Archives : all posts by Dan

Chad VanGaalen - "Willow Tree"

"Our lives are of little importance," said Rebecca, to the figure in her favourite painting. The painting is old and has a traditional frame and hangs on her mustard-coloured wall. The figure inside is looking at the artist, at the audience, standing on a windy grassy hill. Rebecca is tall so the picture is hung high, higher even than her eye-level, so the figure looks like it is looking down at the viewer, or over the viewer's head. An obvious position of superiority.

The rain has been non-stop. The whole east coast has had rainy days for three weeks straight. Biking in the rain, even the change in Rebecca's pocket is wet by the time she gets where she's going. The bank, the library, the video store, a potluck, a vernissage, the movies, a date, nothing special.

Rebecca checks her pulse and writes it down. She keeps detailed notes of her anxiety. She is most anxious at night time, when she believes that she hears noises that aren't there, people that aren't there, things that aren't happening. She has trouble sleeping, but takes natural sleep-aids like melatonin. The notes she keeps don't really help the anxiety, they kind of function like making an extremely detailed floor map of your own apartment. Yep, there it is all mapped out, but you could also just look around and see the same thing.

In the margins of her notes, Rebecca is drawing a little story of a rocket ship with arms and legs. It burns off its arms and legs when it tries to fly. On the first sunny day after the rain, it's a Saturday. Rebecca went for a walk to find a garage sale. She brought her favourite painting with her, and she walked in the sun on the sidewalk. She found a garage sale and pretended to look at things until the old couple in the lawn chairs whose stuff it was weren't looking, and she left the painting right there, leaning up against the old bear-shaped dishes and VHS copies of Three to Tango and Money Train.

[Buy]

Reigning Sound - "Funny Thing"

"I'm an old cop," he said, putting out his cigarette. "It's in my blood, I can't help it. I just want to protect you." The upholstery of the sofa looked like a big patterned joke and his teeth clicked as he swallowed. His daughter, Louisa, stood with her arms hanging limp at her sides, like knotty ropes hanging from her summer dress. "We're moving anyway, what does it matter about this boy?" She stared darkly at the floor, with her hair pulled back and her lips tight. That's exactly why he's important, because we're moving. She thought her father was very practiced at smoking, and that one day she would probably be as good at it. [Buy]

Duchess Says - "Black Flag"

A mere selection from the fictional correspondences between Duchess Says' manager Chip Legrand and Henry Rollins himself:

Hey Henry,

Chip again on behalf of Duchess Says. Just finishing up the new album here and wanted to get your thoughts on something: we have a song called Black Flag and thought maybe we could get you to listen to the album and see what you think. The song isn't about Black Flag or anything, just thought it would be a cool way for you to hear some stuff you normally wouldn't.
take care!
Chip Legrand
Duchess Says

6 months later...

(in an envelope addressed to Chip)
Your letter interested me a great deal. If I listened to everything I got sent I would have to give up either sleeping or eating and I'm not willing to do either.
good night,
HR

Hey Henry,
Chip again. No problem, worth a shot, right? Okay, take care!
Chip Legrand
Duchess Says

(in an envelope addressed to Chip)
I listened to it. that song is made of 80s rubber, timeless pleather, and real emotions. You've dressed up a pop structure in clothes I like. I want DS to accompany me on my spoken word tour. I will be singing. These are the dates.

Hey Henry,
Sounds great, only just have one problem with the Houston date, that's an unavailability for us. The rest are good though!

(in an envelope addressed to Chip)
Never write to me again.

[Buy]
["Never Write to Me Again", the book of correspondences, is out of print]

(image by Reagan Forsythe. it's not the winner of the Sappyfest contest, it's just a picture I like)

Fruit Bats - "Tegucigalpa"

The family's all here, in the warmth and the green. Grandpa's got the word-of-mouth disease, but he's holding up, and holding a beer. Aunt Gayle is addicted to assholes and sits practicing her smile. Benny is a cousin and growing a bit fat, he's got a girlfriend who brought Magic Cards. Uncle Thomas is funny, but in a different way, like how it's funny to have broken glass in your bed. Red is super tall, and not really related to anyone, but his long gray face is soft and he makes calmness with his hands. And of course there's all the rest of them, the uncles and aunts and pets and cell phones, I don't know if they're from down the lake or they're part of my family. I never cared, really, when I come here, I love them all like I love the national flag. That's not to say I don't, I'm trying to say it's there, don't doubt it. "We've got a new kind of classic about us," Grandpa will say, his stubble gray and thick. "Classics are still being made, and we're one of them."

