Said the Gramophone

My family Doctor.

CFCF - "La Soufrière"
[Pre-Order] -Radiance and Submission ships late July.

So, my family doctor retired. I called the clinic and the operator said, "Dr. Nguyen retired last month." with annoyance, like we all have when your computer asks you if you want the new update for iTunes. I understand. I'm sure she has to repeat same phrase over and over to all his patients.

It took a really long time to get a family doctor. Every time I went to the walk in clinic I would ask the doctor that saw me if they could take on any new patients, they replied, "No". It was same as every time I go to Pharmaprix and get asked, "Do you have the Shoppers Optimum card?". My answer is always, "No". I don't need anymore card. I would take a quick glace at the doctors' desk, there would usually be a picture of his/her family and I would think "Oh ya, family doctors have families too and there is only so much they can take on. They have lives. I understand.

One morning, after 4 hours of waiting at the walk-in clinic, I asked the same question, but this time the doctor casually said, "Sure" with no emotion at all. I thought it sounded like he said, "Shure" the microphone brand. No emotion just monotone robotic automated message tone. I was so happy to finally find a family doctor, "Welcome to my family!" I almost wanted to say and hug him and ask him if he wanted to go Go-Karting or Mini-Golfing with me on weekends.

Dr. Nguyen was a a mystery man. I never found out much about him. He never smiled or made any casual conversation. Even talking about the weather. If I would say, "it's getting hot." he would answer, "Yes, summer is coming." with a monotone voice, the opposite of John Snow, "Winter is coming.", but I didn't mind at all. He just seemed like that kind of guy. I imagined that he enjoyed reading National Geographic Magazines, hiking, mowing the lawn, taking care of his garden, drinking a glass of wine on his patio with his dog, listening to Bach cello pieces, going to see his elderly mother and bringing her an orchid, preparing tuna tartare, not using the dishwasher because he feels like cooking and washing dishes are therapeutic, ironing his own shirts, and then going back to work and getting enjoyment out of helping people. It's all in my head, and of course, there is always a possibility that as soon as his work day is over, he yells, "Fuck ya! Friday! Friday! I'm gonna call my all friends and get wasted lol!!" as he loosens his tie and drives away with a screech of SUV tires, or maybe it's a convertible with leather seats, he drives away blasting Boston, and drinking Redbull. He gets home, orders pizza, and sits in front of his computer watching porn. When the pizza arrives he doesn't tip and eats it continuing to watch porn, then he showers, puts on a silk shirt and snake skin shoes, goes out with his friends, comes home at 4am, falls asleep watching more porn and wakes up at 3pm, eats the leftover pizza with gatorade for breakfast, and watches Jude Apatow movies. Then repeats on Saturday. Then he picks up his dry cleaned shirts and gets to work late because he almost forgot to delete his browser history, just in case.

I don't really think he was like that. I think he was a shy, quiet, nice guy who cared for his patients.
But now he is retired so I will never find out. He might be on some remote island, eating exotic fruits, and bird or whale watching. He is probably listening to new CFCF albums on a yacht with sunset behind him, with the sound of gentle waves over and over and over repeating eternally.

Hope you have a great after-retirement life Dr. Nguyen. Thank you for taking me into your family for a short time. Take care

STRIX VARIA

Flesh World - "The Wild Animals in my Life"

I saw my first owl.

We were driving up the dirt road at the cottage when I glimpsed a flash of something through my window. It was gliding alongside the car, a few feet away.

We stopped the car and got out and walked back down the road. Sitting on a branch a little way into the forest there was a barred owl staring at us quietly with its black eyes. We watched it swoop away silently.

The next day we saw another one on a trail at Murphys Point Provinicial Park. We heard the high-pitched whistle of the young owl and then we saw one of its parents on a branch, not too far off, watching us from the green world. You can hear the calls of the barred owl here. The juvenile whistling was the only sound we heard, we didn't hear the famous "Who-cooks-for-you?" hoot. Maybe next time.

