Monday, September 12, 2005
How can the pleasant if guileless publicist leaving me a voicemail re P.J. Olsson know that, with every "I know you've written about Beck, and they get a lot of comparisons" and "his voice is really soulful, it's smoky and just a great voice," and "the songs are fun and quirky" (all these as close to direct quotes as I can manage w/o playing the message again), she is digging her artist's grave, as far as my critical time is concerned? [Nothing against this woman doing her job -- at least she's not writing me one of those pretending-to-be-palsy-but-actually-just-a-mass-mailing-with-my-name-macro'd-in things that several of the smaller, more 'funky' indie-publicists seem to think will make me forget that we are not even acquainted.}
Nor could she know that I would avoid pre-much-less-re-viewing this album, nearly as a matter of my own sanity: I wrote up Ollson's Dawson's-placement-driven debut for CMJ Monthly several years ago, and, as little as I wish to appear to be taking some principled stand against gutless, witless, pale-15th-gen-copy-of-"Loser" trip-hop, recall it as the very record that brought me up against the fact that actually passing my orals might be more satisfying than spending n hrs. listening to a piece-of-crap record repeatedly, toward the mere end of converting said experience into approx. 210 words of piece-of-crap prose and a R.I.Y.L. taglist. And that, as with few records before or since, I actually had to cleanse myself of the experience by driving around mid-Wilshire for an hour playing, unusually for me, a classical station, which, unusually for me, happened to be playing Morton Feldman's For Christian Wolff, its irregular crystallography a godsend at that moment.
Even less could she know that I've just moved most of the way across the country, and feel, at this moment, like the second-most psychologically isolated person alive. (The first-most being Bree, who doesn't even have contact with the clerks at payroll or campus police/parking [from which office issued, incongruously, the Live 1975 version of "Hurricane."]) Which does tend to manifest itself as a certain lack of magnaminity: I'm feeling exceedingly bitter and negative, toward [Excised: list of unfairly scorned objects that said far more about the subject. Apologies for making nonsense of JD's link, and for eliciting in the first place.] Which makes this a good time to zip it.
Nor could she know that I would avoid pre-much-less-re-viewing this album, nearly as a matter of my own sanity: I wrote up Ollson's Dawson's-placement-driven debut for CMJ Monthly several years ago, and, as little as I wish to appear to be taking some principled stand against gutless, witless, pale-15th-gen-copy-of-"Loser" trip-hop, recall it as the very record that brought me up against the fact that actually passing my orals might be more satisfying than spending n hrs. listening to a piece-of-crap record repeatedly, toward the mere end of converting said experience into approx. 210 words of piece-of-crap prose and a R.I.Y.L. taglist. And that, as with few records before or since, I actually had to cleanse myself of the experience by driving around mid-Wilshire for an hour playing, unusually for me, a classical station, which, unusually for me, happened to be playing Morton Feldman's For Christian Wolff, its irregular crystallography a godsend at that moment.
Even less could she know that I've just moved most of the way across the country, and feel, at this moment, like the second-most psychologically isolated person alive. (The first-most being Bree, who doesn't even have contact with the clerks at payroll or campus police/parking [from which office issued, incongruously, the Live 1975 version of "Hurricane."]) Which does tend to manifest itself as a certain lack of magnaminity: I'm feeling exceedingly bitter and negative, toward [Excised: list of unfairly scorned objects that said far more about the subject. Apologies for making nonsense of JD's link, and for eliciting in the first place.] Which makes this a good time to zip it.
