Meet me in the desert.

10:30pm
I am going to Las Vegas tomorrow, for two days. Anything I should know about the Sity of Cin?

The ten of clubs is your magic card, that is all.

3:34pm
Las Vegas, you were a big disappointment.

The Good Stuff About My Trip to Las Vegas: A sizeable amount of 'father 'n son quality time', mostly over video poker (ps. This is not to be undervalued. Really.) Nice art exhibition at heritage museum. Decent stand-up comedy show.

The Not Especially Good Stuff, In Fact, the Rather Downright Bad Stuff About My Trip to Las Vegas: It was incredibly frustating. Back home, at age 18 you're legally entitled to drink, gamble, get into nightclubs, drink some more etc. This means you're sneaking into clubs and getting plastered at age 16. By the time you reach 19, you're waxing nostalgic about the good ol' days and wondering if maybe you aren't ready to settle into a slightly less "hectic" weekend routine. So you arrive in Vegas with a distaste for excessive glitz, but at the same time you secretly hope that you'll be able to take advantage of at least some of that delicious, leather-clad, booty-shakin', high-rollin' decadence you've heard so much about. But lest you forget: you're a minor. None of that for you. You may as well be 12. Argh.

I did manage a little gambling and, really, I wouldn't have done much more had it been legal for me to do so. I can't watch money turn to nothing, it eats me up on da insidez. I'm pretty sure I get this cash neurosis from my mom. And, with the ever-weakening SA Rand, performing constant currency conversions in my head (ie. multiplying everything by 12) can be a stomach-churning exercise. And I had a running nose and a scratchy throat, but if I mention that I run the risk of coming off like a tedious, whiny, (undersexed), self-involved pre-post-teen *and* a sympathy whore.

So, yeah, mostly disappointed. And wondering how I'm going to scare up some decadence of my very own back here in lil' Tucson in 12 hours. And it's my Dad's birthday today, too. Happy Birthday Dad.

tell them about how you found two copies of d.i. go pop you bastard. "oh, well, i have the one, i don't need two that i could send a second copy to jess to replace his lost one that he's been searching for for three years."

you must search harder jess. TO MORDOR.

mordor where the shadows are currently touring

TO THE BRIDGE OF KHAZAD-DUM!

TWO COPIES? Mitch you cockfarmer.

One disc to bring them all, and in their stereos bind them. I must congratulate Mitch on his good taste, of course. ;-)

Sauron cares not for the shadows, THEY USED TO BE ABOUT THE MUSIC "MAN".

Further to the being a minor thing, do American teenagers have more sex because there's no drinking to fill their time with, or does the lack of drinking make sex a trickier thing to come by?

I'll burn copies of "D.I. Go Pop" for everyone. (Even though it ain't *ALL* that. So far.) And I'm also v. curious re: Mark C's question.

MITCH YOU GOD AMONG MEN.

mitch i have a burned copy already...::stalks off mumbling incoherently...::

Mitch, were you just saying that D.I. Go Pop is somehow *not* a revelation? *throws Mitch in sack and sends him down the Colorado River*

And Josh, if you've *needed* a burned copy all this time, why did you not ask? ;-)

I was going to burn all those em pee threes, but I never got around to it and then lost my chance. :(

Silly boy. Send me your new address.

ned, since we're whoring, does yr offer of burning the d.i. singles (ala yr top 136 of the 90s) still stand?

2:37am
Hurrah! Josh gets the CD, I don't have to ship anything overseas, Ned's giving everyone singles and that's another New Years Eve spent bored and alone!

I have made this great deal with my friend returning from a year abroad in a couple weeks. She predicted that both of our New Years were probably gonna be dull family affairs, and suggested that we celebrate it on January 20th. I advise all the achin' heart ILE'ers (hi Jess!) to do likewise. Let's make Jan 20 New Years, take 2.

Drinking age = 21 = fucking stupid.

Actually, drinking age = 18 = also fucking stupid

Oh yeah, poker machines = really, really, fucking stupid

Even though I think it's all stupid I reckon that when you come of age in yrrr home place you should get a card or something saying "ADULT" and it shouldn't matter where in the world you go after that, you should be recognised as adult everywhere.