The woods are full of surprises, friends. You probably live in a city like I do, but I hope you get to go out there sometimes.

[buy]

(photo by Spike)

PLAINER CRAVER

Stephen Tsoti Kasumali - "Banakatekwe". I know you have considered it: dismantling your life into its simplest parts, small pieces, discarding everything and emerging into a freer today. Sometimes I consider it as I am staring at a plot of grass. This lawn, this green lawn, just leaves. This song, just singing and handclaps and a drumstick and a bare guitar. But more often I consider the simplification of my life when I am reflecting on its present complexity. This life, this busy life, full of so many moving parts. I look at all these pieces and wonder how many other lives could be constituted from this stuff. Is the stuff of my life enough stuff for three lives, five, fifteen? Would my one complicated life be able to be reconstituted as fifteen simple lives? Plainer, happier lives, like singing and handclaps and a drumstick and a bare guitar? Not poor lives, ramshackle lives, like a row of shoeboxes - just lives like green lawns. It is too easy to fetishize the sound of faraway, to diminish the complexity of another person's experience purely because it is alien to you. And this is especially true when Westerners look at Africa. I do not believe that Stephen Tsoti Kasumali and the other musicians on "Banakatekwe" have simple lives; their lives are probably as complicated as mine. But "Banakatekwe" is a dream of something easier, freer, made of fewer parts. I wonder if they wonder this too, listening to the recording: Could I make my whole life like this?

[buy (out of print)]

(Photo by Robert Knudsen. It's of Richard Nixon's final lunch before announcing that he was resigning as president of the USA.)

My Long My Lonely Listen

Nap Eyes - "Dark Creedence"
Nap Eyes - "Delirium and Persecution Paranoia"

Every once in a while it's nice to be gently reminded that you know, in the grand scheme, almost nothing about yourself. Actually okay I should be less general - maybe you don't have this problem, but a lot of the time I let myself fall or at least lean gently into the idea that the feelings or tastes I currently have are feelings or tastes I've always had and will continue to have forever. I guess I know people who don't do this so much, and intellectually, if you asked me, hey Emma - do you think you'll always like the things you like now? In the same ways? For the same reasons? I'd be like duh obviously not, with a little condescending smile, because what a question!

But emotionally, intuitively, the vague but pervasive impression that there are some things about you that are fixed (and that you can at least track if not control the ones that aren't) is kind of what lets you live like a normal human being out in the world. Right? It's how work gets done, it's how decisions get made. I mean for fuck's sake, I have tattoos. Even if you know in your brain that you are not going to be the same forever, in a more free-floating hand-wave-y intuitive sense you have to base so much of your life around the idea that you know at least a few things about yourself: about what you like or what you don't, about what feels good or bad to you, about what counts and how. It's a convenient system - the linear narrative, the idea of foundational things or fixed taste or canon or context - and it's also necessary because without it, making any kind of choice ever would be fucking excruciating. You have to think you know what you like, and you have to have stories about why you like it.

But it also seems important to remember sometimes that a lot of that's a fiction, flimsy bulwark against the Great Uncertainty. The first time I ever heard Nap Eyes it was through this very website, and I was like, huh, I dunno, and then forgot. The first time I really listened to Whine of the Mystic all the way through was a few months ago, and I felt actively annoyed, because it felt like everyone I like totally loved this band and I just did. not. get. it. I don't really think I'm that different from the person I was a few months ago; not much has shifted or changed, no major traumas, whatever. But things have passed over and through me I guess, and a month or so ago I thought maybe I'll give this another try and all of a sudden these songs made me feel like someone had twined Christmas lights around my ribs in my sleep. They sounded out a part of me I hadn't known was there; they made me feel pulled and pushed in a way that is so subtle and strong I am not sure how to explain it.

