their plan was to knock me out the top of the game:

I know I should probably blog today - I don't want to go two days in a row without doing so quite this early in the year - but I said I would probably be talking about my top albums of 2008 and frankly, gentle readers, I just don't care to do that right now. however, I have been pretty preoccupied today by a variety of potential new year's resolutions, and I feel like I have narrowed the list down to a level that is doable and significant; since I'm such a big screaming deal, I have decided that these resolutions constitute a blog that you will enjoy reading.


I'm glad you agree, gentle readers. somehow I knew that you would.



- get ripped by June 1st. this is partially motivated by the idea that if I'm really hardcore about the gym and my diet for about six months, whatever level of fitness I achieve by that point will be something I can maintain with a more reasonable level of effort in the foreseeable future. mostly it's just because I'm really vain.

- become at least moderately educated on one new subject a month. Derrida and Althusser have already been awarded January and February, respectively, but hopefully this will eventually lead me a little further out of my intellectual comfort zone.

- only hang out with strangers whenever possible in 2009. there are certain exceptions to this rule, of course: certain people are grandfathered in, and if I haven't seen you in six months or if we only talk on the internet for the majority of the year, you're exempt. but by and large, the people I've met so far are boring (sorry about your luck, people I've met so far) and I am determined to cultivate a social circle more reflective of my tastes and goals.

- write a rap album. I know I say this a lot, and frankly, I've probably got two albums' worth of rhymes written. but when I say 'write a rap album' I mean edit and practice twelve raps to the point that I would be comfortable performing them in front of a vast sea of humans I do not know personally. I'm talking about some shit that is purely discipline and muscle memory, you know? by December it shall be so.



I feel like this is enough to keep me busy for twelve months and still have time for weekend hilarity.

stay tuned to this bat-channel for further musical revelations this week.





(but I overstand, they truth is all lame:)

I was drawn with larger hands:

one of my New Year's resolutions involved a blog a day - and I know that I say that a lot, but I meant it that time, gentle readers, but between moving into my new apartment and an impromptu trip to the emergency room, it just hasn't been feasible the last few days to sit down for more than ten minutes in any one spot or have more than four thoughts in a row.

so, to make up for it, here is my more than slightly belated top twenty albums of 2008, which I will spend the remainder of this week elaborating on - complete with Albums That You Think Are Awesome But Actually Sort Of Suck(tm).


onward!




TOP TWENTY:

#1: Girl Talk - Feed the Animals
#2: The Cool Kids - The Bake Sale EP
#3: Black Milk - Tronic
#4: Invincible - Shapeshifters
#5: T.I. - Paper Trail
#6: Squarepusher - Just a Souvenir
#7: The Breeders - Mountain Battles
#8: Blizten Trapper - Furr
#9: Why? - Alopecia
#10: Max Tundra - Parallax Error Beheads You
#11: Vast Aire - Dueces Wild
#12: Atmosphere - When Life Gives You Lemons You Paint That Shit Gold
#13: GZA - Pro Tools
#14: Lil' Wayne - Tha Carter III
#15: Tapes 'n Tapes - Walk It Off
#16: Subtle: ExitingARM
#17: Food For Animals - Belly
#18: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!
#19: dj/rupture - uproot
#20: Kanye West - 808s & Heartbreak


HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Jaguar Love - Take Me to the Sea
Spiritualized - Songs in A&E
The Walkmen - You & Me
The Bug - London Zoo
Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours
Scarface - Emeritus
Moe Pope & Headnodic - Megaphone
88 Keys - The Death of Adam


SOMETHING I AM LISTENING TO RIGHT NOW THAT YOU SHOULD WANT:

Gas - Nah und Fern (box set madness!)




and with that I am spent. dinner demands my attention.


until next time.




(and holding's not for strangers, it's for friends:)

rememberin' where I been:

it is quarter ‘till four in the morning as I am writing this; I have to be at work no later than eight thirty - about four and a half hours from now. there is no sane reason at all for me to be awake at this hour, much less blogging, but there comes a point in the insomnia experience where you just accept that tomorrow is going to be a very difficult day and it would be best for you to find something to occupy yourself with in the meantime. fortunately for you, gentle readers, that something is a blog for me.

insomnia has been the bane of my existence (or at least in the top five) for almost as long as I can remember. I’ve never been an especially sound sleeper, but sometime around my junior or senior year of high school, things took a decided turn. it became damn near impossible for me to get to sleep before midnight or more likely one a.m. regardless of what time I had to be awake the next morning, which necessitated a lot of sleeping through first period for the remainder of my high school career. since then, I’ve mostly stuck to evening classes and night work out of simple convenience; I can’t sleep until I’m totally exhausted anyway, so I might as well accept the fact that I’m usually going to be up until six in the morning.

