about Linkin v Dillinger

In my freshman year, I went to a guy's dorm to play guitars. I was pretty good. I played Slayer and Ozzy. A few years later he asked if I wanted to start a band. He wanted to sound like Linkin Park, but I was into The Dillinger Escape Plan by then.

He had never heard Dillinger, so I played "Calculating Infinity" on my car stereo for him. He didn't like it: "Who wants to listen to this?"

I asked the same question about Linkin Park: trend-chasing commercial music for idiots, I thought.

Since then, I shed some snobbery and learned to see his side of it. It's fine if you care whether people like your music. Like, when I listen to music, I usually decide within two minutes minutes, asking, "Where is the bite? What's in this for me?"

But on the merits of sounding like Linkin Park versus The Dillinger Escape Plan: Dillinger was an admirable success for over 15 years. Its audience was loyal, and the band's influence continues. Linkin Park changed nothing and shed fans rapidly after a few years. The lead singer killed himself in 2017.

Note:
- Success in the music industry is the Holy Grail, anyway.
- Funny, all the little details of these two moments.

(posts) a poem

"Tinnitus"
    —Robert Wrigley

The loneliness of a rank of six public
pay phones moves me today almost to tears,
and I wonder, dropping in my quarters,
if you will allow this odd nostalgic

impulse toward anachronism
to go through. That is, if you will answer
this morning’s call from an unknown number,
or let it, by the cold mechanism

of that which is called caller ID,
be rerouted to what is known as voice mail.
And then, on hearing your unreal voice, if I will,
nevertheless, tell you that it’s me.

But no, I hang up, and from the pay phone
on the far right I call the one one slot left,
and from the third, call the next one left,
and from the fifth, call the sixth and final phone,

creating as I do a carillon
of overlapping, almost identical rings,
disturbing the many students studying
in this building, where no one’s home.

As I leave, I dial you on my cell phone,
and you answer, asking if I’ve just called,
saying the number was strange, that you’d called
back but heard only a busy-signal’s drone.

Ah, love, let us be true to one another
in almost every way, I also do not say.
I’m at the door now, this cold and snowy day,
thinking of the old high ways one lover

once spoke to another, over wires,
when a call could be a complete surprise.
Still you ask, what is that strange bell noise?
And I answer, just the ringing in my ears.