djchampion - no heaven (highly recommended)

It’s all about folk music right now. I can’t let them get by me without knowing about it. Not have heard Bob Dylan? O no no no. I can hardly let them get past me with so little milked off, so swollen with knowing and randomly interesting unnecessary things.

the obstacle is the path playlist:

the weepies – say I am you
bob dylan – desolation row
the weavers – kisses sweeter than wine
rhett miller – bird in a cage [your] {nervous heart} repost
lisa loeb & elizabeth mitchell – big candy mountains

The future is a wall of black, cold exciting infinite backdrop of nothing. I’ve always felt that a lot. Time fleets. I've always hurried to plant seeds while I could while I could. Then there are the moments when I was held or I held someone and for that fleeting time, that embrace made falling backwards into the future seem not so bad, almost dreamlike, melty. It was not that they would be there when I died. It was that the moment itself with someone held-holding confirmed that there had been some reason, some sense, in and for having been alive. And that feeling is Alive. And that feeling is some kind of faith. It is difficult right now, because I crave a dollop of that feeling very keenly. Like eating up before a hibernation or expenditure. The future is at my back and I am striving for purchase as I walk backwards into it, wishing and waiting patiently for the Alive bits to make themselves felt. Kisses at the nape of the neck so pure and pleasureable that they make the howling wind recede in shame at their beauty.

The Gorillaz – The Future is Coming On [sic], (Clint Eastwood video) mp3link

Are you gay?, 11.2006

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Lil’R notes recently, Hey Canada is a whole different country! You’d think that would be obvious, but it’s only minutes away and the people do speak a somewhat similar language and dress warmly most of the year too, etc. If you add American arrogance into the equation, it’s a simple matter to confuse the nation for an annex, sad but true. As it turns out, though, since it’s a different country maybe I can go there and not be in my own country, which metaphorically speaking could be the middle porridge moment in this sequence of my lost-in-the-woods story line. They open the kitchen for you if you’re hungry even if it’s after 9 p.m. Sooo nice, for real.

But what the hell is up with the obsession with whether or not you’re a gay man? I’ve heard of this, but from afar, and I chalked it up to something I know about but can’t feature, like the seal-only diet of the Inuit. In the states, men do call each other ‘faggots’ as an insult, from playful to violent in intent. But even if meant playfully, after a couple of times, an American ‘straight’ guy will probably punch the other guy in the face or something. My current hypothesis is that this running you’re-gay no-you’re-gay thing between Canadian men is partially the result of the lesser tendency Canadians have in general to interpersonal violence. Hence they can keep that up without risking bloodshed. Also the fact that it can be a never-ending topic/joke might indicate a lesser degree of violent homophobia. I’m not sure. I have to do more field work on this, which won’t be hard since all it takes is several Canadian men in the same room for the subject of whether one of them is gay or not to come up:

D. are you still faking this girl out that you’re not gay?, asks J. Does he go down on you for hours to cover his gayness?, he asks S., D’s girl.
You’re gay.
No, you’re gay.
Ok, it’s true, says J. to S., I’ve had your boyfriend more times than you have—Worst 2 minutes of anybody’s life, man or woman—but at least I don’t go down on women to fake them out, that’s pathetic.
What are you a Black Guy!?, asks M., J’s brother.
No, but there is no need for that kind of thing, sex is for the man, it’s for procreation, I’m a religious guy, says J.
You’re like that Black Guy, who works at such-n-such (there’s one Black Guy?), but he doesn’t have to because he’s got that big black cock.
You oughta know, since you’re gay.
It’s not about that, says C., the nice looking guy whose wife is pregnant.
Yeah, says M., straight guys and lesbians like to do it, Right?, he asks my friend K., whose eyes are wide with the hilarity of it all.
Um Sure, she shrugs. (lol)
M. says, If you’re good looking like him (gesturing at C.) it’s one thing, but a guy like me has got to have talent. [He does look like one of the pudgy minor characters from The Soprano’s, truth be told.]
It doesn’t matter if you are good looking, says C. You can’t spend your life with someone who doesn’t want to give you a blow job that lasts a good half hour at least, and vice versa. (Nods all around, a serious Truth of Life moment.)
I knocked up your wife, says J. It only took like 30 seconds, she hardly even noticed. I did it as your friend, it was a job that just needed to get done, ya know what I’m saying?
HEY, that means you’re kid’s gonna be GAY, says half the bar in unison. (lol)

for Fort Erie and FaintedInk in particular (f’n priceless so funny):

The Tragically Hip ("the Guess Who of Canada")- Bobcaygeon

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not for all North Carolina,
11.2006
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The Magnetic Fields - All My Little Words
Eef Barzelay (Clem Snide) - Thanksgiving Waves

ten yards at a time (self help + tunes)

Thanksgiving = Football. The feng shui of the game?, She wonders.

