Archives : all posts by Dan

Chalices of the Past - "Br00tal Krew"

It's either the mountains or the beach. It's either forgetting or constantly talking. It's either spending your savings or saving for nothing. It's either raining or it's waiting to rain. It's either human or a beautiful facsimile. It's either sex, as in orgasm, or searching, as in lacking d'erection. It's either PayPal or burn the banks. It's either banksy or a nice wall. It's either employment or the end of time. It's either New Years or Few Tears. It's either join us, or forget the whole thing.

To get on board with this song, I had to give up every other song I know. I may regret the decision in time, but I take each day as it comes.

Chalices of the Past - "Ignition (remix...again)"

THE NATIONAL ANTHEM OF COMPUTER COUNTRY. GETCHER VISAAAAAS.

[PWYC for 2 RUDE]

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TONY HO: LET'S CALL IT COMEDY

http://tonyho.ca

The world of sketch comedy is a diverse place. Full of posers, and wishers-were, and try-not-hard-enoughs. But there are also delights, there are challengers, freakers-out, and i-have-an-ideas. And Tony Ho, a fledgling new sketch comedy group are in the latter category. Their aesthetic goes to places that excite and terrify and malign, that make you giggle and gasp and hold your face. They make huge baroque sketches, immense entire short films, whole bodies of tone and story. They have created their own little world in which to exist, and you should take, even a little, look inside.

(image from the Phuket Vegetarian Festival, taken by Great Z, an anesthesiologist)

Thee Oh Sees - "Contraption/Soul Desert"

On the way to the clean-up meet-up, every Nov 1st for the past three years. It's usually the last day to bike, hard to squeeze the brakes with mitts on. There's a garden glove on the McKenzie's fencepost, a white picket wave, like it's a signal for something, TURN BACK I think. The air is cold and full of sparks. My phone buzzes unknown caller in my pocket, next to extra candies. At the entrance to Bern Park there's cookies on the bike path, none are crumbled, three face up. Past the basketball courts a white cargo van has its back doors open like wings. Looks like a robbery, or just someone moving. At the entrance to the school, at the back after-hours door near the gym there's a buzzer-inner. I put my eye right up to the camera and my mouth right up to the mic. "EVIL EYE!" I say with a demon voice and they buzz me in without a laugh. I imagine soldiers, marines, SEALs, running through these halls, one stops to butt a locker with his gun. I stop and look at the honour roll. Jennifer Rald, where are you now? [Pre-order Carrion Crawler / The Dream]

Each Other - "Freak Heat"

Cleaning up after Hallowe'en jerks is not a chore, if you're with people and you can laugh. There's a tp'd tree on Everly Lane, that takes a ladder. There's a firework'd beach by the Duck Pond, that takes a rake and a bag. There's burned-out dumpsters behind the cinema, I'm there with Peter and Tall Kevin. There's a horse corpse on the golf course, and that needs a fork lift I think. In the cold and setting fall, the damage is expansive and harsh. Moreso than any year I've seen before. Two of the high-rise apartment buildings are still evacuated, the dump was set loose and spillage ran into the viaduct, there's e coli in the water. The Chapters got shook out like a loose pocket, and all the stores in the Valley Mews are afraid to even set foot inside, what for the smell. But we'll keep at it, on our honour, and we'll turn this place around. Have it all ready for in time for Christmas. The Holidays, I mean. [PWYC for Taking Trips]

Duchess Says - "Time to Reiterate"
A.Dd+ - "Genocide"

"Foxy..." he grumbled, as he watched his prey evade another elaborate trap. "She just stands there," he thought, fixing his ice-maker, waxing his skis, "eating the bait like she just found it there." Skiing in the desert, flying off a cliff, rocket shoes, moving boulders, this life is shit. "It seems sometimes like the universe wants me to fail," he thought, his face turned to soot from a backfired explosion, "I'll paint a pathway on a rock, and she can use it like a tunnel, but if I try to do the same, I break my nose. It's not fair." He walked back to his cave, feeling the pebbles beneath his feet, in the carved side of a barren rock face. There's no fucking food around here.

[Buy In a Fung Day T!]
[More free A.Dd+]

(image of the appropriated fences after the Oakland police action via @gonzoakland)

John Prine - "Blue Umbrella"

A crooked mouth like a painted picture, his face looked drawn in few and heavy strokes. A cigarette squint, a sunlit tilt, chin out and hair in the wind. Head pounding like a drum, he walked up to the site. The foreman came down off the scaffold, rubbed his hands on a rag. The night before was a blur, a bunch of pretty girls and a bunch of handsome men, all like mixed-up cut-outs from a kids' book. She had on his pants, and a loose tie, and he had huge curly hair and a nice pair of tits. It was all Texas Chasers and California Wasters, from seven to seven and sun to sun. It was a great time, an enormous time, that had the taste of ending to it many times over. Drinking has a way of making your appetite endless, making the horizon stretch out, it seems like the day will never come. But then it does, and you're down to your last smoke and you wake up next to a passerby, and the mirrors are calling but you don't know your own name. And you get to your job and your boss has to unhook himself from a safety harness to come talk to you. Has to climb down the scaffold and rub his hands on a dirty rag, and take a minute to squint at you, and then "Well? Should I fire you?"

