TACO BELL FOR THE EARS

Dag! Someone remind me not to partake of the free nacho platter at the next film festival after party. From a dream -- actually, a nightmare -- in which Interpol were playing a live cover of The Smith's "This Charming Man," I awoke with what was quite possibly my worst case of indigestion yet. Were I not buckled over in pain, consciousness would've been a blessing. Of course, I fell back asleep and the dream started all over. When I woke once more, again buckled over in pain, I thought, "This is my world?" And not a Tums in the house.

CROSSOVER

Sometime during my freshman year of high school, Matt, the first friend I made that year and future bandmate, pulled out a copy of Suicidal Records legendary comp, Welcome To Venice. Save for the "Institutionalized" video on MTV, Welcome was truly unlike anything I'd been exposed to. The cover looked dangerous as fuck: technically, it's a brilliant painting but slightly twisted, the title a gross joke on Venice, California's reputation for gang violence.

The music was dangerous too. It was hardcore and thrash but the solos had a very distinct flavor that wasn't quite either. Later, my sister's roommate, Spring, offered to sell me a cassette of "silly ol' skate rock" which I misheard as "Sicilian skate rock". The guitar solo in the intro sounded incredibly familiar: "There must be a Sicily, California right next to Venice," I thought.

So, my penchant for hardcore persists. Infatuation? Perhaps, but I'm really enjoying myself. I've taken to burning copies of the first Skate Laws recordings onto 3" CDs before leaving the house and plan to take some along for the trip to France -> Ireland -> Germany -> Malta. Is there a Maltese hardcore scene? A quick search yields great results: Extreme Maltese Metal Festival!

HEY MUSIC

What goes on? Three weeks ago, everything was fair game! All genres had equal footing and, god damn, almost everything sounded great. Then I made a joke about how Vampire Weekend showed up, the world went crazy, and I lost my appetite for music altogether.

It turns out it wasn't a joke -- it happened! About two weeks after the VW album dropped, my musical world dwindled from a diverse playground to a meager (but choice!) stack of hardcore cassettes. My average listening experience has been widdled down to 16 minutes -- the same length as Agnostic Front's 1984 magnum opus, Victim In Pain! It's a peculiar world...



wait! this shit's even better...

THE CLOSED WORLD

I was left standing there, dick in hand. You said: "I'm sorry, but are your buns winking at me?" There was that sweet shit and then there was my blueballs. In those little shorts, I lost it by the waterside.

LA FIN DU MONDE

On February 6, a tenant of Forest Arms Apartments set what grew into a five alarm fire, resulting in at least 100 people without a home. Among the casualties was Brad Hales' record store, Peoples Records, which wasn't touched by the fire but drowned by the thousands-and-thousands of gallons of water pumped into the building.

Brad sent out a message on Friday, the 22nd, saying he would finally be allowed into Forest Arms on Saturday to salvage what remained and needed help. Around 4pm on the 23rd, Aaron and I split for Detroit in our nastiest duds.

Despite an entire youth spent exploring abandoned houses and burnt out buildings, Forest Arms, and especially Peoples, was nothing like I expected. The effects of the blaze were still fresh: pieces of the building were falling on workers outside, all windows had been boarded up, and water was in EVERYTHING. Still, it didn't occur to me that we'd be working in complete darkness until I walked into the store.

Shortly before we left, I watched a photo slideshow of Peoples' history. Just before the fire, the store was at its best, looking like the warmest, most beautiful spot in the world with immaculate handpainted 45 boxes, records everywhere, and Brad's endlessly positive vibes. Now, it looked like the musty, unoccupied Detroit basement room Brad moved into several years ago.

Along with about ten other fellows, Aaron and I helped to gut Peoples among standing water, black debris, and lots of smells. Half the stock, maybe less, was so damaged it had to be thrown into stacks for later trashing. When we gave up for lack of daylight around 6 or 7pm, we'd almost emptied one of the two main rooms of the store and stacked several thousand soggy or frozen LPs against two walls. Aaron and I followed Brad back to his house where we loaded into his basement everything that had been excavated from the store.

Brad remained incredibly positive throughout the day. Earlier, holding a particularly pathetic water-logged copy of Pharoah Sanders 1977 album Love Will Find A Way, he said "That's ten less copies of this record in the world." When the other workers slagged the album, Brad laughed and said, "Oh, I really like it!" Holding up another sopping record, he said, "Isn't life funny? When this happened, that's all I could think: life is funny."

In other news, my current favorite record label has a myspace page.

