not saying goodnite

hotel existence

2011-01-22T02:30:00.002-05:00

Drove us all the way through highways and perfect glittering lights of a place that wasn't mine and realized I wanted to climb up every apartment building with my fingernails and open every window and crawl in every bed to feel comfortable, knowing that I never would and never will in a city that isn't mine and can't ever be

building steam

2010-11-03T23:26:00.004-04:00

The things
That I don't feel like talking about
Are just the things
That perpetuate themselves
In the talking

eggplant

2009-12-30T19:15:00.007-05:00

This time, it was in the city. We had our badman clothes and our guns pointed up and out. We made it to the big metal trailer where everyone was - the klieg lights came on and everybody was running around, and John pointed his gun at the man's head or maybe at mine. I don't remember. Then the kids mobbed John because they don't have their own guns, and John came back when it was light with a face full of cigarette burns and no bullets left (but he only had one anyway, and we all know who he used it on). We got worried because our guns were empty, so we walked around a little until we found the police. We walked straight by them - they didn't say anything or look. We each picked up a long half-cylinder filled with fresh-hewn granite bullets, rough and glittering. I had to make sure the police didn't see what we'd taken, so I made sure everyone turned the bullets to face their bellies. We went through the rest of the city like this: marching back with wary eyes and belly-shields. Your mom told stories to comfort us on the way, and we all laughed, but at the last crosswalk the cars were too fast and we lost her on the other side. We went on; it was dark by then, so we put our spoils down in the side yard of a house and decided to crawl across the tops of the hedges. Someone played a song, or sang, but I'd never heard the song before. I stopped near the end of the hedges and went back to check on our bullets. Of course, they were eggplants now. I marveled at this simple fact of nature just as the sun rose and turned the houses green and gold.

you'll laugh, but

2009-11-30T14:02:00.003-05:00

Rattle-brained, faculties drained (or perhaps reduced to their bitter, essential elements), focused very intently on the thousand-yard mark: the leaves looked like the scales of a revenant Leviathan - dragged back with a tiny fishhook for a few panicked, groaning seconds before both atmospheric pressure and tremendous disbelief took hold and it burst with a sound unlike those of this world into a falsely ruinous shower of deciduous entrails and crackled ochre skin.

One wonders if we are ever to become pneuma, if we are to be privy to some secret knowledge, a word perhaps. Or if there is any secret knowledge at all.

scientific infidelity is not that bad

2009-08-05T14:37:00.001-04:00

I had a dream that my girlfriend had slept with Richard Feynman.

In the dream, I said that I would've been angry, "but he has a great sense of humor".

I'm not sure what this says about either of us.

i know i am

2009-07-31T15:25:00.001-04:00

“The music I’m making is not terribly easy to apprehend,” [Longstreth] said. “The people I really admire, like William Blake and John Coltrane and Richard Wagner, had these ridiculously full universes that took their entire lives to describe. So from one album to the next it’s been hard for people to see the way they’re all related, but the whole thing makes sense to me.” (via the Times)

Sometimes I wonder if anyone else is having a hard time trying to enjoy Dirty Projectors.

----

I'm enjoying the weather as of late (eighty degrees and relatively clear at noon? in a place where the state bird is humidity? what's going on?) but it still seems a farce to me. I'm waiting with bated breath for the days when cigarette smoke melts and falls instead of wafting and the heat is so oppressive that you feel like you can't get the front door open because it's being blocked by the sun.

Threw together another mix (an actual one this time, not a jumbled folder of mp3s); tracklist and link after the jump.

crude representation

(decided to try Megaupload instead of Rapidshare. download rates seem to be better)

Tracklist:

Pumice - Eyebath
Karl Blau - Alone Baby
Mobius Band - True Love Will Find You In The End
Neko Case - Knock Loud
Suckers - It Gets Your Body Movin
Warpaint - Beetles
Hologram - Blazey Storm
Best Coast - Sun Was High (So Was I)

The Mobius Band cover is particularly good - they did an EP of them for Valentine's Day a while ago.

Also worthy of a shoutout: Major Lazer's new mix, via Gorilla vs. Bear (again). It's not dickriding, it's just recognition of a superior music source.

A little dickriding. A little.

100 / a hundred

2009-07-22T16:24:00.000-04:00

(via some required and this)

------

Toro y Moi has been every where as of late, and for good reason. It's the nostalgia-smeared summer grime of Wavves, but if Wavves was fronted by Kurt Vile and he decided to get into some beats once in a while.

Toro y Moi - Blessa (via GvB)

Also, if you haven't been up on dem hunger all summer, then what have you been up on?

problems?

2009-07-14T14:08:00.000-04:00

From a top 10 records of 2008 list I meant to finish but realized this record wasn't from 2008 so I stopped but I liked this one so I kept it.

Paavoharju - Yha hamaraa

"I can't say enough about this record. It's like finding something, like a picture or old film after a huge snowstorm next to a factory that used to make other, smaller factories, except it was deemed useless and shut down and now it's a place for huge snowstorms to happen. Also it's right next to the Baltic Sea, so everything's that special sort of Northern-European frozen that makes you think of national loneliness. Anyway, you take whatever you find back to your bright white apartment and for the next week, strange but not unimaginable things happen, and for the rest of your life, you're never sure if those things happened because weird things happen all the time, or because of what you found in the snow that day. It's spooky, infectious, welcoming, and terrifying."

I'm not sure either.

Also, I think I might like gin and tonics a little too much. It's not my fault that I used to drink tonic water and lime juice during the summers before, and gin just introduces a freshly-sliced-greenwood flavor that just tops the whole thing off marvelously. It's pretty much the perfect drink for hot night time-wasting.

plum ice cream

2009-07-09T13:26:00.000-04:00

That phrase popped into my head a couple nights ago, and I figured I should do something. I've never had this particular flavor, but I'm relatively certain as to the qualities of its taste - greenly, juicily sweet, and tempered with cream.

