El Perro del Mar - "Change of Heart". She is in the pillow section and he is in the picture-frame section. He is at the end of an aisle, taking a matte silver frame from a hook. His arms are raised and he looks particularly bear-like, strong and bearded. She thinks of how he will put the frame around his shoulder and come over to where she is standing; he will stroke the arc where her neck meets her shoulder; they will go hand in hand to the warehouse at the end of this vast store. The frame will glint in the fluorescents, and he will choose a trolley from the row of trolleys and wheel the trolley through the tall steel shelves. They will find the melamine desk they liked, identifying it by its ümlauted label; he will balance the long, flat cardboard box on the trolley he chose. In the parking-lot they will bump into one of his old friends from university. Everyone will shake hands. And much later, at home, he will put the lithograph into the frame and hang it above their bed. They will make love like two traincars passing in a dark tunnel.

She stands and looks across the aisles to where he is taking a picture-frame from a hook. She wonders how many geese went into these pillows.

[buy]

Labani Kalunga & Fikshala Band - "By Air". His name is Peter Parker and he is a mathematician. The other lecturers like to make jokes: "The Spider-Man of MATHS 120A!" Students put references to Mary-Jane and the Green Goblin in the titles of their papers. Once, someone left a box in his mailslot that contained a small spider. This is particularly funny because Peter Parker is a small, gentle man who recedes quietly into his little brown suits. He is 52 years old. He has probably never read a Spider-Man comic in his life, they think. He has probably never raised his voice, or danced, or laughed at a fart joke. They imagine him sitting in silence with pages of mathematical notation, a pencil in his fingers, the symbols passing into his mind with the dry sound of graphite scrape. What they do not know about Peter Parker is that when this little man looks at G(n) ∼ (lnn)², what he sees is dancing fireworks. When he gazes at the twist and leap and dive of an equation, at the cresting hope of a proof, he hears a filligree of joyful electric guitar. He heard a dance of gold and silver, a riff as beautiful as the most beautiful girl. [from Awesome Tapes from Africa/buy]

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My friend Abby McDonald (once of the Poptext music blog) is about to release her second novel, a book called The Popularity Rules. She has launched a website and video-thingy to promote it. Go look.