March 2012
2 posts
White Ballet
Outside sometimes I wish there was a lake
Instead of this river that doesn’t matter to anyone
Completely drained of color
Barely moving
reflecting reflecting
.
We live in this summerhouse breathing
always wet grass on a Saturday morning
the yellow evening lights turn me on, make me friendly
A neighbor likes to mow his lawn
I think his name is rick
That’s all I know about him
He could hate mowing...
Julianna Barwick - "Never Change" →
October 2011
2 posts
Bliss Was It In That Dawn To Be Alive
Craig Hancock received his B.F.A and M.A. from The University of California Berkley and his Ph.D from Vassar. He currently specializes in American and European post-minimalism. Craig was a Stanley Stetson visiting scholar at Northwestern University in 1992 and has received numerous grants and fellowships for his research, including an award from the J. Paul Getty Foundation. His book Dan...
Slow Club - "You, Earth Or Ash" →
September 2011
2 posts
Dancing Before A Mirror Before God
I.
After the lake has been frozen for a few months I will on occasion find myself completely unaware that underneath the violent ice there is a rushing, a water - sweet, dark and cold. I’ll say to Joann or Stacy or Bob, we can walk here now. Our waking universe has expanded. Nature only shows deference or remorse anymore. And I’ll really mean it when I say this. Then we’ll go inside...
The Chills - "Rolling Moon" →
August 2011
2 posts
What Will Take Care Of You After Release?
I am sitting in the St. John’s Medical Center cafeteria with my sister Amy. Another Thursday just evaporating.
A man walks in. He wears his gown hunched and heavily adorned with IV lines as two of his family members walk slowly behind, one at each side. He looks like a retired general in his new uniform, regal and depressed. He carries with him a great and dignified loss, nearly broken over...
St. Vincent - "Surgeon" →
July 2011
2 posts
Goodbye Physics
I was never really awake until I felt the first clean crunch of 12 ounce leather landing into the left front orbital. Usually someone’s glove and my face. I mean a lot of times I got the first punches in but being clocked was certainly alarming. That’s just the way it works. It’s strange, compounded velocity that moves everything. Physics alarm clocks.
I was really attracted to Euclidean...
John Maus - Believer →
June 2011
2 posts
Clearing
So much depends on
a few drops of rain above Crawford county
clouds as big as houses explode into being
maliciously circling around the midday sun
while we sit fast awake on another blank Saturday
a picnic in purgatory
you point to some rare bird floating upwards on the wind
as if it means anything at all
.
So much depends on
how we will entertain the breach of our isolation
and suddenly I’m...
The Soft Boys - "I Wanna Destroy You" →
April 2011
2 posts
Water In Water, Waves In Waves
I never saw someone cry like that. Really amazing, hard, profound tears that glittered against your soft skin the way diamonds dance under light. The face streaked all burning and wet. I didn’t know what to do next so I pulled you down close and we sat on the hardwood kitchen floor in alternate universes of sob and silence.
I am living inside weird springtime weather cycles. Mend, break,...
Parenthetical Girls - "The Pornographer" →
March 2011
2 posts
Possible Revisions On The Other Side of Time
I’m going to miss my flight to San Francisco. I’m going to miss your graduation. I’m going to miss our time together in some small bed forever borrowed.
I accidentally left my suitcase at one of those corporate-y forced middle-class chic airport restaurants in the Delta terminal at JFK. They always have names like Delilah’s or SoHo Grill. There is never a Delilah. And this is definitely...
The Sandwitches - "Joe Says" →
February 2011
5 posts
February 20, Song Sparrow, Saugerties, 2011
For 27 years, 17 times a year, my Dad went on a 37 hour trip into the Catskills. We lived in Binghamton when I grew up (my parents were college professors, I should have known I was cursed from the start) and one of my earliest memories was my dad mysteriously packing up the Volvo and driving alone to the West Kill Mountain range. He was doing what men do when left alone in the world. I mean...
Easter Vomit - "Grey Shapes" →
Air Waves - "Gems" →
Standing In The Corner, Infanticipating
Gillian stood in our cold room, naked and ebullient. For the first time she appeared to me completely as a woman, a mortal vessel, as old, magical and ancestral as the earth itself. Stark in her fertility, untouchable in her transcendence. It was in this way she carried our child for nine months. We both knew she was deeply changed but never spoke of it. She was beyond me now. She and God...
Young Galaxy - "We Have Everything" →
January 2011
8 posts
Sault Sainte Marie
Little wonder
You dance on endless seas
In a spinning, imperfect pirouette
At the schoolyard
In the year we found the eclipse
On sidewalks frozen mirrors
.
There we are on the swingset
Or maybe we’re swimming
Or drawing
Or laughing ourselves into oblivion
On days electric inside waves of white light
.
And now here we...
J Mascis - "Not Enough" →
Goodnight, I Love You
“So, what are you up to these days?”
