Archives : all posts by Dan

The Wandering Lake - "People"

Go to sleep. Please go to sleep now, I am tired and you are tired. Please go to sleep.

I named you Dark Rescue, you know how dangerous it is. Just check your geiger if you don't believe me. Now go to sleep. Please.

Fine. I will tell you about the forest, and then you will go to sleep.

Do you know there are beasts that roam the Uninhabitable Zone? The beasts and the bugs and the plants have taken back the earth now, it is theirs again. They are sick and dying, but they are kings and queens nonetheless. A dying noble is still a noble, and they live their lives according to their station, short though they may be. On one of my trips, I've told you many times, I saw a fox wearing a hide, he wore it like a cape, and he was a king. I've told you many times about his wife, the fair tanuki, with her silver eyes and dripping amulet, but I have not told you yet about their daughter, the beautiful and fiery Iriomote cat. The king and queen adopted her after the waves settled her there, picked up all the way from the island of Iriomote to the northern forest. She was rebellious and wily and incorrigible, but they loved her. She loved to hunt, as all Iriomote cats do, and she was very good at it. She could catch a snake with one paw, her claws like perfect fingers that brought it to her mouth. But the adopted princess, her name was Ichi as she was the first child of the king and queen, became arrogant with her skill, always proclaiming she could hunt larger and larger animals. "I can kill a crane," she said one day, while batting around an old egg shell on their floor of their dirt home. Her mother, the fair tanuki, smiled and looked back at her work, sorting sticks into piles. "You don't believe me, I can kill a crane," said Ichi, more determined. "I believe you can do anything you set your mind to," said her mother, in the way that mothers set those words down like flowers on the graves of future plans. "You don't believe me," and Ichi set out into the snow, and made her way down into the buildings, where the cranes often took shelter. "Be careful," said her mother, looking back towards the sticks.

The old crane was very wise, this was no easy target for Ichi, especially since it was ten times her size. The old wise crane saw her coming, saw her climb onto the edge of the old subway entrance to the underground, in the reflection of the glass on the automatic doors. She was trying to find a high vantage, in order to leap onto the crane's back and sink her teeth into its neck, so she stood perched on the walls of the old subway entrance, and it was slippery, covered in ice. As she began to lose her balance, the crane made a quick decision. If Ichi were to fall, she would land in the underground, which may kill her instantly from falling, but would kill her within hours from the radiation pocket. The crane swooped up into the air and plucked Ichi from the walls of the old subway and carried her high into the trees. As he dropped her, he said, "Hang on to those treetops, your parents need you to survive." And that was all he said, and Ichi did hang on, and she went back to her mother, who had no idea how close she'd come to losing her. "Did you catch a crane?" she asked Ichi, the sticks now sorted. "Yes," she said, happy to be back home, "but I let it go. Cranes are too beautiful to hunt. So I let it go."

Yes. All day and all weekend.

[PWYC]

(image)

The Lovely Bad Things - "Big Sur"

I'm not saying this would ever happen, a lot of things would have to be just right in order for this to happen, but if a cat stole a megaphone and went to the roof of city hall to make demands, I think people would listen. The cat would say stuff like "down with currency, down with property" and outline its ideas about The Great Roam, a new paradigm of human interaction, based on nomadic traditions and something called "telenesting" a brand new way to incorporate the internet and family. I think people would really listen. Cause its got cool ideas, and cause it's a cat. Y'know, like, why would this cat, assuming it has always, along with possibly many other cats, had the ability to speak, choose to speak now? Why? Cause it's got something really important to say. [Buy from UVR]

Gentleman Reg - "Coastline"

A passport, slipped in a thin pouch, stretched across a suitcase. All this traveling is like a life lived through the window of an envelope, small and reduced, simple information always front and center. "I'm just here for a brief time, yes it's beautiful, okay I will try that." So many beds, come-ins to hotel room what-to-dos and showering off a flight. An innumerable whats-tv-like-heres and might-as-well-get-a-beers it's like an ocean of shrugs and strolls and pointed-out unique-ties. Air is truly fresh the first time you breathe it, so never go back somewhere twice. [Site]

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2 weeks left for the funding drive. Things are going extremely well so far, so if you read the site regularly, and you like it, please consider donating.

