Figures Obscured In A Dusty Ditch

Now Edited To Make Slightly More Sense. Midnight Ramblings Deserve Proofreading Too.
After a week or so of listening to that album I guess I don't really feel like breaking down what I get from it into a series of logical reasons why it's good or bad, where its strengths and weaknesses lie or feel the need to compare it with their other records. I've been reading a lot of reviews and things and after all the track-by-track breakdowns, star ratings, "not-as-good-as"s and "better-than"s the one thing I've taken away from them all is simply the notion that this album just 'is what it is' on its own and my experience won't be your experience and maybe you might try it and like it and maybe you already have and didn't but I hope you try it in case it works for you in some way. I guess I've been realising lately how important it is to just try things, maybe there isn't anything more important than that, just finding yourself in things (not in a material sense, some other use of 'things') and the way they make you feel or whatever it is I'm hopelessly trying to describe. The more music I've been exploring the more I've realised how much there is to experience, its like discovering things as a kid, all these new, unique feelings in every nuance, abstract and defined only by unique association with the way a moment works with and against the moments its embedded in, both in the music and in the listener. I don't want to dumb that down and analyse it that with such cold logic. It's making something so pure and real in its own right into something synthetic and relative for the sake of defining something in need of no definition. I'm not bashing the idea of criticism or something ridiculous, just the means with which so many critics seem to be going about it. Oh. Dear. GOD. No really, read that last one. As for the music, just try it and you might discover something. If not, cool.

Just as a further comment to that and what I was saying about the whole Mulholland Dr./Blue Velvet thing , sometimes I wonder if maybe I'm just lazy or don't want to deal with things or something in kind of... generally relying so much on abstract things I can't define and preferring the elusive and undefinable to the concrete, or if maybe it's the other way around and it's because the abstract appeals to me that I shouldn't feel the need to rely on definitions and absolutes. I guess that's something I maybe need to figure out. What I'm getting at I suppose relates to how I often feel like I only let people see me in glimpses between a false construction that portrays my personality in a very broad way drawing heavily on superficial, homogeneous ideas of what I consider people might accept, even if it means constantly underselling myself (and even if I really dislike that persona), to avoid the crushing hurt of exposing who I am at heart and being rejected with no comforting reality left to fall back on. I think that's something maybe reflected in my past unwillingness to share writing or make films or whatever comes from my mind with others (or even what I'm really thinking in conversations when I sit there saying nothing) just because they're so personal and to expose them to the possibility of rejection could destroy the illusion that they're 'better' than they are, like a little reassuring lie to avoid dealing with their actual reception in reality. I dunno, that probably sounds weirder or more pathetic than what I'm trying to describe actually is. I guess its like thinking of a melody or something for a song and never being happy with the lyrics because to lock it down as 'completed' then in light of the full song you might see it for what it is: far less than you imagined when toying that melody in your mind with abstract notions that somehow exaggerate it beyond what it really is.

It seems to me so hypocrticial to be that guarded about myself, particularly in drawing on all these stupid superficial traits in my outward personality as some sort of construction of an absolute notion of an 'accepted persona' (one incidentally undermined by this construction). I guess over time I've become more disillusioned with a lot of mainstream ideas often taken for granted in modern day society and the hypocricy lies in having a desire to escape some of those deeply-ingrained social ideals only to find myself unable to escape from my own protective shell. I think I'm too passive with respect to that and that's why I rarely get anywhere in terms of actually expressing myself and why these ramblings would probably just slip away inconsequentially to be forgotten for a while until my next passive resolution not to let them had I not forced myself to write them down. I don't know if they're for my benefit or what, I don't know if anyone will ever even read this and I guess that's probably the only reason why I even feel that I can put it all down. But it means something to at least try to describe some of this stuff as best I can, even if just to collect my thoughts and even if I could never do it justice with words (I guess that's where the appeal of film and music also lies - the things you can really convey through those, the opportunity to communicate those more abstract thoughts and feelings). Plus it's better than that bland bullshit that filled up the last blog where I'd read what I'd written a day later and see that fake person again in that writing and regret exposing that person again for no better reason than to feel better and quell some anxieties that I knew would ironically be refuelled both in that regret and in the knowledge that people had actually read those words.

"As" is a wonderful song. I'm lying in bed listening to Stevie Wonder jotting down all these random thoughts and resolving to post them tomorrow (today) no matter what comes out because I feel that's at least honest. This music's somehow created the perfect little sphere for that. I feel like I need to feel right now just from listening to an album I've never heard before. Isn't that the greatest thing? So if you want a review, maybe In Rainbows is just that what it says, something in amongst some reds, blues, greens and yellows. I hope tomorrow (today) I find something like that. Between the awesome CD Michael put together (cheers again) and an over-the-top stress-relieving music and movie shopping spree yesterday I've got a healthy diet of unheard Sufjan Stevens, Aerosmith, The Modern Lovers, Bloc Party, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, Deep Purple, Can, Sigur Ros, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, King Crimson, Dinosaur Jr and My Bloody Valentine records to get to know over the next few weeks so I don't think it'll be a problem. Like Godard's Made In USA I shall now unexpectedly stop, mid-conversation, characters driving down the road, with a nice vivid FIN