JimmyBramlett Dot Com
This Site Is a Mess And So Am I
RSS
  • About
  • Tumblr
  • Contact Me
  • Pictures

Blog 0 comments music

2020 Albums of Note

jimmy

December 21, 2020

Here are some albums in no particular order that have grabbed my attention this year. What’s notable was despite the overall shittiness of the year, the music was pretty damn good. Either that or I finally paid attention. You can load your Spotifys and listen to these tunes. You’re fucking adults. And if you really like them, you can purchase a copy of your very own that won’t be subject to the fickle whims of content license agreements. Most of these folks are on Bandcamp.

Mamaleek – Come and See

Black metal fucking jazz fucking avant-garde fucking noise fucking our oppressive inside spaces and how they affect us. It’s appropriate this was released on my birthday. I’ve been listening to it off an on throughout the year, and it’s always held my attention. I want it to cum on my face.

clipping. – Visions of Bodies Being Burned

Slash me up and stab me and fuck me and leave my body a messy maggoty steampile, but don’t forget to leave no evidence.

Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou – May Our Chambers Be Full

I already talked about this album a few weeks ago. It woke me the fuck up.

William Basinski – Lamentations

When you want to wallow but fuck those who want to comfort you. You just be left alone in the horror and misery.

Merzbow – Screaming Dove

Loud ambient screech drone torturefuck with razor-implanted hardons. It’s Merzbow.

Hum – Inlet

I feel bad I gave them a bad review in the UCSB Artsweek section of the paper back in 1998. This is a very shoegaze album that doesn’t mention missing trains from Mars or any of that shit.

Yaeji – What We Drew

MY PEOPLES! You can dance to this without any guilt. It’s not the K-pop that we’re weaponizing against the world you stupid wypipo.

Annie – Dark Hearts

More somber and reflective songs from my favorite Norwegian pop queen.

Run the Jewels – RTJ4

El-P and Killer Mike slay again. “walking in the snow” is an absolute showstopper. The soundtrack to the 2020 protests.

Stabbing Westward – Hallowed Hymns

What did we have to do to get Stabbing Westward to cover the Cure, Ministry and Echo and the Bunnymen? Just wait decades for them to reunite the kablammo with a pandemic.

Thou – Blessings of the Highest Order

The Nirvana cover album you didn’t know you needed.

tricot – 10

Japanese pop punkish math rock and roll sprinkled with aspartame. They make me smile.

Arca – KiCk i

More melodic and less abrasive? Definitely something I can seize to.

Havukruunu – Uinuos Syomein Sota

I heard a hilarious rumor years ago that Syrian refugees who resettled in Finland were so bored they wanted to leave. This black metal group would make me want to stay.

Kiss

Blog 0 comments

Oh Shit!

jimmy

December 15, 2020

I just realized that holy shit, Christmas is in 10 days. This week is the last full business week of the year (although I am taking Friday off.) Next week is Christmas and the following week is New Year’s.

Which means that when the calendar turns to 2021, my ass will be back in Montana. I’ll be in a different cabin this time closer to the Montana-Idaho border, but this cabin has a hot tub. My boss is going on maternity leave at the end of January, so I see it as the only opportunity for a true vacation until Labor Day. And who knows, by then we can maybe travel overseas and I won’t have to travel to remote areas in their way way way offseason to prevent the chances of coming down with this damn virus.

Speak of, damn I’m horny. I’ve been having dreams of making out with guys lately. I’m telling you, the second after I get the second shot of the vaccination, I’m going on a fucking orgy.

Trumpy

Blog 0 comments

Dejections and Injections

jimmy

December 14, 2020

I had written some half-cooked bullshit about Trump, his calls of voter fraud and how unoriginal it is. But fuck it. I really didn’t care too much anyhow. I’ve just been marveling at what lows he and the RepubliKKKan party would crawl to in order to kill democracy. Besides, today an institution used to keep slavery intact voted to give Joe Biden the presidency. And while CNN and MSNBC both talked about watching democracy in action, I wonder how they didn’t choke with laughter on their own words since the electoral college is the furthest thing from a democracy. Makes me sort of glad to be a college dropout.

But today we also got the first vaccines into the arms of Americans. So I guess 276 days since I started working from home, there is some hope for the future. I guess the question is whether 2021 will be okay and whether I can travel overseas again. By 2022 definitely unless some other calamity comes and affects us all.

Asleep

Blog 0 comments

Sleepy

jimmy

December 9, 2020

It’s one thing to be tired, like you can’t handle the weariness of being awake. That your limbs and brain need to sit down somewhere and regroup. That you yawn a few times an hour.

But I’m flat out sleepy. Like sleeping all night, waking up in the morning and sleeping while having my coffee, sleeping while on lunch break, sleeping once I get off of work, sleeping after dinner. Or like on Saturday where I was basically sleeping the whole day. I don’t know if it’s the lack of daylight or the wonders of depression, but here I am just wanting to sleep.

