Irony Maiden

2011-12-30T18:00:00.000+13:00

Best Albums of 2011

2011-12-20T11:00:00.004+13:00

Honourable mentions to:

Feist - Metals
PJ Harvey - Let England Shake
Bill Callahan - Apocalypse
Wild Flag - Self-titled
Battles - Gloss Drop

Some things I have been enjoying lately.

2011-12-15T01:11:00.004+13:00

2011 continues to be awesome

2011-12-14T00:16:00.004+13:00

Best comic ever?

2011-11-29T09:07:00.003+13:00

All the shit I liked today.

2011-11-09T01:01:00.003+13:00

http://youtu.be/aUfu-lEflbQ

http://thekittencovers.tumblr.com/

2011-11-08T22:21:00.000+13:00

“Of course my jokes are in poor taste, inappropriate, and confused; they reveal my lack of security. But that is because I have no respect for myself.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

2011-11-03T21:13:00.002+13:00

"Are you familiar with the work of Dr. Peter Mark Roget? He understood that to dump sewage into the river you drink from is to no one's advantage. He would be very happy if you opened up his thesaurus and quit saying 'fuck.'"

- From Cruddy by Lynda Barry

I think I will make this at the flatwarming.

2011-11-01T19:36:00.003+13:00

Just to see if I survive.

Classic Champagne Punch

Ingredients
1 1/3 cups of Fresh Lemon Juice
1 cup of Vodka
1/2 cup of Orange Liqueur
1/2 cup of Triple Sec1/2 cup of Cognac
1/2 cup of Fresh Orange Juice
2 bottles of Champagne

Mixing Instructions
Combine the lemon juice, sugar, orange liqueur, Triple Sec, cognac, and orange juice in a non-reactive bowl and stir until the sugar is completely dissolved. Add the Champagne and stir to combine. Cover and refrigerate until chilled, about 1 hour. Pour into a decorative bowl or pitcher. Garnish with orange or lemon slices and fresh strawberries, if desired. Serve in Champagne flutes, wine glasses, or punch cups.

How to decode someone with an anxiety disorder.

2011-11-01T19:28:00.004+13:00

lipstickandsidewalk

Things we can’t help but do all the time:

second-guess ourselves
behave impulsively and reactively
worry
have difficulty accepting compliments
have difficulty reciprocating friendly gestures
have difficulty finding the courage to respond
have difficulty not being suspicious of others’ intentions

things you should keep in mind:

we’re scared of everything
pretty much all of the time
it’s an actual disorder
it manifests as impulsive behavior
you can’t fix us with words
also, we wear a lot of armor
cold, heavy, affection-proof armor with spikes
we constructed this armor as children
we’re fairly certain you will never be able to pry it apart
but there is a nice person under there, we promise

things you can do for a friend with an anxiety disorder:

stick around
ask them if they’re comfortable in a place or situation
be willing to change the place or situation if not
activities that help them take their mind off of things are good!
talk to them even when they might not talk back
try not to take their reactions (or lack thereof) personally
give them time to respond to you
they will obsess over how they are being interpreted
they will anticipate being judged

things you shouldn’t do:

tell us not to worry
tell us we’ll be fine
mistake praise for comfort
ask us if we are “getting help”
force us to be social
force us to do things that trigger us
“face your fears” doesn’t always work
it would be more accurate to say we are scared of the fear itself

emergency action procedure for panic attacks:

be calm
be patient
don’t be condescending
remind us that we’re not “crazy”
sit with us
ask us to tighten and relax our muscles one by one
remind us that we are breathing
engage us in a discussion (if we can talk, then we can breathe)
if we are having trouble breathing, try getting us to exhale slowly
or breathe through our nose
or have us put our hands on our stomach to feel each breath
ask us what needs to change in our environment in order for us to feel safe
help us change it
usually, just knowing that we have someone on our side is enough to calm us down.

Luckily I haven't had a panic attack in years. But this whole thing is pretty accurate.

2011-10-29T23:40:00.007+13:00

'"Remember that day you said you loved me? Remember that? See, you could do that because you're basically a sane person, who grew up in a loving, sane family. You could take a risk like that. But in my family we didn't go around saying we loved each other. We went around screaming at each other. So what do I do, when you say you love me? I go and undermine it."

Had she known from the outset about his manic depression, his messed-up family, his shrink habit, Madeleine would never have allowed herself to get so passionately involved. But now that she was passionately involved, she found little to regret.

To feel so much was its own justification."

- From The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.

I love this book. Love it. I always identify so strongly with Eugenides's characters. I want to write like he does.

2011-10-29T15:37:00.003+13:00

"In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so became unremarkable."

- from The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

2011-10-23T05:15:00.004+13:00

Some bits are a bit fucking naff but...

2011-10-22T11:57:00.003+13:00

Stop worrying about whether you’re fat. You’re not fat. Or rather, you’re sometimes a little bit fat, but who gives a shit? There is nothing more boring and fruitless than a woman lamenting the fact that her stomach is round. Feed yourself. Literally. The sort of people worthy of your love will love you more for this, sweet pea.

In the middle of the night in the middle of your twenties when your best woman friend crawls naked into your bed, straddles you, and says, You should run away from me before I devour you, believe her.

You are not a terrible person for wanting to break up with someone you love. You don’t need a reason to leave. Wanting to leave is enough. Leaving doesn’t mean you’re incapable of real love or that you’ll never love anyone else again. It doesn’t mean you’re morally bankrupt or psychologically demented or a nymphomaniac. It means you wish to change the terms of one particular relationship. That’s all. Be brave enough to break your own heart.

When that really sweet but fucked up couple invites you over to their cool apartment to do ecstasy with them, say no.

There are some things you can’t understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding. It’s good you’ve worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.

One evening you will be rolling around on the wooden floor of your apartment with a man who will tell you he doesn’t have a condom. You will smile in this spunky way that you think is hot and tell him to fuck you anyway. This will be a mistake for which you alone will pay.

Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet.

You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

One hot afternoon during the era in which you’ve gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with heroin you will be riding the bus and thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She’ll offer you one of the balloons, but you won’t take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You’re wrong. You do.

Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Many people who appear to you to be old and stupidly saddled down with kids and cars and houses were once every bit as hip and pompous as you.

When you meet a man in the doorway of a Mexican restaurant who later kisses you while explaining that this kiss doesn’t “mean anything” because, much as he likes you, he is not interested in having a relationship with you or anyone right now, just laugh and kiss him back. Your daughter will have his sense of humor. Your son will have his eyes.

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that she saved for months to buy, don’t look at her skeptically after she tells you she thought the coat was perfect for you. Don’t hold it up and say it’s longer than you like your coats to be and too puffy and possibly even too warm. Your mother will be dead by spring. That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life.

Say thank you.

Yours,
Sugar

From Dear Sugar

So nostalgic right now

2011-10-18T19:46:00.003+13:00

Awesome snippet from this Royal Trux interview. Index Magazine rules.

BOB: You seem to have a lot of wildlife.

NEIL: There's a Walmart about an hour or forty minutes away.
JENNIFER: I love Walmart.
NEIL: See, Walmart destroys …
JENNIFER: You guys must have really strong ideas about things that you will and you won't do. Is there anything that you just won't do, or that you're completely against, as far as like …
NEIL: … supporting the Christian Coalition?
JENNIFER: Well, no …
NEIL: You're saying, morally or personally?
JENNIFER: No —
NEIL: Like, "I smoke pot, but I never do cocaine?"
JENNIFER: No, like, "I don't wear gold."
AMY: You don't wear gold?
JENNIFER: Oh, I wear gold.
BOB: Like, not wearing fur? I don't think men should wear fur anyway.
AMY: What do you mean, men shouldn't wear fur?
JENNIFER: But that's what he thinks.
NEIL: This rationale for wearing fur, "but it's already dead," that doesn't cut it. I don't think it's right.
AMY: I don't understand … something I wouldn't do?
NEIL: Is it class you're talking about?
JENNIFER: No, I'm just asking. A lot of times people won't reach out to something that's right there in the present. It's always like going forward or backward, and sometimes people reject exactly what's happening in the present.
AMY: The moment there's something new on TV or on the radio, people are like …
NEIL: I like The X Files.
AMY: Oh, X Files rules. Did you see the one with the guy who could take pictures with his mind?
NEIL: Yeah, that was a good one.
AMY: That was rad. That was the best one.
NEIL: We don't like Friends.
AMY: Well, god, who does?
NEIL: It's sort of like a funny Melrose Place.
AMY: How did talking about Walmart get to this?
NEIL: Walmart's bad, man.