Eleanor Friedberger - "Early Earthquake"

Please let your guard down for this song. Let it stand in your room, in a beamed-up sun dress with unwashed hands. Let it look at all the stuff on your walls, in your drawers, under your bed and out the door. Let it eat crudités, take texts and smile, let it take showers and wrap gifts and make cards. Let it stay, breathless and grinning, a while. [Pre-Order]

Handsome Furs - "Serve the People"

Inside my body there is art waiting to escape. It shows up on the surface of my skin, in ink lines. The marks made on me by people who love me or fuck me over show up like magnet lines, like filings falling into place. As if the very beating of my heart drew patterns of travel and maps for the way back. [Pre-Order and get a free poster]

(images by Marco Suarez)

Sparks - "(Baby, Baby) Can I Invade Your Country"

Teddy was 13 and under the impression that he was much more good-looking than he actually was. He wore his wing-tipped jeans like they didn't fit like a rotten pear. He walked proudly with his chest sticking out in front, blissfully oblivious to his sinking hunched shoulders and his plunking, swishing gait. He spoke slowly, as if he poshly needed to taste all his syllables, taking no notice of his own condescending whine, nor the splay-toothed spittle that formed at the sides of his mouth. Despite having a voice like a seeping balloon, he enrolled himself in a local youth choir at the Briarcrest Community Center on Thursday nights.

He came into rehearsal for New Voices Youth Choir, always one of the first to arrive. He dropped his droopy satchel bag in the corner near the coat hooks and made his way to a group of three girls, chatting before things got started. "Hello lay-dees," his voice creeped out of his throat like it were an insect, like it had its own eyes. The girls always dreaded a talk with Teddy, but always seemed to forget that it would happen, the way you only take notice of a leaky shower faucet when you're actually in the shower; a problem that quickly gets itself forgotten, only to come back every time, with the pall and residue of an untended annoyance. "What-ever are you discussing amongst yourselves? Perhaps the weather?" The girls looked at him like a plate of left-out cheese, a sweaty, sagging, unduly proud pile, edges hardening by the second. "We're talking about how to get beer this weekend. So..." Two of the girls closed their shoulders together, a gate denying entry, but Teddy stood motionless, his hands perched high up on his waist, pulling his shirt up with his hands placed icky on his bare skin. "Oh. Beer. Myself, I'm more partial to cock-tails." One of the girls, the oldest, said with eyes firmly rolled, "Oh yeah?" The door opened and the instructor came in, sighed, and Teddy zeroed in on her; he had plenty of suggestions for new songs and special requests for solos. As he left the girls, he spoke without looking at them, "Yes. They certainly do take the edge off the day." One girl, the tallest, looked lazily at his satchel, sad and dolloped in the corner, and wondered what-ever could be inside.

[Order from In the Red]

Floating Action - "Well Hidden"

Crook-seated and knee-crossed, cords and smudgy lenses, Matthew Marshall, Matt, writes on the cover of an unbroken journal. "A Summery Summary", he looks Junely out the sunny window and smiles with his hands, in the way he holds his pen. To be the main character of one's own story is a privilege earned and not a right handed down. Perhaps with a masters, or a fellowship, or a crisis, if this car were to crash fiery, he would jump forward in line, but for now the trees cut light and the air is warm and underneath these clothes are the mechanics of a person, whirring quietly and without claim. [Buy Desert Etiquette]

Human Eye - "Alien Creeps"

77. 77 is the perfect number because you're not going psycho speed and you're not taking any shit from idiots. On this road, where psychos are going 85 and 90, Yevgeny keeps it steady at 77 and it's the ultimate combination of sensibility and time-management. With clear traffic, without too many psychos or idiots, the trip is 5h 44min. But still with every trooper car he passes, those shiny stoic perchers, like chess pieces, like carved bishops, his heart sinks. His head goes into theirs for the next 3 miles. He sits in their car, burrito wrapper on the passenger seat, shotgun heaving at the dash, and pretends to be their easy conscience, their fickle whim. "Why not? I got nothing better to do," and peel out, that daring swooping squeal from highness into chase. [Pre-Order They Came From the Sky]

