Always Be My Baby

So, today sees me having finally finished what I think is going to be the last "going away" entry I actually find it necessary to write (other than my inevitable "A freshly-unemployed Publishing Professional Reviews The New Springsteen" post for my next go-round at A Good Blog Is Hard To Find), and this one's the hard one. I just signed, sealed and delivered (or some other cliché about being done with something-"nail, coffin" anyone?) my final blog for the Wordsmiths store blog.

*heavy sigh*.

There's been some good that came of today, though-in addition to me writing my three-line bio for BabyGotBooks, some exciting things arrived in the mail (and if I was a faux-Anglophile who said things like "trainers" and "cuppa" I would have said "popped in the Post" or such):

Not to be all like Kanye West screaming "HEY GUYS CHECK OUT THIS FLY-ASS PEACOAT Y'ALL", but those are my new, super-hawt RussComm business cards designed by Amanda Lauter(haus).

Oh, and, also...what's that? What did someone send me to review for Resonator?

MARIAH. CAREY. THE. BALLADS.

I am CONFUSED as to how "Dreamlover" snuck onto a Mariah compilation titled Ballads , but that as possible Mariah Carey compilation trespasses go, that one's minor.

(Gonna overlook the fact that "Always Be My Baby", aka ALSO NOT A BALLAD, is on here as well. If we're going to play "Not A Ballad" Mariah Carey compilation making time, where the hell is "Emotions" and/or "All I Want For Christmas is You"?)

I mean, there's "Hero", I song I played the hell out of when I had it on cassingle, and, by god, "One Sweet Day". The meeting of the brilliant, flaxen-voiced lovebutter-on-silk-on-creme Mariah "The Pipes" Carey with Boyz "The Pipes" II "More Pipes" Men.

Come on, "One Sweet Day" was my and my first girlfriend ever's song.

Now, granted, that song was about a dead Grandma or old yeller or Jesus or Clinton something, but still, I get all misty-eyed and romantic when I hear it, thinking about holding hands and walking the mall, heading straight for Bath and Body Works to watch her buy Peaberry lotion with a gift certificate.

Now that is love. And that is obviously what this fine compilation of brilliant songs hopes to conjur: true, Peaberry-lotion-scented teenage love. Mariah-you, miss, will always be my baby.

I get your point.

As I was trying to post that last entry here (you know, the super-emo "OMG WOE-IS-I" one about leaving Georgia for New York, becoming unemployed, my relationship ending, etc etc the tiniest violin in the world, with my name etched on it, playing "Hearts and Flowers" or some Bright Eyes song) to my Facebook  (that whole "maximum visability neu-media" thing that I hear so much about), feeling both super-accomplished and empowered having finally "written down the bones" or "chewed on the bones" or "boiled the bones to make a stock" or whatever it is one does when one writes a lengthy, personal blog post about the collapse of a way of life, I was given the following Facebook authentication code request:

Apparently Facebook thinks I'm a slut. Or that I should go into the phone sex trade.

Suffice to say, I get your point, Facebook. Thanks. Thanks a *lot*. 

As long as I'm avoiding getting my Sunday started and not doing anything i should be doing, i.e.laundry, packing for my New York trip this coming weekend, continuing to pass wavering positive/negative judgment on the new Animal Collective album, uh...getting started on hitting the vodka+oj?...

Yesterday, I happened upon this fantastic signpost at the McDonalds here in Decatur:

Jesus God and Baby Jesus, if there's one thing I do *not* want to see happen, it's the current burgere couture fad altering the way McDonalds does business. I need to count on Mickey D's being cheap, gross and grease-pounding. So yeah, while this instance of "the $250 McMuttin" is just an awesome example of what do do when it's your shift to change the signboard because the Dora the Explorer happymeal toys have run out and you don't have any more "f"s, it seriously can't be too long before it's an actual menu item. Soon, the menu boards will be split between the "dollar" menu items (small fries, small sodas, vanilla ice cream cones, bag-o-grease) and the "big ballin' menu", complete with a logo of rapper T.I. happily consuming a "Millionaire McFlurry" (made with endangered goat's milk that had been collected by one individual monk living on a cliff in some remote part of wherever it is that there are cliffs and monks and goats), proclaiming "Whoa, Kimosabe, Big Ballin' is my hobby", and featuring the $250 McMuttin, the $300 Dodo Egg McMuttin and Cave-aged Gruyere served on a biscuit crafted from individually cracked wheat grains and drizzled with honey milked by hand from the glands of bees one-at-a-time, and the $800 Cristal-spiked milkshake, served in a diamond-encrusted pimp-cup.

