Archives : all posts by Dan

Matt Banham - "Guitar Song"

Margaret spoke with her chin, walked with her hands, and packed a suitcase like a magic hat. She brought sundresses, and sweaters and weird shoes, as if trying to conjure her ticket by suggestion. She took a break to down a glass of wine, to let her heart catch up with her breath, mind like a whack-a-mole. She tried to flush a picture frame, but it just sat there, edges seeping, obstinate. She smashed it with her heel but it just gathered in the middle like ice. Tight-lipped, Margaret looked back and forth between her coat and her curtains, as if trying to decide which would offer more warmth. Finally, she left to hail a cab, and met the delivery man in the hallway, "Oh, I forgot about that, forget it. I'm not hungry." He froze a moment then continued to her door, and knocked on her empty apartment. She left him like that. She took a cab in the dark and thought of how a city is like a body, and a body can get sick and this one was throwing her up. She got to the airport and paid in too much cash. She ran inside, the coat was not enough to keep her warm, she should have brought the curtains. "Where should I go?" Margaret asked the unshaven, gawk-eyed man behind the counter. "Are you serious?"

[PWYC]

Elephant - "Skyscraper"

I'm doing research into the Lamprey Holocaust. My major is in Drying Studies, my thesis the Five Great Deserts: Stone and Memory. I've got a kickstarter for my Air Fish project. I pay respect every day to the Ancient Earth Veins, geolocated on my smartphone. I give money to the High Water Marxists, and administer petitions on behalf of Know Longer. I'm dating a member of The Continuists, the militia group, our relationship is mostly podcasts. My life these days isn't best described in words, rather some kind of many-sided translucent shape. All one colour, like rough-hewn gelatin.

[PWYC]

(image of an erupting undersea volcano)

Yo La Tengo - "I'll Be Around"

My knees. My knees simply will not heal. Firstly, they were broken. Rapped wickedly on their caps when a debt got out of my hands. The mechanism was shattered, and my calves swung loose like earrings for months. I stared at them nightly, the crater where my knees would be, the sinewy gore a fascination, a constant nightmare, an embarrassing malformation. Now shatter-proof plastic caps sit in their place, and a doctor recommended I travel only on my knees, as a way of training them, fast as possible, to be stronger, less prone to breakage. I've been walking this way for months, hobbling, slow and giving the appearance of penance, of pathetic pleading. It hasn't helped in the way I expected, at least not yet. But what's worse, I continue to borrow, and continue to find myself in debt. But now smaller debts, spread out among many people, so as to confuse, surprise, cloud the minds of my creditors. And my poor poor knees have been the victims in all this. They've been hyper-extended, ground with salt, the bones exposed on all sides. I even tried walking with my calves folded out in front for a month; November, the month of laughter I did not understand. I suppose I looked like a vaudevillian joke, or perhaps everyone was laughing at something unrelated to me. So if you see me, do not pity me, do not throw me change, do not take any notice, it's only required so that my knees will be good and strong one day, and a debt will not feel like a deal with the devil.

[Buy]

Walrus - "Sleep"

With sleep the new money, I withdrew. It was easier spuh-lashing around in my cavernous dreams than say, sitting awake, trying not to eat chocolate and checking my phone. *IS TEXT MESSAGING DOWN FOR ANYONE ELSE??* I slept until Nebuary, some cloudy next month, sat on the back of my neck and choked the life out of me. Finally. Life stained my pillow, where I could see it, smell it, feel it cold and wet like some star-stuff dog nose. I'll never forget that colour, until I have to remember something else like my old high school locker combination and I forget that colour. So when the sun comes up, that'll be me, and you'll be able to find me, I'll be in bed.

[PWYC] (rainbow church by Tokujin Yoshioka)

Danny Brown - "Witit"

Like a three-story house with more floors than a skyscraper. A pair of bud-vase jeans, in a chandelier hat, doing a wobbly wax dance. Slipping up a gravel hill, knees bloody and scraped. This song was drawn from a vein, pulled from an ever-present current, previously untapped and restless. A spring, a new thing full of empty, a thought, all words at once.

[Buy the pill-shaped clear vinyl from Fool's Gold]

(image of Chinese bodyguard training)

Sweet - "Action"

I beat them all. I won. You can walk through their bodies like pudding. Their lungs line my bookshelves, I eat dinner out of their stomachs and then I eat the bowl. Their eyes are the tiles on my bathroom floor, get a real good look, chumps. I won, and there's no one left who can take that away.

[buy]

(image by Margaret Durow)

--

Clearly I'm in a fighting mood. If you live in Toronto, come to Comedy Bar at 10:30 tonight, I'll be in a rap battle as a character from one of my favourite shows: Intervention.

Angel Olsen - "Can't Wait Until Tomorrow"

"And the heartbreak was a lesson, a growing up. He knew he would search in vain for the rest of his life, the world over, for a love that would make him feel like a child, like there was only hope for the world and anything was possible, so he decided instead to give that feeling away. He knew from the vague memories of her gestures, he could do a fair impersonation of her beauty, her manner, her joy, and he could be that for someone else. A kind of story passed on to another generation about how love is possible. He cupped his hand around the candle and blew, and some wax flew out and onto his hand. Hot at first, it quickly hardened and he flicked it away."

[Buy from Bathetic]