Pretty good SY interview.

2011-10-18T19:43:00.001+13:00

By Jules Moore. From Hobo Magazine.

Like most people under the age of fifty, I first encountered Sonic Youth back when I was a young teenager. Their first album,Confusion is Sex, was laying face-up on a friend’s coffee table. It belonged to her older sister, whose age and coolness terrified me. I had no idea what the title meant or how prophetic it would prove to be, but that notion caught my attention; the music has held it ever since. In the worlds of punk rock and experimental music, nobody has composed a more vital sound effect for the unruliness of life than Sonic Youth. Three decades after its New York start behind the post-punk No Wave movement, the band is still treading the path of chance paved by American composer John Cage. Their motor runs behind a mindset that everything works out to something, and as a result, Sonic Youth has produced more albums than most bands will ever dream of. This year, following a return to their indie beginnings with a move to Matador Records, the noise artists cum cultural architects are back with their 16th studio album, The Eternal. Like everything Sonic Youth creates, the vibe is familiar and alien, a reformation of aggressions with a mischievous charm, a playful energy that is fun and infectious. The Eternal is ripe with new sounds and imagery, with a heartbeat that is unmistakably Sonic Youth.

Like parts of an ivy plant, the members of Sonic Youth allow one another to move and grow in all directions, each finding the unexplored space and filling it, Kim Gordon with her constant involvement with visual arts, Thurston Moore with his solo projects and endless collaborations with other musicians, Lee Ranaldo with his contribution to literature and spoken word, and Steve Shelley work running his own label Smells Like Records. Their breadth of involvement is a testament to the value of keeping an underground sensibility while working within a mainstream machine. For this sensibility, Sonic Youth’s album art reads like a mini MOMA, each page a mosaic of keepsakes, their own and others: A drawing from William S. Burroughs, a painting by Kim, Lee’s photo of a New York sidewalk, an illustration by Raymond Pettibon. Chronic collaborators in art and life, Sonic Youth is committed to a lifetime of uncertainty, to perpetual sweaty palms and heart palpitations, a state of eternal youth. The first interview with one of rock’s most iconic women is set for late afternoon on Easter Sunday.

Jules Moore.— Hi Kim, how are you?
Kim Gordon.— Oh, pretty good.

— I just recently saw the photos you took with Ari [Marcopoulos].
— How do they look?

— The images are beautiful. Ari had mentioned that you go back quite a ways. How did you guys meet?
— Through the Beastie Boys maybe? Ari was always around taking pictures and he has a little boy who’s our daughter Coco’s age, or maybe a year older.

— So, the new album. It’s been a big part of my life these past few days. I think it’s incredible. How do you feel about it?
— Oh, well, I’m glad you like it. We’re pretty happy with it. It was really fun to make and we wrote it quickly.

— I’m sure it varies from album to album but, generally speaking, is the recording process something you tend to make playful or take very seriously?
— Playful? (laughs) I don’t think I’d describe it that way, but I guess because we recorded in our own studio, which is always more relaxing, it is kind of comfortable. That and we pretty much play all at once. There aren’t that many overdubs. Yeah, it’s comfortable. And John Agnello, the engineer, is really fun to work with too.

— I think it comes across that way too. Out of the dozen new tracks, could you select one that’s closest to you?
— “Massage the History”, in a way. It’s kind of a sad vampire love song. It’s a lot of things. It’s also a kind of metaphor for the record industry and kind of makes reference to our history and, I don’t know, I can’t really explain how it’s closest to me.

— If you were to play only one song for a friend, would that be it?
— Well, if I was going to play my favorite song off the album, I guess I would play “Poison Arrow”. I just really love that song. It’s really fun and I love the way the background vocals came out. The melody reminds me of a Kevin Ayers song. I also like “Anti Orgasm” a lot.

— What about some of your projects – for instance, Free Kitten [musical collaboration with Pussy Galore’s Julie Catfritz]. That’s exciting.
— We’re not really working on anything right now but we’re talking about doing a single. I’m working on some art for a book coming out in the fall. It’s a collection of paintings and photographs. We have an exhibit that’s been traveling in Europe based on different artists whose work we’ve done collaborations with over the years. People like Dan Graham and Tony Oursler, Mike Kelly, Raymond Pettibon, Jody Conrad, and then Sonic Youth has assembled some of our own works. So that’s going to be opening in Malmo. Now it’s in Germany, and it’s opening in Sweden in May. So we’ll be going over there.

— Speaking of connecting and collaborating with other artists, I read an article where Spike Jonze credits you as being the single phone call that set him off into a life of directing. If I’m not mistaken, that’s also when you met Marc Gonzales. Was there something you saw in him back then, some kind of untapped creativity or energy there?
— Yeah. Thurston had seen the Blind Skateboards video that Spike had done and it was basically these guys riding in a car that eventually goes off a cliff and the video we had in mind [for the song] 100% involved skateboarding. Thurston thought it would be great to have Spike shoot that part of it. Cameron Davis was the director and she basically taught Spike how to make a music video. We had him shoot the skating part and Marc Gonzales came by and actually Jason Lee was in the video too. And Marc was great. He kind of just opened the trunk of his car and said “does anyone want any paintings?’

— Were they his own paintings he was selling?
— Yeah, he’s a really good artist. Anyway, that’s basically how Spike learned how to make videos, although I’m sure he would have gotten to it sooner or later. Cameron very generously showed him how to edit and from there he just took off.

— In the way of film, you were involved with Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There on different levels; aside from being in it, Sonic Youth did the title track. What was that like?
— I thought Thurston did an amazing job. We all took a turn trying to sing it but his was so great right off the bat. Yeah, Todd is such an amazing filmmaker and I really like his films a lot. That approach made so much sense for Dylan.

— You’ve also been in another biopic, Gus van Sant’s Last Days. It triggered a lot of discussion as to what you were, nobody could agree, and maybe that’s the idea. The moment when you come in and offer an escape route and share that moment with Michael Pitt’s character was really intense. Could you shed any light there?
— I was thinking of somebody there. Rosemary Carrol, actually. She’s a lawyer for Courtney. She’s kind of an eccentric. So I was thinking vaguely of her. And then I was thinking of Francis, Kurt’s daughter, and how that would be the one way to really get through to him. It was strange to do but at the same time was so much fun. (laughs) On the one hand it’s such a sad and profoundly subversive thing to do. Because, you know, Thurston and I had never ever talked about Kurt to anyone. Thurston had been consulting with Gus about the movie, and also talking with Michael, and we had Michael come up to the house and they jammed and stuff, and then it felt kind of easy to do because there was hardly anyone in the room. It was a little unnerving going up there ‘cause like Harmony Korine was there doing a scene and other people I know and admire. But it was basically just improvising the lines.

— One of the overarching themes in this issue of Hobo is nostalgia in art. Do you see any of your music or visual art as nostalgic or inspired by nostalgia?
— Nostalgia is a funny word. I tend to equate sentimentality with nostalgia. Does that make sense? I don’t really think of our music as sentimental but we reference a lot of history, certainly on this new record. The fact that we’re back with an independent label again and working with Gerard Cosloy, who we worked with when we were at Homestead Records, is kind of like coming full circle, coming back to people who we’ve known for such a long time. Maybe that’s where we’re at nostalgia-wise.

— Do you collect anything?
— Well, not intentionally. I’ve been auctioning off my vintage Darryl K clothes, which I didn’t intentionally collect. I’m not a collector like Thurston is. He collects a lot of records. I’m not anti-collecting but I don’t want the responsibility of having to take care of things. I like to have books and art, but when I think of collectors I think of someone who’s pretty focused and kind of obsessed in their acquisition of things.

— Is there a designer you’d trust to dress you?
— I like to go out and find things. I like the store No.6 in New York. This woman Karen, she’s a stylist and she has a line. She has all sorts of interesting vintage clothes and other slightly avant-garde designers.

— Your work is above all, consistent. Is that a result of having a lot of direction? Do you always have a pretty firm grip on where you’re going?
— We have no direction (laughs). I mean, we have kind of a work strategy for how we’re specifically going to do it because Thurston and I don’t live in New York. But we don’t have such a direction. Maybe when it comes to initiating songs. In that sense there’s a focus, but I’m a firm believer in getting lost too and just, you know, that cliché that when you’re lost, that can be a really strong place to work from.

