Tag: music

over a year ago, do you remember?


Heaven’s in the backseat
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Here there are no weeds growing, there are no patches of green grass to startle the eyes through the snow and hard packed side-walk ice. The reality is fiercely burning ears, tips of noses too numb to feel, and lips slurring inexpansively from cold. It gets dark quickly with no ocean to snare the sun. Walking down the street is noticing the flash of neon signs reflecting off eye-glass lenses, is watching black trends in coats and scarfs, is wishing for someone beautiful to step out from the crowd to ask your name. I’m feeling like I’m failing at being at peace. I could find something here to capture me, but I’m lost for a direction. There’s so much to explore that all I’ve accomplished is walking. I’m not clicking into place like a missing computer chip, instead I’ve barely scratching a surface I’m not even sure I’ve been allowed to see.

Why aren’t you here beside me? When I’m running on so few hours of sleep, my dreams are always just on the edge of sleep, as if hallucinations are forcing me down into the bed instead of the insistent hand of gravity. Around the screaming edges of my tired lids are dark curls bleeding into my field of vision, the institutional brushes of a fingertip along the inside of my arm, the certainty that a tongue has just shaped the sounds required to speak my name. I flinch away, turning my head into my pillow, and sink into sleep, haunted by subliminal echoes of another bed, the one I would rather be in, wherever that is. I’m not even sure right now. People make fools of places, expose them for the space occupied that they are no longer living in. My memory lies to me, tells me that if I put my hand out, the right hand will take it, swing it to the softest lips my needs spill into and take my heart from it to cradle gently and let me rest. Sleeping lately hasn’t been rest. My heart is soul searching without me, leaving me always on the edge of exhaustion. I’m finding it difficult to follow simple conversation and the native language isn’t sticking to me at all. Instead, I’m shoving off, wandering on-line, trying to find somewhere within walking distance that would be interesting to be at two a.m.

I slipped out of the apartment earlier to try and look at the wonder that is the sky. (A pregnant woman survived a fall from it earlier, though elsewhere.) There’s an easily accessible rooftop deck on the twenty-first and a half floor. Through the tiny gaps in the clouds, the stars are a seemingly endless metaphor for a patternless universe. I’m considering finding some of my most solid underwear and going back up. The other part of the roof encloses a heated pool. If I can’t find freedom, I might as well splash my toes around and read a good book. Last night I stayed up reading comic books that James had chosen for me from his prodigious collection. Fast fiction snacks, I thought. Strange little things, not solid enough to take a full bite of. It felt odd to be reading dedications written by people I know in the front covers, like I was deconstructing reality just the tiniest bit. Enough so that maybe when I looked up from the last page, it would be perfectly in time to see an unexpected explosion through the window, chunks of building spinning orange and black into the sky twenty blocks away.

Well, one can hope.

I have a media request of the internet audience again. You folk were so utterly amazing the last time that I figure this particular search should be a breeze. James introduced me to a music video, (download), a few months ago at Quickie Culture Night, DJ Krush – Truthspeaking, (linked here as an mp3). He’s in love with the singer, I fell in love with the DJ. However, his work is easy to find. DJ Krush is high in the hierarchy of wicked hip-hop fusion gods to come out of Japan in the last ten years, but Angelina Esparza’s a bit of an enigma. James has been unable to find anything else of hers in spite of a rather intensive search. If anyone’s got anything, could you toss it our way? Personally, I find her a little generic. Instead of finding her enchanting, I’m left craving more video with this man in it. The depth of personality he’s got engraved in his motion is simply breathtaking.

there is no higher ground

Does anyone knows where to find a copy of Useless by Kruder & Dorfmeister? I’d be happy for any of their music. What Do You Want Me To Say? by Dismemberment would be good too. I’m running out of downloaded music I like, and Pandora, though useful, runs itself into the ground when left alone too long. I set it to play Lamb and when I came back from a shower it had decided TATU would be a good idea. That I have no iTunes account merely adds to that particular annoyance. When I find enjoyable new music, I have no access to it.

  • Anti-teenager sound weapon.

