Been flu-ish the last couple of weeks. Every time I seem to be recovering I go right ahead and lose my voice by the end of the working day and I'm coughing phlegm in the morning again. Anyway, despite it all, I've managed to pull all loose ends together at work. Quite proud of myself in fact. Been meaning to get started on the cog, but I don't know, there never seems to be a right time to apply the first mark. Obviously, the more I put it off, the harder it's gonna be to actually get started, but let's not go in that direction right now. Bought Cunningham's Flesh and Blood but it's on the bench for a while now... every chapter is like a Greek tragedy, this crazy Sense of Foreboding in every little action... it's just too much right now. Benched. Meanwhile, I seem to have gone back to the masters. There's really nothing good happening right now it seems. Was chatting with a friend over coffee yesterday and he said, pointe blank, that there's been no great album since the Cardigan's Gran Tarismo. That's 1998, fellas. Is he right? We went to HMV, spent like an hour on the second floor and pre-Cardigans, you'd have to go all the way back to the 1970s for something that kills. Bob Dylan, I think, sounds better as he's aged, but christ, where is our generation's Jimi Hendrix, The Who, The Smiths, The Doors, Led Zep, The Beatles, Elvis, the whole Motown bunch? I think the best album released this year is Silverchair's Young Modern. Rolling Stone gave Kanye West and M.I.A. 4 1/2 stars for their latest releases, but I've never been one for rap and hip-hop. I don't know. The last time I dug that genre was Eminem's Lose Yourself and The Streets' Original Pirate Material. Talk about going way back. I spent the morning listening to (and following the translation) to Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro (Salzberg 2006) and wondering why I act all best-friend-ish with somebody who's not only not the brightest bulb in the room by a mile but pretty near completely fused since 1999 and takes it out on me in wicked smiling double crosses, and wondering if I myself who have flatlined intellectually and am in a really sad state of delusion. I like the Abstract Expressionists again and I don't care why, and I don't care if Greenberg wants to give me answers, I am reading Kerouac's On the Road. That must count for something.