I Liked You Better

I saw Trainspotting for the first time yesterday, right after Fellini's Amarcord. The response people have always given me when I would say that I hadn't seen the film adaptation of the Irvine Welsh novel is incredulity- how could I not have seen it?

I just hadn't. And it's a good thing. When it came out I probably wouldn't have been able to get past the obfuscating themes of the film- heroin, general tomfoolery- to see to the meaningful themes- leaving people behind, standing on your own.

But, really, I would have liked Renton a whole lot better if he had left off that "I choose life" platitude at the end of the film. Yer gonna end it that way, stay a junkie, mate.

shamefully self-serving commercial display

I'm selling this on ebay.

Вперёд в Сиски! -- I Loves Me Some Titties Redux

Via Audiomastermind:

Free vst : Extreme effects for extreme musicians:



Perky ! : "Make your drums percolate…"

Red-Handed -- Einstein "On the (Nude) Beach"

Via Stereogum: The Right Brothers - "Bush Was Right"

The Right Brothers - "Bush Was Right"

I can't bring myself to listen.

Business as usual.

When the mouse is away, the cat will obsess on the mouse's absence until it returns. The cat will be BUSINESS AS USUAL.

When the cat is away, the mouse will recreate the terror and authority it lived with when the cat was lurking just outside.

What Have I Been Thinking?

I will leave it to intrepid souls to interpret and execute the amazing baked cheese dip described in the previous entry with so very few meaningful pointers. Suffice to say that this shit is good when baked within a bowl hollowed from a loaf of Hawaiian bread.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and I need to think thankfully.

Thanks: this year is almost over. There are a JET AA Bonenkai and Shinenkai on the schedule in the near future- will be attending those.

Thanks: Man, what a year!

Still, as Jeff Tweedy would say, "short on long-term plans", but making some kind of progress. Nearing 30. Very strange, but that is not to be mistaken for unique. Must remember that.

Been listening to the new Wilco live album:

"Kicking Television: Live in Chicago" (Wilco)

I am short on words, but this will be described in detail.

cheese dip

16 oz container sour cream - 2 cups
1 whole bar of cream cheese- (2? you must judge the thickness)
1/2 cup salsa (use more)
mix all together, add in 2-3 cups shredded cheese (more is good)

bake 375 for 90 min
if in casserole, only 30 min

Recently drinking has been a heart-on-sleeve downer self-loathing trip. Need to reorganize.

Lethe Water

I've been very slowly progressing through Pynchon's Mason & Dixon since early summer. It's really the same way I got through Gravity's Rainbow- though I have not yet given up and started over from the beginning.

There is one passage that finds the two surveyors outside of Philadelphia at the site of an indian massacre where certain of the townsfolk slew a defenseless group of natives, the reason being, or given, that some of their relatives killed relatives of marauders. Mason is trying to fathom this hallucinated, cruel offshoot of England, an apparent den of all the darkest and most unreal impulses, and he comes up with this passage:

Acts have consequences, Dixon, they must. These Louts believe all's right now,- that they are all free to get on with Lives that to them are no doubt important,- with no Glimmer at all of the Debt they have taken on. That is what I smell'd,- Lethe-Water. One of the things the newly-born forget, is how terrible its Taste, and Smell. In Time, these People are able to forget ev'rything. Be willing but to wait a little, and ye may gull them again and again, however ye wish,- even unto their own dissolution. In America, as I apprehend, Time is the true River that runs 'round Hell.

Annie to Play with TSM, TV on the Radio

December 1 at Webster Hall the TSM show with TV on the Radio will also feature Norway's Annie. The following day she plays the BLISS party in DC. Politely alluring, this elfin nymphet from the land of long rays is suddenly 1 degree of social separation- or is it 2 if she knows someone you know?

Weird.

Radiohead concert on TV last night got the whole apartment into a mood, found me jamming until as late as my hangover husked brain would stay awake, people who came in the door began singing, the TV was on but the sound stayed on mute as everyone waited to see who was going to make the next great noise.

Tune my fork

There's a channel piped into my face as part of the digital cable package we share here at my place that appears to be only concerts. Showtime C. I've been watching an '03 concert of Radiohead's for the past hour or so, and old seizure-eyes has been crooning back into my lizard brain with his icky toilet water love velvet slither voice. The colors are very saturated, they must have been using film. Thank you, right now, Thom Yorke for reminding us we are afraid of television and the awful pictures of ourselves we hit each other with over it.

Speaking of Radiohead, the band's American counterpart, WILCO, has a live album reviewed on Pitchfork today. WILCO: Kicking Television. I must get it.

What is the state and role of politics when so many relations are no longer connected to the business of the polis, per se? When memes, direct transmission and submission to information, and clearly stratified virtual groups based around specialized interests dictate our physical gathering places, fashion, and our actions in the physical world, is politics then a euphemism for the balance and hierarchy established by our virtual selves acted out with the pomp of fabric and insignia in meatspace, or is it completely disengenuous, containing not even metaphorical value? Constantly in touch, never falling away, never moving on, our smaller cells of association stand the test of time and do more to dictate our actions than adherence to the general project of city planning and civility have done. Have we moved on to a guerilla cellular form of politics? Cellitics?

