To: Podcasters
From: the Last Plane to Jakarta team
Re: talking

Dear Podcasters of the World:

Wasn't it exciting to learn that the new build of iTunes featured Podcast support? To say it was like "free advertising" understates the case, since your product was already free. What iTunes support means for Podcasts is a new morning; a central hub on an application already in wide use by hundreds of thousands, or even millions, probably. We have never been good with numbers.

OK, we don't generally do politics here, at least not directly, but these are weird times, so lemme just ask one question: isn't Karl Rove's attorney essentially reframing the "I didn't inhale" defense here?

...Dizzee Rascal's Boy in Da Corner? It's not just that it's as good as all those Moonies who went crazy over it said it was back when it came out; listening to it this morning, in a time when the notion of the masterpiece has been (thank God) somewhat marginalized, it sounds like, ahem, scuffle scuffle, dunno how to say this, but...it sounds like a fucking masterpiece. It's the use of space that's getting me today, which is weird, because I remember feeling penned-in the first time I heard it: like there was nowhere to turn, no way to get free. This was (and is) why I preferred Showtime, which was lots more fun than Boy and which did the right thing by not just claiming dance turf through a series of dizzyingly complex signifiers but by making it glaringly obvious: you can dance to this. Today, though, Boy seems to waft cool air across the room - I hear wind blowing, almost - it's like the night sky. The only track that still word-associations stuff like "claustrophobic" out of me is, oddly, "Jus' A Rascal," the funniest track on the album, which begins with a huge open riff but cuts off the ring gradually 'til at the end there's just you and a frothing nineteen-year-old listening to his answering machine messages.

Twelve Rooms, the new album by Palaxy Tracks, has held my interest for over a month now; at first I really liked it, then I renounced it because the singer never once raised his voice during the whole album and that shit always makes me crazy suspicious, then I had no idea what I thought about it. It's roomily produced in the airy-cymbals thudding-kickdrum Chicago style, which is a sound that's practically shorthand for a number of aesthetic positions toward & by which I feel both drawn and repulsed to about exactly the same degree, and it's very atmospheric, which always makes it hard for me to pay attention to things. It violates one of my most basic "avoid that rhyme" rules - that is, it falls victim to the "in your head/words I said" heresy, which, I'll grant, is still better than "in my/your/our bed," which makes me straight-up hurl. Still: someone here has got a vision, and this is a pretty interesting album. It seems flawed to me, which is a word I hate to use because it's so condescending, but it has moments of real grandeur, and it doesn't resort to the quasi-spiritual schtick that most people reach for when they're looking for grandeur lately, for which I gotta say "bravo." Seek it out.

By the way, the best album released so far this year is still The Foundation by the Geto Boys. Like, by about a country mile. Nobody else in rap working anywhere near this level. Just so you know.

So here I am on a Saturday morning, listening to Swedish melodic death metal real loud and wasting time online - doin' the thing, you know, following this or that random impulse, reading stuff that's marginally interesting to me and which I will have completely forgotten by mid-day. Somewhere along the line, the album I'm listening to ends, and then there's silence except for conversation & the insistent chirping of the birds who've taken up residence in our chimney. And, somewhere in this Saturday-morning quasi-meditative state, I find myself talking about the Broadway musical Annie, and wondering who wrote the score.

The sweet secret that people who wanna kill themselves don't tell you is that sometimes it feels really good to wanna kill yourself. You get this sensation of total power. Psych theory has it that this sensation is delusional, which position I accepted entirely when I worked in the field, since the argument makes a lot of sense if you're looking at things from a self-protecting-itself standpoint. Older and having been through the wringer once or twice, I'm less sure about whether that feeling suicides get - of control, of power, of being close to God - is delusional or, y'know, visionary.