Lana Del Rey - "Video Games". Sugar, magnolia, melting ice cube. This love is slippery, smoky; it hides, plays, coyly rises. Lana Del Rey will watch your car rattle to the curb, watch polygons fret on the LCD, she will long for you from a place that is just beyond arm's reach. Her summer dress is off and then it's on. She is against the jamb. She drinks pink lemonade and watches the jade plant curl. I am not sure I trust it, the thing she is promising. Some prizes look better in reflection. [from Pitchfork via Grizzly Bear / MySpace / before you get too excited]

Nikkiya - "When I Was High". When C came down the mountain, the trees were grey, the fire hydrants were grey, the rooms were room-temperature. She sat in her kitchen, drumming her fingers, squinting out the window and into the wasteland. The mountain was not very far away; she could go again. Her backpack was slouched near the door. But C did not want to give in to that impulse. She had things to do. Look at all these papers. She sighed, doodled, wrote a few lines. She tried to write the lakes blue, the lips red. She tried to remember the way the world had felt, from the top of the mountain: the birds' darting hearts, the cities' breathing, the clouds' fucked-up swagger. Could she feel these things again, in her house on her street? In the dumb lowland? It had been so easy on the mountain. Every time she closed her eyes, she could still hear it - the feathered trills, thunder and lightning, all that altitude. [website]

(photo is of Stephen Hawking & Jane Wild, 1965)