on waking up to barren trees

so it’s been feeling a bit
out here in the woods
like some kind of pact
was enacted in secret
against me for reasons
i was never informed

not so much a conspiracy
really more like a carelessness
in common everyone forgot
to tell me they didn’t care
anymore because they didn’t

but what if it was a mistake
and suddenly it’s all
oh shit!  you’re that guy!
where have you been hiding?
here’s your money let’s go
get coffee and find arts let’s go
to shows and eat brunch and
fuck and be friends these times
are cyclical you survived
it you’re back!
welcome back!

well anyways
i’ll make my arts
and hug them tight
when it gets cold again
out here in the woods
i tell them everything
my arts my little lies
my little friends.

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gold dust

Forgive the embed with advertisements, DJ Fresh definitely employs a gaggle of gremlins ready to flag my account if I rip this.  Still, it is the rare studio video that’s worth it.  That hook.  Them ropes.  Mm, gold dust.

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asap

Doing yoga to Headphone Activist this morning became a sort of melancholic dance.  Rain against the windows.  Wild.

It’s trap, yes.  But it’s also a requiem.

 

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magic spells

Crystal Castles were a surprisingly satisfying find, at a time when I knew there was something I liked about chiptunes, but was disappointed by the standard fare I’d found in digging.  In hindsight, that’s because they weren’t really an 8-bit band at all.  Despite their use of gameboy sound-effects, despite her voice being modulated to a point of synthetic in-humanity, Alice Glass punk-rocked out like an 8-bit boss.  Her live performances were the spitting, smashing stuff of legend.  Unlike their contemporaries, Crystal Castles weren’t defined by their choice of nerd genre.  They were really something else.

“Don’t worry, dear Pamela, 
I’ll do my scientific best 
to command your fleet.”

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the fields are breathing (tobbaco’s wispy version)

Black Moth Super Rainbow.  It’s either the very best or the very worst band name that ever was–it’s been seven years now and I’m still not sure.  In the end I always forget to care.  Tobbaco’s weird little band and its oddly melodic songs are so beautiful he gets a pass.  Call it whatever you want.  Or just skip words altogether.  More and more I’m finding that’s the way.

“La la la la la…”

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alternating sips

i will be cold
as a village housewife
who knows winter
who knows what to do
when her bitch has babies
i will stuff my memories
of us in a sack and drown
them like too many mouths
to feed i will drown them
myself in pussy and alcohol
alternating sips
i will be cold
cold as winter
cold as a village housewife.

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pepsi/coke suicide

holo pleasures is a tiny little album of surprisingly large internal proportions. Each song clocks in at around two minutes, for a grand total of 12 minutes of magic. It’s so simple it sneaks up on you, and suddenly it’s hugging you from behind.

It is quiet and succinct and the opposite of flash.

It is elvis depressedly.

It is excellent.

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even gentlemen have a heart

what makes that thing swing
to and fro up there?
_____the wind, that’s all
but what is it, hanging there?
an officer, a gentleman,
a doctor, a lawyer,
a professor, an engineer?
and why did he do it?
_____it’s our fault, all our fault
we humbled him
belittled him
we…
_____MADE HIM UNDERSTAND
that he was just a man
like us
like them
like you
like me!
but how’d ya do it, mister? hey mister!
how’d ya get up on
that flagpole there?
with a ladder?
through ambition?
or was it a bank loan
that got you there?
no, you’re wrong
_____it was love
even gentlemen have a heart.

lyrics from Poem Strip,

a graphic novel by Dino Buzzati

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my people are full of light

when at last it starts to break
you my people the cracks
make it easy to find you
my people my broken things
i think you are not my people
because you are broken i think
you are broken because you are
my people because you saw
what a life could be because
people are always failing
you my people the breaking
makes it easy to find you
fading finally as the night
takes you in its smooth arms
leaving only the colors
in your widening pattern of cracks.

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the rules of attraction

The Rules of Attraction.  Good sweet god damn, this movie.  I watch it every once in a while, whenever I remember it exists, and it never fails to leave a knot of pure emotive appreciation in my throat.  Originally a novella by Brett Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, this film adaptation does what so many adaptations fail to do: it improves the original in ways specific to its new medium.  What a concept!

The cinematography and directing are incredible, the actors pitch-perfectly cast (James Vanderbeek, of Dawson’s Creek fame, is darkly incredible, no joke, and Shannyn Sossamon makes me want to fall in love again, immediately, without wasting any more time), the philosophical themes of the book are unrolled and explored, and the music…  Oh my, the music.  Ellis wrote a haunting horror story, one of modern humanity’s aimless disaffection; a grim march of helpless, deterministic self-destruction — themes which Avery addresses immediately, physically, and all at once in the opening moments of the movie.  Mm.

I’m gushing, and I know it, but I can’t help myself.  There’s just so much good to say about this work.  I’m a real bastard about movies, about Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer and the sloppy shit they and their ilk slap together to pander to the slack-jawed, mouth-breathing, lowest common denominator of humanity.  They don’t make films; they make money.  What makes me such a bitter asshole about it, is that their monstrosities marginalize those with real capacity.  Film can be powerful, and emotional, and illuminating, and sad.  It can be art.  It can be this.

