Archives : all posts by Dan

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.

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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.

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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!"

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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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Trans Am - "Night Shift"

You can always tell a replicant because they don't care about breathing. When all is quiet and calm and the fires have died down and the waters rinse the streets, you, a human, can feel yourself breathing. You watch your stomach rise in front of you and even if you don't think it in words, you think it in shapes "ahh, old friend". It's a calm reminder of your animal nature, it's a comfort to re-understand you are never truly at rest. But a replicant does not need to breathe, it merely simulates the rising and falling of the chest to resemble life. And that, for me, is how I've always been able to tell. When it's quiet, look in their eyes, and see that they don't appreciate for one second they're able to inhale the atmosphere. Their electric breath means nothing to them. It's mere decorum. Like a curtsey.

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Tetevi Teteh)