In brief (link whore session)

Sorry, I'm linking and running here because it's almost 1am and I'm still not quite fixed after this bout of head cold I've been writing about the last few days. I've been beating my head on the wall trying to learn CSS and HTML and whatever the hell else you need to know to make a halfway decent webpage, and all I've come up with so far is a monochromatic Myspace page with a couple of songs posted. But, if you're interested, you can check it out at www.myspace.com/alexanderjamesmusiconline. I really didn't want to go with the Myspace page because after six months of this job I can safely say Myspace is the worst social networking site ever, but it seems as though every other two-bit musician has one, so being as I'm also a two-bit musician I bowed to peer pressure.

Conversely, my Facebook music page is still up; unfortunately it has a URL that is not at all conducive to business cards. So click that link instead.

And, finally, there's nothing up on it yet save an introductory video, but I plan to post videos of covers and originals on a dedicated YouTube channel I've set up as well. Yes, this is LinkWhore Central today, and I apologize, but I promise to have proper content back on this page soon. Besides, if the big redesign of the blog hasn't tipped you off, I kind of like to play music. Maybe you'll like it too.

Thanks for your patience; I'm going to go die now, and hopefully be resurrected in time for work tomorrow.

More Head-Cold Philosophy

There's something about the little sicknesses that seem to qualify time. I'm not talking about the big stuff – clearly there's nothing positive to be learned from a stint with cancer – I'm talking about the little ones. The colds, the sinus infections, the stomach flus. Not enough to harm you, though you feel like you're ready to die some days, but enough to polarize things you normally take for granted.

For the last two days I have felt like somebody's trying to scrape a divot through my sinus cavity into my brain with the sharp end of a hypodermic needle. It's a fascinating sensation, if you try to isolate yourself from the pain and irritation of it and really feel it for what it is. I have always been able to imagine (or imagine I imagine) the feeling of intense physical trauma – some part of me wonders whether or not I didn't have a limb cut off in a previous life, because sometimes I dream about sustaining disastrous injuries and I wake up absolutely certain my arm's gone. I remember the pain, which is bizarre because I've never experienced anything like it. It's like that with the imaginary needle in my nose – clearly, nobody has shoved a sharp piece of metal into me recently, but I believe this is exactly what it would feel like. So it's interesting to ruminate on a little bit, and it takes my mind off the fact that it hurts like hell.

The other thing mild sickness seems to do for me is make me step back a little bit and realize how good I normally have it. Major sicknesses are debilitating and they're allowed to be. Nobody's going to criticize you for missing work or failing to produce any new songs if you've got a tumor the size of a tangerine slowly eating its way out of your skull. Minor sicknesses are debilitating too, because it becomes completely impossible to focus on anything for more than a minute or two unless you really channel your energies, and then you're exhausted much more rapidly than you'd be under normal circumstances. But nobody gives you slack for a head cold or a chest cough. In fact, I'd hazard to say most people will tell you to suck it up and get back to work; I know this for a fact because I've said it to employees and coworkers and friends often enough myself. And it's tough, and it's not fun. And I'm not whining about it either, because I'm trying to make something constructive out of my tiny misery.

It's those little moments in between needle-scrapes, when your head clears and you can breathe through your nose for a minute or two and your eyes stop welling up with sick-tears because you perpetually feel like you're going to sneeze. Those moments, when you remember what it was like (because it feels like it's been weeks) to be able to function like a regular human being, without having to manually navigate your thoughts through nebulae of mucous and whatever other fluids collect and spill whenever your body's fighting a bug. Those moments make you realize that under normal circumstances, things are pretty damned good after all. Sure, you might be kind of broke and your pantry is looking a little sparse. You can't afford to hit the bar after work with your friends for a beer, and you shouldn't really justify that pack of cigarettes you're planning to buy (even though you will anyway). But all in all, you're not doing so bad, right? You've got your faculties about you; your thoughts are clean and precise and not sticky at all; you can talk to people without running watery phlegm all over your lips and chin; you're actually saving money on tissue paper; your eyes can see across the block without little blotches obscuring your view of that falcon who's been visiting the apartment building across from your work on a daily basis. Things are All Right, and you can't really complain.