John Prine - "Quiet Man" (live in 1970)

"I can't do nothing, 'cept write love songs." And the sound of a train, away in the distance, taking something to somebody somewhere.

[Buy The Singing Mailman Delivers]

(image by Daniela Sach)

Bombadil - "One Whole Year"
Joel Brandt - "Lovers' Island"

• animal behaviours are determined by a combination of instinct and sense perception
• something's 'nature' is its instinct, its 'nurture' is the sum of its sense perceptions

• animal behaviour is therefore the expression of the sum total of experience up to just before the moment of that behaviour
• a mouse that makes its home in a garbage pile could not have made its home in anything else except that garbage pile

• an animal's behaviour is a necessary symptom of the state of the universe
• animals are conceived by a parent, and breathe
• music is conceived by a parent, and breathes
• music is an animal
• the way music sounds is a necessary symptom of the state of the universe
• if you do not like it, then like the mouse, the steam, the chlorine, the clouds, the city, the cardboard box, the leashless dog, you do not understand it
• there are many things I do not understand

Icarus Himself - "MCO"

Arnold and Tommy were brothers and their babysitter was a floating head. Arnold was 6 and Tommy was 4, they had talked about getting married, they only talked of that in whispers, and their babysitter was a floating head. They shared reused gum, they had a shared collection of homemade kiln-fired figurines that looked like beige blobs with arms, and their babysitter was a floating head. They slept in bunks one above the other, and it was the creaks of the strained cheap wood that would keep them up at night, not the constant murmurs and mutterings of the babysitter, the floating head. She had long blond hair that draped down around her ears like two blond banners, barrettes like insignias, her face a great dictator, her mouth the speaking podium and her eyes two eternal flames. She murmured and floated listlessly around the house, in the dim glow of the night-lights. She would sometimes move the furniture with her chin or slam the fridge with her nose. When the phone would ring, even if it were mum n dad, she would just stare at the phone, either unable or unwilling to answer, and the boys would count the rings in their room. [Buy from SOS Records]

Doom Trumpet - "Oregon and Again"

The dawn is not a quiet thing. When a city comes to life it is a raging thunder in the air and in the ground. The cars and engines blow like children deliberately into the city's microphone, making that whooshing, rapping, cracking breaking sound all through the whole air, the cold earth shakes and it feels like it will never stop. But this guitar, this true and solid guitar, threaded through everything to make it feel sane, quiets it all, like seeing a face in the lines of a foreign map. [Site]

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The Nâ Hawa Doumbia album that I posted about a while ago, is available today from Awesome Tapes From Africa. It is wonderful, and only 5$ for a digital version.

(image source unknown)

Parenthetical Girls - "Don't Give Up" (Kate Bush/Peter Gabriel cover)

"They're killing us," he said, tears in his eyes. Out the window, smoke rose in plumes like the earth were a leaking balloon. Pictures rattled off the wall, in a swept pile of glassy frames, showing scenes of accomplishment and meaningless, wild glory. A servant girl, not barely a year younger than the soldier himself, felt many things as she poured two glasses of wine, from the last bottle in the case. He had asked her to join him in a drink, and despite all that was happening, all the things that were so vast and more important than love, she thought maybe this was his way of sharing his feelings. "They haven't attacked the Mission District, they haven't even been watching it," she said handing him a glass, "That means they don't know about the Secrecy." The Secrecy. What an impotent thing that was now; the forces were closing in, there would be no stopping them, no matter how surprised they might be. "Yes," he said, into his glass, where he looked and saw a little piece of cork, floating in the red. "It's not over yet, sir. Have faith." He looked at her sad apron, at her tired eyes, tired from working double shifts as a nurse in the emergency ward, and he loved her. "Yes, faith is all we have at this moment. A simple belief in the utterly unreal."

Across town, and in a different language: a meager tent sat damply in the drizzle, two men inside, talking low. Already this mission had been talked to death, but still they talked. They talked of oppression, of secret poisons in the water system, of exploding SMS bombs, of cultural persecution. A people reduced to fear and anger and retaliation. A history that would not die, that would fight for survival. Steam from the hot tea filled the air and made them sweat. The tea kettle sat on a wobbly table, on a newspaper, making a wet ring. On an unfinished crossword that had only one answer written in: "PROTEIN". One man, the older of the two, sipped his tea and shook his head, unconvinced, "I understand all that. I do. But this is not the city to capture, not like this. They are too strong, they have forces we don't yet realize." The younger man, his uniform new and beaded with droplets from the steamy air, looked deep into the eyes of the older man and gave his speech that he had given a dozen times or more before, each with its own intensity, like he were constantly rehearsing for the next time he'd perform it, "My father...was murdered...on his way home from work...for the contents of his pockets...four crown and a postage stamp. We need to finish what we've started." He looked out the slit of the tent's door, the smoke rising in plumes like the earth were a well-cooked pie, and put on his preferred capper to the speech, "They're killing us."

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This song was given as part of an EP called Demos for the Dreaming for people who pre-order Privelege IV: Sympathy For Spastics which is another in their series of limited-run (and truly fantastic) EPs. As usual, they will be individually numbered in human blood.