Archives : all posts by Dan

Ike & Tina Turner - "Every Day I Have to Cry"

"Pick up, pick up, pick up, you fuck."

Nowadays, phone booths are only for freaks and the desperate. There are no casual phone booth users left. If you're using a phone booth, something is wrong. You've had your purse stolen or you've just arrived in a foreign city or you've witnessed a car accident or a crime.

"You fuck, pick up, pick u--Hello? Who is this. Cheryl? Do not hang up on me."

The sunlight was red inside the booth. There was red graffiti all along the inside of the glass, and it was dripping. Huge red dripping streaks, it looked like some kind of graffiti creature had slit its wrists and rubbed it on the windows, or maybe just exploded.

"Cheryl, give me his number. Give me his number, Cheryl. It's 2000$, why are you arguing with me over this?"

Despite being repeatedly, obsessively checked, there was no free quarter in the change slot. That was one of the best feelings in the world, finding a free quarter in the change slot. You could press "refund" for another 20 minutes, thinking maybe this phone was in the habit of giving out freebies.

"Are you suggesting I can't pay my own rent? He's a millionaire and he won't send me 2000$? You want me off the street? Then why don't you call him and tell him My God get your son that 2000$ now give me his number, Cheryl, so I can leave him a voicemail, please. I want him to hear my voice on a voicemail message."

Pay phones have a sturdiness not found in personal phones. Pay phones have that quality, like public drinking fountains and stuff you see in army surplus, of being ready for any manner of human use. Like they can weather the storm of any behaviour, no matter how you act a pay phone feels like it will stand strong with you. But you do occasionally see a receiver yanked out of its metal cord, lying cracked on top of the phone.

"Psychology is sorcery, Cheryl. I'm young, I'm smart, I'm goodlooking as hell. You don't think I can pay my rent?"

A car horn beeps. Jeans are like phone booths, too. Built to last but you can break 'em if you try.

"I'm giving you one last chance to give me his cell phone number. I've been in and out of jail 22 times, my lawyer wants to have me committed, Cheryl. This is the last time I will ask him for anything."

The sun beat down like a goddamn baseball bat. Like a goddamn frying pan.

"Just do me this one thing! God, you're sick, you know that? You're sick, Cheryl."

[Buy]

Correatown - "Everything, All at Once"

I don't know how you feel about it, but you were female in your last earthly incarnation.You were born somewhere in the territory of modern Yukon around the year 1275. Your profession was that of a preacher, publisher or writer of ancient inscriptions.

Your brief psychological profile in your past life:
Timid, constrained, quiet person. Sometimes your environment considered you strange.

There are some things I can't believe about this reading. Just as there are some things I can't believe about this song. There are moments where I wince at falseness (publishers in the dark ages in the Yukon? come on) but there are moments when I can sit staring at the sensation of it, hypnotized with the possibilities. Of course I was a woman, I wouldn't expect anything else. [site]

Beauty Feast - "It Grows It Grows"

Type your birthdate as a list of digits. Multiply it by your age. Think of a three-digit number, and drop the first digit and type what remains. Divide that by your street number. Add your shoe size, your number of sweaters, the number of channels you get, your last mastercard balance, subtract the number of dishes in your sink, and multiply by the factorial of how many fist-fights you've been in (2!) and add the factorial of imaginary fist-fights (4!). Now turn the calculator upside-down and you should see a cool message: "Careful not to burn the bridges you are standing on." [Site]

Makeup Monsters - "Rude Romantique"

By way of analogous example, take for instance that time in childhood when you're in the grocery store or a museum or an outdoor crowd, and it's winter. A lot of people have that similar brown thigh-length coat with the fur-lined hood and by accident you follow the wrong person, thinking it's your parent. Until finally, you think of something to say, tug on the grungy edging of that coat and the person turns around with this horrifying masque-version of your parent's face. You look around as if this were a joke or really a nightmare. Well if you can believe it, I went out with the wrong girl for 3 months in this same way. My actual girlfriend and I were both into shoegaze music and hiding our eyes with our hair, and never really referred to each other with our names, it was always "hey" or "dude". For 3 months I met up with this other person, we would watch movies and snuggle, go to concerts, go for walks, ride bikes together, cook for each other, share our clothes, lend books, write love notes, make mixes, ask advice, leave goofy messages, call really late, talk about our families, get drunk together, and flirt endlessly, as if the flirting would go on forever, as if we were constantly just coming together anew, sparking, buzzing, pop. And then suddenly, the way you need to come up for air when you're underwater, we were making love as we often did and we finally saw who the other was for, apparently, the first time. It came out before I could self-edit, "Oh shit sorry," I said, "I thought you were someone else." [MySpace]

Kathryn Williams - "Little Lesson"

I imagine that there must be at least some souls making-do in Hell. Yes, Hell. Aitch, ee, double-hockey-sticks Hell. Whether it's the dark horned angels doling out damnation, or the few lucky masochists they got as their charge, there must be some meditative moment, some reflection of "I could do this better" or "am I really using my surroundings?" There must be, it's simply the nature of all progression. I imagine an organism, perfectly evolved to survive and thrive in the underworld. It's some kind of paper-thin kevlar carpet, that flies on hot air and cooks its food on contact, its entire face a digestive element. The Dark Leaf, I think they call it, and they can be as big as a parliament flag or as small as leftover shavings in the sink. [Out Today in the UK]

