Unsolicited Advice

I don't often buy CDs anymore. With media I'm generally only interested in the main content, and the hard drive stays the same size no matter how much I load onto it, so digital services are easier. It's rare that I want some part of the packaging enough to store it, and pack it, and move it from house to house when I am eventually forced to be itinerant again. Placebo released a 20th anniversary retrospective, and I paid to have them mail me one. I like them enough to give them money, and their website asks a very reasonable $11 for a 2-CD set, in a hardcover gatefold. I wanted the pictures. More accurately, I wanted to know which pictures the two of them thought were relevant. Knowing what people want to remember is sometimes more interesting than the events themselves. There is a brief introduction to the album by Brian Molko in the front of the book. I have seen very little prose from him, but it all has the same curious quality of standing by itself, hanging over t...

I worked a gig Saturday night that took so much out of me that when my co-worker nicked some chocolate chip cookies out of the staff kitchen for me, I didn't eat them. I was so tired that food didn't taste good anymore. It was just a mouthful of crumbly stuff that really wasn't much fun at all. When I ran out of things to read on the late train home, I started desperately pawing through my phone for something to think about. Though my playlists are generally albums in proper track order or a collection of a dozen or so loose songs that won't stop circling in my head, I load entire discographies onto the storage card for exactly these kinds of emergencies. Usually there's something weird enough in the directory of bootlegs and B-sides to keep me awake until I get to my stop. I ended up listening to this on loop. That is Brian Molko on vocals, and probably him on the guitar, too; it's one of the B-sides to an early Placebo single. It sounds almost entirely un...

I spent most of the afternoon trapped on a train today. Normally, this does not bother me much. Public transit is nice. I can't be shouted at for loafing; I am on a train, so clearly I have left the house and gone to do whatever thing needs doing. But I also can't be expected to do anything about it right at that very moment, as there are a limited number of things one can tend to on a train, and I can't do anything to make the beastie get where it's going any faster. I am In Transit, and everyone can kindly fuck off for a little while. When I feel lousy I also feel like rabbit-punching everyone around me who wears a backpack and has a poor sense of personal space, so I had my earbuds jammed resolutely in. I had a lot of Very Loud Things turned up Very Loud Indeed in an effort to ignore all this. Very loud. Louder. Why is it not getting any louder? WHY HAS MY MUSIC NOT BEEN ENLOUDENED. WHAT DO YOU MEAN THAT IS AS FAR AS THE VOLUME CONTROL GOES. THE OTHER PEOPLE ARE ST...

People make me think things. Brian Molko makes me think really filthy things, which I am willing to admit in public mainly because he's pretty plain about being okay with this. He clearly understands this state of mind, as he has a reputation for entertaining himself on tour by sleeping around. On the other hand, I am an adult, and I understand that sometimes we think things that do not need to be immediately ejected into the open air; he appears to get that too, as I have never heard him comment on-mic on the attractiveness, or lack thereof, of any other human being. I assume he's not shy about sharing this information with specific people in whom he is interested, or he wouldn't get laid nearly so much, but discretion about the details is generally a good thing. He also makes me think things that are probably equally dangerous to be dreaming about on the train. Writers are a lazy species, in that we all understand it is much easier to write about things that are alrea...

I'm informed that Lady Gaga soloed a Bowie tribute at the Grammys. I have not seen it. I watched the opening with the face-tracking projector effect, then winced and turned it off. I'm pretty vocal in my dislike of her; I don't wish her ill, but I do wish she'd spontaneously decide she was rich enough already and retire to a tropical island somewhere. I have no problem with her being as weird as she wants, and I even concede her right to be weird specifically in order to sell records even if I'm not going to buy them, but I find her insistence that this claptrap is meaningful  to be pretentious at best. If you ask me, and nobody did, the tribute should have been given to a handful of artists instead. Perhaps one of them would have butchered his songs less than people are telling me she did. And if you'd insisted on handing it over to a solo artist, I'd have scared up Brian Molko, with or without the rest of his band. Molko is frontman for a band called...