March 2011
175 posts
February 2011
202 posts
“I’m tired of hearing about the death of publishing. If these companies die, it’s because they were dedicated to a dying model.”
—Ron Hogan (via housingworksbookstore)
Tunisia, Egypt - The Universal Reach of Popular Uprisings. Alain Badiou →
lacan.com
“And whatever happens next, this triumph, illegal by nature, of popular action, will be forever victorious. Now, that a revolt against the power of the State can be absolutely successful is an example of universal reach.”
“There is, for instance, a simple, spooky sense in which the Internet is just a loud and unlimited library in which we now live - as if one went to sleep every night in the college stacks, surrounded by pamphlets and polemics and possibilities.”
—Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker (via axisofpraxis)
“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (via novellas)
“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”
—Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse (1977)
To Like You
That Ghost
That Ghost - To Like You
When I first heard this, it caught me off guard, in a good way. I wasn’t sure what to expect from a band called That Ghost. Was it gonna be witch house? Was it gonna be a terrible Kings of Leon sound-alike? Well luckly it was none of these. Instead it was delightfuly awesome.
It’s as if young Ryan Schmale took a cloud of hazy goodness and applied it right to the audio tracks. I also really dig this style of singing where there seems to be this glide and crescendo to each note. I would totally slow dance to this song.
This track is off his album that is being released tomorrow on twosyllable, pick it up here.
And remember kids: You can never have enough reverb.
Spirit Or Something
Monogold
Monogold — Spirit or Something
A lot of songs take a while to speed up, get going. They suck you in, entice you with a look, gain speed, then at some point you realize you’ve been hooked by their sharp claws and you can’t escape the sound. This track has been making it around thru my friends’ blogs, and after listening several times, I’m realizing how it’s the end of this tune that just slays it and has me hooked. Wickedly good pop.
Pick up their new LP The Softest Glow here. See them with Chad Valley, Selebrities, and Teeel March 11, 2011 @ GLASSLANDS GALLERY in Brooklyn.
Up-tempo Brooklyn-hailing trio called Monogold, dropped a catchy tune by and it just made me wanna jump into a ravine only to grab a vine and swing to the ground as I pretend to be chased by some sort of anti-environmentalist. I’m not really sure though.
San Francisco Reads:
Bi-curious by Natalie Weber on the 19 bus. Glossy cover. Watching this woman read unapologetically gives me some serious hope. I felt embarrassed once for reading Story of the Eye on the train, the cover was facing an elderly woman seated in front of me, or it might have been Frisk by Dennis Cooper, I can’t remember. Regardless I was reading something about sex and genitals. I felt embarrassed and giddy at the same time.
The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald on the N Judah train. This is probably Fitzgerald’s least beloved novel. The woman reading it doesn’t seem to be enjoying herself. She’s about 30 pages into it. Reading Fitzgerald is like agreeing to feel sad for an extended amount of time. How could you read this stuff, really? It’s all tragedy, in the fiction and in real life. Zelda burning in her hospital room some years after Scott dies of a heart attack. Damned forever.
Fragments of Cutlure: The Everday of Modern Turkey by Debuz Kandiyoti and Ayse Saktanber on the 22 bus. Library book. Turkey makes me think of Libya, of Egypt, of Iraq. Out drinking the other night with friends I said that the protests in the Middle East and North Africa prove that America going to Iraq was a waste, that ‘democracy’ did not need to be delivered by the US armed forces. My friend said that that didn’t need to be proven. Democracy will spread and America never needs to deliver it. The protests prove nothing. I think my friend was right.
“we do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch…”
—e.e. cummings (via mopete)
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nothin to lose
Jeremiah Nelson
Jeremiah Nelson :: Nothin’ To Lose
A nice fellow named Jeremiah Nelson wrote me and asked me to listen to his EP. The first track swept me up and tossed me back and forth like the Beatles and Elliott Smith playing tennis.
That crescendo is pretty fucking gnarly too. Certainly someone to keep yr ears on.
Serfs Up.
San Francisco Reads:
Empire Falls by Richard Russo on the N Judah train. Didn’t they make a movie based on this book? No, it was an HBO mini-series. Whenever I see the title I think of Empire Records starring Steven Tyler’s daughter. Her name is Liv Tyler. Have you seen American Idol this season? I used to sit in my mother’s living room and watch Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul. The only redeeming part of this show is when they relentlessly bully the poor, delusional contestants (or at least during the auditions). It’s sickening to feel so enthused by other people’s poor fortune. But, shit, they are on television. I would give anything to be on television. Anything.
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving on the N Judah train. Woman reading it marks her place, puts the book back in her purse. She’s on her Blackberry now. I understand. I get headaches when I read on the train. I want to reach over, tug on her Patagonia jacket and ask if she’s liked the book so far. She gets off at the same stop as me. I let her walk ahead. We turn down the same street. She’s answered a phone call now. She’ll be there in a minute she says. I spit into the gutter.
