ballboy I Worked on the Ships. I love ballboy. They are in the realm along with the Bats, the Lucksmiths and surely loads of others I can't consistently recall. They record the same album, over and over and once again. Slight updates are introduced through production gimmickry such as a sample of a Paula Cole song but little else is updated. ballboy's(small b) thing is jokey/clever stories, some are abou kids eating bags of glue, cannibals in love, boring sex, etc...This then is more of the same. Thank goodness. I can relate to all of these bands because I have a repeating set of riffs as well. Not only on here but everywhere. I present one limited face in public and rarely diverge from it. I am meaning to change this but i always feel caught beneath a mountain of conformity that I must slay, mountain slayer, before my raging eccentrism is let loose on an unsuspecting public. I am going to allow my more irrational side to flower, someday. Sarah Palin says "bloom where your planted". I like that. She's my new spiritual guidance counselor. I went running along a different route last evening. I had followed the same route for the past 16 months. Last evening I ran through the tech center instead and marveled at the 'ADA' tags on concrete at my feet and I was thinking it was some new gang that had infested my tony Greenwood Village suburbia similar to the mythical A.B.I. of my youth. Albanian Boys Incorporated. Of course ADA is not a gang but rather the American with Disabilities act. It was probably some bureaucrat who is now tasked, hazed, with tagging his territory. He'll spray paint the curb inelegantly as bureaucrats are wont to express themselves and later some disreputable company will come in and install a curb cut with those fancy braille foot pads. When I first moved here there seemed to be loads of blind people walking about with their canes and super senses of smell on full display. Near the Entemans factory it must have been heaven for the extraolfactory, near the Maytag sales center the clockwork machinery a pleasant ring in their extrahearinability, near the chain smoking Asian checkout clerk at the Firestone shop a lack of sympathy for the asian male who will grow up as alone as I am. But i've moved away. The blind can't seem to afford my prosperous life here in Greenwood Village. I can't really either, I'm a dreaded tenant. I could bring a case with the aid of an ADA lawyer as I do allegedly have a cataract and could claim that the fact that I can't actually afford these million dollar homes is only because i am being summarily discriminated against because of my less than perfect eyesight. It sounds fantatically plausible at the moment. The braille footpads could be some sort of secet communication device used by a cabal of the blind who are intent of conquering western civilization and turning it into a tyranny of the sightless. Early every morning these foot pads are likely modified with new messages inserted to give commands to the foot soldiers of the blotted revolution. Secret directors polluting their minds with dastardly details of the coming sighted holocaust. It will be grim. Why do they hate us? Or...it is possible that they might have a more benign function. I could speak of the music. Have you heard a ballboy song? Then you know what this sounds like. Really. The peacable outcome of more braille footpads could be a secret dissemination of the disappeared texts of literary masters. The lost novels of Salinger, Ducasse, Joyce, etc...blah blah blah. Walking around the city they shall read, sensually, the bumps through their toes and imbibe in the joy of all of the the lost classics secretly yet deeply woven into the culture of the eyeless. The eyed would be jealous, if only they knew, if only they could get over their Sarah Palin crush to learn how to read braille with sole(s). My sole laid bare, indeed. A Baudelaire pun! Actually it was Poe. No? And it was 'heart laid bare'. But there were those Baudelaire journals, his friendship with Manet, the Salon, Berthe Morisot, etc...blah blah blah. I had a pretentious period where I only read French novels. Flaubert, France, Zola, Jarry, Appolinaire, Gide. I was sophisticated even as I read And the Gods Will Have Blood, I could understand when bass players made wanting comments like 'this reminds of a gide novel'. Or I could pretend to. ballboy are not pretentious. They are small 'b' salt of the earth. Scottish. I am Scottish. I am frugal. I realized tonight that I don't buy anything at all. Other than food that is. I buy pants too, i go through a lot of pants in my job. Does that make me seem mysterious? Why is he going through so many pairs of pants? It's better to leave them guessing I have found. These braille stories could be fabulously surreal, a Joyce-ian tale about a loft dweller in East St Louis with his very own cosmology that revolves a cult of personality surrounding George Lemaitre. A very small group of St Louisans gather in the World's Fair ruins alongside Hiram Birdseed and pray to heaven for the discovery of the last greatest mystery particle, the Veronica Lake-on. And in Salinger's hidden novel Holden Caulfield is revealed as a republican and OCD and he is cast from the pantheon of literary super agents with a cruel shower of fables told by ironic kids from a post ironic future with moving sidewalks and earnest scottish pop bands. Sadness. Ducasse? His sharks that made love to devils are now pregnant and embedded in stain glass windows just outside, just next to, almost inside the Maldives. And there the dare arrives at the end of the book instead of at the beginning begging enjoining readers to respire or die. I was in a Wal-Mart and there was a young lady in front of me discussing how a local restaurant chain was not recycling their recyclables and she was in near tears while explaining this to her near husband/boyfriend/accomplice. I do not recycle. I can not relate. It's an artificial market. It is created by mandates and through mandates its success feds on itself while no one looks at the dark side. There is a dark side to recylcing, somewhere, it's simple if recycling was a worthwhile endeavour then it would be market competitive with simply throwing my old pants int he dust bin. I recycle my pants. But anyway. von Mises!. ballboy. This is a lovely little record, pleasant and kind, warm and inviting. 