but now I have a day job, and some days are infinitely longer than others. I can handle two or three days on a couple hours’ sleep - four at the most - but then I crash, and when I crash, I’m out for twelve or thirteen hours, which means I wake up at noon and can’t sleep that night - rinse, lather, repeat. the only thing that’s ever worked in terms of getting me to go to sleep is running myself absolutely ragged at the gym twice a day and then a handful of Benadryl two hours before I head to bed, and it’s not very often that I actually have time to hit the gym twice a day (once is an achievement lately, but I digress.)

it’s more a mental thing than anything else; my brain insists on thinking about really, really irrelevant things if it gets bored, and I have always been easily bored. and if I actually have something important to think about, like all the apartment stuff I need to do tomorrow (which is now today) and the St. Mary’s paperwork that needs to be done next week and a handful of equally significant Things To Do, well, I end up having nights like this where I get an hour and a half of sleep before midnight and have to make due for the rest of the day. the part I’ve never understood is my brain’s ability to keep me awake in spite of myself. I am exhausted right now; my body is heavy and my eyes hurt and I want sleep like nothing else. but as soon as my head touches the pillow, I am suddenly wide awake. I get up and make a sandwich - back to being exhausted.


and we’re now coming up on four thirty in the morning. I do believe I will make a trip to Wawa and buy the absolute biggest can of Red Bull they have. wish me luck, gentle readers. I expect that I will need it.




(I remember how hard it is out on the block; every time you turn around somebody get shot:)

horizon west, pt. II:

more than eight years later, I am far from surprised to see the embers long residing in the back of my eyes should roar to flames; near a decade from the first I authored and ain’t nothin’ changed. the sentiment remains - I kept it, aged it well and rearranged most of the words you heard a while back; I’ve traveled strange and unfamiliar roads that cost me dear since then, exchanged unlived years of my life to catch sights perceived for seconds, never settling, fashioning each and every word heard into the sharpest of weapons to cut the true from out the false, separate the diamond from the dross, desperate to cheat a creeping death no matter the cost, often I cut across the fault lines I’m always able to find in foundations laid long past in an almost endless line of minds that mostly testified to selfishness and to failure of faith - so much so that I’ve despaired of anything to embrace beyond the blades and the bottle - but now I’m ridin’ with you and I’m reminded that for all my wisdom, I can be such a fool.

this is older than my whiskey, than the knives up my sleeve; a secret long held sacred like “I WANT TO BELIEVE” in a future I can see so clear like Gibson Praise, no matter that the months go by and these pages fade, I remember every word, I’ve not forgot a single glance, a catalogue of solar flares shot out of one fortunate chance - whether a dance you don’t remember or a kiss that doesn’t age, it’s been written for the longest time; believe me when I say that we might “wash off all the dirt’s been done and write off wasted time - for you I and at least deserve each other’s peace of mind” - yeah, that horizon’s farther down and might not still lead west, but that line’s at least eight years old and I’ve not revised it yet. and sky high or stone sober, we’ll still remedy the fall so many still expect to die of when they need not fear at all, for there is more than just the physical we’re bound to live through - and every time I see you dance, I believe that anew.

I believe in you - that’s my truth and I’ll rep that to the death, until the end of the world, until I run out of breath - which I never will do, these lungs pump strong in my chest, ready for whatever comes next, from Iron City to the bent left that don’t recognize no borders, by the beats we’re possessed - everything I ever wrote was supposed to be my best, but I knew a while back my best would be Horizon West, so I’d suggest y’all clear a path - thou shalt not test or disrespect - I put my heart in this one and consider myself blessed to see rewards for all my work but I never would have guessed that the answer would have been one that I already know, that I hit upon in writing more than eight years ago. after all those years I spent teaching myself how to fly, your company’s a kindness as we burn through this eastern sky,


so this I dedicate to you - muse, light, life, and friend; know that I will be here waiting should you come around again.




