Heaviness – Staddest Colour

Heaviness – Saddest Colour

Astounding! ‘No idea this band had any web presence beyond the myspace page!

Fans of Pship mixtapes from 07 and 08 will recognize the name: with Electro Group, Heaviness are my favorite neoshoegaze purveyors, rightfully located somewhere between MBV and Flying Saucer Attack. For me, those genre coordinates are serious-as-fuck, and of a significance that a different sort of person would refer to as “spiritual.”

In this live context, the MBV/FSA sandwich takes on an appropriately “EVOL”-ish tone of throbby knife-thrusting and screeching, getaway car guitars.

[h/t to BuiltOnaWeakSpot for turning me on to Heaviness so long, long ago.]

Quick 4pm Horn

ROMAN POLANSKI’S PIRATE DAYS – Vice Magazine

I have a soft spot for references to the Seychelles, for reasons that’re none of you all’s business.

Venezuela Bans Family Guy :: Film & TV News :: Articles :: Paste

For those who say I’m “soft” on Chavez — not so! I think this is crap.

» hush arbors “the devil made you high”

J Mascis-produced new Hush Arbors seems to be veering away from the scary hamper of of drony psycho songwriter moves, towards, uh, very well recorded guitar/bass/drums throb.

Mental Housecleaning, Part 1 – Read:My:Back

Prisonship favorite Mike Lupica prepares for the sensory onslaught and paradigm shift that fatherhood portends by remembering a whole universe of shows we all wish we had gone to, too.

Une Reve

Granparents, Advisor B, an old flame, and a whole world of dudes pranced into my unmentionable unconscious this AM. It was like Short Cuts, circa 1983, in a Colorado mountain suburb. Shit happened. There were a lotta inhalants.

Who knows why we remember what we remember?

facebook blues

Overheard on Fbook, when I was wondering how such a sack of dogshit from the prep school days appears, by his photo, to have a relatively younger, relatively attractive-r blonde wife. Here’s what I figured out from his profile, in addition to his being Executive Director at one monolith of finance capital after serving another ex-monolith for the 8 years before its famous collapse:

About Me:

“What’s your name?”

My response: “Fuck you– that’s my name! You know why, mister? Because you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight, I drove an $80,000 BMW. That’s my name!”

Paul F. Tompkins: Catholics vs. Assholes

Paul F. Tompkins’ spite and my spite are pretty much locked-in. This is less about “funny” and more about living down your Catholicism.

I decided there was no Jesus no later than during year 10 of my life, but I still wake up soaked in Catholicism-goo every goddamn day. Help me help myself and watch this contempt-rife clip.

Horn of Disappointments: Prisonship Edition

Dave Matthews, Edwards Wedding Singer? – The Caucus Blog – NYTimes.com

Among the numerous surprising details in Neil A. Lewis’s report about John Edwards, who is reportedly considering admitting to fathering the baby of his mistress, Rielle Hunter, we found one particularly striking element. Citing a book proposal for a tell-all written by a former aide, Andrew Young, Mr. Lewis reports: “He wrote that Mr. Edwards once calmed an anxious Ms. Hunter by promising her that after his wife died, he would marry her in a rooftop ceremony in New York with an appearance by the Dave Matthews Band.”

You gotta be fugging kidding me? As if the lying, more-lying and the more-more-lying weren’t enough? Now I’m getting gratuitous glimpses into the love affair-ing economic populist’s bedroom lies? And they involve fucking DAVE?!?

Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard Talk Kerouac Project :: Music News :: Articles :: Paste

Jay Farrar recording Mermaid Avenue Vol. 6 – Glorious Noise

Wait a second — is Jay Farrar trying to punish me? Not for nothing, but look…. I feel like I’ve been a pretty damn loyal soldier with my support for/critical writing about Son Volt 2.0, Gob Iron and assorted Jay solo stuff. Well, shit… after a mostly-flawed clunker of a new SV lp that’s more about laziness than about any kinda return to laconic country swagger, I can’t see either of these weird projects of historical re-enactment/wish fulfillment as anything but ominous harbingers of further anticlimaxes to come from Jay.