Mark my words, it's only a matter of time.

Title comes first

I'm really relatively unsure as to how to begin this. When I started this blog, I'd decided that, rather than fill it with sappy mush at a furious pace in the beginning, only to leave it sad and unattended like a petulant child refused its own birthday cake and locked in the closet, I would attend to it with a minor degree of professionalism. As professional as a "blog" with a heavy swear-word count and an open letter to Tori Amos asking her to leave her trash bag and publicly denounce Sarah Palin can possibly be. However, the other place on the internet where my words tend to go, my LiveJournal, lay sadly dormant for a while even before the news of its eventual and impending collapse, and now I'm trying to port anything of any interest, relevance or hilarity over here before I wake up one day to find that any and all trace of my internet "blog" (read as: open diary) presence since 2000 has been wiped by disgruntled LJ employees. As such, I kinda feel necessity, like gravity in that R.E.M. song, pulling me to actually write "down the bones" (a Jeanette Winterson-I-think-not-going-to-google-it MFA class phrase that I hate, because I had a poetry professor as an undergrad at Oglethorpe who used it all the time to describe the type of disclosure she demanded in every piece handed in to her. To boycott, or as protest, or simply because I was bored and had to turn something in for a grade, I wrote a poem about how, when I was like 8 years old, I had a hamster that committed suicide. True story. She loved it. I read it aloud for the class.) here in terms of my current life situation.

So, with that typical digression aside, I've been sitting here trying to reconcile talking openly and not in a voice at all about "things", and have been finding it extremely difficult. Usually, with any/everything I write, be it blog post or, uh, blog post (or that "memoir" I'm writing/not-writing), the title comes first.

I have no title for this entry, and I probably won't even once it's finished. So rather than continue to pretend that my pre-apologies and asides are at all compelling, I'll get to those Winterson-esque bones (which, when written as such, makes her sound like a pro-Anorexia postergirl):

Like a giant oak covered in pictures of obscenely-to-the-point-of-hilariously obese cats and filled with far too many books, the past three years of my life are uprooting as we speak.

For the past three years of my life, I've lived in Decatur, GA, which is a little Birkenstock-clad, tofu-eating, super-artsy suburb of Atlanta. Also, for the past three-ish give or take, years of my life, in addition to various other projects (like, you know, collecting those pictures of obscenely fat cats), I've put my marketing and publicity degree to use by mainly serving as the Marketing/PR director for Wordsmiths, a local indie bookstore that I helped conceptualize.

And now I find that position coming to an end. I mean, the economy's super-awesome and publishing is doing really well at the moment, so of course it's a total shocker to me. Note the sarcasm, because as you may not know the economy and job market are both awful, and publishing as an industry keeps taking hit after hit and then scrambling to use words like "monetize" and "twitter".

Running concurrently with this, the two-plus year live-in relationship I've been in has also run its course.

This is where, dear readers, your mental soundtracking should cue Lauryn Hill's voice singing "when it all/all faaaallls down..."...

As such, on March 27th, I do something that, for the longest time, I swore I'd never do: I become a cliche, pack up everything I can't sell for pretzel money and move to New York.

I've lived in Georiga my entire life, with a minor accidental digression to Las Vegas (where I had to beg a random girl in a Barnes and Noble to go on a date with me-ask me about that later, k?), so this is a little...a bit...um...

it's fucking terrifying, is what it is.

I am a fucking southerner. I like screen doors, porch swings, iced tea (with splenda thx), fried green tomatoes...ok, granted, I DO enjoy a good vegan cupcake, but, hell, I say "y'all". And I can't STOP saying "y'all".

I have a place to stay for a brief period of time, and I have...um, well, basically that's about it. I'm hunting and gathering job prospects, but the whole thing has given rise to me finally launching my industrious, cheeky approach to the freelance media/pr/marketing game: RussCommunications, aka RussCommTM.

Check out the awesome logo:

(super-small version, obv)

designed by my friend Amanda Lauter, of MailChimp and LauterHausProductions LLC TLC OPP. I'll obviously be a success, because, um, hello, no one with a sweet-ass logo has ever failed at anything.

(She's promising me business cards, too. I eagerly await them. NO PRESSURE, LAUTER.)

One of my first "clients" (that's what you call them, right, clients? I misplaced my "Communications In The Aughts" handbook) is my former boss Zach Steele's awesome, hilarious and offensive-only-if-you-don't-read-it first novel, Anointed. You can become a fan of RussCommTM on Facebook-forgive the lack of, well, of anything, really, going on with that page, because, um, I still have this to deal with:

that's right. The past years of my life, as seen as books going into boxes.

