Daft Punk is playing at my house

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….. you know, 2013 has been a pretty freaking good year so far. We got a new apartment, i’m flush with quality commissions, April and May have been unusually cool, and Muna and Dahir haven’t jumped ship yet…

…and on top of all that, motherfucking DAFT PUNK is back!

I was cautiously optimistic about their new album, and it exceeds expectations. It’s fabulous. And unexpected. Daft Punk is thought of as the repetitive sampler guys, right? For this one, they spent four years working with loads of old-school session musicians and producers… sure, the vocals are still robotic (done by analogue vocoder, not Autotune, thank you very much,) but the music is warm and alive and barely classifiable as “electronic dance.” I mean, the album’s epic center track features an old vocalist with a wounded, syrupy voice like that of Clarence the Angel emoting against a backdrop of angelic choruses and… a jazzy horn interlude? Not repetitive. Not “dance.” Just pure freaking awesomeness.

Oh, Daft Punk, i knew you had it in you.

Like a lot of people who went to college and started smoking weed with an electronic music-loving friend in 1997, i spent more than one night sprawled on a stained couch at 2:00 AM and being mesmerized by the video for Around the World and thinking, goddamn, the world sure has changed since grunge. Scientists were right, the future is more futuristic than they originally predicted.

Then came their second album, Discovery, which is still one of the best things ever. An eternal beloved classic that i’ll never not love…

…and then, in 2005, when my own life was already pretty bleak and dismal, they lazily crapped out Human After All, a monotonous slab of idiotic garbage that remains one of the worst albums ever. I listened to it for the first time in years last week, just to see if the people who say it “grows with time” and “is an artistic statement” know what they’re babbling about. They don’t. It’s as abysmal as ever.

And then Daft Punk kinda wandered away, did a bunch of tours in Europe, made a live album which was okay, and crafted the soundtrack to Tron Legacy, which is, to be fair, one of the greatest science fiction films of all time starring Garrett Hedlund. All in all, by 2013, it had been a decade since Daft Punk did anything i really cared about…

…but then there’s this one. Random Access Memories. Cheesy title. Great album.

^__^

Crap, this day is weird. I’m going in 8 hours early to work my first overtime shift in months. Doubles suck, but if i gotta do one, i much prefer working 4:00 PM to 8:00 AM, as opposed to midnight to 4:00 PM. But who am i working with, Gomez or Cherry?

Let’s leave the apatment and find out.

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….Gomez.

Now i have a headache. It’s funny, we’ve both been there forever and yet we’ve never worked the same shift together. It’s just as awful as i thought it would be… the braying laughter. The endless attempts at jokes, the diatribes against Apple Computers and Lady Gaga, the effusive speeches about American Idol and other shows of that sort, the nonsensical theories…

…he has abundant energy which is more than i can say for some people there. I’ve just never seen him put a single atom of it towards any sort of work. Even filling out a single form seems to be an insurmountable task for him; every bit of his consciousness is dedicated to nothing but ultraloquacious verbosity. He tries, every second of every day, to be some kind of life-of-the-party-animal, the hilarious mascot guy emceeing life for anyone caught within his radius.

And no one can stand it. It’s peak annoyance. It’s like, how much more irritating could he be? The answer is none. None more irritating.

And believe me, it’s not just me who thinks this.

We don’t wish ill on the guy. We just wish he could go back to his home gas planet. Or happen upon a field that is filled with others of his kind, like the Bee Girl from the Blind Melon video.

>__<

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Heeeey.

Another nice surprise.

John posted a new little writing this week, called An Intimate Terror. It’s brief, but it’s the first thing he’s written in ages that wasn’t a collaboration or somehow initiated by me. And that’s heartening.

Collaborations? Why, yes, we started emailing one another back and forth, and ended up with this abomination — Dear Advicerella.

And if those are too tame for you, and you want a glimpse into the full depths of our diseased creative process, look no further than Dreams of the Curator.

I swear, if i ever lose the ability to be intensely entertained by just language and my own imagination, i’ll kill myself.