The Irrepressibles - "Nuclear Skies"
"Now, without any reasons, without any context, tell me how you feel."
Unable to answer this nonsensical question, I snicker and twirl a pen. This guy is really something. He thinks he's some kind of magician or something, he might as well be wearing a tuxedo. He speaks with that kind of flourish, he sounds like he's unveiling a statue every time he talks. May I present...Anastasia! or some bullshit.
"I don't know. Scared."
"Good, excellent. Hold on to that."
Fuck him. Fuck his golf shirt and his khakis and his salad breath and his bike helmet and his too-many keys. Fuck his beautiful wife. Or maybe he's gay. Oh well, fuck 'em both.
"It's only 'cause I'm up against this case and I can't afford a better lawyer than y--"
He was holding up his finger to his lips. Goddamn magician lips.
I let out a big sigh, fell back in my chair, and put my feet up on his stupid coffee table. He talked for an hour about what he was going to do to defend my case, all the evidence he was going to present and all the people he was going to question. Instead, I kept hearing he was planning dance numbers and pyrotechnics to get me off.
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Grace Lee and the Stylers - "Each and Every Flower"
"Okay, good, the Stylers are on. Now, you listen to me. You go out there and you do it just how we rehearsed today. I don't want any slip-ups from you. You're the only one who can do this. He deserves it, don't forget what he did to us, to all of us. He's scum, Jin. You shake his hand and let him press the starting button in your palm. And then with every drum hit you'll administer poisonous dust into the air. You remembered to take your breathing pills? Good. Now focus, Jin, don't falter. If you break the pace or you falter in your spirit, the jig will be up and we'll all go down for the count. Listen to me, Jin, I love you. I love you and need you to be strong. For me, Jin. For Tai-Tai. Okay, they're finishing, get ready." [Buy from Sublime Frequencies]
Vampire Weekend - "I Think Ur A Contra". You could tell me there is still snow on the mountaintop. You could say the birds were all jays. You could say, "Sean, there is a place in San Francisco where the street is pressed with seashells." Dear one, you could whisper such dreams in my ears; you could sketch symbols on postcards and chalk secrets on the cement. We could lay together, wishing, joined in fingertip. You could tilt your head toward mine, and your mouth, up. You could smile like so and shake like this and close & open those big small eyes. You could murmur, "Mmhm." And you know, I'd rest there softly, and I'd listen, and I'd be sheltered. But I think maybe I think maybe I think I maybe I too would be lying, love. [buy]
Oberhofer - "Away FRM U". It's funny you should say that Cynthia because Misty was actually my first hawk. She's the only one I didn't raise from birth. Yup straight from the egg - isn't that right Rusty? But not Misty. What's that? Oh, six years. Before that I was a superintendent. At a school, yes. Junior high-school. Oh, it's a funny story. Last day of school before the summer. I had just had my heart broken something awful. Aw, thanks Cynthia. She worked at the school. Ms Elly Anderson. Yup. She hurt me something awful. The hallways were grey and the lights were fluorescent and all these kids were so happy because it was the last day. And I didn't get out til after sundown. Everything felt dead, my feelings all straw, and who should come flying but Misty here. She crested the school and then dove down right in front of me. Stopped on the sidewalk. Stood there. I said, "Here girl". And she came. And I said, "Rip my heart right out of my fucking chest, girl." And she didn't, no ma'am. I been chasing her since. [MySpace]
Frog Eyes - "A Flower in a Glove"
Beginning with legs, jeans, socks, shoes, polish and a ring. Desdemona drinking a glass of milk, still drinks milk, an unbreakable habit for peanut butter toast. A distant family, father in sales (distant, travelling), brothers (one into piano, insular, one a chessmaster, hesitant) mother in jail (innocent-ish).
A fictional daughter asks her a question in the shower and she giggles in response, "It's sex, but you're too young, I'll tell you later". On the bus, she's in another life, tilling fields and working her hands hard and tough and big-breasted raising a freckly family and happily eating a potato a day and maybe some carrots. A hard life looks like fun from the window of a bus, she smirks, twirling her hair between her fingers, on the way to the hospital.
In the spilled water, in the splash of the mop, she hears ocean life and ocean warmth, slapping waves that curl like God breathes water. In the squint of a smoke break, these days begin to feel like thin threads, all delicate and breakable on their own, but add up to something large, some huge work, some final majesty. Possibly a pile of nice threads, checking the schedule for the weekend, working nights. Arguing with a thin aggressive man about visiting hours, she smiles warmly, almost laughing, "I sound like quite the dictator, don't I?" and he leaves without a scene.