— Since your work and art and love is so integrated with you and Thurston, is there an overlap? Do you ever start writing lyrics together in the middle of daily routines, like unexpectedly when you’re just hanging out?
— Well, the song “Anti Orgasm” came about when Thurston and I were watching this German movie called 8 Miles High about this model in the 60s, Uschi Obermeier, this sort of glamorous girl who became involved with a commune, and how they were kind of into open free sex and this girl says, “we’re not really into orgasms” (laughs).

— Has Sonic Youth’s core family dynamic changed much over time?
— Not really. I guess we got to be more mature (laughs). I mean, we know how to get along with each other and we don’t drink or do drugs, which is often the thing that breaks a band. So the dynamics of the band haven’t really changed that much. I think that fact that we all have different projects outside Sonic Youth helps to alleviate the pressure that this band has to fulfill everybody’s needs all the time. You can have different dynamics when you play with different people.

— Was it a collective decision to not drink or do drugs?
— No, of course not. We’re just boring (laughs).

— In one of Ari’s photos there’s this great wall of tapes and tucked in is a photo of Patti Smith sticking her tongue out. How did you and Patti meet?
— Thurston was actually much more a Patti Smith fan than I was ‘cause he was in New York in the 70’s going to CBGB’s and saw her early readings. We met her when she came back to New York. I was totally into her and so kind of in awe of her energy as a performer and the fact that she was so androgynous. Also, her idols were male musicians, which I found interesting and I was somewhat of a tomboy so I kind of related to that.

— Is that an energy you tend to value in others?
— With her, the admiration is because I felt I could never do that. There’s a certain kind of theatrics to what she does and she’s also very unself-conscious. I don’t see myself as being a sort of charismatic performer so I guess I admire that.

— Looking back at your shows, what kind of audience makes you walk off stage and say “that was a good crowd, a good show, a good night”.
— I guess it’s when you feel that it’s all sounding good and you feel the audience being with you and that’s where you can lose yourself and not feel self-conscious. The worst is being in a really dry place where you can hear someone talking from twenty feet down, an acoustically dead room. The audience is involved as kind of the sound observers and all the energy they impart.

— I see this beautiful dog in the photos. What’s the name?
— Merzbow, named after the Japanese noise artist.

— Ah nice. Well, thank you so much for your time and happy Mother’s Day.
— That’s in May, no? Easter’s what’s coming up.

— Really? Maybe I should pull that card out of the mail.
— I don’t know, maybe you should leave it.

— (laughs) Well, have a great day Kim.
— Yeah, you too.

Where Kim guides you through the garden, Thurston shows up with a trowel, ready to uproot and examine each detail with a loose, think-aloud approach to dialogue. One week after speaking with Kim, I catch up with Thurston at the crack of dawn on a rainy Sunday. Thurston is driving through Lower Manhattan, on route to a friend’s recording studio in Jersey. Throughout our conversation, there are numerous silences, pauses, garbled words and static. As Thurston pulls into the Holland Tunnel, he warns me that reception may fail. He’s right. I lose him completely, panic and pace the room. As John Cage once said, “We live in messy conversation located at lively intersections of present, past and future.” An hour later, far from hi-way pandemonium, Thurston is back on the line.

Jules Moore.— Hi. Okay, are you in a still place now?
Thurston Moore. — Yes.

— We were speaking about being on [the label] Matador right now and I was wondering about the face of the album. The cover is a painting by John Fahey. I’m wondering why his artwork seems fitting for you in this case?
— John was a good friend of mine in his last years. I met him late in his life, and he had sort of reconnected with wanting to go out and play music publicly and recording, when he found out that there were people in the experimental avant-garde underground who really recognized him as a figure of independent kind of musical ideas. He was kind of an outsider in the whole sort of ‘60s folk guitar scene. But he was also recognized by that scene as being somebody who was extremely iconoclastic and at the same time a genuine scholar of the music, of blues music and folk music in its form. I think when he found out that people like Jim O’Rourke and Sonic Youth and others were naming him as an influence, I think he got really interested in that. And we just connected with him. He was a real character, [a] really eccentric artist. I actually did a little tour with him in, I think, the late ‘90s… he just basically sprawled out in the backseat of my Volvo and we’d drive up and down the Eastern Seaboard playing these little clubs. He sent me a bunch of paintings and I always held on to them. When we were doing this record and we decided to call it The Eternal, I thought (the cover painting) was completely appropriate for whatever we were trying to evoke with a title like that.

— Reflecting back on some of the keystone tracks, songs from back in the day – “Teenage Riot”, “Kool Thing”, “Pink Steam”, “Dirty Boots” songs like that-I feel that there’s a mood that endures. It plays on growing pains, tensions, anxieties that are tangled up in an individual’s aging process. Would you agree with that interpretation?
— I would agree with that. I really do think all of our lyrics were very personalized. Once in a while we’d step aside and make commentary about populist concerns, but, by and large, the lyrics deal with internal issues about age and gender and other sort of societal image issues. Also connections and feelings between lovers and desires and such. I don’t think I could ever write “Teenage Riot” lyrics again.

— I was reading an interview with Nick Cave recently and he was talking about Murder Ballads being a line in the sand between old and new Bad Seeds. Could you single out one album that marks a line in the sand between the Old and New, or Young and Mature?
— Yeah. Like, certainly, you got the Daydream Nation – when we went in and started doing mid nineties records of Goo and Dirty – and then onwards. But I think it would almost be after Dirty, where we kind of stepped back from what was going on with the whole alternative rock explosion, where we could have gone with that or with following our instincts to make music that was a little bit less obvious. Like Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, which was very minimal and linear and very unfashionable. I think that was kind of the important line right there, between Dirty and Experimental Jet Set.

— Your solo album Trees Outside the Academy is a really enchanting record. Do you think you’ll put more energy in that space again?
— I would love to do another record not only like that, but with the band that actually played that music live afterwards. I mean, the record’s pretty much myself with Steve Shelley and Samara Lubelski. And I played all the guitars with Dave. I had J. Mascis play a little bit on it. But the live band was that same trio with Chris Brokaw on second guitar and Matt Hainer playing bass. I really like that band. We toured a little bit on the West Coast. It’s really a matter of finding the minutes to do this kind of stuff.

— I watched an interview that you did about a bookstore and the beauty of tangible things, keeping things in print versus everything becoming about blogs and YouTube and whatnot. It was about this nice permanence to things you can hold and document forever.
— I like the tactile aspect of creative works. I mean, people have asked me “how do you listen to all those records you buy and collect” but I don’t really listen to all. I like looking at them and holding them. [laughs]

— So records are kind of like art.
— I kind of gleaned energy from it as much as I do putting it on the stereo and listening to it. It’s almost of equal value, just for me to see it, hold it, look at it. You know, if you have a romance with somebody you don’t just want to hear them. You want to see them and touch them as well.

— Is there an album or a piece of music that can guarantee you a particular mood or feeling, that you can count on to put you in a certain place?
— There’s certainly records like that. Certainly the first Ramones album was very important to me because I was very curious about it before it even existed, because I knew something was going on there. And when it first came out in ‘76, and I was eighteen years old, and I immediately went for it and it was very alien, it was very odd. There was really nothing like it, but I knew where it was coming from. Punk rock was not at a genre so much yet that record was almost coming out of glam and glitter rock in a way. It was taking all the colour away from it, stripping it down, and that record, just in the way it looked for four guys leaning against that wall on First Street at the Bowery, really meant a lot to me. And it was right when I started driving into New York and becoming completely enamored by it. So I still look at that album, pick it up and listen to it or not. It really brings me to a very significant place psychologically.

— Do you and Kim share a lot of music with each other? Is part of experiencing music sharing it?
— Yeah, I mean, I’m always bringing stuff to the house. I go through periods where I look at certain genres of music, like rap (or) like, really underground, kind of unlistenable black metal music. We definitely share things, and our daughter (who) is fifteen years old shares. Things I would never think I would be interested in I hear through her.

— What kind of stuff?
— You know, things you hear about, like Regina Spector or a lot of contemporary females, songwriter stuff, semi-mainstream, that she comes across. Or even bands that I would never listen to, like a band like The Dodos or something. They were kind of a hot gay pop punk band of sorts. I would never have had access to that and she’d be playing it in the car and I’d be like “what’s this?” because the band was totally great, kind of pop bubblegum hook to it without being too inane. And she hips me to it, you know, so that’s kind of cool.

