Read Lips

"It was the same dream again: she sits up in bed and puts her feet on the floor then her socks on her feet; up-to-the-knees widens each of the stripes until taut they then relax and all, not so much as shrink, but relax firm and settle there, each and every of at least 5 colors; a handful of oranges in my eyes and all I feel is blue as I hear her sing so, tinily crying once like smoke falling along an alluvial drift off her lip: Her; "idontcare idontcare idontcare." She shakes her head, and her whole body makes the smallest sound like the squeak of arctic heartbreak; the room is filled with cracks. It keeps holding together for some reason, but for what it is which but dust: it's not the dynamic supercomputer of a rock holding itself together but ash walls waiting to fall on not much of anything. I was so relieved that I didn't care either."
Gordon Shearer -- Home is Where the Heart breaks


"Years ago in rocky mountains of my youth, a burnt-out rainbow approached me with a clipboard in hand and asked for the definition of love, LOVE. Normally dismissive but with time on my hands, I stopped and thought about it: it's a stupid slippery word; maybe not stupid, but clumsy. Obviously every time you feel it is an expansion of your previous definition by the very nature of all one's felt being exactly that and more all the time. "Love is rolling over and baring your soft to the blade." He thought it was grim; I wasn't talking about romance. It's becoming more rare that I can look in someone's eye's and feel they know that I am, know that they are. Miles beyond that, to look in someone's eyes and know they could reach inside you and pull you out on the floor to die before your own eyes a million times is love. Putting your heart in someone's hands is not a cartoon on a greeting card: blood is involved. "My love is not about people hurting each other: it's about when they don't.""
Gordon Shearer Delirious Trembling


Some phone calls remind me of The Moviegoer by Walker Percy; the eponymous Binx Bolling measures out his life in movies like ticks on a calendar: I don't use it to keep time but more to keep rhythm, to chart progress. It seems every exchange with you is a little push forward. I want to hold your hand: I want you in my ear.


I'm distracted, so it's nose-to-the-grindstone. More soon.


If You Only Knew -- Jurassic 5

Baby It's You -- Smith

I've got Blood in my Eyes For You -- Mississippi Sheiks

Johnny is Dead -- Q-Tip

This is where I belong-- The Kinks

Sateen Dura-Lux

Ten versions of After You've Gone...

Al Jolson (1949)

Jaki Byard (1965)

Charlie Parker, Lester Young, et al

Bessie Smith (1927) If you only listen to one, listen to this one...

Nina Simone (1969)

Fats Waller (1930)

Andrew Bird (1999)

Judy Garland (1941)

Fiona Apple (2005)

California Ramblers (1927)

I should have my own ukululu version up once I get that Dm/A7/Dm/Dm7-5/C/E7/Am/D7 part that is like my favorite thing ever.

I fell asleep on my arm until my arm fell asleep

The work speaks for itself far better than I could: while some of this work reminds me of yours, connecting some of these to you would be a stretch. Here goes: stuff I've been looking at over the last few days...

Fertility and Depression

Spring is in the air and my running start is starting to feel like running; maybe it's because Spring is in the air and everyone has a little color in their cheeks, but I feel like writing about smut. I've always loved the pin-up aesthetic and that winsome drift of times-gone-by of which they always seem to reek for me, redolent of quaint innocence and the heartening waft of hope that maybe this one unforeseen time Walt Disney didn't ruin my life by filling my head with dreams of a princess in a tower serving only to leaden my heart in this world filled with dragons. Your daddy's rich: your mama's good-lookin'.


Then again, I feel that lots of smut seemed to have a joie de vivre didn't completely collapse under this pervasive creepiness. Women's lib and political correctness aside, I quote Marlene Dietrich; "In America, sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it's a fact." I would add that movies were better in the 70s, it seems.


Not to appear insensitive about objectification of Women and the representation of an ideal form: on the contrary, the role of gender representation in reaction to and as a continuation of traditional roles; pink for girls and blue is for boys. I've always loved when, paraphrasing the Rolling Stone review of Frank Zappa's We're Only in it for the Money, active participants within a medium fling mercilessly derisive raspberries at the very form itself. As Gordon Shearer said, "Stuff it down their throat. Do it with panache."


I sat in front of the huge sculpture of a pregnant her atop the plinth in Trafalgar square and thought about the Venus de Milo. Michelangelo's slaves are oftend cited as being unfinished works, but I felt as though they should remain trapped uncarved as they're slaves. We're all chained to the stone of form, burdened with nothing but the flesh. The Hunchback of Notre Dame was one of my favorite movies as a boy; it wasn't until I was a teen reading the book that I realized Quasi-modo means partly-formed.


This has been sitting unfinished for a week. Lately I feel like I've been lost in a subdivision and driving fast. Let's just drive right on through the next cul-de-sac. Juxtapositions...


I get in these phases where people seem so remote. I get the feeling, when I look in peoples' eyes, that they don't know that I am, and, by extension, I doubt that they are. I feel like I'm on the moon of another planet doing very important work. I study my array of screens and interpret transmissions through a web of filters.
I was five-years-old in a traffic jam outside of Oklahoma City: my brain exploded with the idea of all the people in all the cars being that; people in cars with lives all their own and consequential experience threads that brought them out in the sun outside of the city, from where and when and which they would all continue on forward. The man in the car next to me was so much older than me. He was with a beard, driving and smoking; and I thought about everything he'd done in his whole life and all he would go on to do: that was one man in one car and I could see dozens of cars; I was certain there were at least hundreds. Someone in one of the cars around us could be a person to whom I was or would be connected by means of a circuitous tangle. The family in the car behind us could be direct descendants of Abraham Lincoln: I pictured the lot of them with stovepipe hats. 100 yards ahead could be a station wagon holding the Great American Hero, a super-villain in a Fiat. The potential of where they'll go just boggled, so I concentrated on their stories. That was the central appeal of Sherlock Holmes to me as a child; his superhuman powers of deduction told him so much more about a person upon first meeting than the rest of us could deduce.
I stumbled over this collection of pictures. I could ramble all day about them, but the story they tell... a thousand words and all that. This guy took a polaroid every day for years and years and years. I thought it was a quirky interesting thing I could skim through, looking for a goofy picture I could post; two hours later I was crying my fucking eyes out. It goes from 1979 to 1997, when he stopped.


Music soon.

Last Played Tag

This is gonna be an all-over-the-place grab-bag of the last few days browsing. I used to cruise lots of German sites to keep up on the Sprache. I'm rusty as all hell, so it took me a bit to dig up this site that I admired so long ago. I was obsessed with lenses and mirrors as a kid, and was always sketching floorplans for rooms which mirrors would appear to double in size and make everything visible. I still geek out when I see the cover for No Pussyfooting. This fondness for optics extended to microscopes; I spent my twelfth summer looking at everything up close.


The the degree of craft displayed in those impresses me almost as the intricacy of form in what are essentially the invisible bits that surround us; I could also get lost staring at this stuff too, though.


Nothing cuts the butter of transcendence like dis-ease, leading to a hot metal transcendence all its own.


I don't know which I like best: spend some time here...


I'm not much of one for video games, but I could spend some time here.


This game makes me feel like I'm playing god.


I'm getting sleepy. Instead of my usual 5 MP3s, I'll just send you five different directions.

moteldemoka

Destination OUT

ear fuzz

Honey, where you been so long?

Blow Up Doll