Jerry Paper
Toon Time Raw!

What is the drug that most of all makes you feel neurologically drunk? I can't tolerate nimesulide, especially Aulin. I start to hallucinate and see doors melting like in a Dalí painting. Not to mention Zitromax: after fifteen minutes, I hear voices around reverberated and muffled, a bit like little Danny when he senses the voice of dad Shining already close to an axe rampage.

These days I'm taking Augmentin, to prevent infections from dental extraction. It was my first experience with this drug and, all in all, it went well.
On the second day, some serene yawns like never when they stuffed me with Valium. On the day of the extraction (a wisdom tooth, for those interested), "Toon Time Raw!" by Jerry Paper also arrived.
A vinyl purchased almost blind: I was crazy about the cover and often you discover great masterpieces that way too. Let's be clear, this is not the case of a great masterpiece, but the story of this Paper had fascinated me. He seems like a Silicon Valley nerd who didn't guess the startup of a lifetime and now orbits a step away from the ghettos of the Californian metropolis, ready to take some exotic-sounding drug that makes your skin fall off.
In reality, I read that Jerry Paper is a scholar of religions and in that area there, recently, this thing about religious sects has been very fashionable, especially among the celebs.
There, in the L.A. Area, it works like this: one year you go with religious sects, the next with vodka and Vicodin, another year it's trendy to get badly redone lips or cheekbones. I emphasize badly: you're on trend if you strut around Beverly Hills with crooked blow-up lips.

Anyway, what I expected from Augmentin and all these drugs to sedate bacteria, in the end, came from listening to this album: a nice sonic treatise of musical nerdiness, perhaps a little studied at the table, much like Paper's image strolling down the street with an Eighties jeans jacket with white wool padding (I had the Uniform one and I still can't sleep at night).

If an eighties Uniform jacket paired with an eccentric scarf, a pair of eighties Lozza glasses on the nose, and a nice cover were enough, I would gladly bring back all the "references" read so far about this musician and his work (from Kevin Ayers to Captain Beefheart). I would've also put in the Residents who work as free-for-all dusters.

In reality, I don't feel like troubling anyone: two flanger spins on the voice don't make psychedelia. Dressing like Napoleon Dynamite's cousin doesn't make you an "outsider".

I believe this album is the sum of unsettling doses of antidepressants and pharmacological remedies for bipolar personality disorder that the young and mystical Paper will have taken upon reaching the study of self-flagellating saints like Saint Veronica Giuliani.
The result is – needless to say – alternating: sad and happy, in focus and out of focus, it just misses the track where he talks about himself in the third person.

Fact is, at some point, I got the urge to vomit and I'll never know if it was the fault of the Augmentin or this weird nightmare mumbled to the rhythm of sometimes aperitif sambetta, then sad and circus-like, and then romantic and introspective again.

"Life's a big joke," he says in Shouldn’t you be laughing? And that hint of mockery somewhat reaches me, but it's okay too.

In this Augmentinian spring, it seems like the most fitting album to listen to while I spit out the bloody gauze from my mouth.