— So she’s off on her own hunt. Have you and Kim offered some musical guidance?
— Well, she’s discovered through us, like, ‘60s stuff. At an early age she really recognized the Beatles, the Kinks and the Who as being kind of amazing. And she listened to it a lot because some of those Beatles songs are like nursery rhymes. But she also responded to music by Dinosaur Jr. or Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, bands that are friends of ours that we have records of. She’s never really gone through a period where she listens to, you know, Britney Spears or Spice Girls or whatever kids were listening to at her younger age. She knew about it. She might have checked it out. She really liked Fiona Apple.

— Yeah, she’s wonderful.
— That record Fiona Apple did, I would have never, ever listened to that record, but Coco played it incessantly and I think it’s one of the most brilliantly composed records that I’ve heard in a decade.

— I’m curious about you and Kim, your method in life together. I imagine that you’re together a lot. Is there any risk in sharing your love and your work, or is one reflected in the other?
— We also have lives somewhat away from each other. I have a whole world of activity I’m into, playing improvised music with some of my noise friends in basements throughout the New England area. She and I will play together as a duo, Mirror/Dash, but that’s not something she wants to do that much, whereas I want to do it all the time. As a visual artist she does a lot of painting and artwork. She’s involved in the art world, New York, Europe and L.A. to some degree, quite a bit. So both of us are working different places a lot, somewhere away from each other, but aware of each other. But we are together more than we’re not. We’ve always been very intimately connected just through the fact that we work together in Sonic Youth. And if there’s any kind of edge to the situation, our relationship, it would have been early on when we were younger and maybe a little more immature, especially at my end, with how we’re happening dynamically in the band. We’ve been in a very good phase, romantically, emotionally for many, many years, especially with the birth of our daughter. Every relationship has kind of ups and downs. We’ve never had any serious problem in our relationship for sure.

— Before I forget, there’s a guilty pleasure question I have: what’s the story with the Sons of Lee Marvin Club?
— Oh, that’s just kind of a secret society of people who don’t even deal with each other. That’s how disparate and beneath the radar. Like, the people in that society aren’t even quite sure who else is in it. They only know who else is in it through everyone once in a while a journalist will mention the fact that the person they’re interviewing is in it. [laughs]

— Which I’ve just contributed to.
— Yes, exactly.

— I guess I should probably wind down a little bit here. I want to say thank you so much for taking time out today for me. And for us.
— Oh absolutely.

— Okay, take care.
— You too, ciao!

Two hours and three coffees later, I reach out to Steve Shelley after his lunch. He is well mannered, quick to the point without being rude. I tell him about my earlier conversations with Kim and Thurston. He knows I’ve got the bases loaded and therefore is quick to skim over the past and get right down to current business, a well-ripened cherry atop Sunday’s Sonic sundae.

Jules Moore. — Hi, Steve, how are you?
Steve Shelley. — I’m good. How’s it going?

— Great! So, you’re in New York, yes?
— I am in Hoboken, actually. At our studio.

— You are originally from Michigan, so coming into New York and connecting with Lee and Thurston and Kim; what did that cohesion come out of?
— In 1985?

— Sure.
— [laughs] You know, I moved to New York and I joined this band and, much like you join any group of people, you kind of learn what each other is about and how you can work together. We were very lucky that we were able to work together in a really interesting way.

— I imagine it as being some kind of explosive chemical mixing, right from the get go.
— It could be, yes. Yeah, we just don’t know how that works.

— In ‘92 you founded Smells Like Records. What did you have in mind at that time with that venture?
— I just got interested in putting out music by friends and people that I admired. For quite a few years I put out, I don’t know, fifty-something releases, and it’s grown to include final editions of Sonic Youth music and an instrumental label that the band does themselves called SYR so it’s grown to be quite a project, quite a business.

— Now you guys are working directly with Matador. What was your experience in developing this album this time?
— We pretty much just do what we do. In fact, Matador’s been really helpful- we’re really happy with our new label and we think that they’re a lot of fun to work with right now. They give us a lot of support and that’s a really cool thing that a label can give you, is support and encouragement. We actually feel like we’re in a really good space in this life as far as really sharing music and distributing it around the world. So we’re very happy to be working with them. As for the creative process, when we get together and read music, we don’t really think about who is handling the music or who we’re working with. It’s a whole other process. We just sort of get together and see what we can come up with, you know, with a group of us.

— In the off-season when you’re working on your other projects, and you’re not focusing directly on a Sonic Youth album, are you banking things to bring to the table for the next meeting of minds?
— I don’t do that so much. It’s more of an ‘in the moment’ kind of thing. When we get together it’s like things either come together or they don’t. Right now Sonic Youth’s engineer and myself are putting together a series of concerts, mixing concerts from throughout the years of Sonic Youth Live, to be broadcast on Sirius Radio. There’s always something going on with Sonic Youth world, even if it doesn’t seem that way for the public.

— When will that be coming out?
— I think this is going to air the week before our new album comes out. It’s just, like, five nights of Sonic Youth programming concerts but we record almost every night that we play a concert. So Erin and I have been going through and picking concerts that we thought might be interesting for the fans to hear.

— That week or day that the album comes out, is there some sort of ritual that goes along?
— No, that day is really arbitrary as far as our life goes. I mean, it’s just a day the new record is available. A new record, it goes on to have a life of its own or not. The fans and the public decide what kind of a life it has once you’ve released it. It’s sort of like it’s not your property anymore. It becomes the public’s property.

— Is there anything else you’re looking forward to now that the new Sonic Youth album is out?
— I’m excited to go on tour this summer. We have a series of live shows lined up and I really enjoy that a lot. We’re going to spend a lot of time in North America this summer playing shows.

— What is some music that you’re really enjoying these days for yourself?
— What am I really enjoying? I don’t know. I always seem to be going through a Bob Dylan phase and lately I’ve been listening to a lot of new and old Bob Dylan music.

— I’m always in a Bob Dylan phase.
— Yeah, it’s always coming and going, but there are times where it’s heavier. Definitely it’s heavy right now, just with all the activity that he’s been having with his radio show and bootleg releases and all that.

— And a new album coming out as well.
— Yeah and I’m looking forward to Neil Young’s archive box set quite a bit. I’m a long time Neil Young fan and so I’m really curious to hear what he’s put together.

— You guys toured with Neil Young. What was that like?
— It was a lot of fun. I saw a lot of concerts. [Laughs] But he’s one of my all-time favourites. Just a really big fan of Neil Young’s.

— What’s your favorite Bob Dylan album at this moment?
— Well, I think not even just at the moment, my usual favourite album of Bob Dylan’s is Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid which is not a typical record of his but I really love that album.

— Lots of good instrumentals on that.
— Yeah, yeah, exactly. It’s not typical because it is partially instrumental.

— Well, I should let you get back to your work.
— Okay, yeah, we’re mixing for Sirius Radio today.

— Oh nice. Well, thanks so much for taking time out to chat Steve.
— Okay, sure.

— Okay, Bye.
— Bye bye.

One day we’ll get Lee. One day.

K & T.

2011-10-17T21:42:00.005+13:00

I am not coping with this at all well.

I think everything I ever believed in has been shattered.

I mean, if they can't stay together, who the fuck can?

What is the fucking point of anything?

2011-10-16T21:33:00.003+13:00

Forrest Gimp.

2011-10-14T20:12:00.000+13:00

My personal philosophy on life, just btw

2011-10-11T23:45:00.002+13:00

"We need to make books cool again. If you go home with someone and they don't have books, don't fuck them."

- John Waters

2011-10-11T20:44:00.004+13:00

"Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt they can’t afford the time to think. Tuition fee increases are a “disciplinary technique,” and, by the time students graduate, they are not only loaded with debt, but have also internalized the “disciplinarian culture.” This makes them efficient components of the consumer economy."

- Noam Chomsky

Not that I give a fuck about students anymore but this is so true.

Sincerely Yours, Confused

2011-10-10T00:04:00.005+13:00

2011-10-07T23:07:00.001+13:00

back when a girl

could be beautiful

just for being ok with herself

2011-10-06T16:12:00.002+13:00

2011-10-06T12:19:00.001+13:00

Wishlist

2011-09-28T21:43:00.003+13:00

All of these records are either ridiculously rare or ridiculously expensive. Fuck my life.

2011-09-25T22:20:00.004+13:00

2011-09-19T23:04:00.000+12:00

2011

2011-09-15T09:48:00.003+12:00

...has been a good year for music.

2011-09-13T16:30:00.002+12:00

Best of 2011 so far

2011-08-14T22:39:00.005+12:00

2011-07-29T19:29:00.008+12:00

You'll burn me an effigy and I'll burn you an effigy

2011-06-10T22:32:00.006+12:00

Morning Bell

2011-06-03T07:21:00.006+12:00

Dogs of the Soviet space programme

2011-06-01T22:55:00.013+12:00

Well, mostly just Laika. I couldn't find much information on the others.