from Moving the Chains: Tom Brady and Pursuit of Everything by Charles P. Pierce:

It's within the movement of the chains that football finds its soul. It's within the movement of the chains that football players see most clearly how they are bound together. When an offense is moving the chains, it keeps its defense off the field, rested and ready, while exhausting the defense of the other team. When an offense is moving the chains, its success is easily defined in calibrated achievements, ten yards at a time, one after another after another again. Each player gains confidence -- in himself and in what comes to be seen as an inexorable whole. This confidence can become an almost physical force -- something Newtonian, like gravity or inertia: "An offense in motion tends to stay in motion, except when acted upon by an equal or opposite force, which is usually a linebacker with blood in his eye." In fact, an offense relentlessly moving the chains is often said to be going "downhill." The constant progress shortens the game. "Time of possession" is one of the most beloved statistics among football coaches. Moving the chains bends time itself to a team's will.

An offence in motion tends to stay in motion (so be careful) Playlist:

A Tribe Called Quest- I Left My Wallet in El Segundo (vamp. remix)
Control Machete y Blanquito Man – Cumbia Sobre el Rio
Ryuichi Sakamoto - e Preciso Perdoar
Nortec Collective – Panoptica (kkkkkribcraack)

bonus: EagleSeagull - Your Beauty is a Knife I Turn on my Thoat

parent teacher conference day

Independently of knowing of this blog, of course, The Beauootiful Miss Molly has nicknamed the littlest one “Mr. Justice”. You mean The Judge?, I ask. She laughs. He’s reading at a 5^th grade level and comprehending a couple grades higher . . . (back at ya, Ears, with the trophy thing). Also, um, Natalia and he are a couple—Natalia is determined and he has little choice in the matter. He seems resigned to it, Molly says. They’re the only ones at their level, and she outweighs him by about 30 pounds. Being gifted brings certain burdens.

johnny cash - you know I see the dark(er)ness
(acid pauli remix) (link repaired-this song is like nothing else)

for Virgo this week: In the fairy tale "Hansel and Gretel," a wicked stepmother convinces her husband that the only way the two of them will survive poverty and starvation is to take his children deep into the woods and abandon them. That way there'll be two fewer mouths to feed. The kids overhear the plan, and as the adults lead them into the middle of nowhere, Hansel, the son, surreptitiously leaves a trail of white stones. This allows him and his sister Gretel to find their way back home later. The stepmom is chagrined. A few weeks thereafter, she once again convinces her spouse to leave the children in the wastes. This time Hansel drops breadcrumbs to mark the path, but they're eaten by birds and the kids have no way to get back. Moral of the story: When you get sucked away from your source, leave clues that are more like stones, not crumbs. Alternative moral of the story: Don't return to a source that doesn't want you there.

who knew?

amon tobin - deo
link repaired

(image from Artists in Buffalo)

T is for Titus who flew into bits.
(Neville and Maud)

it's like a preteen Olsen twin mash pit kind of thing .. somewhere between adorable and dashing out your brains

"Like a Prayer (Madonna cover)," glitterbug

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

--Elizabeth Bowen
The House in Paris (1935)

[if there were not DmS, it would not be bearable]

(gone fishing)

I made it on the bevel.

1. There is more surface for the nails to grip.
2. There is twice the gripping-surface to each seam.
3. The water will have to seep into it on a slant. Water moves easiest up and down and straight across.
4. In a house people are upright two-thirds of the time. So the seams and joints are made up-and-down. Because the stress is up-and-down.
5. In a bed where people lie down all the time, the joints and seams are made sideways, because the stress is sideways.
6. Except.
7. A body is not square like a cross-tie.
8. Animal magnetism.
9. The animal magnetism of a dead body makes the stress come slanting, so the seams and joints of a coffin are made on a bevel.
10. You can see by an old grave that the earth sinks down on the bevel.
11. While in a natural hole it sinks by the center, the stress being up-and-down.
12. So I made it on the bevel.
13. It makes a neater job.

--Cash Bundren

for Virgo this week: The Delaware Gap National Recreation Area in Pennsylvania has an outhouse that cost $333,000 to build. It's a two-hole beauty with a roof constructed from slate mined in Vermont, porch railings built out of Indiana limestone, and an indestructible cobblestone foundation. This is your symbol of power for the coming week, Virgo. May it inspire you to devote elegant, sumptuous attention to one of your most basic needs.

clem snide - grievance

frou frou - all the waiting

lady sovereign - love me or hate me

black painting 2 - cecily brown

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radiohead – how to disappear completely

mid drift, 11.2006

from Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity:

Free beings alone can be strangers to one another. Their freedom which is common to them is precisely what separates them. As a pure knowledge, language consists in the relationship with a being that in a certain sense is not in relation to me, or, if one likes, that is in a relationship with me only insomuch as he is wholly in relation to himself, [Greek word?, looks like kaOavro], a being that stands beyond every attribute –a being, consequentially, completely naked.

james eric - More than This (roxy music cover)

This week: Sometimes, Virgo, you're too damn smart for your own good. (LOL) You may describe a problem so brilliantly, for instance, that you think you've solved it merely by talking about it, and never get around to actually fixing it. On other occasions your fine mind runs amuck in an orgy of razor-sharp analysis (snort), cutting things apart in order to understand them but not putting them back together again. I beg you not to indulge in these excesses during the coming week. Your intelligence will be soaring beyond even its usual exceptional levels, and it would be a shame for you not to capitalize on it momentously.

