Icebox Records » winter

Cooley Doppelganger

Eric Olsen — Wed, 19 Mar 2003 00:23:08 +0000

So I pour a nice Belgian style, clean up a little detritus about the box, and decide to write a small spiel here … talk about how the weather’s making everything better than bearable (which is what it kind of plateaus at halfway through the winter here … survival, existence, not necessarily life), how people seem friendlier, or at least I do … and how I’m sitting here listening to the new Malkmus / Jicks CD … so I go to write and notice Cooley has written pretty much the same thing for the day.

So fuck it. Instead, I’m going to talk about how this weather’s a fucking tease … it’s going to get worse before it gets any better, I’ll tell you that much. Look at Colorado today … getting fucking 3 feet of snow … and if it doesn’t get worse here, it’ll just turn into a detestable mudpit, thus giving us yet another thing to complain about, more kindling for the Ubiquitous Conflagration of Complaining About Where You Live (UCOCAWYL).

It’s always fucking something.

So

Jason Cooley — Wed, 19 Mar 2003 00:21:42 +0000

not much to say…listening to malkmus and the jicks.

the records are selling and people seem to like ‘em.

weather’s getting warmer and my mood is getting better. I love spring. I love all the seasons excepting winter. So why do I live in VT you might ask? I don’t fucking know.

Barely there

Eric Olsen — Mon, 17 Mar 2003 00:17:05 +0000

It’s a long walk home at 2am (or 3am, if I were feeling honest). And it’s Vermont, so there’s ice, and you concentrate so hard on not falling that you tend to not notice what’s happening around you as you try to get from this to that. And bullshit’s happening all over, swerving cars glaring at you through half-open eyes, cops observing you from the third floor of a parking garage, 2 white-caps stumbling home trembling with dreams of Pamela Lee … and something makes you think, and you wonder if anyone’s seeing it exactly that way, and you don’t think they do but really, you know that they do. You say you don’t really smoke but you light another cigarette. Hearts are broken as often as shitty books are published. We nudge our sorrow along like discontent tugboats.…

…and there are bright moments, sure. Times when you hear it working, when you can tell what color it is, when the random tones strike a chord … and then you try to figure out the key, and it’s a fucking crap-shoot, like shooting fish or punching blindfolded. A white rook, a black knight, a double-twelve domino you’re stuck with when the Mexican Train folds. Do you still not get it? What I’m saying is that it’s a cakewalk if you’re stupid, it’s simple if you’re lucky, it’s easy if you’re blessed … and still most of us move slowly forward under the weight of the heaviest of palimpsests, the joy that knowingly shares it’s space with sorrow.

Or let me put it this way: it’s like a B string that won’t stay in tune … it feels so good playing it– so right being heard– you don’t really care that everyone else thinks it’s wrong.