September 17, 2005

day of fog

There's something I really like about staying up most of the night to write an article, especially on a little bit of caffeine: I feel focused, I'm self-critical enough to rewrite and polish a lot but not so much that I lose hope, and I don't get distracted by the shiny things I can see by daylight. The problem is that the next day is a washout. Finally wriggled toward bed at about 5:00 this morning, and was woken up about three hours later by a phone call. And that was it for me in terms of productivity for the day: did a little listening and research for some pieces that are due imminently, attempted to go exercise (finding that my reflexes were slow enough that I noticed that some stretches were really not feeling so good a few seconds before I realized that, duh, maybe I shouldn't stretch that far), spent a few more hours in a fog at my desk, then finally dozed for a while. I think I also entertained Sterling for a while with the help of the Ukulele Boogaloo songbook--nice to be able to play "Elevate Me Later" and "I Will Survive" on the uke.

Somewhere in tonight's haze we watched Napoleon Dynamite, which I hadn't seen before--the whole thing seemed like an extended version of the maybe 30 seconds of stylized dialogue and ultra-sharp fisheye or quasi-David LaChappelle cinematography in a music video before the song kicks in.

Currently listening to Vladislav Delay's The Four Corners, which is strange to hear after the glory that was last year's Luomo album (Delay's reverb-house pseudonym)--his early stuff wasn't that far away from this, but now this sounds to me like the component parts of Luomo disassembled and lying on the ground, some of them still partly charged and most of them inert. You can tell it's his work, it's just making a point of not going anywhere. It's actually the same sort of effect I get from the Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom album, which I like more than Matos does, but Gonzalez & Russom's everything-pulling-together triumph of a record was one single, Black Leotard Front's "Casual Friday." Can't I get more than that before the whispering breakdown arrives?

The song in my head despite the Delay album is Ray Charles' "Greenbacks," in which "greenback dollar bill" is rhymed with "just a little piece of paper coated in chlorophyll."

Eight novels to read in the next five days, effectively.

Posted by Douglas at September 17, 2005 12:35 AM | TrackBack
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