Archives : all posts by Dan

Lowell - "The Bells"

Frank, 12, learns to text. And the eyes of his mind widen, this is a treasure. The way little love notes, and they are all love notes, pop up in just his cradled arms at 10:30, 10:41, 10:55. They could go forever, he can hold Lindsay from his class right in his bed and she lights up. Poof. Poof. Poof. He writes back anything, any combination of letters and spaces is enough to say i love you and it bounces over and back in their neighbourhood. Sometimes three in a row, they can say goodnight for an hour and a half. It seems like the air is helping them, like all of nature wants them to kiss their messages back and forth over their neighbourhood. [Buy from Insound]

Sparks - "The Rhythm Thief"

Alison is sitting up in bed and her arm is aching. THe light is jagged across her face, like a ripped letter .The curtains are too long. The eggs are going bad, they could be bad in the mornig. The door isn't locked. Showever showever showever showever.. That's a lackadaisical shower. Frank's joke book, with the genie coming out of the lamp wearig the naked man's clothes, that doesn't make any sense. Cancer . It shouldn't take that long to search on Apple TV. But also hopelessness for humanity. Slow Heat Death. 6:30: early enough? *scratch* "One Million Cases". How come women don't report their ebola to authorities? --Something seems to reach up through her crotch, right up through her cold stomach, and shake her rib cage like a fruit tree. Palm out, waiting for what falls. [Buy]

Leonard Cohen - "Samson in New Orleans"

Edmund imagines himself dying. He is in a white-linen bed or some such thing where the points of his feet show at the bottom and there is a plant in the window. He is somehow able to address everyone in his life at once, he can speak in their head like God's voice, a voice that drowns out all other sounds. And he imagines himself saying the right thing. A lengthy address, poetic, that would bring them all to tears and they would see his jagged beauty for just that, beauty, and not a thing that saws at everything that tries to grasp it. It would include many things, he thought, but definitely a phrase like "I guess that's how it goes" placed perfectly and given the right weight. The voice would be so powerful that, in death, he would crescendo, his last breath would correspond to his last note. And he wouldn't die like the rest, panting, wrung slowly into cardboard, furtive, embarrassed, unfinished.

[Buy directly from Leonard Cohen]

Weaves - "Shithole"

Lift my head from my body, loose already like a shard unglued, and rest it slanted in grass. Bring sun and wind like wet ingredients, lift it all into the air and let it go. Watch it float there, it doesn't fall. Sidewalks all like blankets, all doors curtains, roofs tents, all trees pendulums. Everything has an individual gravitational center, like a fingerprint. If your fingerprints had on them the names of people you almost were.

[Buy]

Today there is great news: Sean's book Us Conductors made the Giller Prize shortlist. But I don't want to say anymore, besides that I am so unstoppably happy for him I can't keep from grinning, proud, amazed, but also: "of course!"

--

So today I will post a couple of things I've been working on because life is short and I hope you like them.

FIRST is a proof-of-concept video as part of CBC ComedyCoup, a television "accelerator" (read: contest) towards a single winner of a $500K half-hour prime-time pilot. Our show is called One Night Only. Your views and faves and follows and ratings and shares are all the gold coins we need to collect. If you like it, pass it on.

SECOND is a music video I helped out on. Yes! There is still music today! The marvelous new band Brave Shores teamed up with some of my closest friends Tony Ho to make a lovely little celebratory romp (not without its darkness of course) that I think you will also like.

There's a song I left amidst the papers on your desk. I wiped the phone receiver clean, but could do nothing about the coffee ring. The window was open a crack, was that on purpose? I closed it. I hope it doesn't get too stuffy in there. That whole place seems to be tweed fabric stretched over metal. It's hard to remember when it rains, that it's not raining everywhere. That somewhere it's very nice. There's a film playing in my head when I close my eyes. It's of a rabbit being peeled like a banana. It's hard to remember when there's music playing that somewhere there is silence. I left a song amidst the papers, you'll find it if you look. It's long but you can read it if you like.

Hani Zahra - "Ma's In A Vaze"

Hani Zahra are different shapes of sticky rice, and they're in hidden places all over. You find them and it's food.

release show tomorrow at The Knitting Factory

Blonde Redhead - "No More Honey"

Edmund was breaking into Alison's house. They hadn't spoken, not face-to-face, in a year-and-a-half. They'd seen each other in the sides of their eyes, in the peripheral run-off of looking at their son Frank. But not face-to-face. And now Edmund was putting a garden stone through the back porch window. "Paid for that window anyway," he thought, as he wrapped his jacket around his hand and cleared out the jagged edges from the frame. He pushed his body carefully through the opening and was suddenly reminded of his stomach, bloated from beer and not much else. It was hard to tell when he'd started to sweat; was it after five minutes of struggling in the window opening, wondering how his legs must look out the back? or was it the very minute he decided to come to the backyard with bad intentions? Finally his gut, which was now compacted into his body like overpacked luggage, let loose over the edge of the frame inside and his legs crumpled in a paralyzed slump to the floor. Edmund rose with a kind of triumph particular to the slow-boiled criminal: little victories, the clear-and-present-fuck-you. He was in, and he could do whatever he wanted, for a little while.

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