We’ve gotten quite a bit of rain here in Southern California. From last Friday to last Tuesday in Downtown LA we’ve gotten almost six inches of rain. I know in our local mountains some places have received 10 feet of snow.
The bulk of the rain fell here on Friday and Saturday. I made sure that my fridge was full so I wouldn’t subject the food delivery folks to the treacherous road conditions — there was no way I wanted to be out there, so how in good conscious could I subject anyone else to that shit?
After a gloomy and cold couple of weeks, next weekend is supposed to get warm again. I can’t wait.
I got tickets to the Numero Twenty fest just so I could see Unwound again tonight. Also I realized I didn’t have The Future of What on vinyl, so I got a copy along with another tee. It was a shorter set tonight unfortunately, but here it is:
Abstraktions
All Souls Day
Envelope
Hexenzsene
New Energy
Usual Dosage
Corpse Pose
Go to Dallas and Take a Left
For Your Entertainment
Valentine Card
Kantina
Were Are and Was or Is
Also playing was Karate, Chisel, Tsunami and UI. I missed both UI and Tsunami. Also it was at the Palace Theater which is two blocks from my apartment. So you understand why I had to go see Unwound, right?
On April 1, 2002, we received this following announcement:
Yes, Unwound has decided to call it quits. Due to our inability to do any touring for an indefinite period we have decided to disband. We will continue to play music in different forms (other than unwound) in the future and also hope to release a collection of live tracks, demos and any unreleased material there is. Also hopefully a live/tour video-movie of some sort. Apologies to those who missed their chance to see us last year due to our cancellations. We can’t begin to thank all of those who helped us over the years, so we hope you know who you are! A round of applause from us to all the fans that came and went. Thanks and good night! unwound people
I used to make fun of Fatkid so much for loving Unwound. Mostly because I was (and still!) am an asshole and like poking at people. To be honest, I don’t think I ever really heard their music at all, but hey, anything to amuse myself.
But once I heard them, fuck, I was hooked. Absolute chaos and darkness from the guitars and throat of Justin Trosper that surrounded the steady beat of Sara Lund’s drumming and Vern Rumsey’s bass was sublime. They were less Grateful Dead than early 90s Sonic Youth, more complex than the simplicity of Nirvana and more cohesive than most of the other Olympia bands. All of us who are fans wonder why they were not bigger than they were even after their demise.
Along with Nine Inch Nails, Unwound is (are?) my favorite band/musical act of all time which is why their breakup affected me a lot back in 2002. With their last album Leaves Turn Inside You in 2001, they seemed to reach a zenith in their artistry and could have gone so much farther. But the inevitable communication breakdowns, substance issues and all that typical rock star bullshit even made its way to them.
I didn’t think I would ever get to see them live again especially after Vern died in 2020. But Justin and Sara have come back together bringing along Jared Warren of Karp and the Melvins to fill in on bass and Scott Seckington of one of Justin’s post-Unwound bands Nocturnal Habits on guitars and keyboards. There I was at the Wiltern on the second night of their sold-out shows here in LA. After coming out to what sounded like the National Weather Service radio report of Northern California, they launched into their normal open “All Soul’s Day.” Holy fuck.
Then came “Envelope”, “Hexenzsene” and “Look a Ghost.” Boom boom boom. They weren’t fucking around here. This was for all of us who stood by holding the torch after all of these years. After this section, Sara asked who of us saw them back at the Jabberjaw. Then, perhaps most surprisingly, when she asked who weren’t even born yet when they last played, there was quite a bit of cheering. “This next song is for you,” she said as they launched into “New Energy”, a quick burst screaming for passion, youth and burning shit to the ground. It was also nice to notice that there was a bit of moshing down in the pit which I haven’t seen in ages.
It was spellbinding being on this journey as they calmed things down with “Usual Dosage” to the snarky “Laugh Track” and dark “Corpse Pose” and “Scarlette.” It was hard not to get choked up during “Disappoint” especially when Justin screamed out in the chorus “I never want to dive / Inside this heart of mine,” and then a resigned mournful singing “I’ll disappear and then I won’t know it’s true / Disappointed in me, disappointed in you.”
But, no shit, tears did come out in their noisy culmination of their set “Swan.” A complete banger in 5/4 time signature, it hit me when Justin screamed “What I see is the end of the end of the end,” before the song complete breaks apart into a wall of feedback. As they left the stage, they played a tape of “Pardon My French” on a loop as they took a break and gave us all a change to catch our breaths.
Fuck. That was so fucking good.
