Are the Foo Fighters Bad? Part 2

I received this response from my friend Luke Thornton in response to my, let's call it dilettante posturing about whether The Foo Fighters are bad. 

Luke said,

I like the Foo Fighters. Have so for decades. You are obliged to feel superior now. But you raise an interesting point on liking music based purely on nostalgia and I would agree it's probably why certain people like certain bands or albums.

Are the Foo Fighters Bad?

Whenever a question seems hard to answer, it is usually because there is no answer. The question itself is wrong. Like this: is casual sex bad? The answer is probably something like, depends on what you mean by sex, what you mean by wrong, what you mean by casual, and what you mean by is. Then even after you define all that...the answer will not answer the question. It will just be a choice, like picking an outfit, and you will maybe want to pick a different outfit based on who is seeing it, your mood for the day...

And there is this question that keeps surfacing, that is like this: destined for a convoluted answer that succeeds supremely in its failure to provide an answer:

Are The Foo Fighters bad?

Things That Go With Happy Hardcore Music

Happy hardcore is a terrible genre of music. However, it is no longer horrible when you combine it with certain other things that are horrible. This is weird because it happens in other places, such as when you combine pictures of cats with jokes in bad grammar, or when you floss really hard while having angry thoughts about your grandmother, or when you have a sex dream about Justin Bieber right after your divorce, and you are both dolphins, like the kind of making out that would happen in his video right when he decides to start being sexy for real but he can't get all Cry Me a River yet because his fanbase's moms will get angry, and secretly turned on, and that will make them more angry, but he doesn't have adult fans yet like Skrillex and Maroon 5.  

SURVIVAL

I saw a movie tonight 
about a boy lost at sea 
for 30 days, 60 days, 
something monstrous. 

He shared his raft 
with a Bengali tiger,
an animal that wanted 
to kill and eat him. 

I'm So Fucked

My ex came over last night. He comes over about once a week, or I go to his place, for the sake of visitation with our kid, and then I spend the rest of the week trying to refrain from binge drinking, flirting like a 30-year-old whose body WANTS ANOTHER FUCKING BABY, or going on some kind of shame spiral that involves stuffed-crust pizza and freaking out on Twitter.

The Etymology of Cordial, and Being of the Heart

I told someone off this weekend. He is a good guy, and a friend (well, was a friend), and I told him off, and now I feel terrible. I don't think I've ever told anyone off, in my life, without feeling really bad about it afterwards.

This is, weirdly, with exception to the people I am in serious relationships with. 

There is an idea that honesty in relationships breeds intimacy, and people use this idea to be really mean to each other.

I have said things to my exes that I would never say to a family member, coworker, friend, bus driver, child, or animal.

I remember my first relationship being especially insane. We lived on the second floor of a 1940s' mill house next to a dilapidated old mill. I was always throwing his stuff out the window. Or he was throwing my stuff out the window.

We lived across from a family of kids who would scout the yard for cigarette butts, until the girl got pregnant, and moved away, she was maybe 14, and liked to wear a red flannel shirt that I stilil remember.

Her brother was maybe 9, and very fat, and hung out with gang members who scared me a little.

They had a really hungry pitt bull on a leash on the porch, and I was also scared of this pitt bull.

That boyfriend, the guy I spent my teenage years with, he was prematurely jaded, and had become violent.

Maternal Devotion and Self-Love

I went to see my ex last Sunday so that he could visit with our daughter. He is living in a residential hotel, a little clustered strip of brick buildings hidden behind a tower of storage units. Well, this hotel room is just a bed, a TV, a table, a dresser, a kitchenette, and low-pile carpet. He has his VHS collection stacked against one wall, the same one that he had when we met, and a pile of pumpkins, and a dresser covered in skulls. He has his guitar and mandolin and his PlayStation and a heart-shaped ashtray half-full of cigarette butts. We sat on the bed eating fast food and watching an old-school Care Bears movie.

Our daughter kept wanting him to take her to the sink to wash her hands, then to pee pee in the pot, then to feed her bites of food. She kept nudging the fork into his hand so that he would eat, too. I remember that about him--I would cook, and he wouldn't eat it. He didn't understand how the refusal to do something together is sort of a denial, like you are saying no to the person without doing anything. It was other things too, how he would fall asleep on the couch or keep his shoes on hours after he came home.

He said in a voice that I don't like for a two-year-old, an annoyed and patronizing voice, "You can feed yourself."

Well, ok. I am learning how to make my daughter happy. She is almost two, and I only just figured it out. She wants me to be her mommy. She wants me to wipe her mouth, get her Sprite, help her pee, pretend to do chores with her, hold her, cuddle with her, and watch cartoons in a little snuggley ball in a mountain of stuffed animals. 

