Archives : all posts by Dan

"It's cold, bring a sweatshirt." Alex wore a rain coat, he always wore a rain coat, just in case. Grabbed the We Buy Gold! one, pink with gold lettering, and a stack of bars on the back.

Out the window and onto wet lawn at night. Sprinklers have stopped it must be after 1. Schoolwork takes the ghost of my mother's face, it must be September again. But fuck this year, this year can suck a dick, I'm done caring.

At the tracks, the branches let go around the rails, beat away by the trains probably. Gravel bank for the fire. Stumps, milk crates, Alex brought some beer. And Hillary. Hillary was sitting there, with her hands rolled in the sleeves of her sweatshirt, pulling it down from around the sides of her neck. Her hair dyed strawberry, her shoes white flat. There were probably some other people there too.

We drank and smoked and stared at the fire. We had a summer in a night because we wasted the summer or it felt like we wasted it. Alex was naked and making the girls scream. I thought it made me look smart. I forgot all about everything, until the sun started to come up and it all came funneling back. Like the sun was the source of all my problems, voraciously toothing its way back into my life. I said, quite dumbly, "We have school today." Nobody laughed or said anything.

We all walked drunk or with bikes to school, and I walked with Hillary. "Are you going to college?" She had her arms fully in her sweatshirt now, the sleeves empty and loose, "Of course, aren't you?" I pretended I was. Didn't really want to apply, to be honest, but I pretended. "Where are you going to go," I asked, "in town?" She kind of laughed but mostly sneered, "I don't think so. I gotta get out of here." I suddenly had to piss really fuckin bad.

In homeroom I think I must have been really mad cause I was sending Alex 4 and 5 texts at a time. All about Hillary. she's kind of a bitch. who does she think she is? I get it, so she likes me but Im like some stop on her journey. Im like some hostel she stays in on her trip to europe to go find herself, well thats bullshit alex. and I knew I was mad but I knew I must also be still kinda drunk, cause I'd wait, and I'd wait, and just get back: ??

It was 11 now and now it was Gym. Outside cause the weather's still nice. Warm in the sun. Actually, hot in the sun. We had to run laps around the track and my head was spinning and my gut felt like it was sloshing in my shoes. The runner in front of me, Luke Schubert, started to get farther and farther away, I turned to puke in the big black garbage can, flung the heavy domed lid off.

Mr. Carson was headed my way, clipboard and white visor and dress pants with running shoes. He asked me something about being okay, but I didn't let him finish. "You think you're so important, don't you. Well, let me tell you something.." I was speaking slowly and in long sentences, and I was talking to the whole class now, who were looking at me, two weeks into September. "Outside these walls, of this school, you're nothing. None of you are anything! So enjoy it while it lasts, you stuck-up pricks. Money's just a number." Alex was sweating and looking at me with a strained face. He didn't think that last part was as clever as I did.

I left the field like I'd just finished a marathon, and I was headed to the bus stop, when "Hey!" I turned around, slowly as if being ready for the worst would somehow make it better. But it was Mr. Carson, just holding up my sweatshirt, with a big chunky stain on it, We Buy Gold!

Cannon Bros' album Firecracker/Cloudglow is not about the singles. It's almost not even about the sound. It's about the album, start to finish, as a fleecy, whole-felt thing. It's pure teenager, it's as important as anything was as a teenager. It's lovely.

[release slated for Oct/Nov]
[an old EP featuring "Out of Here" is available for free]

(image source unknown)

Heavy Times - "Too Many Dreamers"

A squirrel enjoys a bit of red wine and loose garbage. Walks along the telephone cables, trying to keep feet single file. Passes windows that drip with human breath and glow-light. Up trees to see streetlights, the tips of silent chimneys, and three stars. Sleep will come when it does, but until then, as always, the hunt.

Heavy Times - "Poison Ivy"

For supreme and utter obedience to the letter of the law, there is a state-funded Heaven. It's not easy to get in, as it costs taxpayers a hefty sum to keep it running. Some believe there is a conspiracy to keep true and righteous citizens out of its high-walled floating gates. A peaceful angel, known on Earth as Robert James Kelly, was recently kicked out because he was found to have once made a, while not illegal, frowned-upon mid-street three-point-turn.

[Too Many Dreamers is out of print because they only made 10]
[possibly still available red vinyl of Dead]

(image by julie jacinto corriveau)

Covergirl - "Chemicals"

"You got the password?" a grimy nose peeked out from the crack of a chain-pad door.

Sammy did not have the password. He had come because he needed drugs so that he could cut the drugs and sell them out to dumbasses in his neighbourhood cause he needed a lot of fuckin money right away. He stared dead in the eye of the stinky nose that grimed out from this crack. "Penny?"

Penny was the real name of the beautiful wife of the horrible dealer who had his office inside. Penny was a goddess, all pink and tight and taut and teeth. She was so nice. When you'd do blow in the back room off the broken pool tables she'd bring Long Island Ice Teas and smile so pretty. But nobody knew her real name was Penny. Everybody just called her P because that was what the horrible drug dealer called her, and whenever anybody would ask, "Hey, P, what's that stand for?" the dealer would give them a look like he was going to kill them and he'd tell them to shut up. Some of the guys thought it was Patricia or Polly or Penelope or something like that. But one night when Sammy was leaving at glow-sky dawn, he woke up from a plush bench pass-out and realized his head was in her lap, like she was a pillow. Nobody saw, so he just smiled and went to leave, and she said, "You can call me Penny."