I was talking with Shea from San Diego who was sitting next to me. Talking about the last time we had seen Unwound live (he in 2002, me in 2001) over 20 years ago, we chatted about how much things have changed: we used to be the ones smoking cigarettes in venues that we were now complaining about; that we now paid for actual seats because standing in the pit for hours on end is a no-go now. It was just reassuring to be next to someone who was just as into seeing Unwound as I was. (While talking, he even reminded me of the DC band Circus Lupus who I had completely forgotten about!!!!!!)
As we were gabbing, Unwound came back out and launched into “Dragnalus” which brought all of us old folks a lot of excitement. “THIS BOREDOM REALLY SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!” went into another Fake Train gem “Nervous Energy.” There is something about the chaos on that album that really causes the head to violently bang so-to-speak. They slowed it down with “Arboretum” and “Lady Elect” before ending the show with THE trilogy: “Valentine Card”, “Kantina” and “Were Are and Was or Is.” It was here that I really noticed Vern’s absence. While Jared held the fort down and you could hardly tell the difference, there was something mournful as Justin was screaming and pleading, “STAY! DON’T GO!!!!!!”
And just like that it was over. They spent a few minutes handing out the flowers to those in the pit, then the roadies came onstage and turned the amps off. “That was fucking amazing,” I noted to Shea. We both sat there for a few minutes to regain ourselves before going our separate ways.
Yes, I wished they had played “Equally Stupid”, “Unauthorized Autobiography”, “Devoid”, “Summer Freeze”, “Radio Gra”, “Broken E Strings”, “Seen Not Heard.” Sure, I wish this was a three-hour show. But this little tidbit was such a fucking gem of a show which made up for all the lost time.
Last month I bought a PS5. Yes, I was able to my hands on a PS5 through the Sony website just paying retail. Right before New Years I was on the PS5 webpage and just for kicks opted to put one in the shopping cart. To my shock it went in rather than the usual “Sorry, we are sold out,” or whatever bullshit they have been rejecting us with for the last few years. I was able to put in my payment details. Next thing you know, I purchased it, and five days later it came to my front door.
I’ve been wanting to play video games more for a bit, and here I am now. I got the original Mr. Driller and Puzzle Fighter, but the real game I had been wanting to play is Stray. It starts off with the trauma of the cat falling down the wall and landing in the city. Then there are those little monsters that jump up and try eating you. I’m at the rooftop scene now, and I’m totally enthralled. Now I’m not at the point where I will spend three, four hours playing a game at one time, although I do see how easy you can fall into that.
I also downloaded the updated version of Doom but really haven’t started getting into that. The one thing I do have a problem with is controlling the aim and all that.
Lately I’ve been having a recurring dream that I had started hormone treatments to become female a couple of months ago. The other day I received news that somehow, inexplicably, I became pregnant. Now, in this dream, I’m walking around work aimlessly trying to distract myself from the reality of it all. I know I need to go to an OB/GYN to get the baby checked up, to figure out how in the hell this was possible since I’d only been on hormone treatments for a couple of months, figure out who the baby daddy is and tell him. But I’m just trying to delay this as much as possible.
While I have all of this weighing me down, I run into some coworkers and I just had to tell them that I’m pregnant. I don’t pay attention to their reaction — I’m just venting.
Ok now here in the real world. I am not trans and have never had any gender dysphoria. I am very comfortable being a man. While I may not like the actual vessel I’m in, I like that my genitals are on the outside. Also, I do not want children.
So what does this mean?
Just a note: I KNOW that’s now how things work. I know taking hormones won’t magically give me female genitals, and I know it would take more than that to get pregnant. But tell that to my stupid subconscious. What a typical man. Ugh.
Back from Vegas. Lost $100. Tried to hide from the rain. Ended up getting my ears pierced, and learned I have really meaty lobes when I could hear the needle go through the cartilage. I figured it was a little odd that I only had the septum piercing, so voila! And I got a dagger for my gay ear. Oh, and a stud on the left ear, but that’s boring. Oh, and I ended up driving in the median after falling asleep. Oopsie. My 2013 Honda Accord really does handle off-road driving pretty well. I won’t be doing that again.
I could have also titled this post “Who Gives a Fuck?” I’ve been quieter on social media lately. I deleted Twitter months ago. I last posted on Instagram on December 8, and aside from cross-posting stuff from here and Insta there hasn’t been a post on Facebook since my European vacation. I have checked Facebook and kept up what my friends want to share with the world. But I’m getting more and more disillusioned with us giving our data away to be sold away all willy-nilly to advertisers. I guess a company could come here and grab all of my posts here to give information to advertisers, but damn it, at least it makes them work for it, put some sort of effort for it.
