Electric President - "Grand Machine No.12"

I've been trying to listen to more new music lately, partly because there's a lot of great stuff out there, and partly because I caught up with an old friend on MSN a while ago - one I hadn't talked to properly for a long time - and she took a look at what I was listening to and said, "you really DO listen to things over and over again, don't you?"
This is true, I tend to slowly build up a list of my favourites and then listen to them for aeons - sometimes it works, but sometimes [like now] I feel the urge to see what's out there.

I appreciate the quirky, and this song by Electric President fits that inch-perfectly. It's also very subtle, intelligent and subversive, which is never bad. The video is so excellent that if you're not careful you can find yourself missing the music, which though understated is really very good. Yes, it panders to all those post-hippie era indie kids out there, but I feel I can let them have their fun as long as their putting out pieces like this one.

Pictures of You

© www.picturesofwalls.com

Ω.

"They walked through the sunset and into the start of the night, with despair and horror and depravity licking every footfall. They walked without looking over their shoulders at the city they left behind, until the tall buildings molded into spiny lumps over the surface of the earth, until the highway curved and that little spine sunk down to a small dark patch in the blood red of the sunset, until the patch turned to a spot and the spot turned into a dot and the dot shrank into a point so small you had to squint to see it, if you could notice it at all. They walked until the sun fell into the place where the city had vanished. They walked until the streetlights came on and they could cry again."
-- Sam Virzi, Vanishing


With a little more experience as I've gotten a little older, I find it pretty easy to judge a bad week: it's one where there's more days without a shred of hope than there is with. On the surface, it's quite a positive outlook - just one unexpected phonecall from a friend, one random act of kindness by a stranger or a ray of sunshine where it has no right to be... easy, neh?
If only. More and more at the moment I find myself sitting at my desk, wondering what the hell I'm doing here. This used to be where I felt the most at home: connected to the world, reading and writing and listening, throwing ideas back and forth between people whose opinions mattered to me; this is where I stamped myself upon the world when I couldn't actually be out there walking in it. Now it feels like I'm stuck in a maze of backroads and can't find my way out to get anywhere. Or rather, it's the opposite - that's where I want to be, wandering the interesting less-travelled paths, but I'm stuck on this accursed highway with people I don't know [and don't want to] going nowhere. I can't even wrench my hands off the wheel to crash the car.

[When Ecclesiastes begins to make good sense, you know you are in trouble.]

That's how I feel here. I read and nothing clicks, I listen and nothing means what it should. I barely even bother writing any more - my prose stumbles to a halt scant pages in, the lines in my poetry bump up awkwardly against each other and jar painfully out of rhythm, even my theology just spirals downward out of control into some bleak, Godless inconclusiveness. I read back some of my older pieces, so full of expectation and confidence in what waits in the unexplored, and I cannot remember how it felt to write them. For the first time in my life yesterday I closed Tennyson's Ulysses without finishing it; I took my copy of The Transient Manifesto down off the wall, I actually couldn't bear to fully understand how badly I measure up to my own creed.

I am very, very tired, and I'm running out of lifelines. Tennyson makes me cry, Guy Gavriel Kay feels too much like hopeful lies, Gaarder like it comes from a whole other world; I get frustrated with the impossibility of Eternal Sunshine [as if that was what I should focus on, urgh], Garden State and Big Fish ring beautifully hollow; even Iron & Wine, the Lucksmiths, Amy Correia - all of them feel too attached to a time [a then], possibilities and chances and people I've missed, and that is not what I need right now. I continue to read John Buchan and Wendell Berry in the hope that the simplest cure is the most effective, but... I just don't know. I want to sleep for ever. I could sleep for an age and wake to find the world utterly changed, and I still don't know if I would have the energy to raise myself above this. I'm tired.