XVIII

Ever take a nap in the middle of the day and the very first thing you think, and consequently say out loud, is "WHY?"

Me either.



Marvin Gaye - "What's Going On" (1971)

XVII

I haven't done enough pool-hopping lately. It was a great way to pass the time when we were in high school and had no cars or anything to do. We'd just walk around from house to house, looking for the ones with pools, jump in and bolt. Eventually I guess that lost its luster, because it got to the point where we rang a doorbell and asked if we could swim in the pool, the answer obviously being no. Then we discovered that the town pool has a much better payoff with much less risk, sealing it as the ultimate aquatic trespass. I miss hiding when we thought we saw cop cars, or running into the woods barefoot when we definitely saw cop cars. I miss the absolute pain of sliding down a giant slide that isn't lubricated with running water. Those were the days. I'm much more mature now. I spend my time drinking until I can't see and passing out drunk on the beach in the middle of the afternoon. I'm a grown up.



Rilo Kiley - "More Adventurous" (1994)

XVI

I really have nothing to say at all, except time is a motherfucker and summer is a dickhead of a season.



Big Star - "Third/Sister Lovers" (1992)

XV

I got my first introduction to Sonic Youth through some interview with Kurt Cobain in which he said he dug them, which prompted me to download "Teenage Riot" via Napster. I liked it, so I downloaded more, all of which I pretty much hated. I didn't get all the noise. I didn't go back to them until probably last year, by which point I finally understood.

I'm currently living out of my car and it seems like every time I get in it Sonic Youth is playing, hence the boring, "who gives a fuck" story.



Sonic Youth - "Daydream Nation" (1988)

XIV

It's 4 am, I'm drinking, forgive me for any incoherence.

There was a regrettable period of my life where I was a mallrat. We'd take the bus there every Friday after school, and just walk around being obnoxious, which is really all I did for the first 20 years of my life anyway, just in different venues. Before we went, I would always go into our basement where my mom kept the money she held for the school store, and take 20 or 30 bucks. It still kind of amazes me to this day that she never caught on, because I was pretty liberal about how much I took. I used the money for three things: food, bus fare, and CD's. This was at the time where I was the only person I knew into punk, so I was on my own as far as discovering bands. A good way of doing this while staying within my limited budget was buying comps, the first of which I bought was Punk-O-Rama 4. There's a bunch of really good songs on it, and I still listen to it almost 10 years later. Among a bunch of others, it was my first introduction to Bad Religion, with their song Generator.
The same year I stumbled upon this gem, I went to Long Beach Island for a week with my dad and my two brothers. I met a bunch of surfer kids that lived on the street I was staying at who pointed me in the direction of a halfway decent record store. I can't remember what else I bought, but I picked up Generator, the album whose title track I was so fond of. I had only heard one song, but I was not disappointed. The music had a level of sincerity that I had not encountered prior and which still resonates with me now, drunk and bitter.
There was a kid we hung out with in my mallrat days who went to see Blink 182, and Bad Religion opened for them. He came back from the show and said that some band of old dudes played and everyone there hated and heckled them. I look back on him telling me that as the first moment that I started to hate the general population.



Bad Religion - "Generator" (1992)

XIII

The summer between my junior and senior year of high school I spent a lot of time walking around our small, 2 square mile town. Only two of our friends had licenses, so mostly we all just moved about on foot, meeting in parks and parking lots and doing stupid things you do as a stupid kid. I did this armed with my trusty walkman (wow) by my side, usually containing a mix cd I had made. Around this same time I started getting really into noisy/screamo bands like Orchid and You and I. I spent many days walking through the gully where the old trolley used to run in Glen Rock, listening to what I consider now to be mostly unlistenable music. There are a few records that I still throw on every once and awhile though, one being the Neil Perry/Kaospilot split. I had never heard of Kaospilot and bought the record because I was really into Neil Perry. However, that riff in "The Noise From the Bell Killed Me" ended up stealing the show. Unfortunately their follow-up LP proved disappointing. The last track on the Neil Perry side is my favorite of theirs.