Apparently, there were many canines launched into space long before humans took their first voyage. Ten out of a total of 29 dogs survived. I certainly don't condone using animals in any sort of way for anything but their unfortunate experiences would have provided information necessary to preserve the lives of humans who later travelled in outer space.

This dog is wearing the first, rather rudimentary, space suit ever made. I think he pulls it off pretty well although it does look a little on the snug side for his furry form.

These two actually managed a successful journey back to Earth.

Doggy space suits:

They did voyages with bunnies too!

Aaaaand Laika. Everybody loves Laika. She's the people's heroine.

From Spacetoday.org:

"While other animals had made suborbital flights, Laika was the first animal to go into orbit. She suffered no ill effects while she was alive in an orbit at an altitude near 2,000 miles.

Laika had been a stray dog — mostly a Siberian husky and around three years old — rounded up from the Moscow streets and trained for spaceflight. She was carried aloft in a capsule which remained attached to the converted SS-6 intercontinental ballistic missile which rocketed her to orbit.

The 1,120-lb. Sputnik 2 was outfitted with scientific gauges, life-support systems, and padded walls, but was not designed for recovery. Laika was supported inside the satellite by a harness that allowed some movement and access to food and water. Electrodes transmitted vital signs including heartbeat, blood pressure and breathing rate.

She captured the hearts of people around the world as the batteries that operated her life-support system ran down and the capsule air ran out. Life slipped away from Laika a few days into her journey. Later, Sputnik 2 fell into the atmosphere and burned on April 14, 1958."

From The People's Cube (heavily edited by yours truly! Click on the link if you want to see some mad propaganda...)

"Cosmonautics Day (Russian: День Космонавтики) is a Soviet holiday celebrated to commemorate the historic first manned space flight made on April 12, 1961 by 27 year old

Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin of the USSR. Gagarin made one complete orbit around the Earth (lasting 1 h 48 min) aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1.

The very first unprecedented and heroic sacrifice in space was made not by Gagarin, but by Laika the Space Dog, who volunteered to be the first living creature in space four years prior to Gagarin. And unlike that of Gagarin's, Laika's flight plan didn't involve a return from orbit."

Articles of the Week

2011-05-24T12:58:00.005+12:00

Rare Library of Congress Photographs from the Great Depression Era

If the World Doesn't End, Can We Sue? A Rapture Round-up

Twenty Awesome Literary Tattoos

If I Were A Hoarder

Stay Out of My Dropbox: Susan Orlean on Online Privacy

Cut Collective

1st of August, 2011

2011-05-19T01:41:00.002+12:00

Coup de Main presents Modest Mouse live in NZ for the first time ever

2011-05-10T10:42:00.001+12:00

Everything is good but I am not

2011-05-08T20:33:00.005+12:00

2011-04-25T22:01:00.001+12:00

I resembled this mannequin last Wednesday night, apparently.

ASTRO RON!

2011-04-21T13:00:00.002+12:00

This guy posts pics from space. Obviously, he is the man.

Astro Ron

Whoa, this guy is intense.

2011-04-21T06:31:00.006+12:00

Also, why the fuck did I drink so much last night?! I need to be reminded that I get hangovers now. Thanks, meds.

My heeead. And my knee. And my chin, for some reason.

Fuck. What? Huh? Yeah. DON'T DRINK, YOU MORON.

Anyway.

BON IVER, BON IVER (ARTWORK BY GREGORY EUCLIDE)

This incredible new record by Bon Iver is the follow-up to the debut, For Emma Forever Ago. It will be released in North America on June 21st, 2011 and June 2oth in the UK. After the jump we have the official track listing as well as a short piece written about the album by author Michael Perry.

Side A:

Perth
Minnesota, WI
Holocene
Towers
Michicant

Side B:

Hinnom, TX
Wash.
Calgary
Lisbon, OH
Beth/Rest

First it was For Emma, Forever Ago. The soul in a refraction of icicles. A moment hanging like breath on air. And yet life – even still life – is not still. The story is not a story if it does not unravel. Your eyes you may cast backward, but the heart is locked in the chest and must beat forever forward. Bon Iver, Bon Iver is the frozen beast pressing upward from a loosening earth, one ear cocked to the echo of the ghost choir still singing, the other craving the martial call of drums tumbling, of thrum and wheeze. The desolation smoke has dissipated, cut with strips of brass. Celebration will not be denied, the cabinet cannot contain the rattle, there is meat on the bones. It’s there right away, in the thicker-stringed guitar and military snare of “Perth,” and “Minnesota, WI.” Anyone who had a single listen to For Emma will peg Justin Vernon’s vocals immediately, but there is a sturdiness – an insistence – to Bon Iver, Bon Iver that allows him to escape the cabin in the woods without burning it to the ground. “Holocene” opens with simple finger-picking. The vocal is regret spun hollow and strung on a wire. Then the snare-beat breaks and drives us forward and up and up until we fly silent through the black-star night, our wreckage in view whole atmospheres below. The vocals in “Hinnom, TX” ease to the muffled depths, while the instrumentation remains sparse and cosmic. “Calgary” is a worship song to everything For Emma mourned, and at the point in the final track “Beth/Rest” when Vernon sings, “I ain’t livin’ in the dark no more” it is clear he isn’t dancing in the sunshine, but rather shading toward a new light.“Bon Iver is often equated with just me,” says Vernon, “but you are who surrounds you, and for Bon Iver, Bon Iver I wanted to invite those voices as musical catalysts.” Thus on the track “Beth/Rest” and throughout the album, we hear the pedal steel of Greg Leisz (Lucinda Williams, Bill Frisell), the uniquely layered low end of Colin Stetson’s (Tom Waits, Arcade Fire) saxophones, the riffing of Mike Lewis’ (Happy Apple, Andrew Bird) altos and tenors, and the lush horns of C.J. Camerieri (Rufus Wainwright, Sufjan Stevens). Bon Iver regulars Sean Carey, Mike Noyce and Matt McCaughan contributed vocals, drums and production, Rob Moose (Antony and the Johnsons, The National) helped with arranging and added strings, and fellow members of Volcano Choir, Jim Schoenecker and Tom Wincek provided processing. Bon Iver, Bon Iver was recorded and mixed at April Base Studios, a remodeled veterinarian’s clinic located in rural Fall Creek, Wisconsin. The main recording space is constructed over a defunct indoor pool attached to the clinic. “It’s an unique space and destination; it’s our home out here,” says Vernon, who purchased the structure with his brother in late 2008 with the sole intention of converting it into his ideal recording studio. “It’s been a wonderful freedom, working in a place we built. It’s also only three miles from the house I grew up in, and just ten minutes from the bar where my parents met.” The creation of Bon Iver, Bon Iver was a three-year process, and Vernon says the completion of the studio paralleled the completion of the album. “I was writing and recording in the windows of time snatched between tours in support of For Emma,” he says. “When I finally came home to hunker down for a solid stretch there was a feeling of solid ground and an opportunity for liberation waiting in the space for me. In the absence of solid ground, the whirlwind becomes a whirlpool, and Bon Iver, Bon Iver is Justin Vernon returning to former haunts with a new spirit. The reprises are there – solitude, quietude, hope and desperation compressed – but always a rhythm arises, a pulse vivified by gratitude and grace notes, some as bright as a bicycle bell. The winter, the legend, has faded to just that, and this is the new momentary present. The icicles have dropped, rising up again as grass.

- Michael Perry

http://jagjaguwar.com/blog/2011/04/bon-iver-bon-iver/

2011-04-12T21:43:00.001+12:00

2011-04-10T23:22:00.000+12:00

24 today.

2011-04-04T22:10:00.002+12:00

This is how I spent my 24th birthday.

Packed up most of my stuff (laptop, clothes etc), and caught the train to work. Ran into a friend I hadn't seen in a long time, which was nice and unexpected. Had a good day at work - got to learn more stuff pertaining to my actual job. My amazing job that I love (I mean that). After work I shifted my stuff to my friend's apartment, then met up with my best friend for a catch up. Got tired pretty quickly though and was back at the apartment by 8:45pm. I've spent the past couple of hours watching these.

Best birthday ever? Yeah...just about.

The winners of the David Lynch music video contest.

2011-04-02T14:58:00.004+13:00

Last year, David Lynch and the website genero.tv ran a competition for film-makers to create videos for Lynch's songs 'Good Day Today' and 'I Know' in the space of a month (between the 29th of November and the 25th of December). I don't know why I only heard about this today.

