Sam Prekop and Archer Prewitt at Southpaw

Photos of the two Chicago auteurs playing last night at Southpaw sans rhythm or any other backup save each other. Excellent renditions of a few Sea and Cake songs were thrown in along with pretty much the whole new Prekop album. Do Now Fairly Well, Civilise, an oldie that I didn't know the name of but that was familiar to me, Midtown were all taken from the Sea and Cake songbook. The pretty, aspirated vocals, the jazz, the freshly complicated guitar lines, the mutant bossanova made me smile and sway.

This song is sexy.

"Pop the glock" by Uffie.

She's on Myspace I guess. Read about her on Bigstereo.

Last Friday I couldn't get in the shower in the morning. My soap and shampoo were in the downstairs bathroom, and that was where Michael Rother, kraut-rock pioneer of Neu!, Kraftwerk, and Harmonia (among other things) fame was performing his ablutions, blow-drying his grey hair.

Thursday before that I came home from work characteristically (of late) late, and Michael Rother was sitting on my couch with Josh slouched and watching something about disasters on the History Channel. I then went and had a glass of wine with Josh and Rother in the wine bar downstairs.

Saturday I saw Rother perform with a couple other musicians- one of whom was Ben from Secret Machines, and it blew my mind.

Tonight I came home and small talked with Rother again.

This post is just not bizarre enough to convey how surreal this is to me.

A kraut-rock pioneer, auteur and guitarist behind some of my favorite recordings of all time, has just been hanging out in my house for a week.

"De Luxe" (Harmonia)

Last night's dream was an encounter with the uncanny. In my grandmother's house, standing in the hallway upstairs, I looked into my grandfather's bedroom. There, where I always expect there to be, stood an apparition- but this was of myself, shirtless, long-haired, staring at me exactly as I look today. Seeing this doppelganger filled me with fear, provoking a response that was merely the repeated quaking accusation of its identity. It stood expressionless and stared at me ominously. I gasped the words, "It's me! It's me!", the "it" somehow meaning more than simply that unknown thing that stood before me, but instead signifying some other, more intimately familiar unknown. I struggled to wake as, in my dream, I descended the stair. Downstairs, waiting and staring up at me from the other side of the bannister with the same unnerving look, was the apparition. I could not wake and the phantom would not dissolve until I had come within range of it with my fists. When I swung at it, it vanished, and I awoke.

Meet the Band

You can stand next to the people you may like to be.

Will this change anyone?

A simple equation will tell us.

+


=

or



Clearly, all the results are likely to be mixed, but can be counted on to lean heavily toward confused inner turmoil whilst dressed in suits or outward displays of obvious identity issues.

Who is this guy?

Yeah, it happens to some of the best of us, I guess- putting us out of the running for that select group of people who would simply be "the best of us," the qualifying term "some" mercifully absent from the prologues to their terms of vaguest grouping. Bacchanalia is good for putting yourself outside of the things, the Catholicism, the morbid pasts, the unwhole and unwholesome reflections that revisit from time to time, hiccup memories of a different self set to chastise the current, worldly you in quiet moments when the hive-mind connection isn't being used for downloading porn, loving someone, moving forward. But bacchanalia is a medium, set in place millions of years ago by the ur-cells when they were still thinking about getting together with these "mitochondrian" guys, still considering a strategic alliance to assert their permanent physicality in contradistinction to the spiritual world they were the pumping and oozing self-reflections of. Forgetfulness...
Oh, Lethe.
Step outside yourself and move ahead, but the important step you eventually cut the corners from (speed and sleek achievement of desired effect; as above, so in the corporeal below- remember the cellular dream imperative!): Remember to bring yourself along.

I have left hundreds of impressions on people, I have spoken from my soul over and over as a reflex, but the words press out ahead of my bread-crumb man who sits soaking up the leavings of his yeast brothers somewhere behind the tight column of meanings faster than the light that sighs forward in a free rage from the headlights of the rented automobile we escape in.

I am forgetting things, or people are remembering the parts of me they know are important for me, while I remember only the parts of myself that know where to find my next drink.

Was it in summer of 2004? Who is this man and what is he thinking about? What conclusions did he come to, what thunderclaps did he cleave the virgin souls of the assembled with when he broke his reverie and decided it was time to speak?



It becomes so frighteningly easy, as I become older, to internalize the lack of regard I think others must have for me... no one's listening, and I just have all these sermons on the mount to pass my time discarding. An unremembering shell that my words continue to echo out of in search of new bodies, new lives.

Oh, memory. Will you help me to remember, once in awhile, to stop and talk to myself?

