Archives : all posts by Dan

Neil Young - "Guitar Solo 5"

Last opened: About A Year Ago
Duration: 14:41

First snowfall and a backpack. Caught in late November, hitchhiking is a lonely pursuit, like trying to win a game of chess against yourself, or even trying to lose. Darkness rests on your shoulders heavier than all your belongings put together, and I even own a car someplace. Impounded. I imagine it now, surrounded by pacing dogs, the windows blown out, or smashed in, and snow along the insides of the doors, sort of melting and dripping onto the seats and floor. I own a coffin too, that's something I don't tell many people. I came into a lot of money after an inheritance and I bought a coffin for myself. Can't quite remember what I was thinking, but now that I've done it, things feel a little more redundant, like I'm doing or saying all sorts of "extra" stuff. But everything I do feels very conscious, very much my own choice. I'm working for myself, in a way. So I can stay out here, my shoes getting a ring of wetness and my jacket shaking nervously like it's about to cry out of fear, and my hands cold and stoic at my side, too proud to set the pack down and get out their gloves, in the middle of the night, because my boss is making me.
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Gillian Welch - "I Dream A Highway"

Last opened: --
Duration: --

First snowfall and a milkshake. 12-year-old Bridget leafs through the classifieds; houses, jobs, cars, furniture. Her first cell phone rings in her pocket, but it's her dad so she doesn't answer. A sip of the milkshake and a look out the window. People hugging themselves walk like they're always almost there. The phone rings the message ring and she starts the wordsearch. "Holiday", "gargoyle", "bun", "upstart", "lesson", "righteous", "gray", "theatre". Her boots swing and kick the side of the counter. The waitress smoking at the end looks up from her phone call. Looks away. Bridget goes over her homework in her head. Her cell phone rings again. It's not time yet, though. She'll wait the whole morning, and however many mornings it takes, until it's cold enough. Once it's cold enough, for the ice highway, then she's likely to believe a phone call. But not until then. Wouldn't believe a word.
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White Denim - "Heart From All Of Us"

White Denim pap cloudly from the air around my notepad. They hup clicking and stup fupping in their sole-slapping leathers. Down dirt road microphones and smoke-tray dishrags. They clop together bent old drawn funnies and rock tunes, training them all the way to the station, cabbing it every day to the grocery store. They quit kissing and replaced it with hissing, humming, yelling, closed-eyed brelling, and tumbling til they turn it down, accidentally landing on the volume pump, pressing it deeply with their beer bellies, unugly but a bit uncute too. [Buy]

Crystal Stilts - "Crystal Stilts"

All Crystal Stilts songs take place in this hollow ice chamber, where you can see your breath but your voice is too echo-y to understand anything. Tonight in the ice chamber they're playing surf rock and showing road movies, apparently my two favourite things and a winning combination. But it's not until that little pipsqueak organ whines from the backseat about not enough legroom that I'm completely sold, I'll stay cold for this. [Buy]

PDF Format - "Wonderful Day"

Tonight, it's cold, I'm very sick, and there's nothing better than new PDF Format to warm me up. I was at the Pop Montreal show and had to leave early, but this was the show opener, and its honest beauty remains intact from that night. In a recent no-sided conversation I had with him, he's looking for money to record his rock opera (his incredible and sweeping and I've-no-doubt absolutely canonical rock opera) "properly". So if you run a studio and you've got like 3 weeks of unbooked time, let him know.

[all mp3s on 8-bit collective]

(image made in MS Paint by Diamonster)

Fewn - "Ten Times the Fun"

My first job was at a gas station. Full serve Sunoco. There were some pretty heavy fumes, and legally they had to post signs on the pumps saying "prolonged exposure to gas fumes has been known to cause cancer in rats". I mostly just asked for rewards cards and tried to sell carwashes as an add-on to whatever people were already buying.

Oh, a chocolate bar, would you like a carwash with that?

And cleaning things that were already clean.

I have to clean these fridge doors with windex?
Yes.
But they're already clean.
You have to.

I think this would have been my favourite song while working there if I'd known it then. I would have ripped out the direct feed to Majic 100 and plugged this song in for all the gas-pumpers and mild shoplifters to listen to.

Is this Ween?
Fuck you.

[Buy]

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Sergei Rachmaninoff - "Isle of the Dead"

Nothing ever scared me until I followed my father to work. I never thought the dark rings under his eyes were anything but natural, that the softening in his look when he would come home in the morning was anything but a tired happiness. I never thought it was relief. I followed him one night because I was supposed to do a project just like all the other kids called "take your kid to work day". I asked my father nicely, at dinner, and he barked something about this being his breakfast and told me to "read comics instead". I said I had to write about it, like homework, and my mother looked like she was going to scream, so I shut up. But then, that night, when I heard them saying goodbye in the foyer, I could hear my mom stifling tears because my mom always cried when my dad left for work, I left a pile of pillows in my bed and went down the fire escape which was out my baby sister's window. I followed about half a block behind, trying not to lose him, but also trying not to get noticed. He got on the 33rd train to G-line and Avenue Beta, so I did too. I almost lost him trying to find change, but I managed to catch the doors just as they were closing.