Both of the winning videos are incredibly haunting and appropriately Lynchian.

The first is for 'Good Day Today' and was made by Arnold de Parscau, a French film student who is only 22. Younger than me. That's depressing! But anyway, this video is a total work of art. Stunning. The description, "A little boy is having dinner with his family", wildly belies the true darkness of this video.

'Good Day Today'

This one is for Lynch's song 'I Know'. A very different sound from 'Good Day Today', but that's David Lynch for you. I think I prefer this song, actually.

The video was directed by Tamar Drachli and is about a man obsessively trying to get his ex-girlfriend to come back to him. His weapon of choice? A remote control. Disturbing in an entirely different way to de Parscau's video although they both have a revenge/retribution theme which I really like.

'I Know'

You can view all the finalists here. Which is what I think I'll do right now; I may update this post later with some of my favourites, if I have any. I'll have a thorough browse of this website anyway, it seems pretty great.

2011-04-02T01:04:00.004+13:00

Well I very much dislike the song 'Hollywood' by Marina & the Diamonds but I love this quote. I guess her attitude is good, it's just too bad her music sounds like boring pop.

"I’ve felt both rich and poor, very ugly and very beautiful, and I’ve conformed and been an outsider, as well. I suppose the song’s a way of saying, ‘I’m not this. I’m not gonna be a dumbo who doesn’t know what the hell is going on.’ I think, without getting into conspiracy theories, that most people don’t realize that they’re being bombarded everyday with who they should be, and you are, especially in America and the U.K. And that’s what Hollywood is about—it’s about breaking free of that and being your true self, which is who you’d be if you were living in a cave 2,000 years ago. I always think, ‘What would you do if you were in a cave, Marina?’ So that’s my basis for everything. I just wanna be myself."

- Marina Diamandis

This is so weird. I'm not sure what to make of it.

2011-04-02T00:16:00.000+13:00

Truly surreal.

Recently:

2011-04-01T21:17:00.003+13:00

Watched:

Eastbound & Down Series 1 - 9/10

The Trip Series 1 - 9/10

Daria Seasons 1-5 - 10/10

Trailer Park Boys: Countdown to Liquor Day - 8/10

This Is England directed by Shane Meadows - 10/10

Black Snake Moan directed by Craig Brewer - 7/10

Black Swan directed by Darren Aronofsky - 10/10

Buffalo 66 directed by Vincent Gallo - 10/10

Brown Bunny directed by Vincent Gallo - 8/10

I Am Love directed by Luca Guadagnino - 10/10

Pulp Fiction directed by Quentin Tarantino - 9/10

Read:

Lovesong by Nikki Gemmell - 7/10

The Book of Rapture by Nikki Gemmell - 5/10

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd - 6/10

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - 8/10

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess - 9/10

Geek Love by Katherine Dunne - 10/10

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky - 6/10

Reheated Cabbage by Irvine Welsh - 9/10

Junior by Macaulay Culkin - 3/10

A Mercy by Toni Morrison - 7/10

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood - 9/10

Listened to:

The King of Limbs by Radiohead - 8/10

Let England Shake by P.J. Harvey - 8/10

Kudos by Surf City - 9/10

Street Chant EP by Street Chant - 8/10

Sinister Militia EP by Telepathe - 8/10

Hardcore Will Never Die...But You Will by Mogwai - 9/10

Fantastic.

2011-04-01T19:58:00.003+13:00

I want to send all of these to everyone in the world.

From here.

Currently reading:

2011-04-01T19:28:00.004+13:00

"With one burning hand she held his and with the other she kept pushing him away."

- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

2011-03-31T14:30:00.001+13:00

Last weekend a couple of friends and I went to the aquarium and took a bunch of pictures.

This one ended up by being my favourite.

Haunted Air by Ossian Brown.

2011-03-29T18:47:00.004+13:00

A book of incredible old Halloween photos (from circa 1875-1955) found at junk shops and garage sales etc. An amazing piece of historical Americana. I haven't seen a book I wanted so badly in ages.

Ossian Brown is an English artist and musician (he was in the industrial bands Coil and Cyclobe, and has made cameo appearances with Current 93 and The Nodding Folk). He worked in collaboration with David Lynch and Geoff Cox on this book.

So chilling and ironic. I think it will be my birthday present to myself.

Vivian Maier.

2011-03-28T12:06:00.001+13:00

I am fucking obsessed.

Vivian Maier

2011-03-27T22:50:00.001+13:00

"When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks."

- Slavoj Zizek

Sometimes Urbandictionary.com is terrifyingly accurate.

2011-03-27T02:35:00.002+13:00

Louise

Louise always attracts attention to herself even without trying. She is extremely intelligent but sometimes a little ditzy when she gets too excited, but always interesting and fun! Louise usually looks gorgeous and has a fantastic smile that lights everyone up. She treats people fairly and truthfully even if they don't like it! Don't mess with her - she will never forget it! Louise is the greatest one man woman lover you will ever find and is always optimistic with life, and stubbornly determined to succeed like a warrior at whatever she attempts. Louises are great people! Hug one and tell her so today!

Words of Advice for Young People by William S. Burroughs.

2011-03-25T23:43:00.003+13:00

Meanwhile, life goes on...

I am sometimes asked if I have any words of advice for young people.
Well, here are a few simple admonitions for young and old, man and beast.

Never interfere in a boy and girl fight.

Beware of whores who say they don't want money. The hell they don't.
What they mean is that they want more money; much more, these are the most expensive whores what can be got.

If you're doing business with a religious son of a bitch, get it in writing; his word isn't worth shit, not with the good lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.

If, after having been exposed to someone's presence, you feel as if you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence. You need it like you need pernicious anemia.

We don't like to hear the word "vampire" around here; we're trying to improve our public image. Building a kindly, avuncular, benevolent image; "interdependence" is the keyword -- "enlightened interdependence".

Life in all its rich variety, take a little, leave a little. However, by the inexorable logistics of the vampiric process they always take more than they leave -- and why, indeed, should they take any?

Avoid fuck-ups. Fools, I call them. You all know the type -- no matter how good it sounds, everything they have anything to do with turns into a disaster. Trouble for themselves and everyone connected with them.
A fool is bad news, and it rubs off -- don't let it rub off on you.

Do not proffer sympathy to the mentally ill; it is a bottomless pit. Tell them firmly, "I am not paid to listen to this drivel -- you are a terminal fool!" Otherwise, they make you as crazy as they are.

Above all, avoid confirmed criminals.
They are a special malignant strain of fool.

- William S. Burroughs.

2011-03-25T11:16:00.000+13:00

From La Boca Design.

2011-03-20T14:05:00.002+13:00

"I’ve wasted a year of my life. Maybe everyone out there is a liar. And maybe the whole world is “stupid” and “ignorant” but I’d rather be in it. I’d rather be fucking in it than down here with you."

- Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

Big Time/Neil Young

2011-03-13T21:47:00.002+13:00

gonna leave the pain behind

gonna leave the fools in line

gonna take the magic potion

gettin' in an old black car

gonna take a ride so far

to the land of suntan lotion

gonna take it state by state

till i hit the golden gate

get my feet wet in the ocean

i'm still living the dream we had

for me it's not over

walkin' on the bridge one day

lookin' out across the bay

i saw a rippling in the water

once a big ship had passed

i borrowed a traveller's glass

and focused on the ocean's daughter.

kind of like a wave confused

dancing in the sunset hews

she waved to me and called me over

i'm still living the dream we had

for me it's not over

talkin' 'bout a friend of mine

talkin' 'bout a gold mine

richest vein in any mountain.

talkin' 'bout the enemy

inside of me

talkin' 'bout that youthful fountain.

talkin' 'bout you and me

talkin' 'bout eternity

talkin' 'bout the big time.

i'm still living the dream we had

for me it's not over

2011-03-12T03:21:00.003+13:00

Wolf Like Me/TV On The Radio

2011-03-03T01:01:00.003+13:00

hey hey my playmate

won't you lay hands on me

mirror my malady

transfer my tragedy

got a curse i cannot lift

shines when the sunset shifts

when the moon is round and full

gotta bust that box gotta gut that fish

(my mind's aflame)

we could jet in a stolen car

but i bet we wouldn't get too far

before the transformation takes

its bloodlust tanks and crave gets slaked

my mind has changed my body's framed but god i like it

my heart's aflame, my body's strained but god i like it

my mind has changed my body's framed but god i like it

my heart's aflame, my body's strained but god i like it

charge me your day rate

i'll turn you out in time

when the moon is round and full

gonna teach you tricks that'll blow your mongrel mind

baby doll i recognise

you're a hideous thing inside

if ever there were a lucky kind

it's you, you, you, you

i know it's strange

another way

to get to know you

you'll never know

unless we go

so let me show you

i know it's strange

another way

to get to know you

we've got till noon

here comes the moon

so let it show you

show you

now

dream me, oh dreamer

down to the floor

open my hands and let them weave onto yours

feel me, completer

down to my core

open my heart and let it bleed onto yours

feeding on fever

down on all fours

show you what all the howling's for

hey hey my playmate

let me lay waste to thee

burned down their hanging trees

it's hot (here), hot (here), hot (here), hot (here)

got a curse we cannot lift

shines when the sunset shifts

there's a curse that comes with a kiss (we're howling forever)

the bite that binds the gift that gives

now that we got gone for good (we're howling forever)

writhing under your riding hood (oh, oh)

tell your grandma and your mama too (we're howling forever)

it's true, true, true, true

we're howling forever, oh, oh

H8 u, Valentine's Day.

