Sound and Fury

A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

s + f = 0
.: |s| = |f|

Unless both s AND f = 0, then:
Both s AND f are quantifiable and non-zero.

So:
Sound = x (an integer)
Fury = -x
or vice versa.

Which means:
Positive sound + negative fury = nothing (x - x = 0)
Negative sound + positive fury = nothing (-x + x = 0)
Negative sound + negative fury = something twice as bad (-x - x = -2x)

But
Postive sound + postive fury = twice the sound or twice the fury
depending on how you look at it

Either way, sounds good to me.

Post-everything

I'm sick to death of irony. I'm also sick of tension, tolerance, sarcasm, and the despotic imperialism of the postmodern, along with the smug condescension of its legions of followers. Who knew relativism could be such an absolutist, totalitarian dictator? Modernism gave us two world wars and the Holocaust before we wisely gave up on it. So after all the dismantling, all the deconstruction, all the touting of pluralism, what do we have? Hipsters. We may not be hell-bent on assimilating the Other anymore, but we certainly don't embrace it. We just co-opt it and sell it, and if you're not buying, you're a bigot.

Pardon me, but what the fuck?

I pray for the return of narrative, beauty, and common struggle.


+ (See John Leland's Hip: The History, The Baffler's Commodify Your Dissent, & David Brooks' Bobos in Paradise)

Playing:
Knut - Terraformer
Ocean - Here Where Nothing Grows
Stars of the Lid/Labradford - The Kahanek Incident

Shirt designs

New Rosetta shirt design, silver ink on black fabric:


This will probably be modified into a zip-up sweatshirt shortly, with only images on the front and a larger body of text on the back.

I'm also starting a new series of five t-shirt designs, with one for each different star system from disc 2 of The Galilean Satellites: Deneb, Capella, Beta Aquilae, Ross 128, and Sol (the Sun). Each design will be limited to 36 shirts.

Playing:
Sunn0))) - Black 1
Balboa / Nitromegaprayer split
Ion Dissonance - Solace
Byla - s/t
Stars of the Lid - Per Aspera Ad Astra

Americana

Found while passing through the great state of Connecticut:



File under "serendipities of the road."

Ocean was truly excellent this weekend in Maine. Many thanks go to Stella from Sinferno who not only gave us a place to stay, but fed us bagels and hot cider for breakfast at Arabica. Portland is a great town, and everyone is nice to the point of it even being a little weird. There are too many white people, though, so we played a little game of I-Spy-the-Minority.

To add to the surreality of the weekend, our friend (and old-school Relapse veteran) Robert Williams of Nightstick was at the show, since CWAF (a semi-related Weymouth band) opened the evening. I haven't seen him in person since we played in Boston with Dysrhythmia back in March, though he wrote me a letter over the summer. He's one of the most gratifyingly strange people I have ever met -- a genius of sorts, obviously highly educated and very articulate. Still, his cocaine use (which he most likely would not define as a "problem") makes it difficult to engage with him in an authentic way. I appreciate his comments greatly, because I think he gets what I'm trying to accomplish musically, but the space between us is huge. In some ways he makes me sad -- he seems like he reached such a point of existential self-awareness that the pain of nothingness overwhelmed him, and he just surrendered to drugs as an escape. When a mind like that misses redemption, it feels like a waste.

At least I left our conversation with two Nightstick CDs and a Siege tape.

Playing:
Ocean - Here Where Nothing Grows

Bone

1300-page comic books are a warm and tender opiate for the disenfranchised academic. Or maybe after consuming so much existential angst from the dregs of the "art" world, I'm just a sucker for narrative.

Postmodern insomnia

It's almost 4am and I'm wide awake. This evening was the first time I've slept in days. And I have nothing to show for it because the project I just finished got "collected." The weather oddly reflects my state of being, going from unusually warm and sticky to thunderstorms, then to almost frost, in a period of a few hours.

Tim sent me an interesting article on the place of faith in the continuing dialogue over postmodernism (which I am beginning to crassly believe may not actually exist). In a more narcissistic bent, there's also a rather enthusiastic new review of the Rosetta disc on Decoymusic. Oddly enough, we scored higher than The Mars Volta.

