End of the Month Music Bitchfest - February 2016

Between the Year In Bitch and Bowie's transformation into pure energy, I decided to take a month off...not that much is going on...silence from Eels and Nine Inch Nails.....definitely feeling the lack of a new They Might Be Giants song every week; although those fifty two songs were quite the feat, they clock in at just over two hours.

Still, some truly great stuff and (for once?) I am not complaining.

Aside from all that nothing, Beck announced some tour dates this summer, which, for a normal band might indicate a release is upcoming...but Beck is not normal. 
He is fickle and cruel.

But, speaking of Bowie...I've been listening to a lot of Bowie, as has anyone with ears and a soul.

I finally sat down and really listened to Tonight and Never Let Me Down. 

Tonight is pretty awful. From the shitty reggae of "Don't Look Down" to the overwrought, atonal cover of "God Only Knows" to the pointless appearance of Tina Turner on the title track...man, what a disaster.

While Never Let Me Down isn't nearly as bad as its predecessor, it's a low point for me, although there are some gems there.

I also noticed some stuff...almost every Bowie album mentions angels or aliens or something akin to them, thus further confirming the fact that David Bowie is, in truth, a celestial being and is not dead because something like Bowie can never, actually, die.
Moving on. 

I have cemented the opinion that my favorites are still Bowie's mid-to-late 90's albums. Tin Machine not included.

Everyone always goes on about the characters and story of Diamond Dogs and Ziggy Stardust, but not enough credit's been given to the story of and behind Outside.

That is a dense goddamn plot line.

Bowie wrote a murder-as-art concept album set in the future that involved time travel, the subtitle for which was: the Ritual Art-Murder of Baby Grace Blue: A non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-Cycle. 

Ziggy Stardust and Halloween Jack can eat a thin white dick.

Nathan Adler, Ramona A. Stone, Algeria Touchshriek, Leon Blank, Baby Grace Blue, Paddy...these aren't just vague concepts tying into what costume Bowie was wearing at the time, this is a fully realized work of which we are only getting a glimpse which will never be fully realized now...unless I'm right about Bowie being some kind of angel and visiting Eno in his sleep to impart the rest of the trilogy for him to complete with the help of Trent Reznor. 
Or whatever.

As for Earthling, yeah, one could say it's just Bowie doing drum 'n' bass, the stuff that was popular at the time, but, one would be a fucking idiot. Yes, DNB was popular, but no one EVER created anything in that genre like Earthling. Throw in the fact that his backing band had Reeves goddamn Gabrels and fucking Mike Garson in it and you can just stop talking. HE USED A WASHING MACHINE AS PERCUSSION. SHUT UP. TITS AND EXPLOSIONS.

Also, why all the hate for Hours? This was written by Bowie and Gabrels, played by them and the rest of his backing band from his previous two albums, and is sincere as hell. Half the album is well constructed, beautifully written mellow rock and the other half is Bowie's weird experimental brilliance. Yes, "Brilliant Adventure" sounds like something from a handjob spa and "What's Really Happening?" was written by some guy who won a contest, but the rest is almost perfect. It comes from a place without pretension or costumes or characters where Bowie can look back over his twenty or so albums and thirty-five or so years of being an artist. It's called perspective, yo.  

Also, the b-side "We Shall Go To Town", could be on ★.

And, I also listened to Nevermen, the self titled collabo between Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio, rapper Doseone, and Mike Patton of Faith No More. It's unique as all get out, for better worse or worse, and kind of just makes me want another TVOTR album. If you're feeling adventurous or just bored with Rihanna and Adele, you should check it out. Review here.

Tuesday Was Awful

Yesterday, for the first time in a very long time, I was afraid. I was legitimately terrified. I was terrified of losing my one, functioning eye, thus rendering me completely blind.

Since my 9th grade year or so, I only had the one functioning eye, and it doesn't function that well, I'd say between 35 and 45 percent. This is because of a large quantity of scar tissue on my retina left over from the half dozen plus eye surgeries I had over the course of 1995 and 1996. These half dozen plus surgeries were to reattach both my retinas which had become detached while I was on my high school football team*. As a result, my night vision is almost non-existent, I have no depth perception whatsoever, what is well-lit for you is dim for me, and what is dim for you is basically pitch black for me. Combine the sports angle with the eyesight situation and you'll begin to understand why sports bars are, literally, hell for me.

And, I've had a few folks try to "see what it's like" by merely closing one eye. That doesn't work. You'd have to close one eye, retard the rate at which your pupil dilates and then disrupt and distort your vision with a constantly-shifting blob of color (the scar tissue) filling up most of your upper left quadrant and patches of your other three quadrants of vision.

Just saying.

So, why was I actively concerned about losing my remaining, shitty eyesight?

You ever get a eyelash in your eye?

You ever rub your eye?

Well, when angles and pressure and Satan's prankishness are all juuust right, you can rub an eyelash RIGHT INTO YOUR EYE. The white part of your eye is called the sclera and I got an eyelash embedded in my sclera. No, it didn't hurt, but the idea of something penetrating the delicate membrane of my eye...ugh, shudder. Incidentally, this is why you should have deep eye contact with someone special every day, it strengthens the relationship and they can see if you have any foreign bodies puncturing your eyeballs.

Anyway, how does one remove an eyelash which has been lodged in one's sclera? It's pretty motherfucking, goddamn, horrifically terrible friends; the eye doctor, hopefully with the rock solid hands of Roland Deschain of Gilead, puts numbing drops in your eye and then uses an instrument to remove it. A tweezers if you're lucky, a scalpel and a tweezers if you're not. The worst part for anyone else is having to keep your eye open and motionless while a series of metal instruments draw near, touch and then sort of distort your vision (that's the instrument piercing the surface of your eye and slightly altering its shape). For me, throw in the fact that, if something goes wrong, I could lose my remaining sight. 

So while I'm trying to sit as still as possible, hold my eye open despite EVERY FIBER OF MY BEING AND THE SCREAMING COMING FROM MY MIND TO GET AWAY FROM THE BLADE ABOUT TO CUT MY EYE and not sob in terror (both because that would shake my body and because I am an ugly, ugly crier) some things flashed through my head. 

What were the last things I remember seeing? 

The last movie was Deadpool, and, while not a fantastic film, I felt it could be a fitting last one for me. 

The last non-Braille book was "Vampire L.A." by Phil Tucker (seriously, Phil: 100% enjoying it now that I'm 3/4 into it).

Last VO gig was AirWick.

The last concert, They Might Be Giants (or, kind of, Mother Feather, if you count the dozens of times I saw them perform "Living/Breathing" last weekend), fine with both of those.

The eyelash, which had broken into two pieces, came out all right and, as of right now, things are okay. I'm taking a course of antibiotic eye drops and I have a follow up on Friday, and another in a week or so after that, but now (and for a while probably), I'm afraid to go to the gym (sweat and/or pool water probably not helpful), keep my eye open (dust!), keep my eye closed (more bastard fucking eyelashes), pet the cat (dander, whatever that is), sneeze (sudden pressure shift), read (bit of a hinderance when that's technically my job), shit (muscle strain), utilize anything with a screen (reduced blinking results in dry eyes results in my eye turning to glass and shattering probably) and so on.

So...that's where I'm at.

* peer pressure, Florida, etc.