2011-02-13T12:00:00.005+13:00

Article on Toni Morrison's 'Beloved'.

2011-02-07T09:15:00.004+13:00

One of my all time favourite books. From Slate.com.

Why Is Beloved Beloved?

After all the plaudits, it's time to look at the novel's merits.

By Stephen Metcalf

Posted Thursday, May 18, 2006, at 2:42 PM ET

In 1987, Toni Morrison's Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1992, with Beloved still widely regarded as her masterpiece, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Three legs make a stool: This past month, in a New York Times poll of 200 critics, writers, and editors, Beloved was named "the single best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years," beating out novels by such luminaries as Roth, DeLillo, and Updike. I participated in this survey and can attest that, from the moment the solicitously hand-typed letter from the TimesBook Review arrived in the mail, Beloved was the presumptive winner.

Like two other American novels devoted to race, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, Beloved exists wholly beyond its own artistic merits and demerits. These books have become something more than mere literature; they're homework, with an afterlife guaranteed by their place (or in the case of Huck Finn, its embattled absence) on the high-school and college syllabus. ("Only Shakespeare rivals her in the number of senior theses devoted to her work," Harvard English professor Barbara Johnson has said.) Were it simply a matter of social redress, we could all go home now, the Dead White Males having been forced to cocktail with a Living Black Woman. ButBeloved isn't solely a work of protest and advocacy, as Morrison herself has insisted, nor solely a symbol for the progress and virtue of the prestige-granting institutions in American letters. It's a serious novel and a work of art, and it deserves to be accorded the highest respect. It deserves, in other words, to be asked, Yes, but are you any good?

For those who haven't read it, Beloved tells the story of Sethe, an ex-slave who has resettled to the outskirts of Cincinnati with her daughter, Denver. Near the beginning of the book, the two are joined by Paul D, once Sethe's fellow slave on a Kentucky plantation called "Sweet Home." (After years of thankless yearning, Paul D has at last become Sethe's lover.) It's 1873, the Civil War has been fought, and though slavery as a legal institution is over, it has only started its haunting of the African-American psyche. This Morrison dramatizes with the actual haunting of Sethe's house by Sethe's deceased baby daughter. We never learn that baby's given name, but in exchange for sex, Sethe has had a headstone carved for her girl, bearing the single word "Beloved." Paul D exorcises the house of the ghost, but later, upon returning from a carefree day spent at a carnival, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D discover a young woman sleeping near the front door of their house. The young woman goes by the name Beloved, and from all appearances she is a revenant, the embodied spirit of Sethe's dead daughter.

Morrison presents Sethe's turbulent inner life through a process both Morrison and Sethe herself call "rememory," a kind of psychic haunting in which the specifics of a traumatic incident are told and retold, even as the teller tries to block their full emergence into the conscious mind. The central traumatic episode of Beloved, to which the narrative returns again and again, is an infanticide: Twenty years earlier, Sethe beheaded her baby Beloved with a handsaw rather than allow her return to slavery. In Beloved, Morrison perfected a mode of narration, entirely her own but with roots in everything from the African griot to As I Lay Dying, built out of compulsive repetition, in which the onion, as it were, is constantly being both peeled and reconstituted; in which memories are constantly being both exhumed and buried; and in which the mind of the storyteller is both imprisoned and set free in the act of retelling. And so, like the return of Beloved, and the enduring curse of slavery itself, rememory is both a reconciliation and a vexation, both a healing and a wounding.

No wonder Beloved has been such a success: It draws up so elegantly on the blackboard. And in some very real sense, the central deranging tragedy of American life has found its finest expression in the oceanic rhythms of Morrison's prose, with its deft use of synecdoche, anaphora, and incantatory repetition, with its unique combination of seething plaintiveness and iron triumph. At the same time, though, one notices a secondary effect of these rhythms: The traumas depicted in Beloved don't actually feel, to the reader, particularly traumatic. On the contrary, the dominant sentiment of the book is the nobility of sheer endurance, a sentiment that transfers rather too easily to the reader's own self-regard. Would this nobility have transferred so easily had the book portrayed its humiliations more graphically? For a novel that will educate many Americans about racism, the grislier facts of the post-bellum world have been strangely muted—there is a single, somewhat oblique mention of the Klan ("Desperately thirsty for black blood, without which it could not live, the dragon swam the Ohio at will"), and there is almost no sense of hunger or deprivation. ("Feeding her is no trouble," Sethe says of Beloved. "I pick up a little extra from the restaurant is all.") Certainly Beloved contains passages meant to invoke intense horror, but none is immediate or documentary. For vividly portrayed action in the novel's present tense, the following passage is more representative:
Beloved took Denver's hand and placed another on Denver's shoulder. They danced then. Round and round the tiny room and it may have been dizziness, or feeling light and icy at once, that made Denver laugh so hard. A catching laugh that Beloved caught. The two of them, merry as kittens, swung to and fro, to and fro, until exhausted they sat on the floor.
A Land of Cockaigne quality pervades their lives, with meat stews on the stove and pies in the oven, so that when Sethe fetches pillows for her girls "from the keeping room," I had to work not to picture items out of the Cuddledown catalog. Physical humiliation is downgraded in favor of psychic humiliation, which is then dispersed into ambient waves of spiritual uplift. Sethe's mother-in-law was a lay preacher who once worked a spot called simply the Clearing:
Finally she called the women to her. "Cry," she told them. "For the living and the dead. Just cry." And without covering their eyes the women let loose.
It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women, and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart.
In the universe of Beloved, rational knowledge isn't denigrated so much as absent—a notable regression from Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book written more than a hundred years earlier. In Stowe's novel, an interesting allegorical conflict had been generated between the characters Uncle Tom and George Harris. As a simple man in the image of his lord and savior, Tom is totally exempt from the world of rational calculation, an innocent when it comes to profit and loss. His worth, Stowe lets us know with her signature operatic bluntness, is infinite. Harris, in the meantime, is a black man who is mentally talented. How do you stand between him and his fullest potential, Stowe asks, between him and his fair market value as a wage earner? Knowing full well that religious zeal, and not Jacksonian free enterprise, would carry the cause of abolition furthest, Stowe made Tom, and not Harris, her symbol for the brutality of racial oppression. Uncle Tom's Cabin, according to a bon mot often attributed to Lincoln, started the Civil War. Beloved … well, it has won a black woman the major literary prizes, hasn't it?
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Black Boy, Invisible Man … Beloved? Perhaps the reduced compass of its ideological ambitions is an expression of the book's feminism, in the same way, for example, the Great War has been reduced to a mere parenthetical in To The Lighthouse. And yet, though Virginia Woolf always wrote as a woman, and often as a feminist, nothing she ever wrote feels written for women. A feminist's rage against the facts of a man's world, and especially a recent tendency to mass violence, runs throughout her work. Beloved, meanwhile, is a historical novel that doesn't feel grounded in history. Its historical details, such as they are, feel quickly sketched, and much of its imagery is vague, combining a tendency to faux-folksy countryism with a casual use of modern slang (Paul D is said to have "beat the shit out of" the haunting spirit of the baby Beloved).
What Beloved does feel grounded in, and firmly, is a repudiation of everything that exerts a soft but nonetheless unpleasant authority in a young person's life. In place of the need to master hard knowledge or brute facts, there is folk wisdom; in place of science, animism; in place of the strict father, the self-sufficient matriarchy, first of Baby Suggs', and later Sethe's, house; and finally, in place of a man's world, the hallowed sorority of women, especially women of color—though on this last, Morrison does not insist too heavily. As Sethe, very pregnant fugitive, breaks for the Ohio border, she runs into a young white woman named Amy. At first Sethe is fearful, but Amy is raggedy and a little touched in the head and presents no danger; and eventually she helps Sethe through (a peculiarly uneventful) labor. In a passage Morrison has identified as holding out hope for racial reconciliation, Sethe and Amy swaddle the newborn on the banks of the Ohio. "A pateroller passing would have sniggered to see two throw-away people, two lawless outlaws—a slave and a barefoot whitewoman with unpinned hair—wrapping a ten-minute-old baby in the rags they wore."
If Beloved expends almost no energy mapping its historical reality—the wage system, like parturition, has been oddly gentle to Sethe—it's because Beloved was not designed to conjure with the past as a concrete reality. True, the past, in all its ugliness, breaks into the present, but the landscape of Morrison's present is mostly an interior one. Late in the novel we discover that the painfully withdrawn Denver, like George Harris before her, is clever. "Other people said this child was simple, but Lady Jones [her teacher] never believed it. Having taught her, watched her eat up a page, a rule, a figure, she knew better." But this is a small flourish, another aside. Beloved is not Denver's story, the story of a worldly gift artificially depressed by bigotry. It's Sethe's story, as Sethe stands poised before the possibility of her own therapeutic self-renewal. The word "self" is worth pausing here. If you asked a college student in 1967 what she most believed, she might put a finger in your face, before telling you off about the war; these days, too often she points to her own chest. In a folk ideology, the ardor with which we believe becomes its own truth. Not coincidentally, Morrison has spoken eloquently of "the precious interior, the loved self, whatever that is, whatever vocabulary you ascribe to it, [that] is suppressed or displaced and put someplace else."
The language knocked around in my head for days after I read it. Where had I heard this before? In the late '70s, coincident with the emergence of Toni Morrison as a major novelist, a European psychologist named Alice Miller wrote a best seller called The Drama of the Gifted Child and the Search for the True Self. The opening paragraphs reads as follows:
In order to become whole we must try, in a long process, to discover our own personal truth, a truth that may cause pain before giving us a new sphere of freedom. If we choose instead to content ourselves with intellectual "wisdom," we will remain in the sphere of illusion and self-deception. … The damage done to us during childhood cannot be undone, since we cannot change anything in our past. We can, however, change ourselves. We can repair ourselves and gain lost integrity by choosing to look more closely at the knowledge that is stored inside our bodies and bringing that knowledge closer to our awareness.
Beloved is indeed a work of genius. No other American novel of the past 25 years has so elegantly mapped the psychobiography of its ideal reader.