O damn, ixnay the orgy this week.

Motor – Black Powder

(more new bedding la la la)

Matisse - Harmony in Red

So, the bedroom. Obviously, it’s a feng shui challenge. It used to be the “guest room” though we rarely had guests. I think of it as the room I retreated to and lived in apart, like an ill-performing au pair who could not yet depart for her own country. Yes. This is the room that was the waiting room for the departure to my own country. I had a futon on the floor, some books, some cans of orange soda and whiskey, and a laptop in the dark. It could use a chi pick-me-up before my ass cheeks crack into bits of ice and hit the ground. The book says to get rid of mirrors and any family photos. Ears broke the mirror recently and I decided that given the circumstances I’d count that as 7 years bad luck BACKWARDS. The book says that you should hang photos of happy couples, and I go with Fay Ray in King Kong’s fist. The book says to pick restful colors and colors to look good by, flesh toned hues. So I go to the paint store, the one I always go to, down on Best.

Those guys have been with me since the mid 90’s, through the commune and the sanctum and 12 and 81 several times over each, since I’m always remodeling something or other. I’ve got a fistful of off-whites. I’m trying to lighten up. I lay them on the counter, making my final selection: whipped cream, fresh bread, vanilla, champagne, or melted ice cream. See the punch line coming? Yeah, they’re all edible. I hadn’t noticed. I suppose it could be a backhanded blessing that my X told me once (and again and again and) that I am a Ridiculous Person. Good practice. Since this year has taught me that I can be lost in the Ridiculous Woods like Little Ridiculous Riding Hood and not know I’m about to get my frozen ass chewed off (or not, as my Unconscious would like to point out). I bite the inside of my cheek (shit lololo), one of the guys says “Toning it down, eh?” and I smile politely “Melted ice cream, please – Thanks.”

David Gilmore Girls – House Warming Party

The Judge orates philosophical truths from the back seat. His latest: Life is like a race downhill towards a deadend. Then he ranked his grandparents for which he thought was out in front. He thought he was clever and lucky besides to be the youngest. But his brother pointed out that the dog was the first to go, and she was younger than he was. The Judge thought about it a second. “You’re Right”, he said soberly.

sometimes it's just too hard to go back i think...
sometimes there's nothing to go back to...
sometimes there was never anything there but attempt
turned inward contemptuous words breed contemptuous thoughts
maybe this is all there ever is

- words and image from faintedink

(come back, we’ll drink more wine)

It’s good to know some writers and some books. The need for expression and the capacity for it are two different things. The need for ______ and the capacity for it are two different things. Capacity for it and its existence are two different things. I had once and again the capacity for what did not exist. So I made it. I had once and again and again (and again?) the capacity to lend that capacity to others. I can make-pull a man towards me into being. I have need of this. But I should be careful, and now I try to be, stepping around the shards of glass barefoot, trying not to get cut but refusing to put my shoes on also because in safety you can lose your feel for it altogether. No stomp stomp stomp just to go downhill faster, as people seem hell bent to do, stepping on or over whomever they will like roadkill.

It is a beautiful day. We go for a walk. He seems happy. He says hello to almost everyone. He looks at me, asks me a question with this eyes: “Is it just me, or has that storm made a buffet of hard hats and rescue workers out of the city?” He takes a sniff. I always look at my feet when I walk, and have to remind myself to look up, which doesn’t cost anything if I don’t want it to, since I’m too short to make eye contact without further effort on my part. Usually, anyway. Our solitude together is interrupted when one says hello back, three times, and seems to be talking to me. Looking dead ahead, I am eye level with his diaphram, the hernia of which killed my brother. I hear someone else singing in my head, stare politely right on through. To one I would say “okay”, to someone else I would say “I always say okay.” This seems a crucial difference to me. But it probably isn't. Say La Vee.

Meanwhile, I study feng shui.

trentemoller - take me into your skin

tegan and sarah – when you were mine (prince cover)

tournament day

I definitely have a mood that would not be ill expressed by spinning nun(numb)chucks and knives in whirling circles and throwing them into the air to catch them on the turn around as I barked out EEEEYA at the top of my lungs over a deafening soundtrack of warehouse dance party heavy beat. The boys are in training for that mood. Like "Stop Drop and Roll", one hopes it’s an unnecessary precaution, but . .