Then the faucet which used to be your nose resumes its clockwork drip, your sinuses seal up like an airlock on a space shuttle and your eyes start leaking like you're watching The Notebook whilst chopping barrels of onions. You're back in your little misery, and all too quickly you forget the brief moment, the same one you should take away from any troubled time.

My intention, whenever I manage to kick this stupid nagging little virus, will be to remember those brief moments, to not take for granted my day-to-day, which is Pretty Good, Considering. I'm supposed to be all about the truth, and this is just one more truth I get to discover. Hopefully I'll learn it and be a better person for the experience.

But in the meantime, I'm going to go put a healthy dollop of vodka in my Soothing Raspberry tea, because if I'm not going to get better anytime soon, I'd rather be too drunk to care I'm sick.

Robitussin Blues

Head spun on cold medication -- again -- with only forty-five minutes to go in an especially tedious day. I have some concerns about visiting my father's parents on Sunday, because they spent really a lot of money helping me through my undergraduate degree, and now I use that very expensive piece of paper to justify my over-qualification for doing the job I'm doing. I wish I could actually write for a living, but if wishes were horses we'd all be well-fed.

I have difficulty concentrating when my head isn't where it needs to be; right now it's floating in a Robitussin haze while I try to clear the yellow goo out of my face where it's collected over what I can only imagine has been a period of months. It certainly feels that way -- it's like somebody took these futile leg-weights I wear everyday and tied them to my eyebrows. Ten pounds of pressure dragging face into keyboard karjwgioawrvmawi.

Forehead typing. Now there's a thought to chew on, no?

I called this blog the Politics of Being Good because that was going to be the title of my first novel. I never did get around to figuring out what it was going to be about, but I did reckon it was a pretty happening name. Maybe one of these days I'll be able to hammer out some kind of a cogent story from the things I write down here. I don't put a lot of stock in "maybe", though, because it's really all up to me, isn't it?

To whom, I wonder, do I keep directing these questions?

It feels like somebody's driving a nail up my nose. Down another swig of Recommended By Doctor Mom. And I think I am damn close to tapped.

Going to listen to a great blues band tonight. All it's going to do is make me want to play. For my money that's a good, good thing. The new guitar sounds great; almost makes me happy I fell on the last one. Almost. Going to play some blues. Robitussin blues, I think. It's purple, though.

Okay. This is why I don't write when I'm stoned, even legally stoned. You'll forgive this, loyal readers -- I will be back tomorrow with something more reasonable. I'll review the great blues band. That's what I'll do.

Assuming my head is clear as the big blue sky above me.

Confessions of a reforming music snob.

Guess what time it is. Go ahead; I'll wait. It's like magic, that I'll get the urge to throw down in this stupid little writing space, and when I look at the clock it's almost always around the same time. Patterns and lines drawn in the sand, I guess; time has a way of looping back on itself and bringing us around to the symbols that matter.

I'm feeling a little pensive. I've written at length about music recently, but I've been talking like a reporter, updating a mostly non-existent audience about the comings and goings of my projects. I don't want to do that today, not at this time of day and certainly not on this particular day.

I have never understood how people can take music for granted. At times I'm even guilty of it myself -- you're at the mall or in someone else's car and a song comes on that you patently don't like. For me that can be a lot of different things, and it becomes a distraction -- an irritant -- something to be spat out and disposed of. What a crime on my part, and on yours.

Okay, so not every genre or artist is going to appeal to everyone; it's not supposed to and it doesn't have to. But being judgmental never got anybody anywhere. It bothers me to no end that people have such specific tropes in mind when they think of musical genres: the big one is "country". Apparently, digging country music bears the stigma of also owning a home on wheels, at least five belt buckles the size of dinner plates, enjoying huntin', drankin', and other things that end with apostrophes, and being married to an existing family member. What nonsense. Clearly, "country" is a genre label that is as broad and general as any other application of the word. I don't like a lot of what you might call the "new" country; Garth Brooks has never held any appeal to me, nor has Mr. Achey Breaky Heart -- you know, Hannah Montana's dad. But there are SO many other styles and subgenres (if you want to call them that) out there, it would be foolish and -- as I said -- borderline criminal for someone to paint with such a broad, misleading brush such a rich musical tradition full of genuinely talented artists. Translation: liking country doesn't make you a hick, and in fact you're the uneducated peon if you think Shania Twain is the alpha and omega of the genre.