'You left your notes on lesbian sex on the fish tank in the hall'. Poor Gordon. He's ben a school teacher in his non-pop star life. He could teach the children the life story of Isidore Ducasse. You could make it up, nobody knows. Not Mark Polizziotti, he is lost, that's for certain, the desert metaphor, oh dear. So many fragmentary thoughts. I am tired, so so tired, I have been working and playing ice hockey and not much else in between. I've not ben spending money to save the jobs of those less fortunate than I am. I am playing golf this weekend, happily. With someone who seems to disapprove of my hockey playing. I have, suddenly, a reason to not go into work and I am also free to spend an afternoon with a brilliant kind soul who will petend to enjoy spending time with me. It will be marvelous. Next song. Ominous. FDR paraphrasing, he borrows snippets of Americana and turns it on its side awkwardly. I listen to Gordon the school teacher sing Born in the USA and it is so comprised of ache, melancholy and terror and then I listen to da boss and it's full of bombast, constipation and irritation. Yay for Scotland! This is a lovely song. Much of this reminds of the solo-ish acoustic record he made some time ago. It has been so very long time since the last ballboy album. The A.D.A. is killing Christmas here. There was meant to be a village of christmas on the prairies, a light on the lawn of a real estate moguls' personal museum where his taxidermy delights are displayed alongside giant dioramas and peachy glasses of lemonade. But the A.D.A. says that the village on the lawn, on the turf covered hill, must be handicap accessible. It's important not to discriminate when offering up cheap facsimiles of holiday tradition. LED. The disabled in China do not leave their homes, there are few elevators in China. Are you aware of this? Me, I spread holiday cheer from October to January, all across the city, all hours of the day, with ballboy in my ears some days and ballboy in my heart always. This is some impressive sort of lovely. I enjoy ballboy. I do. When I am spreading cheer far and wide underneath the big sky in unfamiliar places i've now learned that I can orient myself directionally by staring at the cows as apparently cows prefer to align themselves along a north south axis. It was discovered via intense research completed with the use of google earth. I was using google earth today to look at football stadiums to be dressed up in bows, to look at the vehicles in our workplace parking lot and hearing that you can email google and have them remove photos of your street views because there are images tempting the baleful within the frame. Another quiet one now, Empty Throat, it's a bit raspy and willowy, threadbare. I actually purchased this record online. I could not find any place to steal it. So I lied. I do buy some things. I also purchased a dvd from a lecture series an entry on "how to construct worthwhile sentences". Next time you read an entry here you may just be dazzled by my new shiny sentences. Gone forever will be these limp, decrepit imitations that I try to pass off as coherency and in its place sturdy, reinforced clauses and dactyls and when read aloud effervescent dipthongs will roam and there will also be whatever else I am keen to discover through the joys of video scholarship. Normally my acquisition of knowledge comes from repeated viewings of The Core. I have upgraded, possibly. I rarely leave work now before the night arrives. This song is similar to earlier ballboy numbers, it has a sprightly jig feel about it but it's in a muted, gauzy, softer, winded style and rather not spiteful or tart. Nice. I could be nice. I could spnd my life searching for a path to eternity. I did spend a few patient minutes discussing inventions and intentions this afternoon with someone who works for me. He believed he was primed to change society with his revolution in haberdashery. Cheerful cellos! His ranting has been neutered here, trampled with delicately trimmed piano ballads and tender vocals and a female accompaniment. It's all serenity in dreamscape echos. What of his side project that had visions of Darren Haymanesque/French disasters conjured in public by the minds of devotees? A song about mobile phones. I can't relate. Will it be soon that people have a fetish for items with moving parts. I can hear the whirr and hum in the internal workings of my macbook on occasion but it seems a nuisance to punctuate fruitless efforts to take me to this website and others that deride the lack of imagination within children these days. I have photos on my wall and i stare into them and look deeper into the smaller corners where the definition is unkempt and feel smug at the richness of my internal monologue. Envy my decadence! This the new girl. Was she on the last album? I can't remember. The other got married, 'there's a lot to be said about lifelong sex and security' after all. Two more songs. It is late. Next is a jolly tune, piano like player piano, thumping drums, strums. The same strums he's been plying forever. it's charm that carries him through, it is charm that I lack. I am too afraid to make a good impression. It might bear with it responsibility and hope, and all I can deliver is disappointment and resentment. This is a beautiful album. Much better than the Euros Childs album I was able to steal earlier yesterday afternoon. Euros Childs seems lost. He needs to look to the Ayrshires, Guernseys, Holsteins! It is where I discover all of my own inspiration. Completely and utterly. Seems like ballboy is a bit spent as well, here is the trademark windup at the end of the song and it's reserved, tepid, unfit. It's actually really quite nice though. Surprising. Last song, quiet, again. Small and steady, pianos, guitars, warmth and other tiny blessings.