Jan 20th = NYE Version 2 = fantastic!!

Card = no. Stamp on forehead = yes.

jackboot stamping on forehead forever = not sure

You almost make Orwell sound cuddly there, Mark.

does yr offer of burning the d.i. singles (ala yr top 136 of the 90s) still stand?

Natch.

It's interesting that Orwell's getting some attention of late round these parts, 'cause a couple days ago I was going to talk about a perceived connection between his dystopian futureworld and Broadcast's "The Noise Made by People". On first listen, the album was terrying. It had to do with some kind of underlying austerity, a cold iron at the core of the songs with the warmer, more 'atmospheric' touches applied like painted red lipstick on a mannequin. But then repeated listening begins to reveal the slighest hints of humanity- a vocal quiver or an unexpected inflection was all that was needed to collapse my theory. Still, there's something in the collapsing machinery that ends a few of the tracks that still give me the feeling that the CD is an artifact of some unnervingly unsentimental tomorrow. (Or maybe I'm just exorcising some unplaced emotional baggage from my apparent swing from tense indie kid to allembracing poptart-in-training, re: the 'soullessness' of modern pop).

The non-Broadcast track that comes closest to the way I was hearing the album is probably "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors", which makes me think of a skewed 'show & tell' session, taking place in some disturbingly altered parallel universe-

Teacher: Okay, settle down, class. Today, Thommy's going to tell us all about doors. Thommy?
Thommy: There are doors on the rudders of big ships and there are revolving doors.

The world seems more Orwellian every day. Or more Huxleyesque. Or more Gibsonesque. I suppose the desert would seem Lynchian. Rargh rargh rargh!!! I love it!!!!!!!

I have D.I. Go Pop to sell. (I'm gonna sell all my CDs, I think. Free- jazz and musique concrete, anyone?)

10:58am
Leaving the US today in a few hours. Then 3 days in Paris. Then home. Talk to y'all in a few days.

2:43pm
Back home. Now you can "Meet Me in the Grimy and Dangerous Streets of Johannesburg". Paris was good. Cold, though. The kind of cold that makes the sensation of feeling "too warm" seem as alien and remote as, well, Arizona. One high point: listening to "Amnesiac" on top of the Eiffel Tower.

I'm not sure if this is a universal experience, but whenever I return from a sizeable period of travel, I experience disorienting 'mis- memories'- fr'instance, listening to CDs last night as my brain hovered between dreams and consciousness, I kept feeling as if I was about to open my eyes to find myself in a hotel room in Paris, or my bed in Tucson, or felt a niggling worry over whether or not my luggage would arrive. Each time I would awake to find myself at home, which I found (perhaps oddly) more saddening than comforting.

Records I Bought While on Holiday:
(in order of purchase)

Prefuse 73 - Vocal Studies and Uprock Narratives
Boards of Canada - In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country
King Biscuit Time - King Biscuit Time "sings" Nelly Foggit's Blues in "me and the Pharaohs"/No Style EP
Broadcast - The Noise Made By People
Aphex Twin - Come to Daddy EP
SchneiderTM - Moist
Disco Inferno - D.I. Go Pop
The Avalanches - Since I Left You
kid606 - GQ on the EQ++
Microstoria - Init Ding
N.E.R.D - In Search Of...
Schneider TM &
KPT.michi.gan - Binokular
Dntel - Life is Full of Possibilites
Piano Magic - Seasonally Affective

Too much IDM. I wanted more pop and hiphop. Oh well. IDM still good. I'll comment on some of these later.
(additionally, all of these were found used, save for "Since I Left You", "Binokular" and the Piano Magic and DNTEL albums. Honestly, what some people'll get rid of.)

Start with DNTEL, someone very special to me has been telling me to get it. But I am scared and need to save money for my forthcoming holiday and the Chems new album.

