Francis Bebey - "Bissau" (Buy)
Lately, I've been swamped with work and didn't get a chance to write here. My apologies.

It's been eating shit food too. just bread rice and bag of chips.

Again, I go to corner store to pick up vegetables and ready to cook nice meal but for appetizer, I end up picking up a bag of chips and never follow through on cooking nice meal.

and then, I watch fail videos, funny animals instgram accounts on bed while eating chips and fall asleep.

so I figure I need to exercise. I was taking stairs to my studio on 7th floor but it was too much for now. I need to start somewhere less intense. So I though I hold my breath in elevator after read somewhere deep and shallow internet that heart rate goes up and you burn calories. So I held my breath in the elevator from 1st floor.

But on 4th floor, this Canada post man came in. I still kept my breath but it stopped at 5th floor. FEDEX GUY CAME IN!!!

I couldn't hold my breath anymore at this moment!!! I just went, "bhaaaaa~!" and started breathing heavily but trying to hide so breathing through my nose and I looked like Mixed Martial Fighter or Boxer before the important match at the press conference. I couldn't face at Canada Post and FedEx guys.

The end.

Comments:

The best part is the Burger King bag in your hand as you take the picture.

Thank you for that wonderful story.

by Idiocrat, Jul 16, 2017

thank you mitz!
best laugh i had all day

by dennis, Jul 17, 2017

oh my pleasure! im glad! thank you for reading!

by Mitz, Jul 19, 2017

thank YOU for reading!

by Mitz, Jul 19, 2017

You da best, Mitz

by Brendan, Jul 25, 2017

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The Young Disciples & Co. - Girls Girls Girls

I have not been writing here too much because I am embarrassed at how little new music I've listened to this summer. I know the point of this whole thing is to write about very good songs and that's it, no time limit, but still - it seems like if I cannot come to you with a brand new gem between my teeth each week, some magic misshapen crystal from my travels across the internet and through the terrible world, then I have failed.

By this metric, I am failing the summer and then some. I have been doing a lot of work, sometimes for myself and sometimes for other people. I am writing in every spare moment I have, but not often about music, and in the few moments each day where I am listening to something other than the sound of keyboard on keyboard it feels like I have to re-learn my senses super quick so I can pretend to know how to use them, not freak everybody out. This is how you have a conversation, this is how you eat in front of someone else, this is how you walk when there are other people in the room. Remember? Sort of.

Some summers it's not like this; I'll feel tuned to the same frequency as the world, the same loose handful of top-40 bangers thrumming through every body in the city, moving us all at the same pace. But this month, at least, I'm out of step. I like the new Lorde, but I don't have much to say about it. The other day, crossing the bridge to Carlo's house, I passed through a cloud of teens all holding sparklers and nodding quietly at what I later found out was an Ed Sheeran song, buzzing tinny from a single iphone speaker. In a few weeks, I'll be in a car listening to the radio, and then I'll be at Sappyfest, listening to everything.

But for now, all I want to listen to is soul songs, the same kind I've been listening to since I was a baby. I want to expand my vocabulary of sadness and love and lonely and longing, get my heart dimly lit up at the edges by some new old convergence of voice and metaphor, plain fact and tape hiss and past.

This is how I tripped over "Girls Girls Girls," which might be the best song I've ever heard in my life. It is certainly the best song to ever have this particular title, and the only song I care about right now. It is also absolutely the song of the summer - this whole summer, the summer of the whole world, not just mine. Yours too, even if you don't know it yet. Last night I listened to this song while walking through my neighbourhood at dusk and felt as though I were made of nothing but light wind and stardust, and if that sounds corny it is because there is nothing as embarrassing as being in love.

The best quality a single song can have, I think, is the sense that it somehow contains every possible feeling in the world simultaneously, plus another ten you've never fathomed. A song that has sadness and joy and longing and fear and sex and humour and comfort all threaded through its DNA at the same time, intersecting at angles you couldn't possibly imagine without it. A song like this is a prism that teaches you a brand new colour each time the light hits. Just by putting it on at a different time, in a different light or mood, you can learn something secret and impossible about the world, about what you can think and feel inside of it.

Songs like this do not work on a principle of pure sympathy. If you are sad, they do not make you feel sadder, or give you reasons for your sadness. Instead, they give you a feeling that forms a perfect chord with your sadness - or your joy, your in-love, your weird summer walks through the neighbourhood at dusk, thinking about your terrible poems. They move with you, move you somewhere new.

There is no single second in the entire 2:55 of "Girls Girls Girls" that does not contain an entire world's worth of feeling. Some songs you wring out by listening to them over and over, but here, the more attention you give, the greater your reward. Its first fifteen seconds alone are a perfect sunrise, and if I start listing all the other wonders I might never stop. This song is full of stray moments that float into it as if by accident, that settle so perfectly into the landscape you feel almost tricked by their loveliness. You might need to listen to it on headphones to catch them. Someone hits a woodblock just once, just so. A bridge drifts across the horizon with its perfect horns, like a single parade float passing under your open window. Sometimes there are bongos. Near the end, when everything begins to unlace but nothing falls apart, someone strums a guitar just once, and it is impossible to tell if it is an accident or not.

This is the song of the summer, and the whole point of the internet - and this website specifically - is for me to make sure it arrives in your life in time for you to take advantage of its magic. If you put this song on at a party, everyone will fall hopelessly in love with each other, and also with you. If you put this on a mixtape, it will glow like neon. If you are sitting in your bedroom with the window open, put this song on and turn your speaker out towards the full moon, your dreams will be charged with a gorgeous melancholy and you will wake up feeling more peaceful and rested than you've been in weeks. If you play this song for your plants, they will appreciate it. If you play this song in your headphones, you will write a better poem. Promise.

