it take more than a magazine to kill my vibe

You may have already heard about a recent underwhelming Kanye West performance (& it's subsequent underwhelming reception) at Bonnaroo. Ladies & gentlemen, it was just plain rude. Well, judging from his rebuttal Sir West certainly had an entirely different perspective on how all that shit went down. And as you know, you can't tell him nothin'.


"I am sick of negative people who just sit around trying 2 plot my downfall... Why???? I understand if people don't like me because I like me or if people think tight clothes look gay or people say I run my mouth to much, But this Bonnaroo thing is the worst insult I've ever had in my life. This is the most offended I've ever been... this is the maddest I ever will be. I'm typing so fucking hard I might break my fucking Mac book Air!!!!!!!!..."


But really, I wasn't too shocked by this semi-illiterate response from an angry Kanye. The real reason for writing this was to feature a post of someone I really admire/idolize/potentially have a nerd celebrity crush on. And no, it's not Mr. Throw Your Diamonds In The Sky.

Sasha Frere-Jones's letter teaches us (& Kanye West) to take a deep breath & rap all them bad vibes here.

"the internet: we all live there now"

Today's entry title comes from a panel held earlier this month by n + 1 at The Kitchen, which quaintly describes my relationship with the "Net." This is not to be confused with the 1995 Irwin Winkler thriller "The Net" starring Sandra Bullock, although the degree of its executional & metaphorical horrors are perhaps comparable.

As a child of the '90s born on the cusp of World Wide Web project beginnings, I have an understandably voracious appetite for the internet. I would even go as far as saying that my attachment to web-based activities exceeds that of most technologically savvy youths I know. Throughout the past four years, the internet has ruthlessly transformed from a source of swift communication & quick references to the leading mainstay in my daily rituals & customs. Admittedly, this change has immensely affected the ways (& wheres) I live my life.

I have shamelessly sat with good friends in parents's basements (not smoking weed or debating the hefty merits of the lastest Seth-Rogen-inspired movie) but sitting stagnant with separate lap-tops, accompanied only by the sounds of secretarial-speed click-clacks & the occasional "Guffaw."

Leading me to arrive at the latest apogee of online achievements: Facebook. Created like most other networks by University students, it has caused a recent furtive escalation of "face-time" with the internet. Pun indeed intended. With great discomfort, I admit that Facebook gives me yet another reason to cruise the "information superhighway." Comparable to an appetizer & dessert arabesque surrounding my long-winded online buffets - Facebook is my way of saying to the browser both "Heyyyyy, good looking," & "Is it really 4 AM? I really should go & at least try to get tired." And like a buffet, everything consumed from the broad range of choices leaves no distinct or satisfying taste in my mouth.

There have been various attempts to wean myself off this useless incessant need to know if anything has "happened" since last I checked Facebook. I've tried numerous account deactivations, contact-purging, even making a friend change my password (only to have Facebook e-mail me the new one). It's all no use. The toxic habit seems to have seeped into my genetic mapping, placing itself just above the compelling urge to feel the sun on my skin.

My devotion to the internet is not to say that I don't spend time reading (hard-copy) novels, exercising, or interacting with my own species. My fear is that I'm not just losing hours that could be devoted to reading another Nabokov novel, but that the internet has become such a central constituent of my lifestyle leaving potentially productive mind-space being frittered away by too much time in front of a screen; that an internet junkie is no better than a couch potato. I'm not certain how many words or facts I acquire each day - but it's likely they reached me through a podcast, blog or unpredictable hyperlink.


But really, I don't mean to give the "Net" an entirely bad rep. When it's not being abused or acting as the abuser itself, the internet can be a truly wonderful thing. Research that would have taken days in a paper-based library (remember catalogues?) can be reduced to mere minutes using the right URL & keyword. Take for instance Wikipedia, a loosely reliable but very convenient all-encompassing database which has enough respect for our beloved "Net" to make "Internet" a locked entry - something they have yet to do for, say, Milton, Du Bois or Faulkner.

from milwaukee

I was smitten by a pattern-preoccupied instrumental band:

"Collections of Colonies of Bees are precise instrumental math-rockers. They use odd meters and layer on stop-start riffs, with drums snickering in the spaces and then joining the thrust; then, when everyone was riffing together, new guitar lines sudden sprouted like tendrils. Everything was calibrated — the music was as much blueprinted as composed — but there was an edge to the neatness."