Now Playing Trigger Hippie from the album "Who Can You Trust?" by Morcheeba

OBLOQUY!

1. a. Verbal abuse directed against a person or thing; detraction, calumny, slander. Formerly (also): {dag}an abusive or calumnious speech or utterance (obs.).
b. Abuse or detraction as it affects the person spoken against; the condition of being spoken against; ill repute; reproach, disgrace, notoriety.
2. A cause, occasion, or object of detraction or reproach; a reproach, a disgrace. Obs.

From our good friends at the OED.

Also, this is a good book about the OED:

"The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary" (Simon Winchester)

Brian Eno is selling lots of gear!

Via Musicthing:


Brian Eno is selling lots of gear!:

It's Vemia auction time again. It's a kind of cool private eBay for music geeks. Brian Eno is selling off his beloved (and battered) DX-7, which was presumably used to compose the Microsoft Sound, among one or two other pieces of music. He's also selling a Prophet VS, Jellinghaus DX-7 Programmer and a couple of Mackie Mixers. The DX7 is already at almost £2,000. Other delights include Tim Simenon (Bomb The Bass) selling his 303 and a load of other gear. The auction ends on the 12th November. The Vemia Website is still an absolute nightmare to use and navigate (try to ignore the javascript faults and popups), but it's well worth the effort. There was even a EMS Synthi with a starting bid of £20, but it's already up to £1660...

Abe Lincoln

Friday I picked up Steve Almond's latest short story collection, entitled The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories, and burned through it over the weekend. In the main, I would say it is at least as compelling as his first collection, My Life in Heavy Metal, with the same balance of really powerful stories and those that you end up feeling are sort of filler. This is simply the peril of working as an author who walks a very thin line between pure prosaic retelling of easily relatable goings-on and the perfectly-timed emotional switch that provides the strange and surprising, breathtaking insight that pulls the whole experience of reading his stories together. Each episode from the lives related (usually centered around relationships, loss, or love and the coming-to-grips associated with each) is made unique, always reiterating the message that, though, yes, we can all recognize love, heartbreak, loneliness, camaraderie, nostalgia, these states only come to be themselves through very personal and unrepeatable circumstances. Just as musicians are only musicians as a group by accident, huddled together by the independent hands of critics and not by the players themselves, who each have their own personal way of visualizing their music, using their emotions, their own personal goals to arrive at through their art, so lovers and friends are, ultimately, each unique in how they arrive at that definition. In one particular story, Lincoln, Arisen, we see Abraham Lincoln as a montage of his life and the world of his dreams through conversations between he and Frederick Douglass the abolitionist that may or may not be happening.

"There once was a man who found no happiness in his life. He was sad every moment of the day. His duties were many and without mercy. Senators ran to him in anger. Common men blackened their hearts on his behalf. A nation of mothers cursed his name. he hoped to make himself content through an adherence to God's will, but when he examined his beliefs found he held none. His wife went insane, Douglass. His children died like flies. his one love perished." Lincoln's voice deepens and curls, assumes the timbre of a dream. "He behaved nobly, but for reasons he could not fathom. His faults were but the shadows his virtues cast. He saw himself grimly advancing on history, but came to understand it was the other way around. He grew bored of his own stories and savored none of his achievements. His single respite was sleep. And then that left him too. Hold me, Douglass. All the strange checkered past seems to crowd now upon my mind."

I suppose I don't have anything to say about this passage, save that I was moved brutally by the idea that he behaved nobly, but for reasons he could not fathom. In reality, as is recognized by the author in his acknowledgments, the character of Lincoln only feels this way because he feels unrewarded by his path and disappointed. He is not ignorant of his motives. Almond writes in his acknowledgements of Lincoln:
"Let us, in this age of unremitting grievance, choose as he did: to love, to sacrifice, to forgive."
Good God, the responsibility lies with each of us.

"The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories" (Steve Almond)

The Resubversion of My Local Graffiti Culture

Tats Cru get made someone's toy.

Tenderness, you find me with knives in the front and the back
Patience, you steer through the gauntlet of the steady and vengeful third hand
who is not the cheek unturned
and is not the cheek turned.
When you have found his blades' secret points
You answer,
"I am without response in kind."
Patience, your love has no enemies.

Headset has a video for "Jaw Modulation" with Beans

Here.

Big Fuzz, All Action, No Motion

A quick trip to Illinois this past weekend put me in the mood to listen to Hum this week. The psychedelic static space rock has been crunching in my headphones, me doing dumb things like going to work and wondering why I'm doing dumb things.
Downward is Heavenward puts me in a still place in pulsing chaos these many years on.

"Downward Is Heavenward" (HUM)

Go to him

There was a voice that called, but you could not hear it, for there was only a single set of footprints and who got sand on the sheets? It sounded like "I'm sorry" or maybe "I'll be god-damned if I'm going to pay the bill in full before I die."
Herm is at it again.

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The television program gray's anatomy is a real death trip- a tight confusion of ferocity of emotion and platitudes for depth and insight.

俺の赤いS二千

俺の赤い
S二千出来ない
事は無い

使わない
のに力入って
待ってるずっと

Technorati Tags: 歌詞, 赤い, 音楽