The other day I was re-reading a book I've read a few times already, and this one poem jumped out at me that never had before. It's beautiful, my favourite kind of thing, a mood that starts off wandering and then gathers into a sharp turn:

Who are you?
What of you persists? Your life built on intervals
the way a chord is, on changes that alter you
by thirds, by fifths, in silences the progression climbs
to where each song ends, and the next begins.

Your life, your tastes, your feelings - it might all look a narrative, straightforward and building, but that's just the shape of things, not their content. You can know a couple things about yourself but for the most part every part of you is mutable, flimsy as weather. New things find a way in, press against you at new angles, and you don't get to know how or when or why. You don't need to. You just get to keep moving. It's cool.

[buy Whine of the Mystic]

Ketchup Chips and other kind of chips.

Century Palm - "Desire"
Babe Chick - "My Phone"
A Pony Named Hesitation - "Johnny Girl"
Mark Fragua - "Stimulator"
Bonnie Doon - "B Hole"

Afterburners Vol.5 (Bruised Tongue) - Free download comp. here.

I'm just typing this with my fingers covered with ketchup chips. Excellent label, Bruised Tongue from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada has an excellent compilation. I finished my ketchup chips and moved onto Party Mix. There is also a bag of Original flavour waiting for me.(there is an office party in my studio right now. That's why there are many bags of chips.) I guess music is like a chip flavour. Some people enjoy simple flavour, some people like something with a little kick, jalapeno flavour. Even texture of chips alone is different some are hard crispy chips. Some are thicker. Some are all natural close to real potato as possible.(Probablly Steve Albini likes this.)

Not much happened to me last week, some highlights were, I watch Jurrassic World and came home and killed so many fruit flies mercilessly. I saw a guy riding bicycle carrying a full-size air conditioner. That's all. Have a great week and hope you enjoy this compilation.

SILENCE

Don Cherry - "Brown Rice"

Sometimes you have to travel into the unknown, leave behind the familiar places and light out for a destination that's only hinted at, imagined. It's over the hills, beyond the river's mouth, on the other side of the lake. Unseen.

This song is an unknown landscape. Its open space is traversed by a haunting vocal melody, echoed by electric piano. This is your pathway through wonders. As you move through it other features become known to you; rumbling bass, clear tenor sax, percussion quieter than footfalls. Then another voice whispers in your ear, guiding you along while the instruments take turns revealing themselves and then retreating into silence. Eventually even the ghostly vocal melody disappears and you realize that you have arrived at your destination. Silence.

(Gerhard Richter Seascape - image source)

SWEET SURRENDER

Evening Hymns - "Sweet Surrender". Somewhere in the multiverse, there is an alternate Earth where Sarah McLachlan listened to different tapes, signed to a different record label, stayed east in Halifax instead of migrating westward to B.C. This universe's "Sweet Surrender" is not necessarily superior to our universe's "Sweet Surrender" - McLachlan's 1998 hit is one of my favourite mainstream cancon ballads. But instead of boasting a clean, polished sound; instead of trim drums and neat electric guitars, where the only mystery is the singer's cool + reverberating voice; instead of all that, in this Eric's Trip-inspired "Surrender", there'd be fuzz and chug, voices like burnt sugar. There'd be something closer to what Evening Hymns have done - recasting Thursday midnight as Saturday hangover, mystic longing as grounded wishing. But the same hope and the same defeat: Sarah McLachlan knows and Evening Hymns know that this song is about the hope as well as defeat. Sometimes hope and defeat are call and answer; sometimes they're just singing at the same time. Sometimes hope and defeat are the same syllables in the same voice at the same time, impossible.

[This "Sweet Surrender" is taken from Quick Before It Melts' DOMINIONATED (Deux), a free compilation "of classic Canadian songs covered by contemporary Canadian artists". / more from Evening Hymns]

Paint Every Insignificance a Sign

The Weakerthans - "Aside"
The Weakerthans - "Plea From a Cat Named Virtute"
The Weakerthans - "Reunion Tour"

The Weakerthans are finished. Maybe it seems a little lopsided to mourn the passing of a band whose last album came out in 2007, whose members all have solo/other projects, are out in the world making things still. But this band was important, and important to me, so let me do this for a second.

