Low. Mormons from Minnesota — home of Garrison Keillor and other very white folks — write glacially slow minimalist music. Except lately they haven’t. It’s strange, but the last few albums have had a decidedly wider sound to them. Which is good, but strange — more instruments, more complex songs, but they still sound harrowingly bare, austere and distant. Even the painful songs are just…far away. Removed.
So but see their video for “Breaker”: QuickTime, from their website (or here if you prefer YouTube). It’s homey, but creepy.
I saw them live with Dr Robert, professional guitarist/lawyer person thing, and they are just as chill-inducing in person. (aside: Mimi Parker is achingly pretty in person. Very tall and with a kind face, but with that way that really nice people have about them that you just know if you actually manage to piss ‘em off you might as well just kill yourself then and there.)
I really love how it’s this one mutating story that moves from musician to musician and it’s the same thing, but always a bit different, for example, check out the lyrics to Nick Cave’s surprisingly filthy version and then compare Dylan’s.
Big Black’s “Kerosene”, live. Steve Albini, one of the most antagonistic and principled people in the music business. Check the credits in your record collection, I bet you’ve got something he’s producedrecorded.
My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult’s “A Daisy Chain 4 Satan”, live. I recently found the MLWTTKK website again and now it’s got PDF’s of the lyrics. Whoa, I’ve been singing this song wrong for ~10 years now. I like my version better, even if the only lyric I could make out was, in fact, wrong. (I keep singing “dream war” instead of “dream why”).
You are getting this random assortment of links for entertainment purposes. And to waste time with at work. Consider it anti-spam, or the obverse of those links your interwebaolnet-unsavvy friend sends you (you know, “OMG CAN YOU BELIEVE THEY WANT TO TAX TEH WEB?!?” or “HERE’S A CHAIN LETTER THAT SAYS YOUR GENITALS WILL FALL OFF IF YOU DON’T PASS IT ALONG”). If this email bothers you, um….tell me and I won’t send you any more. Or just delete it. Whatever.
I have of late been fascinated by Nikola Tesla. Among other things, he liked electricity enough to invent the alternating current. And the Tesla Coil, which even if you don’t know what that is, you’ve seen in countless shitty horror movies. See a musical tesla coil: http://www.i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=23904 Speaking of weirdo scientists, isaac newton: genius or religious crank? http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/06/18/newton.papers.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories on the one hand, the man invented calculus and just by thinking, explained the basic language of nature and the universe. on the other hand, he once put a sewing needle between his eyeball and his skull and moved it around a lot, just to see what would happen (he was experimenting with the effect that distortion of the ocular globe would have on vision, but still). This would be after he spent three days in a black room for having stared at the sun for a hour. Again, just to see what would happen.
Bubba nosferatu and the curse of the she-vampires is being made: http://imdb.com/title/tt0457295/ This is a prequel to the movie “Bubba Ho-Tep”. Brief summary of Bubba Hotep: The real Elvis gets tired of the hoopla about being The King. So he (The real Elvis Aaron Presley,) hires an Elvis impersonator to play him and he goes and does Elvis tribute shows, getting to “rock out” without being mobbed for being Elvis. Except the next week his impersonator is the dude who dies on the toilet. And the real Elvis continues his merry life of “playing” Elvis and getting to be a musician. Except he falls off a stage and hits his head and winds up in a coma. For 20 years. When he wakes up, he’s in a nursing home sharing a room with a black dude who says he’s John F. Kennedy — the CIA gave him a brain transplant into a black guy so no one’d believe him, and packed the missing brain area with sand. Circumstances being what they are, a mummy ends up loose in the nursing home, stalking the old people (which makes sense, where else could a mummy pose a threat? Mummies stumble slowly, but it’s not like old people can run fast.) ANYWAY, Bubba Nosferatu and the Curse of the She-Vampires is a prequel, wherein Elvis fights vampires. Did I mention that Bruce Campbell plays Elvis? Cos he does: http://www.imdb.com/gallery/granitz/1494/Events/1494/BruceCampb_Vespa_609180_400.jpg?path=gallery&path_key=0281686
The discovery of molecular receptors totally revolutionized medicine; it’s made it possible to “aim” a particular drug at a particular cell-type’s receptors and be reasonably sure you’re going to affect that cell type and not the whole body. (aside: if you don’t think this is close to magic, consider that the other option is to basically hit a mosquito with a cannon. c.f. treating cancer with radiation and chemotherapy.) So it’s good news that a new type snail venom (no, I’m not kidding,) has been found that does very specific targeting: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/14/1654244 But that’s not why I’m writing all of this shit down. No no no no no no. I’m telling you all this just so that I can link you to a very short video clip of one of these snails attacking, stunning and eating a fish: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2213559523134687406&q=cone+snail&total=35&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=5
Title from Fad Gadget’s “I Discover Love”, but I can’t find that on the web, so you get Fad Gadget’s video for “Collapsing New People”. I’m kind of surprised that Marylin Manson hasn’t covered FG yet.
My Bloody Valentine’s “Loveless” is the most intense music to have sex to, ever. 4 days later and I still have a headache. I can’t describe it more than to say it’s a lot of overwhelming, and it made me feel every single moment in slow motion. Beats Acid Mother Temple’s “La Novia” and Miles’ “Kind of Blue” hands-down. The tantric breathing might have helped, though. cf: convo w/ lisbert w/r/t the french calling the orgasm “the little death” circa 97? before our big falling out ages ago.
