(no subject)

[atolnon]

Nobody really comes to office hours unless something's due and they're panicking - as if a last minute conversation reeking of desperation will make up for some kind of fundimental lack of planning. Since nothing's really due, I fucked off for a few minutes to grab a microwave breakfast burrito and check the university book store for some kind of Moleskine equivilent - since I figured that's what they'd have.

The bookstore is one part kitschy gift shop and one part... I'm not really sure. Some kind of half-serious Barnes & Noble, maybe - a business model that couldn't possibly survive in an environment where people were easily able to go somewhere else. They had spiral notebooks but nothing that you could really call a journal with an appropriate amount of rigor. At least I got my burrito.

I've been listening to a lot of Metric, including (or maybe especially) Grow Up and Blow Away - by all accounts, a real-life prequel album. Its point of origination (2001) doesn't feel so far away, but I think that's simply because I've gotten just old enough for time to stop progressing in relation to my sense of self. I think the magic moment was, in fact, 2000 - a nice round millennium to set my watch by - but that's simply an illusion that's no more complicated, really, than the feeling of movement you get from being stopped at an intersection where a train is speeding by. The sound is very 2001, in that there's something in its tone that reminds me of being 16 again, and listening to music on a stripped-down PC with only intermittent internet access in a room empty of literally anything but the computer and an aging, white-painted farmhouse desk that may have been the oldest thing in continuous use that I was aware of (even older than the television in the basement, which at the time was still a wood-cabinet vacuum tube deal. You'd turn it on and it'd immediately somehow jettison a wave of static electic feedback. It's since been replaced.). The point is, the sound takes me back, even though there's no reason I can point to, in particular. I'm not tuned to that level of discourse on how music works. 

Comments

[scottopic.livejournal.com]

I adore them, and they take me back in some ways even though I didn't get tuned into them until Fantasies (I think it was Bipolar Bear's band who did a cover of theirs)

[atolnon.livejournal.com]

Ya'know, I think I originally heard about them through some nerd forum I don't go to anymore (RPG.net is really the only forum I check up on with any sort of regularity), but I haven't thought of Bipolar Bear in sort of a while. I intended to buy his album back when I had zero dollars, and now that I have a few, it occurs to me that I still might.

I think I heard Grow Up and Blow Away - the song, anyhow - first. I almost certainly bought Fantasies first, though.

[aircrash.livejournal.com]

grow up and blow away is so good! also i agree with your "real life prequel" description - it was on heavy rotation for me around when i turned 30.

[atolnon.livejournal.com]

You know, I can kind of understand the band's concern about releasing it after their first actual release happened, because the tone of the album really is different than "Old World Underground", but I'm really glad they did actually end up releasing it. It'll get removed from my rotation lately, just for me to put it back on a day or two later.