happy new year!

Well, another year has passed and... wait, Pete's calling. Happy new year, me!

tunes!

here we go magic - fangela

lee hazlewood

Maybe it's because there's that one Nancy Sinatra song in Kill Bill, but whenever I hear Lee Hazlewood sing with her, I think of David Carradine and Uma Thurman.

pop is better

music go music is the name of this group.

comfort food like peanut butter & bacon & stuffing

Somethings make me feel TOO comfortable. One of those things is thinking about Elvis in his later years, in the 1970s, with the deep, blood-red-almost-maroon shag carpets, wood paneling, uncomfortable sofas, scratchy sweaters made from materials far less sophisticated than our modern cotton blends, and the sweet, heady, heavy-lidded drunkenness that comes from imbibing expensive liquors, gorging on fondue, owning many guns and leaving a few of them lying around in the parlor, and keeping the furnace at 74 degrees year round. The feeling of having sated your desires, slaked your thirst, your body surfeit with the things other people want.

There's a recording of him, Elvis, I mean, sort of mumbling "The Answer is Blowin' In the Wind" along with I assume friends and family... It's a home recording from 1966. But the way it sounds, I put it in the early 70s. He sounds a little drunk, and a little full, from chivas regal & turkey stuffing, I like to imagine. He gets about 5/6s of the lyrics... it's not an album worthy performance (if it weren't Elvis, at least)... and it's like your drunk uncle fading in and out of a conversation as he gradually passes out in the easy chair with a half-drunk beer still propped in his hand. But there's something deeply moving about the recording. Here's a guy who was probably nearly as crazy as Michael Jackson was... if for no other reason save that peerlessness in the pop world seems to breed some sort of benign, childlike megalomania. Or I don't know. I don't personally know any peerless musical performers, so I guess I'm just bullshitting here. Whatever.

Anyway it's still moving. He's balls crazy, probably, and he has all of the finest things in life, probably, and he's in some mansion (either Graceland or Hollywood) with his closest relations gathered around, probably. And yet, in a few years he's going to die of a heart attack brought on by over-consumption of all those fancy things (and drugs too, yay!), falling face first off the "commode" and into that thick shag carpet, and his staff won't find him until rigor mortis is setting in, and the only thing left to do is to roll him over and pull up his pajama bottoms and cancel the tour.

I know it's morbid sounding. But it makes me think of the Holidays, which is nice. Canned cranberries, buttered brusells sprouts, and melancholy shadow of death creeping into the corners of our mouths and the crow's feet in our eyes when we smile at one another. Creeping in like a penitent dog who got caught eating turkey off the cutting board and is just now being let back inside to sit by the fireplace.

Yeah, like that.

Dent May & His Magnificent Ukelele

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?nzcmgajlxdg

summer shorts shots

Threeasy steps to a better summer:

1. Get some corduroy pants.


2. Figure out how cool you are. The shorter you're willing to cut your shorts, the cooler you are. For instance, I'm level 7 cool. Brendan Frasier is level 5.


3. Cut the shorts, drink a beer, and have fun! Hey, it's summertime, man!

???

I kind of want this to use as a beach blanket?

LA SPIAGGIA!

yes I would, if I only could

oh by the way I saw revanche last night, and yah, it was good. what did I tell you?

revanche

I'm gonna go see this movie. tonight or tomorrow. you can bet it will be good.

summer time!

photo moto

i need to take more pictures. it's gonna happen, I swear. for now, here's a couple shots from a camping trip to the lost coast in january of, um, 2007.

new kids

spader. stoltz. the girl from fullhouse in rabbit-blood-smeared panties.

bad kids vs. good kids.



when i was 14, mishan and i stole diapers from a parked car. that's about as bad as I got, really. I probably did worse things, but the intentions were never worse than that. i'd like a BB gun for christmas.

buy me a present

and make it this jacket.

or a BB gun. I'd like a BB gun so I can shoot some beer cans this summer.

Kenneth Anger

Lucifer Rising. In full. Yer welcome, dawg.

blue sky come to portland

The clouds took time off yesterday.
Sol Tushman came to breakfast at Screen Door.
Drank pink mimosas on Kelsie's front porch.
Everyone was at the park.
and Naomi Pomeroy (Beast) cooked cheese filled
sausages in back yard at her housewarming party.

