hello sinister. right now i am surrounded by cds, and i am again surprised that forty of them in one pile is still not enough to handle the delicate intricacies of making a mix tape. i think i have left some home by my broken tape player, thus leaving me with about twenty albums with which to make an amazing compilation, one that will wow the listener with my well-honed capabilities to put songs together in a semblance of order, make things that don't have anything to do with one another work in such a way to make an oiled machine of the various glued-together parts. i think i should have tackled a smaller, simpler project. sixty minutes of music is nothing and everything to me when someone else makes it. i buy it and listen to it, cherish the little circle of heaven and brandish it in the air. i make everyone else stop what they're doing, slip a little something in the news desk cd player, turn the volume up a bit and put my hand to my chest in the ultimate gesture of adoration. i am a crazed fan. and not only that. i think i might suck at trying to take things other people make for my own bit of art, ripping four-minute increments and attempting to re-weave a tapestry of sorts that was already perfect to begin with. argh. i would never never win the mix tape battle. i think i may only reduce the listener to tears. tears of shock and dismay, mind, that my skills are...well. yeah. maybe it's not that bad. maybe it never is, really. but the open door to the top of the arts desk boom box, when combined with the open door the player's tape deck, looks like a transmogrified mouth, gaping. laughing. *** sitting around today, i spotted a calendar on the arts desk for the zoo bar here in lincoln. they usually have blues bands of some sort there; i've been once to review a show. a family band. the millers. you realize something when sitting in the crowd at a bar, watching an eight-year-old kid wail on the harmonica while his dad and brothers play back up. providing a clean dance track for the tipsy thirty-something single women, who saunter up to the edge of the stage and give that grade-schooler a show he probably shouldn't get until he's at least fourteen. you realize loneliness drives people to strange things. for one. you also realize just what people are driven to on a tuesday night, a pitcher of drawn beer and a few friends the only salvation from mundane schedules. the schedule for the zoo bar here has, unsurprisingly, nothing i want to see this month. and nothing i could see, anyway, since i am, alas, at the tender and terribly frustrating twenty-year mark, where nothing happens except an extreme teetering in the area of a chalked, coming-of-age line. in the spirit of trying to console myself and having something to do come may 11, i thought i might hop on the internet to find more calendars. more things i don't really want to go to. here is a small list of musical acts thrilling the chicago area about two weeks from now. (get out your personal planners now!): 1. michael mcdermott, who, in the description, is hailed as a faded "MTV megastar" 2. scott miller and the commonwealth 3. giant step 4. neko case/pieta brown 5. thrones 6. down (who, according to that description, are "metal." YES.) of course, bright eyes is also in that mix, but must be stated away from those other gems. i was hoping the "tweeter center" might have some interesting acts -- after all, they do have "twee" in their funny little name. i was very very wrong, though, because coming up at the tweeter are hot hot HOT acts usher, alan jackson and kid rock. and i can't even get a little tipsy in order to get my groove on before any of these hit peeps, unless, of course, i smuggle a little booze in the venue via the belle and sebastian flask i may as well buy off of ebay in lieu of something else. misslou sighs, and adds more stars. *** tonight, on my way to the coffee house to interview kids about how cool the strokes are, i looked intensely for a few moments at my cigarette. i watched the smoke curl, the paper burn, and i tried, for a minute or two, to time the pace of my walk to the burn of the paper. so that maybe, without really inhaling, the whole cylinder could burn away by the time i got to my destination. i gave up, and got rid of the thing the normal way. there was a boy at the coffee shop. he bought a piece of cheesecake and a glass of milk, and i watched him cut the cake into asymmetrical sections, then place red coffee stirrers vertically in the geometrically pleasing squares and rectangles of cake. i never figured out what he was doing, but he looked up at one point and smiled at me, telling me he had wondered that day what it would be like if he had no preference for the taste of anything. he ate the cake then, removing the red straws as he went. he and i are both over the top, we agreed, and far too poetic for our own respective goods. maybe none of us can cut something up and put it back together properly, save for eating the messes we make to the rhythm of a pretty song, a harmonica. women dancing. bands we've never known. growing fond of ending posts with lists of things, interconnected and disjointed. the assignment of meaning to nothing and everything, and filling all the space between with wasted time and imagined memories. i have made the tape once. and now, upon listening to the finished product, i will make it again tomorrow, the way i should have made it in the first place. love, l. lou _________________________________________________________________ Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. 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