    Day by day I have nothing planned. There’s a gentle tick tick tick in the back of my head. I’ll be gone in two days and I’m still uncertain what I’m doing. My house is cleaner, my room tidied, but my suitcase is sitting like a guilty house-pet on my bed, mouth open and half empty. I expected a call from Ray this morning, but the phone’s rung once and it wasn’t for me. Nicole tells me I have to face down a mall somewhere. Living in Vancouver doesn’t prepare a body for anything cold that doesn’t come out of a gelati parlour. I mostly have slim pieces of tie-on velvet and little black t-shirts with subtle line drawings of aliens on them. Nothing ready for snow, except for my scarf, and honestly, I’m not sure how many times I can pack that.

    Speaking of aliens, darling theramina posted this link to a video of a contortionist woman with especially extraordinary flexibility that is worth watching if only for the reminder that humans are capable of the weirdest things.

    Part of my shopping dread stems from the time of year I happen to be doing this in. There’s christmas lights in every display window and piped in “holiday favourites” in every store. Fake plastic trees that grab at nothing, offering hope only to little kids and people with real families. (And how many of those have secrets tucked away in sad apartments the other side of town?) I used to make stockings out of silk organza and taffeta edged with rhinestones as an attempt to fight against all the tacky red fake fur and gummy white fluff. This season though, like last year, I should be lucky to find a moment of respite in the places I plan on going to. I’ve no weapons against the overwhelming false cheer. All those beautifully wrapped boxes are empty.

  • A NOLA-area mall’s Katrina-themed holiday display has been gaining coverage.

    Nick, the regular godsend he is, has volunteered to take me down to Army & Navy today. He’s a heavy snow boarding enthusiast, so I’m going to let myself fall into his hands as if in a trust exercise. Is anyone else willing to dive into shopping hell with me? I don’t know where yet. The rare times I go shopping, I do it on The Drive. Someone suggested Metrotown, (Why don’t they ever name these places interestingly? I’d rather spend time somewhere called the virgin-whore complex.), which sounds pretty evil. Unless there’s a store marked WARM SOCKS & SWEATERS ETC, I suspect I’m going to be unsuccessful alone.

    • what’s wrong with them?

    THE AFRICAN KILLER BEE PORTRAYED IN THIS FILM BEARS ABSOLUTELY NO RELATIONSHIP TO THE INDUSTRIOUS, HARD-WORKING AMERICAN HONEY BEE TO WHICH WE ARE INDEBTED FOR POLLINATING VITAL CROPS THAT FEED OUR NATION.

    I may have a new favourite piece of found music, a track to match both Emilie Simone‘s Flowers and That One Guy‘s One. Someone named Selina Martin made this, 11 Ways To Get Into The House. There are some more mp3’s for download on her site, but she does the vocals on the rest of the available music and though she’s very damned nice, she can also be very ‘girl sitting in a tavern making people feel nostalgic for love affairs they never had’, and I’m hoping that somewhere there is more music that feels like a cross between Tom Waits and Ani Defranco.

    As a bonus, I’d like to toss in some gothy music I found through Warren‘s Apparat Programmes: Masochist Monkey Circus – You’re An Animal. To get a copy separate from the Programme, I tracked down the artist and groveled a bit. (Same sort of deal as when I was trying to find more from Revporl and Stuart Crozier after being sent the Dr. Thirsty.). He seems like a very nice fellow. I may have tracked down his journal as well, masochistmonkey, but I’m not sure. Only friends can reply to his posts. Even if I’m wrong, I’m leaving them added because it’s a pleasant read. I’m planning on writing him tonight to confirm, however, and to pass on word that I’m throwing his music to the internet winds.

    I hung up the phone and ignored the disappointed sting in my belly. Instead, I got lost in my computer and when I looked up, it seemed like there was a wolf in my doorway. A giant gray creature with golden eyes. I considered quietly picking up the reciever and pressing redial, but I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to blink. It seemed the moment I closed my eyes was a precipice hidden in a dark green forest I could tumble down and break my sight like a bone too delicate or clumsy to ever properly set. The wolf breathed out. It stood. I heard paws heavily scraping the hallway floor. One foot swung forward, placed itself firmly on the carpet of my room. I blinked. It was gone.