“I always knew it would be this way…”

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a capital letter and a period

when you first summed up
all your past relationships
in single sentences
i cocked an eyebrow
that better never be me
i said don’t you dare
do that to me i am more
complex i said we are more
complicated than a single
sentence and a period
but of course you did
and of course i am
and i know it’s because
of the great bad thing
in your long ago i know
it’s survival summing up
to box away and put behind
the only way you can face
the present by boxing away
the past neatly in a sentence
a capital letter and a period
then putting it behind you
and i cocked an eyebrow
and i said that better never
be me but of course you have
a new guy and i’m boxed
away to forget and i wonder
if he cocks a brow at that
and i wonder what it was
you told people i wonder
what my sentence was
and i wonder if it’s different
when i slip off my period
escape my box in your bed
late at night when i wonder
if you know it’s a fiction.

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burning

So there was this bar in Taipei called Roxy Rocker, and downstairs at this bar they had a little glass room full of vinyls you could pull out and spin, and then a big lounge with the bar itself and a DJ in a booth who took written requests.  Sometimes they played them, sometimes they didn’t.  It was great.

One of the DJs there was a beautiful, Nirvana-plaid-wearing Taiwanese girl, with big headphones and a perpetually sleepy look.  After all the bland, “我愛你,” chest beating, big hair blowing, music-video-ready nothing that passed for popular music in Taiwan, finding a local who knew that good shit I was getting out of Brooklyn at the time was a trip.  She played Animal Collective one night, long before Merriweather Post Pavilion blew them up, and I fell instantly, madly in love.

It was through her I found this track.  That sexy bass line drew me dancing to her booth, where it was deafeningly loud, so I asked her what the song was via hand motions and scrap paper. Later, when I stumbled back up there wasted to give her my number, I didn’t have the Chinese, the time, or the native capacity to explain all that I was trying to hand to her.  I couldn’t take the top off my head and show her the radiating prism of light that was my secret world.  She never called, because obviously, but it hurt all the same.

There’s so much that could have been, so many universes, so many futures, dreamed up in instants then torn apart and scattered to the winds.  So many reasons we don’t connect, so many reasons things don’t happen.  You can’t take it personally.  You cannot take it personally.  Do not take your rejections personally.  I know it hurts, but, stop, just — stop.  Fuck.  Let’s dance like wild things.

“Caught in a motion that I don’t want to stop…”

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at my window

I hate, genuinely hate, the polished swaying plastic bullshit that is pop country.  Toby Keith et. al, evoke a visceral reaction in me, and that reaction is puke.  That being said, I don’t hate “country music”– That would be silly.  Any artistic medium can be done right, and if you dig diligently, there’s always someone to love.  For “country music,” for me, that’s Townes Van Zandt.

“[He]’s the best songwriter in the world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.”
-Steve Earle

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goodnight irene

Speaking of Leadbelly, here is one of the weirdest, most awesomely awkward live recordings I’ve ever seen. The crowd, the way they hold their drinks, the fact that he only sings the chorus and hums, the stare he levels at his wife, and the end where he grips her face and the white guy behind him grabs (slaps?) his head. Man, what the fuck?

The story is that two white guys, the Lomax brothers, found Leadbelly in a prison somewhere, doing time for stabbing a white man, in the south, in the 20s.  He was playing this song, and they dropped everything they were doing to race back with equipment.  He was recorded there in that prison, by these two white fellows, and the rest is history.  Decades later, Kurt Cobain is covering “where did you sleep last night,” and Van Morrison is traveling around the world with the guy’s picture, singing obscure lyrics about “hugo ledbetter.”  Great musician.  Great song.  Weird, weird, fucking video.

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sweet love for planet earth

I like to imagine Leadbelly’s ghost, drifting down from music heaven to check out an old favorite venue, and finding himself at a Fuck Buttons show.  He sees these two hipsters standing across from each other, swaying rhythmically as they twist knobs on plastic boxes and sing into voice modulators.  The look on his face is fantastic.  It tickles me to think that someday, in our collective dotage, we’ll all find the world just as incomprehensible.

“It doesn’t work!” I yell at the phone.

“Just tug the clicker-skunk, grandpa, god.”

“I AM tugging the skunk,” I scream.

“Well, did you twist the tail?”

“AHHH!  It’s spraying everywhere!” I cry.

“And?  Did the channel change?”

“Oh…” I sob, hugging the squirming, spraying animal tight to my chest, “Yes, it changed…”

“What will become of us, will we evolve?”

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break the chain // sweet chris

They’ve got a good sound, these guys, sculpted and restrained; for some reason it’s making me kind of emotional.  That must be a good sign.  So enough with Fleetwood Mac and their advice, I’m with Ultimate Painting: break the chain, even if it hurts like hell.  See what happens.  Sometimes you’ve just gotta.

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