Their third album, Reconstruction Site, came out in 2003, and in the sense that loneliness can kill the kindest parts of you, it saved my life. I was a very weird kid and an even weirder teenager and though I've learned now (as you do) to spin that strangeness into a few edgeless, charming origin stories, things were pretty rough there for a second. Do you remember what it felt like to be alive, a human being walking around and thinking and feeling in the world, before you'd met any of the art that now defines your borders? The word alone's barely a start. The year Reconstruction Site came out I was in the seventh grade, bookish and anxious and depressed and insomniac; I loved Nancy Mitford and the CBC and old punk records and my mom and none of it was charming or coherent; I was awkward and precocious and thin-skinned and flinchy and terrified of everyone. Most of all I was very, very, very sad, and as afraid as I was convinced that I would never be less so.

I don't remember exactly how I found Reconstruction Site - I think I heard something on the radio, or caught the cover art in the record store? - but I do remember bringing the CD home, hearing the joyous thump and blast of "(Manifest)" for the first time, and going wait a minute, is this a sonnet? And the ground shifting under my feet.

Over the course of their career, the Weakerthans put out four albums - Fallow, Left and Leaving, Reconstruction Site and Reunion Tour - each of them gorgeous and bookish and sad and hilarious and anxious and strange and completely unique. Do you remember what it felt like to find the first piece of art that spoke your language, before you even knew what that language was? The first thing people talk about when they talk about this band are John K. Samson's lyrics, and with good reason - they're singularly beautiful, real poems and not just lyrics-that-sound-like, always honest and ringing and true and backlit by a generous sense of humour - but it's not just the words. There are plenty of bands with "literary sensibilities" that still reach too far, try too hard, haven't ever figured out the balance the way the Weakerthans seemed to breathe it. In the wrong hands, a song like "Plea From a Cat Named Virtute" (a prose poem from the perspective of a housecat with a depressed owner that contains my favourite lines on earth, of all time) would be a clattering, cringey overreach. Instead it's an anthem that lifts you out of your fucking shoes with its soaring line, its sympathy. (There are lots of songs about depression out there, in the world, but few that can pull off the phrase "tinny blood" and mean it.)

There's influence, and then there's influence. The Weakerthans wrote songs about cats and curling and bus drivers and Bigfoot-spotters and confused explorers having dinner with Foucault; they had songs that were prose poems and songs that were sonnet sequences, songs where time went backwards and songs that ran in backwards time. They quoted poets like Catherine Hunter and Patrick Friesen and used art by Marcel Dzama and I didn't know who any of those people were when I was thirteen, and it didn't matter. They loved Winnipeg, a place no one was supposed to love, and taken together their body of work forms a complex, layered lesson in origins and enthusiasm and honesty and frustration and love and familiarity and community that I think I am still learning even now.

This music matters to me, still - but when I was younger, when I first found it, it showed me a way that things might be, and the first art that does that for you is the art to which you owe your life. The way the Weakerthans were - sweet and brave and shy and sad and hopeful, unafraid to love the things they loved, to push around and yelp a little in that feeling - gave me a glimpse of who I might be if I ever had the courage and the patience to become myself. They were not the first band I ever liked, but they were the first to ever make me feel truly un-alone, and for that I owe them, forever.

[buy all of their albums // image]

"He is watching you over."

Ryuichi Sakamoto - "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (Piano)" [Buy]

Susumu Yokota - "Purple Rose Minuet" [Buy]

Rest in peace, Mr. Susumu Yokota.

