i just had coffee for the first time in 3 years
you're gonna wanna read this
May 7: ‘the red silverado’
I’m stopped at the light behind a red Silverado pickup. On the back of it there’s three bumper stickers. One is your classic blue lives matter flag; that’s a must-have for any rotation. Another’s got the word PRO big and bold, and beside it in smaller print and in descending order:
-GOD
-GUN
-LIFE
Dare I say, dear reader, what clever design. To realize all on their own how ‘pro’ can precede each gets a nod of respect out of me as I wait for the light to turn green, or for the driver to yell at me to ‘fuck off back to the country of your ancestors’ origin’ at the sight of my face, whichever should come first.
Finally, the last decal simply says—sweetly if I may add—LOVE…you know, spelled out with pictograms of semiautomatic rifles and a hand grenade for the ‘O’. Truly a non-deranged well-developed-during-childhood individual operatin’ that vehicle! A warm comfort washes o’er me as I reflexively turn down Britney on my radio, knowin’ here exists this lovin’ Pollyanna at the light. I wish nothin’ but the best for him/her/them!1
May 21: ‘return of the coffee’
I’m writing to you while sipping my second coffee in 3 years. It’s not the first; that was yesterday. This is today. Extremely average medium roast ground cof purchased from Vons with some oat melk and ice in my Disneyland mug, all ketchup red and mustard yellow and a dark, uh, prune juice blue.
I’m playing on repeat only three minutes and six seconds of Jean Constantin’s ‘Générique et car de police’ from The 400 Blows (dir. François Truffaut) because I don’t pay for Spotify and I’m not about to trigger some Autozone or California Avocados ad for the 19th time. That’s just not the kinda guy I am. I am, however, the kind of guy who will swipe up with three fingers, then in the Spotify app ‘manually’ drag that shit back to 0:00 every three minutes and six seconds. I haven’t heard the end of a song in years.
Yesterday, when I decided to coffee again since 2020, I got acid reflux, heartburn, and a five-minute headache. Not today. Today it’s only the ‘flux and ‘burn. I don’t care. I love coffee. I love coffeeshops. Three years I’ve yearned. Hey, did you know that coffeeing makes me more drowsy? Let’s take a nap!
May 25: ‘crisis at the market’
I’m at the Japanese market in the produce section. There’s aggressive anime theme songs blasting right above me from a poorly positioned speaker and my body refuses to move from its tractor beam. Think that’s the AC blowing back your hair? Nah. Around me, grannies turn down their hearing aids and endure the dance dance revolution.
These poor radishes don’t stand a fuckin’ chance. I rescue a daikon from the auditory onslaught and dissociate hard. I can’t figure it out: what is music, and what is it for? For grocery shopping? For anime? For Autozone commercials? Enhanced interrogation tactics for vegetables? What the fuck is going on?!
I’m in the car now driving slow on purpose down Dog Walk Row (coined it myself). There’s always so many people at all hours walking their dogs along this street. It’s not scenic and the sidewalks are broken like every sidewalk in SoCal. Small dogs, big dogs, long and short; round guys, hairy girls, cute as heck dorks (still talkin’ dogs here). Let me roll down my window, catcall these dogs. ‘Fuck, pooch, lookin’ real precious struttin’ in your dog socks like that.’
I don’t actually. In my head, yes. I’m also thinking: what have I done to my life? I’ve managed to waste most of it on music?, and I barely got any joy out of it. If I had spent all that time on, say, dogs instead, I likely would have had a more satisfying life. Dear reader, I am so dogless and I can’t make sense of music. It’s just this thing you study econ to and sells you chicken wings between innings when you’re watching the Angels give up the lead. It makes you think of anime when you’re picking out bell peppers. It lurks in the background while you do anything else. And that’s fine. Except I’m the guy stuck in that background, clawing to be foreground. For what? To get on a Horny And Respectful mood playlist on Spotify? Is that all?
Anyway, Weval’s new record Remember is my favorite album of the year so far.
May 28: ‘“dreamweaver…plus actor”2’
[recorded into phone on 3/14/2021 and 9/13/2021]
”sand it won’t surround
the water up your knees
the water up your knees fill up
what do i need it for
& why do i need you more
i will crash the ocean liner
i will crawl emotionlessly
????”
Paul McCartney is famous for writing songs in his dreams. I mean, he’s famous for other things, too, like being in the Beatles and having a cameo in Brüno. But he dreamed up all of “Yesterday”. Might not believe it if I didn’t also ‘write’ ‘music’ in dreams. I do it more often than I’d like; I rarely remember them and I’d rather not deal with such loss.
When I do, I force myself awake and immediately hum/mumble it into my Recorder app. 99% of the time listening back to what I had proudly accomplished at 4:28am, I realize it’s just two notes pingponging without context. Here’s a B flat to an F, no bassline, no harmony, no rhythms. It’s like if I emailed myself, ‘hey, remember that thing you thought of?, you know which thing I’m talking about’ and that was it.
I caught just enough of this one before it slipped away. But this isn’t the voice memo at 4:28am. This is after I fell back asleep and woke up again, then filled in the blanks. Guitar’s out of tune. So am I. This is three takes crudely edited together.
Spooky part is I remember in the dream looking down and seeing a capo on the second fret. Sure enough, playing it in the real world with a capo on the second produced a song in the same key.
May 29: ‘“i’m always making lists”3’
I’ve made two lists on Letterboxd regarding audio tech: one for minidiscs, the other for Nagras. They’re not exhaustive so let me know what to add. Also, you can now view my Substack posts with audio in them and posts unrelated to the musicmaking process.
Here’s my top 5 fave Pixar movies ranked:
Wall-E
Monster’s Inc.
Coco
Finding Nemo
Up
tell yer friends to say hi [IRL / substack / instagram / tumblr / letterboxd]
stream the music [spotify / apple]
buy the .wavs & tapes [bandcamp]
these people respect the hell out of accurate pronouns!
“I’m Garth Marenghi: author, dreamweaver, visionary, plus actor.”
“You notice this list, huh? I’m always making lists. In fact, that’s probably why Steven Spielberg cast me as Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s List. I said, ‘Steven, I make lists all the time’. And he said ‘that’s exactly what I’m looking for’.”
Not reflected in the top 5, but I wanted to mention that The Good Dinosaur and Onward are underrated. Fun movies not talked about as much. And Monsters University is among the BEST in the Pixar Universe and I will die on that stupid hill. It's laugh-out-loud funny to me. Just the concept of making a 'crude college comedy' PREQUEL for a kids animated feature is audacious. The ending is so sweet without being saccharine. They cheat, they fail, they get kicked out of school. But they realize how well they work together, and respect one another finally as friends, and get a job in the mail room. They work their way up to become the legendary Scarers they wanted to be—and thought was owed to them before—and it's all through hard, unglamorous effort, by pivoting and changing their mindset. Like I genuinely am so happy seeing them succeed. This is a fuckin' 'kids movie' for crying out loud.
dreamweaver (...plus actor) is so fuckin gorgeous what the hell. u write better songs in your dreams than most could ever hope to in the waking world. i honestly think u should officially release it in some capacity, without changing much if anything at all about it (maybe as an interlude of sorts?). i feel like it has a power and beauty in its current form that would be hard to translate or replicate, akin to what made bruce springsteen decide to release the demos for nebraska as the album itself.
i have pretty much those exact issues when i drink coffee, plus a capacity to induce a state of mania, yet i still subject myself to those risks by drinking it on a semi regular basis. guess my self preservation instincts are no match for my love of coffee. opressed coffee drinkers unite!