I’m amused that nobody seems at all to hear the voiceover commenting on manufactured vs. organic intrigue. I think that says it all about what passes for style these days, doesn’t it.

(via Beach Black)

And while we’re dealing out great songs, this is always a sweet one. And the film in its namesake is also an eerily timeless iteration of adolescent female sexuality.

When I was a kid, my mother used to use an epilady to de-fur herself. I would sit next to her on the bed in solidarity and run a small matchbox train up and down the length of my shins. Pain is beauty, I guess. Beauty is pain? Whichever.

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Sometimes you just can’t get over a voice, no matter how hard you rattle your own head.

This is by far my favorite poem by him. I will read it again every month or so and feel myself come to understand something closer to the heart each time.

My Father’s Wedding, Robert Bly

1924

Today, lonely for my father, I saw
a log, or branch,
long, bent, ragged, bark gone.
I felt lonely for my father when I saw it.
It was the log
that lay near my uncle’s old milk wagon.

Some men live with a limp they don’t hide,
stagger, or drag
a leg. Their sons often are angry.
Only recently I thought:
Doing what you want …
Is that like limping? Tracks of it show in sand.

Have you seen those giant bird-
men of Bhutan?
Men in bird masks, with pig noses, dancing,
teeth like a dog’s, sometimes
dancing on one bad leg!
They do what they want, the dog’s teeth say that.

But I grew up without dog’s teeth,
showed a whole body,
left only clear tracks in sand.
I learned to walk swiftly, easily,
no trace of a limp.
I even leaped a little. Guess where my defect is!

Then what? If a man, cautious,
hides his limp,
somebody has to limp it. Things
do it; the surroundings limp.
House walls get scars,
the car breaks down; matter, in drudgery, takes it up.

On my father’s wedding day,
no one was there
to hold him. Noble loneliness
held him. Since he never asked for pity
his friends thought he
was whole. Walking alone he could carry it.

He came in limping. It was a simple
wedding, three
or four people. The man in black,
lifting the book, called for order.
And the invisible bride
stepped forward, before his own bride.

He married the invisible bride, not his own.
In her left
breast she carried the three drops
that wound and kill. He already had
his bark-like skin then,
made rough especially to repel the sympathy

he longed for, didn’t need, and wouldn’t accept.
So the Bible’s
words are read. The man in black
speaks the sentence. When the service
is over, I hold him
in my arms for the first time and the last.

After that he was alone
and I was alone.
Few friends came; he invited few.
His two-story house he turned
into a forest,
where both he and I are the hunters.

People always give me tons of shit for being a snob. Not snob like they love me at the country club, but snob like I’ll call you an animal when you’ve got more than 2 tbs. of ketchup on the sidelines of your dinner plate. Meanwhile, I’ve got like “The Idiot’s Guide to the Middle East” on my book shelf and a sincere affection for Garfield.  Some snob.  An authentic snob is the type who will tell you that they’ve simply never “cared for” a Tarantino picture.

The point is, I saw two popcorn movies this past weekend. Big end-of-summer jams, District 9 and Inglorious Basterds. The ham fist of that excruciatingly inept alien allegory knocked me into some hard existential mourning. I walked out around 20 minutes in, waited for my family in the lobby. It failed not only because it was obviously written by a mediocre mind, but it had an agenda. It had the pretense of an “indie” production when it was no such thing at all. It wanted to make some point, except the only point I could see was that the capacity for human cruelty is so heartbreaking and endemic, bring on the exterminators. That’s cute, the whole apartheid/xenophobia angle, but the fact remains that no aliens have yet come, and it is just us, mostly without grace, blindly righteous and blithely ruthless. What a bummer.

I prefer the universes Tarantino creates. His characters are not without brutality, but they have grace. And I do mean that in the theological sense. I think maybe the opening and final soliloquies delivered by Miss Alabama Whirley do a fine job of showing you what I mean. I could not count how many times I’ve watched this film. When I think of being in love, of beauty in the world in spite of…, I think of this right here:

Here is a silent film in which I am the star:

Having a fan in your face turns anyone into a paperback romance.