    On the top of something tall, I don’t remember what. It might have been a granary tower or it might have been the apex of a bridge, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I remember looking down at the sprinkle of city lights and thinking, “All of this was made. Every tiny one of a million million details was thought of by someone. There’s no where else for it to have come from. All our civilization, all our languages and ideas and music, it all came from someone. Humans are so unreal. Every emergency room in the country has a diamond tip drill for popping the vacuum when idiots shove lightbulbs into unpleasant places, and yet… those are the same people who created the infrastructure that all the rest are taking for granted. What a containment for disparity we’ve made. How beautiful all that sodium glare.”

    a crime in my country


    ultra uwe scheid
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    The angel raises her head, her eyes focusing with an audible click.

    Sometimes I’ll wake in the middle of the night, the sky still dark and broken by occasional stars strong enough to shine through to a city. My eyes are blind without my glasses, I can’t see stars, but on these rare times the darkness lets me compensate. Around me might be other people, might be only blankets. I think, “Where am I going to be?” and I feel myself leave the bed, leave my breath and body full of bones and interlocking chemicals systems and slide into the Other City, where my heart resumes beating. I have an entire life there, a place by the water, a favourite coffee shop, but I can never find it on purpose. Instead, it washes over me, into my cells like some illusive memory of being in the womb. Like when the body remains lying still on the bed, but every neuron firing tells you instead that you are weightless, floating in a fetal position, turning in warm black water.

    Amateur band performs Super Mario theme on marimba.

    There’s a wonderful music store on Commercial Drive that you should all become addicted to. The staff are friendly, with an admirable grasp of anything pleasantly obscure, and the selection is excellent. They sell odd little instruments in the front window and are always playing something you’ve never heard but instantly like. They’ve been doing it for at least twenty years. It’s like it was created for some warm love-story movie that left them behind when Hollywood knocked, but with less pretension. Aiden and I were caught earlier today by a sale table they had on the street. I walked away with Rickie Lee Jones and I’m still wondering if tearing myself away from the afro-european funk they had playing was the good idea I told myself it was. Already I caught myself singing it on the bus while I was reading my borrowed John Barnes. (One for the Morning Glory is now required reading, yo. Find yourself some kids and feed it to them, chapter by chapter.) There’s the reason I hardly ever go in.

    I went in a couple of weeks ago, though. Second time this year. I bought a street kid some guitar strings. His name’s Cody, he’s working at Juicy Juice on the Drive now, (go support him). Ryan and I met him a few months ago, his first day in Vancouver having left him begging for change outside of Love’s Touch. When we ran into him with his newly acquired guitar, I traded it for a joint, man, and he smoked it with me too, so it’s like I traded it for only half a joint, I brushed off my gift by telling him that one-string Deep Purple is a punishable crime. It’s probably true somewhere.

    edit for all of you who jumped onto messenger and asked me: I do not, in fact, remember the name of the store. It is on the block across from Beckwomans and the Santa Barbara market, (the place with the orange bags that’s a few shops down from the BBQ place that catered Jenn’s wedding and the bicycle shop), and is in between the Elizabeth Bakery and the incredibly oldschool italian cafe that goes frankly mad whenever soccer/football comes around right next to the equally brilliant bookstore and the nice little laundromat.

    “we’ll cook our food in a satellite dish”

    Our mother, a cessation of time. I stand alone, watch the clock, wanting the minute to never turn forward inside me. She is a music box full of the beating of hearts. Patches and sound, sewing them on stitch by stitch with second hand strings. Her skin is written like a music video, split clips of what I used to want when I was younger. She’s a stranger with brightly highlighted eyes. Her skin is as white as the walls. Electric arc, her nails on the tips of her fingers, her nails that hold up the timbres of her voice. I move in slow motion, snagging my shirt on the seconds that are training their sights on the pupils of my eyes. Advertising. My gun is her hair like copper lights, the bullet moves at the speed of dreaming. Her sighs are dedicated. The lights are off.

    Two dusty coins fall from my lashes when I blink, holding my tongue between her teeth. Two payments I didn’t think I’d made. I’m staring at rivers turning into I loved you, I’m dry. I could think of what I’m doing, but that would be the end of it. I would have to pick up my mourning shroud and don it, torment children, die before morning. Chords lashing me into a smeared black bit of making up. My palms are sweaty. She is the firmament, marker letters on her chest. Hello, You Have Never Met Anyone Like Me Before. I had a name. I’ve forgotten it.

