hotel existence

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 Read More...

building steam

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

eggplant

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. Read More...

you'll laugh, but

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. Read More...

scientific infidelity is not that bad

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. Read More...

problems?

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. Read More...

plum ice cream

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).

Read More...