But alas, I am obliged to swing a little mud my own way on this point. I have a slight tendency to be a little judgmental when it comes to music I deem unworthy or lacking in some way, and sometimes I'm right -- at least insofar as my own criteria are concerned. For example, if I say that a rap song praising the street credibility garnered through the purchase of a pair of "Air Force One's" lacks any semblance of inspired artistry from a songwriting perspective, I don't think too many people would disagree with me. That's not art: that's a shoe commercial, and I'm not interested in debating the nature of art as it relates to advertising -- Hendrix never had to defend his choice of bell bottoms in a song. It's NOT art. Sorry.

See what I mean about that judgmental streak?

But going forward I try (I really do) to see the bright side. Okay, does "Air Force One" say anything important? Not in the slightest. Does it have a danceable beat and is it catchy? I guess it is -- I don't dance, so I'm not an authority on what constitutes a danceable beat, but I am a musician and I know catchy when I hear it, and that song is catchy as all get-out. So in that respect, it fulfills its function in the musical pantheon -- let's face it, to paraphrase Brendan Fraser in Airheads, "Purple Haze" doesn't exactly have much to say either, lyrically speaking. Not everything has to be some kind of important statement or rich story; sometimes it's enough for a song to rock, or in this case I (begrudgingly) admit, it's enough for a song to groove.

I like to think of myself as being in self-imposed elitism therapy.

Then there are those musical genres that I don't necessarily dislike, I just don't get. The music makes no sense to my ear, and like so many of my forefathers who listened to the Beatles and heard only discordant clashing, I just can't wrap my head around the sound enough to make music out of it in my own head. It makes so little sense to me that I can't even properly label the genre(s?)...I've heard the terms "emo", "screamo", "scene", "post-punk" and a host of others bandied around, and I'm sure none of them are correct, but hopefully you get an idea of what I'm talking about. Like an elitist asshole I have listened to a lot of the better-known bands of this dubious genre and have in the past labeled it self-aggrandizing horseshit, full of middle-class white sorrow (read: self pity) mixed with pubescent rage against perceived authority establishments. Trite, immature nonsense, I figured.

Did I mention the part where this makes me an asshole?

Once again it's unfair of me to pass judgment on a host of musicians I only know peripherally, if at all. If I'm going to live the examined life, and definitely if I ever want to be taken seriously as a musician myself, I have to drop the pretentious bullshit (the same pretentious bullshit of which I'm accusing this entire genre) and do my research. As it turns out, there's more to the "emo/screamo/whatever" genre than I had originally allowed for -- big surprise. The genre is a wealth of incredibly talented technical guitar players, drummers, bassists, keyboard and MIDI players, turn table artists, and even singers and lyricists -- a fact I'd passed over because of the screaming (I can't always understand what lyrics are being...well, screamed) and the fact that many mainstream singers who actually sing seem kind of whiny to me. But for every sub-par Dashboard Confessional lookalike there's a tight, talented rock-influenced outfit like this one or a really surprising artist who's actually in line with some of what I do myself like this guy, and when I find out about them I feel like an even bigger prick for painting the entire genre with my dislike for what MTV tells me is representative of that music scene.

This is me, trying to stay real at 3am. I have a proclivity towards arrogance (as displayed by my use of words like "proclivity") but I try very, very hard not to let that affect the most important parts of my life that aren't people -- namely, the music (mine and yours). So I'm finally asking something of the folks who read this blog -- take a look at my profile if you don't already have a good idea what I'm about, see what I'm into musically and then educate me. Send me a suggestion or a link to something I've never heard of -- it can be in any genre, just tell me why it's cool and I'll check it out and probably write about my thoughts on it. Bonus points if it's you or a friend of yours -- I like to know musicians personally.

And since I haven't link-whored myself yet, for more information on what I do and why I'm so interested in not being critical of other people, check out my temporary music page on Facebook. I'm looking forward to hearing from you.