Did Ted Leo just say 'bourgeois'?

Sigh.

Low provoke more lazy reviewing than most any of the music I like. Slow! Oh! My! God! It is slow! They are slow! Hey! Slow!

I don't see how John could ever get sick of all five thousand songs on his new iPod; I've had mine for a few months or so and 3551 out of 5200 of the tracks I share between iBook and iPod are still unplayed.

'a teenage love that didn't feel no hurt yet'

'Why, Doctor Wong, what brings you here?!'

The spy-guitar shit on Britney's Toxic seemed to have vanished once I listened to it for the first time on my decent headphones, and the bendy bassline gained prominence.

Undergraduate humanities educations are sincere but premised on things that aren't really possible with a normal life outside the academy: leisure time and a community of intellectual friends. They are possible, but only by rejecting much that is difficult to reject.

It seems as if the tracks on this Akufen mix tend toward a consistent sound, where the beat and the bassline and maybe some other clicky ffft things are separable from a midrange sound or sample or something or other, often a vocal from an original track; this is noticeable because over the course of the record, since the beat is let's say polite, and the other component has a certain distanced smallness to it, it begins to sound as if the record is just a chain of episodes of these little fiddly midrange bits. Maybe playing it louder changes things; it does seem less monotonous (in that good way) than the last time I had it on, and up much louder.

Lately I've felt more pressingly the sort of lack in music that must be what makes some people eventually defend one of two positions - and the military connotation should be taken seriously. Either, that there is great art and then there is the disappointing remainder of the field; or that art, no matter what level, has no claim to truth and is ultimately mere entertainment or stimulation. On the one hand, crossing one's fingers hoping that by a vigorous enough defense (and thorough enough repudiation of what is 'ephemeral'), what hasn't yet betrayed you will be able to be saved; on the other hand, folding early.

I feel this lack more acutely when I also think that my inability to write something that feels significant about a record is a sign of the whole enterprise not really being worthwhile in the first place.