[Relase date: Aug 4th]
[MySpace]

Talbot Tagora - "Replacing The Northwest"

"What's the cutest thing?"
"The cutest thing?"
"Like, the cutest thing you can think of. The perfect image of cute."
"Children."
"Boring."
"Robot Children."
"Too twee."
"Like hollow robots. Like those robots that need ghosts to run them. You know, like the ghost in the machine."
"Little robot children powered by ghosts."
"Yeah, child ghosts."
"Like murdered kids?"
"Not necessarily. I mean, some murdered kids, but mostly just regular ghosts who take the form of children. A child-like ghost."
"Pretty cute. What do they do?"
"Travel in packs. Like bikers. They kind of just ride the highways, roadhouses, desertscapes, that kind of lifestyle."
"Like nu-wanderer child-ghost robots, kind of despondent, kind of hilarious, but completely a force to be reckoned with."
"Exactly. A hell of a bar fight when these kids are around. Quips galore."
"That is cute. Pitch me a story."
"The pack of wanderer robots, we'll call them Hallowe'en Girls for now."
"It's just girls?"
"Yeah, it's just girls, I wasn't clear about that. The Hallowe'en Girls are chilling at their wicked hideout playing darts and skateboarding and smoking dope. Everything's fine, everybody's happy, they put on amazing talent shows, little skits about how regular humans don't care about their own kind and are letting each other die pointlessly all over the world. Real honest stuff. But The Hallowe'en Girls don't know the government is watching them the whole time, studying them and planning to turn them into a new breed of soldier-spy. Eventually one of the Girls discovers a bug in the hideout and they have to run from the fascists. They set out across the American west in search of a new safe place to live and continue their mini-culture. They take on all comers in their own unique way; creepy oversexed loners, low-moral bikers, relentless polluters and corrupt politicians. It's a mangy teeth-gnashing ride through girlhood, and what it feels like for a robot to grow up."

[Buy]

Braids - "Lemonade"

People think my addiction is a weakness. They say it's "humiliating" or "degrading" to watch me chase drugs or get high. But I say humiliation is a relative term. It's only humiliating if I'm humiliated, and it's only a lonely lifestyle if I feel lonely. Sure, the first time I tried drugs, it might have been motivated by weakness, by loneliness, but not anymore. I mean, consider all the acts committed out of loneliness or weakness that turned into great meaningful pursuits. A brush stroke on a canvas, used as a replacement for talking about your problems, turns into a lifetime of painting. Sitting lonely in your bedroom playing guitar or cymbals turns into a cassette recording like Bleach. Well I started because I wanted to impress Person or make up for why Person abused me and now I'm completely in motion, I can't even stop if I wanted to and I love every minute of it (not every minute, but that's true of any great work). "Yes, but what are you producing? What are you creating?" That's what most people claim is the difference between what I'm doing and what I'm drawing parallels with. But I say that I'm creating my own perceptions, I'm creating sensual symphonies and emotional masterpieces. When my world falls and crumbles to pieces, in a matter of hours I can whip up the wind of my personal life into a froth of manipulation and borrowed money and bummed rides and pawned accessories and with my face down in the fucking dirt, surrounded by the foulest scum of the earth, I can feel as high as the damn clouds. I feel like, with my mouth open against the gravel or the pavement, that I could swallow the whole world. I can shape my mind into a mountain, and stretch my body over it like a rubber band, and snap snap snap against the bottom just for fun. I have access to another plane of existence, it's like a magic power that takes certain expensive keys and all of my energy to perform. I merely dabble in the world you call "The World" and my place is not here, it's a step above. Sometimes I sink back down here, but it's not long before I'm back up where I belong. Do you want to help? I'll commit any worldly act in exchange.