That pretty much says it all.


Flocks III - Collections of Colonies of Bees
Fun - Collections of Colonies of Bees

in the ring of life, i'll reign love

I Believe I Can Fly was my Grade 7 graduation song. Regrettably, I haven't been listening to much R. Kelly since then. But this - this counts.

Probably.



Bonnie Prince Billy - World's Greatest (Cover)


I still remember my lamentable solo line:
"I'm leaning on the everlasting arms"

tut-tut, it looks like rain

Winnie The Pooh was my entire world throughout my early schoolgirl years. At the library, I would borrow every book with the darling bear on the cover & developed somewhat of a crush on Christopher Robin (oh, & Eeyore too).

This is absolutely charming; Pooh-bear done gorgeously à la the Russians.

girls jumping off a new river bridge

It sounds like: three broken fingernails, liquid cancer, beauty or violence - I'm not sure which, apologies for abandoning you at the fire tower (in a tender green jacket that never kept you warm).

Matt Bauer's The Island Moved In The Storm is due Sept 2.


Matt Bauer - Don't Let Me Out
Matt Bauer - Rose & Vine
Matt Bauer - You Belong To Me (Cover)

yellow butterflies & scorpions

I can breath out now.


I've finally finished One Hundred Years of Solitude & according to The New York Times, I can now call myself a human being. It is, after all, considered by them to be "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race."

Where was my head before this? What was I thinking? What was I doing? Was I really so preoccupied for these past nineteen years to have, time after time, overlooked this?

To produce any form of a typical "review" would prove audacious, for there were certainly moments when Marquez would describe a feeling & I would root down through his imagery in attempts to evoke the same emotions in myself. More times than I'd like to admit, I couldn't. Not to sound like Don Henley or anything, but I thought I knew what love was - oh boy, what did I know.

I remember wondering (presumptuously) during Love in the Time of Cholera trailers why they wouldn't instead produce a film version of "One Hundred Years of Solitude." & this is in no way to trivialize Marquez's other works, but upon reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude," I quickly realized that it was far too wonderful, filled with far too many dramas born from magic realism to ever be replicated on screen (or, at least, I deeply hope). *

I believe Stanley Kubrick said it best when referring to his adaptation of Lolita as "such a bloody marvelous book that, no matter what, you're fucked. You are doomed to failure." Any director (I don't care if you're even, well, Kubrick) who attempts "One Hundred Years of Solitude" would be condemned to a similar fate.

For me, Marquez's brilliance arises from the ability to write a novel of most unconventional plots, organically streaming from episode to episode that my heart draws them in like varying hues of light, yet my memory mirrors this in glowing white. The details & repeated names have blurred together to produce the distinct scent that is "One Hundred Years of Solitude" to me: the Colonel's small golden fish, Rebeca crouched at night eating dirt & whitewash, the death of a thousand yellow butterflies, Meme's love.

A novel of fantastical incidents speaks seriously of the greatest truths of our civilization, encompassing an entire nation's history through six generations of the Buendía family. & I couldn't imagine a more honest closing sentence:


"He had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."


& my favourite passage:

"That night the guard brought down Mauricio Babilonia as he was lifting up the tiles to get into the bathroom where Meme was waiting for him, naked and trembling with love among the scorpions and butterflies as she had done almost every night for the past few months. A bullet lodged in his spinal column reduced him to his bed for the rest of his life. He died of old age in solitude, without a moan, without a protest, without a single moment of betrayal, tormented by memories and by the yellow butterflies who did not give him a moment's peace, and ostracized as a chicken thief."