Well, as with a lotta the stuff I bought, I've still got a lot of listening to do before I can form any concrete opinions, but there's a strain of Bad Indie Pop running throughout the DNTEL record- "Tweemotronica" perhaps? I've a penchant for IDM/glitch with vocals, so I hoped that "Life is Full of Possibilities" would be my dream record, but it seems my tolerance for "wibbling" indie is lower than expected- even when it's also skipping, clicking and squelching. That said, I still like a good deal of the album, and the instrumental cinematic glitchscapes are certainly very pretty. The vocal tracks with the indie grrls seem better than the ones featuring indie bois (but perhaps my judgement is clouded by my prior favour for other female-fronted 'atmospheric'-electro acts Portishead and Broadcast). So it seems like this will either grow on me or leave me feeling only partially satisfied and slighly annoyed, like it does now. Definitely one you should try and listen to before you purchase, Ronan.

Wow. Until last night, when the video was playing on VH1, I don't think I'd ever heard Laurie Anderson's "Superman". I really like it.

9:01pm
What I expected from the King Biscuit Time release, considering
1) the title of the record and
2) that it's the solo project from The Beta Band's Steve Mason,
was charming ramshackle Beta fun 'n oddness (which, for 5/8ths of the album, is what I got) and not two magnificent pastoral pop songs (the shimmering, sun-dappled "I Love You" and the gentle, breezily melancholic "Time To Get Up") and a glorious feelgood anthem (the bouyant "I Walk The Earth"). Suprises like these are very good things.

12:00pm
Mitch is, astoundingly, travelling again. Meet you back here in ten days, k?

3:05pm
I just remembered that I've got this (sort-of) blog thing. Anybody want me to talk about anything?

"Overheard", Installment #2:

Scene: Exiting a shopping mall after dinner.

Situation: This is a couple weeks ago- I've just had dinner with a group of people that I'm vacationing with. One of them is quite worried about her family, she's just got this feeling that there's something wrong. Her friend is trying to comfort her. I'm walking a few steps behind, listening. (Side note: Look, I don't do this all the time, I'm not some mad sociologist or anything.)

I feel a cold shiver run thru me. Why? Why: The comfort offered by the friend sounds so rehearsed, so obvious, so delivered- but at the same time the insincerity is immaculately fashioned, with such calculated precision and care of craft, that it displayed- paradoxically- what could only be some kind of genuine concern for her friend.

Did you find that Prefuse 73 C.D. really sucks yet? Cut-up beats+ cut- up raps+IDM/hip-hop snoozerama...

Mr. Bourke Rat: Nah, I'm pretty sure the Prefuse disc doesn't suck, but it has yet to impress me in any serious way. First listen: very underwhelming. Every track built from hiphop and jazz cut-ups that didn't seem to blend/collide/contrast/do whatever cut-ups should do in any particularly memorable manner. Snoozerama. Then: I paid a little more attention, and the record began to sound appealingly intimate- my favourite bit was the processed sound that resembles a plaintive horn wail in "5 Minutes Away". And now: I've just listened to it for the first time in a few weeks and I'm underwhelmed again.

*Warning: Something You Probably Know Already to Follow*:

Thanks to the ever-weakening local currency, buying import (read: everything that isn't locally pressed) albums is becoming a very, *very* costly exercise. The good side: shiny, (and locally-pressed) pop is still relatively affordable. I've subsequently decide that I should start buying these records. My recent pop ephiphanies have mostly been mp3-bound events: I wasn't sure that I needed entire albums of the stuff. Just a couple months later and it seems silly that I could've been so cautious about giving a pop-house album a chance to find it's way into my listening life (so tentative was I that I shamefully didn't even buy the thing: I burned an mp3 copy.) To my then-suprise, embracing "Rooty" was remarkably easy, and a fuckload of fun to boot. If I still had any lingering indie-kid groin fear issues, "Get Me Off" set me free.

That's not really what I wanted to talk about, though. I'm getting there, I think. So where were we? Oh yeah, I had just discovered that pop could sustain my love for the length of an entire lp and was cheap too, so with this in mind I finally picked up Aaliyah's self titled album. And (*Here Comes the Part You Probably Already Know*) it's astonishingly great. I already knew I loved "WNAR", "Try Again" and "More Than a Woman" (thanks to Mel W. for turning me on to "More.."), but apart from the enthusiastic writings of Mr. Finney and Mr. Honda, why hasn't even more of a fuss been made about, say, the menacing tropicalia of "Read Between the Lines" ("he's talking in dubs" is a fantastic lyric, too) or the rubber-band shooting, orchestra-hit indignance of "U Got Nerve" or the underwater daydreams of "It's Whatever" or the epic melodrama of "I Refuse" or the gorgeous ache of my favourite Portishead song ever, "I Care 4 U" or just about everything else on the album? Nevertheless, it's one of the most instantly loveable records I've yet discovered, and one that I'm plan to cherish (and probably continue to gush about) for some time.