Obviously only some of my books, my babies, are going to make the trip north with me. It's that culling, the "do I take things I haven't read and risk them sucking? Do I take old favorites? Do I just re-read Special Topics In Calamity Physics over and over again and sigh myself to sleep every night?", that is making it rough.

Right, Russ. That's the ONE thing making the sorting through and packing up of everything tough. Trying to choose which damn John Updike books to keep.

So, I mean, I guess all this is to say that that, in fact, is what's going on in my life at the moment. A lot of listening to Fever Ray. A lot of Grouper, which you may have read already read about. I'll still be writing here, chronicling the "journey", but when I say "journey" I don't mean it like those women who read Eat, Pray, Love but skip the last two bits and then gush over Elizabeth Gilbert saying "thanks for the journey". Or maybe I do? Dunno. Regardless, that will be here.

I'll still be writing about music at Resonator, and hopefully my relocation to New York, finally again close to the two friends with whom Resonator was begun, will allow Res to become a more active community force. I'll still be writing for the fantastic, literary collective group blogA Good Blog Is Hard To Find. Also, as of today, I'm excited to announce that I'll be doing book reviews and writing for BabyGotBooks, the lit blog that I joined forces with in my previous position to throw some seriously cool rock-n-roll book party extravaganza things.

So, I mean, that's me. Right now. With the emotion swept aside for the moment, and the boxes, like the future, looming. Expect to see more pictures of those boxes.

And yes. I am making this sound way easier than it's going to be.

That Real-Life Wall

It has been suggested that I utilize this method of communication and break the third wall (fourth? I don't know, I'm not good at counting and equally bad at construction), and actually discuss the massive personal and professional changes occurring in my life at the moment.

My initial response to that: "Pshaw, what, is this LiveJournal?"

While, thankfully, it isn't (though I can't and won't front-I <3 LJ like whoa, always have, always will), there's some validity to the assertion that, if I'm going to keep this blog, and have it basically use my name and nothing else, then I really should talk about things other than how awful the Atlanta paper is, particularly given the whirlwind I find myself in. While this turmoil is both positive and negative AND pretty much entirely self-inflicted, I find that, in order to do this properly I need to actually attend to a few things first.

All of this is a long way of saying: there's some serious real shizz coming. Soon-ish. In the meantime?

'Nuff said.

(Also, I really will figure out how to disable the "read more" links being on every post. I promise.)

It was sunrise when we started

Over at Resonator, I had the sad task today of posting about the death of Charlie Cooper, of the New Orleans/Chicago-based electronic pop group Telefon Tel Aviv. If you're not familiar with TTA under that name, you've heard their work: they've had their hands all over stuff by Nine Inch Nails, just to cherrypick one name.

The official announcement is over there. For those that care, I had the good fortune to cover *two* Telefon records, both 2004's Map Of What Is Effortless and this year's Immolate Yourself. If you like gorgeous, dark electronic pop compositions, with seriously intense production work, both of these albums are pretty much perfect. In 2004 I spent a day with the two guys in Telefon, Josh Eustis and Charlie Cooper, for a now-defunct electronic music magazine, and ended up writing a rather large piece on the sheer brilliance of Map Of What Is Effortless's chopped, spliced R&B vocals and micro-processed drums for a now-defunct electronic music magazine. For my efforts, they sent me a signed, one-sided, hand-stamped 12" record of their song "My Week Beats Your Year". I played the hell out of it when I had turntables. That version, the exact same recording as the one on the album, always sounded better to me.

I've already declared Immolate Yourself as one of my top albums of 2009. It came out really recently, possibly today even, on one of my favorite record labels in the world-Ellen Allien's Bpitch Control, a home, a haven really, for smart, forward-thinking electronic pop compositions.

I had hoped to see them tour again.

The brilliance of Josh and Charlie, together, as Telefon Tel Aviv, was a weird sort of brother/lover interplay that the two had, where they would, within the course of a live set or a studio album, fight and curse and smile and cry and fall apart and rebuild and pour their souls into what they were crafting, and that's exactly what their music sounds like.

I encourage you to scroll through the Res Mag stuff posted on TTA, and have a listen. My interview with Josh Eustis (the surviving half of TTA) from late last year is up (it was because of this interview, solely from Josh's recommendation therein, that I picked up the Grouper album that I've grown to fall oh-so in love with), and there are a bunch of individual TTA songs, including my favorite Telefon song ever: "I Lied".

I've done, here, an awful job at eulogizing a person I really didn't know, and so instead I choose to let their music, beautiful and pensive and dark and at-times-frustrating and always-heady and also pretty much nearly always perfect, do the talking.