* Also - far too incestuous

signs & symbols

The Triumph of Death

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

The Triumph of Death - Detail*

On May 15, 1948, Signs & Symbols became the first Vladimir Nabokov short story published by The New Yorker. It was recently featured again in the monthly fiction podcast of the same magazine, where I encountered it for the first time. In a letter to then chief editor Katherine A. White, Vladimir famously comments that many of his stories function upon a scheme "wherein a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one" (Selected Letters). Simply by reading the title, the reader is tauntingly primed to dissect the symbol-imbued story.

Nabokov's entomological facilities, as suggested by Stephen Gould, stem from an ''almost obsessive attention to meticulous and accurate details" (Vera's Butterflies) that equally influence his literary creations. Like "Lolita" or "The Vane Sisters," "Signs & Symbols" is sedulously & deliberately written such that the synthesist reader may unthread both plot & story.

Throughout sixty years, various possible interpretations of "Signs & Symbols" have surfaced, but perhaps Nabokov never intended for it to possess any fixed meaningful analysis. The actuality of the message behind that third call is irrelevant to what Nabokov is expressing - that the "referential mania" of assigning our own significations places us in a fatal maddening silence.

* Bruegel's painting is described in "Signs & Symbols" as "an idyllic landscape with rocks on a hillside and an old cart wheel hanging from the branch of a leafless tree" (also machinery used for torture).

Read it for yourself here.
Read an interpretation of its arbitrary signs & symbols here.

i was a postcard, i was a record, i was a camera until I went blind

Packing away the warble developed from when he was thirteen, he drove down to Mexico. Passing the dreaming barefoot girls in long necklaces, he was not ashamed to look back.

With the precarious eyes of a poet, Conor Oberst has once again ventured into (semi-new) terrain: Merge Records & a solo album. Backed by the Mystic Valley Band, which consists a few holdovers from Bright Eyes (drummer Jason Boesel, & arranger/multi-instrumentalist Nate Walcott), Oberst self-titled album releases August 5.

No Mike Mogis, no Saddle Creek Records, no Team Love. I've listened to some of this so-called solo work (I was under the impression that Bright Eyes's limelight spilled mostly on Oberst anyway) & I miss the wavering, gnawing sounds of "I'm Awake, It's Morning."

But I'll wait until I hear the full album; maybe I just need to keep my ears closer to the ground.


Conor Oberst & The Mystic Valley Band - Danny Callahan
Conor Oberst & The Mystic Valley Band - Souled Out!!!

& if you say i'm not o.k. we're miles to go

After playing Lykke Li's "I'm Good. I'm Gone" in the car the other day, my father asked my brother whether he liked the song, whereby he sheepishly replied "Yeah, kind of." (the questioner heartily agreed).

My brother is eight. I don't know whether to be horrified, or to just seriously reconsider the whole I-don't-drive deal.

Admittedly, on first listen Li's addictive feathery pop vocals could appeal to even the most unrefined ears (refer to my stylishly-Celine-Dion-listening/pulled-up-white-tube-socks-&-sandals-wearing father).

On second listen, not much has changed. Is there really anything more to her than a perfect combination of catchy choruses, electro base beats, & an endearing pair of Swedish eyes that have been making their appearance on nearly every credible indie-music blog? & when it comes down to it, does there really need to be?

Hailing from the country that has produced some of the best indie* acts of the 21st century (including Peter Bjorn & John, Jens Lekman, Radio Dept, The Knife, Hello Saferide, Robyn, José González, & the ever-so-revered Hell on Wheels) Lykke Li fits charmingly in the genre of, how should I put it, sweet melodies from a cold climate. She's unafraid that her lyrics aren't esoteric enough (as far as cryptic goes - the majority of her home-based fans can't even understand them) & the pure unadulterated joy that filters through her heavily synthesized sound is worried only about singing a good song. I know, it's ridiculous, but what can I say - shit is wild.