I do not think that I understood until recently what the interaction thing means. It is about burrowing deep down into a person, until you are finally eye level. It is a way to look around and see the world the way they do. From this vantage point, I know what my daughter wants. 

"She just wants you to do stuff with her," I told him. "She wants you to eat with her."

I have been thinking a lot about something I read last week in Force Vs. Power, one of the many hippie books I've been reading lately. He talks about self-love in a way that makes me think about maternal devotion.

"At this more evolved stage, nothing 'out there' has the capacity to make one happy, and love isn't something that's given or taken away by another, but is created from within."

I have been experiencing, some evenings, a glowing sensation that wells out of my love for my daughter and into our apartment, covering the pile of laundry, the furniture, the musty yet comfortable scent of our home. It comes out of me, but it also wraps around me. This is, I've been thinking, my maternal gaze turned inward onto myself--and outward onto the world. "Above all things have fervent love for one another, for love will cover the multitude of sins."

Love in this way, as a blanket of warmth, rolling out to bathe and massage the cracks: love that is drawn from an infinite source--I think that is how to be a mother. Or an ex-wife. Or just a person. IDK think about it.

Dubstep Remix of Ellie Goulding Covering The Weeknd

I have insomnia tonight, so I'm doing whatever it is I do on the internet when I can't sleep. Tonight, the google tangent served me well, and went like:

-Look up lots of Ellie Goulding songs
-Finally listen to Ellie Goulding covering The Weeknd
-Look up dubstep remixes of Ellie Goulding covering The Weeknd on Soundcloud.
-Find a real good one.

I just feel like there is so much awesome happening in this song.

Non-Violent Communication and Parenting

My daughter is two years old.  She has been violent in her communication since before she was born, when she would kick my stomach so hard that I would see the full imprint of her foot. My daughter had colic. She cried for four-six hours a day for as many months. I am conflict-avoidant, neurotic and submissive in my interpersonal style. My daughter totally stressed me out. She still does.

I have been arguing with one of my friends for a few months now about how I parent. He thinks that I need to be more stern and punitive with my daughter, who now screams and flails like an epileptic fish when I won't let her drink my wine or climb the monkey bars. But I know that the punitive style will not influence my daughter, which is why I have found a much more way to sway her: with love.

Best Dubstep Songs According to Jenna

"cinema" skrillex remix  "under the sheets" jakwob remixes ellie goulding "headbanga" excision & downlink "ghosts n stuff" nero remixes deadmau5

I don't like house music. It annoys me. Well the beat annoys me. Sometimes if the house music is pretty enough I like it. I like dubstep because the bass kind of shakes my body and feels good. 

I like these four dubstep songs a lot. 

 

“Cinema” Skrillex Remix

 
I like Skrillex. People think he's cheesy, and I get that. But his music is really exciting.

I saw him at an electronic festival just now and he told us to dedicate "Cinema," to the aliens. So we put our lighters and glow sticks in the air and sang I guess to the aliens, which is awesome when 20,000 people are on molly. 

This song is so romantic and I love it. The lyrics are sentimental but the bass is hard and masculine. Really cool. Skrillex remixed this track by Benny Benassi. He is a house DJ and the original is boring.

Skrillex is dating Ellie Goulding. Or at least the internet told me that. I hope so.

“Under the Sheets” Ellie Goulding 

Remix by Jakwob

 
I listened to this Jakwob remix a lot when I was pregnant and the biggest thing I remember about this song was going dancing New Year's Eve with my friend Katie and dancing to this song and thinking about how I couldn't drink for a really long time. 

It was at a dive in the Tenderloin in San Francisco and this song came on and I danced awkwardly because dubstep is kind of hard to dance to. Here are some pictures of Katie since she is so beautiful. 

“Headbanga” by Excision & Downlink

 

 

   
 At that CounterPoint rave there were two tents in the back for dubstep and a bunch of Pretty Lights artists. The best one for me who played was Excision. It was really sweaty and crazy in there.

So I guess a lot of metal heads go to dubstep, according to this guy I met at that rave. So that would make sense about this "headbanger" song being such a big deal.  

The part "I'm a fucking headbanger" is from a Busta Rhymes song where he is using the phrase to playfully change its meaning to describe shooting someone in the head. 

Yeah it's a good song. 

 “Ghosts n Stuff” by Deadmau5 // Nero Remix

“It’s been so long, I’ve been out of my body with you/

I feel alone, feel at home, feel like nothing is true…”

 
These lyrics could be sad, or not, just like raving. Being high on molly rules. Coming down off it sucks! And the sound of bass and the frequency releases dopamine into your body. 

