hello again.I was drinking some coffee and I just read those two words and everything all of a sudden was so much brighter. Everything is transitory, i.e., we're within a Heraclitean flux. 'Natch. But I guess that means everything is transitory: Even that feeling you get in your stomach when you realize that everything is transitory, the wasting sickness that you swear is flattening your arteries and ushering you off to a quieter death. That feeling, the natural human reaction to caprice and effluvial hopes, is itself transient. When a lover leaves she goes because she had to go, and all things must pass; even passing must pass.
This morning I read a news article conjecturing, rumormongering. hello again, this is Jeff Mangum. Hello again, what a beautiful day. Hello again, I'm listening to hear where you are. In an E6 message board posting entitled news and fish and meaningful messages, Mangum (apparently) implied that he's still working on music (expected) and that an album would come out again (unexpected).
we dont have a timetable for releasing the album yet, so dont get your hopes up for new songs now. if you want more “aeroplane” just ignore all of this, the songs are songs but they’re longer and more free. when jeremy came down after his tour we just spent days playing noise while screaming and it was incredibly liberating.
Who knows what to expect. But sometimes a Lebensform seems to have developed so as to close off whole wide avenues of discourse. Sometimes your life is such that speaking about love or bitterness or unrepentant contempt makes no sense. The words are always the same, but your life-world is different; and the world is not a thing: It's your own self's limits. Words suddenly partake in sense-bearing again. The world changes.
Here is a link to three Jeff Mangum performances in mp3 format (from Elephant 6). Below is a snippet (just a snippet as I'm loathe even to look at more of this translation) if Rilke's first Duino Elegy. (Who's to say what, but I would consider both Mangum and Rilke religious writers.)
And so I hold back, and swallow down the yearning,
the dark call heard in the cave of the heart. Alas,
who then can serve our need? Not angels, not human
beings; and even the sly beasts begin to perceive
that we do not feel too much at home
in our interpreted world.
In other news, Sleater-Kinney qua band is headed for the grave. Stylus (rather ambiguously [i.e., ambivalent towards S-K's overall awesomeness], I must say...) offers a eulogy.
They should have broken up after 1999’s The Hot Rock, in which Tucker and Brownstein achieved a nauseous parity: they traded vocals and guitar lines and finished each other sentences, dividing and dissolving as they reenacted their psychodrama for the audience. A lot of people think it’s their worst album (the honor goes to All Hands on the Bad One, whose inept role-playing proved why they weren’t ready for anything besides indie stardom). Like a John Cassavettes film it exerts a voyeuristic fascination that may or may not have anything to do with whether it’s any good.
