"here I am" [scan] 6.2006

chris whitley - loco girl

From “Caught in a Hit and Run [or 'Someone Shoot Me']” playlist

Paula Abdul – Straight Up
B52’s – Love Shack
Tears for Fears – Head Over Heels
Robert Palmer – Simply Irresistible [video] (I couldn’t resist.)
Psychedelic Furs – Love My Way
The Cure – I’ll Stop the World and Melt with You

bonus: (the buffet) The 80's, all spread out before you--delightful or traumatizing? Odd how often one can apply that question, and also not know the answer.

Brad Sucks, again. I know I know. But I can’t help it. I just love this guy. There’s something about the deadpan quality of his right (of the one-two punch) “life sucks, eh?” followed by the left-cross of the (strangely romantic) songs, that it just about slays me. Just when I think I’m gonna get over it, I tune back in.

Brad Sucks – We’re Not Friends
Brad Sucks – There’s Something Wrong

New stereo equipment. The speakers hung on the wall. My first “component system” starter set since Ex-1 assured me that Harmon Kardon used diamond grit in its electronics, and I put my face in a book to hide the eyeroll. I cue up backwards through my day, missing whom I’ve rooted out to meet me at the music. I’m listening to tunes, missing backwards from most recent goodbyes and losses, to a living room near Detroit I wish I were in right now, to a back porch sagging off the building with the guac and chips, to the baby who first danced with me swaying to the beat before she learned not to crap her pants, to the one safest place of a kitchen where Grandpa fried the pork chops with black pepper and poured the Coke after school. That’s the thing about music, and why I couldn’t afford it for a while, the soundtrack for the life thing. Nowadays it’s become just part of breathing to go from fine one minute to breaking left and right the next, no and yes one word like catdog (which end is the ass?) . . . I think I’m so smart, but I must be nearly the last person on earth to realize that happy is sad waiting to happen, like a happy childhood harboring within itself its own inevitable end. The reverse is true too, though, right? I know that one. Happy Waiting to Happen is the cover version.

From “Happy is Sad in Reverse” playlist

Nicole Atkins and the Sea - Skywriters
Cowboy Junkies- So Lonesome
Ron Sexsmith – Secret Heart
Emmylou Harris – Prayer in Open D
Indigo Girls – Power of Two
The Sundays – Here is Where the Story Ends
Dean Martin – Memories are Made of This

damien rice - volcano

from "Bossa Nova and a Bubblebath" playlist:

Stan Getz & Luiz Bonfa - O Morro Nao Tem Vez (AKA Favela)
Keren Ann & Benjamin Biolay- Jardin d'Hiver
Rita Lee - She Loves You (Beatles Cover)
Astrud Gilberto - Ocean Dreams
Shivaree - Goodnight Moon
Emmanuelle Cadoret - La Nuit, Le Chien
Nouvelle Vague - Killing Moon (Echo and the Bunnymen cover)

cowboy junkies – if you gotta go, go now (dylan cover)

The Eels – It’s a Motherfucker . . . . . . (band website).


"lay around"
6.2006

from Billy Budd (ballad/ch. 31):

Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I’ll dream fast asleep.
I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?
Just ease these darbies at the wrist,
And roll me over fair!

I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist

summer officially starts today

Johnny Cash - One (U2 cover)

insomnia still sucks [ass]

smoosh- la pump [video] (yes those are pissed off little indie/suburban cherubs--the drummer is 8 years old--ala claymation that yells "screw you" and punches itself out. what's not to like?)

from "return to sender" playlist:

sera cahoone - couch song
mazarin - another one goes by
hotel lights - let me
damien rice - cannonball
chris mills - you are my favorite song
the boy least likely to - faith (george michael cover)
the futureheads - skip to the end
bishop allen - eve of destruction

it’s hard to walk tall when you’re small

insomnia sucks

10 000 Maniacs - Every Day is Like Sunday

Bono – Hallelujah

Lancaster Orchestra - Please Please Let Me Get What I Want

self help reading + music

from How Proust Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton:

We might also let ourselves out of the zoo. What is considered normal for a person to feel in any place at any point is liable to be an abbreviated version of what is in fact normal, so that the experience of fictional characters afford us a hugely expanded picture of human behavior, and thereby a confirmation of the essential normality of thoughts or feelings unmentioned in our immediate environment. After we have childishly picked a fight with a lover who had looked distracted throughout dinner, there is a relief in hearing Proust’s narrator admit to us that “as soon as I found Albertine not being nice to me, instead of telling her I was sad, I became nasty,” and revealing that “I never expressed a desire to break up with her except when I was unable to do without her,” after which our own romantic antics might seem less like those of a perverse platypus.

etta james – you can leave your hat on

self help reading + music

Gertrude Stein:

Money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.

The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing.

I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.

A cutlet. A blind agitation is manly and uttermost. [runner up]

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables. [my fave]


Magnet - Little Miss More or Less

Oookla the Mot - a.m. suicide (there's a little Gary Coleman inside of us allll . . . . )

Who needs radio? I hear ya, about the corporate America sucks thing, but the answer to that question is: a girl whose shorty leaned forward one day and barfed into the CD changer. So, in a Parallel Universe there is a safe place. I never thought I'd start to be a convert to the GIANT BURB, but I gotta admit that Canadians have better schools, the tight ass way they pronounce "progress" is sort of cute, and now this: http://www.chrwradio.com/

hightlights from the Commuting to/from the D. playlist:

Feist- (the best of this mix) Inside and Out [Bee Gees cover]; bonus track Lovertits [Peaches cover]

The Flints – Girl

Raised by Swans-Relentless and Capable of Cruelty
The Jimmy Swift Band – Two Hands on the Wheel
(these the last two aren't totally fabulous, but they are playing Club Vinyl in Guelph next Friday, fyi)