Live 365, the site that hosts the Evening Melancholy radio station (basically pays all royalties for a fee), provides a Shout-Out link for all listeners of the station. That link allows the listener to contact the owner of the station and give kudos, criticisms, requests, etc.

Today I received a Shout-Out from someone in Japan. The email was written entirely in Japanese. Of course, I do not read Japanese, but when someone from Japan sends the owner of an internet radio station a note AND it is entirely in Japanese, the curiosity factor goes way up. So, I took the Japanese email and used one of the Japanese to English translators on the web in an attempt to decipher what the sender of the note was trying to convey. In short, the note said the following:

A friend of 30 years worries for renal cancer very much.
But a heart is healed very much when I listen to music of here.
Thank you

Nothing I do on a day to day basis at my regular job could ever crumble and thrill me like these few words have done. Repeatedly, I am able to connect with people all over the world simply because of this wonderful thing called music. We have these quiet moments during our life when it seems like all we have are the thoughts that haunt us and the music that soothes us. During those times, everything else disappears. What an elixir music can be.

40+ hours a week I spend just “living the dream”. I need the job. I need the paycheck. But I’m not kidding myself. This is not the dream. This is the crutch I must use until, hopefully, the real dream comes along.

I had intended on writing a lengthy blog about one of my favorite music producers (of any genre), Blockhead. Unfortunately, time has gotten away from me and weeks have passed since I first set fingertip to key on this topic. So I have decided instead to include my initial scribblings on the subject and leave it at that.

Anyway, you can also listen to my all-time favorite Blockhead song, The Strain (I probably listen to it at least three or four times a week), as well as Four Walls from his latest album “The Music Scene”. I’ve also included some of the songs that either influenced or were sampled in Blockhead’s music. Seems to me that any person who can seamlessly combine Johnny Preston’s Running Bear with a comedy bit by Nichols and May deserves a respectful nod and kudos. And because of Blockhead’s “Four Walls” — which uses the now loathed vocoder/autotune, although I still really like the song — I was introduced to Eddie Holman. Holman’s concise version of Four Walls is both haunting and instrumentally divine. It does in less than three minutes what most songs never come close to doing in twice that amount of time.

There’s a scene in the Michael Mann film Heat where the following words are spoken:

You sift through the detritus. You read the terrain. You search for signs of passing, for the scent of your prey, and then you hunt them down. That’s the only thing you’re committed to. The rest is the mess you leave as you pass through.

To me, these words (enviable writing, by the way) accurately describe DJ and producer Blockhead. I first encountered Blockhead’s production chops in the fall of 2001. The album was Labor Days, the rapper, Aesop Rock. I had a four hour plane ride from Nashville to San Diego and was so enthralled with the album, both lyrically and musically, that it turned out to be the only cd I listened to during the entire flight. In fact, I spent most of my drive time in San Diego listening to Labor Days over and over and over again, seriously knocked out by what I was hearing. I have been enthralled by Blockhead’s music ever since.

Sift through the detritus, read the terrain. People like to goof on sampling. Many think of it as nothing more than petty theft. But it takes a certain brilliance, a keen ear and a steady resolve to sift through thousands of records and extract a sound that fits perfectly the vision you have in your head. Now imagine taking a collection of sounds and producing such a unique amalgamation that the initial artistic expression is mutated and rendered damn near unrecognizable as an altogether new emotion is evoked. To me, this describes precisely the unique and peerless skill of Blockhead.

This picture was taken at a rally in Texas for governor Rick Perry and the former Alaska governor and current hand scribbling “leader” of the Tea Party, Sarah Palin. Seems a little weird to me that the kid is facing one way and the sign another, but…whatever. Maybe he wrote on both sides to improve the sign’s effectiveness. “Home Scholers for Perry” on one side and the old Locke quote, “Resistance to Trannies is obediance to God” on the other.

At first, I tried to convince myself that this sign should actually be read as “Home Scholars for Perry”. But Scholar is spelled with an A and not an E, so that doesn’t work in dispelling the incredible urge to call this kid’s mom a dunderhead. Sure, the kid is holding up the sign, but the lady next to him either wrote it or assured the young lad that it was spelled correctly. Either way, she should be clubbed about the face, neck and shoulders with a large ball peen hammer. You’re not helping your cause — whatever that cause may be.

Maybe the sign is supposed to be read as “Homes Cholers for Perry”. The dictionary defines choler as “an irritable petulant feeling”. Perhaps there is an inordinately large group of far right conservatives who hold an ungodly amount of animosity towards their homes. How Rick Perry got them all to gather in one location and hold up crudely written signs is beyond me.

Wait a minute. Governor Rick was pissed at the amount of power the US federal government was wielding and supported the idea of state sovereignty, right? So, in truth, he held an irritable petulant feeling towards the US — his home. By Jove…it all makes sense now! That kid’s mother isn’t an illiterate numskull after all. Turns out she’s brilliant!

Or not.

I had a wisdom tooth pulled a few days ago. It was impacted, slightly jutting out at the back of my mouth. My dentist has been bugging me about it for years.
“You should really get that extracted.” “Yeah? Or what?” “Or your head will rot off.”

Let it rot, I thought. I didn’t want anyone cutting stuff out of the back of my mouth. Pain and blood and me screaming like a white woman in church. It’s been sitting back there for years, bothering no one, especially me. It actually made me feel kind of special. Most people brag about how they had four wisdom teeth. I had six! How brainy does that make me? Suck on that, Stephen Hawking! One tooth chose to stay embedded deep within the recesses of my apparently gargantuan pie-hole. The other decided to peek out at the world and cause my dentist to become hideously apoplectic.

I haven’t always seen this same dentist. For years I saw one guy. He took care of me since I still had my baby teeth. But years ago, he decided to retire and pass his business on to some holy rolling, man-hating busybody. She liked to prod around my mouth while talking about her divorce and asking me if I was in fact seeing anyone. Are you kidding? The proverbial back breaking straw came when she asked what church I attended. Like a dumbass, I said, “I…don’t go to church”. At that moment, I swear her eyes went red and I could feel my bowels shift. I spent the rest of the visit watching smoke billow from my mouth like a small brush fire, wondering if I was going to walk out of that place looking like Jaws from Moonraker. After that, I had to go to the ATM to get money for my bill because as she stated when I pulled out my Visa, “Now you know we don’t got no credit card machine.” No, I….didn’t know that. I’m sorry. I wasn’t aware that my bill would have to be paid off in wampum. I thought this was the 21st century where dentist offices took plastic and educated doctors didn’t speak in double negatives. My bad. I hope your ex-husband, wherever he is, is still running.

Anyway, I mentioned the previous dentists because they always saw the extra wisdom tooth peering out but never mentioned the fact that, in time, my head could in fact rot off. So, either my new dentist is full of shit or my old dentists were too busy thinking about nursing homes and restraining orders to care. Who knows?.

All I know is I have a hole in the back of my mouth that has become an annoying food trap. It’s disgusting. The other night I was able to scoop out some beef with my tongue. Only, I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten beef. It’s all very disconcerting. And it still hurts.

I’m sure my head would have indeed rotted off in twenty or so years, but damn, I miss that little hunk of tooth. Feels like a little piece of me is missing. It also feels like I don’t got no more wisdom. Maybe I should go into dentistry.

you have to admit, this is pretty damn funny.