I’m well aware that I’m trying to bring back the experience of being online back in 2004, and I’m well aware of the dangers of falling into the romanticism of nostalgia. But I really hate that our lives and what we share on these social media sites have become a commodity that gives us NO PROFITS. It’s sort of like how in Berlin they prefer to use cash rather than cards because the specter of the Stasi and Berliner’s absolute priority for privacy. As annoying as it is when I travel there, I admire their determination.
New Tattoo!
I don’t do the new year, new me thing since it doesn’t matter what the fuck I do, I’ll always hate myself. But I went and got a new tattoo last weekend. It’s just paint splatter that frames my already existing leviathan cross tattoo. It’s only five days old hence the scabbiness, and I don’t know what itches more: the tattoo or the arm hair growing back. But me likey.
As for reading, I’ve already gone through Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Fernando A. Flores’s Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas. I’m on to Nicolai Gogol’s Dead Souls now.
Off to Vegas for the weekend for my cousin Gina’s birthday weekend. We’ll be hiding from the rain in Vdara. Maybe I’ll win big and be able to live a life of leisure that I was built for. One can wish.
This is pretty fucking hilarious, but the congressman from Bumfuck, Nowhere, California did not get the votes required to become Speaker of the House in three attempts today. I guess this leads us with no second person behind the Vice President in the presidential succession chain for now. I must say this schadenfreude for the Republican party makes me giggle. Some people are talking about going outside of the House for a speaker or having a coalition house, whatever that would entail. As fractured as this country has been in its history, this almost never happens. I must say this is one way to make politics interesting for me — make it be a completely historical farce!
So here is the annual tradition, my cooking of ë–¡êµ (Dduk gook) for the New Year. This year’s version had an angus brisket instead of a flank steak, and it was boiled for two hours to make the broth extra flavorful. It came out very well, so I’m hoping that it brings me lots of prosperity this year. It better, or else I’ll kiss these fucking Korean traditions off.
A lot of old farts around my age (and even some younger than me!) keep bitching about how shitty music is, how Gen Z is ruining music. If the only music you listen to is pop music, then yes. It’s crap. But pop music has always been mostly crap. Pop music is design to be loved by the masses, so of course there will be nothing revolutionary or profound about it.
But there has been some good music to come out this year. Here are some of the things that I’ve kept in rotation that came out this year:
Petrol Girls – Baby. If there is anything as exhilarating as “Baby, I Had an Abortion”, I don’t know what is. Angry feminist post-hardcore from the UK and Austria, this is a perfect soundtrack to the post-Roe dystopia we find ourselves in. Long live the riot grrl!
Chat Pile – God’s Country. Sludgy guitars and heavy lyrics from Oklahoma City. To quote their Bandcamp page: There’s a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. If this is American nihilism taken to its absolute zenith, then God’s Country… is the aural embodiment of such a concept.
Diamanda Galás – Broken Gargoyles. Fuck. Just fuck. Here Diamanda features words from German poet Georg Heym who wrote about the horrific state of people institutionalized with yellow fever. Their delirium, the treatment they suffered and the isolation in early 20th century Germany just feels appropriate after the last couple of years, huh? This is just two tracks, each clocking around 20 minutes, and they are pure horror.
Rhys Fulber – Collapsing Empires. Is this industrial? Ambient? Trance? Whatever it is is quite mesmerizing, soundscapes that you lose yourself in. It’s definitely not as harsh as everything listed above, and it’s certainly not Front Line Assembly. It is good in its own right and shows how amazing Rhys’s ear is.
As for older things, I’ve been listening to a lot of Nine Inch Nails, particularly The Downward Spiral and The Fragile. But one thing that I couldn’t get enough while I was in Europe a few weeks ago was Hole’s compilation My Body, The Hand Grenade. Not only does it have early songs like “Turpentine”, “Retard Girl” and “Dicknail”, but it also has “Old Age” which always fucking brings me to tears:
Maybe because I’m not sure if Courtney wrote this or Kurt did since Nirvana also has a version of this song. But I prefer Hole’s version.
Also on the comp are several songs from their MTV Unplugged session including their cover of “He Hit Me (It Felt like a Kiss)” written for the Crystals by Carole King. There is something about Courtney’s voice, command and dramatics that make these early Hole songs so captivating still all these years later.