  • hallowe’en to download music: devils & dead friends

    • oops, wrong speed on that one

    Peel’s comparing debut on Top Of The Pops: “In case you’re wondering who this funny old bloke is, I’m the one who comes on Radio 1 late at night and plays records made by sulky Belgian art students in basements dying of TB.”

    What sound does not create the grandest of consequence? This October 13th was the one year anniversary of the very last session played by the late John Peel. For you in the Americas, John Peel was the man whose tastes dictated law in the land of new music. Your media failed you if you didn’t know this already. He died of a heart attack last October while on vacation with his family in Peru, a tragedy. The BBC has been putting together tribute concerts for him all week.

    Here are some of Peel’s stories, collected from a series of interviews with Simon Garfield.

    Here is a collection of legally free downloads of music that he’s played, as well as a toss of links relating to other pages of Peel and information.

    Here is his list of twenty favourite albums, with a bit of Peel information on each. There is a BBC list of links at the bottom of the page that are well worth going through.

    Speech-only MP3s of Peel standing in for Mark Radclffe in October 1996, with guests Lee & Herring and Stuart Maconie. Nearly all the music has been edited out (bar a Swedish Elvis impersonator), leaving 50 minutes’ worth of deadly genius. All reports agree that Peel’s contributions on the second MP3 are particularly fine.

    A comprehensive list of his Festive 50’s, a yearly listener’s poll of favourite records.

    “I know that I’m going to die trying to read the name of some band in the headlights of a car behind me, and then drive into a truck in front. People will say, ‘Oh, this is the way he would have wanted to go.'”

    I refuse consequence.

    Sunday : working 2 – 5pm ->> 5:30 Lori, broadway stn.
    Monday : working 5 – 8pm, Korean movie night
    Tuesday :
    Wednesday: cowboy bebop 12 – 5pm, rehearsal 6:30
    Thursday : working 2 – 9pm
    Friday : working 3 – 9pm
    Saturday : working 2 – 8pm

    “The morning mists had risen long ago, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting me.”

    The body as a home. Every nail, chewed maybe, I do not know, is still a protection, a fine metaphor for weapon tipped fingers. Promises about an intent to future. We are our own checks and balances, our own inner ear and voice. Time will burn ripe without my having to think about it. This is a call to soft arms. My wrists, they crack under the weight of history, one hand a bracelet around bones, crack. This is a slight battle with having to go home. The foundations are iron but rusty. My attic is crawling with what nice people do and the traps I’ve laid down for them. One trick is to turn around in time to see the other person walk away without being caught. Otherwise sadness closes in, reminiscent of airports and long drawn out sighs on the street, as if everything should have changed while you were away for that last ten minutes. The best part is that trick is a lie, but an accepted one, like going home to comfort and safety. Stability deters the basic creature from improvisation, from evolving. Looking back only leaves part of your gaze behind you to drag like a sucking wake behind the sails of your coat and breaks the illusion of independence that pacing away like duelists kindly offers.

    I want to visit Iceland. It appears to me as beautiful beyond measure, as if the music born there were merely a representation of the stones and soil.

    empty time today



    Originally uploaded by Boytoy.

    I’m vacillating between listening purely to The Arcade Fire and what new music I’ve found this week. It’s a difficult decision, Funeral being a powerfully difficult album to put down.

    The lighthouse is fractured, a flash of light explaining very strange pieces of personal mythology. blink The first time I was seduced by a woman. blink Going there with the band the next day. blink Balancing rocks with my missing lover, my best friend, the only person who’d met him last time. My eyes cannot be covered by my hands to shut it out. blink I don’t want to. blink It’s a strange place to think about only because I’m not used to it. I forget it exists. blink A picnic, they talked about making a music video on a sailboat for a song about whales. blink A different lover, but the same best friend. Fire. blink oh Nikki’s hair blink oh how he used to have a temper blink the painter blink the violent drinker blink different people, the time I almost threw myself in. GLITTER WARNING FLASH. One of the only lights you can accurately see across the inlet. The memories creeping into the fabric of the trees and cliffs and water. FLASH. It’s Vancouver, this particular quality of light remembering. The sign on the road. The parking lot hemmed by forest. Running the path. Running the cliff. The water looks like expensive gun-metal silk shimmering in a radio play. Everyone sits and raises the children of conversation in front of the ocean. It’s only human, but how I wish I could swim.

