VIRGO this week:

Once upon a time, you asked a certain someone for a blessing. Instead, he or she blasted you with a curse. The debilitating blow of that bad magic hit you right smack in the place that was ripe for the blessing you requested. What a tragedy! Now, at last, you're wise and strong enough to defeat the power of that old curse. Here's the first step: Understand that the seed of the blessing you once needed (and still need) is hidden within and obscured by the curse. Figure out what that blessing is, and it will reveal to you what to do next. (P.S.: The French word for "wound" is blessure. It suggests that blessing can come from wounding.)

heaven - alan lomax (irony)

rachid taha - bakara

There really is no pressing need for me to be anything other than a radiant bundle of fascinating contradictions.

lavern baker - tweedledee dee

hawksley workman - on the hightway tonight

Anita O'Day - Little Girl Blue

Why am I watching Major League Baseball and reading the Bible online? (long [increasingly sad] story)

Song of Solomon 1.7:

Tell me, you whom I love, where you graze your flock
and where you rest your sheep at midday.
Why should I be like a veiled woman
beside the flocks of your friends?

(i.e. icksnay on the eepshay)

Eddie Vedder w/ Ben Harper– Throw Your Arms Around Me

world cup sunday

John Gorka - Italian Girls (website)

Clothelines Revival – Ramblin Man (website)

self help reading + music

from “Fort Apache Iraq”, by Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone this week:

To understand the war in Iraq, you first have to understand the people who are fighting it. . . .

Wilkerson has an outstanding tattoo on his foot, an arrow pointing to his big toe that reads TAG GOES HERE. Back home in Oklahoma, he'd been one half of the inspiration for an underground comic book called Split-Dick and Stretch-Nuts. Which half? Wilkerson could pull his nut sack so far out of his zipper that he could balance a sixteen-ounce can of Heineken on the outstretched membrane-tray. It was a trick the whole squad referred to, with reverent awe, as "The Grandmother's Tongue." "I just have stretchy skin, I guess," he said.

The conventional wisdom about Iraq these days is that this war was and is a colossal blunder, a classic crime of hubris that has metastasized into a disaster rapidly spinning far beyond our control. And, well, who knows, that may be true -- but only a goddamn Canadian can fail to appreciate the dream of omnipotence roaring along these Middle Eastern highways.

[speechless]

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from “Tom Petty’s Last Dance”, retrospective/interview/review in same edition:

Square One

Saving Grace (both from forthcoming CD, Highway Companion)

Don’t Fade on Me (acoustic, reviewed in “Deep Cuts”, Wildflowers)

I think of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as movie soundtrack music, i.e. how could anyone forget the last victim in Silence of the Lambs singing along at the top of her lungs to “American Girl” right before she gets shoved in the hole, on the wall of which she sees the broken nail of the last girl who tried to claw her way out? But these tracks are all really (really) good.

bonus: You Got Lucky

self help reading + music

from the Britney Spears - Matt Lauer interview transcript:

Lauer: Can you imagine ever living anywhere else? Could you pick up from here and go to small town America again?
Spears: Maybe ... I could go to Atlanta. I've been to Atlanta. I like suburbia-type area ... I love where I live right now. It's really beautiful and stuff like that.


Lauer: What do you see in him? What is it about Kevin that makes you love him?
Spears: He’s very simple. Women complicate everything. He’s so simple. His simplicity and just he’s like a boy. He just, you know, and he cares. He cares so much and his—his heart is awesome. [lol]


Lauer: Talk about motherhood.
Spears: Motherhood.
Lauer: Yeah.
Spears: It’s amazing.

Lauer: What kind of music would you be thinking about? Because you’re at that kind of—
Spears: I have no idea.
Lauer: Well, but it’s an interesting time in a career for someone like you, because you’re not 17 anymore.
Spears: Right.
Lauer: You know, you’re gonna be, what? 25?
Spears: Uh-huh (affirms).
Lauer: And so what kind of music is going around in your head these days?
Spears: To be good music is it’s gotta be timeless.
Lauer: But because you’re a businesswoman, you know when you release new music there is an audience out there.
Spears: Oh, yeah.
Lauer: And who is that audience now for Britney Spears?
Spears: I don’t know.

Lilly Allen - O My God . . . (website)

tuesday ain't much better

I’m trying not to be depressed. The thing about being depressed, though, is that the more you try not to be, the more you think you suck because you’re failing and then the more depressed you get.

First off, it’s raining. The only time that’s good is when you’ve got nothing to do and a mattress on the floor and your beloved in it. Otherwise, it’s raining. My hair will suck all day and my dog will prefer to crap inside.

Second, it’s my nation’s birthday. That’s like having to go to a party for your asshole boss. The only upside is the fireworks, but um it’s raining.

pansies

So I summon the list of things that might make me feel better—clean stuff and put it in right places, run to China, buy something, paint something, read something, listen to music, have a chat with a real friend [laugh or cry]. The list gets better as it goes, I realize, the further it gets from “productivity”. But it gets worse as it goes too, because it gets more dependent on the existence of other people. I’ve never been very good at finding others whose presence makes me feel better rather than worse, which is why I’ve made some people from scratch (thank god). I want a heart that is shaped like a place into which I can let myself with the key that has my name on it and I can set myself down and feel ‘welcome’ wrap around me like a warm good smell. Then I’ll know I’m home.

Damien Rice – I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (U2 cover/Blower’s Daughter mash-up)

the artist formerly known as wednesday

John Prine – Long Monday
Augustana – Midwest Skies and Sleepless Mondays
Jimmy Buffet – Come Monday
Buddy Guy – Stormy Monday Blues
Damien Rice – Moody Monday
Malcolm Middleton – Monday Night Nothing

self help reading + music

from the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, mark haddon:

And when I was asleep I had one my favorite dreams.

And in the dream nearly everyone on earth is dead, because they have caught a virus. But it’s not like a normal virus. It’s like a computer virus. And people catch it because of the meaning of something an infected person says and the meaning of what they do with their faces when they say it, which means that people can also get it from watching an infected person on television, which means that it spreads around the world really quickly.

And when people get the virus they just sit on the sofa and do nothing and they don’t eat or drink and so they die.

And eventually there is no one left in the world except people who don’t look at other people’s faces and these people are all special people like me. And they like being on their own and I hardly ever see them because they are like okapi in the jungle in the Congo, which are a kind of sloth and are very shy and rare.

And I can go anywhere in the world and I know that no one is going to talk to me or ask me a question. But if I don’t want to go anywhere I don’t have to, and I can stay home and eat broccoli and oranges and licorice laces all the time, or I can play computer games for a whole week, or I can just sit in the corner of the room and run a $1 coin back and forth over the ripple shapes on the surface of the radiator. And I wouldn’t have to go to France.

the wreckers - leave the pieces

"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