City of Quartz by Mike Davis on the 22 bus. I read this the summer after college. It made me not want to live in Los Angeles. It filled my head with great trivia for a while. Now I’ve forgotten it all. Wasn’t California great back then? Just looked this book up on Wikipedia. It says it was supposed to be Davis’ PhD dissertation but it was rejected. Went on to sell a billion copies. I wonder what his dissertation committee thinks about that. Slow growth indeed.
“For years, we’ve been bludgeoned with the cliche ‘information is power.’ But information isn’t power. After all, who’s got the most information in your neighborhood? Librarians. And they’re famous for having no power at all. And who has the most power in your community? Politicians. And they’re notorious for being ill-informed.”
—Clifford Stoll, High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don’t Belong in the Classroom (via librarianista)
“A writer of the future sits in her office in the present, trying very, very hard to not panic.”
—The Millions : Modes of Imagining the Writer of the Future (via housingworksbookstore)
Something On Your Mind
Karen Dalton
Karen Dalton, “Something On Your Mind,” off In My Own Time (1971)
Thanks to newspeedwayboogie, I’ve been listening to this album all morning on Rdio.
Turns out Karen Dalton was a kind of influential zelig all over the 60s Greenwich Village folk scene. She played at Cafe Wha?, performed with Fred Neil and Bob Dylan, and is the subject of the Dylan and The Band song “Katie’s Been Gone.” She was called the “folk singers answer to Billie Holiday” due to her soulful and pain-filled voice. She did covers of folk and motown songs, and made them completely her own. She was a legend in the scene until she suddenly disappeared from public view amid addictions to drugs and alcohol. In 1993 she finally turned up, collapsed on the streets of New York City, having been suffering from AIDS for the 8 years prior. She died too young, and only left two real albums of recorded material.
In My Own Time is Dalton’s second album, and is the highlight of her career. None of the ten songs on the album are originals, instead they’re all covers of soul or blues songs or new versions of traditional folk pieces, yet all of them sound like Dalton created them. Dalton mostly takes on more obscure material (like the aforementioned “Katie Cruel”), but also pops in a few familiar nuggets, like Percy Sledge’s “When a man loves a woman” and Marvin Gaye’s “How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You”.
Box Elder (Blackbird Blackbird Remix)
Pavement
Pavement - Box Elder (Blackbird Blackbird Remix)
Pavement - Box Elder (Blackbird Blackbird Remix) by blackbird blackbird
Oregon Girl
Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin
“Oregon Girl” - Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin
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Someone still loves you Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin
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Paper Palms
Birdlips
We floated along in innocent ecstasy. Our playful and childlike love displayed for the world to see. As we would giggle at our inside jokes and private musings, we’d blush and shrink - hiding into ourselves - unsure and overjoyed. I would figuratively touch your cheek with loving reassurance. The idea that you found yourself unappealing was endearing and saddening at once. Your eyes, I was sure, would shift quickly from to the floor, observing the cracks and the dirt beneath your bare feet. Wanting to embrace you, to make you feel alive, I merely smiled sweetly at the thought of your reddening cheeks. A glowing, blossoming devotion fit for us two misguided yet harmonious beings. My gentle and timid consort residing halfway across the universe yet living in my heart. Perdu-ish partner - charming companion.
Birdlips is, in essence, modern psychedelic pop with light sprinklings of vocalists like Margo Guryan and stylings of Lee & Nancy. Both familiar and unfamiliar, their tracks tend to drift along kaleidoscopic, prismic waves. Like watching a sunset or sunrise, the curling, silky fog drifting in, it is lulls you into a soft, swirling bliss. The old is new and the new is old once again.
Birdlips will be preforming at the Hotel Utah Wednesday, March 2, 9pm for free.
Get the album here.
♫ Bonus: Birdlips - Walk Through Walls
♪ File under: duo, blissful psychedelic pop
Bookselling Without Borders →
thegreenapplecore.blogspot.com
“But if you’d rather not have a bookstore in your community, shop mostly or only at Amazon. No one should shop at Green Apple out of charity or pity or noblesse oblige, but because you want what we’ve got. You mold the retail landscape with every purchase; vote wisely.”
Click through for the full, excellent post from San Francisco’s Green Apple Books.
“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (via jesuisperdu)
“The work of art leaves the domain of representation in order to become ‘experience’, transcendental empiricism or science of the sensible. It is strange that aesthetics (as the science of the sensible) could be founded on what can be represented in the sensible. True, the inverse procedure is not much better, consisting of the attempt to withdraw the pure sensible from representation and to determine it as that which remains once representation is removed (a contradictory flux, for example, or a rhapsody of sensation). Empiricism truly becomes transcendental, and aesthetics an apodictic discipline, only when we apprehend directly in the sensible that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible: difference, potential difference and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity. It is in difference that movement is produced as an ‘effect’, that phenomena flash their meaning like signs. The intense world of differences, in which we find the reason behind qualities and the being of the sensible, is precisely the object of a superior empiricism. This empiricism teaches us a strange ‘reason’, that of the multiple, chaos and difference (nomadic distributions, crowned anarchies). It is always differences which resemble one another, which are analogous, opposed or identical: difference is behind everything, but behind difference there is nothing.”
—Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 68-9. (via mattermedia)
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