Archive for June, 2010

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So sad, so sad, so sad.

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Francois Peglau – One Minute To Midnight Dream (So Sad)

OK, sure, I know: life sucks. I get it. It’s hard, it’s demanding – so many expectations – and you never seem to get what you want. So when you do, it’s like goddam, I got it, and it’s not that great. Hey, what’s that over there! And the money you keep crumpled in your pocket will mean nothing next week and the people look expressionless in their metropolitan hordes and fidelity is tough (so much to consider) and all the while people are shoving pamphlets in your face saying believe this! No, believe that! Wait, free muffins? I’ll believe you! And yeah, it’ll depress you and deject you and push you down, but then you hear a ditty like Peglau’s One Minute To Midnight Dream and it isn’t to your taste on first listen but then second third and fourth are kind of catchy and the banshees wailing sad, so sad, so sad, so sad! are all you think of but you don’t feel sad, you feel kind of happy and like you want to run for your life but not run away from your life for your life but run for it! RUN! I want to run for life! I want to run a marathon to support life and everything it offers and takes away and I’ll pay five crumpled dollars a mile and I’ll run ’til my thighs start fidgeting with my bones and shaking and my sphincter’s relaxing in an altogether alarming way but I’ll keep running running running ’cause I want to live goddamn it.

[Watch the video here.]

Posted on June 30, 2010 - Tunes - 11 Comments » Share

The man of a million faces

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Stephen Meritt – The Man Of A Million Faces

It feels too alike, it feels circular.
I once got a nine on Countdown: Peninsula.

The making of…

[Purchase this delicious treat for sixty-nine (and while you’re at it, get 69 Love Songs, too) of those humble English pennies.]

Posted on June 29, 2010 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

I didn’t understand.

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Elliott Smith – I Didn’t Understand

A tin-can rolls down Maine St. Skipping over stray stones, collecting dents, left to its own. The unsuspecting quail in the forest twitches unsurely. Ruffles its feathers. A click and a sweaty finger pushes, forty yards away. A shot. Out on Pyrmont Bridge the orange-clad construction workers jackhammering away in the neighborless sun trade wisecracks, marital advice, and bets. Hair growing from a newborn’s scalp pushes through the pores. Little barbs of black jagged like the remnants of a charred forest torched for industry.

[XO.]

Posted on June 28, 2010 - Tunes - 1 Comment » Share

This here unfolds for you

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Four Tet – This Unfolds

This Unfolds has missed the Lost in Translation soundtrack by seven years.

It reminds me of walking through doorway beads as a boy, through that pebble crashing curtain of clinking energy, from one room to the next; rooms filled with green glass bottles, Virgin Mary statues, an ageing dog who even a mile away would be too close to any kitchen table, trinkets of snowflake sameness (from a distance) hanging from already low ceilings, and grocery bags you just knew were brimming with goodies that would fail to reach your lips until you’ve downed something that was probably once green and something else that only tastes nice when your mother makes it. Time spent with grandparents in homes so confusingly dissimilar to your own.

It’s music so appropriate for now, glowing with future calls, yet the perfect fit for something already lived, something gone.

[Purchase the newest record from Four Tet: There Is Love There Is You.]

Posted on June 27, 2010 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

It’s a mixed up masquerade, penniless arcade.

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Swan Lake – Petersburg, Liberty Theater, 1914

“The worst artists look only to the self: people who write down their dreams and relate their drug trips and describe, as close to truth as their side allows, their painful break-ups. The second worst artist looks only at the external: didactic faux-revolutionaries, critical theory poseurs, Foucault fucks, nature writers. The best artists find the point where the self co-mingles with the external. The self and the state. You and your partner. Fathers and Sons. It’s really really hard to sit on this point and it shifts, which accounts for the varying quality of work in a person’s career–this balance is constantly in flux.”

—Carey Mercer, MBV

[“We sow the songs, the Earth bears our wrong, our pales wrongs all along!” moaned the Beast to the archangel and the pitied woman.]

May McDonough – Gone With The Snake

If you go to see Maia, remember: eldest of the seven daughters; a feminine vessel fertile in demeanor with black eyes lively by the fire. From where she sits, only women come courting but these women seek only words and a twist of the wrist, nothing else. And Maia’s left arm is adorned with pearl-white bangles that fasten at her hand. She brings this hand before her courters and speaks in aphorisms: “Romance is mostly being lied to,” she offers.

And, if you’re going with the Snake: remember that it wraps its nubile belly around the grand piano pedal before you pound on the keys.

[Don’t cry over Spilt Milk, even though you’ll want to.]

Posted on June 26, 2010 - Tunes - 4 Comments » Share

We are adventuring, we are adventurers!

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be your own PET – Adventure

In Spain, my chest, then free from the spoil of creeping hair, slowly sizzled under a mesmeric sun. That night I read Animal Farm twice as cubes of ice melted upon my chest.

In Turkey, I first experienced how persuasive emanating Mosque calls could be. How truly beautiful they could be. The mornings after I witnessed how moving, too.

