Caution in the wind!

I fainted at the doctor’s office today.

I can’t imagine it was pretty, at least from the doctor’s and what I assume were nurses and receptionists point of view. Here I was, a young man on a table, I had been polite while they prodded at a mysterious rash, and in being confounded by my tricky rash, needed some kind of memento of which to remember me by, or my rash by, I can’t really say. I am not a doctor.

Having successfully numbed my shin, and taken his victory biopsy, my doctor started to sew me back up with a single suture. As I was sitting there, thinking of breakfast, all of the sudden I felt like I was kind of dreaming until far away some shouted “He’s fainted!” and I thought to myself “Who’s Fainted?” and someone answered “You’ve Fainted” and then I suddenly appeared in a doctor’s office and said to no one in particular “That’s weird…”. So here I was, in a doctor’s offic, clad in a pair of blue boxer shorts and a red striped sweater being held up by an overweight nurse dressed in teal. My sweater was torn by the ordeal and my head hurt. My rash was generally unaffected.

I am sorry about mentioning the rash. Please forgive me.

I’m not sure if it was a contributing factor, but it bears mentioning that on my way to the doctor’s office I was informed by my mother that my grandpa had passed away, I think it was probably a bit of feeling weird about that and not having any breakfast and having had too much sugar and coffee for the three days prior that really did it. I don’t hate needles all that much, or thread or suture or whatever it is.

In any case, I did interrupt some of the grimness of the proceedings at my grandma’s house with my tale of (non) bravery, so at least my shame helped my family through a difficult time. Also my uncle brought most of a leftover christmas ham, and we told stories of how many times my grandpa had spanked each of us (I actually lead everyone including aunts and uncles with 2 times. Once I bit his leg, and the other time had something to do with me continually interrupting the building of a house. I remember neither incident.)

Anyway,

Oh Klosterman, you devil!

Nick sent me an Esquire Chuck Klosterman article (yes, he always has written for shit publications) that talks about that fucking annoying question “What kind of music do you listen to?” which in my experience has always been answered by most people I’ve witnessed (my younger self included) as “anything but rap and country”.

In any case, he breaks it down to pieces of music that he loves, such as the first 15 seconds of a live Humble Pie song and a few others that he really likes. I thought about this for a minute and 3 or 4 (okay 5)examples come to mind.

1. The first 15-20 seconds of the Murder City Devils song “Press Gang”. It starts off with just a sort of slow, driving organ solo, and after about 12 seconds a short quick guitar riff is played, the moment ends about the time that Spencer Moody’s vocals start.

2. From Neil Young’s Harvest, about 40 seconds into A Man Needs A Maid, Neil sort of breaks his voice over the line ” just someone to keep my house clean”. It sounds like a desperate cry, like he can’t take his world being so messy and cluttered with junk. It’s the only line in the song with that desperation.

3. In Radiohead’s Karma Police, the end of the song kind of peaks at about 3 minutes and 40 seconds into the song, and slowly but surely a kind of scratchy warbly electronic sound fades up until basically at the end of the song all of the other vocals and instruments die away, and all your left with is this weird dying synthesizer noise. A robot funeral, maybe?

4. Another, much longer piece is the the insane guitar solo that lasts through the last couple minutes of GNR’s November Rain. I also love the first solo starts at about 3:50 seconds and ends about 5:38. The second, more furious solo starts at about 7:12 and lasts until the song ends near the 9 minute mark.

5. This might just be because I read an interesting article about the Guitar Hero version of this song, but the moment the insanely fast guitars kick in about 20 seconds into Dragonforce’s “Into the Fire and Flames” until the point the vocals start. The guitarist plays so fucking fast my brain hurts.

There are probably others, but I am not the slave to the details Mr. Klosterman is.