I could get used to this!

timber timbre

from toronto. how rad? VERY!



two albums that I know of: Cedar Shakes and Medicinals, and then maybe there is a new album that came out earlier this year? I don't know. Anyway, it sounds good in my ears.

robin and the rocks

Carmel Point

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses-
How beautiful it was when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs:
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. -As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves:
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become more confident
As the rock and ocean we are made from.






















Hey, man! That's a pretty heavy poem!

next time i watch a movie

it will be this one! I saw it when I was 11 and it freaked me out.

let's read something by Leonard Michaels!

ok? I just bought The Collected Stories and The Men's Club on the webbernet. Books are like friends! I have lots of friends! Most of them are books, though...

selection from Sylvia
by Leonard Michaels

"Sometimes, after a fight, we went to the movies. It was like going to church. We entered, found seats, faced the light, and let go of daily life as we succumbed to the vast communal imagination. In the all-night movies on Forty-second Street, we’d sit in the balcony with great smokers and popcorn eaters, their fingers scrabbling, mouths gnashing. Others sucked chocolate, licked ice cream, rattled candy wrappers. Drunks and half-wits talked to the screen. Bums spit on the floor. This was the honest-to-God movies, place of Manhattan’s sleepless people, like a zoo but, in its massive anonymity, private-feeling. We could go to the movies together, even though twenty minutes earlier we’d been screaming murder into each other’s eyes. In the desolate silence after a fight I might say: “You want to go to the movies?”

Sylvia would straighten her clothes, check her face in the bathroom mirror, grab her leather coat, and she would be tying the wrap-around belt as we went out the door. I loved seeing her quickness, particularly in her hands, when she gave herself to something. We’d hurry off to the subway without finding out when the movie began. There would always be two movies. We could watch at least one from the beginning.

Sitting in the balcony, the eating and smoking all around, I sank into creaturely happiness, and then I noticed my arm was around Sylvia’s shoulder, and she had leaned her head on my arm. Our bad feelings were annihilated by big faces of love shining on the wall. Later, back in the street world, electricity lashed at our eyes, crowds mauled us, traffic wanted to kill us, and evil birds of marriage, black flecks soaring high in our brains, threatened to descend, but we were going home, we’d soon be in bed, hidden, committed to each other’s darkness."

fish lips

From "The Flounder" by Gunter Grass:

"'All a lot of subterfuges!' you say, looking sternly out of the window into present January. But how do you expect us to live without subterfuges! You yourself are a subterfuge. That's why Agnes never closed doors. Always left them ajar. No hesitations between her comings and goings. Often she was there, but I noticed only myself, whereas someone else (Möller) noticed her even though she was with me. Her love was placeless. That's why I was never able to perceive her presence: what I missed was there. And even the Flounder, for whom everything, like his backbone, tapers down logically to a tail fin, couldn't understand that what she never ran out of was dill. He thought love must work like a mousetrap and that she must have fallen for Möller and me. Actually it was one of four or five Swedes whose regiment was occupying Putzig, and they'd only wanted to go for a ride and hunt rabbits in the dunes when they came across Agnes, who was sitting curly-haired in the beach grass. She was tending her geese, and all of a sudden she had all four on top of her, one after another, it didn't take long. But only the first really counted. He was closer to her than Möller and Opitz later on. It seems his name was Axel. And it seems his downy boyish beard was blond. And his brittle, commanding voice lingered on. He never came back, and he was always near her while I, sitting over blank paper as Agnes passed through the room, traveled to Zlatna, where in my days as a young teacher in Transylvania I was surprised by a young kitchen maid who never cooked for me - just as you listen when I'm with you to see if someone else is coming. When actually I've been gone for ages and I'm just smoking.

My subterfuges - yours. I suggest we meet where the Striessbach flows into the Radaune and the Radaune flows into the Mottlau and the Mottlau flows into the Vistula and all these rivers empty into the Baltic Sea. And there I will tell you how it was with Agnes, whom I also have in mind when I come to you and absent-mindedly - which always makes for a fight - call you Agnes."

ouch!

this song blows! i hope ozzie got PAID

the tough alliance

hey jeff, you suck!

jeff had the last laugh! ha ha!

pull up to my bumper baby

Warm Leatherette & Nightclubbing are pretty solid albums. The first one has a pretty good cover of Brian Ferry's Love is the Drug. Check it.

