sunday june 22 2003    |    11:43 a.m.

thank you, rob crow, for deciding one day that you would be a musician and make records and follow your own precedents and direction and make only the music in your head. thank you.

offcell, by pinback, is a record worth getting excited about. it has been so long. now maybe i will have something to write about.

i am uncomfortable in this house today, although i have a few hours alone, if you discount (which i do) the presence of the roommates on the other side of the curtain. it's hard to live with people you don't know, half a year later. whatever.

i have to fill out an application for the promotion-job at work, and go to kinko's to print out my résumé, and hand everything in tomorrow. i should do that in the quiet of the next four hours, but i am armed with pinback and i feel like writing.

i liked that pitchfork review, the one linked to offcell above. but i don't see messrs. crow and smith pulling a dismemberment plan, since both bands are inherently different animals. the dismemberment plan was always an album-centric band (the album is not dead!), a tight and sequential product, best listened to from beginning to end, each song a chapter in a novel. the dismemberment plan played and recorded their progress, from the beginning potential of ! to the(ir) utmost achievement, with change. textbook definition of, what, musical objectivism? (my boyfriend is reading the fountainhead, i apologize.)

rob crow --and, by extension, pinback, which will deserve its own chapter in the Big Book of Rock n Roll Innovation-- works in the shadowy corners of experimentation, not the tenuous but glossy spotlight of forest-for-the-trees perfection. there is a time and place for the forest, a time and place for the trees. and yes, i see the trees continuing to sprout up in their own particular twisted coils, and i suppose what i'm trying to say is that i really hope that pinback sticks around.

pinback: where three tracks go a long way.

please, rock, save me from a gray fate.

i am totally not feeling banana-blueberry-bread. i feel a lot closer to my sixteen year old restless, angry coil. it all comes from inaction on so many fronts. and isolation. i'm 24. i want to go to rock shows and have my own place and be a little reckless and a lot responsible and did i mention OWN place, as in no roommates no big stinky unwashed dog no onions frying at three in the morning no midmorning yelling fighting clanking. i want to go back to school. i want to find people to talk with, what is wrong with this city? maybe it's not even the city, but i suspect it is partially responsible.

well. i suppose this is why i'm still writing in diaryland, what, three years later.