Gravediggaz - "Mommy What's a Gravedigga? (RZA mix)"

|| Hey, can you text me Robin's address? I need it for the border || attending || not attending || not attending || maybe attending || not attending || remove from events || Like || ME TOO! MISS YOU! || i saw this yesterday. old news, malcolm! || 6331 Esplanade, buzz 3 || Like || Dear everyone, what should I do in Montreal? Thanks! || thanks, can you send me the postal code too? I don't know, I might need it || Make sure you get to your rideshare early, guys, the front seat is key #fuckyounerdydude #chivalryisdead || Also, it smells like peas in here #itwascheap || RT @disneywords - I just needed to get out on my own, live my own life. And I did, and it's great. -Simba (The Lion King) || RT @PimpBillClinton Sarah Palin should stick to what she's good at: mangling American history and blowing guys on snowmobiles || H2T 2T3 [Buy Double Suicide Pack]

1,2,3 - "Work"

I'm not gonna make it. I'm seriously not gonna fuckin make it. I can't breathe. What's this girl typing a fuckin novel? This is fucked, my heart feels like it's gonna fall out of my chest. Nothing is calming me down, I feel like I'm gonna strangle this fuckin idiot. I'm just gonna reach over his headrest and pull my belt tight and we'll go swerving off the road and hit the corner of a bridge and a grassy ridge and be done with it. Well, maybe not done with it. We'll have to go through the windshield and get stuck in the twisted metal and then our hearts will really fall out of our chests. This Wolf Parade isn't calming me down, wait this isn't even Wolf Parade. I think I'm gonna puke, just raise your hand, just raise your fuckin hand like a normal person, and don't use it to strangle anybody. "Excuse me? Can we stop soon? I need to go to the bathroom." He grimaced, he grimaced, he knows, I'm sweating. [Pre-order New Heaven]

(map collage by Matthew Cusick)

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in just one day we've seen so much support from you. It means a huge amount to us, we're extremely grateful, humbled, awed. see the fundraising post below.

Grown-Ups - "Actually Bankrupt"
Feel Alright - "Blood Cathedral"

Archives. I scurry through moldy, capillary hallways, head-height vaulted cabinets hung with files like gutted birds. I breathe shallow, I touch sparing and brief, to minimize the contact with this unburied graveyard of informal thought. Like if twitter could somehow be harpooned, its sprawling heaving corpse would smell like this. Hundreds of millions of death sighs, warm and steamy on the beach. I'm looking for a single phrase, I need to find a single phrase amidst this garbage. I need to find an instance, a printed instance, of the words "a nightmare involving Danny Zuko". Don't ask why I need to find it, I don't pry into your business, I just need to find it. So here I am, neck-deep in confessional columns and police reports and community theatre reviews on microfiche. I'm sitting hunched in the bowels, stacks of reproductions in the "checked" pile, and I can't believe the world ever saves anything at all. Recorded history is a relatively new idea, and history hoarding is even newer, the world entire is now a scribe, a scholar, and a preservationist. "Where are my emails? Where are all my blog entries? I wanna read the one I wrote about a nightmare involving Danny Zuko." Not a printed instance, it doesn't count, but it's getting closer.

[Buy Stopped Caring from Modern Documents (released June 21 as MD001)]
[Buy hahahahahahaha from Planet of the Tapes]

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Feel Alright is Craig Fahner's band, and he's also an artist, with art that I simply had to share with you. This is a piece by Fahner, called Organ, that is one of a few physiological instrumentation pieces he's done. Organ is controlled by an EEG headset, and it's programmed to play notes as the musician becomes less cognitively aware. Yes, that is less cognitively aware. If you can figure out how to even do that, you can play this organ. I want to try it so badly.

(I heard about Fahner, and Feel Alright, through the great Emma Healey)

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BREAKING: Sean has won a National Magazine Award for his piece on UX & the Paris catacombs that was originally published in Brick and is now up at Gizmodo. This is great news.

This song is a prayer to the senses for forgiveness. A confession to the body gods that not all thinking has been critical. Not all conclusions based on logic. The spirituality of the scientific method, the clinical rituals and calculated risks, controlled studies and epistemic evidence, is often too daunting, too fanatical to maintain. The extremist calm, the reasoned zealots speak with certainty that nothing promising is a promise, that nothing solved is true. Forgive me, logic, for ever thinking everything was possible, for ever thinking anything was done. Life is work and work is long but both will soon be done in time. [TEEN on myspace]

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Junip is having a video contest. Make a video for their song "Without You" and submit it to their youtube page.