November 20, 2001, 11:38 p.m.

it's just the way the medication makes her

back & forth

On my table here: two letters, one to SWW, witch and co-Walden-Pond-splasher, one to the very lovely and bored M(R)W, both dated some days ago. Well, both dated more than a week ago, as usual. I wrote them that Thursday, sitting in the Hollywood Espresso in Porter Square, while they played sad country songs on the stereo and I had a pretty damn fine cappuccino. I pulled them out of my bag this afternoon to remind me to put stamps on them and send them tomorrow.

I didn't, despite promises, do laundry today. This gladdens me: I want to be a dangerous, exciting man, the kind to whom I'm attracted. Breaking promises, especially domestic promises, makes me far more badass, ergo desirable. Life with me is like playing poker with smarties -- all the adrenaline with none of the high stakes. Oh, and a dry, sickly, spent-sugary taste when you wake up the next morning.

I did, however, listen to the incidental music for the Tempest by Matthew Locke, in the shimmering and almost unbearably dramatic performance by il Giardino Armonico. They're not shy: they play every suave dissonance to its dying gasp, every brutal rhythm like they've just learned that violins can shout. They are the sort of period-instruments ensemble to make your mother tell you to turn down that racket. Their greatest strengths are probably tight ensemble, technical mastery (you know, fast and loud down to nothing instantaneously, that sort of thing), and a talent to very big affekt -- woe and fury probably chief among them, but also a not-too-shabby amoroso and bracing dry wit.

I can tell that music is getting through to me as soon as I want to turn it off. The sense that there's a foolish grin on my face, that there's something irrepressible stirring in my pants and that there's nothing whatsoever restraing my limbs from setting themselves about in quite uncomfortable positions, also known as "getting into the groove", sends me into unbelievable paroxysms of shame. When I'm around another person, I can usually hold it all still, but when I'm listening to something really great alone, I usually have to go make a cup of coffee or tie my shoes or go get the mail rather than submit to the agonies of a piece of music that knows more than I do.

Anyway, this is one of those recordings. It's whiz-bang enough to get your Black-Flag-obsessed kid brother interested in classical music, but, oh, yeah -- it's a real, viable, interpretation of the effect XVIIe musicians wanted to have on their houses. The jaded music public of 1670 is a pretty good mirror of the jaded musical public of 2001. Anyway, enough of this old shit.

I went to EN's show at the M*ddl* **st last night. They got the balance right, there was a cool light show. EN looked so strange up there in her white feather boa and ultra-short hair. I had trouble concentrating on the idea that I knew her. I would put it in my mouth for a while and then it would slip out; I retrieved it from the air above my head a few minutes later, put it back between my left molars -- clamped down. Sure enough, in a few moments it was gone again. EN's doing what she wants to be doing. Do you know the sense that, when you're doing something kinda awesome, it can't really be awesome, because it's just something that you're doing? Anyway, I wonder if I have that second-hand from EN. It's so routine these days that I can't really feel impressed, even though all her other friends are practically yelping about it like Venus herself is giving them head. Maybe EN and I are so close we feel the same sensations, like mystic twins. Or else I feel I own too much of it to be able to dissociate myself from what is rightly hers. Or else the band kinda sucks. Whichever way you julienne those carrots, it won't stop me going to those concerts. (Now if only I could get EN, or for that matter, anybody at all, interested in French Baroque opera...)

After EN came MZ, about whom I don't have ever so much to say, other than her songs are pretty good, she has a spaced-out stage presence that's funny and endearing and irritating all at once, and it was most deeply during her set that I rued not having enough cash for a drink.

MZ was succeeded by a few minutes of Led Zeppelin, during which I chatted with MB's awesome homey E, who is cute and adorable and better than General Gau's seitan on a rainy day. Hey, he may not be in my league, but at least he's playin' ball.

After Zep, AP. Oh, yeah. AP. The AP test. Ms. Frightening herself. I remarked to EN as la AP took the stage that, from where we were standing at the back, it was unlikely that we'd be able to see AP's twat.

Make yourselves comfortable, kids. This only gets more lurid.

AP is officially a friend of a friend, even though we're on "saying hi" terms (she has, de temps en temps abused this privilege by goosestepping up to me and shouting "Heil!", but MG assures me she only means it as a joke.) Anyhoo, she scares the living crap out of me. Many of her songs last night were aimed at JP, her ex, who, although not the cleanest folio in the quire, is a pretty decent guy. And they are, like, hella songs. Mean-spirited, brilliant, touching, just nostalgic enough to get you hooked into them and then, crk! the steel clamp tightens around your ankle. She's fond of word play, and therefore, she spits her lyrics out so you can hear them. Oh, that all the rockers in this fair city could take a lesson from her! Her hero is Kurt Weill, although she may prove a better songwriter than he -- if she makes it through the next few years alive. You see, AP, bless her, has taken to heart the idea that great artists are flawed people, and so she cultivates her demons. She feeds them, darns their socks, loves them. And they have treated her well, in kind, torturing her in a pleasing variety of keys and time signatures.

I have something to declare: my cultural baggage includes a weakness for European art music, and with it, old-fashioned popular song [the very crap that frosted TA's shorts, no less!]. Hence my fascination with SM of the Future Bible Heroes, etc. I also love a good mezzo-soprano, pianos (even electric), and witty wordplay (vide supra). Key words here include: sex, violence, cabaret, masochism, red roses, blood, "the Soldier's Wife", Verfremdung, cigarette smoke, keeping your cool with whisky and a six-shooter, aging whores, lost young men. AP works nicely in this vocabulary, adding such related concepts as adolescence, psychopharmacology, growing up hopelessly middle class, going to W*sl*y*n and not being the smart kid any more, &c. I don't even care that she's got a high opinion of herself (when she's not picking herself apart clinically and publicly... oh, don't do that, AP, you're getting blood on the stage...) and treats people like filth, including CC, who'd made a point of leaving before she took the stage. Me, I'll put up with it. The stuff she writes is good, and I fear it would pale slightly if she couldn't summon up that spite in her daily life. AP and her drummer, BZ, call themselves the Dresden Dolls and they are creepy. And very, very good.

From my results for theSpark's esteem'd "Slut Test":

FACT:

2,684 women agreed with you, and chose "Alexander The Great" as the best sex option of all time.

Now you know all my dirty secrets.