When It Means Something to People

I like when people put something out in the world that means something to them. I like it when they do it only because it means something to them. They do it not because it will aggrandize* (*embiggen) them, but because, hey, here with the going there and waking up sometimes late or sometimes with no place to be, always flush with cash and slick with slit or almost as oft skint and friendless queued up so's to wait for the next do-right to jump the line or line-jumping for ghastly utopian principles that will pay their dividends not in grudges but in pure cash money future for all babes, puppies, and bumblebees kind of world we live in, for some people life just ain't so simple that it's all about constant self-PR work. I like reading something someone wrote that was uncensored and unfiltered from inception to inscription because it was a thought. I like it when someone is so surprised that they have learned something from life that they just say it. I like when this kind of thing surprises someone else, and suddenly two people have a reason to support each other. I like when people can make lasting friends whose acquaintance is valuable beyond expiry and beyond cheap commodity just because of the way one has of batting an eye after their particular fashion in the opinion of another. I like it when people come out of their ruse-goldberg contraptions and show you who they are un-self-consciously, uncalculatingly.

I guess I should get to what prompted me to write this.
I like The Life Pursuit.
I like that when I listen to this record I want to spout about sincerity.

"The Life Pursuit" (Belle & Sebastian)

Similarities

The new Prefuse 73 cd, "Security Screenings", has a cover remarkably similar to the old Coil cd, "Love's Secret Domain".

Just saying.

Compare for yourselves:






Man. Funny how a little trick of meshing neurons will get you back into music you haven't listened to in years. That is all.

We pillory the fading, terminal impulses of the day, for if we shouldn't postpone them once and for all, at the very least we stretch them out that much longer.

Terminator T9 Wants Me to Say "Hangover Home"

Hangover home, exclamation point, it's what my Fighters stick it out, poking tiny buttons better suited for speaking in math (thansk, Rajiohdea), but did I saw taht?

I cunt mean ot.

won't anything come out right again? The tech has its own designs, but whose were they first?

And what will it have me say next?

Rain, My Spending Habits

It's raining this morning in New York. It's early February, and it doesn't look like it's getting cold anytime soon. I used to reassure myself that the climactic change wasn't really happening- it always seemed like the cold bit of winter had just been pushed a month or so further into the year. This year, however, the doomsayers are are attractive to me like a middle-aged fellow's crises-beset divorcee's genuflection at the altar of fresh nubility is to him.
That's right. I am tempted to believe THE END IS NEAR as much as that balding guy who just split with his wife wants to give a girl in high school his wife's cold sores.
Rain is shitty. But, so are the sidewalks, so I guess we need some.

I had a refund for some stuff on Amazon I got to use yesterday- replaced a borrowed book with a nice library copy, hardcover with dust jacket. Got the yet-to-be-released Belle and Sebastian, a new Polysics record (I have Neu! and For Young Electric Pop, but I think FYEP was released under a different title in the states). I also got "Musique Automatique" (Stereo Total)
by Stereo Total, because I couldn't think of anything else to get.

ephemera:
-Craig Finn from The Hold Steady does a cameo on a P.O.S. (Minneapolis Hip-Hop) song.
-Egon Schiele exhibition at Neue Gallery is really good.
-currently reading Innocents Abroad by Twain.

-There is a new Morrissey track leaked
-There is a new Sufjan Stevens track leaked

Definition: BEDIZENED

From the OED- "Dressed up with vulgar finery."

Things No One Would Believe Anyway, or Private Communiques with the Irrational

Among the things no one would believe anyway but pretend to want to:

Astral traveling
meaning in repeating dreams
amnesia
night murmuring
old men who refuse to leave, even beyond the grave
true love
bouncing apparitions
succubi/incubi
your True Age
wives' tales
Peace, Love, Understanding

When It's Pink Instead

The results are still pretty hot.

NSFW video for a cool techno songenfunken. Easy Love the title? MSTRKRFT the auteur? I don't know.

Bukkakemashou!

You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having

I've been listening to Atmosphere's You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having the past couple days. Walking the city on my unexpected week off between jobs, Hockey Hair came on, and the sped-up soul samples grabbed me and the repetitive rhythms slew me.

"You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having " (Atmosphere)

This Video is Awesome

"Sixteen" by Los Super Elegantes.

Me encantan Los Super Elegantes.

Mason & Dixon

I have just finished the greatest book ever written in my lifetime, the constant recollection of which has beaten the reverse panes of my eyes, and, indeed the whole of my insides, with fierce tears left unwept in public spaces for the sake of propriety.

"Mason & Dixon" (Thomas Pynchon)

Today a television advertisement told me "kids' pink- it does more than you think.