-Matt

Watching “Once”

I’ve been really excited to rent and watch the movie “Once” for a long time, the story of two musicians meeting and playing songs for the duration of a movie was something I was definitely interested in (I’ve been working on/thinking about incorporating music in my screenplays in a way as to make them non-musical musicals for a year or two). I watched about 30 minutes of it last night, and even though Gretchen was bored, and it looks like it was shot on DV or something of that ilk, about 15 minutes in, the two main characters play a song together in the back of a music store that was exactly what I’d always wanted to do in a movie.

This is also the way that the movie Juno ends, with characters singing. The last fifteen minutes of the movie make up for the precociousness of the dialog of the rest of the film. And what happened to Rainn Wilson’s character? A cranky old convenience store character who dispenses weird-ass advice would have probably been amusing. Plus that guy makes me laugh whatever he’s doing.

I’m in a movie-centric mood, so there you have it.

-Matt

To Oregon!

The Coldest

Originally uploaded by Tzpkcht Kzmsrskstlrz

The first time I took my (now) annual trek to Oregon was 5 years ago. I believe I was drunk and hanging out with some random people, and in trying to impress a chick with how interesting I was, I mentioned that I was going to take off for the Oregon coast alone the following weekend. It sounded so cool when I said it, that I decided to just go ahead and do it.

I’d been dating Gretchen for about 6 weeks at the time, and in another moment of trying to sound cool, I asked her to come with me, not really expecting her to say yes. Strangely enough, she said yeah, and we ended up staying in a Motel 6 (for a discount as the room had no remote control) and a cheap pirate motel.

Last year, because of the ’storm of the century’ we ended up not going to the coast and instead staying in Portland at a fancy hotel and drinking champagne from the mini-bar. I’d actually never really done anything like that before, and in getting an over-priced bottle of room service champagne, I felt a little out of place, but for some reason, it was completely worth the money.

The photo from Flickr, is from a cheap disposable b&W camera that I purchased from a drug store in Seaside. For whatever reason, the pictures from those things always turn out pretty cool.

This year we’re splitting our time between Portland and Seaside. I’m leaving tomorrow at 6am. I will not forget to write!

Handmade & Skin Tight

I’ve just uploaded my new screenplay, this is pretty much as raw of a first draft as it comes, and since I know I haven’t really been talking specifics besides that it’s personal and has a lot of music in it, it might come off as kind of funky (I think that’s the best way to describe it). I’ll probably do some serious polishing and work next weekend when I’m in the savage Oregon jungle-beach, but I always love when draft 1 is done.

Link

Slowly going downhill

Day 1 one of this morning coffee experiment is not going all that well. I mixed unleaded and regular together for my morning coffee, and though it tastes like the devils balls, the best part is that I was suckling at it all morning and receiving none of the foolgoodery that coffee provides me. I sweated out the morning meeting and ate lunch, which made me feel a little better.

For whatever reason I am now drinking a coke zero, which is giving my head a feeling somewhere between the coffee shakes and being hungover.

Oh, but there is no going back.

Goodbye Morning Coffee

So I’m sitting here at my desk today on a conference call and I was reading this article on giving up morning coffee. And I had to agree, morning coffee is sort of bullshit in a certain way. I only really drink it as ritual at this point, and I’m pretty sure that it only contributes to me being irritable when I don’t have it.

I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to ween myself off of it, probably just start drinking half cups and then itty bitty cups and then thimblefulls and then nothing. I also read that you can take excedrin, but then I wonder if I’ll be hepped up on excedrin too.

As a sidenote: It’s not that I’m going to stop drinking coffee altogether, noooo, that would be crazy. Only a ban on coffee from Monday-Friday 9-5. Oh coffee, I could never leave you!

November 2007

Rhapsody Link

1. Suffer For Fashion - Of Montreal
2. Born To Run - Bruce Springsteen
3. Wheels Of Love - Drive-By Truckers
4. Cold Roses - Ryan Adams
5. Philadelphia Grand Jury, The - The Fiery Furnaces
6. To Catch a Thief - Lovage
7. Goin’ To Acapulco - Jim James
8. Mushaboom - Feist
9. No One’s Gonna Love You - Band Of Horses
10. Broken Arrow - Neil Young