When my father passed away, people said "he is watching you over." I'd like to think that, but I don't really believe in any religion. The closest I came was when I used to listen to Bad Religion for one summer in junior high. Anyway, I do enjoy the traditions and customs that come with religion, like going to Shinto shrine on new year's day, visiting ancestors' graves, or even Christmas. These are great ways to spend time with family and friends you love. I think likely there is no afterlife. When someone dies, that's it. No consciousness. Nothing. Complete darkness, like when you pass out after drinking too much tequila sunrise watching sunset and next thing you know you wake up in a rain, in between that, time passed but you don't remember. Dead blank time. You will never get to talk to, touch, or see the person who is gone again ever. Forever.
But I'm not sure, maybe there is. There is heart pumps blood though your body. How does your heart pump? Where does the original source of energy that pumps your heart come from? When someone dies, where does that energy go? Maybe that energy goes somewhere else. I have no idea and I'm no where near an expert on this, let alone using my second language to explain this deep stuff. Looking at nature: water evaporates and forms a cloud and rains, on repeat, or a tree dies and falls over decomposes, back into earth. It seems like that the energy is re-used somewhere after someone dies? Reincarnation? Possibly.. But i really have no idea.

When someone says, "your dad is watching over you," I always thought, but I have two brothers, and my mother, and my grandmother. How can he watch all over of us at same time??? but then, a picture would pop into my head of my father relaxing in a comfortable Eames chair, petting my deceased cat on his lap, in front of dozens of surveillance camera monitors (one monitor for all of people he loves), drinking cold sake and watching all of us at same time.

But then I thought, I don't want him to see me and my girlfriend having sex!!!!!!!
But maybe the monitors have parental control built in so it will blur when we are engaging in activities that we don't want the deceased to see, our subconscious sends the signals automatically. No problem

SCAVENGING

Tenement - "Feral Cat Tribe"
Tenement - "Hive of Hives"
Tenement - "I'm Your Super Glue"

Before his grandfather got sick, Doug had to do the rounds with him every garbage day. At first when his grandfather stopped his tiny car on the side of the road, Doug stayed in the passenger seat, reading a comic book as the old man efficiently worked through the pile.

"I can use this to fix that broken toaster!" He held up a spring for Doug to see. "This will come in handy," he said, picking up a piece of sheet metal.

Doug was twelve and embarrassed, worried a kid from school might see him. He was there in case his grandfather needed help getting something heavy into the car. Lifting wasn't good for his bad heart. "It could just go in a second. Pow, that's it," Doug's mom told him.

"This is the golden age of junk," his grandfather said one day, while rummaging through a big pile - the contents of a whole house put out on the front curb. "I grew up in the Depression. No one threw anything out. Everything had to be used six or seven times. People wore rags!"

That was also the day his grandfather first got Doug's attention, coaxing him out of the car with the question "I guess you don't want any of these, eh?" He held up a few old comic books.

There was a whole crate of comics from the seventies and Doug eagerly gathered them up. After that, he started looking through the piles at his grandfather's side, picking up stray parts and figuring out what they could be used for.

Later, with his grandfather gone, Doug spent most of his summer days in the old garage behind the house. Everything was in there: a wall of broken TVs, five lawnmowers, sprockets, ratchet sets, and teacups of fine bone china. Doug liked the smell of the place, musty and oily, and the quiet. He sat in his grandfather's easy chair, drinking a pop, and dreaming about what he was going to do with his inheritance.

[buy Predatory Headlights]

(Kim Adams, "Bruegel Bosch Bus" (detail), image source)

SOFT DIARY

New Dog - "23". Anar Badalov sing a song of half-serious confession: the things he's done, the things he's done. But mostly it's the guitars that do the admitting, the baring of souls. Splashy electric guitar, dependable electric bass, a mingling of notes that add up to autobiography. Imagine the confessional pyrotechnician, making memoir out of his fireworks display. Imagine the hedgemaze-maker whose hedgemaze says it all. His topiary says, "This is who I was, this isn't where I'm going." "23"'s guitars inhabit this song from the very beginning, giddy to say what they have to say. That first solo, 28 seconds in - part-evident, part-hidden, a laughing panorama. But Badalov doesn't get caught up in their flightiness. He remains convincing, steady, a monk slowly tracing page after illuminated page. [buy]

