Archives : all posts by Dan

Beck - "The Golden Age"

First move of the day. The sun barely up, coffee still warm in the thermos. It's a little girl who says she's a ballerina and she has a pocket dog. People never see about ten things in any given move. This time it was emptying her drawers. She just had some mental block about it, and then when we showed up she shook her head and slapped her forehead. "Yeah...yeah, why didn't I empty them? I'm such an idiot." So we moved the fridge while she packed like a maniac. That ballerina concentration.

Second move of the day was a retired couple, the wife didn't want to talk to us, I think she thought we were servants, but the husband, he wouldn't shut up. Talked about being a professor, talked about his painting class, life-drawing, naked ladies. I think because he saw me watching a young woman pass by. I can't help it, when I'm getting physical, breaking a sweat of any kind, nothing to do with my mind, it goes straight to my dick. "Every week a new one. They're not all like a magazine, but they're all beautiful in their own way." His wife seemed to get madder and madder.

The ride between one place and the next, from one arbitrary point in the city to another, with every single thing a person owns, is the part I like the most. I feel like we're shuffling the deck of the city, and when you have everything someone owns in your possession it makes you look at everyone else different. They're just going about their day, but behind them I see a trail of all the little things that make up a person. A futon or a four-poster or a dirty single, an old sad lamp or a beautiful brass cane or a painting of mt. Rushmore. It falls behind people like their shadow, and they pull it all on strings, on the bus or down the stairs from work or doing anything else that wastes all the time they'll ever have.

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Eola - "Someone's Got A Secret (Sean Nicholas Savage)"

A bubble-popping smile and bright cloud clothes. It's not 'don't touch the ground', but rather 'there's no ground to touch'.

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Jeff Feuerzeig, director of The Devil and Daniel Johnston, got in touch to tell us about Chris Stroffolino, "former Silver Jew, PhD-holding Shakespearean scholar, now homeless and lives in the van with his rescued piano." You can check out his delightful songs (which remind me in a nice, simple-clear way of Alan Price) at http://pianovan.com/music

(image source)

Parenthetical Girls make a heartswelling live performance.

And I've made an extremely silly thing, that it would help me very much if you watched, liked, shared. But I understand, it's not like stuff that's usually on here. *shrug, smile*

Pere Ubu - "Thanks"

It was so quiet you could hear the plants growing. Stretching their stalks, shuffling their leaves, and sipping their dirt. I would walk past that room, and he'd be watching the tv on mute. That high-pitched electric zeeee the only thing competing with the plants. I would walk past that room, the tv on mute, and I would try not to look in but I could never help it. Like a magnet I couldn't help it. And he was always looking at me. Always. That look that was part animal, part lecture. Part thunder, part hot metal. Part callous, part hard kiss. And it would stay with me all day, unfolding itself like a time-lapse blossom, strange dark colours and always surprising. I could hear his look, like the growing plants in my head.

[Buy]

Jumbling Towers - "At The Cashier's Station"

Thor ground a pill into the counter, and his watch alarm went off. One-fifteet-teet-teet. He quickly inhaled the pill and took a needle from the drawer. He squeezed a section of his stomach like a sausage and shot it in, cold. He had been chatting with an eighteen-year-old, twelve years his junior, in a sexually explicit way for days. His neck ached and his vision seemed to have a gradient to it, like faded sunglasses, the tops of everything seemed purple. Today seemed to be a comedown day for the two unlikely lovers, no more talk of fluids or empty pillows or swollen anything. She was talking about the pain in her feet from working co-op at the hospital for five hours on a Saturday. She had an adolescent flare for poetry, and typed: "pain is like a story." He thought about his heart, a strained ka-tha-bump, and his left leg like a meteor or a thousand summer sparklers, and typed: "pain is like a story the way a song is like a hallway." A pause, the sounds of children too young to know who Bruce Springsteen was, or is. She replied: "...identical?"

"unrelated."

[5$]

Blackout Beach - "Deserter's Song (BT)"

When the ocean celebrates, it rains upward, in what looks to us like slow-motion. But to the ocean, it's an ovation, it's practically leaping into the sky, drops rocket from the surface like popcorn. A single wave surges straight upward and leaves its home, never to return again, itself a steam.

[Buy] (I bought mine 5 minutes after reading a tweet that it was released)

No one noticed as the sky climbed across the tops of the trees. People slept and made love as the sun melted, the trees shrugging under the weight. Tea still steeped as new mountains were made. It's easy to forget that the earth is deaf and blind, illiterate and without a sense of beauty or poetry. The only thing it can sense, if anything, is time, and it's getting very very bored.

At age 42, Vladimir Vysotsky, drug-addicted, persecuted, and torn between wife and mistress, died under mysterious circumstances in the middle of his run playing Hamlet in 1980, during the Moscow Olympics

(via Sofia)