[MySpace]

[image source unknown, via ffffound]

The Very Best - "Chalo"

you are better than you are better than you are better than you are better than you are better than you are better than you are better then you are better then you are better then you are better then you are better then you are better then you are better than you are better than you are better than you are better than you are better than. If the sun didn't rise until you finished your homework. If you walked on strings hung between parking meters. If holding hands were all-day breakfast, were toll booth change, were scratch-n-win. See the sun rise and listen to the first word of the day. [buy other stuff from Green Owl]

Swan Lake - "Warlock Psychologist"

I wake up aroused and mosey into a pile of clothes and emerge fully draped. Finest cottons and denims and rubbers wrap themselves like slick vinyl around my parts and I'm at once hidden and completely showing. I pretend to address the nation as I take down yet another bowl of grains and water with the greatest of ease. "Dear Nation, prepare thyselves for an onslaught unlike you have ever felt. For soon and forever will you feel the impending impact. Get ready, peons." Soft wheat dribbles down my chin, but I wipe it with my sleeve, I catch most of it, gather the rest off the blue flower print of my kitchen table. I gallop from my garage on my rollerblades and enter a state of mind I can only call My Travelling Trance. After 15 minutes I arrive at work unscathed, and switch to my inside shoes and head to my post. I run the reception desk at a YM-YWCA, I hand out towels and amend memberships. My co-worker Cyndi brings her cat to work, a habit I detest. It makes me want to dive backwards through the reception windows and land three stories below in the olympic size pool. But today, today something happens. There is nothing special about today, so I don't see why it should happen now. Sure, I dribbled a bit of wet wheat on my chin this morning, but I wiped it up, I don't see why it should cause anything like this. I can't describe it any other way than to just say it, so I will say it: I dropped my pen, and as I bent down to pick it up, I locked eyes with the cat. And the way you back away from a structure to see its full size, I suddenly saw the whole of this cat's life. As if it spoke to me in pictures, as if its form stretched somehow through this space and into another, into thousands, and I saw them all. This cat feels love and it feels jealous and it fights and it believes and it grows fond and grows distant and cold and fucking tired. It gets what it wants, it never gets anything it wants, it completely moves between the three walls its given and it hates and it clings and it cares. It thinks often of a face it holds dear, it remembers only the things that keep it alive. It is like a fresco so fresh that it's dripping and I begin to bawl like some portshore widow. Right in front of Cyndi and all the damn patrons and all the kids standing in pools of pool water with their foggy goggles in their foreheads and all the poor snack-munching masses. Nation, I'm crying about a cat. [Buy]

소녀시대 (Girl's Generation) - "남자친구 (Boyfriend)"

"What would be my, how should I call it, spontaneous attitude towards the universe? It's a very dark one. The first one, the first thesis would have been: a kind of total vanity. There is nothing, basically. I mean it quite literally. Like, ultimately there are just some fragments, some vanishing things, if you look at the universe it's one big void. But then how do things emerge? Here, I feel a kind of spontaneous affinity with quantum physics. Where, you know, the idea there is that the universe is kind of a void, but a positively charged void. But then particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed, and I like this idea spontaneously very much. The fact that it's not just nothing, things are out there, it means something went terribly wrong. That what we call creation is a kind of a cosmic imbalance, cosmic catastrophe. That things exist by mistake. And I'm even ready to go to the end and to claim that the only way to counteract it is to assume the mistake and go to the end, and we have a name for this; it's called love. Isn't love precisely this kind of a cosmic imbalance? I was always disgusted with this notion of "I love the world", "universal love". I don't like the world, I don't know how I--uh--I'm basically somewhere in between "I hate the world" and "I'm indifferent towards it". But the whole of reality, it's just it, it is stupid, it's out there, I don't care about it. Love for me is an extremely violent act. Love is not "I love you all". Love means, I pick out something and--it's again this structure of imbalance. Even if this something is just a small detail, a fragile individual person, I say, "I love you more than anything else." In this quite formal sense, love is evil."

[buy Zizek! from Zeitgeist]
[video for Girl's Generation's Gee]

--

Cousin Chris - "Head Down"

*choking sounds*
Ha ha...
Pretty good view of the inside of my mouth, huh?
"it was great.."
...
...
Did you see down my throat at all?
...
What did you see in there?
"it was very dark."
What?
"it was dark, I didn't see much of anything."
So you didn't see any teeth or anything then.
"i saw your teeth."
(smiling) huh...
Did you see the uvula which is that dangly thing at the back of the mouth?
...
...
What we need is a light, then.

[buy Billy the Kid from Zeitgeist]
[site for CC]