We got out at a station that looked like it hadn't been cleaned since it opened probably a hundred years ago. Outside, the neighbourhood was even worse. It was like the buildings were crying these black tar tears, and everything was wet and dirty and looked sneezed on. My dad walked quickly with his hands deep in the pockets of his leather jacket, and he just stared at the ground when he walked, he wasn't acting at all like he did at home. He walked past a bunch of dry cleaning places, though I can't imagine anyone ever getting anything cleaned around there, and turned abruptly down a flight of stairs. On the walls of the stairwell someone had spraypainted "Satan's Pussy", and the door at the bottom of the stairs was heavy and the handle was greasy. It was dark inside, and I hurried to find a corner, a place against the wall so I wouldn't be seen. From there I watched it all happen. My father would make long speeches before a crowd of lowlifes who would cheer and boo him, and after he was done, the other disgusting lowlife he was talking about would either walk away and out the door, to much cheering, or through the back hall much to the crowd's dismay. My dad seemed to be some kind of defense lawyer for some underground court where the cases were too awful to be handled by regular courts. I couldn't understand the words a lot of the time, it was like they were speaking some other language, even though most of the words were English. But my dad seemed to be in charge of most of it, second only to the judge, who wore a long dark wig that hung over his eyes and face and only his pointy nose stuck out. There were times when my dad looked like he hated it, like he thought he might die if he said another word, but there were other times in the night when he looked like he loved it, like he never wanted to do anything else. The next day, tired and smelling like hand-rolled cigarettes, I told the class that my dad was a technical writer. I brought the instruction manual for my 8-speed and told them that he had written that. It didn't seem like anyone noticed.

[via Octember.net (thanks, Evan!)]
[inspired by the song and from the painting below, from Sean's Monday post]
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Tony Randall - "Byrd"

A change has come to America. Election night was like some kind of real-world masterwork. I cried like a little baby during that speech, not ashamed to admit. [via the WFMU blog]

Beck - "Gamma Ray [Jay Reatard Version]"

[Buy]

Gigi - "The Hundredth Time"
Gigi - "One Woman Show"

I'm looking over 3 years of doodles and drawings from a pad I keep near the phone. There's a dragon looking meanly at a fire hydrant with dog feet. There's about a hundred broken hearts, there's a bunch of testing-the-pen scribbles, a half-face that looks like a mix of Lenny Kravitz and Hunter Thompson. There's a coffee stain that's been outlined and turned into zero-gravity liquid that's flowing from some outer-space faucet. There's sign posts for made up destinations, phone numbers with no name, addresses for real but forgotten places. Some words that I think I was trying to write them out to test how the spelling looked. Like 'occurrence' and 'negligible' and 'hundredth'. Listening to this song, I'm suddenly walking in this weird world, looking up and around as the thoughts fall like half-formed flakes of snow, to be shoveled later into blue cracks, or just to melt away. [MySpace]
(thanks, Michelle)

Neil Gaiman - "Bloody Sunrise"

If the Magnetic Fields had been asked by Said the Gramophone to write a Hallowe'en song for us to post today, they would have written Neil Gaiman's "Bloody Sunrise". But Neil Gaiman would have already written it, and submitted it, pretending to be Magnetic Fields, but in that way that you have to start by looking up before you climb. In any case, it's here now, and it's for all of you who are just putting on a zombie movie and having a fire and handing out candy to lonely little happy kids in the evening. [off the new and wonderful Lifted Brow compilation (more below)]

Jumbling Towers - "Cowards"

I think it's always Hallowe'en in the Jumbling Towers mansion. It's such an endless supply of fantastic creeping and crawling and slinking and sliding music. With flashing-eye flourishes full of teeth and face paint. I wonder what the singer is going to be dressed as tonight. I would guess an animal, like a wolf or a pig, whose first conscious thought (before self-awareness) is performance art. Or some obscure real-life pirate who, if you knew the story, you'd look at him and say "yeah, that's exactly the right costume, and that's terrifying." [free incredible EP]

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The Lifted Brow is a biannual magazine based in Melbourne. With their most recent issue comes a 2 CD set with some really great stuff on it, including the first CD kicked off by a gorgeous and haunting song by our own Jordan's band The Cay. Go see.