Yuk Bon

YouTube – Animal Collective – Cuckoo Cuckoo Malta Festival 2006.

I don’t know, I kept dismissing Animal Collective for years — too twee, too annoying, too faux-artsy-fartsy. And then I heard this song and I couldn’t stop listening to it, sad chaotic and I didn’t know why; and then I heard “what would I want? sky” and I fell in love with the singalong and “My Girls” is very sweet and bizarro like a male Bjork. But I kept coming back to “Cuckoo Cuckoo”. In the broader sense it’s about losing childhood and sorrow, but in the more specific sense I am pretty sure it’s about a miscarriage. Note the album version has the last verse as “where’s my friend i wanna hold him tight” but this live version it’s definitely “where’s my wife i wanna hold her tight”. The piano part samples are so mellow and ordered — I want to say Chopin but it doesn’t feel sharp enough and I’m too lazy to google it out. Liszt maybe?

How I lost my boy

The king in I died
He kept floating past my eyes
And singing his songs
Life was good now death’s all wrong
Cause you can’t feel a thing
No heart flutters in late spring
You just drift and pray
For sun kissed golden days

And I can’t hold what’s in my hand
Don’t do any good to say this isn’t what I planned
And little kids sliding down the steel park slide
Little kids can’t play with things that have died
Sometimes all I want is one favorite song
And two to three minutes don’t seem so long
And where’s my mom I want to hold her tight
She’s so far away from crowded nights
I’m going cuckoo cuckoo
We’re all going cuckoo cuckoo

He said please stay
You can see me, don’t go away
I can’t see the landscape
Please describe its amaranthine haze
It’s odd where I am
There are people you’re not like them
They just look away
For rain quenched golden days

And my tears quench five feet of lawn
And I can scream, but I cannot yawn
And people gonna come and people gonna cry
He just woke and dreamt and ate and died
Don’t try and erase what you have done
Put your fingers in a mouth and kiss it if it wants
And where’s my wife, I want to hold her tight
He’s so far away from mountain lights
I’m going cuckoo cuckoo
We’re all going cuckoo cuckoo

Pink Mania on Vimeo on Vimeo

via Pink Mania on Vimeo.

I have noticed that I’m spamming bullshit links on facebook instead of here, so let’s fix that;

linkspam collected:

Everyone needs the wisdom of the James Lipton Beard.

He does, you know.

WWJD? cap santa in mouf, apparently. Or possibly threaten the welfare and aid given to the poor and helpless because he really hates fags, apparently.

The axle-grind that can be explained is not the true axle-grind

Guerrilla Handbell Strikeforce

So recently there was all this brou-ha-ha over weird spiral lights in the atmosphere over Norway, people on the web freaking out about how it was aliens or the fucked environment or Jesus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster reaching His Noodly Appendage out or whatever. Turns out it’s just Russians shooting missiles from nuclear subs, nothing to worry about. Wait, what?

Big Rock star gives unknown underground rock band some cred by singing one of their little indie songs with them.

The best cafe ever.

seriously? does no one in the pentagon watch movies? who thinks “zombies?! what a great idea!” and stamps “OK” on this memo?

The reason the internet has video

McNuggetini – “meat garnish!”

Maneki Neko, a short story by Bruce Sterling.

If you’re honest with yourself, you know you always thought it happened exactly like this

excellent blogs:

• Letters of Note, “Correspondence deserving of a wider audience”; example: So it goes (Kurt Vonnegut Jr writes to Sr on the occasion of surviving the firebombing of Dresden).
• Contrariwise, “Literary Tattoos”; example: “I shall not live in vain”,  “hope is the thing with feathers”
• My Parents Were Awesome

And tonight’s nightmare menu, featuring:

• Creepy yoga dude with rasta rooster
• AAAAAHHHHHHHH

xkcd’s strip today brings up house of leaves by mark z danielewski. which is a genius book. nightmare-causing, take your breath away reading, for real. some of the writing is not as poetic as say harlan ellison’s “speculative fiction” but it’s certainly more claustrophobically horrifying. i finished this book at the bar, the day before my last conversation with the woman i thought was the love of my life. still is? i don’t know. i stopped thinking about it. she’s still the love of my life, but now in the past tense I guess. It’s just one of those things where you associate something with what was happening — e.g. Aphex Twin’s “Selected Ambient Works II” 2nd disc is to me an incredibly erotic piece of music, just because of associations — and House of Leaves is just a picture of a raw gaping wound. It doesn’t hurt, but it reminds me that there was a tender part exposed and hurting.

http://entertainment.slashdot.org/entertainment/08/05/31/015213.shtml

whoa. Probably my favorite PKD novel dramatized. Hrm. Consider that all of stuff that’s been movie-ized has so far been from short stories (the one exception being “A Scanner Darkly”, which Linklater got so fucking spot-on that it’s amazingly scary and gorgeous. I mean he even got the paranoia feeling down. It’s amazing.)

I’ve had a copy of Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart’s “Take Me To God” for about 5 years. Picked it up used, 5 bucks or so. I listen to it maybe once a year, which on average is kinda high actually. It’s like techno world music that your reggae dub DJ friend mixed for you. Here’s a song from the album:

Anyway, I saw a used copy again and picked it up for a friend and in the process also picked up a used copy of Jah Wobble’s 30 Hz collection and it is indescribably good. How he does that with his fingers is beyond me. Listening to his basslines makes me want to play the bass forever and forget about the guitar. And you gotta give props to a man who quit the music business out of disdain and keeps dropping out of successful bands when they start sucking.

Jah Wobble (and Sinead O’Connor and Boy George) interviewed: http://youtube.com/watch?v=N425-qsKGQ8

artist is Jesse Owen Youngs, song is “Fuck Was I”

it means we’ll manage, I’ll master your language.

Vignettes:
my favorite part of dogs is that they cannot help showing your their emotions — if a dog is happy or excited, the tail will wag, no problem. A confused dog will be quizzical, a scared dog will be scared, a happy dog will wag his tail. it’s so honest, it’s fucking gorgeous.

I have a headache, so this entry will be refreshingly content-full and thought-free.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Tricky recently:

“Karmacoma”, Massive Attack featuring Tricky:

Tricky’s version of the song:

Christiansands, live:

Let me backtrack, I’ve been listening to JWZ’s mixtapes a lot recently and one of the songs on one of the mixes (13 i think? coulda been 20) was “Bad Dream” from Pre-millenium Tension. So it reminded me of how awesome Tricky’s music is and I had to …acquire… “Ruff Guide” to sort out in the car. But it was missing some stuff I felt it needed (e.g., his covers of “Lovecats”, “Dear God” and “Something In The Way”). So I wound up digging out my old CDs anyway and reburning a new comp.

I still have a headache from last night, going to finish watching Sweeney Todd and maybe a nap.