between good enough and bored stiff

from “Around the Rim”:

Chauncey Billups and Antonio McDyess each scored 18 points to lead the Pistons over the 76ers, 101-91 . . . Dwyane Wade (how the hell do you say that? is that Duane? or D’Why-ane?) scored 16 of his 37 points in the fourth quarter and the Heat beat the Raptors . . . (nothing about the Spurs, otherwise known as The Village People [in my head]) . . . Paul Pierce and Wally Szczerbiak each scored 22 points as the Celtics pounded the Knicks (otherwise known as the team with those hats, like David Duchovny wore all the time that one season and he was so hot [whatever]), 123-98.

loudon wainwright iii - pretty good day (mp3)

(not really. and then it rained)

small sacrifices

It’s inevitable. The cold will return, and it’ll probably catch me out, nipping body and spirit. It will be bracing, and I will brace myself against it, crossy-armed. Anything that is dynamic, anything alive, moves. Up and down; back and forth. The mind knows this, but the heart delights in the warm day. The mind says, Remember. The heart, Live. The mind says, The warmth is fleeting, and thus it is not real. The heart, Everything is fleeting, and it is warm today (duh). The mind says, No. The heart, Yes.

No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yesyesyes. The heart is stronger than the mind. (reference: Terry Schiavo.)

The first pedicure of the year. The mind knows this as the sacrificial pedicure, lain on the alter of the Sandal Goddess and otherwise wasted in the Texas shitkickers.








"Juciy Pink" - 3.2006










yeahyeahyeahs – Let Me Know (this is a b side of a single off the new cd --Review of it here among other places, but most have samples that iTunes cuts off after one minute. Phemonena interrupted.)

corpse of wednesday

Paul Anka – Smells like teen spirit [Nirvana cover] - (The rhyming inspiration of mosquito and libido really comes through in this version.)






"Dancing"
S. Klaurens







bonus track: Detroit Grand Pubahs - Sandwiches

Not the person who could not read and write would be the illiterate of the future, but the person who could not read photographs.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy 1936

-----------------------------------------

Every photographed object is merely the trace left behind
by the disappearance of all the rest.
It is an almost perfect crime.
It is photographs which bring us closest to a universe
without images, or in other words to pure appearance.
For it is the object which sees us, the object which dreams
us. It is the world which reflects us, it is the world which
thinks us. This is the basic rule.

Jean Baudrillard 1998

------------------------------------------

Every photograph is a certificate of presence.

Roland Barthes 1999

-------------------------------------------



(Amon Tobin) Slowly

theory + music

from Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire:

Submerged in reality, the oppressed cannot perceive clearly the order which serves the interest of the oppressors whose image they have internalized. Chafing under the restrictions of this order, they often manifest a type of horizontal violence, striking out at their comrades for the pettiest of reasons; the oppressed feel an irresistible attraction toward the oppressor and his way of life. Sharing this way of life becomes an overpowering aspiration. In their alienation, the oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressor, to imitate him, to follow him. This phenomena is especially prevalent in the middle class oppressed, who yearn to be equal to the eminent men of the upper class. Self-depreciation is another characteristic of the oppressed, which derives from their internalization of the opinion the oppressors hold of them. So often they hear that they are good for nothing, know nothing and are incapable of learning anything that they are sick, lazy and unproductive, that in the end they become convinced of their own unfitness.

They must realize that they are fighting not merely for freedom from hunger but for freedom to create and to construct, to wonder and to venture . . . if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life but love of death.

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes 'the practice of freedom', the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

rhett miller – your nervous heart (mp3) (what would be my heart's adjective?)

ecstasy being more easily imagined than achieved

I'm already late for coffee and still messing around reading about how to rip from vinyl to pc, dragging my feet. She’s been knocking on the door for six years, and I’ve been pretending not to be inside. But recently she’s sent me an email to apologize for blowing my head off in a dream. I email her back, thanks for being sorry . . .

She works here, no I don’t want my coffee for free, for the umpteenth time, why do you ask every time I come in? Everyone else takes it, she says. No. She’s agitated as usual, obsessed with the latest love affair as always, which has ended typically. I am rereading the horoscopes, bored and groggy. She’s complaining that she wants everyone he loves to die. Well that sounds like a good plan, I say—Do you know how the turntable works at World? She says, He’s adopting another kid and working it out even though his wife is a lesbian. Skip your noon yoga class for me, she says. (sigh) I want to go to the record store, but the Morrissey cd still isn’t out and I don’t need the Trespassers William or anything really, I say . . . She brightens and pulls out a little notebook in which she’s written a Morrissey quote about how people who say passionate things aren’t passionate people and how people who write the best things about the human race are loner weirdos who live in small squalid rooms. I laugh, Great finally I look good for having not published a novel.