I’ve got two karaoke standards: Peggy Lee and Bobbie Gentry. I’m working on my Dusty, but she’s got some hiiiiigh notes, I’ll tell you what. Bobbie was one of the first country ladies to write and produce her own songs in the big leagues.

(And Dusty was an infamous perfectionist hellhound in the production booth, which is exactly why her records are fucking perfect and this is the sort of instance which affirms for us all that there are indeed a few truths in the universe which only a woman may fully understand.)

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If my father had been an aesthetically-obsessed writer enlisted in the military and not an audiophile student enrolled in veterinary school, this is the same letter he would have written me:

9 March 1944

Dearest Tess

Here is a little note to wish you every happiness on your birthday. Your mother will give you the present I have for you. It is some painting material and I want you to take great care of it & paint very carefully, because these colours and brushes are not made as toys but are the kind which real artists use, and when a thing is the best of its kind, even if it is only a little thing like a paint brush, it should be treated like a Sacred Animal. Always remember it is not the size or price of things that is valuable but the quality.

You have been a great happiness to your mother and me for five years. It is very sad that I see so little of you. I pray that before you are six ¹ we shall be together at home once more

Ever your loving
Papa

¹ It was her sixth birthday.

(From The Letters of Evelyn Waugh)

Later he would write, “My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.”  A charming brilliance, he had.

Normally I’ll stab a party picture in the face, but this one is really good because it tells you exactly what a spiraling abyss of downer I am on the inside:

(except really I was just pissed because the bartender was acting like I was just gazing at him for my own goddamn pleasure, except I got news: no one’s throwing him any goddamn parades)

(maybe they were, who cares)

(via weekendpartyupdate, ole)

I have this thing for Peter Sellers.

I mean who, with any taste at all, does not share this thing?

Sellers was the king of self-erasure.  He would become entirely who he was directed to be for his audience.  When the audience was not sufficiently large enough–say, family, women, his children, friends–he would feel he was no one, nothing, someone with out self.  But that was what he wished was true, what he wanted to be true.  He wanted to be tragic, misunderstood, hollow so when you tried to aim your finger at the monster, there was nothing.  Just shadow.

He hated himself.  So he inhabited others. 

He said, “Me?  There is no me.”  Here, you can see him confess this himself.  To Kermit the Frog.  In a Viking’s helmet.  It’s the truest thing he’s ever imagined so he tells it to a puppet.  Even the puppet wants to change the subject.

Follow that public confession with Richard the III’s soliloquy accompanied by musically tuned chickens, however, and top it off with “Shave and a Haircut”? Well that is just genius.  The liminal gray space between comedy and tragedy, the truest of the true. So there’s a conflict of interest here, isn’t there? “It’s all part of life’s rich pageantry,” isn’t it?

I wonder how much of it is, about the self.  When he was swaying between lucid and senile moments just before his death, he often would confuse himself with Chase.  He fought to make that film, he loved it fiercely, it was like his epitaph.  One whose name was writ in water, yet again.

A bunch of people have asked me lately how my handwriting is so miniature and uncharacteristically precise.  This is because I write on Doane Paper.  Exclusively, if I can help it.

Recall Lolita; ol’ Humbert Hum spends his afternoons milking the venom from his fangs in a fey little leather bound diary.  He assumes the Big Dove too witless to make any attempt at deciphering these ruinous revelations, the stuff which fills the exhausted silence she neurotically mistakes for love.  And yet, Lo!  The Fat Haze has it in her.  A Bad Accident soon follows.  Hum, feckless greedy tick that he is, was not writing on Doane Paper.

“College ruled” paper should be left for the animals.  Wild minds need structure or else they’re all over the page.  Must each letter be a mile high, visible to every wandering eye vying for a peek at your engine?  That’s always infuriated me.  My mother prefers gridded paper, but because I am a dumbell, my eyes cannot stay on a linear path.  Chad Doane has brilliantly solved this.  Every three horizontal lines on the grid are a slightly bolder blue.  It’s a beautiful thing.

No one’s throwing themselves in front of a speeding car for me, my friends.  They can’t read a goddamn thing I write.

It’s also great for drawing and mapping out plans to better your future which you will never execute, but will frequently pause amongst the ruins to admire the order and ease they had so elegantly promised on paper.

