account. I just uploaded all 157 polaroids that I've ever scanned! I will try and scan more stuff soon and get it up there. Also, older digital stuff of varying quality and importance.

Check it out!

my Flickr.

Vague.

2008-03-14T08:27:19Z

It's alright!

Perfect.

2008-03-04T06:13:50Z

"If you're unfamiliar with the (New York) Times, it's sort of an obituary for subcultures, in that once yours appears there then it's already dead." - Bike Snob NYC

I'll choose red, yellow, and blue.

2008-02-09T07:22:29Z

Santa Cruz is kind of lonely right now.

Born Ruffians are very, very good.

Why would you lie about how much coal you had?

2008-02-07T04:51:08Z

A good friend, a real friend, is one who leaves a mix in your car CD player when you're not there.

Television is scary.

2008-02-04T01:06:05Z

If I had a blog, by definition, would it have to be significantly more serious and self-involved than this could ever be?

I think so.

I was doing my laundry at the Ultramat today and there was this very intense dude in there. He was my height, roughly, and weighed about 100 pounds. Dressed in female clothes, tramp stamp on his lower back, folding his thongs and saying "bitch" every so often. I swear to god he was washing his leather boots and putting them through the dryer. He struggled to put them on under his jeans. Several pairs.

There was also a man folding a very, very large blanket. On this fleece blanket was a gigantic American flag and a violent looking eagle. I really, really wish I had one of those.

"Oh god, Tom Petty." - Ros.

Now, it's time to watch Tom Petty. Oh no, there's a floating, glowing flying V, and a mob of women attacking Petty on his heart shaped stage. His voice sounds so so so bad right now. American Girl, it's time to retire.

(...did I just live blog?)

Get out of Cape Cod.

2008-02-01T10:43:08Z

I'm just going to be the 1000000th blog/journal to say it, but:

Vampire Weekend is the real deal. Wes Anderson meets West Africa. Charisma for days, the songs back up the hype. Listen to "Walcott". Oh, it's great.

?

2008-01-14T01:36:47Z

I was walking home and some high school aged dudes driving someone's dad's black Mercedes yelled out the window at me "indie faggot!" or "hippie faggot!". It was incomprehensible, but I forgot what that was like since it's really been a long time since I've been openly made fun of in such an insolent manner (you know, besides half of UCSC talking about me on livejournal, and making up my tastes).

"Keep the Christ in Christmas" - Fallbrook, CA.

2008-01-05T09:19:42Z

I went to Southern California and it was a lot of fun, but I could never, ever, ever live there. I sat in front of an extremely nondescript, side-of-a-busy-street strip mall, eating the best ice cream I have ever had and will ever ear in my life, and listened to two people talk. One, aged probably 35, spiky hair, sunglasses, british accent, leather, aging C-level rockstar persona. The other, aged 30 (in LA years, that's like 50), wanted to look 20 - an Asian lady with pink hair to match her pink makeup and pink tights, no sunglasses, hoop earrings that you could fit John Candy through on a bad day, and a Kool XL (I'm serious) hanging out of her hand. They are talking about what it was like for the man to see an Ace Frehley solo show at CBGB's in New York City a few years back. They are talking about this as if it is completely, one hundred percent normal to them. Welcome to Los Angeles, this shit happens all the time.

I am driving down Melrose and am trying to turn left on Fairfax or Pico or Beverly or La Brea; they all look the same, it doesn't matter. The light turns green and I don't move, because there is a county's worth of traffic coming straight through the intersection. Within seconds, I hear (and feel) the cab driver behind me pounding on his horn. I inch forward into the intersection. Having moved roughly five feet, I still cannot turn left onto Santa Monica or La Cienega or Olympic or Normandie because of the oncoming traffic, but I have somehow assuaged the driver behind me by moving several feet. The light turns yellow and we both make it onto whatever street we wanted to be on. Funny enough, the only thing that I could do quickly in Los Angeles was eat a six dollar bowl of Matzo Ball Soup at Canter's at 3 in the afternoon on a weekday at the counter. I must have been in and out of there in ten minutes, and it was the most Jewish experience I've had in several years.

I am driving south down the Golden State Freeway (this is "the 5") through downtown Los Angeles and I can only see downtown because I know it is there in my subconscious. I have seen it before and it has not moved, but what moves through it has caused me to not be able to see it. Funny enough, I'd rather see a blurry downtown any day of the week than a semi-blurry Carson, Downey, Commerce, Buena Park, or Santa Fe Springs. The sun does not set through these areas. Everything just slowly gets darker and then it's a brown nighttime forever. These towns just keep going and going and when I get onto the 91 East heading towards godforsaken Riverside County, they just get sparser and sparser and I feel like I'm rolling down a mountain forever, accumulating dust and snowballing all the malls in the world like a glorified Katamari; at the junction with Interstate 15 in Corona, I pick up steam, rolling it up with Temecula and Murrieta and Lake Elsinore and several signs for a casino where Aaron Lewis, formerly of Staind, is playing next week. It looks like I have missed the Brian Setzer Orchestra, but Carlos Mencia is just around the corner. I will not be around that corner. I will be as far away from Carlos Mencia as possible. This is pretty much a rule that I base my life around.

