Duke Ellington - Day-ream

Britt Daniel - Bring It On Home To Me (Sam Cooke Cover)

Bang Gang - It's Alright

bonus- Otis Redding – I Can’t Turn You Loose (from The Very Best of Otis Redding, 1992)

ruthie foster – People Grinnin in Your Face (son house cover) – [kicks your ass recommend - if u never listen to anything else off here, u might wanna pick this one] ] I actually BOUGHT it today, because I couldn’t find it blogged anywhere and I had to have it. ( web)

for Virgo: You're capable of pulling off some unprecedented mixing and matching in the coming weeks, Virgo. You could figure out a way to blend oil and water, metaphorically speaking. And you might find a logical loophole that allows you to reasonably compare apples and oranges. But those examples represent only the most obvious ways your skills at juxtaposition could work. You might also, for example, be a matchmaker for the son of a Saudi Arabian oil magnate and a Jewish goth performance artist, or convince the Dalai Lama to have a summit with Paris Hilton.
Wax Fang - Bi-Polar Bear

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To Love Somebody - Ray LaMontagne & Damien Rice (bee gees cover)

Benjamin Costello Volcano (Damien Rice cover) [original] the first line of this song melts me down

The Mothers: Pefumlani Kunye/Breathe Together feat. Miriam Makeba

I love this.

self help reading + music

from Flesh and Blood, Michael Cunningham:

Billy was lying on his bed looking at this comic strip when his mother called him to dinner. It was an old strip, one his mother had given him, about a cat in love with a mouse who despised her. With every brick the mouse threw at her the cat fell more deeply in love, until her head was lost in a whirlwind of hearts and exclamation points, the mingled signs of her devotion and her wounds. Bill had so adored the comic strip that he’d begged his mother to let him keep it, and he looked at it almost every day, the big nosed cat stupefied by love for the furious, spindle armed mouse. His mother read the words to him until he knew them by heart. “ignatz my dollink. I loves ya a million times. Wham.” The sequence of panels excited him, stirred round in his chest. He never tired of watching the cat and the mouse go through their unchanging sequence of injury and pure, bottomless affection.


She liked the idea that her own body would fit completely inside his. She could wear him like a suit of armor. A wet, frigid smell rose from the grass and she contemplated his belly, where little pools of his semen lay, opalescent in the shifting dark. At first his discharge had repelled her but gradually her revulsion had turned to interest. This viscous juice came from Todd’s inward, secret self. Todd, the senior class president, whose mother ironed his undershirts. The spilling of semen was so unlike him that Susan couldn’t help but be moved. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Tasting you,” she said. “Strictly for scientific purposes,” she said. But she heard the thinness in her own voice. She had miscalculated. What she’d done was not the province of people in love. She was sluttish, grotesque. They sat up and began putting their clothes on, Todd took a handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped his stomach with swift unsentimental motions, as if he was cleaning the windshield of a car.


The inner workings of his body were implicit under his skin the way most men’s nakedness was implicit under their clothes, and she imagined undressing him, peeling the skin away from the wet purple skeins of muscle and reaching in for the lungs and intestines. She imagined taking out his rampant, glistening heart, and holding it—its obstreperous thump—in her hands. Levon’s body was blatant, unashamed, unmysterious. His only secret resided in his brain, where he kept a tight little knot of Levonness, strange griefs and needs that nothing, no comfort or sex, no ceremony, could touch. What did she mean to tell him? That she loved him so much she wanted to dismantle him, organ by organ, and hold each part reverently as the sun rose over the tenements. That she wanted to fuck him right there, on the fire escape, to be blotted out and sung to and moved around until she was something else, another shape in the changing world. He finished the song in his own time. While she waited, running her open hands over the ropy surface of his back, Zoe knew what it was like to be a sea captain’s widow, out on the walk with her husband’s ghost who was wailing her the news an hour before the messenger arrived. Mourning was straightforward, a simple anguish. From now on, life would be easier. No more wondering if he was safe. No more worrying that his love has started to ravel and fade.


“You’re growing up aren’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Forgive me for being corny. You’re growing up. You’re turning into somebody.”
“No,” he said. “I’m not.”
“Jamal?”
“What?”
“Nothing. Do me a favor, all right?”
“What?”
“Don’t grow up to be an asshole.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ve been a good mother to you, haven’t I? A reasonably good mother, considering?”
“I guess.”
“Well, if you’re going to grow up without me, that’s about all the advice I’ve got for you. Try not to be an asshole.”
“Okay.”