Also, did you know that Grace Jones has been nominated 3 times for Best Supporting Actress? Yeah, the first time was for Conan the Destroyer! What the shit? That's crazy! She basically just jumped around in underwear with a spear. I'm pretty sure that's, like, racism, or something. Maybe the Academy was on some fancy hollywood drugs. Maybe they were all on drugs.



Anyway...

yikes

"Life itself is only a vision, a dream. Nothing exists save empty space and you, and you are but a thought."

Redsploitation?

This isn't really an advert for Pendleton. But I like the picture, and I like the blanket.

I was looking for Pendleton overcoats, is how I found this picture. Also, look at this saucy fellow.

Too bad he's probably a dick!

Oh Raghubir!

People come up and ask me, "who is your favorite Indian photographer?" And I say "Well, I'm glad you asked, because it's Raghubir Singh."

Books include A Way Into India and Bombay: Gateway to India, and I guess there's one or two others, but I think the Bombay one is the best.

love, or just a good time?

I love having a good time.

http://sexsavagesonwheels.blogspot.com/

bed time story before adam

It's better to crazy than be false, the Bear Moon spoke, glowering fatly from his throne in the purple depths of the sky. The cooking was slow, and the people huddled around the fire and breathed the sweet smoke of roasting hart and hare. Little Buckle looked up into the mouth of the night and listened over the murmur of human voices and yip of the dogs playing in the campfire's half-shadow to the hollow, silent sound of the Moon's voice. He grit his teeth and shut his eyes against the force of Moon's luminous litany, as huge, weightless, bell shaped words dropped down, ringing his ears and causing his vision to blur around the edges and his skull to vibrate slightly. Aphorism after truism, simile and trope, paraphrase upon misquotation. Really, thought Little Buckle, the Bear Moon just likes to hear himself think. And furthermore, the Moon was saying, my favorite poem about me, which will be written by a fey, diminutive Iberian playwright during the blood-glutted first half of the European 20th century, reads, in part, as follows: nadie come naranjas bajo la luna llena. Which, I think, is, or should be true, though the reason why escapes me at the moment...

Little Buckle turned his eyes to the fire and unclenched his jaw and the Moon's voice was subsumed by the low din around him. Old Woman turned the spit, toothless maw slightly agape, crow-footed eyes twinkling with forgotten mischief, and Fat Head stood across the fire, displaying his muscley muscles to the sisters Warble High In The Tree and Mud Legs, who looked to their mother, Fallow Field, who in turn looked to her husband, Oak Ball, who only smiled and remembered when he was a young man who posed and postured in the firelight.

The people were short, slight, and black haired, every one. They were quick to laughter, and sparse and to the point with their words, and they lived before maps could identify continents and before clocks or calendars marked linear time. Abstract pontification had yet to find a role in social interaction. It did not prove useful to expound and elaborate when only the most laconic verbiage was needed to locate food sources and pinpoint immediate threats to survival. But despite this paradigm of oral simplicity, there were times when Little Buckle enjoyed the Moon's abstruse prattle.

He was the only one of his people who heard the ringing celestial intonations, which never seemed to stop, but waxed and waned in volume relative to the size and location of the moon. At midnight, when the Moon was at its fullest, Little Buckle would bury his head under a folded skin to escape the pulsing drone. Certain teas, known for their intoxicating qualities, proved to inhibit the lunar receptors in Little Buckle's head, so much that he took to drinking himself to sleep many nights. He found that the Bear Moon, the last moon of the hunt, spoke softest of all the Moons, and on topics so fantastical and impossible that he was able to listen longer than on other nights of the year. On nights when the Bear Moon spoke, Little Buckle would tell Old Woman to wait until the moon was three quarters into the sky to brew the tea made from fermented blackberries, honeysuckle and grapevine shavings.

On nights when the Bear Moon spoke, the other people knew not to disturb Little Buckle. Though they could hear nothing, they could tell to leave him alone when his eyes reflected the stars of distant, unfamiliar galaxies, and when he laughed and shook his head at nothing in particular.

hey bing!

nice scarf, nice hat, nice coat, great pipes...