Monkeytown has to be the worst venue in Brooklyn. I showed up late and sat in the corner. A balding man was eating the worst smelling mini hamburgers and foie gras. It was gross.
Later I was drinking mezcal and dos equis. Today I'm kinda down.
I am almost done with school (forever/ or for a very long time). I am presenting my senior work on Wednesday! I have class up until the 18th which is my web design final presentation and radio documentary presentation.
Between essays, sound editing, printing and css coding, I've been working on my half of me and Monica's setlist for my SUMMERTTIME (no)BLUES PARTY/ FESTIVAL. The party has had too many names, but what to know is that it is on Saturday the 23rd and goes from 1pm until Sunday afternoon. We already have something like 10 bands playing, mostly noise bands in the backyard starting Saturday afternoon, then when we start up again around 8 or 9 it will be in the basement. My house is gonna fall down.
Monica and I wanted to break up the BK-centricity and all the noise, so we will be paying our respects to the dirty bits we came from---> MIA and ATL respectively. The setlist is gonna be heavy on southern rap throwbacks and dub (because its summertime.) I won't be saying anything else about it, but here is a preview of some jamz:
Romantic love was invented to manipulate women -Jenny Holzer
Is this true?
No.
My brain is flaking.
My body is sore like I went running; I definitely did not. Instead of going Upstate, I found another way not to. I think it had to do with the rain.
I did buy heavy bags of potting soil at Home Depot and dragged it all back home. I saw some guy with dreadlocks that touched the cement floor when I was buying a handsaw. I wish I could have remembered his name, or at least something else about him besides his hair, from when we worked together at the library. So we just kind of nodded when we saw eachother.
I am almost embarrassed, but not
by this-
I was in my bed: in front of a 10-ft window with no curtain, and I watched 'We Are Wizards' on Hulu. The entire thing. It is a few years old and all about 'wizard rock', bands with HP themes. Harry and the Potters, Draco and the Malfoys, the Whomping Willow, etc. All their fans are 7-year-olds or young and greasy girls, which is kind of amazing. To be musician with a predefined shelf-life like that. Like an open jar of mayonnaise.
But Brad Neely was also in the movie. He said lots of funny things and was proud (and probably lying) when he said he had never read the books. Neely said he liked the movies a lot, mostly HP no. 2. He rescripted the movies and made 'adult audio tracks' to play against the muted movie if you time it just right.
I still havn't seen these- maybe one day soon, maybe the next time it rains.
Before you watch that, you should read this. I used my incredible skills honed from writing out Stephen Malkmus and Mike Watt transcriptions for VBS to capture this glory:
"Dear Diary,
Sometimes I think that this planet is owned by devils,
Sometimes I feel like my friends don't even know who I am
And my family belongs to some other me.
Sometimes, I need to be one with nature,
I want to frolic with the polycorns
and run amongst the braintrees, in the brain forest.
So I go to the city park by the lake.
Walking potion: 10 parts sugar, 90 parts whiskey.
If it's cold out, I take a bag of chowder,
And in the summer, I take a bag of banana chowder.
Once there, I look for the dream girls,
And I see the day-mares
And the talking shadows, bonding over disgusting things.
I see the perfects, and the lay-downs, and the hunched-ups.
I watch the followers looking for punch meat (?) ,
And I notice the pansexuals, wiggling down the lane,
with their shades on.
Sometimes, if I'm fast enough, I catch a glimpse of the brainfucker,
Just fuckin the shit out of everyone- and we don't even know it.
But mostly, I look for the dream girls,
You know, if you try sometimes,
You just might find, get what you want.
I have a big coat, with big pockets.
Sometimes, kittens get in there,
It's cool with my as long as they keep their hooksocks curled.
I look for wizard turds in the forest because I was once told they could be rolled into gold.
Sometimes I go to the lake and sing songs to the lake about the lake,
Once, a goose clapped.
Today on the road I saw something important,
I like to think they died while hugging, and that a person hadn't arranged them afterwards.
I found a soft tree and leaned up there, until the stars put on their make up.
I calmed down and focused my Chi, it's good to have a Chi hammer on the ready.
Then, I saw a second important thing that night, hmm.
Ray Davies, what do you mean to voyeurism and what does voyeurism mean to you?
But I don’t need no friends, as long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset, I am in paradise. -Waterloo Sunset, The Kinks
... after glimpsing a colorful boy running down the streets. The boy was chasing a large red ball that was propelling itself down an alleyway and away from a grubby mob of French-spouting children. The boy was the balloon’s friend, but the other children were jealous and chased the balloon and tried to harm it by throwing stones. Eventually the red balloon meets a crowd of other Technicolor balloons and together they float away in silent concert to the top of the sky.
That was the first time I saw Albert Lamorisse's 1956 The Red Balloon (Le ballon rouge.)
Yet, this is my personal account of a sentimental attachment to a work of art—the love of a spectator. I am a pedestrian, a student, an amateur photographer and an audience member. What is more interesting to analyze is the indissoluble and unexplainable relationship between an artist and their creation. Just as I have found my connection to The Red Balloon to be extraordinarily rare, it is the same for artists.