Amy Millan - He Brings Out The Whiskey In Me (web)

Women were pulled through the world. Only the most powerful disappointment could make them stop loving, and once they'd stopped . . . Inner valves would close. Their body chemistry would change. It wouldn't be what they wanted.

Benny Goodman-Sing Sing Sing-1937
Uploaded by redhotjazz

belleville rendez-vous - les triplettes - mathieu chedid (very high recommend)

The little couple downstairs are fighting again. I’m on a forced-bloom-manic spring-project binge, and am now sitting here with a sunburn and sore ass muscles, listening to her yell over the Fleetwood Mac they play to hide it. She’s an ‘environmental phenomenologist’ [i.e. a grad student who skips seminars a lot and spends most of her time in thrift stores], and has read a lot of Thich Nhat Hanh, walking around barefoot softly on the earth and not fighting w her partner bla bla—which was somewhat easier when they didn’t live together, weren’t in grad school, and had nothing better to do than have sex all day long. And as it turns out, the hippie in her goes thrift-store deep, under which is a somewhat high maintenance moody headstrong bossy bessy [i.e. she made him move my console stereo (remember that phase?) down to her apartment from the attic while the Sabres were playing]. Yes, NOW. Okeeee then.

Earlier today, she rode along to get garden fencing from Home Depot that I installed on the upper porch after Jasper tried to kill himself and I caught him by the scruff mid-plummet. I was already buzzy with adrenalin from a morning nightmare and then that, so my stomach is lsdjaldjadlkafdarkly fretsoup, and she’s yapping cheerfully about peephole shoes she found on ebay, when she turns and asks, Can you hear it when we’re fighting? No, I lie. We never used to fight, she says, We went the first two years without a single fight, and now we kind of fight all the time—you think that’s natural or a bad sign?

She’s asking me? (lol) I think, whoa nobody could have made more babies and more breakups and less intimacy out of a list so short that that in itself is probably a syndrome of some kind than me. I suppose that might make me a good reader of bad signs? I know I’m supposed to say “o it’s fine” all big-sis like, of course. I think about it for a long minute. I think of fighting. Of all the times, most of the time, that I curled silent in a corner and then retreated to a hard bunker in my head too and simply waited for them to stop, stop yelling, stop bullying, stop being, stop wanting something so much it had to be wrung out of me and I never knew, not once really, what the fucking hell it was. So I say, When a woman stops fighting with her lover it’s a bad sign, because then she’s actually left and it just doesn’t show yet—fighting with is kind of fighting for. I thought that sounded pretty good. Pithy. Buuuut now she’s yelling her head off at him down there, hahaha—O well, sorry Dan. :/

Clare Burson – Blue Pearl (web) [high recommend]
Bonus - Audioslave - One and the Same

Joss Stone - Put Your Hands On Me

I went with the queen of soul over popes of mope today.

Aretha Franklin - You'll Lose a Good Thing

Eartha Kitt - If I Was A Boy

Mark Ronson (ft. Daniel Merriweather) – Stop Me [Smiths cover]

I've Been Thinking -- Handsome Boy Modeling School feat. Cat Power

Postal Blue - Weather Sensitive

"Girls Just Want to Have Fun (Cyndi Lauper cover)," Greg Laswell

Iron & Wine – Someday the Waves

(he's exaggerating), Drew

and so she became a pillar of salt






.


Reading is, writing is, in some way analogous to sport, or at least to exertion. There’s a ZONE and you know when you’re in it, you know when you’re gonna get in it, you know when you’re not in it, and you know when you’re not gonna get in it. Sometimes I turn the corner of some mile or get to the summit of something or turn a corner and I think, “yup”. And sometimes I think, “nope”. I watched the playoff beards grow and the Sabres win and I was thinking, “Maybe”. Maybe a Thing, or maybe a No Thing. Sometimes it’s like that too. (Not usually.)




I am reading Slaughter House 5 because I never did. I meant to:

'I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction. The sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar, I read. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthre those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.
So it goes.
Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them.
And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
So she was turned to a pillar of salt.
So it goes.'




