Have you seen the glossary? Also known as The NecroKonicon, but I think I’m changing the name soon. I am saying this because if you haven’t seen it in a while, it has changed a lot. I’ve been adding a lot more entries, the layout is changing, there are a lot of new pictures, and it continues to grow. I don’t know how many people read it like 2 or 3 years ago and said “oh, ok” and then forgot about it, but I’ve added a lot of stuff since then, so maybe you should check it out.

Also, I am kind of hoping those people who are sort of involved (lived in Bloomington, worked for UCS, whatever) would please leave some comments, or at the very least, email me and tell me some of your stories. I am planning on making this thing into a book sooner or later, and I want to include stories from other people, like in little boxes in the side heads or whatever. I am really trying to finish things up and get this book out - I realize I have said in the past I wanted to do this, and I stalled, but this time I really am trying to remove as many of the obstacles as I can so I can get this book done. I don’t expect to sell one god damned copy of it, but my rationale is that once it is done and published, I will have it out of my way and I can start working on something else.

Not much is going on here. I have a sore throat and have been congested and sneezy all day, plus I am completely brain-dead, which means another cold, which sucks because I just got over one. I don’t know if I get 24 colds a year because I have a weak immune system, or if it’s the fact that I live in a city where people literally shit in the street, but I wish I had something else wrong with me, like say a brain tumor or something, that clearly showed up on an x-ray that a doctor could just easily cut out and then charge me $60,000, because I would rather have to deal with that than having half of my life essentially stolen from me.

Oh, I did get some dental work done on Saturday, so maybe that’s why I got sick. I actually got a chipped tooth fixed, and I realized that it was about twenty years ago that I chipped it, and that suddenly made me freak out that something I remember so clearly was two full decades ago. Of course, you tend not forget things like getting hit in the face with a wrench, but still.

Okay, my soup and applesauce are about done, so I think I’m going to go read for a while. If I was clear-headed, I’d work on the glossary, but I’m not.

It’s hotter than living hell out. It’s been an entire weekend of unrelenting weather, but this afternoon we got a wicked thunderstorm and some rain, so it felt good for a few hours. Now it’s getting hot again and the apartment is returning to swamp-like consistency. I should probably stop bitching about the weather, but the problem is that when the weather is like this, I have nothing else to write about, because my brain pretty much shuts down and all I can think about is moving to Antarctica, or how I can somehow take all of the computer parts in my house and build a bootleg air conditioner that will work better than the stupid portable one I have in my bedroom.

I finished reading this biography of Lester Bangs - I don’t remember the author [Jim DeRogatis], but the title is Let it Blurt and the author is/was this fat kid who went to visit Lester for his high school writing project, and met him at his apartment, and Lester was incredibly nice to him and talked to him for hours, and then like two weeks later he was dead. The book is the best one out there, but it was still a little weird or lacking, and I don’t know if it’s the writer (although he put a lot of effort into it) or just the arc of Bangs’ life. I mean, it seems like he was just gaining steam, and then BAM, and it wasn’t like Johnny Chapman jumped out with a revolver yelling “death to music critics” or something - he just died, and it’s still disputed if it was a drug overdose or a bad case of the flu or some mystery disease or what.

I think the thing with Lester Bangs is that describing him or what his deal was is a lot like trying to explain Devo to your mom, and you can’t really describe it, and it’s the kind of thing you just have to get right in the middle of and dive in without looking how deep the water is. And I’ve read a couple of the Lester Bangs books, and they kick total ass, and you realize how incredible this guy must have been. But all of his books were postmortem anthologies, and the little bits and pieces are good and bad and glued together at the whim of a third-person editor, and every time you read anything, you wish there was MORE somewhere. I mean, imagine Hendrix never released those first few albums while he was alive, and his entire discography was just these fucked-up, spliced together CDs that Steve Ballmer or whoever puts together. You’d get bits and pieces of the same riffs and jams, but would always walk away thinking “fuck, I wish he had some ALBUMS out!” And now, you put in Are You Experienced, and every song fits together perfectly, and every time you listen, you find some little sound that’s new, and I just wish Lester had put together some damn books in his lifetime so we all had that same experience.