...It’s the artworks that are never completed to satisfaction, or never seen shown before the death of an artist that have the most significance in one's life.
...Ray Davies songs are short, at around 2:30 and combine definitively '60s British electrified-rock with head-bobbing pop rhythms. His work uses personal narrative to capture the smallest, but most enjoyable moments in of life: the scenes we witness from a window, meeting a mysterious woman, getting over a lover or watching the daily rush hour traffic when you are not a part of it. These songs are in fact stories about the small minutes of happiness, infatuation and nostalgia that make up our lives.
“Waterloo Sunset” is written from the point of view of a man staring out the window onto the Waterloo Bridge connecting the East and West sides of London over the River Thames. Davies sings, but I don’t need no friends, as long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset, I am in paradise. He spies a young couple, Terry and Julie, and everything in the world seems to be at peace as long as they are in love, as they are in that moment.
By the end of the song we do not learn who Terry and Julie are, or if they are even real. It is not necessary to know the identity of the lovers in order to understand the bliss of their meetings. Davies has offered many contradicting identities for Terry and Julie, recorded in interviews and his autobiography. ...But the song is widely thought to be about Terence Stamp and Julie Christie, British film stars that were once a high profile romantic couple—even Christie acknowledges that the song is about her and Stamp. Could be the mystery that preserves this song as a timeless story about finding connection in the London’s swarming metropolis? If so, is Ray Davies doing a service to his work by protecting the subject’s true identities?
The cynic might hear “Waterloo Sunset” as a mundane observation of everyday urban traffic patterns. But the song has been proclaimed “a masterpiece” by The Who’s Pete Townshend and "the most beautiful song in the English language" by music critic Robert Christgau. ...In 1985, Return to Waterloo, a soundtrack to a self-directed and written film of the same name was released by Davies. The title is a direct reference to the 1967 song, but the story takes a more dystopian perspective on London street life, while still playing on public voyeurism, imagination, exploring a relationship to the city of London. Davies’ song "Return to Waterloo" concerns the struggles an aging man’s dreams of a return to the world of his youth. Another 15 years later, in 2000, Davies published Waterloo Sunset Stories, a collection of short stories titled exclusively after Kinks songs. The autobiographical stories revolve around an aged rock musician, Les Mulligan, and a cynical promoter planning his comeback.
...I have experienced unexplainable echoes of art, film, and literature—a result of what I can only assume is a deep personal connection to a work. Such as my love for an old French children’s movie about a boy chasing a balloon, or the songs that stick themselves to the insides of all our heads, or the books we continue to read over and over. Artists have similar relationships to their own work, as there are enduring forces that connect the creator his creation. For some, a particular story is perennially created, expanded, destroyed, and redigested over an entire career. Artists are able to dedicate themselves to a story with many endings, just as Davies is connected to “Waterloo Sunset”. ...
A name taken mostly from Phil Elverum's (The Microphones) Song Islands album.
It is also a piece of a Korewori proverb I read in my favorite section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The New Galleries for Oceanic Art is behind Egypt, and also faces Central Park. It is filled with wooden canoes, shields, and statues of primordial ancestors from Polynesia, Micronesia, and Papua New Guinea. All of the bodies of the statues are tall and thin, filled with holes, and covered with mythological animals and painted abstract designs. I am going to try and go back this week and find the quote I read about the 'songs of the islands' and take pictures of the ceiling. The center of the ceiling is covered with a tide of wooden panels that were once part of a ceremonial house.
Canoe Prow 19th–early 20th century Middle Sepik, Iatmul Papua New Guinea, Middle Sepik River Wood, cowrie shells L: 71 1/2 in. (181.6 cm) The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Purchase, Nelson A. Rockefeller Gift, 1955 1978.412.705
"Crocodiles play a central role in the art and culture of the Iatmul people. According to one Iatmul creation account, an ancestral crocodile was responsible for forming the land. In the beginning, the earth was covered by a primordial ocean, into whose depths the crocodile dived. Reaching the bottom, it brought up on its back a load of mud, which became an island when it surfaced. From that island, the land grew and hardened, but it continues to rest on the back of the ancestral crocodile, which occasionally moves, causing earthquakes. Both now and in the past, the prows of most sizeable canoes are carved, as here, in the form of a crocodile. The scale of the present work indicates that it probably adorned a large war canoe, capable of holding from fifteen to twentyfive men. These large canoes, hollowed from a single massive log, were also used for trading and fishing expeditions. Although canoes are no longer used in warfare, contemporary Iatmul carvers continue to make large examples for use in trade and general transportation."
It could also be a moment like lighting a cigarette from a stove burner while it is still in your mouth and simultaneously catching your hair on fire and then laughing about it with your neighbor who did the same thing.
Now you're gone, I won't fall, fall in the fire Oh no, I am lacking, I want what I see
My friend Monica works for Clayton Patterson and has been editing the companion book to the CAPTURED documentary. She is amazing and has been working real hard. So you had better get your hands on a copy when it comes out and if you can make it to this screening too, cool.
breakfast
sublime frequencies
if i can pay my rent this month, the next thing im gonna do is invest in a drug rug
and some lip liner
louise bourgeois
no wake. save the manatees.