(I’m only allowed Nabokov in small doses.)

I want you to see something.

My mother found this on her window shield a few years ago randomly.  I have kept it for years.  At first I was astonished by how many of those needs seemed superfluous, even luxurious.  Don’t allow yourself to live without, in both what you demand for yourself and what you give to others.  With each day that’s passed since first holding this in my hands, I have understood better in small, nearly imperceptible ways how deeply impoverished we so often allow ourselves to become.

This is the only time I will ever use this concept in the affirmative, because it could be the only instance in which it applies: you deserve every single one of these.  You do.  Perhaps rationally you might agree; now the trick is to massage it so deeply into your psyche that you do not just agree, but believe.

The only way to answer this is by saying to the universe, “I’m right on top of that, Rose.”

(click to enlarge)

Having a very nice stereo has got me losing my goddamn mind over three records: Foley Room (Amon Tobin), Uneasy Flowers (Autistic Daughters), Standing On a Hummingbird (Mark Templeton).  Whatever, it’s cool to be 3 years late to every party.  Here, have all three. I’m trying to attract the Eff See See’s attn so like twenty universes implode because I’m a brat who believes in sharing art so they destroy our server and sue each of us for a zillion dollars and our futures wither into internet obliv. (Hi Nick!! “Getting angry, baby?”)

I’ve really only been interested in exploring/cooling out to electronic music in the last year. That is while I’m at home, because it’s sort of weird to drive around in your car with your ipod sourcing some really sick glitchy-comatose soundscape jams. That’s when you work it out with a little Dead Milkmen so your friends are all singing along like everyone’s 14 again instead of stewing in alienated silence over in the passenger seat. Anyway, my point is that my preference still leans towards mechanized music that lays its primary samples down with organic stuff you can feel with your body, all the visceral sounds stolen away from the real world.

A personal aside: Paul, do you know that the very first exchanges Ian and I were in Ms. Keisler’s art class where he was just some older little filthy punk who talked like Tim Armstrong and gave me hella shit for my “nintendo music” cuz I was sulking under headphones to this Swedish outfit Baxter, whom I still maintain put out like one of the best albums of all time? (Same lady who fronted Salt, who are also basically perfect.)

I know this is an impossible wish, but my big fantasy is that one day when I call Ian up to wish him a happy 97th birthday, he will tell me he’s finally grown out of punk rock like the rest of us did with the onset of pubic hair and he’ll talk all gravelly at me into the phone and say,

“Lah-Lah, Lah-Lah.  Listen to me, Snizz. Snizz, you were right. You’ve always had better tazzzzte. I’m zo zorry the only record we ever allowed you to play was Reagan Youthssssssssss or that you evuh had to stand in the back of the Continental with our jackets and the L.E.S. Stitches. Hey, remember thah guy Mick though, how he uzzah serve us with no ID?  Thah wuz pretty good.”  (I sure do, Future Imaginary Ian.)

And while I’m at it, Paul, I wouldn’t mind a collective apology for all the chair matches and Rick Flair-isms I suffered through while you guys were smashing baking sheets into each other’s faces.

Jesus Christ, life.

Tonight when I arrived home from the Cape, my new (to me) Tivoli radio had arrived. My model one has finally rattled it’s last breath; it will now be played in the kitchen so the warbling treble does not drive me up a wall in the privacy of my own music time. I even have this time another speaker and a subwoofer, which as the daughter of an audiophile, is simply velvet.

I’ll be eating only lentils for the next four weeks for various reasons.

The first record I played on it when I set it up was from the Benitez-Valencia Trio. It is pure pleasure and sweet heartache. It makes my toes curl. You can download it here. There is an especially lovely song “Si Tu Me Olvidas,” and it reminded me of a Neruda poem. Some friends and I were talking earlier in the afternoon about all the joyful nuance and shimmer that will slip away in translation. Luckily, music suffers less than language with this.

Here, listen as you read. Tell me what you think is lost.

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An Iranian woman in support of Mousavi (more here). It reminds me of the painting which has become stock imagery in my brain when facing struggle. Also, it’s on the cover of a Melvin’s record.

This is an ode to my lunch date and study buddy.  You’re not the only one around here cooling out on a bev, sister.