I have a grudge against James Joyce. Here’s how it went. First, he intimidated me, which is never a good place to start. Some people find that compelling, but I don’t. I don’t assume you’re going to be more interesting for that, just more insecure underneath, as if what I’m really picking up is the distant sound of something tolling in a hollow. I had read Portrait of The Artist a few years prior, but I didn’t know who James was then, and then when we re-met it turned out he was some big shit whatever with reading groups that met on Saturdays and Hegel would be there and it was very cliquey. But some of the people in the club, I trusted. Susan Howe, for instance, who on a personal level can be emotionally dangerous, but when she says something about what she needs to read, she’s quiet and she means it like she’s talking about what it’s like to be terrified and you think “eek, yup, stop!” So I borrow Ulysses. I start. It’s summer, I’m lazy, I don’t get far, I ask a question about how he’s using a word. The answer started with “Good for you for asking, that’s a smart question.” And I didn’t hear the rest of the answer, because I was thinking When I read Portrait I could go from the English to the Latin and back again without looking at the footnotes or slowing in the least Jackass, and that was that. Now when I think of Joyce, I think it’s something I might want, like a glass of wine, and/but I picture myself getting the glass and being lectured at from above about the wine’s nose and its legs and its Wine Advocate rating while the candlelight flickers unnoticed across my shoulders and smooth upper back, my prettiest parts I reckon, and I take another long pull of the booze and think I wish I were playing Air Hockey right now. . . . . . . --I’m probably being a snippy bitch. So I ordered Finnigan’s Wake. But it’s snowing here still and again and stiiiilllll, and I am burning through my “meant to have read it” pile at the rate of frustration . . . I’m not sure ordering Joyce is a good sign, given that. --Maybe.




Meanwhile, the ending of The Road was a bit Aslan, but I cried anyway. Which was nice. If I had a uniform, it would be a pair of butt-worn jeans and a t-shirt that reads “Please Get to Me” and the lettering would be invisible.

You am I – Please Don’t Ask Me to Smile (web)

"Humor is an almost physiological response to fear."

from FaintedInk: There's a thing when you read if you're a 'reader' and the thing is nose stuck too close to the page as breath holding you move through the book. It's like you meet the book in the store, you turn to your random page (mine is 78 but everyone has something different), you read the page, a line jumps out, you say fuuuuuucccck you buy the book, you can't wait to get home, you get home, you take off your clothes, slowly methodically you open the book, and you begin inside the book, hips trembling with each turning page, hours and hours and hours go by until...as you move through...you finish the book with a sigh, with a reflective look towards and away from that last page and then once in a while and only once in a while, you turn on the bath you slide in and you re-open the book and read it all again.

think about it dude, Drew

Janis Joplin - The Roller Skate Song (Melanie cover)

The Flaming Lips (w Beck) – Lost Cause

from Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife:

He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment is slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting.

Foot stamp. Cold. I’m pretending this will be over soon and meanwhile trying not to think about it. Pretending this will be over soon + Not thinking about it = Reading.

from Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum:

For when he steps into my room it is to me as though I am waking on a strange and unlikely margin. As though the ocean is set suddenly before me. Landlocked, you forget. Then all of a sudden you are wading hip-high into the surge of waves. In the moment there is so much meaning, so much hunger in our mouths and skin. I think every time is the last time I will be with him. I am physically amazed. What I like best is the curious, unfolding, confessional quality of sex. How could he lie?

I’ve woken furious and self-berating. I dragged my heart around like an apple on a string. Dangled it, daring some man to take a bite. Now he sinks his teeth into it and I’m terrified to be devoured. I jerk away and swing wildly out of reach.

I stare at his face, all shadows in the silver dark, and the terrible, familiar wish to be nothing, to shatter to dust, moves me. I break along with him and go where he is. We are like feral children with no rules. It seems that my sorrow is deep in my bones and I’d have to break every single one to let it out.

This is Erdrich’s thing: sex and sadness. Making love on Indian time, she calls it. Gallows humor--how can you have sex without absurdity? impossible.



Cormac McCarthy is a sore spot like Faulkner. Everyone wants to write about the import of him and all that shit. “McCarthy and the Notion of the Border” whatever. Literary criticism is like a condom made by Dunn Tire. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read As I Lay Dying. McCarthy is always compared to Faulkner, who is always sheathed too like that. It bugs me. Dying is a book onto the thicket stomach of which I fall grateful for the familiarity every time I open it, which I have countless times. Back to McCarthy, who isn’t as good but: In Outer Dark, a man goes over a cliff with a stampede and the sentence lasts a paragraph, through which I held my breath then had to turn back and do it again. Child of God. McCarthy’s portraiture of monstrosity stops you up. Because it’s nothing. It’s just a guy, and the world then this and then that and pretty soon you’re there with the character, witnessing and capable of horror by an incremental process you munched grilled cheese through, no problemo. The new one arrived today . . .