The other thing about Lester Bangs is that in reading this biography, he really reminded me of my old roommate Simms, and I don’t know if Simms would take that as an insult or a compliment. I guess they, at least to me, have/had a similar persona, and Simms is totally this kind of guy that you could have a four-hour conversation about everything and nothing and that was a big Lester Bangs trademark, to the point that he had his phone cut off half the time because of huge bills to the phone co. And Lester Bangs sounds like the kind of guy who would go out and buy every Criterion Collection DVD and totally get on top of all of them as far as what was phenomenal and what was shit and somehow relate all of it to Frank Zappa. And I’m sitting here in iDVD, rendering an old video to disc, and the “burn” button is a spinning radiation-type symbol, like a six-piece circle with half yellow and half black, and it totally looks like this button Simms gave me of The Who that I still have in a box somewhere. So Lester Bangs reminded me of Simms, who I have not heard from in forever, but I just called his voice mail, so we’ll see.

It is POURING out. The top foot of my bed is drenched in water from the wind tearing the drops into my apartment. I hope that will dry off in the next hour or two. I also have about 20 CDs I bought in the last week, and I don’t want to listen to any of them. I am listening to Gordian Knot, this prog-rock project thing that is one of the guys from Cynic, along with a bunch of other prog-rock favorites like Bill Bruford and Steve Hackett, and it’s good. But I bought a bunch of stuff to fill holes in the collection, and I was bored of them before I got them out of the bag.

Okay, time to pay my bills and listen to the rain.

This is my first entry from my new machine, which is a Mac Mini. I already wrote about the big switch over on LiveJournal, so read there for the political puling. I’m mostly concerned with getting everything over to the new machine and working. I think web updates are fine, I’m reading mail here, and I’ve got the music collection into iTunes, so that’s good. I still have a lot of adjusting to my workflow, but it’s working well so far. For example, instead of having a bunch of directories with photos flung into them and some half-ass scripts generating galleries, I’m moving everything over to iPhoto. That will make things prettier and easier to deal with, but it’s still a lot of work.

I think the next project might be a print book of the glossary. I am reading this book on the history of Apple computer, and it’s similar in a folklore sense, plus it’s that 8-inch square format that lulu just added to their roster, and I’d really like to do a book like that. I know absolutely nobody will buy a copy, but I mostly want one for myself. So I’ve been picking at the entries a bit. Some will go away - Ray is still convinced I wrote the entire project just to spite him, and so I will have to trim a few things. I also have a lot of ideas for new entries, and those are percolating. I now generally dislike the ones about people and like the ones more about concepts, or old stores or restaurants or whatever that have vanished. Lots of work ahead, I guess. Take a look at the site - I am making edits and syncing them to the head, so to speak, so they are all viewable. I’m also nervous I horridly fucked some pages when I moved the computer, so if you see anything weird, let me know.

OK, back to playing with iPhoto…

Air in the Paragraph Line #10 is now available! Go to http://www.rumored.com/aitpl/ for more info on it. I got the proof today, and it looks awesome. It has 14 stories, 170 pages, and looks like a real book and everything. It’s weird to see the photocopied, black-and-white issue #9 from way back in 1998 sitting next to the glossy, perfect-bound issue #10 from the present. I almost want to bind up the first nine in a little book and make it look official, but it would be easier to keep looking for good writing and put out #11 with even more stuff, so I’ll do that instead. Anyway, there’s a free PDF preview, and for ten bucks, you can’t go wrong, so please check it out.

Not much else is up. It’s hot, I’m tired, and I’ve been spending time working on the web site and doing other zine-related hustling. Aside from reading the zine, I started working on that new Douglas Coupland book Hey Nostradamus!. Well, I guess it isn’t that new - new to paperback. I like it, the writing at least, although the whole Columbine setting wouldn’t be my first choice. His writing, no matter the bad plot, always slides like butter though. I’ll probably finish it in two more subway rides.

Hot. Hot. Hot. And it’s actually pretty nice outside, it’s just this god damned heatsink of an apartment is like the center of hell. Time for another shower.

