imitation sun.

“amazing muscles, or current occupant.” a friend’s door, manhattan, may 2009

May 10, 2009, 5:33pm  Comments

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bud powell - “tea for two”
10” - 1950

in midtown on a bright spring day; still cold, but not the bitter chill of january and february. hobnobbing with the jet-setting crowd, laughing as we push through the throngs of tourists - don’t they know how to walk any faster? - we’re playing hooky, we’re catching a matinee (student rush, always the best), we’re sitting in hotel lounges and not ordering anything; the high life by proximity. we watch children stare up at the buildings and live vicariously through their wonder.

grab a drink at the campell apartment (make sure we’re not wearing sneakers!) at 5:30, right as the wealthy get ready to catch the trains out to westchester and fairfield. the prices are outrageous, of course, but damn the expense, we have jobs - let’s mortgage the future to pay for the present, like they did. you put on your glasses and do your best dorothy parker, I scowl and knock back my rum with a few bon mots and I’m every liberal artist’s dream of hemingway. the night air turns nippy but we walk back crosstown to catch our subway, you, me and bud powell, coy interlopers for a day.

late that night, I dream of the first times I can remember seeing the city, pressed up against the window panes of the train as it crossed the bridge. A stray thought: “my children will never see the world trade center,” and when I wake up, I am crying. you are still asleep, and our stereo has quietly moved back to bill evans. I shut it off, wipe my face and crawl back into bed, and my dreams bring me back out into manhattan.

May 08, 2009, 12:53pm  Comments

» link: short story: "before you say 'hello'," italo calvino

Now that a network of automatic connections extends across entire continents and every subscriber can call every other subscriber at will without asking anybody’s help, I must resign myself to paying for this extraordinary freedom with an expense of nervous energy, repetition of movements, time-wasting, growing frustration. (And to paying for it again in the form of extremely expensive bills, but the relationship between the act of telephoning and the experience of the cruel prices is not a direct one: the bills arrive every three months, a single direct-dial long distance call is drowned in an overall figure that generates the same stupor as those natural disasters in the face of which our resolve immediately finds the alibi of inevitability.) So great is the temptation the facility to telephone constitutes, that telephoning is becoming ever more difficult, even impossible. Everybody telephones everybody at every possible moment, and nobody can speak to anybody, signals go wandering up and down automatic search circuits, beating their wings like crazed butterflies, without managing to slip into a free line, each subscriber goes on firing off numbers into the exchanges convinced that it’s no more than a temporary local hitch. The truth is that the vast majority of calls are made without people having anything to say to each other, hence it hardly matters whether they get through or not, all they do is harm those few who really would have something to say.

I was going to say “calvino’s use of the second person in writing stories about love and desire is always really fascinating to me,” but what I’ll say instead is “italo calvino turns me into a mushy romantic.”

see also if on a winter’s night a traveler, one of my all-time favorite books.

May 07, 2009, 6:20pm  Comments

dusk in shinjuku.
tokyo, july 2008

May 07, 2009, 11:15am  Comments

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the fall - “garden”
from their sixth session for john peel, march 21, 1983
compiled on the “complete peel sessions 1978-2004” box set

someone once asked me what music best conveys a sense of existentialist dread. I said “pretty much the entirety of the fall’s output in 1983.” I still think I’m right.

“the best firms advertise the least.”

May 06, 2009, 11:58am  Comments

soon after my cheeky discourse on sonic youth’s new record, my computer died. then I had a four-hour exam yesterday. suffice it to say, I’ve been out for a bit. apologies. regularly-scheduled programming will resume sometime after friday. in the meanwhile, I’ll try to at least keep you entertained.

May 06, 2009, 10:49am   Comments

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sonic youth - “poison arrow”
from the upcoming the eternal, 2009

after many years, sonic youth has finally moved to a sound I would describe as “west coast.” still don’t quite know what to make of it.

May 02, 2009, 12:04am  Comments