One thing I have been doing in the few minutes when I am fully conscious is online shopping. My whole apartment smells fruity and herby and delicious because my $95 order from Lush came yesterday. I bought both shower and bath bombs and a salt scrub. Y’all might not be able to smell me, but at least when I sniff myself I’ll be fabulous with a capital F-A-G.

Plumbing

Blog 0 comments

Plumbing

jimmy

December 1, 2020

Saturday night I was filling up my Brita water dispenser — as I do every night before I go to bed — and noticed water pooling up on the floor. I know I can be a little sloppy while doing the dishes, but I’m not THAT sloppy. After a little sleuthing I discover that my garbage disposal is leaking. Fortunately I’m not a hoarder so what little I had underneath the sink was easily moved elsewhere.

Of course the fear sets in. — How long will this take to get fixed? — How badly did I fuck things up? So Sunday morning I put in a ticket with my building’s maintenance team and let the fates take over from there.

Now will you believe me that in three hours someone came to attempt to fix it? Indeed that happened. Unfortunately they needed to replace my garbage disposal and said they were expecting a shipment in on Tuesday. That’s fine. I can deal with doing dishes in my bathtub for a couple of days. But really, I was thinking that they would forget about it and I would have to follow up later this week and that this would drag on and on until I just deliberately broke my lease and moved to like Palmdale just to be as far away as possible.

Well, will you believe me if I told you they came in this morning and replaced the motherfucker and that it works? No drippy, no stress, no anxiety. All fixed!

With the exception of the lack of closet space, this place ain’t bad.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Blog 0 comments

Monday Blues

jimmy

November 30, 2020

Fuck me.

I forgot to set my alarm last night and woke up late. Then I remembered that I’m still earlier than most of my coworkers, and no one really gives a fuck. But I do. So I run to my office area without my glasses or clothes and turn my computer on.

For the first hour I was a mess. Nothing made sense. But as I was simultaneously working and getting myself washed up and ready and caffeinated, things were getting clearer.

That’s ok. Nothing still makes sense.

This weekend some people in the disabled community were up in arms because people were making fun of the president by calling him “Diaper Don.” My reading on this was his temper tantrum about losing the election and shit and acting like a baby. But some folks thought it was a dig at disabled people. I thought that was the stupidest thing, so I texted my cousin Gina whom, some of you might know, is a paraplegic. Her reaction to the uproar,

That’s dumb. I think they’re just overly sensitive. When you’re a disabled person you have to learn not to take everything seriously otherwise they can’t survive in this world.

I would have interpreted it as making fun of a baby, not a disabled person.

Then again, she is, as my friend Jess would put it, as sensitive as a brick.

Whatever. We know babies are stupid as fuck, anyways.

So I turned off my social media. Fuck you all. I don’t think I missed anything.

The Grandmother

Blog 3 comments

Still Dreaming after Four Years

jimmy

November 29, 2020

It’s been a little over four years since the Grandmother died, and I had a strange dream about her last night.

For some reason my mom still lived at the old apartment but was getting ready to move out. I was walking around and out of the corner of my eye saw someone who looked like The Grandmother sitting on a bench and talking to random people. I do a double-take and start bawling. I’m still confused as to whether that lady was the Grandmother, but my part of my brain that controls my emotions just unleashed this torrent of tears.

I eventually make my way to the old apartment, and I see my mom is also affected by this doppleganger but says nothing. I look in the hallway and see The Grandmother walking out. What the fuck? I’m still not understanding any of this, so I just sit down to try and think through all of this logically.

I ask the Grandmother how she could be there, that I saw her dead, and I was the only person who saw her face right after she died. But she doesn’t say anything. She just sits down in the living room and watches Korean television.

My mom and I go into the kitchen and decide that we will keep the apartment for another couple months until we figure out what is going on. I also decide to keep taking her to her acupuncture and doctor schedules and spend the next couple of nights in the apartment.

The next morning, the Grandmother goes into the master bedroom closet and disappears. It’s strange, but I decide to go back to my current apartment to pick up some clothes and supplies. When I get back to the old apartment, my mom is asking where The Grandmother is. I tell her the last I saw her she was in the main bedroom. We’re looking around, and there is no sign of her. She had vanished.

So I’m wondering if she is really dead or is alive in an alternate universe.

End dream.

I don’t know what the fuck is going on with my psyche, but I woke up emotionally spent. I don’t know if I have some lingering guilt about her death since I was her caretaker. I mean shit, it’s been four years.

May Our Chambers Be Full

Blog 1 comment emma ruth rundle, may our chambers be full, music, thou

Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou – May Our Chambers Be Full

jimmy

November 27, 2020

Where the fuck have I been? I don’t know what blanket of depression I’ve been living under, but I’ve been ignoring music for far too long. Sure, I’ve listened to what pops up on Spotify or just some glancing items that I see on Facebook. Somehow, someway, I saw this album pop up, and after 53 seconds of ambient noise and feedback, a burst of music pumped out of the speaker ushering in a wave of pleasure, regret and mourning right over me.