These songs try to evoke both the brightness of flavor and comfort that plum ice cream should have. Tracklist after the jump:

plum ice cream

Kurt Vile - Breathin Out
Dara Puspita - To Love Somebody
Little Joy - Unattainable
Paz Lenchantin - 365
Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions - Sparkly
Juana Molina - El Desconfiado
Wanda Sa - Vivo Sonhando
Azure Ray - For No One
Yoko Kanno - Egg
Ai Aso - A Lo N
Mark McGuire - Blue Basket
Ariane Moffat - Terminus
Lunar Testing Lab - Topaze Bay

Lunar Testing Lab comes highly recommended - Dan at OngakuBaka describes it as "another release to add to my "listen to this shit next time you're at the beach" playlist". It's not the fantasy beach that's always in the mind of the vacationer on the way to the coast, it's the real beach that remains in the memory once you've left. Dreamy wistfulness that doesn't stray far into the realm of imagination - which is what the rest of these songs are as well.

I've also been listening to Dara Puspita's cover of the Beegees' "To Love Somebody" a lot lately. I found them at Sunflower Chakra Milk back in December of last year, and now that the haze has risen from the ground and the temperature has gone up too high, their garage-fuzz tone and earnest, Brenda Lee-like vocals fit the weather a bit better than they did in winter. Regardless, they're excellent garage rock (and apparently the only Indonesian pop band in the '60s to actually play their own music).

old notebook

2009-05-15T15:08:00.000-04:00

8/12/06

"I had a dream that a young woman was to be reunited with her son. She knew who he was, but he didn't know her. She was afraid to tell him. It wasn't the right time, so she watched him, drank him in. Tried to live a life already past. It made her happy to know that he was good, and a little secretive/excited because he was oblivious to her presence. It never occured to her that he might deny her. She only had this complacency, this contentedness. Those few moments will never come again."

I remember that she was watching him in a park, talking with his friends. I still wonder if I was the woman in the dream, or I was watching the watcher.

I've also been unstuck, physically, lately. It's gotten advanced enough that I can tell when my mind is going to skip to a place - I can anticipate it now, and I can figure out where I'm going before I get there. It's not always someplace I've been to before.

unfamiliar place

2008-09-02T22:40:00.000-04:00

Since I was a child, certain things have awakened certain memories in me. One particularly strange one is the feeling of hot water on my face - for some reason, it brings to mind images of the houses I've lived in, of nondescript nights that I really have no reason to remember. These memories are always quite vivid, often including odd details that strike me as highly quotidian and insignificant - a TV show that's no longer running, the color of the tile in my dead grandparents' bathroom, and so on. Now, those occurances, by themselves, aren't that weird. What really unsettles me is when something causes a memory to rise and I realize that the memory never happened.

I remember playing with a little train-shaped keychain my grandfather had. It made train noises when you pressed a button on it - whistling, chugging, whatever other sounds trains make. I also remember that it evoked an black-and-white image of a train coming out of a tunnel. After this, the memory's "camera", so to speak, would move onto to a little townhouse next to the train where the lighting was vaguely pre-electric and dim and the wallpaper was a faded calico pattern. Needless to say, I have no recollection of ever seeing this image outside of my mind.

There are a lot of other occurances like this one, but I think that's the first I remember happening. I've never heard anyone else mention it happening to them, but it doesn't really cause me harm or cross my synapses or anything, so I'm prepared to let it slide by as weird quirk of the brain.

And no, I didn't read "Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge" until a couple years ago, so there's that.

Anyway, you know who I miss? Cibo Matto. Fuck. I was going over why they were so good in my mind earlier, and I couldn't come to any conclusions. Anybody who's got their shit together musically does the sort of fusion that they did back in the day, and there's no shortage of weird Japanese bands out there now. I think, though, that no one has replicated the strangely ominous edge those two had in their songs. Viva La Woman's lyrics were all about food, but some of the songs were fucking scary. It was like you were being taken on a trip you reluctantly decided to go on, and the stuff that you're seeing now is so vibrant and jumbled that you can't completely process everything and your sense of reality begins to blur.

"the grand tragedy of a seven-year-old brother" / mountain tan commercials

2008-08-22T19:04:00.000-04:00

Found today, in a notebook:

-"for three days, I had a son"

-"poor husband and wife living with husband's parents (rich)"

-"just had baby (son) who looks like Q-bert (?)"

-"son dies (weak), wife dies (complications)"

-"like the grand tragedy of a seven-year-old brother"

From what I can gather, I wrote this after I had a dream about having a Q-bert son and him dying three days after he was born. I seem to remember slow-motion sequences of googly eyes looking up at me set to Sufjan Stevens' "Flint (For The Unemployed and Underpaid)". Just after my son died, my wife died of "complications" (perhaps some video game-related post-partum depression), and I was left to wander around what, apparently, was my parents' mansion. The whole thing struck me as incredibly fucking sad and the feeling stayed with me the whole day. I mean, come on. Look at him.

Now that I take a good look back, I'm not exactly sure what my subconscious mind was trying to tell me. Either "cherish your entire family, all the time, forever" or "cherish Sufjan Stevens, all the time, forever". Both seem like legitimate courses of action.

---

Meanwhile, this Brit kid named Arch M has been producing little gems of slightly fuzzy, brilliant-noon-sun pop. Sounds like if El Guincho was white and a little sadder and noisier, but just a touch. Pick up his latest cassette EP here for free. His Myspace-exclusive song, "21st Union", is one of those quick little things that make you nostalgic for something you know you never had and never will have.