Besides making lists when you've run out of things to talk about, as Andy says, you can also make them when you have things to talk about and can't get started. So I've been kicking around a list, to make myself write some things down. Roots Manuva and Kardinal Offishall are on it. So is Stereolab, to my slight surprise. But I keep forgetting to write down my list, and I get so stuck on one CD for a day or two that I forget what it was I was so entranced by three days ago.

In the meantime I put on Young Team. I wanted Rock Action because I wanted to feel like its second to last song makes me feel. But I couldn't find that record and didn't feel like looking. I did find the other one while I was looking for it, though, so it had to do.

So instead of making a list I'm listening to Mogwai again. Is anything new happening? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not. I skipped track seven. I do that all the time now. I'm not sure if it tests my patience, or I don't like the loudness, or what. Sometimes I do. At the moment my stereo isn't even up loud. What good would it do? I guess I don't know what it would sound like that loud, right now, in my room, with the current me listening. But by the end of track six it's almost time for track eight so I skip it. I pretend to be an album purist but it's really more complicated than that.

I almost never think of Lisa when I listen to it, but sometimes when I think about "R U Still In 2 It?" I think of her. I don't know if I had the record before she talked to me about it or not, but I remember that she liked that song, and I don't remember taking much notice of it before that. Maybe I had just bought the record. I think perhaps that early association made me approach the song in a certain way. Knowing that Lisa liked it, and because of the title and the lyrics, I heard it more as being about the sort of decadent indifference that people, especially young people, turn to as some kind of reaction against a perhaps shallow kind of boredom. I'm trying to make sort of a sociological point with that, but I'm not sure how to say it in a less value-laden way - I certainly don't think badly of Lisa. But I think that hearing the song that way caused me to identify with it less - or nonidentify with it.

Somewhere along the way I found my own way into the song, and if the way I listen to it now is any indication, it had something to do with glazed-eyed misery, some kind of empty-inside feeling that I walked around with for most of the last two years I was in Ames, which perhaps not coincidentally were some of my most depressed. (Write something about Anna here too, but what? There is nothing important to write. The fact that I want to mostly stems from wondering what it would be like if I started writing more while keeping her in mind. Despite the fact that she is not in mind that frequently, and that I am not always sure she has any connection to what I'm writing. It's an experiment, you see.)

But then why did it make me happy? It's the classic question, and I'm not convinced catharsis is the answer. Or some kind of self-directed schadenfreude. Can just the feeling sad make a person happier? What if that's set not against feeling happy or content, but not-feeling? Blankness? I think that's worth something, distinct from catharsis.

In the car this weekend we had a college radio station tuned in and were confused: is this the Velvets? This can't be the Velvets. What is this? It's almost like the Velvets but not quite. Some substandard indie rock ripoff, I said. The Strokes, the DJ said. So I guess the comparisons are well-founded after all.

Minnesota listens to much cooler music than Iowa State on their car trips. We heard "Play That Funky Music" three (count them three) times on different radio stations.

It's about time!

Old Kogan Voice piece which mentions that maybe all 'electronic' noises were once glitches.

So I'm listening to the new Dylan, since Leah bought it after I harassed her about it for long enough (she was going to buy it anyway), since I wanted to be able to test it out proper-like before I bought it. Sure, people say it's really great. But people said Time Out of Mind was really great too, and Tom didn't, and I trust Tom's opinion some. So I am supicious of these people. So anyway aside from some isolated songs I haven't heard any Dylan past John Wesley Harding. He sounds older and older in what I have heard. He sounds frightfully old here. His voice is totally decrepit compared to even the brash-awful-singing-capitalized-upon of the young Dylan. It sort of leaves me aghast. Yet I still can hear how I would like it in n more listens. I am even liking it more four songs in. In this it's totally different from Billie Holiday on, say, Lady in Satin, where I'm not sure I can overcome the voice. Yet. But I have more history with Bob.

Dear god he sounds like an old man.

Some more notes for my aesthetics class have gone up without notice (except from me). The notes on Walton may be of interest.

Clive with a nice post on struggle.

