Arts
(Listen to audio here)Four nights ago:I listened to an of album of hers on the train ride out on my iPod. I didn't like it much at first. It was something else that made me want to hear it. Her voice and words. A drunken night in her apartment a few years ago sums it up. So drunk, I couldn't remember how it ended when I woke up the next day, and soon after when I was at work, I had this feeling of bliss.I tried to preserve my hearing by keeping the headphone volume low, so the crushing and sliding sounds of the train and its track mixed into the music, so much, so that when the album ended, I didn't realize it....And the youth catches on to doom. As a music and art genre. It used to be that people would tell me about these styles that were new to me, saying they've been around for a while.I think the next act will use loop pedals. I saw that ten years ago in Seattle, and it was boring. Merrill Garbus did it right. The loops on her recordings sound nice, but her voice was the meat! Every chew squeezes out more flavor.The DJ just Put something on that shut the crowd up. If you didn't guess, it's some really cute music, with melodies that could be in a children's song, and loads of arcade game sounds.Next, a recording of a guy I knew played over the speakers. In fact, I received a Facebook friend request from him earlier in the week. I felt important, and relevant for only that brief moment.You get shocked once, and then you're numb. You realize it's the same from coast to coast, in the land of the free. But you'll never be satisfied until you've seen it all, which is impossible. So you keep going, hoping for something new, or for something to stop you....And what a beautiful spring night it was, for the last day of January. Finding the buzz, the pulse of the city. Nobody ever writes romantically about D.C. It's the same as every other city; late twenty-early thirty somethings trying to find mates, and telling each other intellectual jokes to prove they are going to college. Everybody else building families. Poor people seemingly lounging about. Widows and widowers occupying their time with work, the fitness club, church, and maybe, if they're motivated, one other activity they like to call "a hobby."I sat with Coltrane all the way home. After I pulled up the driveway on my single speed bicycle, I popped a beer from the shed and sat in the back yard with it and the warm air, and finished "A Love Supreme," and pretended to be in a time of sixty years ago, with Kerouac.