Desdemona washes her hands, wipes them on a towel, and thinks of the polish on her toes, it's wine and perhaps tonight she'll have some wine.
There are no words to describe how deep this goes, as she looks down the laundry chute. The gurgling, choking throat of a Sarlacc, stripping a bed with the sun in her eyes.
Your majesty, your tar-covered robes are ready, folding gowns with sore shoulders. Competition is the unnatural order of everything, watching the traffic on the salty walk to the bus stop.
If I had left I never would have met you, I never would have seen this, thought Desdemona, playfully catching the busdriver's eye.
--
Elsewhere: new music video by Michel Gondry. Humble enough to be inviting, simple enough to be great.
Laura Gibson & Ethan Rose - "Knife". Richard was kneeling on the institutional carpet and, for the thousandth time in his life, showing his students how to plant new rhododendron in a plastic container. His shirt-cuffs were dusted with soil. One of the students said something witty and Richard took a little breath and said, "No kidding." I do not know why this was the thing to flick Richard's heart like a cricket breaking from the grass. He was leaning over the plastic container, his shirt-cuffs dusted with soil, and he realised that if he wished to run away with L. and spend the rest of his life with her all he had to do was to get up and tell them so. His car was filled with perennials.
[buy]
Bakers at Dawn - "Lester". L. watched Priya approach with her cup of tea. "Thanks," she said. They both took out their instrument-cases and opened the snaps with clacks and in that instant L. recalled the moment of last night, late, when in fatigue she had pulled apart her clarinet and chipped the cork all around the middle section. L. stared at the instrument swaddled in black velvet. "Fuck," she said. "What?" Priya asked. "The cork." "Oh," Priya said, "whatever." But L. spent the whole morning thinking about it.
[You Must Hide Your Love Forever is a free download.]
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Carl Wilson has written a short story (!) about a Charlie's Angels lunch box thermos. You can also bid on this item on eBay. All proceeds to 826 National.
(photo source unknown)
The summer rubbed its hands together and cast a quiet spell. Grapes tasted like honey, wood felt like bed sheets, and bats brought the night. A danger blushed in our faces and making love was suddenly a declaration, a challenge to the lake to stir its glassy surface. Foxes patrolled like night watchmen, pissing on the mushrooms to prove they did their rounds. The clouds lit up like moon's milk, hunger exhaled by every living thing, in light billowy vapours. Beneath the ground is all the money in the world, and you can spend your life stealing it, or protecting it. [Buy]
The Feeling of Love - "God Willing"
Like an ESL horror version of Summer Babe. [Buy]
Like getting a letter in the mail that tells you finally what to do. Written in a language you can never understand. [Buy used]
Abner Jay - "I'm So Depressed". After they took the furniture away, the house felt huge and lonely. Sam went outside to stand on the porch. Moths battered themselves against him. He felt stupid and without purpose. He went back indoors and to the pantry. There were lightbulbs, a broom, and one jar of his father's favourite brand of strawberry jam. Sam took out the broom. He swept the floors. He swept dust and crumbs into the cracks between the floorboards. He swept dust and crumbs out the back door. His father's plastic garbage bin was sitting in the back of a rattling Goodwill cube-truck. There were rectangles on the floor where the beds had laid, and the couch, and the recliner. The kitchen cupboards were lined with brown paper and there were grey circles on the brown paper. A box of dishes was at the bottom of the stairs, for Steph's kids. Two lamps were waiting for either Josie or Louie, whoever came first, in the middle of the living-room floor. There was still a bag of firewood. Sam found two nickels on the mantle, and the business card for Amigo's Resto-Bar. There was still a bottle of dish-soap, open, beside the sink. Sam poured cold water into his palms and drank from them. He opened the door to the cellar. He turned on the light and went down three steps. The cellar was filled with wine-corks. His father had drunk ten thousand bottles of wine, in his time. Now under this empty house there were ten thousand wine-corks. Sam didn't know what his father had done with the bottles. The cellar smelled of grapes, shoe leather, and life. [buy]
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Fine, heartbreaking stuff at Wattled Smoky Honey-Eater.
If you live in LA, later this month you can see Peepers, a gentle and ribald feature film that stars, among others, our own Dan Beirne.
Gigi - "I'll Quit (feat. Owen Pallett)"
"I suppose in some ways I was asking to have my heart broken," said looking blank, at the pitcher of lemonade on the table, covered in plastic wrap with an elastic band to keep out the flies.
"Dr. Nevsky, please," said the young assistant, anxious in a fitted lab coat.
