A Tribute to Portishead

*About nine months ago, I de-activated my Facebook account. Today, I deleted it permanently. Here is the one worthwhile thing I posted in six years of Facebook activity.*

An Obsessionposted on Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 5:14pm
Wow, I have a migraine right now. Some people know I once had a migraine for nine months straight. That was four years ago, and I only have them sometimes now. But tonight I have a migraine. And I am at work. But my head hurts so bad, I can't really get anything done. So instead I am writing a Facebook note. Anyway:
When I was in high school in the 60s I thought Natalie Portman was like the coolest person ever. One time I read this Star Wars Insider interview with her where she said her favorite band was Portishead. Wanting to immediately be as cool as she, I made it my mission to find all I could about this "Portishead" and get all their music. I immediately hit the Internet, the awesome late 90s Napsterless, ITunesless version, and went on an all night sojourn in which I downloaded an entire song of theirs from AudioGalaxy or some other MP3 site. In the time it took to download another one, I listened to the first one, "Sour Times", like 2,000,000 times. This was the amount of time required to find and download one 4 MB Mp3 in 1999. Anyway, the start of an obsession was born. From this moment I entered a new world, just me, my car, and my bootlegged Portishead cassettes. It is weird saying cassettes considering no one even listens to CDs anymore, but anyway.
I would spend all of my Wal-Mart work dinner breaks sitting in my car staring through the rain at the moon or some random streetlight and listening to Beth Gibbons haunting voice over Portishead's weird mélange of mashed up ghosts and empty spider webbed dancehalls and whatever other thing is spooky and cool and old but uninhabited except for ghosts and my ears.
Anyway, after 11 years of silence, nine years since they shook me all night long, Portishead is back with a new album. So go buy it and listen to it and get transported to a place called awesome while I think of my new copy (thanks, Crystal!) sitting in my car CD player (finally moving up technology-wise, though I wish I had the vinyl, too) while I sit here at my desk with a blinding migraine and the deafening noises of the helpless public.
Portishead, almost a decade later, are still magicians. Natalie Portman is an okay actress, I guess, though I must say, thanks Natalie and Star Wars Insider Issue 45 for sending me on this wonderful journey.