Archives : all posts by Dan

The Dirty Nil - "Hate Is A Stone"

Life in The Claw. A beautiful small town with five thin mountains surrounding it. They curve up and away from the town center, forming what look exactly like five clawed fingers. The town sits in what would be the palm. My house is on the point where the curved thumb-fold hits the main straight-line fold. Right in that wrinkle, on a dirt cul-de-sac that's full of abandoned strollers and big-wheels. I walk the streets, people say it's too big to be without a car but I don't care, and I think about how close we are to the precipice. You see, there's an old story about The Claw, that if the town, as a whole, does too many bad things, that the fingers, the mountains, will just close up and the ground will make a fist, and we'll all come out the sides like goo. Of course not too many people believe this story, I'm not sure if I believe it myself, but sometimes I wonder. Like the way you can do something wrong when you're not even trying, it just comes so natural you don't even notice. Like a dog doesn't care about a haircut, we just think it looks nice, you know? And if there's a way of looking at it that we're one sin away. One unreturned text message, one step on the back of someone's heel while they're walking, one making someone feel left out, away from the whole thing just being closed up and squished to death. I wish there were a jumbotron, a skywriter, heck a website, where they put the score up there, how close we are, how many chances we have left. [PWYC]

Swan Lake - "Warlock Psychologist"

Better to be armoured than to be pure. Ask the fly smashed on the windshield, wings sagging in the rushing air: "Would you rather have flown in such a way as to never have been hit by the windshield of a bus, or would you rather be ready for when the bus hits you?" I have reprogrammed my body, through vitamin balancing and surgery, to be able to handle the shit we call food and the poison we call air. I can drink oil, crude, refined, ready to burn, I can drink it all. And when I pass it through my body, I won't go into detail, I render it useless as a resource, it will not burn for fuel. In order to keep the world from burning up like the surface of Venus, at least millions of years before its time, we must leave megatons of oil unused. And instead of ask a junkie to simply ignore the mountain of drugs sitting beside him, or buried beneath his house, and to instead eat a raw vegan sandwich, I have taken it upon myself to destroy it. I will hang suspended on a harness, in a mine, where the newly unusable oil can pass through me back into the earth, and I will drink every last drop. It will take years, even after I'm dead funnel it through my reprogrammed organs. It's at least something I can do. And perhaps others will join. #crudedrinkers #theswallowproject #blackpiss

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Yeah Yeah Yeahs - "Maps"

Without you I am unmoored. I am adrift, my life a drift. Like eyes closed on the highway, the car hits a bend, seems to tilt and never quite go back to level. A plane that dips and seems to suddenly ignore the horizon. There is energy that slides, is pulled, straight out of the center of my chest, right where you used to lay your head, and powers the television long enough to read the lyrics. My tarred, dark heart still loves you, my light heart smiles, scarred. A stiff upper lip while the lower one quivers. I don't want you back, I just want back what you took, which, unfortunately, is you.

"Put it all in quotes," said Chumley, carrying a box that read "kitchen". Heather thought about putting it all in quotes, italicizing it. Maybe attributing it to some impossible source. Veronica Lodge. The Dalai Lama. Alanis. "Why?" she asked, while making a mental note: shower curtain. "Well, if you're feeling self conscious about it. Plus, it'd be funny." Chumley didn't work very hard in the moving process, but Heather was thankful that he was around.

Sam was smartly dressed, a fitted fall coat and trim slacks. A victor's dress. He found the note, without italics, without quotes, signed sincerely. And the effect it had on him, what Heather wanted so desperately to see, was rather disappointingly internal, he looked as if he had just swallowed a multivitamin. In fairness, a potent multivitamin, one that might come from a $12.00 bottle. [buy]

Dan Deacon - "USA III: Rail"

In this version, we will help each other. [Buy]

Lil Wayne - "Burn"

Lil Wayne's perfect songs are full-on assaults. Attacks coming from every direction, repeatedly, relentlessly. Like a trick of perspective, a telephoto lens that shows one menacing black SUV on the heat-blurred horizon, that suddenly and punishingly splits into four when the rest pull out from behind. It's like being force-fed time bombs that are set to explode just as the regular bullets hit you all at once. It's Party Cubism. [Free]

ESG - "You Make No Sense"

"We're not here to answer accusations about who came up with the idea or who is to blame for it's not working exactly according to our expectations. The whole department was behind the idea of Muppet Cops. It was a unanimous decision brought about by the department in conjunction with the province, there were many many signatories in this process. Muppet Cops still sounds like a good idea to me. But it's obvious now that there were unforeseen problems with the procedure. Too much power. We thought they'd be cute and they just became tyrants. We've never had so many police killings, and never more brutal. Officers are still speculating as to why that is. Some think it's because the Muppets are operated from underneath, so while this was formerly a figure of authority, it became a kind of super-authority because even the officers where subordinate to their whims. Some think it's the transfer of authority into a character, one that is separate from human ethics and morals, that allows it to be 'set free' in a sense and operate outside of human decency. Others, and if you've ever used one you wouldn't dismiss this option, feel the Muppets themselves are possessed by some sort of demon force. Needless to say, we'll be canceling the Muppet Cops program immediately, and will do everything in our power to bring the twelve escaped Muppet Cops in as quickly as possible and bring them to the justice they so desperately deserve. May God help anyone that runs into them out there."

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Sharon Van Etten - "Leonard"

We are only sad because all those ideas need to be thrown out. What a waste, all this human-shaped furniture. Now we get hot walls, and hot roofs, and those will bring new ideas. They will not look like ticker-tape and mirrorballs and empty bars and ice. They will not taste like watermelon and fall leaves and proud old houses. They will look like new things, at first storm shelters and illegal food, but soon ocean homes and wind travel. Raise a glass to the in-between, because it will never be seen again. [Buy]

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