Archives : all posts by Dan

Goat - "Goatman"

Goatman will Fuck you up. Goatman says that Every Day is a Point of No Return. Goatman drinks gasoline, to render it Unusable. Goatman rides a vegetarian horse, through barren steaming planes. Toxic clouds, toxic water. Goatman keeps an Electronic Journal. Goatman hides his face, but only to keep his Skin. A famous swath of Purple Cloth. Goatman is the Counter-Weight, the One that Balances. Goatman will soon be here. [buy from Forced Exposure]

(image from Consume Consume)

Fiona Apple - "Regret"

A given room normally has six sides. Four walls, a ceiling, and a floor. Maybe a window or, if you're lucky, two. Rooms can be furnished or finished or un to both. They can be high up in the air or buried in the ground, but usually they are about eye level. When a bomb goes off in a room, when it's held out on the palm of your hand, a ticking bundle of dynamite like a piece of fruit, the room becomes quickly something else. Yes it will all die, but at that moment when the blast blows the floor and the walls and the paintings and the wires all over the place, there are hundreds of sides to that room. It's showing all its material, its guts are told at once, and there's something lovely and embarrassing about a room that used to have the normal six sides that suddenly has to reveal that it's always had hundreds, they were just kept in line by physics. Even if you only ever see it once, and only for an instant, and you will never get it back, and you probably won't even survive. Still, it's nice. [Buy] (thanks to Adam for insisting on this record. I love it. Go buy.)

(self-portrait of artist (and musician) Bryan Lewis Saunders while on bath salts)

Kissed Her Little Sister - "The Thrill is Gone"

I can reset your cells to zero. I can let you live in the same stinking body, with the belly paunch and the weird ears, for two hundred more years. You'll consume twice as much meat and burn twice as much gas and break twice as many spirits and tumblers as any normal person. Any former person. You are the new kind of person. Double life persons. Twicers. Do you want to have a hundred and sixty more years of working in bars, trying to make ends meet, working on your career? People think living forever means dressing in a toga and walking the greenspaces. Naw, it's only your life, you only get 220 years of it, make the most of every day.

(image)(cell reset)

Josephine Foster - "Child of God"

Greatest Hits Summer. All the greatest summer days of your life, in a row. All killer, no filler. The day it rained at the garlic festival and it was so wet and people ran everywhere and that poor farmer slipped in the mud and then it cleared and the clouds looked like a holy painting. The day the morning was so bright you thought your head might explode but it was just up-all-night body dirt and the coffee you shared smiling tasted like it was the first one ever made. Like the cricket night, the gravel drive and grass stain cricket night. The water day. The day all the traffic lights conspired to set you totally free. The day you walked under a cherry picker and the man up in the tree said, "Hey. Hi. Up here." "Yeah?" you said. "I'm just gonna throw some stuff down, so...don't be startled." "Okay." Only days like that.

[Buy]

Mountain Mocha Kilimanjaro - "It Must Be You"

A room service cart rumbles squeaky-wheeled down a stark hallway, a silver-domed tray and a bottle of red. Room 422. A man, face half-covered in shaving cream, comes wet-haired to the closed door. Peephole, distorted uniform, the lock--chunk. "44.95, would you like to cover that now?" "Put it on the room. Make it 60." "Thank you, sir." "'sat a shrimp parmesan?" "I--'m really not sure." He lets the door close itself and the man continues shaving his face. He is at that point in the shave where he cannot possibly shave in the right direction, for little hairs grow every which way in this particular area. He pauses for a moment, listening to the fan, the lights, the idle plumbing. Scritch. Blood. The man runs the water, curls back his lips. Softly, outside the bathroom, the small reverberant lift of a silver-domed tray. The man dabs the cut, and puts a foolish bit of toilet paper on it, it grips his neck, a tiny Japanese flag. Clin-tick, the familiar drawing back of a hammer, snub. The water stops, his breathing stops, everything stops. He looks in the mirror, at the shadow in the hall. "You must've lost weight," he says. He slowly grabs a towel, daubing his face gingerly around the cut. The shadow replies, "I'd never order a shrimp parmesan." The man looks at himself, his eyes suddenly well aware of gravity, like a heart suddenly aware of its need to keep beating. He plucks the tiny tissue bandage from the cut, it blooms again, still less silly than that white outline. "Just tell me one thing," says the man, his chest beginning to show the shape of age, that sharp breast-like sag, "Did that waiter know?" A pause, the colour blue, a pause the colour of deep dark blue night water. "Yeah." The man sighs, frowns, resigned. "Tell him to make it 50." Kang.

[Site and Buy (thanks, Emilie!)] (source)

Thee Oh Sees - "Wicked Park"

"Put your hands in the dirt," he said sharply, the tiny camera whirred and that meant business. She pressed her hands, white lace gloves, in the dirt like she were kneading dough. "Good," he said, and moved the camera closer. It was one of those cameras that looked like a boxy laser gun, without a proper viewfinder, he couldn't really know what the picture would look like. They walked through a field and to a fence, her black velvet dress getting streaked with dew from the tall grass. Her feet were wet and sore through the shoes. She thought about eating dinner while she climbed the fence, the camera whirring. "What will you do with this?" "I'll edit it," he said, and of course she knew that but his tone kept her from asking any further. She thought he had wanted her to be his actress because he liked her, but he was not acting that way now. The sky was moving quickly and the lace felt silly over her eyes. What were they even doing out here? Summer almost over and the August heat soaked into the ground and was starting to disappear. It seemed like they were putting gestures and guesses into this whirring jar, for later, and what would they look like? They would probably look exactly like what they were. Kneading the earth like dough, standing on a fence post, and walking in grass. It's likely, she thought, that memories are most suited to decay, since they too are organic matter, like vegetables or pets or food.

[Pre-Order now from Picadilly in the UK] [Buy from In The Red in North America Sep 17]

Foxygen - "Why Did I Get Married?"

Neville's breath. Neville had paper thin breath, after three vodkaredbulls and a slack neck taxi ride home. His life, of late, had the composition of a compressed brick of garbage, sitting formed into a shape all the things that never resembled that shape to begin with. He thought of the bar, the dance floor, where he danced nervously, as if pleasing some king, and thought of the creep with the upside-down face¹. At that moment, he suddenly felt all the things in his pockets, they took shape against his body and he had wanted to strip naked. But, prevented by decorum, he watched expressionless as people all around him 1-upped their life goals, and he felt invisibly stepped-on, used as leverage or like a pipeline. Now home, he blared old Stones and thought about how all of us are pipes, made of pipes, live off pipes, and ship our poison and bring our death about with pipes. Lead pipes, sewer pipes, oil pipes and organs. Neville felt that dual desire within him, that familiar pull between hungry enough to get food and too drunk to move.

¹ The man with the upside-down face. The top of his head came to a small point, like a chin, and his eyes, in their resting state, lay squinted beneath a brow so prominent it made a dark line across his forehead, greatly resembling a mouth. His nose was piggish and looked as if it opened upward, and he had a line of hair under his bottom lip, below his splayed and froggish mouth, that looked like a reverse eyebrow. Further below this, as if he had cultivated this look exactly, he had a luscious chin beard, which contrasted starkly with his completely bald head. As Neville danced he wondered if the man had any further Twilight-Zone-style differences, like he heard music backwards, or lived in an upside down house, the floor lamps hanging bolted from the ceiling, their chains dangling perfectly within reach, and strapping himself into his suspended bed at night.

[Buy] (thanks, Roger)