Eeya: Disillusionment and Frustration Training, 11.2006

Ears won his first trophies, in forms and sparring both. The sparring was particularly impressive, since he is the smallest by far in his rank, and he came out of his corner like a leprechaun composed of adrenalin on a mission. His eyes were as big as half dollars, and he literally spun at his opponents in a blur of little "eeya eeyas". The first round, the Master stopped at the point hit and laughed out loud, "Wow little buddy, Geez!" I looked at him and thought sure he already knew plenty about that mood thing.

The Judge got 2 medals, and was disheartened by his brother’s larger success. Noticing that, then Ears refused to have his picture taken without him. I told Judge that all little brothers catch up to their older ones, and do better in the long run usually because they don’t make the same mistakes. I told him that my own sister was sad when I had him and thought she’d never have a kid so great, but that now she was having her own baby. He said, Well that doesn’t count because almost all girls wind up having some babies but not all boys wind up winning trophies.

Lifting Belly Baby and Bokun Playlist:

Outrageous Cherry – Paranoid World
The Knife – You Take My Breath Away (mylo remix)
Graham Coxon – Freakin Out
Ash - Meltdown
Juniper (Damien Rice + Bell x1) - World is Dead
Margot and the Nuclear So-and-Sos-Barfight Power Revolution Violence (o Canada la la la) [best in show]

bonus track:

the postal service - brand new colony

from News of the Weird this week:

In September, the headmistress of the Dvergsnes primary school in Kristiansand, Norway, proposed that boys be taught to urinate while seated, in order to reduce splashing and mis-targeting, which burden the cleaning staff, but many parents and politicians reacted bitterly. Said Vidar Kleppe of the Justice and Order party, "It's a human right (for a boy) not to have to sit down like a girl," adding that the school was "fiddling with God's work." Parent Nancy Bakke was proud of her 7-year-old boy's ability to aim: "This rule goes against everything I've tried to teach my son." [Daily Telegraph (London), 10-15-06]

the pretenders - precious

Lorenzo Martin, 34, was charged with domestic violence in September, accused of holding his estranged wife's leg in a bed of fire ants, resulting in more than 100 bites (Cottonwood, Ala.).

cake - world of two
elliot smith - ballad of big nothing

beware of dog (he snores)

voices of the seven woods - an hour before dawn (if only--seems like it's now light in this city only about an hour a day total)

If the thirst would subside just for awhile

It would be a little bit, enough.

--Ashbery"On the Towpath"

I am finally reconnected to the World. And I try to think of what to say or even think about the last several weeks as words come rushing like factory girls in a panic over a fire at the backside of my face, which is not a door. I suppose I’ve been building a fortress mostly. I like my handiwork so far well enough. I like the houseplants reclaimed from the snow and the smell of new paint and of the sage I burned to smudge the place. Locks (click click), stairs, up and up, closing the ways in behind me as I go, bricking them over, Rapunzel of heart. (Did Batgirl ever get a cave of her own?) I turn around and think that nobody would have the hutzpa or quixoticism or imagination to attempt to scale this, certainly not against my will. I’ll let down a knotted rope, maybe, if you know the password and have a jar of some kind of secret sauce as a fort-warming present. No fucking strangers allowed.

Meanwhile, I also get to know my tenants. They guard the first floor. A couple, their first apartment, she’s a graduate student and he’s currently working as a painter and retaking the GRE’s. She’s been going bonkers increasingly, first with no power for over a week, and no internet still as of when she left this morning. I hear her flipping out down there, weepy hissy fits, and then his appeasing voice. Once I glanced through the window on my way in when they were in the middle of one of those, at day’s end again with the hard hats not showing up again. He was kneeling in front of her, and she had her hands over her face trying to pull it together. I am deeply glad they are here—they are the perfect counter in spirit to the unhappy-couple vibe this place has been sucking up for too long, and I like particularly that they are on the first floor, where I remodeled to make everything so beautiful and wrote in my journal two years ago that its loveliness seemed in direct negative proportion to the punishing marriage resident within it. Like this year, I was living in two places, so to speak. The little couple in love are righting the chi on the other side of the torn wall. My side is still a gash. I’m working on that.

for Virgo this week: In a number of indigenous cultures, there's the tradition of the "joking relationship." Two members of an extended family, often a brother and sister-in-law, are expected to form a bond that revolves around them playfully teasing each other. If you don't have an ally like that in your life, Virgo, I urge you to get one. And if you already do have such a companion, raise your connection to an even higher level of loving mischief and jocular amusement. It'll keep you loose in just the right ways during the coming weeks and months.

the caesars - jerk it out