[buy The Young Disciples]

.

Culture Abuse - "So Busted" [buy]

These are the facts: the ever-present rattle of the wind through the tall grass. The low trickle of the stream across the dry riverbed. The travelling dust, getting into homes and clothes and machines. The long and straight roads carved into the flat landscape. The sun, burning low and pink on the horizon.

After a day of walking the man was beyond filthy. His shirt had gone from white to grey to near black from the sweat and dirt. In a stationhouse lit by a single bulb the man spent the last of his money on a ticket west, to the end of the line.

"You can wait inside," the porter said. "I'm about to light the fire."

The descending night was bringing frost with it, but the man shook his head. "No thank you." His voice was a whisper. He needed to catch that train so badly that he had to watch for it, see it emerge from the distant nothingness. It would start as a speck of light in the deep prairie night and then grow until it was full-sized before him.

The man pulled on his coat and hat against the cold. On the platform he heard the crickets singing. Otherwise the air was still.

"There," a voice from the darkness told him. The man who spoke was only a smouldering cigarette tip floating in the air. He stepped closer, into the dim light leaked from the station windows. "My train, too." He pointed.

The man turned and saw the light in the distance.

(image source)

Television - "Marquee Moon (Live 1978)" [buy]

"I don't know why anyone else even bothered making music after this performance." - Spike

(The lupins are here! I love this photo by Spike)

Moss Lime - "I Always Get What I Want" [buy]

This is psych-up music for a world-class diamond thief. She plays it in her headphones in the backseat of her limo, as the chauffeur whisks her to the second heist of the night. She hums the tune as she lowers herself from the rooftop on high-tension wire. She sings the chorus softly while removing the lid of the oversize glass box holding the rare jewel. She exchanges the diamond with an exact replica from her right hoodie pocket, then hides her calling card in the display. If the curators ever discover that they are exhibiting a fake there will be no question as to which criminal mastermind snatched the real thing. The card reads "The Yellow Magpie / Cat Burglar, est. 2005 / 'I always get what I want.'"

[This assured jam from Montrealers Moss Lime's brilliant Zoo Du Québec EP is featured on the amazing new comp Typical Girls Volume 2 from Emotional Response records. Like the fantastic first volume in the series, the second edition features "sixteen of the greatest current female fronted independent punk and pop bands, from around the world," including NOLA circle-pit champs Patsy, sharp-as-knives post-punks Bent, Melbourne twee nihilists Suss Cunts, and Madrid dark punk combo Juanita y Los Feos. All killer, no filler.]

Sonny Smith - "Wolf Like Howls from the Bathhouse (South East Land Otter Champs)"

We're tiptoeing into the glowing edges of my favourite season now, the one where everything really starts to overlap. Past and present, day and evening, sound of rushing water through someone's open kitchen window, chorus of dogs freaking out at a nearby siren, drifts of laughter floating down from everyone's second-floor decks and settling around you as you're walking to the store. Sometimes the best way to remind yourself of the smallness of you is to go climb a mountain or stand in a very still, complicated forest. But sometimes all it takes is ten minutes of true city, the close-together-ness.

Once the night air climbs up above room temperature, Toronto starts to shake off its stiffness and be once more a place everyone uses the same way they use their houses, like to live in. A couple nights ago I was very hungover and also pretty sad so I decided to go for a walk and see if the world outside my brain had anything to offer. I'm not gonna lie: I was not hopeful. It was a full moon and everyone was going fucking crazy. A raccoon waved hello to me as he pawed through my neighbours' recycling, not breaking eye contact as he chomped into the side of an aluminum can. A group of kids drifted across the sidewalk like one of those banners pulled behind planes on a clear day, graceful and unurried and waving in the wind, but also they were all screaming very unkind things at each other. The counterpoint of everything was almost too much for me. Every couple I passed was arguing about something very serious but also kind of new: you could feel that these were exciting, sexy, charged-up early-summer worries sprouting from the wreck of winter's worn-out ones.

It got darker and I was still walking. I was tired and I wanted to go home but I also did not want to leave without discovering some kind of magic. And then I saw something, just as I was about to turn back around, at the mouth of a sidestreet I would not have otherwise looked down. It looked so beautiful and strange and confusing against the bruised sky of almost-late-night that it made me feel as though my veins were filled with glitter.

I can't tell you what it was. Or, I guess, I am not going to tell you what it was, because you would not believe me: it would seem too convenient, too wonderfully strange, too much of a device. But it was there, and as I stood there all frozen and marvelling, suddenly completely alone, breeze and streetlights and distant car-sounds and soft light thrown from people's uncurtained living rooms, I felt not for the first time in recent memory a strong awareness of the fact that my life is shot through with a level of wonder that far outpaces and exceeds what I might necessarily deserve. This song was playing in my headphones.

[buy 100 Records Vol. 3]

The Clean - "Point That Thing Somewhere" [Buy]

I hope people don't think I'm disgusting but I was peeing this morning in a rush.

I put the seat up and started peeing with such a force but seat bounced back and I noticed however, I was holding my Saving Private Ryan and brushing my teeth on the other hand so I couldn't catch the seat. So in that moment of 0.25 seconds. I held my pee and let the seat go down so that I don't pee on the toilet seat as it came down. I finished brushing my teeth and put the seat up while holding my pee and completed my task.

I was proud of my reflex so I thought I would share with the world.

Peace