Neil Perry/Kaospilot split

XII

RIP





Drive-By Truckers - A Blessing and a Curse"

XI

I walked into Mexicali Brewz late last night, and was immediately accosted by two really faded dudes as I tried to find even the slightest hole to get a beer. They kept telling me my fedora was awesome and then started yelling, "BOUNCING SOULS? BOUNCING SOULS?" I responded "Yeah man, How I Spent My Summer Vacation" is a great record, to which they reacted by yelling "Yea bro" over and over. A couple minutes later the long-hair was walking around and the bartender kicked him out, presumably for being an excited lil' boy. He walked out, dejected, only to come back a few minutes later. As he opened the door though, the bartender stood in wait, and began throwing coasters at him until he left. One of the better bouncings I've seen for sure.

Stay tuned for my new book, "Adventures of a Fancy Gentleman", dropping in the fall.



The Bouncing Souls - How I Spent My Summer Vacation

X

I'm in the middle of about a three week bender and I hope everyone is having as much as I am, though it would be nice to go to sleep before the sun wakes up.

I love horror movies. Can't get enough. I wouldn't even really say they scare me for the most part, but that's not even the reason I watch them. I watch because I'm obsessed with the different devices and methods that a filmmaker will use to get scares. A perfect example is the climax in Halloween, when Laurie Strode, played by that tranny Jamie Lee Curtis, kneels at the frame of the door which opens into the room where she's just killed her masked assailant, Michael Myers. Before she can catch her breath, he sits straight back up. If you try and tell me that isn't one of the scariest scenes in movie history, you're a dope.
Again though, it's not actually frightening, it's more of a "cool" scary. I have a smile on my face the whole time. I like scenes that make me yell "Fuck, that ruled." Unfortunately the american horror movie has become an endless string of bad remakes, in which they take movies from Japan and Korea and strip them of all beauty and artistic sense, the very things that make them scary, and replace it with cheap thrills, jump scenes, and happy endings.
I went to see "The Strangers" the other night, and all I can say is fuuuck, that ruled. The movie was exactly how it should have been. It's been getting terrible reviews, and the people I went with hated it, but I will not be swayed. If you saw "Funny Games", you'd probably recognize The Strangers as a less lyrical, worse acted version of that, and I mean that in the best way possible. I'm not gonna give it away, but the ending is perfect.

All the music in the movie is played through the turntable in the house, one of those aforementioned cool devices I hold so dear. The soundtrack has a couple great songs: Richard Bruckner's "Ariel Ramirez", the Woody Guthrie written, Billy Bragg and Wilco performed "At My Window Sad and Lonely", and "The Sprout and the Bean", from the Joanna Newsom album "The Milk-Eyed Mender".



Joanna Newsom - "The Milk-Eyed Mender" (2004)

IX

A few summers ago, my friend Ryan and I drove the 40 mins down to Westfield, where I had lived and worked for a little while before an epic crash in which I was fired for drinking at work, and then spent the next few months unemployed and a recluse, only leaving my room to go to the liquor store. We were going to visit my friend with whom I had worked and kept in contact with. I think we met her at some awful cafe where a lot of kids probably pumping Norma Jean through their ill-fitting, terrible sound quality earbuds hung out. A forgettable experience to say the least. Afterwards we grabbed a couple six packs with my fake ID which I still had at the time, and went up to a golf course to put em down. It was perfect drinking weather. I hadn't started smoking yet, but it was the kind of weather when cigarettes taste the best. That summer I had three albums in heavy rotation: the first two Hold Steady records and "Grace". The warm tone and almost distant sound fits in well with the summer. One of my favorite things about music is the way it just naturally becomes a soundtrack for certain times or activities, though I'm not sure if it's due to the sound or to the listener.



Jeff Buckley - "Grace" (1994)