Morrissey – You Have Killed Me (video link, he looks fabulous, love the suit, and the quick shots to women in the audience rearranging their tits in their dress-up clothes is amusing punctuation). This song gets better and better the more you listen to it. "You have killed me. You have killed me. [repeat]"

self help reading + music

"The older I get, the more I realize less is more." -Jessica Alba, Elle Magazine, Mar 2006.

Kevin Long - Kicked (live) ; Haunting my Hallways; I know (Fiona Apple cover)
all of these are great

m i c, k e y . .

A good friend is not going to die after all. So we have coffee and he makes me an honorary colon cancer survivor, a mousketeer sorta, like Annette Funicello. There are rules: Eat what you want, but as soon as it doesn’t agree with you, stop. Do what you want, but as soon as it doesn’t agree with you, stop. Heal and wait six months before doing anything much, and if you find yourself doing otherwise, stop.

from A Short History of Decay, E.M. Cioran (an oxymoronic title if ever there was one):

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude. For each of us will do anything in order not to be doomed to himself. Our kind is not a fatality but the temptation to fail. Incapable of keeping our hands clean and our hearts undiluted, we soil ourselves upon contact with strange sweats, we wallow—craving for disgust and fervent for pestilence—in the unanimous mud. (Is this guy an upper or what?) And when we dream of seas changed into holy water, it is too late to dive into them, and our advanced state of corruption keeps us from drowning there: the world has infested our solitude; upon us the traces of others become indelible.

trespassers william – i know (mp3)

self help reading + music

from “Gospel Song”, Dorothy Allison:

“You got a look like your granddaddy sometimes.” Granny pinched me and laughed again. “Bastard was meaner than a snake, but he had his ways. And didn’t I love his ways? Lord Christ!” She pulled back and rolled the snuff around in her mouth.
“Man had only two faults I couldn’t abide. Wouldn’t work to save his life and couldn’t stay away from gospel singers. Used to stand out back of revival tents offering ‘em the best whiskey made in Greenville county. Then he’d bring me that slush they cleaned out of the taps. Bastard!” She stiffened and looked back over her shoulder, afraid my mama might be behind her. Mama didn’t allow anybody to use that word in her house.
“Well, shit,” she spit to the side. “You got a little of that too, don’t you? A little of that silliness, that revival crap?”
“Aunt Grace says you a heathen.”
“Oh Aunt Grace, huh. Aunt Grace fucked her oldest boy.”
My mouth fell open. Granny wiped her chin.
“Don’t you go telling your mama everything you hear.”
“No ma’am.”
“And don’t go taking that gospel stuff seriously. It’s nice to clean you out now and then, but it an’t for real. It’s like bad whiskey. Run you through fast and leave you with a pain’ll lay you down.”

(amen. but what won't do that?)

low - amazing grace

(bonus track: cherokee singers [acapella] – amazing grace)

self help reading + music

from “Mama” (Trash), Dorothy Allison

Watching my mama I learned some lessons too well. Never show that you care, Mama taught me, and never want something you cannot have. Never give anyone the satisfaction of denying you something you need, and for that, what you have to do is learn to need nothing. Starve the wanting part of you. In time I understood my mama to be a kind of Zen Baptist—rooting desire out of her own heart as ruthlessly as any mountaintop ascetic. The lessons Mama taught me, like the lessons of Buddha, were not a matter of degree but of despair. My mama’s philosophy was better and thin. She didn’t give a damn if she was born again, she just didn’t want to be born again poor and wanting.

(throw the kitten in a bag with a rock, plug your ears to her soggy mewling)

death cab for cutie – sick of myself (but Edie Falco rocks my world)

addiction theory

Ah, L’Amour (Don Hertzfeldt)

end (of the week at least)

"Unexpected Dangers" (Erdrich)

I’m much the worse for wear, it’s double true.
Too many incidents
a man might misconstrue –
my conduct, for a lack of innocence.

I seem to get them crazed or lacking sense
in the first place.
Ancient, solid gents
I sit by on the bus because they’re safe,

get me going, coming, with their canes,
or what is worse,
the spreading stains
across the seat. I recognize at once

just what they’re up to, rustling in their coats.
There was a priest,
the calmer sort,
his cassock flowing down from neck to feet.

We got to talking and I brushed his knee
by accident,
and dutifully,
he took my hand away and put it back

not quite where it belonged; his judgment
was not that exact.
I underwent
a kind of odd conversion from his act.

They do call minds like mine one track.
One track is all you need
to understand
their loneliness, then bite the hand that feeds

upon you, in a terrible blind grief.

Tegan and Sarah - Speak Slow

who invented irony?

from FreeWillAstrology this week, Virgo:

The ancient Greeks had words for love that transcend our usual notions, writes Lindsay Swope in her review of Richard Idemon's book Through the Looking Glass. Epithemia is the basic need to touch and be touched. Our closest approximation is "horniness," though epithemia is not so much a sexual feeling as a sensual one. Philia is friendship. It includes the need to admire and respect your friends as a reflection of yourself--like in high school, where you want to hang out with the cool kids because that means you're cool too. Eros isn't sexual in the way we usually think, but is more about the emotional gratification that comes from merging souls. Agape is a mature, utterly free expression of love that has no possessiveness. It means wanting the best for another person even if it doesn't advance one's self-interest. The phase you're currently in, Virgo, is providing you with opportunities to explore the frontiers of at least three of these kinds of love.

uh huh.