The Incredibly Long and Fruitless Commute of Mia De Capatista

Mia De Capatista lived for only one day. She would wake days and weeks before the sun had remembered itself to everyone. There were always two of her, two of her to redouble her worries. There was Mia, rising in anticipation of the repetition of her day, waiting in the performance of her ablutions in chronology's anteroom. There was Mia, proceeding dutifully about her day's ministrations. She was unhappy for two reasons: First, She, though uncommonly talented in that regard, had no one to love. Second, she, being a smart girl, could find nothing to assuage her of the futility she felt when she questioned her creator as to why such a young and vibrant creature should be given only one day whose call to await and whose disappointments and travails to encounter over and over without fail.

She kept a room in an ethereal ghetto called Bronks that flew above an island called Manahatta, which itself floated on the sea- it being the province of all girls with unreal fates. Each morning when her day, who was also her master, would, finally, call, she would emerge from her room dressed and perfected for presentation. She would proceed to a station of the metro and descend on a long and otherwise unridden train alone to the island below. The commute would tax the day of its supply of hours so that it was nearly dusk when she arrived, and she had nothing but drifting piles of tabloid newspapers to, not exactly pass the time, but at least stultify her as she rode. On her arrival she would make directly to a bar in midtowne, the place where she drew her day's pay. There she aided people, with her guile, with elixirs and lethe water, with the loudly trumpeting bloom of her young sex, in forgetting how they had gotten to where they were. She saw people there whose days were each new, pulling them off in new directions (aging them all too quickly, but they didn't seem to mind).

Under this bar, out of the view of the patrons, on a shelf on a level with her knees, were a row of semi-spherical objects twitching in the shadow of a partial obscurity. These were the quaking, undying heads of her suitors, numbering then 18, and there was ever space on the shelf for additions.

Mia's unbearable fate was unique even among those born into the strange prenatal contracts consigning them to the unseen, but not unfelt, shtetl where she lived, for her curse was not limited to having been afforded only one day to live and wait on as a handmaiden. It was compounded by the measures her day and master took to assure that she would never escape him. Her master's penalty for presuming to the station of one of her beaus was a sudden and painless denial of the suitor's body, resulting in a life lived forever after, undying, as a head on a shelf beneath her bar.

Notwithstanding its persistence in visitation or its jealousness of the beautiful 18-year-old Mia, her single day and master's blighted craft was proven all the more diabolical with the observation, as it became difficult to avoid making with detachment once eyes were laid on her, that, with such a curse in place, his Mia was the perfect device for amassing a collection of undying, lovelorn heads that would never fail to appreciate in quantity. Mia, for her part, had a penchant for rescue woven into her character that led men into her trap. It was no secret to her day and master that she wished to hie away from him and begin anew, and those patrons who made the ill-advised transformation from patron to suitor were well aware of her need for this and were drawn by it.

"You only have to be 18 to serve, but I usually don't tell people- sometimes people aren't comfortable with it, you know? But it's OK, you know, because we're talking." She would sparkle with a contained sadness, a martyrdom whose building discomfort only the perpetually young can sustain, flirting.

"I moved out when I was 17, I haven't had it good, but, you know. I'm working for awhile and saving for college," as she would lean closer, her words dreaming the symbols of the future.

If the suitor had found enough of his own unhappiness in the various days he had been given, and if Mia had given him enough drink to forget himself, he might feel called on by his need for ennoblement to rescue the poor, hopeless specimen from her long, hard-luck bad day-the quietly abided fate given to so many pretty girls.

It was unclear what her eternal day and keeper considered the punishable infraction, what signified an irreversible mistake of infatuation, but, ultimately, once a suitor had resolved to befriend the youth with a mind to reforming both his and her lives in the shape of a happy dream, redeeming all with some kind of rescue, His body and all his attachments to the world would vanish in the instant and his head would fall to the the bar he was leaning over, suddenly without the under-standing of its body. Mia would quickly and sadly place the man's head beneath the bar and clean up his traces before other patrons noticed anything, kissing the heavy thing lightly, out of sight, near where she washed the glasses. The confused head, for its part, was ever unable to cry out, deprived of its lungs and voice.

A pretty girl from the home of nightmares, Mia was no different than most. Even as her day gripped her and her prospects, her special awareness of her fate kept her locked within it, and she was forever taking heads and losing loves, wondering when her awful day would end. The heads, with suffocated voices, (if they came to themselves again) were trying to tell her, still gallant in their mission of rescue-
"Mia, tomorrow is over there. Don't come back."
"My love, don't come back."

H_________d

Thank you, Mr. Tweedy, for:

his goal in life was
to be an echo
the type of sound that falls around and then back down
like a feather
but in the deep chrome canyons
of the loudest manhattans
no one could hear him
or anything...

He slept in the mountains
in a sleeping bag underneath the stars
he would lie awake and count them
but the great fountain spray
of the great milky way
would never let him
die alone

(so he said)
remember to remember me
standing still in your past
floating fast like a hummingbird