I had no idea who Emma or Thou were, whether I should have known who they were or anything like that. What I heard is music that is a harder version of Seaweed with the folksy haunting voice of Emma accompanied at times with the demonic screaming of Thou. It’s the dirtiest of early 90’s Seattle regurgitated into the swamps outside of Baton Rouge near the Comite River and emerging in a sweaty Frankensteinian mess that reaks terror.

I eventually figured that Emma Ruth Rundle is a singer-songwriter from Louisville and Thou are a sludge metal band from, appropriately enough, Baton Rouge who made a Nirvana cover album earlier this year and had somehow been featured on NPR. But all of this I found out after a couple of listens to this.

I don’t know if the nostalgia of the sound hit me, or if was how gorgeous the juxtaposition of Emma’s voice was to the music that threatened to drown her out but never managed to. But I just thought about how I could have missed out on this and how my stupid depression just kept be in a haze that allowed me to ignore everything and stay in a cocoon by myself. And that I must wake up and emerge into whatever world this is.

Sure, this world they paint through these seven songs and 36 minutes is scary and ugly. In “Ancestral Recall,” “I’m not of this world, this decaying existence / I’m not shackled to their cold, cruel and morbid logic / It tells a truth known to everyone who / Truly knows me.” This is a dark world not for us designed to keep us tied up. But there is a dangle of hope there, that we can like them be unshackled to this, that we can get over it.

In “Magickal Cost” which starts out mournfully and explodes in a guitar-fuelled battle, it ends with “My voice reaching back / Of rippling impulse / True, real raw hunger / My voice reaching back.” What we need to fight is within us anyhow.

Maybe I’m making too much out of this. I do acknowledge that the lyrics can come off as a bit cheesy and prog, especially as the album ends on “The Valley” with “You see them there? / Ancient and seething / Up in a pyre / Get them out of my way.” But I guess we need a little of that in our lives sometimes. I mean, how many fucking people loved Game of Thrones?

But I like that despite the bleak narrative, there is something within us that transcends all of that bullshit and help us become free.

Hopefully I can find a little more of that.

Thanksgiving 2020

Blog 0 comments thanksgiving

Thanksgiving 2020

jimmy

November 26, 2020

In the news, people are going crazy because they’ve been advised not to see their family this Thanksgiving. Despite the prospect of getting their family members sick, people still decided to travel home to be with family although in decreasing numbers than in normal years. But this has me confused. The jokes at this time of the year is how fucking unbearable families are, how stressful the holidays are because of Uncle Ted wanting you to pull his finger and other traumas that make you want to slit your throat. So why are so people so looking forward to being with family now? Has COVID damaged our brains so much that we would rather put up with these traumas than be by ourselves now?

As you can see, I prepared a little mini-feast for myself today. You see a Ralphs rotisserie chicken, green bean casserole and Stove Top cornbread stuffing. I should have made the stuffing myself because it is too goddamn salty. The chicken was all right, but the green bean casserole was good since I used fresh green beans. I guess all of this isolation has gotten to me too, because after dinner I thanked myself for my meal.

One good thing that came out of today was finally getting the archives back up on the site. I took a shortcut and rather than create a whole new database, I just deleted the existing table that contained all of the posts and recreated the table from scratch then copied the archive table to the new one. That means the images are not connected to the image files on the server, so the images won’t load for the individual posts. But that I could live without. For now.

It also meant that I had to manually post the 25-or-so posts that I had created since 2018. This caused all 3 people who subscribe to the newsletter version of this site were emailed all of these posts since I didn’t know how to turn that off. It’s a good thing I haven’t been prolific.

But that’s it. Other than listening to music — how the hell did all of this good music all of the sudden pop up out of nowhere?? — nothing much more has been going on here.

Error

Blog 1 comment

Database Hel(l)p?

jimmy

November 22, 2020

Ugh. I’ll repeat… ugh.

Back in 2018 I had to delete and reboot WordPress, and in the process I lost all of my posts I had here. Some of these posts date back to 1999. So that’s a lot of history up in the air and up to the whims of the Wayback Machine Archive.

This weekend I figured out where all of the posts were backed up to, but in trying to figure out a simple solution of copying the contents of one table in pasting them into another, I instead kept coming up with the 1062 duplicate entry error.

So it looks like I’ll be creating a new WordPress database, importing the old posts and other content tables from the old database and manually inputting the newer posts. Fortunately there are less than 30 new posts here, so it won’t be too bad.

Unless someone has any alternative methods to make this an easier process.

Ugh. I remember when I just manually updated the html for every time I wanted to post. Things were much simpler then.

Anyhow, this is my excuse for if this page it down for a significant amount of time. Oh, look at me pretending people actually come to this page. Silly me. Nevermind.

«‹ 15 16 17 18›»
Back to Top

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Yesteryear

(c) 1997-2025 Art in Deep Koma Productions
 

Loading Comments...