#24 - Art-house porn can be depressing. Music too, albeit less so.

A couple of nights ago I saw Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs---which in addition to offering a lot of graphic, intermittently hot sex, tries to capture the sensation of standing around in a rock club and giving yourself over to the volume and beats and notes through the eyes of a 30-something Antarctic geologist, who is falling deep into it a thing with a 21 yr old hottie he met in a club. Outside the Brixton Academy one night for a Super Furry Animals show when his girlfriend is elsewhere, the dude marvels “five thousand people in a room and you can still feel alone.”

Well, yeah.

It seems to me the essential condition of being in a rock audience is precisely this. Standing alongside dozens or hundreds or thousands of other people (or even just one), all locked away in their individual experience---drugged or sober---of what is supposed to be a collective rapture, a group orgasm. But they never are. The performances that have always moved me the most were those that attempted to break through or melt this wall of isolation, usually via dancing. The Dead once. At The Drive In show. An early Jurassic Five show in San Francisco. Basement Jaxx. But they all fall short. Even if you are there with a lover---and I saw 135 shows with Emily (I know; I have every ticket stub)---and even if you go home to have hot, spitty, rough sex afterwards, it is impossible to escape the feeling that while the band is playing, and you are riding pleasure waves created by audio waves rubbing, riding, slapping you the way a lover might, you are alone.

Jesus, dude---snap out of it. You’re really beginning to sound pathetic. This is going to be my last post until I can pull myself out of this funk. As for music, no funk tonight. I’m just not feeling it.