In England, I travelled in the back of a van with twelve others, in heat reaching forty degrees Celsius, watching faces sweat in air free air, Irish faces flushed with heat and exhaustion, and then the emerging fresh, white teeth, weak to the trigger muscle of smile. My [extended] family on our way to a humble car boot sale. The time lived since is insulted by my inability to be as happy as then.

In Amsterdam, I left the bus from the airport. Within eighty close seconds I was almost knocked down by a car, closely avoided the first tram to have entered my life, had clashed with two bicycles carrying yellow flowers in front baskets, and experienced my first – and what remains my only – offering of drugs. The remaining time spent was not near so insultingly stereotypical.

To adventuring! And the hope of better tales to tell!

[Don’t doubt the fun. Dig in.]

Posted on June 25, 2010 - Tunes - 3 Comments » Share

Moving parts, and electric dreams.

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[Find the rest of these blossoming flowers In The Wooded Forest.]

Posted on June 24, 2010 - Videos - No Comments » Share

Toughen up, but keep hold of tenderness…

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Wreckless Eric – (I’d Go The) Whole Wide World

We had defeated the Japanese and he kissed me. I didn’t know him, this boy or man, but I was walking against a stream of people and he caught me and then he kissed me.

In my uniform of pure white.

His lips were thin and what little of them I could feel was broke; prickly leafs of skin itching the fall underneath my bottom lip, the thicker of the two. And he was cigarette air, I swear, something I didn’t much appreciate as I despised men who smoked, much like I despised the Japanese – although I had never met a Japanese man and maybe they didn’t smoke – but I must be kind, it was fresh smoke and certainly not of the stale variety. Fresh smoke I could embrace. Fresh smoke reminded me of my very own father and the stands we would sit on for home run filled baseball games. Men and me and air of new smoke and one of few times my own father would smile. Other girls would gather at the bottom of the stand and play with the dolls that our mothers had packed along with the sandwiches that were never eaten, but I sat and watched him smile. I saw Joe DiMaggio during the time of his hitting streak. Later it proved that he liked blonds, which didn’t much bother me as I never fully liked the look of that boy anyway.

When he ended, relieving his clasp on my stomach, he stood me upright and left, turned back once a few yards of distance had birthed between us and smiled for a moment, somewhat flickering, overbite and all, put his hand to his mouth and turned away again. I suppose I should have been upset that he kissed me, upset that he took me in the way he did. I wasn’t his and he most certainly was not mine, but he fought for me, didn’t he? “Thank you, darlin’,” he had whispered. What’s a kiss when he fought for me? What was his name? He did smile. He did fight.

[Rest in peace, Edith Shain, who may be one half of such an iconic image, but shines the brightest. And the sound? Buy the Greatest Stiffs and take it all in.]

Posted on June 23, 2010 - Tunes - 1 Comment » Share

I would like you for my own.

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[via switchphotography.co.uk]

She & Him – Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?

Sometimes, you just see a pretty girl. You just see a pretty girl, maybe you’re on the tram to work or waiting for your friend – your friend that’s always late – to show up for drinks or maybe you’re just sitting at the park thinking about things you think you should think about, and you say under your breath, “Goddam, she’s pretty.”

So you watch this pretty girl in her sunflower dress and her casual stroll and her folded umbrella as she’s making her way across the road or crossing her legs as she waits for the bus and you unravel the bare threads of string that make up your brain and think: Well, she’s pretty, yeah. She’s pretty and her neck is porcelain in shade and so slender and inviting and her cheeks seem to suspend her lips by the lines on the corners of her mouth and you’re hoping the wind comes whistling to rattle those swinging lips and break a smile. Yeah, you’re watching her hands and how considerate her grip is, how she holds that umbrella and twirls it absent-mindedly with the abandon of a puppy caught chasing a mouse through the bushes of an underpass overgrown with moss and lilacs.

And you think to yourself, man, what I would give to jack off on her face.

[Go buy Volume Two. The above song isn’t on it… but if you wanted Volume One, you would have it already. So you know.]

Oh, hey, yo! Yes, you! You and your strange friends! Follow us – like a cult – on Twitter or ‘like’ us on Facebook. It’s mostly just Dylan Moran and oboes, but still.

Posted on June 21, 2010 - Tunes - 6 Comments » Share

Ice water for blood.

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The Smiths – Wonderful Woman

She was twenty-three, still bonded to youth, and suspicious of those with confidence, “How can anyone like themselves in this age of mirrors?” She’d choose to coyly pose at any bar’s back entrance, to move only for the sweetest of forays, that of a conga train with a man of vein wrapped ankles. She’d ask him home and in the morning he’d clear his throat and begin with that planned speech he said he’d deliver when surely sober. Something about thanks and fun and ‘gotta run’. Her morning spent binning evidence and without friends to induce a whimper.

[Amazon have the Sound of the Smiths on sale for £4.49; so that’s less than 10p per song (45 tracks available, too, as it’s the deluxe edition) – including the song above.]

Posted on June 20, 2010 - Tunes - 3 Comments » Share

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