Youth Novels, Li's first full album (also check her previous E.P. "Little Bit") was released this past May 6 and has received radiant reviews (from Pitchfork, Stereogum, & my entire immediate family). The production team included Björn Yttling from Peter, Bjorn & John and Lasse Mårtén**.


Lykee Li - I'm Good. I'm Gone (Black Kids Remix)
Lykee Li - Little Bit
Kleerup - Until We Bleed (w. Lykee Li)


*“The Swedish definition of indie has much more in common with the original term: that it is independent music...What would be labeled electronica or some other genre in the UK or the States is defined as indie in Sweden, whereas the music that is actually guitar-based – the post-Oasis pop songs – is considered to be pretty much mainstream.” - Andres Lokko (Swedish music journalist)

**Lasse Mårtén has worked with Celine Dion - my father will be happy to hear.

all of these days & all of these nights - they only prove i've been taking my time

I promised myself I would be in bed by 12:30* as to avoid feeling like a deflated balloon tomorrow at work (you know what I'm talking about), but I made the mistake of fumbling around The Blah Blah's blog. I hit upon Amy Courts & had to pause for a moment to make a quick announcement: she was hurtin' but hey, no one puts baby in a corner. In her semi-confessional lyrics, it's obvious some things may be over - but Courts is just beginning.

Reading her bio, I have to ask myself: what IS it with Christian songstresses? Clearly someone has got it figured out, because they produce the most staggering melodies. Courts's (independently released) sophomore album These Cold and Rusted Lungs is brimming with honesty. It's not surprising considering she wrote all songs but one on the entire album. There's nothing cryptic in her lyrics. Is simple, is genuine, is probably something your aunt would enjoy.

I've always been a bit jealous of throaty voices. They make you want to care about them. I've heard two songs & I already care.

Amy Courts - Breathe
Amy Courts - Inevitable


*Had to post the morning after due to nauseating computer troubles.

ratatat

If Mozart, Herbie Hancock, 45 King, The Unicorns, & their dog Jupiter had survived in the same time period, they would have found each other through happenstance. They would have lived together in an East Indian farm house along the Mahanadi River. They would have composed carnatic melodies while chewing sweet lansa under a mulberry-sunglow sky. They would have sounded something like Ratatat.

Comprised of Mike Stroud, Evan Mast & a laptop (modern man's best friend), Ratatat's musical unpredictability creates sounds both classic & experimental. Known as Cherry until 2001, Ratatat has so far released two albums ("Ratatat," 2004; "Classics," 2006) & two self-released remix/collaboration sets (2004; 2007). They will be releasing their 3rd album LP3 this July 8, with the single Shiller already available for sale in vinyl format.

Ratatat is often criticized for supposed repetitiveness in their synthesized instrumentals - so not surprisingly, some small infamy comes from various commercials spots, fashion catwalks, & even anonymous background tones in movie montages. Yet it's clear to me, the stunning organic growth during the band's short history has led to its arguably most honest (& best) work appearing on LP3. The album features a sense of homecoming as the band draws towards their hip-hop roots & the product shimmers in cinematic lushness (à la Wim Wenders).

Ratatat - Shiller
Ratatat - Imperials
Ratatat - Mirando
Notorious B.I.G. - Party & Bullshit (Ratatat Mix)

"Yes the dream would be to have an entire Ratatat orchestra. 12 guitar players, a full string section, french horns, trombones, flugelhorns, 4 mellotron players, 3 organ and synthesizer players, grand piano, 3 zarbists, 2 percussionists, timpanis, and half a dozen well-trained birds. I think it's quite close to becoming a reality."
- Evan Mast

V.

I am finished organic chemistry, yes.
& I finally figured out how to listen to music without diverting away from the page. Throw. Your. Hands. Up.

Kanye West - Get 'Em High (Ratatat Mix)

Modest Mouse - You're The Good Things

Of Montreal – Make Out, Fall Out, Make Up

I think I will spend the day in bed.*



*Started Thomas Pynchon's "V." & it is fabulous. It is so unlike "The Crying of Lot 49" (despite obvious stylistic similarities). I refuse to read any summaries or reviews because it's far too great right now to have any of that fog & ruin it all.