---

Elsewhere:

• My novel, Us Conductors, is out this week in the UK. Buy it from Bloomsbury. In recent days I've spoken about the book with BBC Radio 4's Open Book and my fine friends at The Skinny. I'll be working with the Skinny for one of the amazing events I'm doing as part of a visit to Edinburgh and St Andrews in August.
• But first I'm going to our nation's capital! To Ottawa for an incredible event on Tuesday night, as part of Music & Beyond: I'll be reading from Us Conductors between performances by Thorwald Jorgensen, truly one of the world's greatest theremin-players.
• Then to Saskatchewan: readings in Moose Jaw, later this week, as part of the Festival of Words.
• Finally, have a look-see at this week's column for the Globe & Mail, where I wrote about songs by NEEDLES//PINS (via Jeff) and Tune-yards compatriot Naytronix, plus some thoughts on Mdou Moctar's extraordinary Touareg remake of Purple Rain, Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai.

Just Total July

Monomyth - "Candleholder"

Sometimes, in summer, you find yourself feeling like you're in a crucial, second-act montage in the gorgeously shot and tenderly scripted washed-out-coloured sun-dappled film based on you, in the summer - like you're in a car, maybe, that's more rusted and gorgeous than any ancient boat's ever been, tracing the spine of the city with your hand out the window, the fucked up paint on everything just shining with the trees overhead, green everywhere, houses with their generous balconies and the wind so soft you feel sure someone must be messing with you - but sometimes you want to go a step further and just swallow the sun until you dissolve and become it, until how you are is how it looks, thrown over everything. Which is why we have love songs like this one. It's a favour they'll do if you ask nice enough.

[buy Saturnalia Regalia! // If you're in Toronto, Monomyth are playing with house favourites Nap Eyes, whose wonderful Whine of the Mystic was just re-released and is worth your time and attention, at Smiling Buddha on July 18th. I can't go and I'm bummed about it, but you probably can! You should go!]

sock-gazing

Skywave - "Under The Moon" [Buy] -sorry this album is not available anymore anywhere online to purchase but there is a great tribute album.
Yo La Tengo - "From a Motel 6" [Buy]
traces - "water table" [Buy]
Meeks - "Across The Universe" [Buy] -please switch your itunes location to Japan.

oh beautiful sunny summer days. I woke up but still not getting up still laying in bed. Looking at miracles on ice on my ipad with slight double chin on my face. After two hours of life research(aka procrastination online), I decided to put clothes on and go to my studio. When I tried to put my socks, I realized I had a really hard time. As I was socks-gazing, "I need to exercise." some voice in my head told me. But other part of me said, "eat ice cream for breakfast first." so I ate leftover haagen-dazs which is half of the cup at least. I did do situps after reading online. "core muscle workout" or whatever it's called. It was more of slow-core workout but it burned my abs. I was exhausted. I read more online about make sure to rest your muscles to give time to grow. So Im planning to give at least 3 weeks of rest for my muscles to grow. So I laid down and said to myself, "oh what a beautiful summer day to stay inside."

OLD PUNKS

"Old Punks" - Baby Eagle and the Proud Mothers
"Uninhibited" - Shotmaker
"Thanks, Kelly" - Assfactor 4

I met a writer a long time ago. He wasn't having a good time on tour. The other writers he was traveling with brought their partners, and he was alone. He was far from home, his accommodations for the night were my couch, and it was cold out.

He was hungry after the reading so I took him to the diner around the corner. He was pretty quiet. He said he was from the southern US and named the town. It rang a bell. "Isn't that where Assfactor 4 were from?" An old punk band who played with spit and vinegar.

