Hey, you kind of sound like A.C. Newman, but mostly in other songs with the harmonies. You know. Okay.
In East St. Louis a boy grabs a plate of food and this plate is unfortunately too hot for the layers of skin on his fingers. These layers separate. Oh dear. The food is delicious but the boy is thinking about how senses are inhibited instead of how they can be enhanced.
In other news an elderly women who rides a bike for ten kilometres every day accidently breaks her favourite vase with a swinging bike helmet as she steps out into the humid air. The magnitude of the tragedy isn’t clear but we know glue won’t help.
And then there’s me, listening to the New Pornographers and wondering when I’ll download The Blackened Air by Nina Nastasia (because Nastasia is better than the Pornos). I can’t wait to hear it — it’s supposed to be her best, or close — but on the other hand let’s leave it alone for a little bit. Let’s wait. Okay.
(PAS/CAL are good; the best part about the song is that it sort of feels like six different songs.)
The girl. The girl watches. The girl watches me. The girl watches me eat. The girl watches me eat an ice cream cone. The girl watches me eat an ice cream cone and wishes. The girl watches me eat an ice cream cone and wishes for a bowl. The girl watches me eat an ice cream cone and wishes for a bowl of rice. The girl watches me eat an ice cream cone and wishes for a bowl of rice because she loves rice best. The girl is lactose intolerant.
I am too, but I am not Atlas-strong. I am going to be sick to my stomach.
next
we broke the stick
we loved for pushing firelogs
in half–for what?
where is the love
in the dried halves
of my extended
fire-safe hand?
cast them in
as kindling.
last
let’s see where the trail takes us now if we go north and north and if we find your old backwater hole where all the dark pebbles congregate and you can pick them like ripe apple tree apples
and now my legs feel soggy and soaked with tired wet walking soap it’s clean and cold and making me slow and slippery in the mind so let’s sit here and take our sweetnesses to the earth or better yet let’s swash our hands in the brine of rice patches and sing a fury upwards.
Twee’s really good at making a sad song sound happy. Twee is also usually a little bit silly, but it’s the kind of silliness people use to cover up their sadness. Hell, what is twee anyways?
Another Sunny Day are a really good band from a label called Sarah Records, and Sarah was the sort of epicentre of straight-edge sad-silliness in the late 80s and 90s. Another Sunny Day sound sort of like the Smiths, especially on their big single, entitled “You Should All Be Murdered.” Even that title sounds like a Smiths song. It is perhaps safe to say that this band borrowed something — a pair of needle-nosed pliers to fix a light bulb — from the Smiths. I’m not trying to say that the Smiths are twee; if you recall I don’t know what twee is, and I sure as hell don’t know what kind of genre.tags are given to the Smiths. In any case I’ve talked too much about the Smiths.
This is a song to take to the sandbox with a pail. Or it is a song to take with you as you bury your first fish. But I suppose you would be taking it to the same place.
Let’s worry about truth later, because I can see some things that you can’t see. I can see a magnifying glass as it helps a lost family get to Cape May and then Phoenix, Arizona; I can see the broken handle of a fridge door and the hands of the broken man who won’t dare fix it because it was the last thing his wife broke. I can see a lot of things that you can’t see.
One of these things is a club in a midsized American city. It’s got a clever name that’s now a cliché, and it sells $2.25 Coronas every Friday night in the summer. It owns a rusty dumpster in the back in which, every night after close, someone comes and puts the trash. It has concrete steps which lead up to the door and a black railing which does the same. If there is a God (and this one thing I can’t see), it would never cast a light upon a place like this, simply because there are better things to cast a light upon in the world we’ve come to know. I’ve seen the rhododendron of Japan, and those would be a better place to begin.
In the bar there are people of every kind you can imagine, and they are dancing. They are not dancing like the rhododendron of Japan dance to the sea breezes or to the rhythm of the rain — they are dancing to Top 40 radio. Top 40 radio is nothing like the sea breezes or the rains of Japan; it is a much different thing, but this is a comparison which would mean nothing to the people dancing because none of them have ever been to Japan. None of them have even tried.
There is a girl and she is dancing by herself. She is dancing by herself because she hates it when the boys come and touch her, and because there is a boy who is hidden inside of her head with whom she wants to dance, but cannot. He is not available for dancing. But by dancing she is highlighting the map for him — to bring him outside, up the stairs of the club and through the doors. She is reeling him onto the dance floor and into her proximity. She is luring him into the range of her perfume.
But on this last point I am only guessing. There are some things I can’t see for sure. Your guess is perhaps as good as mine. To you, the dance is maybe a ritual; it is maybe an act to keep the hope of return attached to the unreturnable.
I just saw this for the first time now, and so like all of the other lame people in the world with blogs, here we are.
Best Mountain Goats video to date. Except for maybe the one where Darnielle cameos in that Aesop Rock song, which of course isn’t a Mountain Goats video but hey, this isn’t an international darts competition or whatever. Anytime Darnielle plays a zombie my eyes open a little wider and I pay a little more attention. But I do that whenever Darnielle does anything.
