You don’t go out to Tonic to hear laptop-loop music. You're too old to go out (or maybe everyone else is too young). Since you graduated from Cooper Union, you've been slacking at a sleazy, low-rent label that specializes in distributing reissues of '70s new-age albums. You don't have much to do, so you fart away your time on the Internet, trying to find ways to screw Amazon out of Werner Herzog DVDs. You have a girlfriend, but you can't remember when you last spoke to her, and you can't even remember if you're still together.
At home, you have a fish. One fish—a large, billowy, tropical-colored fish, left to swim around in a large tank with a floor of cobalt-blue gravel. It's the only beautiful thing you own. You call it Huelsenbeck, but you're not entirely sure why.
Your home would be shabby-chic if it were chic at all—some people buy expensive pieces of furniture to show off the books they own; some people buy expensive coffee-table books to lay out on their expensive furniture; your books are your furniture. They are your coffee table. Stacked up, perilously close to crashing to the floor if you answer the phone with too much gusto. You've got more books propping up the broken leg of the dining-room table in the dining room you don't have—where the hell would you put a dining room in a studio apartment?
You own the Firestarter soundtrack, on vinyl. You own musty, first-edition texts on behavioral psychology. You own too much, if your Marx-Engels Reader is right.
If Throbbing Gristle are right, everything you don't yet own must be available to you. Even shitty, self-released tapes of found musics (more on that later) and objects d'art, and synths, and loops, and talking/speak-singing voices that obviously don't give a shit about being preserved in the ever-temporary, always present, always saleable evolutionary black-box of time-space.
You own an iMac, but it doesn't work, because it fell off a stack of books, and the monitor shattered.
You own roughly six white T-shirts. One of them has a film-festival logo on it, and some Russian words. (You don't know what it says, but you know someone who does.) The rest of the T-shirts are regular white. Not even off-white, or bright, bleachy white. Just drab and faded, from being washed and dried too many times. Sinking into their own fibers, but not quite shrinking. You own a pair of jeans. They're not from a vintage store, and they're not from The Gap, or anywhere offensive like that. You don't think about 'em, you just wear 'em. You're vegetarian, but you're gonna quit soon.
You own the Eraserhead soundtrack, on CD.
You don't listen to music while having sex, but if you did, you'd probably figure out how to rationalize your selection as "erotic"; however, you're not a terribly erotic person. You have a book of erotic German photography, though. Erotic Japanese photography. Bondage. Fire. Aggressive-looking sex. You sleep on a mattress, on the floor. Flannel sheet, sinking-fiber white. No visible stains. You have a girlfriend; she does something with oil paint.
Scummy grout on the tiles. Beer rings on the hardwood floor. Your apartment smells like the cats of its former tenant. It's draughty. You're 28. Jeez. 28. You like the coarseness of your flannel pillowcase, and hate how the flattened pillow leaves you with a headache every time you wake up.
You refer to pieces of 20th-century classical and avant-pompous music as musics, but you laugh whenever you catch yourself doing it. You didn't used to. You don't laugh that hard, or that heartily, but you're finally finding yourself funny. You bought one of the SYR CDs when it came out, but you never listened to more than two tracks of it, and you think, in so many words, that it's "all a bunch of wank." You don't go to Thread Waxing Space anymore—is it still there?
You have a friend, an annoying and garrulous younger friend, who has recently discovered Ligeti and Gorecki, and you're too far ahead of the curve to be proud of him for coming to a conclusion you came to 5 years ago. Now you're listening to Crass and chiding yourself for not having been cool enough to get into them in college.
You don't even particularly like Throbbing Gristle that much. You don't like music. You could do without it. It's nice to have something to fall asleep to, so you don't have to hear the rats scraping through the pipes. Aural wallpaper. It's this or Whitney Houston. This or Whitney. Tough choice.
