I recently acquired a tape deck from Jeff. As my CD player is still broken, the tape deck has made a welcome addition to the stereo in my room. Unfortunately, though, I've had to subsist on a handful of tapes I had around in my office at work. All good tapes, but I'm tiring of them more quickly than I expected. So tonight I copied a disc of Louis Armstrong Hot Fives and Sevens recordings onto an extra tape, using my roommate's stereo. I'm not totally sure why. I've enjoyed listening to the music since I bought it, but not that much; I still need time to figure it out, get used to it. And that is not at all what I intend to do tonight. I want some guaranteed comfort. And yet here I am, listening to Louis Armstrong. I suppose it will do. I'm pretending like I've got an old-timey radio.

If you live in the Twin Cities, you may be interested in the Merriam Park Neighbors for Peace, whose website contains information about a march scheduled for Saturday near Macalester (where I live), and other protest events before Saturday.

Good lord, I swear this Ted Leo and the Pharmacists track sounded like "Dust in the Wind" there for a very long second.

And then it sounded like it again.

My seven favorite rap tracks of the moment:

Cee-Lo - "Big Ole Words (Damn)"
Clipse - "When the Last Time"
Ice Cube - "Down for Whatever"
Killer Mike f. Big Boi - "A.D.I.D.A.S."
Mobb Deep - "Survival of the Fittest"
Nas - "N.Y. State of Mind"
The Notorious B.I.G. - "Things Done Changed"

My seven favorite dance tracks of the moment:

Akufen - "Deck the House (Herbert Stops Like This Mix)"
Basement Jaxx - "I Want U"
Herbert - "The Audience"
Luomo - "Tessio"
MRI - "Tied to the 80s"
Recloose - "Can't Take It (Herbert's Some Dumb Dub)"
Superpitcher - "Tomorrow"

Why only seven of each? Because I couldn't go on. But I wanted to see how long I could go on, so that's OK.

Yes, I know the dance selection is notably limited: three Herbert tracks (one original, two remixes), five or six (loosely, now) microhouse tracks, three on Force Tracks. Don't think that I'm just caught up in a particular interest at the moment. That might imply that there's much other dance that I really listen to, which is not true.

Killer Mike, you may remember, did a verse on one of the new singles on the Outkast best-of, "The Whole World". The second (?) single from his own album fucking bangs. There's some kind of toy piano or jack-in-the-box melody from time to time, but mostly it's big hollow-sounding fuzzy dirty bass pulses, four on the same pitch then another thing, over and over. So in the middle, when right under the lyric, "took 'The Whole World' and murdered that shit," the "Whole World" beat plays for about two seconds, er, something happens. I don't know what. The two seconds is just long enough to set me up to be excited to hear the "Whole World" beat, to recognize it as oh, it's that. But it's taken away so fast that I'm a little shocked and confused.

If I still owe you a response to a recent (or even three month old) message, don't worry, I haven't forgotten it. Chances are I think of it, and what exactly to say in response, quite frequently. Things have just gotten away from me, a bit.

"Xenia told me once that when she was a child in Alaska, she and her friends had a club and there was only one rule: No silliness."

Incidentally, I just received Silence as a lovely gift from Tanya. I couldn't be happier, especially as I've had the book on my mind (or rather the idea to read the book) often in the past few months.

(I get the impression Cage would have happily been able to follow Wittgenstein's suggestion that an entire book of philosophy - or in Cage's case, a book on music, or whatever, a book on both, or neither - might be written consisting of only questions, or only jokes. Happily, that is, aside from thinking it would be more interesting to not write a book consisting of only one thing.)

From John Cage's "History of Experimental Music in the United States", p. 67 in Silence, something I thought Mark would like, or probably already knows about and does like:

About the same time, Willem de Kooning, the New York painter, gave a talk at the Art Alliance in Philadelphia. Afterwards there was a discussion: questions and answers. Someone asked De Kooning who the painters of the past were who had influenced him the most. De Kooning said, "The past does not influence me; I influence it."

This is of interest for two reasons: a) it's Jess, writing again (not for big bags with dollar signs on the sides, or in the case of Citypages, big bags with dollar signs on the sides, made comically floppy by dint of being mostly empty), and b) it seems connected to me, in some way I'm unsure of yet, to the post I just made about dancing. In particular, what he says about the beat that Makes You Dance.