(photo of The Death Pit)

The Books - "A Cold Freezin' Night"

"Culture, I would argue, is the most widespread addiction in the history of nature. The avocado is, at its core, a smooth-skinned fruit. The bumps that you see on most avocados are in fact a disease that nearly every avocado is "born" with. The way some babies can be born addicted to heroin, it is my opinion that most babies are born addicted to culture. They are so primed and ready, immersed and tuned to swallow language and property and class and conflict, that it is almost instantaneous that you can see the mind of a child stretching and twisting their newfound set of expectations in their mind, and they invariably pass through the cruelty phase. This period of 5 or so years where they gnaw on their biases, and literally try to break open their most precious gift of "a place in the world", is my proof for the weight under which we live our lives. Think of a world truly given over to children, culture would be annihilated in under a year, whether through instant societal decay (the money crash, the trade drought, the end of electricity) or some kind of nuclear suicide."
-Prof. Desmond Velting, lived 19 years in a Skinner Box

Laurie Anderson - "Thinking of You"

Tomorrow, wake up an hour earlier than you did today. This should only take an hour, so once you've finished, you'll have wasted none of your regular day. Get out of bed immediately and do not dress. Eat a small piece of raw meat, any meat, coated in sugar. Just pat it in sugar and eat it. This will be your exact amount of energy needed. Get dressed in clothes you don't care about and leave your house. Find a crack in the sidewalk with a flower growing out of it. Near there should be a wall, climb it. At the top you should be able to see much farther than you could before. You're looking for public transport: buses, taxis, a sign for a subway, anything. The first one you see, go and catch it. Take it until it stops, if it's a taxi, hand over whatever money you have and say "take me this far". When you get out, talk to the first person you see, find out their name and where they are from. If you do not speak the same language, at least get a name. Now, use this name in some way, let it change your life. Tattoo it on your body, spray paint it on a wall, masturbate to it, write it on bread and ingest it. Anything to let transference take place. And once transference takes place, you may begin your day as usual, and awake awake awake. [Buy from Nonesuch]

Lloyd Miller & The Heliocentrics - "Pari Ruu"

"If I'm resurrected, I sure as shit better be able to dance," were my grandfather's dying words. I either thought or said, "Do you mean reincarnated?" but it was too late. He was suddenly more lifeless than the rubber plant on the table next to me. I had bought it for him when he had gone in; something that didn't need too much watering. I didn't cry, it had been too long coming for that, but I suddenly wondered about his Buick LeSabre. I told the nurse I would drive it home, but she insisted I stay for lunch first. It was odd, but it was still early in the day and I didn't really feel like going back to work, so I agreed. I sat in the cafeteria with a bunch of the nurses who had been caring for my grandfather off and on over the years and we talked about him and told stories. They talked about how no one wanted to be the one to give him sedatives, because once he was drowsy he apparently became pretty lascivious in his language. I apologized on his behalf, but I could tell they didn't really mind. They said he could be sort of poetic about it sometimes. "If I have earned one prize in this life, it's to have your breasts graze my chin as you change my sheets." I looked out the window at the hospital garden, which stretched on down a long green lawn to a forest. A lovely place for slow-walking patients and visiting loved ones to take a stroll. But as I focused my eyes towards the horizon, at the edge of the forest, there was a figure, facing away towards the woods, as if about to go in. But dancing. Wildly and with rabid abandon. I'm a bit embarrassed of my reaction, I suppose it had only been a couple of hours, but I ran headlong into the plate glass window, which flattened my face and bounced me to the floor. Luckily I was surrounded by nurses. When I came to, I asked fervently about my grandfather, if he was alive. Of course he wasn't, the orderly came in who had been dressed in his clothes and dancing in the garden. I smiled, but still, "Why did you do that?" "He asked me to." [MySpace]

Scissor Sisters - "Running Out"

Here's the coolest thing about the coming World Government. Like, when 1984 gets here. Here's the coolest thing. Everyone will have an implanted GPS tracker (which they will purchase willingly, they will pay (literally) through the nose for it) that will have tons of cool apps on it. One layabout social mooch with no job and all sorts of stolen free time, will design an app that saves your GPS movements, all of them, and paints them in lines across Maps like stringy ribbons. You save these up over a year, and then send them in to this layabout social mooch's computer, and he sky-jects them on a cloudy night, animates them, and people's lives bloom in yellow, pink, mauve, and beige blossoms across the map of the city. You can see some people spread like a sprawling virus all over the city, the world, or ping-pong to a few places like a trapped rat, or stay in one place and seep from the boundaries of their house like a fountain pen held in place too long, like an oil spill from space. That'll be the coolest thing. Well, that, and the escape attempts from the Unpatriotentiary. Those will be pretty rad. People sewing themselves into other people's skin, that kind of thing. [Buy]

One last week for the funding drive. To decide if you'd like to give, you can read the post about it, or read about the prizes at the pledge page.