2011-02-05T23:57:00.001+13:00

2011-02-04T03:45:00.001+13:00

Dear Diary.

Today I decided.

Who.

Fucking.

Cares.

2011-01-29T16:56:00.002+13:00

"I would welcome each new dislocation, unpack my few belongings with alacrity and even joy, then set out to explore the neighbourhood or district or city and learn its ways; but soon enough I'd begin to imagine what I'd become if I stayed in that place forever...shut up in a cage of a house that would not be recognised as a cage until it was too late.

Too late for what? To get out, to move on. Yet at the same time I longed for security. It was a similar story with men. Each one was a possibility that quickly became an impossibility. As soon as there were two toothbrushes - no, as soon as I could even picture two toothbrushes, side by side on the bathroom counter in trapped, stagnant, limp-bristled companionship - I would have to leave."

- Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder

Simple Man by Bon Iver (Graham Nash cover).

2011-01-28T23:33:00.000+13:00

2011-01-28T19:24:00.003+13:00

i will remember your small room

the feel of you

the light in the window

your records

your books

our morning coffee

our noons our nights

our bodies spilled together

sleeping

the tiny flowing currents

immediate and forever

your leg my leg

my arm your arm

your smile and the warmth

of you

who made me laugh

again.

- Charles Bukowski

And I also found...

2011-01-26T23:26:00.004+13:00

...a cool article on J.D Salinger...

Holden Caulfield's Goddam War

...and Adam Panczuk.

Adam Panczuk was born in 1978. He is a graduate of University of Economics and Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan - Faculty of Multimedia Communication. He travelled through Asia from Middle East to Siam taking photos.

He is now working on a project depicting the transformation of Polish village. His focus is on the relationship between human being and nature and on the essence of humanity in relation to the earth, the seasons, and passing away and birth as inseparable elements.

It's definitely been a while.

2011-01-26T23:05:00.009+13:00

Vincent Gallo is a beautiful man.

2010-12-07T17:47:00.005+13:00

"I stopped painting in 1990 at the peak of my success just to deny people my beautiful paintings; and I did it out of spite."

"I came to New York to be a legend, and within five minutes of realizing I was an interesting kid and other people thought so, I had given myself a nervous breakdown. I was 26 years old before I knew what it was like to have an ordinary day."

"I don`t trust or love anyone. Because people are so creepy. Creepy creepy creeps. Creeping around. Creeping here and creeping there. Creeping everywhere. Crippity crappity creepies."

2010-11-22T13:44:00.003+13:00

'Do you know what it came from?' said Luke. 'Mayday?'

'No,' I said. 'It's a strange word to use for that, isn't it?'

'It's French,' he said. 'From M'aidez.'

Help me.

- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

2010-11-16T21:18:00.001+13:00

“Boy, did he depress me! I don’t mean he was a bad guy- he wasn’t. But you don’t have to be bad guy to depress somebody - you can be a good guy and do it.”

— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

2010-11-14T00:31:00.000+13:00

"Stop waiting for the right person to come into your life. Be the right person to come to someone's life."

- Marie Peroja Flores

I decided to do this instead of going out tonight.

2010-11-13T22:02:00.004+13:00

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold the books you've read in their entirety, italicise the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

2010-11-11T18:12:00.004+13:00

2010-11-02T22:23:00.004+13:00

"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it's normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."

- Ira Glass

I need to remember this.

This might be the most amazing thing I've ever heard.

2010-11-02T16:01:00.001+13:00

2010-11-02T00:18:00.001+13:00

Sums everything up, basically.

Fuck all those idiots who get the wrong idea about me.

Crazy/Galaxie 500

2010-11-01T00:21:00.003+13:00

hey you're so old
you must be 23
you spent the year in a drunken frenzy
lied to your friends
adopted false ideas
quit your job
because they made you crazy.

Unpublished.

2010-10-29T03:17:00.001+13:00

The Boy by David Foster Wallace

2010-10-29T02:24:00.000+13:00

"I don't give a shit about sleeping, Leon. I want love. Or death."

2010-10-12T23:45:00.005+13:00

Warpaint/Undertow

2010-10-11T14:21:00.005+13:00

Your brown eyes are my blue skies
They light up the river that the birds fly over
Better not to quench your thirst
Better not to be the first one diving in,
though you caught me and you know why
they breathe in the deepest part of the water.

What’s the matter, you hurt yourself
Opened your eyes and there was someone else
Now I’ve got you in the undertow
Now I’ve got you in the undertow
Why you wanna blame me for your troubles?
Ah ah ah you better learn your lesson yourself.
Nobody ever has to find out what’s in my mind tonight

Let tonight pass us by,
Do you really want to be the one to fight?
And I said “You’re better not to light that fire
It will take you to the darkest part of the weather.

What’s the matter, you hurt yourself?
Opened your eyes and there was someone else?
Now I’ve got you in the undertow
Now I’ve got you in the undertow
Why you wanna blame me for your troubles?
Ah ah ah you better learn your lesson yourself.
Nobody ever has to find out what’s in my mind tonight
Nobody ever has to find out what’s in my mind tonight.

Nobody in my mind. Nobody in my mind.
I feel it in my heart tonight.

I laid on the floor, pressing in my eyes.
Seeing little lights.
These are the decisions that only one could make
I wanted to stay home but i went running running running running from the troubles
running running running running running running running

What’s the matter, you hurt yourself?
Opened your eyes and there was someone else?
Now I’ve got you in the undertow
Now I’ve got you so
Why you wanna blame me for your troubles?
Ah ah ah you better learn your lesson yourself.
Nobody ever has to find out what’s in my mind tonight.
Nobody ever has to find out what’s in my mind tonight.

Poetess

2010-10-08T00:56:00.000+13:00

2010-10-03T23:55:00.000+13:00

21st January, 2011.

2010-09-28T22:38:00.002+13:00