So to get into this room, with this chain-pad door and this grimy stink-nose pokin' its way out the side, he gritted his teeth and said, "Penny?"

The door chunked open and Sammy stepped inside.

Das Racist - "Michael Jackson"

[Covergirl bandcamp]
[Pre-Order Das Racist's Relax from Insound]

TEETH - "U R 1" (removed by request)

In a dream I thought I was an alien that had just come to earth, looking at it from above like a hot air balloon. I thought that grains of rice were words, more precious than gold which had of course no meaning to me, and held secret in silos and in grocery stores, blended in amidst the food. I dreamt that speech was eating and talking was unnecessary. I ate so much rice, pilafs, curries, paellas, sashimi, but couldn't make sense of it in my stomach, it felt like jumbled nonsense, though I knew if I could only find the order it would all come clear in good time. [Buy from Moshi Moshi]

Nurses - "Fever Dreams"

"Fever Dreams" is not a pathway, or food, or a sunset. It is not wind, nor is it speech. "Fever Dreams" is not a building. What it is is that little opening. Like when your shoe begins to split at the sole and the toe. When a tiny crack shoes up from a rock in the windshield. When the first droplet forms on a melting winter. It is that start, the tiniest step to the largest possibility of a finish. It is wagging, wailing hope. [Buy]

(Alt. Olympic Rings by Daniel Eatock)

Sovroncourt - "Thompson . Eastman"

"It's not ready." Teddy knew the rules: make a machine that can dance like a human being, evoke human emotion through mechanized movement. He'd been working for 6 months and the contest was today. "It's not ready," he told his uncle, Mike, who was driving Teddy to the field for the contest. "Well, Teddy," said Mike, "it's a bit late for that now." Teddy just held his face in his hands and the morning news washed over him like nonsense. When the time came to launch the machine, the music was playing and he turned to the judges: "It's not ready." They didn't react and Teddy looked at Mike, who gave him a go on gesture. Teddy turned on the machine and it twirled and it lurched and it stepped and it swayed. Parts fell off, and the machine seemed to be dying, slowly, unraveling in clumps. Lunging points, cresting stags, the machine dismembered in a whirling fluid flail, and Teddy watched on with his hands in his pockets. [Bandcamp]

Writer - "Family Dinner"

Music to slam your door to. To hit the pillow and 'never again' to. Music to misunderstand by, and by which to be misunderstood. [site]

(image by Walter Russell, who said 'Mediocrity is self-inflicted and genius is self-bestowed')

Total Babes - "Le Guts"

Titans are walking. Heroes are being killed and swiped aside, others are preparing to fight, if only in vain. Trouble is coming.

"My cell phone works fine, but I want a different plan, and if it comes with a new phone then I'll take it," said texting, while boxes of groceries in the trunk, bungee corded, stack themselves. "I didn't get to pizza! We always pizza on the first night!" the beach house emptied, with the door swinging open, shone the sunset right out into the sandy road, and it was warm. "Well we're not going to pizza, do you have any idea what is going on in the world?" She knew. She knew enough. "Fuck that--" "Jenniffer--" "I mean screw that, the world is always ending, dad, I don't know if you know that. It's always the end of something or the start of something and something is always threatening you. Always. That's just the way it works." He paused, pushed his sandal back on his foot, turned, and went to get the fishing rods out of the closest. They'd be like goddamn flying daggers if he left them there. [Pre-Order]

CSS - "Red Alert"

The summer crush that will now never be, since 1492, and 1918, and 1945, and 1963, and 2001, and 2011 already happened. [Buy]

--

If this video had a poster (why can't they, talented internet?) it ought to say on it, in big bold letters, "and introducing...COCO"

Oddity: watch this strangely compelling and hypnotic monologue by fake recluse author Tony Ho. What's really unnerving about it is that, as an author, he writes with a slight "gramophone" flair.

(image: good enough for 2nd graders, good enough for me)

Na Hawa Doumbia - "Danaya"

"Tell me the long story."

The old woman laughed and shook her head, "No, no. Not the long story. Not tonight. It's too late."

"Please. Please tell me the long story. There is still time."

The old woman laughed again, pleased and with a warm heart. "Okay, but you must sleep."

"The Long Story" was an embellished version of The Story. The story that the old woman knew best and told often. The story of how she left home long ago on a train and didn't see her family ever again. Of how she saw in her palms the lines like a map and followed them to the North, where she met a camel trader and fell in love with his cunning smile, his warm and heavenly eyes. How they lived together in a little room on the 14th floor and didn't bother anybody else for years. How eventually the police came looking for her and she hid under the sink and they inspected with dogs and they went right by her cheek pressed against the cupboard door and they didn't find her. How they beat up her husband and took him away. How she ran through the streets to the worst man in town, Herake, and asked him for a favour: to find out where they had taken her husband. How she followed her husband into prison, she got herself arrested under a charge of praying incorrectly, and when she was released after a few months, she brought with her a throng of women who escaped and open the doors to the men's prison. How they ran and cried and lived off help from strangers all the way to the East. How they started a home here in the trees and how their new family grew into what it is today. How he still watches over this land, he still has his cunning smile and that will never die. That was The Long Story and it was the long version that had all the details; about the way the water tasted, about the way tears tasted, about the way food tasted when you hadn't eaten. About love and the way it feels. About the sky and the way it forced light through almost anything. About how guns make people cold, and uniforms make people unable to listen. About money, about talk. They way a person can talk all around you like a puff of smoke or talk directly to you like a gift, cupped in their hands like water.

[Incredible album released at Awesome Tapes in October]

(image)