I am driving up Laurel Canyon Boulevard at 4 o'clock in the afternoon on a wednesday. I am effectively killing time. I stop at the Canyon Country Market to get a cup of coffee and sit outside, perhaps sit where David Crosby smoked crack or the Byrds hung out. The coffee shop closes at 3, and I wander about the market aimlessly. I continue up the canyon. I am looking for something. I am looking to try and capture a spirit that so many other people are trying to capture and understand and have been doing so since Roger McGuinn decided it would probably be beneficial financially and personally to plug his Rickenbacker 12-string electric guitar into an amplifier, turn the treble way the fuck up, and have a session drummer shake a tambourine over a crystalline plasticine polyethylene cover of a Bob Dylan song. At the top of the canyon, I reach the intersection of Laurel Cyn (they love to use this abbreviation in Los Angeles) and Mulholland Drive. Hey, isn't there a movie called that? Holy shit. I turn left on Mulholland and head for Coldwater Canyon Avenue. The sun is going down and the glow is magnificent, like nothing I have ever felt before. Everything is bigger, better, and stronger in Los Angeles. The beers are six dollars on tap and they have only two options, the movies are twelve dollars, and you pick your own seat, malls and office supply stores advertise free parking as if it were a strange thing that a mall or office supply store would have free parking. The glow is killing me to my left and I pull over into a park. Laurel Canyon Park. This has got to be it, right? Is this where Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash wrote Our House? This is definitely not the place where the flowers were picked and put in a vase and all that. This is the place where people go to let their purse dogs run free. My car is the dirtiest and oldest in the lot, and I drive a 1998 Acura. I get honked at by the ubiquitous ugg-booted woman in an SUV as I try and turn around and try and park in the lot. I'm parked way up the hill and don't bother to go down into the park where people chat on their cell phones as their dogs play with each other. There's supposed to be something incredibly poignant here, something about the demise of Laurel Canyon as a neighborhood in Los Angeles where it doesn't feel like Los Angeles; where these people who work 25 hours a day to pay for their home in West Hollywood or Santa Monica or wherever are not supposed to have taken over but have, but there's not because it's all over and we're all fatalists; we know our doom very well in the city of Los Angeles, population 3,500,000 at one entrance and 3,950,000 at another (both wrong). This all feels like that really bad David Crosby song on Younger than Yesterday, Mind Gardens. Robert Christgau called it a "completely unlistenable acid meander" and this trip through what I've wanted to embrace felt like one. There were (obviously) no hippies in the Canyon Country Store, just the dudes who ran it and make money off shlubs like me who want to capture some sense of faded glory. At least I wasn't as bad as the dude across the street, taking pictures of the storefront with one of those gigantic camera lenses with several bags on his shoulders that held other lenses. At least I'm not an asshole.

_instereo @ 2007-12-23T02:41:00

2007-12-23T10:41:50Z

Earlier today I was walking around my mom's new house with her boyfriend in Brisbane where I am staying and I saw a bowl of Hershey's Kisses on the table. I said to myself, "Hm, I will eat one of these later!". I came home after seeing two movies (Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and Michael Clayton, both fantastic, and seeing a lot of old friends (also, pretty nice), to find that the bowl of kisses had been replaced with fancier chocolates, an entire bowlful (and a different bowl at that). This is kind of what my mom's new life is. Homemaking (yet somehow still working all the time). It's upsetting. She changes chocolates now.

Well.

2007-12-22T08:58:51Z

Juno was fantastic. Prepare for the Moldy Peaches to get really cool within the next month.

I have been listening to this song non-stop

2007-12-11T03:00:00Z

Here, download this. I can't stop. It's 90 seconds long and it's perfect. Jangly, too.

Primal Scream - Velocity Girl

Can't miss what you forget.

2007-10-12T03:42:16Z

I've gained and lost so much in the past month it isn't even funny.

I really must be procrastinating finishing this essay if I'm updating this and listening to American Football, right?

On the Way Home

2007-08-27T07:45:06Z

"When the dream came, I held my breath with my eyes closed."

I don't really know what I've been doing with myself, but I guess it involves biking and hanging out with people I generally enjoy. A few parties, a trip to LA, a lot of pictures taken that are not digital and I don't have a scanner. Lots of board games, cards, keeping score of life, random visits, overdrawing my bank account buying vinyl, missing and wanting a little bit of things I don't have but that's just the usual ain't it?

If you like music and criticism thereof, read some Robert Christgau reviews. It's interesting to read the work of a brilliant person who isn't afraid of acting like it.

Today I was going to photograph Britta hop the tourist train from our houses to the beach, but it didn't come. This is not a metaphor for anything.

Convoy

2007-07-28T20:21:50Z

If living on a busy street has taught me one thing, it's that I absolutely hate motorcycles who drive by as loud as physically possible. They make my house shake and my ears hurt.

Something to look forward to.

2007-07-26T01:46:27Z

How does a train get lost? It's on rails.

I don't want to fade away/give me one more day please

2007-07-08T21:09:50Z

One relatively embarrassing song that I will probably always unconditionally love.

Visions of Johanna

2007-07-06T00:38:39Z

So, I'm living in Santa Cruz. I moved into a totally awesome house with totally awesome housemates and every day's been pretty fun so far.

I'm still doing a radio show, but at a new and improved time! Wednesday nights, 8:30 to 10:30 is my new show, entitled Teach Your Children, where I play music, and afterwards, from 10:30 until 12:30 is George's new show, Your Weekly Mix Tape, which also rules. Listen at www.kzsc.org, it'll make you happy.

Dear.

2007-07-01T02:26:36Z

So, I just signed onto Myspace, and in the "cool new people" box was Sam Brownback.

Sam Brownback is neither cool nor new, Myspace is done.

Juarez

2007-06-29T10:07:28Z

The sprinklers are going off outside because it's 3:06 AM and I'm just sitting here playing guitar nonsensically in my underwear with all the lights on because I am always the only one home around here. I move to Santa Cruz on sunday and this will all change.

Hahahahaha.

2007-06-10T18:11:22Z

Look what is developing on ucsc_chatter! They always have a finals week "anonymous confessions" post, a la postsecret, and some girl posted the grandaddy lyric "guess who lost the go in the go for it" which happens to be one of my favorite songs ever. I responded, and you can see what happens from there.

Check it.