10:28pm
As per Jel's request, I'm taking a break from pretending to study and updating.

Last song I listened to as a teenager: Eminem's "Stan".
First song I listened to as a post-teenager: Eminem's "Kill You".

I got less action during my teenage years than your average priest.

I forgot how much I enjoy the inflated sense of self-importance that blogging provides!

He who cries most, wins.

Is it "Igbo Uku" or "Igbo Ukwu"? And what's the difference between Igbo Ukwu and Igbo?

I should probably stop being a lazy fucker and get a job now, huh?

How did I get this old without loads of important stuff happening?

Male Senufo Mask: Korubla.
Female Senufo Mask: Kpelie.

Okay Okay the beaded apron worn by Ndebele girl post-puberty, pre- marriage is called "Isiphephetu". I can remember that by thinking "Is she prepared to?" haha. ha. Any of you UK poster's know about Yinko Shonibare? His art was apparently displayed in the tube stations- photos of a black man as a victorian dandy? ring a bell? Anyway I gotta write about him.

Uhm.

shoulda kept it up man

Do you still like Aaliyah, Mitch?

And how is post-adolescence? Did you get depressed?

yeah, we need an update!

2:30 pm
Wow, I thought I was the last person who remembered this thing! Let's see: 'Aaliyah' still good, but on the hiatus pile for now so I can forget enough of it to rediscover its greatness in a few months.

Basically, music listening of late has consisted of 4 things: "The Eminem Show", this mix cd I made with some recent pop singles and other stuff I had on mp3 but not on cd, whatever mp3s I've soulsought that day and "Music for Airports". I'm just gonna go and give ya the mix cd tracklist because I'm convinced it's the greatest mix cd ever:

1) mystikal - bouncin' back

2) soulwax - smells like booty (quiet ronan)

3) aaliyah - are you that somebody?

4) outkast - the whole world

5) the strokes - hard to explain (quiet everybody)

6) basement jaxx - '4 my people' remix

7) toya - no matta what (party all night) (i heard a version of this on the radio with the filtered jungle beats replaced with conventially paced r&b beats and it wasn't nearly as good. did they change it or do i have a remix or what?)

8) dr dre - what's the difference?

9) jay-z - big pimpin' (the most perfect beat ever obv)

10) tweet - oops oh my (i don't like it as much as i thought i did but it's still good)

11) the avalanches - run dna (as good as it is, somehow this ruins the flow of the mix)

12) m.r.i - blue

oh and while i mostly avoided depression, post-adolescence is still kinda sucky, insofar as I hoped that 1) by 20 i'd be a more secure, confident, motivated person (my last "relationship" ended so awkwardly that, had it been his experience, even ramosi would be too embarrassed to relate the details) but since i can't go about re- writing my personal history i was holding out for 2) turning 20 would force me into a period of extended introspection from which I would emerge as a more secure, confident, motivated person. that hasn't happened either, but i'm like working on it and stuff i guess. (and this is also a bit why i stopped 'blogging' in the first place: i tired of electronic whining)(a complaint so commonplace it's become tiresome and whiny itself)(but now that i think of it's perhaps useful, since i don't unload this stuff on my friends but it's fine for you internet foax to wade thru the emotional debris of mitchell lastnamewithheld cos you can just press the 'x' in the top right hand corner and my problems/issues/baggage/stuff disappears) (nonetheless if i decide to reanimate this thang, i think i'd like to put on my daft punk robot mask and focus more on the music and less on me)(maybe i should get a Proper Blog)

No, just talk with us. We are kind and will commiserate on bad experiences, for we have all been there. :-)

no x in the top right corner on my computer help what do I do