I have been listening a lot to the Pixies' BBC sessions disc, and am even more entranced by the sound than before. Now that I've gotten more used to the record, I've got a harder time describing the sound, though. Some of the guitar leads are louder, but more importantly, feel closer in the mix (near-far in a very radial sense this time), especially in contrast to the very very roomy drums and 'rhythm' guitar (or whatever it should be called). I'm never happy with the lack of bottom to Kim Deal's bass, but on this disc especially it has a kind of woody thud that seems to lack any kind of percussiveness, it's just so evenly played, those big dumb eighth notes that she sits on. But the 'woody' element of the sound is where it's most percussive, with sort of a thwacking sound that overlays the gentle thuds. And lots of the songs here sound more cut-off than normal. Are they played any differently than their album versions? Some are, but I suspect most are not. So why do they sound different? Is it just that they're next to different songs? The running order and pacing of Surfer Rosa seems to have a lot to do with the effectiveness of the elliptical little songs, for instance.

HEY

Been tryyyiiiinnnn to meetchoooo

A lot of the time when I listen to Mi media naranja now I think about her. It's the kind of memory like where someone told me about it after it happened to someone else. Not the other kind. So there's no power to it, at first. It doesn't hurt, or feel good or bad. It's just sort of like driving by a sign, and taking note. Oh, there's a stop sign. If I think about it, in some sort of dissociated, listless way, I can make it start to feel like something, but I'm not sure what.

This may be an acceptable reconstruction of it. It was in February, maybe. On Valentine's Day, or close enough to it that we were celebrating it. She may have given me a little stuffed porcupine (or hedgehog?) grasping a heart with a message on it. I may still have this, in her box. We went out on a date. This was unusual, even though we had "dated" for a few years. It's the familiar regrettable story: familiarity bred a sort of apathy where I may have taken her for granted. (I am not sure if either of us accused me of this, or even her of this. But it feel as if it may fit the "facts" I remember, and it's so common as to be tempting.) So we dated less anyway. But worse, the previous summer we had broken up, tearfully. I suffered through a miserable fall, and after isolation at my parents' during the Thanksgiving break, where I ran across a picture of us together (I had almost none of these, because I so dutifully avoided cameras), I became determined to woo her again and reform our relationship. As soon as I returned home, I walked across town, nervous in a new shirt. It was foggy and cold. I did my best and we went for a walk across the field near her hall, where we talked about something. (Do I even know what, at all, I said then? I do not.) She agreed to take me back, and we were both happy.

But there was a caveat. We were to be less physical for a while, to give things time to become more comfortable again. This could have meant sexual frustration, I suppose, but I don't really think I experienced it. We still maintained some physical closeness, which I think is what I wanted most. But in the past I had perhaps treated her in certain ways, ways that are hard to explain. Maybe I was too taken with the fact that she was a woman, a glorious embodiment of woman, and not enough with the fact that she was a person. Even that much speculation seems to put too much of an interpretation on what I can only recall now as unmonitored tendencies. (There is more, I think, but I can't talk about it.)

So we still had some physical closeness, but it was more distanced, more formalized, than in the past. This date, for Valentine's Day, was significant because she acquiesced at the end of the night. Acquiesced to being physically closer, to letting me touch her more. If I experienced no sexual frustration of my own, there was at least some kind of frustration: I thought I knew how much she loved to be loved, and I missed having the chance to make her happy - because it made me so happy to see her so. That's why there was no sexual frustration. Sex didn't have anything to do with it, for me. I don't think I even took off my clothes that night.

It was probably foolish to put on Mi media naranja at that moment, because it never played the right way on my stereo and I knew it would probably present only distractions, despite my feeling that it was exactly the music I wanted to play. I had the suspicion that any fooling around with the stereo would annoy her - had annoyed her, thus the suspicion. But I put the music on anyway and it worked, played through with no problems at all, even when repeating.

So, these things I remember: the music, her stretched out on my green bedspread, her gray skirt. These things are all fleeting, mixed together, inseparable somehow, and not even the good kind of memory. And I can't think of it without thinking of her top, but I don't even really remember which it was. The maroon sweater she stole from her mom? The gray long-sleeved one, that always makes me think of her new haircut now, and her trip to Belize, and the picture of her standing in the airport, clutching her pillow? Or both, one on top of the other? Why does that detail hang me up?

I don't remember anything else about it.

All the rest, I just have to retell myself. And like I said, it doesn't really feel like anything really. So the music doesn't change.