After setting the text of Revelation 16-18 in my artist's book, (((Wrath))), Helvetica is officially my favorite typeface ever.

Playing:
Exhaust - s/t
Do Make Say Think - Goodbye Enemy Airship...
DJ Krush - Jaku
Stars of the Lid - Maneuvering the Nocturnal Hum

Temple "Record Release" show

(Thanks Staci)

The Good: Slacks!, waffles, the kind people of 1633 Diamond, familiar faces, getting rid of Abacinate CDs.

The Bad: Getting cut short and not playing the finale, the room sound being unbalanced, lack of energy.

The Ugly: Worst PA system in the history of mankind.

Perfectionism can turn into a specter in situations like these. I have begun to question the relationship (if there is one) between the fun of playing and audience enjoyment. We can certainly perceive when the audience isn't interested, and that can sap energy dramatically, but even when they are interested, it doesn't necessarily make for a satisfying performance. They may feed off of us, but we can't feed off of them. So much for playing the crowd (could this be why many people find us alienating? Do they even matter to us?). If we could figure out what it is that we do take our energy from, perhaps we could harness it more consistently.

Tour

Keansburg, NJ: 3/5
Syracuse, NY: 4/5 (instrumental low-volume set)
Wallingford, CT: 4.8/5

East of the Wall is a really superb band, and I think when Rosetta got to play after them we were more inspired. Saturday night in Syracuse was "outrageous" as expected, once again due more to the Jersey contingent than the four of us. Every time we're out on the road and Brett is around, things get retarded. It never happens when we're by ourselves.


(The hills were aflame on Saturday)

While trying to go to sleep in the middle of Saturday's wild booze-fest, I overheard a girl arguing religion with Mike from EOTW. Earlier she had told me she was "hammered" and that it was a problem because she had to get up for church the next day. Apparently she considers herself a devout Christian, because her argument with Mike was a typically modernist Evangelical rant about the difference between faith and reason, and how God could not be contained by the latter, such that he required the former --- and certainly could never be "understood." Mike, a hardline agnostic, was nonplussed. Her argument wouldn't have been particularly noticeable (especially since arguments between drunk people rarely go anywhere), except that when Mike failed to convert and the conversation ended, she went outside and found a casual sex partner, presumably to make herself feel better.

What hurts about this situation is that this girl probably has been taught to believe that the resistance she encounters is "persecution," and is a sign that she is doing God's will. But why would people want to surrender their lives to something that produces such hypocrisy? Indeed, it would seem from this encounter that Christianity requires no such surrender at all, only the surrender of reason to an empty dogma, a pattern of speech, a mechanical mantra (is this what "faith" is?). Have we no shame?

Monochrome

Read these

Commodify Your Dissent!
This is a collection of articles from the Chicago-based journal The Baffler. An excellent treatise on the "Culture Trust" and it even has an essay by STEVE ALBINI! Yeah, I just crapped myself too.

Chuck Klosterman -- Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
Hating Coldplay = authority.

Dave Hickey part deux

So, dinner wasn't so bad after all. In fact, it was fabulous. Hickey is one of the most crass individuals I have ever encountered, and as such is amazingly entertaining. He's so anti-formal that I felt perfectly at ease for all 3 hours of dinner conversation (and probably ate a little too much raw eel sushi).

The most memorable thing he said to me was "Given the choice between art and music, I'd pick music any day. Music makes people feel good. Art doesn't." I don't unconditionally accept that statement as true, but I see his point and I agree with him.

He also had a lot of interesting things to say about the resurgence of Modernism since 9/11, and he essentially called out pluralism as a racist institution to "keep black people from going to Princeton." He argues for a kind of holistic assimilationism (my term, not his) which accepts the inevitability that when one culture assimilates to another, neither is the same in the end. So this process is therefore intrinsically democratic...? I'm not sure, but at least it's a new thought in a pretty stagnant and putrid pool of self-indulgent postmodern intellectualism.

Playing:
Kayo Dot - Choirs of the Eye
Isis - Panopticon