And you know what? That’s fine. Jay and I have had a great run, and he doesn’t owe me anything. I still enjoy reading the new Son Volt blog, and am glad to get the sense that all the blokes are having weird, good times on the road. But, shit, if I could boil down my gripes with Son Volt 2.0 down to a single statement, it’s that the lyrics and the music have seemed clunkily pasted together with one another, as if Jay was conducting his own, awkward version of a very played-out modernist disintegration of (musical) form and (lyrical) content*. I do not see how either of these two projects – with their built-in gravity and all the pretenses about “tradition,” “Americana,” etc. – can do anything but worsen these problems with Farrar’s recent work. But I’ll keep my ears open, as always, to have my opinion changed.

(* Another way of stating my gripe with Farrar: he’s getting involved in the kinda collaborations that Paste Magazine thinks’re important. But bear in mind, I’m the wanker reading RSS feeds from Paste, so…)

Porno 4 Pyros Tribute Post

In my family life, household pets have been conscripted into bearing too much of the psychic-semiotic burden. Repeatedly, we’ve projected our own unbearable humanity upon them, and transferred our unspeakable familiarity with/contempt for each other into passive-aggressive, baby-talking pet-worship.

It sickens me more than it should, this pretty-culturally-ubiquitous, “harmless”-ish institution of culture-generation or symbolic affiliation. Certainly, pet worship is no weirder than mine own preferred mode of pomo/catholic/aesthetic transference. I experience my everyday life-world as HAUNTED: on an axis of more or less, implicitly or explicitly, concentrated or diffuse…. But always semi-haunted.

Like early on in John Capenter’s The Thing, I am terrorized by the sense that an ultimate Other looms out in the (literally or figuratively) frozen horizon. And like in Bergman’s Religious Trilogy, my terror-fantasy takes the form of a monstrous, god-like, figure of Judgement (in the Old Testament sense) and alienation (in the marxist sense.)

And again, like in The Thing, while my proximite fear (anxiety) is of other people, the latent, unspoken, half-unimaginable fantasy pertains to the contradictory, Ultimate Double-Horror of BEING LEFT IRREVOCABLY ALONE* — only then to wet-nurse a grisly, abject, unlovable alien from inside of myself.

I know this is all theologico-nonsense, but I deal with it at least every Sunday, and sometimes Sunday is every day.

(* for more on the “being left irrevocably alone” theme, watch Blatty’s “Ninth Configuration.”)

Sur le Lit

I feel accomplished, exhausted and semi-cauterized on days when I’ve succesfully scratched off the sorta paper/pen markings I associate with a list of Things to Do.

I take a lotta notes and slap mods on a lotta concentric lists. There is a pathos to this that is common to socialism, modernism, social scientism, monism, empiricism, etc.- really the whole splendid buffet of petit-b class practices (and self-ish ideas, idylls, idols, id, etc.)

I miss somebody, and my missing- somebody amounts to an equal, dialectical, contrapuntal dosage of tones and ambiences that is a necessary antidote to the deliberative methods and methodical deliverance evoked/connoted/affected avec “work.” Yes, my very capacity for missing heralds a somebody-shaped renaissance of wonder and ecstasy that’s slated for (never too) soon.

(So ends [we]blog-qua-hope-chest pour ce soir.)

THE MOVE – I Can Hear The Grass Grow

A current obsession. THE MOST overlooked 60s purveyors of Brit-mod-psych?

re-blog if you wish President Obama were half as left-wing as the radical right-wingers say

(h/t: hardcorefornerds, which i still read all the time/every day.)

(( and pls, don’t forget all the ongoing politico-blish-blosh-blash over at our Flagship enterprise, l’OG. we appreciate your attention to this matter. ))