    `Wearing an aura of rugged-intellectual charm like a plastic raincoat …’ — Sam Merwin Jr.

    Fantasy spark: water warmer than this, with you.

    tag “john peel” should make this easier

    Mark on the calendar, October 13th 2005 is the date of the first John Peel Day. Later I hope to have time enough and the inclination of the awake to collect together as much John Peel as I can to share with you all. audiography has dedicated this week to him and has already been posting some very choice music. However, my main contribution to the discovery of new music will be slightly early, as Nicholas has pointed me to loveliness this evening.

    The artist is that 1 guy, and he is the best one man music I’ve ever heard. His lyrics are superb, his wacky home-made instrument intimidating awesome. It’s called “The Magic Pipe” because it is. I’m not sure I know of anything so captivatingly versatile. There’s a Listen To Entire Album button. I highly recommend it and also say, watch the video too.

    I’ve discovered that I’m still twanging in dangerous ways from my dancing binge. It’s effort to turn my head, it goes against the natural reaction of my body complaint. I’m impressed. I walked away from an afternoon a few weeks ago attempting to teach Graham and Ryan how to use a sword with less bruises. (And Graham catches on quick to the idea of being hit without being hit). Course, part of it is the stupidly long walk I took with Alastair earlier today. He’s only in Vancouver a few days before leaving for San Francisco and Fiji, so we went for breakfast at Slickety Jim’s Chat & Chew this afternoon. My first mistake was expecting service on a holiday, my second was walking with him from there to Commercial and First, then up to Broadway. My eyes waved at some houses I knew and some interesting landmark graveyards, but the blisters are trying to argue that it wasn’t worth it. Lying on the couch at Korean Movie Monday was like sinking into hot chocolate on a cold day.

    The film tonight wasn’t astonishing, My Beautiful Girl Mari was too mellow for that, but it was legitimately beautiful. The IMDB summary tells you nothing of use. What’s needed is an appreciation for magic realism, for the illusion of edgeless animation, and a commiseration with the logic of children. There is no painfully basic plot, only a gentle climb into a remembered summer that unwinds into terrifically averted disaster and cleverly prosaic goodbyes. The alternate world the boys enter is deeply reminiscent of dreaming, (that the cat also visits this world, they do not bother to explain, and nor will I, as it should be evident), being a place of clouds and peculiar consequences that drops them back into the real world without any warning, though certainly with the sadness of parting.

    mutable like pushing the body through dance


    Yann Arthus-Bertrand – p146_f
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    I’m listening to River of Orchids, arguably the most perfect piece of music XTC ever crafted. It’s on repeat. I’m singing too quietly for my house to hear, but my eyes are closed as I’m typing this and I’m swaying like the most classic of butterfly catching hippie girl. Pluck, and the strings echo the sound of a drop of water exquisitely caught. Unison, tears, a little thread of hair, two fingers, pluck. It’s something complex simmered down into it’s simplest components. A long haired orchestra, a chorus of flowers. Alchemy, singing into gold. Want to walk into London on my hands one day. The harmony is untouchable, flawless, layered in every direction like the air on windless day in a sunny field full of glory. This is my hindsight soundtrack to everything good in the world. It’s both childish and meaningful, lushly encompassing a world of celebration. Visual paeans flit past my mind when I put this on too long. Winding scenes of incongruous joy.

    It’s bloody addictive.

    I put it on because it’s beautiful, because I’m a little bit nervous. Someone interesting is coming over for dinner and a movie. Something cyclical and charming is required, something that reminds me of stand up memories. The mural we had in the basement always disappointed me, it was always a little too dull yellow for my tastes and they never asked me to take part in any way I felt I could respect. I took pictures anyway, when we left, of that wall that I painted topless, smearing white paint with a demoniacal grin. The home-made bars on the windows were covered in gray electrical tape.