"Whoa you know Assfactor 4?" He was perking right up. "I went to high school with those guys. Aw man, did you ever see them play?"

"Nah, but I loved their records."

"They were so great live!" As he launched into a story of the old days his whole demeanour changed. In seconds he went from being a moody writer of the American south, descendent of Eudora Welty and Barry Hannah, to an amped up ex-punk who probably used to drink rotgut coffee and stay up all night wearing cut off work pants and making zines.

Old punks are just a bunch of nostalgics maybe. But when you hear that word, the name of a band from another time that meant the world to you, it can just clock you right on the head. That's how I felt the first time I heard Baby Eagle sing "I wore a Shotmaker patch" in this song.

[Buy Bone Soldiers, seek out Assfactor 4 and Shotmaker]

HOPEFUL REACH

Wolf Alice - "Freazy". One of my favourite movements is the hopeful reach. You on a kitchen chair, tippy-toes, straining to grasp the vase. You on all fours, under the bed, dreaming of that distant box of picture frames. You and an apple tree, you and Thanksgiving's bowl of yams, you and your lover as their train leaves the station. The hopeful reach is nicer than the hopeless reach, nicer than the blind fumble. I am not sure it is satisfying but it is nice. It is nice to watch: see the boy and his hopeful reaching, see the girl and her hopeful reaching, see the Aegean nation reaching for that which it cannot quite grasp. [buy]

(photo source lost)

Missed You In The Basement

Kiiara - "Gold"

Here's a pretty perfect glitchy song by a 20-year-old hardware store clerk from Illinois about fooling around with someone's brother because they've fucked with you, about needing to fuck them back. I can't think of another song I've heard in a long, long time that's walked the angry-sexy line this full-engagingly; there's something so satisfying about that balance, about the weird alchemy this song pulls off. The structure of "Gold" is so familiar and so new at the same time - you feel like you're going to know the chorus in your bones, on the way to it, and then you get there and it's its own new language, nothing you've ever heard before, nothing you could've imagined. Plus if Kiiara saying she's going to "bite your fillings out" doesn't seem like the hottest weirdest thing you've ever heard then I'm not sure what to tell you. This song feels like pure electrical current; hums through you head-to-toe, too dangerous to grasp bare-handed. A gorgeous dark mutation of some more boring basic song-of-the-summer gene. Uneasy balance, pulled-taut bassline, tight rise and fall controlled like only something ready to spin out at any moment can be. Hard bounce, low hum, late-night, buzzing. Ready to snap back any second.

Natural high

Mike Wallace - "Natural High" [Buy or here]

The Smoking Trees - "Trips" [Pre-order]-album will be out on July 10th on Ample Play

Once in a while, I meet people who are from a SNL skit or a B-comdey movie. This Asian guy asked me if I was Korean or Japanese at metro. I answered Im Japanese and he kept counting numbers in Japanese, "ichi, ni, san, shi..." Very friendly but super weird dude who was carrying spicey Chinese soup stock to his friend's restaurant downtown. I listened to count number in Japanese for about 4 minutes til the metro came. He is natural high all the time. Natural SNL skit guy who is always on a trip.

Do you remember the viral video of "What kind of Asian are you?" ? In fact, a lot of Asians ask each other that question all the time!!

I was in Chinatown cafe ordering some pastries and one waitress came up to me and asked me, "Are you Korean or Japanese?" I answered "Im Japanese." She went back to the counter and her co-worker was waiting. She told her and they giggled and one girl did a little gesture of "Yes!" and other waitress was "oh dang!" Then they noticed I was witnessing their "bet." They had "oh shit! he is looking at us! don't look now!" moment. I loled and they loled.

After that, I went home on my bike with a 20kg of rice bag on the back busket of my bike. When I got home, I noticed there was little rip in a rice bag and rice was coming out little by little. There was little trace of rice from Chinatown to my house, just in case, if I get lost. I loled alone and then I realized I was the SNL skit guy. LOL!