BORN BAD

The weekend was looking hectic. That is, to put it lightly. At 1pm, the day after Valentine's, Erin and I were standing in a Kalamazoo courthouse awaiting the short and incredibly sweet ceremony that would wed one of my oldest and closest friends, Jessica, to her man of the last several years. Immediately following the ceremony, we booked back to the married couple's house and imbibed for a few hours with their very nice (and often outright hilarious) families and friends before heading back to Ann Arbor for what would be a sleepless few days.

Back at the house, Brian was hosting a get-together raucous enough to contend with a party made up of four times the attendees. I half-participated in the good times while ripping countless CDs to Erin's laptop as she did some final packing. By 4am, we were the last ones standing and a bit haggard from the events. We snuck in about an hour or two of light sleep alternated with lovemaking, ran some errands after 9am, and left for the airport around 11am. The rest of the details I'll cherish for myself, thanks.

Afterward, I snuck in an hour of sleep and a cup of yogurt before DJing a prohibition-themed 6-hour party with Aaron. The crowd was primarily writers in their late-20s and early-30s, mostly into late-50s and early-60s rock & roll, sipping on Manhattans and gin martinis. A small group spent the last half hour of the night listening to someone's iPod in another space upstairs, which ACL may have taken as more of a "fuck you" than I. We DJed the Monday afterward too. That it was snowing sideways didn't affect the turnout all that much.

It's strange to come home to an empty bed. There is less beauty in this life without Erin. Still, we've been managing, even having fun, writing and chatting online every day. It's more bearable than we expected but I'm dying to see her. Paris seems like it would be nice too. (Sarcasm! - ed.)

GREENER GRASS

Erin's departure is about four short days away. We've been revisiting old haunts and going out a lot, reacquainting ourselves with our beginnings, albeit minus the criminal whiskey intake. It's been a dense week of seeing movies, eating out, visiting museums, and taking long drives into rural Michigan. Strangely, I've found myself reminiscing positively about Ypsilanti. It can be said without too hesitation that living in Ypsilanti was the pits until Erin & I started dating. It felt as though I was constantly fighting for air among the people I lived with, whether it was one person or more. [Brendan would be excluded from that last statement as it was enjoyable when just he and I were roommates.] When she and I got together, the world I anxiously dreamed of in my younger days was a reality.

The basement is looking pretty great and moving into it doesn't seem too crazy. It's a relatively large room and the bed, couch, and computers can most likely all fit in there. I'll split rent with the person that moves into the room Erin & I share and pay off my part long before I take off for France myself. To sweeten the pot for the others living in the house, I'll remove the chore system and clean the house every week myself.

In and of itself, change can be evolutionary or revolutionary and I've got a hunger for the former. The latter tends not to stick anyway. Let's hope the next several months yields dividends.

TRAPPY

Detroit may be of a beautiful decay but the breaks are rough: Brad Hales' record shop was destroyed days ago when another tenant of the same building chose to barricade and torch his room rather than comply with an eviction. Although People's Records wasn't directly affected by the blaze, it's on the bottom of the building and five departments hosed the place down. The water was about four feet deep when Brad was finally allowed in. About 100 tenants are now homeless and Brad's opening shop in his basement.

Speaking of basements, I just reached my saturation point cleaning ours. The upstairs "living room" Erin and I rent will be sublet (subletted?) to a friend when she leaves for France. A few hours of moving boxes from that room and into an increasingly congested area has me a little overwhelmed. I was considering moving into the basement and subletting our current bedroom in an attempt to save money but have to mull it over a bit more. Discovering the source of a rusty stain creeping across the floor was a little disappointing: the drip that spawned it took a detour through a couple boxes of comic books. Hopefully they can be salvaged and sold for Paris rendezvous money. Selling most of my possessions would be ideal and would help to make a move less encumbered by crap that much more a reality. Still, Erin and I own most of the furniture in the house and will eventually have to do something about that. Then again, by the time we return from Paris, it'll all be trash, I'm sure.

God damn, Ann Arbor. You're killing me.

UNDER SYCAMORE TREES

The final episode of Twin Peaks debuted the night before the last day of 5th grade. Is it telling that the scene I remember most is of Audrey Horne cuffing herself to the barred door of a bank vault? Hmm.... Paging Dr. Freud! Now we're onto something! Jimmy Scott's strange voice haunted me for years. If I ever found a singer with such prowess, I'd never go near a microphone again.

HARBOR LIGHTS

I rang in the new year shooting Alligator Gar with a crossbow on a yacht outside of New Orleans with a dildo salesman named Chevy Chase ("We share a name but have never met." Fascinating.). We listened to Herb Alpert, drank awful butt whiskey, and talked about our high school friends. Eventually, I passed out in the ladies' room of the Cat Box after a stirring duet rendition of "Shadow Of Your Smile". By February, I was caught in a game of Lazer Tag with a slave owner. In March, I passed the coiffeur exam in Rinaldo, B.C.