And okay, I know what you’re thinking. You’re right, maybe the visual-display-of-the-lyrics-presented-creatively-as-they-are-sung is a tired music video technique. I guess it probably is. Oh well. It doesn’t remove Darnielle’s admiral’s suit of awesomeness.
if i would be a collector i would be a collector of those good pens and i would never use the good pens because they would become like the good cutlery or like the furniture at the houses of italian immigrant families in 1975. they would be good and so they would be no good to use. plus like all collection pieces you can never use the thing you are collecting because the label of “collection” transmogrifies the thing into a thing that needs to hold value or if you like ink as the metaphor or analogy. if you used the good pen it would lose some ink and so we’ve got to keep all the ink. and this is not some kind of tirade about the gas prices because fuck the gas prices and fuck the goofy guy from the shins with the marital problems and also fuck sweet and sour sauce (which is for some reason a sauce that most people really enjoy). and so what the fuck then is this value business and that pun was intended because here I have a very valuable glass jar of good pens? i suppose after all the pens are not even pens any more and so they must be something else. it’s clear that this something else does not have a name except if we pick up the whole jar we can yell “collection” at our loudest possible pitches and we would not seem crazy. my favourite something is the one with the name address and logo of the plastics manufacturing company on the side of it. this is my favourite one because the font used for the letters written on the side of it is easy to read and because it has a fine grip. the grip is of course not really important in the practical sense but now it is very important in the figurative sense and this is great for me. i keep this one in the middle of the jar protected by the other somethings and it is most days that i think about a time when i will need to visit a plastics manufacturer in some sort of emergency because in this fantasy i will save the day with my favourite something.
The best part about Will Sheff and Jonathan Meiburg is that, when they came together to make music, they formed two bands instead of one. And now we’re really seeing the culmination of this — Shearwater just released one of the best albums of the year, and Okkervil River is soon to release a new record and follow-up (and sequel) to The Stage Names, dubbed The Stand Ins.
It seems like there’s now been some changes, though; since May Meiburg has left his duties in Okkervil River this year to formally take on Shearwater, and Sheff seems to have distanced himself from the Shearwater camp. Meiburg wrote all of Shearwater’s songs on Rook for the first time. Perhaps these two friends are parting ways, instead of sharing the creation of their music under both names as they have in the past. Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe it will prove to be a disaster. Or maybe they will continue to make songs together, mixing and moving like bodily fluids between the bands.
I don’t know.
But this song is like The Forks in the centre of Winnipeg — it’s a Shearwater song and it’s an Okkervil song and who even cares anymore when we’re slapped around with this kind of greatness. When I listen to this I’m being swept away like the broken branches of an Oak tree in the melding currents of Manitoba’s thaw.
I told myself I would write to you last year at this time, but I didn’t have the courage. I couldn’t do it. I’m sorry. I hope you are still at this address — I spoke to Fredrich and Philippe and they said this was the place. How are you Patrick?
I suppose it has been two years…
England is as enjoyable as it can be. I spend my days in the parks with the dogs and I am finally reading Camus (and regrettably enjoying it). I am becoming a better cook (I think) and I stopped smoking so much. I have taken a job with the Government like I told you I always would. It is a good job but the people are a little bit snobby to newcomers. I am waiting to become settled in.
How is Paris? I hope you still like it as much as you did when I left. I am thinking of going to Germany in the Spring to visit my friend Gerda. She lives outside of Hamburg and has a small farm with her fiancé. She invited me to come this summer but I was busy with my new job. I will let you know when I do go; I can meet you in Paris for a short time. I would be thrilled to see you.
There are days when I wished I hadn’t left Paris, but perhaps I was getting sick of it all. I wish I could have spoken French — it’s so troublesome when you can’t speak the same language as someone else. I’m sorry.
In an effort to keep the blood flowing these days, I decided to make a summer mix. I have titled it A.C. Off Summer Mix. I used Not-So-Cool Edit to blend/cross-fade the songs into each other to make it cooler (cheesier). It is a decent mix that has mostly been inspired by a guy on the What.cd? forums who said:
“sometimes i think of a world in which the supremes’ “you can’t hurry love” never existed.
i’m glad i live in this world.”
Here is the tracklisting:
Since I Left You by The Avalanches
Paltimos Park by El Guincho
Inní mér syngur vitleysingur by Sigur Ros
Fake Empire (Live) by The National
No Excuses by Air France
Depressing Interlude Feat. Billy Bragg, NMH, Manitoba
Get Lost by Patrick Wolf
Mwana Wamai Dada Naye by Hallelujah Chicken Run Band
I was at the dentist’s yesterday getting drilled into (that’s what she said). I was put under Nitrous Oxide, which is the best part of any dentist trip I’ve ever been on (pun intended). It’s really strange because you feel how a toddler must feel — you’re trapped in a booster seat watching food on a spoon zoom around your face to a mother’s airplane sounds.
I also sweat a lot under the gas.
It’s also a little bit difficult with the gas because I’m a mouth breather; I always have to concentrate really hard on only breathing with my nose. There is usually at least one moment when I’m under the gas where I get a sudden urge to freak out and rip off the whole apparatus. I don’t think this will ever change.
I’m not sure what song was playing on the radio; I don’t remember because I was under the gas. If I had to guess (which is exactly what I am doing), I would say it was this one from the Dirty Dancing soundtrack. But this might be the compounded nature of my consciousness; I saw the VHS of Dirty Dancing in my living room downstairs because my Mom had taken it out to watch it a few days ago. In any case, the gas from the dentist made everything a little bit wonky, and so the music from the song came through my ears like a weird remix by sixteen year olds done haphazardly in GarageBand. I began thinking about how the song was maybe better this way (as a to-myself indictment, mostly, of easy-listening radio). This made me sort of laugh. It was a kind of stoner-giggle that must’ve been embarrassing. But I suppose this is why they call it “laughing gas.”
I think I chose this song because it’s a bit ironic when paired with a trip to the dentist. So when you listen to the song, think about the last time you were at the dentist. Think about Nitrous Oxide, or needles. It’s kind of funny.
I got three small cavities fixed; I laughed at easy-listening radio; I soaked my shirt with sweat; it cost a lot of money. I had the time of my life.
this is where it happens like a conduit -- geoff guenther's brain to fingers to electricity and then back into biology. yours.
and it happens, i suppose, because no one needs another music blog.