I saved my cousin Veronica’s life when I was 9 and she was i want to say 5; pulled her out of the pool by her hair. Hans, Tio Mel’s Shepherd, just standing there, Michelle confused and screaming. Tio Mel going WTFWTF and he pulled her out of the water. I don’t know why summer reminds me of that.
Dream: 8jun07 high school classrooms, the hall next to the band room, one of the piano labs is now a business office and ex-co-workers are there telling me how much they miss my company1. Leave and into hallway B walks fast and pointedly does not make eye contact with me; i can feel the fury in her movements. Amusingly everyone is dressed in Victorian clothing. There’s something about cars — a trans am? something like that — and a double bass is involved somewhere. Something weird about geometry in the dream, spatial relationships — walls, floors, hallways etc — keep shifting. It’s off-putting. I wake confused.
Birthdays past and birthdays coming up…must remember to remember. Or something.
Segue: Nikola Tesla, synesthete, genius and all around weirdo has been on my mind of late.2
1 Actually this is correct. Vij has lamented to me how it’s no fun anymore, whereas most everyone else is all “so things are better without D around, eh?” No one really appreciates the curative powers of levity; my main function those last weeks was keeping V from hating the job as much as I did.
Politically, I’m not so much FOR the democratic party as I am AGAINST the republican party. In that spirit, please read Matt Taibi’s latest article, which is a FUCK YOU to both democratic and republican parties: http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/51687/
I am a prankster. I appreciate the art behind it. I have to rein that in though, because I tend to just go straight for OH MY FUCKING GOD levels of revenge. But let’s witness someone else’s prank: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9Xw_b3HeUY ah, butter on the floor. a true classic. simple and cheap.
Hey, yeah, memorial day, right: http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_108083.asp Personally, my old man was in Vietnam, and he threatened to lock me in a loony bin if I ever joined the Armed Forces. Hey, who am I to disagree?
I started a new job. Which is cool. So I have a new phone, but my phone number is the same. Except my voicemail’s a bit FUBAR’d at the moment. So if you call and you get someone else’s voice asking you to leave a message…don’t worry about it, it’s still my phone. Also, I can’t check my voicemail, so uh….I’ll call you back. Or you can email me, I’m usually pretty good about answering my email.
Jesus WEPT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k98bRUOb4g …I cannot explain this, except to say that clearly these kids have perhaps had sex described to them and this is how their sad, broken minds were able to understand it. They’ve obvously never actually had sex. Or talked to women. Please watch it until the end so that you can see the end credits. I’m not kidding about that either.
David Bowie has the best birthday parties — to wit: Bjork playing live at his birthday party. Backed by a harp. With a choir. And a guy shuffling cards providing rhythm. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv6rzhZ83rk
“Republicans, and their right-wing Democrat fellow travelers, have been telling us since even before Reagan that we need to eliminate expensive and “wasteful” regulations that are crippling our businesses’ productivity, that if we deregulated our industries back to where they were before the Progressive Era, they’d be making enough money to be able to afford more people. That, my friends, is a total load of crap. And if you want a really vivid example of why those regulations were all put in place, then I suggest that you hop a flight down to Panama, and other places in the world, and start helping the families down there count the bodies that died from one shipment of tainted merchandise from China. They’ve already passed the 100 mark, and have all but given up on finding all of them. And while you’re helping them tally up all of the dead children, consider this: it is only by insanely good luck that a couple of dozen or a couple of hundred of those dead kids weren’t here in the US. What, you thought that poison showing up in adulterated products mis-labeled as food was limited to coal byproducts in animal feed? You wish. It also turns out that around the same time, China was allowing chemical companies to mislabel ethylene glycol as better-than-food-grade 99.5% pure glycerin. That glycerin was sold to manufacturers of cough syrup in the US and Latin America. In America, one chemist at the buyer had an odd feeling about the glycerin they’d just bought and decided, with no law making him do so and no management order to do so, to double-check the purity. That he found that it was just as pure as it said, but pure poison not pure medical-grade glycerin, is the only reason we didn’t have as many dead kids as we now have dead pets.”
grindhouse (excellent movie, btw,) is not just a title of a movie, but a style unto itself. like say, gonzo journalism, but about horror and shock etc. So check out movie posters for movies you know and love but done grindhouse style: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/photoshop-phriday/grindhouse-movies.php?page=1
sonic youth vid in honor of new friend apparently. litl troubl grl, seems a conglomerate of dee, bee, sun, ces, maybe a bit of reven. whoa havent thought of her in ages. also briefly remembered RA from 7thh grade? funny i remember edgar mocking because she was so annoying and i was crushing and all i remember about that is feeling bad. tht’s not true but i don’t want to remember any more details. the past a different country etc
dream: haiti, lines in travel queues waiting to get in, driving around, rose w/ me then stace, inside a bodega looking place the trouble starts — zombies, well, it’s haiti, what do you expect — and in a building next to the shack we’re sheltering in, above & looking down from a party, b is dancing and laughing and i’m in it to my neck and it’s no picnic but i feel pity for her, and i don’t know if i’m forcing myself or not but there’s knifework to be done so the unexamined life prevails. i get us out, but we lose stuff. i shrug. stuff is easy to replace.