The two crouched in silence and dusted bones. Nevsky had stayed up late the night before arranging the bones in an order he thought indicated the shape and size of the new creature. Three long flat feet, two in the front and one way behind. The tail permanently between the legs, the head tilted ever to the ground, arms outstretched as if trying to fly or walk a tightrope. A large chest cavity, horns with joints, and a leftover bone, that Nevsky looked at for an hour or so. Eventually he laid in the larynx of the beast, and when questioned by the assistant, referred to it as "the screaming bone".
"Dr. Nevsky, nothing has ever existed in history that looks like this."
"I know," he said, checking his watch, sweating, his mind elsewhere, "it's quite a find, isn't it?"
"Dr. Nevsky," said the assistant, suddenly calm, and suddenly, finally, attractive, "I don't believe it is."
Nevsky sighed and poured a glass of lemonade. [Buy]
(image: Strolls Through Time and Space, by Michael Johansson)
Sharon Van Etten - "Love More". New music from the woman who recorded my favourite song of 2009. It's a hotter song than she's sung in the past, as if she collected the flaked red logs from a fire, set them glowing around a microphone. The harmonium wheezes happily, a tambourine rings, Sharon sings harmonies with her own voice. She sings of memory, love, and sex, but the steam that fills the room isn't the stuff of parked cars, saunas, breath on cold glass: it's a hothouse, summertime and spring, green things sprouting. It has none of the loneliness of ones and twos. "Love More" is undesolate and peopled. It's fertile. [shared via a new musicians' organisation called Weathervane / buy Sharon's album]
Beach House - "Zebra". The best song on a record called Teen Dream, but it's definitely not teenaged. Victoria Legrand gives even looks. She sings her metaphors as if they're landmarks on a map: the fact of them is more important than the awe. "Zebra"'s great strength is its guitar-line, the chords that rise and dip in unexpected grace. Each change is premature, unimagined, perfect. I have not yet learned it by heart. [buy]
Kate Maki - "Bloodshot & Blistered". The snow falls slower when you've just noticed it. It seems to hang there, in successive suspended stills. Kate Maki borrows this feeling, whispers the secret into her drummer's ear. "Bloodshot & Blistered" shifts, falls, bends forward to touch your cheek; but you never see it move. The piano, drums, organ and voices are like paintings of piano, drums, organ and voices - they don't change until you turn your back. [buy / playing in Toronto tonight]
(photograph is of Ubiquitous, by Naoko Ito)
I get an email from an old friend, a philologist from Montreal, and he's attached a song for me to hear. It's from an album called Pretzel Logic, a favourite of my brother's, but I've never given it much thought. Steely Dan, those studio pedants with a perverted name; why should I listen?! I've got work to do! But the philologist, with whom I used to often play music, says that the song reminds him of early Genesis, which is the second most enticing thing he could say next to that it reminds him of late Genesis. So I listen, and I'll eat my hat if he's not right; it sounds like early Genesis - the ornate piano arpeggios, the mellotron swells, the cryptic, surreal lyrics, and the pretzel logic song structure, not to mention the bounteous fruit and unselfconsciousness - or was that a different Genesis? To be frank, it's been a long time since I listened to Foxtrot or Nursery Cryme, those favourites of my youth, not so long past now, but if you had told me then that on a rainy January morning in a downtown Toronto office building I would be reminded by my friend the philologist, via classic-period Steely Dan, of the nearly-forgotten joys of early Genesis, I would have questioned your thinking.
I wake up at dawn in a threadbare hotel room, grey light streaming through dirty windows, the stale air like weak paper. The television is blaring the news in a language I don't understand. At the window, from the 81st floor, I can see most of the city. Like the surface of cancerous skin, huge brown patches mar the grey palette, and seem to sink into the world like neighbourhood black holes. I light a cigarette and blow the smoke against the glass, and there are fires in the streets. A snippet of something I understand comes from the television, "Captain Man Pole." I look over, and it's obviously the leader of this wasteland; a short, beady-eyed sex offender-looking dude. He's being shown holding a shovel and passing it to a man with few teeth. Cut back to the anchor speaking quickly and down at the desk, so I look back out the window. In the heavy first light of day, the signs are becoming legible. Almost all of them are written in strange characters, save one enormous sign that hangs over an apartment building. It's a temporary sign that is changed every day, reading "The name of today is ______". The workers are out changing it from yesterday's title "Embellish the Veil" to today's, "Rokirk Picardski". A few floors below, a man is throwing some clothes over his balcony. They fall to the street and some land in the puddles below.
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