(wash off all the dirt’s been done and write off wasted time - for you I and at least deserve each other’s peace of mind.)

seeking a friend for the end of the world:

I have been in a pretty foul mood for the last couple of days to the point that today I became convinced that the only real solution to the problems at hand was fast food, bad action movies, and a trip to the liquor store in that order. while I set about my mission, it began to rain - and I mean seriously raining, too. the kind that obscures the road and forces you to turn the music down and somehow only ever happens when you're driving. in my rear view mirror, the sky was almost black, but looking out the windshield, there was a single, fluffy cloud and nothing but clear blue sky, which created the impression that it was somehow raining solely on me.

and while I do not appreciate the universe making sport of my dilemmas, problems, and situations, I did smile a little bit even though I tried not to, because like it not, it was pretty funny.

ringleader man:

so I’m killing time online during my lunch break at work a couple of days ago and I clickity click my way over to metacritic, which informs me that today marks the release of the new T-Pain album wait wait wait what the hell is this? T-Pain has an album? T-Pain has three albums? T-Pain is actually a real person? I thought he was Pestilence incarnate, given flesh to roam the world and unleash the AutoTune plague upon us to herald the end times. oh no, gentle readers. he is a real live producer slash rapper slash crooner of many hooks slash generally drunken shaker of dreads.

and I felt a certain obligation to listen to the album, which is titled Thr33 Ringz. that is ‘three’ with two threes where the ‘e’s should go and a ‘z’ at the end of ‘rings’ where the ‘s’ would traditionally be.


yes, I felt that I needed this in my life.



first, I would like to say that there is one thing about this album that is pristine in its perfection, and that thing is “Superstar Lady”. it is three minutes and seventeen seconds of trumpeting synths and canyon-deep bass and super future 21st-century sheen just dripping off of everyfuckthing while T-Pain singsong-raps his way through the anatomy of some phantom hottie and actually makes the AutoTune sound like a neat idea for once in his life. if this is not the single, surely I do not know why, and if you cannot dig this track, then motherfucker, you ain’t got no shovel.

as for the rest of the album…I don’t know what to make of it, honestly. it falls far enough outside of my realm of experience that I’m not really sure how to evaluate it. T-Pain tries for the rapper/singer/producer hat trick, and dude can put together a bangin’ single, which is what I was expecting from Ringz - too many skits, some super weak filler and seven or eight Singles. but that is not what he did - for better or for worse, I think he actually tried to make an album out of it. there’s some halfass cohesion to it in the production and that bizarre sung rap halfway hook style that really only Cee-Lo is allowed to do.


if it wasn’t for the AutoTune all over everything, as much as I hate it, it’d be possible to forget that this was (in theory) a T-Pain solo album. there are approximately three tracks that do not feature a guest; the guest in question is almost always the focal point of the track - T-Pain’s lyrics, if we must call them that, always come off as a chorus that’s gone on far too long. some things stand out, but not always for the right reasons. “It Ain’t Me” is another potential Single, if only for the T.I. verse (because there is no such thing as a bad T.I. verse. don’t question it; only haters or lames would question it. ask T.I. he’ll tell you.) and then there is “Karaoke”, where T-Pain is dissing somebody, I think, and generally losing the beat while Khaled yells some of his usual unspecific shit. the beat sounds like a G-Unit B-stringer should be using it to talk about his sneakers and maybe call Game a faggot. where the hell is the sparkle and the synth, T-Pain?

altogether too many "Karaoke"ish tracks and not near enough "Superstar Lady" from a guy who's made his name with single after single. maybe this is an average to good R&B album; I wouldn’t know and I can’t say either way. what I can say is that T-Pain is spreading himself pretty thin a la Lil’ Wayne in 2008 without any of the skill Weezy has behind the mic to carry him in his many weaker moments. there’s two certifiable Singles and little else that stands out, even on the production side of things. while I’m impressed that he tried to make an album at all (and has apparently made two previous - when the hell did that happen?) dude definitely sounds like he belongs behind the boards and maybe on the hook from time to time. slow it the hell down, double back to “Bartender”, and get your shit together, b.




(ice out all yo’ fingers, take you out and make you famous:)

flash point:

today's blog is a challenge. my day has been filled by work and insurance and apartment hunting and all sorts of bureaucratic unpleasantness and I really do not have much to say other than 'my eyes hurt and I would like to go to bed now'. I have half a review of the new T-Pain album and it is both insightful and entertaining, but it is only halfway done and you, gentle reader, deserve better, so it will have to hold until tomorrow.

which does not leave me with a whole hell of a lot to say just now, and thinking is becoming more painful by the moment. what I need now is a blog that is long on substance to assauge my guilt and short on effort to allow me to sleep. it is a delicate balance I am attempting to strike here, but I am a professional driver on a closed circut course, and it is part of my god-damn job to excel under pressure.

and so, with this in mind, I give you Zeitgeist. sometimes totally awesome, sometimes totally didactic, talking for two solid hours without getting tired of itself: it's almost like I'm in the room with you! and it hates banks as much as I do! and unlike yours truly, it has both a 'pause' and a 'stop'. it is the best of all possible blogs I could have posted today, so if you need more than that from me tonight, America, you are fresh out of fucking luck and I am sorry about it.


andIcollapsenow.



(she's addicted to the flashin' lights, camera, action:)