Ever get those fantasies going where you go back in time and shoot Hitler in his youth? I wonder what our inner lives would look like if we could take a power hose through time, stick it up the ass of Western Thought, and blow the Greeks out. I spose then we’d all be Spartan? Austere, but Free? ( Or Free, but Austere?)

Jonathon Coulton - I feel fantastic (mp3) when I take my steak tastes better pill

reading + a song

From The Invention of Solitude, Paul Auster:

He ate, he went to work, he had friends, he played tennis, and yet for all that he was not there. In the deepest, most unalterable sense, he was an invisible man. Invisible to others, and most likely invisible to himself as well . . . he had lived alone. Doggedly, opaquely, as if immune to the world. He did not seem to be a man occupying space, but rather a block of impenetrable space in the form of a man. The world bounced off him, shattered against him, at times adhered to him—but it never got through.

Talking to him was a trying experience. Either he would be absent, as he usually was, or he would assault you with brittle jocularity, which was merely another form of absence. It was like trying to make yourself understood by a senile old man . . . I would find myself saying more than I normally do, becoming aggressively talkative, chatting away in a futile attempt to hold his attention, to provoke a response. Afterwards, I would invariably feel foolish for having tried so hard.

In spite of the excuses I have made for myself, I understand what is happening. The closer I come to the end of what I am able to say, the more reluctant I am to say anything. I want to postpone the moment of ending, and in this way delude myself into thinking that I have only just begun, the better part of my story still lies ahead. No matter how useless these words might seem to be, they have nevertheless stood between me and a silence that continues to terrify me.

A Girl Called Eddy – The Long Goodbye (mp3)

who will show up (or might not) + tunes

from “Study Shows Babies Try to Help”:

Psychology researcher Felix Warneken performed a series of ordinary tasks in front of toddlers, such as hanging towels with clothespins or stacking books. Sometimes he "struggled" with the tasks; sometimes he deliberately messed up.

Over and over, whether Warneken dropped clothespins or knocked over his books, each of 24 toddlers offered help within seconds — but only if he appeared to need it. Video shows how one overall-clad baby glanced between Warneken's face and the dropped clothespin before quickly crawling over, grabbing the object, pushing up to his feet and eagerly handing back the pin.

(“The simple experiment shows the capacity for altruism emerges as early as 18 months of age.” As does skepticism, clearly. Like a beer and shot.)

-----

My sister calls. She can fly in tomorrow. Saturday. Wait, what day is today? Seriously? (How long have I been here? Whoa—yeah, I guess I could use the help . . . ) She tears right into the catpisscarpet, yelling "she ra!"

Leadbelly – Where did you sleep last night? (mp3)

-----

Some weeks feel longer than others. Is this hutspa or pychosis?

Voxtrot - MothersSistersDaughters&Wives (mp3)

self help reading

from The Body Artist, Don Delillo:

It felt like home, being here, and she raced through the days with their small ravishing routines, days the same, paced and organized but with a simultaneous wallow, uncentered, sometimes blank in places, days that moved so slow they ached.

Her body felt different to her in ways she did not understand. Tight, framed, she didn’t know exactly. Slightly foreign and unfamiliar. Different, thinner, didn’t matter.

She woke early every morning and this was the worst time, the first murderous instant of lying in bed and remembering something and knowing in the flow of the same breath what it was.

The plan was to organize time until she could live again.



She looked at him.
“Tell me. You’ve been here how long?”
He didn’t raise his head. There was something so strange about him that she heard her words hang in the room, predictable and trite. She felt no fear. He had a founding quality—lost and found—and she was, she guessed, the finder.
“You have been here,” she said, speaking clearly, pausing between words.

“Talk to me. I am talking,” he said.
She thought she understood what he meant by this. There was a certain futility in his tone, an endlessness of effort, suggesting things he could not easily make clear to her no matter how much he said.

She knew it was foolish to examine so closely. She was making things up. But this was the effect he had shadow-inching through a sentence, showing a word in its facets and aspects, works like moons in particular phases. . . He talked about objects in the room, stumblingly, and she wondered what he saw, or failed to see, or saw so differently she could begin to conjure its outlines.

She says she is going to the restroom . . . wait . . . but she doesn’t comes back.



She stopped at the edge of the doorway, aware of the look on her face.
She knew this look, a frieze of false anticipation.
She stood for a while, thinking into this.
Her face still wore a decorative band, a trace across the eyes of a prospect of wonders. It was a look that nearly floated free of her so she could puff her cheeks, childlike, and blow it away.