“Oh you know the usual. A never ending barrage of poor life choices. Running around namelessly and aimlessly through dive bars and sad cars. Night stalking the same half-empty town in perpetuity. I have some serious problems with bad drugs and worse women. What about you?”
“Oh you know the usual. Working at Allstate,...
Roky Erickson - "You Don't Love Me Yet" →
Last Chance Exit Strategies
Towards the end the Q train commute had become this sorta weird visitation of hell on earth and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. OK, I’m being facetious. Sorta. See the thing was I had taken to reading the New York Daily News every day on the subway. The more rituals the better in those days, that’s one way to look at it anyway. The Daily News was simultaneously my direct conduit, my...
Star Slinger - "Like I Do" →
Morality Is Not A Moveable Feast
PART I
Plausible fairy tales
Laws that cause chaos
Oppression of nice, friendly Midwesterners
to expose, to imply, to impose, to deny
to order pizza on the Internet
Jazz rock, car phones, non-alcoholic beer
Glaring omissions in sacred texts
to become the thing you hated
to better define problems I waited
PART II
I sat silently for hours listening to the trial. It was a messy case. I...
Destroyer - "Kaputt" →
December 2010
8 posts
Indifferent Oceans, Loving Trains
On the second to last day of the year I took a long run alongside the Atlantic Ocean. OK, it wasn’t that long, maybe an hour, I dunno. Is that long? As I stared off into the infinite sparkling distance, the entire ocean turned into champagne and as the bubbles washed ashore I felt like I was some sort of boozy yet benevolent King Midas. Well, more like King Midas as a child. I ...
Group Doueh - "Beatte Harab" →
Swans
On the longest night of the year a resounding malevolence filled the black garden. From the window I stood staring at the way the wet ground reflected back upon the little house, like the natural world on life support. The painful way the vines had become withered and choked of all beauty. I concentrated intently for signs of the once herbaceous border and couldn’t remember if we had...
Kate McGarrigle - "Proserpina" →
Opposites Really Do Attract, Don't They?
From a note inside the cover of a used copy of Demian by Hermann Hesse. I found the book in 2009 outside a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn amid dark and well lighted alleys, houses and towers, chimes and faces, rooms rich and comfortable, warm and relaxed, rooms pregnant with secrets:
Jim,
And is our pain
the Mark of Cain
hidden now
beneath our brow
by seasoned faces
that leave not
...
Sparks - "Angst In My Pants" →
The King Is Ambushed
I was in the chess shop the other day on Thompson St. We hurried past NYU clutching our coffees tight, peering into windows and avoiding the manic traffic on Broadway. The shop itself is quaint and timeless, untouched by the digital age. Old men, some who had no doubt lost their minds at one time or another, held court at long card tables arguing over pawns and queens the way most people...
jj - "Let Them" →
November 2010
10 posts
To Seek Blood From Precious Stones
In certain sense the end to Kanye West’s nearly impeccable “My Dark Twisted Fantasy” is bound to be interpreted as blasphemy. I won’t talk about all that, though. I’ll leave Gil Scott-Heron alone in his one bedroom in Spanish Harlem to stew if he must over old vinyl records and warm American beers. But he’s not stewing.
I just know he’s not. It’s a new day infinitely far from 125th and Lenox...
Kanye West feat. Gil Scott-Heron - "Who Will... →
Autumn Again, Fantastic
Suddenly I’m split into two distinct parts. On one side we have the spark, the crackle, the blaze. On the other is the smolder, the fade, the char. Now I realize these parts are split neatly into things I anticipate and things I dread. When I wake up in the morning I drive in from the mountains blasting Black Flag and chugging coffee. When I return home in the evening something has...
Owen Pallett - "A Man With No Ankles" →
Different Ways To Say The Same Thing
To everyone who has a soul like a big, warm house and a memory like the foggiest night of the year.
(Porcelain Raft)
Porcelain Raft - "Tip Of Your Tongue" →
Prized Possessions
Jessica kept a green box on her nightstand that she guarded with her life. Inside it contained secrets she accrued through intentions not entirely clear. Charm bracelets, mood rings, paper flowers, handwritten notes, pocket portraits, hair ties, two cigarettes, a gold key, her high school ID card, seemingly innocuous treasures of the dull and banal. Except, it was all a front. It was the...
Jumbling Towers - "The Ramifications of an... →
Tomorrow, Tomorrow I'll Turn Over A New Leaf
Back to the land but this time with much more style and grace. Chasing the impossibility.
(image source)
Onra - "The Anthem" →
October 2010
8 posts
The Impending Obsolescence Of Youth
The earth is a bitch. Why not hover above it beautiful and unbound while you still can? While you still have time. Do what thy wilt shall be the whole of the law. Ignoring empathy in favor of a new generation.
(gif source: sleepoverforever.tumblr.com)
The Stooges - "T.V. Eye" →
The Polite Will Inherit The Earth
More little lies. Reflections in search of clarity. Left over dishes. Late night cartoons. You get the idea. Accomplishing a culture of hot boredom. For a limited time only.