Also the feelings you might have for someone at a party but it just goes away when you try to hang out afterwards.

This remix by Nero has a little bit of that comedown feeling.

8 Reasons Why Narcolepsy is a Mental Illness

that includes hallucinations, sleep attacks!, hardcore memory loss, crushing fatigue and nerve damage.

I just woke up from a two-hour lucid dream session that involved Justin Bieber and me in a swimming pool. I'm not really cool with that. So instead of risk falling back into that groggy half-asleep state
that nightly bombards me with voices and people who aren't there, I decided to do a little writing about narcolepsy.

I have had narcolepsy my whole life and it has been crazy. And I literally mean that--I'm a little crazy. I've been hallucinating since I was four. I really thought that my dolls and shit were alive. Ok maybe you did too, but I really really did. Anyway... what I'm saying is, I know narcolepsy is caused by a brain chemical imbalance, and that "mental illness" is kind of a silly word, maybe. But I think narcolespy belongs there. So I made a list of the 8 ways that narcolepsy means I might be a little crazy. or i mean you might.

The Weeknd, Dennis Cooper and Sadism

I read a few of Dennis Cooper's books around 2007.  

It was a really weird time for me. I was living in San Francisco and felt off-kilter and displaced a lot. And also, just cold. That city is so fucking cold. I was reading authors that really weren't good for me at the time--Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, and most of all, Dennis Cooper. 

an analysis of "breaking bad" and the anatomy of pain

No one would like Walter White in real life. And by like, I mean LIKE. That feeling of oh shit, this guy is awesome. The Walter White of Breaking Bad starts off as a grumpy science teacher, and quickly descends into the rank corridors of the methamphetamine trade. It isn’t cute.

I have been on meth. I’ve watched a middle-aged woman in a track suit snort lines next to her bulimic 17-year-old; I’ve watched a guy show me how he had to “parachute” his meth because he only had a few teeth left, and little to speak of separate nasal cavities. (Parachuting is where you wrap the drug in toilet paper and swallow it.) It’s a toxic thing that kind of reminds me of cancer—a thing that feeds and spreads with the anger of wildfire. And while my interaction with meth involved mostly innocuous college nights spent playing spades until 8 in the morning, the stuff I’ve seen that drug do to people’s faces is enough to make me recoil. This is the truth: I never became a meth head for the same reason that I never became a hardcore drug addict of any kind. It really isn’t worth getting ugly over.

stream ryan hemsworth "last words" ep

this is delicious and lovely and amazing. 

I spent an evening at Ryan Hemsworth's Bandcamp page unable to stop listening to all his ep's. I don't remember the last time I freaked out on someone's canon. "Kitsch Genius" is so chill and sweet to listen to...now, on a fall night in Georgia, with my bedroom window open. I really love this style of music. It reminds me of what lounge and chillwave music were trying to do in the 90s' and early 2000s, but kept making it too sappy. His treatment to the Notwist's Consequence is subtle and beautiful because you barely even notice until the end that it's that song. Anyway, go check out all his stuff on his Bandcamp page.

evian christ "MYD"

dark like burial. been grooving really hard on this. i guess this guy is a big deal right now, off an ep called 'kings like them.' UK guy and kept his identity secret, very like burial.

“the danger is not that the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but that, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.” -jack kornfield

gillian welch "everything is free"

i listened to this song so many times off a cd my friend jessie burnt me. i thought it was about the tension between art and capitalism, and the idea that creation can't ultimately be turned into a commodity without some kind of compromise. but i also thought this song was about something more deeply accepting, a resignation, giving in to the shit and the sadness--and you know, an idea about how this giving up and giving in yields to freedom, authenticity, the total surrender of agenda.

if you've read marilynne robinson's novel "housekeeping," it involves a character who learns how to go sit in the woods and jump onto trains, a dropping out that seems part passive nihilist, part buddhist and very appealing. i read that book in college, and i lived next to these train tracks with my first love--a person who left me shell shocked for years after the breakup. at the time living next to those tracks and feeling the old mill house rattle each night, my future seemed to hold the tangible possibility of becoming rich in nothingness.

i looked it up, and this song is explicitly about music piracy. welch's sweetly sung middle finger to the people stealing her music. it's weird, finding out that the song is about a social issue makes me like it less. i get it...but maybe there's something different to worry about. something about living in a society that does not value art, the writers run to marketing and the artists to graphic design, or they work at coffee shops or sleep on their friends' couches or become career waiters. charles bukowski spent decades delivering mail. parents, lovers and friends give freely of their love, and art can live in this realm. something cynical happens when you make it a commodity. make your art for love of the thing, or not at all.

and you know, listen to conor oberst. "if you love something, give it away."

"To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again." -from Housekeeping