From Cormac McCarthy, The Road:

Dark of the invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with its lamp.

In a pocket of his knapsack he’d found a last half packet of cocoa and he fixed it for the boy then poured his own cup with hot water and sat blowing at the rim.
You promised not to do that, the boy said.
What?
You know what, Papa.
He poured the hot water back into the pan and took the boy’s cup and poured some of the cocoa into his own and then handed it back.
If you break little promises you’ll break big ones. That’s what you said.
I know. But I won’t

They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. The one thing I can tell you is that you won’t survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body.

He was a big man but he was quick. He dove and grabbed the boy and rolled and came up holding him against his chest with a knife at his throat. The man had already dropped to the ground and he swung with him and leveled the pistol and fired from a two-handled position balanced on both knees at a distance of six feet. The man fell back instantly and lay with blood bubbling from the hole in his forehead. The boy was lying in his lap with no expression on his face at all. He shoved the pistol in his belt and slung the knapsack over his shoulder and picked up the boy and turned him around and lifted him up over his head and set him on his shoulders and set off up the old roadway at a dead run, holding the boy’s knees, the boy clutching his forehead, covered with gore and mute as a stone.

Are we still the good guys?, he said.
Yes. We’re still the good guys.
And we always will be.
Yes. We always will be.
Okay.

Thelonius Monk – The Man I Love

TJ asks, What did you name me after again?
Not what, whom. A theologian.
What’s a theologian?
O, a guy who tries to understand how God works.
How does he do that?
He spends a lot of time alone thinking about it and trying to talk to God.
Why?
So he can explain it to other people.
What did he say about it?
That God can’t save you.
From what?
From yourself whatever. Nobody can save you, that’s what he said God thinks.
So what good is God then?
Good question.
When I grow up, I’m going to be a theologian.
Okee.

(pause of some days . . . )

I found out that prophets are the boss of theologians.
[lol] Really? How’d you find that out?
I asked somebody, he says. So I’ve decided I’m going to be a prophet instead.
Okee.
Can you transform this for me?, he asks, plunking down one of the toy-banes of my existence.
O shit, I haaaate transforming these damn things.
Nobody can save you! ha ha

TJ got sick going into the holiday. There are certain things to do. I like the doing. They come home, the cleanliness and order of which is doubly pleasurable when they feel crappy. TJ goes to the couch, waits for the pillow, leans over, gets the bendy straw and the extra cartoon network. Ears, because he’ll get extra television without fever-deserving it [yet?], goes and sits at the kitchen table. I write word problems that feature words he finds funny. He works them out, says “You can’t really take a fart back.” I put the slow cooker on w pot roast, the smell all day helps appetite. I give TJ soup. He says, seriously, “I love soup.” Nap time. Ears gets to play computer, TJ goes down, I lay next to him and read more and doze, listening to his nose clear. When they go to bed, the living room pillows and blankets go into hot water, windows cracked to air the room. When it all passes, all the bedding goes through hot water and the floors get mopped down with a tablespoon of bleach.

The curtains are always clean. The cupboards stocked with the known favorites, never out. There is always butter. I know what to do, what to give, how much of it and when.

In terms of adults, though, it’s like a person who has been paralyzed flexing her toes. Better than not at all, but awkward and with discomfort. What takes shape in dark corners is an absence I often can't quite make out.

happy easter

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they lost but god damn

Drive-By Truckers - Goddamn Lonely Love

link repaired

"Strictly speaking, time does not exist (except within the limit of the present), yet we have to submit to it. Such is our condition. We are subject to that which does not exist. Whether it is a question of passively borne duration--physical pain, waiting, regret, remorse, fear--or of organized time--order, method, necessity--in both cases, that to which we are subject does not exist. But our submission exists."

--Simone Weil
Gravity and Grace

djay – it’s hard out here for a pimp (hustle and flow)

wa







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http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php?menuID=2&subID=1611

FaintedInk posted that story today. I picture those teeth in the road when you pull into a parking garage, and the sign says DON’T BACK UP. That contraption would be very dangerous to make available over the counter, considering how many women, on any given day, will have gotten fed up and to the point at which they’re ready to ask for some Attention! from their guys for the laaaasst time. Ya know what I’m talkin’ bout?