Ára bátur

Sigur Rós is the first reason I can think of for wanting to understand Icelandic. After hearing the mini in-studio clip they had on their website, I listened through their upcoming album Með suð i eyrum við spilum endalaust (or rather, "with a buzz in our ear we play endlessly") to find which song it belonged to. I finally discovered "Ára bátur" - which was recorded at Abbey Road with the 67-piece London Sinfonietta Orchestra & London Oratory Boy's choir (apparently the same one singing in the Harry Potter films). It was recorded in one take, & comes out nothing less than eight minutes of musical magic (even the voice/range break at 5:51 can't ruin that).

i want you for the better

For a time, I refused to read anything not listed on "The Modern Library's 100 Best Novels." This was O.K. then because hardly anyone else was chewing up stacks upon stacks of "great works" (I admittedly did not really understand) through their summer breaks.

They took me up without knowledge of demands.

Holden Caulfield was introduced to the world over fifty years ago, and I understand why we still love him. He voiced my own teenage sensitivity & angst in ways I never could have without sounding exhibitionist & phony. With a jaded voice, he made me feel hideous, & still - made me feel beautiful to be so ugly.

On his own carousel, Caufield has been reinventing himself for the past fifty-seven years - continuously replaying his past losses, & afraid of future connections. The problem is despite his famous cynicism - he is beyond sensitive and locked in finding who he was - not who he is. We haven't been immortalized in novels, and our presentness is very much real. Rather than fear repeatability - I suppose the best we can do is, well, 1) Fall in love, or 2) Involve involve involve ourselves.

Test: This song should make bring tears, quite literally.
Sigur Rós - Festival

The Call - Regina Spektor

gold cell

I finally came around to watching "Into the Wild" yesterday & was truly inspired to pack my bags, burn my cash & drive my hypothetical car with my hypothetical license by the seaside & hike into Alaska. Unfortunately, I know I could never and will never venture to such immodest ends with nature. I dislike my inherently social nature, but I really am quite captured with the routine of civilization. What I did discover was the magic of Sharon Olds & her insight on motherhood (or, at least, how she articulates it). Here is the poem they featured in the movie. I am thrilled.

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar make of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips back in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it - she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the at May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like male and female
paper dolls and bang then together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

The Islands concert was last night, and although disappointed that Sebastien Grainger did not show up, the performance was still o.v.e.r.w.h.e.l.m.i.n.g.. But I do have to mention - as cute as he is - does Nick Diamond mean to pick at least one fight per concert?

Islands - The Arm
Islands - Volcanoes
Islands - Waterloo Sunset (Kinks Cover)

saving

I've been saving my entire life.

I've saved movie stubs, grocery lists, concert posters, airport parking tickets from significant reunions. I've saved boxes of notes passed on blurred pre-summer afternoons, half-hearted sketches, sole-less shoes & yellow-flowered skirts from my girlhood. I wanted a hobby so I saved stamps, saved candy wrappers, saved glass bottles, saved feathers, saved white stones plucked by the ocean. Because of its tangibility, I used to consider saving tears in a jar without considering their purpose, only their cause. I thought of saving brittle love letters tied in ribbons - the way they showed with silver-haired ladies in movies. They were always smiling so I thought that would be a nice thing to have, later on.

Sometime ago, I discovered I couldn't really save the important things. So I began saving words. I kept them in a bowl with water and all the bitter-pennies-dried-flowers I had accumulated throughout the years. I saved words written in darkness when my father had shut the lights at bedtime (words him and my mother would later take to their bedroom to read), words that were supposed to become novels, words that made pressed dragonflies fold their wings in shame.

I stole and saved, I cried and saved, I lost and saved. Someone would die, and I would save. I'm not certain if it helps, but that's the problem with words - I don't know how to finish the sentence. I never have. So I'll keep on saving until the drawers and basement fill with bowls of copper water. When I run out of space, I'll wash my hands and start again.