I’ve been reading Killing Bono by Neil McCormick, something I picked up on Sunday at a Barnes and Noble where I was trying to escape the heat for a few minutes. It’s an interesting little book that most people will see as a sort of first-person biography of the band U2. McCormick, now a music critic, grew up in Ireland with Bono and crew as his classmates, and he is still good pals with the quartet. But that’s not what attracted me to the book. Because what this guy did was told the tale of how he was so close to fame - in fact, he even jammed with the band a few times back when they were trying to figure out who played what, and eventually went off to leave the group, then called Feedback and playing shitty Beatles covers through Sears amplifiers or whatever. And it’s interesting to see not only that this guy had so many close brushes with what later became fame in his youth, but that he didn’t become madly famous for being the fifth U2er or whatever. When he didn’t gig with those guys, he got his own JcPenny bass and started his own shitty Beatles cover band, and although they played some second-rate gigs sixty miles out of town opening for a polka act or whatever, he never got the deal from Island or anything else. Instead, he worked a job at a crappy music weekly paper, pasting down headlines while crammed into a tiny office with a half-dozen other people. I really like the never-got-famous biographies, not of the bands who we now see on the cover of Billboard holding up gold albums, but the ones who really tried to get it going, and partied hard and slept on floors and didn’t do shit, and ended up selling insurance 20 years later. For some reason, that really gets me going, and makes me wish I had tried a little harder at getting a crap band going in high school so I could at least fake writing about it.

I have a pretty mixed opinion on U2, though. I first saw them back on MTV when that live video of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” was played almost constantly, because they only had like 12 videos back then. I never got into the band that much, but got Joshua Tree when it came out, and was drawn to it, if anything, because the bass lines were incredibly easy to figure out. It wasn’t a great revelation or a best-ever sort of thing, just an album I liked, listened to for a few weeks, then filed back in with the rest of the CDs. The other main exposure I had to U2 before I got to college (where like everybody listened to them, as some kind of bridge to what was then called “alternative” rock) was that when I dated my first girlfriend, right before I left for school, we spent a lot of time parked in her car, for obvious reasons. And while I had all of this heavy metal shit in my tape deck, and she had all of this more punk-oriented stuff, I think two of the tapes we compromised on were Depeche Mode’s 101 and U2’s Rattle and Hum - both live albums. So I spent many an hour parked in dark areas of Elkhart listening to Bono sing “All Along the Watchtower” while I tried to figure out how to undo a bra strap.

Fast-forward about four years, and we get to one of the reasons I couldn’t stand U2 for years. This is simple: for whatever reason, there are highly impressionable girls who tend to lock onto U2 and make it their main infatuation in life, only listening to their songs and being in giggles about how dreamy The Edge or Bono were or whateverthefuck. And in 1993, I ended up dating one of them. And while we dated, it was not horrible - I mean, she wasn’t carving lyrics from October into her arm or anything, and she hadn’t planned any pilgrimages to Windmill Studios in Dublin, but it was still one of those minor things that tick you off.

And when she dumped me later, I really, REALLY hated U2, and became a real dick about it. You’d think Adam Clayton personally poured sugar in my car’s gas tank or something. This was further reinforced by the fact that after the relationship, I became heavily involved in the spoken word of Henry Rollins, who has a bit about how much he hates U2. So for years, I completely despised anything with The Edge’s jangly guitar and Bono’s vapid vocals.

For whatever reason, though, I ended up buying a copy of Achtung Baby after I moved away from college, maybe 4 or 5 years after it came out. Part of it was that the girl that I based a character on in Summer Rain was totally in love with that album when we were friends, and so maybe it was research. Also, the ex-girlfriend had once sent me a mix tape, and in some sort of horrible nostalgia, I was trying to track down all of the songs on it, one of which was “Acrobat”. And yeah, I ended up adding that album to my list of guilty pleasures, because it’s so enjoyable. It’s almost as simple as their earlier things, but they built out such a thick sound with so many things in the background. It sounds more natural than synthetic, but song to song varies so much, and the little buzzes and beats make it seem so much more filling. And one of the reasons I like the album so much is that it’s got such a happy sound to it, just this total, poppy, it’s-a-wonderful-world sound to it. But then you really drill down into each song, and some of them are so insanely personal, rather than the usual blanket political/spiritual messages, that it’s so god damned depressing, and that totally hits the spot sometime.

Of course, the story ends here, with no great revelation about how I’m now a lifetime U2 fan. Honestly, I haven’t picked up a single album of theirs other than those two, and I don’t feel a need to. I think the moral of that story is that I have so many of these damn guilty pleasures, but it doesn’t mean I need to rush out and buy someone’s complete discography plus singles and bootlegs and SACDs just because one of the CDs has a certain meaning from a certain time.

It’s still hot, by the way, which is why I keep writing these driveling musical commentaries. It’s easier than trying to work on short stories, and far more interesting than a thousand words on what kind of bottled water I drank today. Or is it?