“Gallon of wine costs $1 my grand paisano. I trust not too rich even for your blood. Listen, brother, you share this wine, and I’ll give you a canary. A beautiful green and yellow bird that sings the day away. It will keep you company at night, even as the wind howls most fiercely. You share your plenty of wine and I give you the gift of beauty. Of song! This is something which does not fade like drunkenness but keeps you as warm. I caught it yonder in the pine forest. It’s pining to return — but it should be enjoyed by the townspeople. By you! You who have such an ear for musak.”
“Can I eat a canary?”
“Hmm. Wouldn’t say I’ve heard of any paisanos who’d ett a canary before. I reckon no. It’s just a small thing. No meat.”
“Then I shall buy this wine … and drink of it myself. Now get offa’ my stoop.”
“I do reckon, though, that certain persons, down yonder there — that house where the railroad lantern hangs afront. You see it. The red one. I reckon some misses might take a shining to a pretty, singing canary.”
“I’m buying the wine. Take the gallon. Now hand over the tweeter.”
”Mrs. Johnson … I’m not sure how to tell you this.”
“Oh my God!” — a shriek.
“Yes. I hate to break it to you. Your husband … he’s developed an autoimmune condition that the medical community has yet to cure. He’s come down … with satire. He’s incurably silly.”
Sobbing. “No! No!” … incomprehensible moaning. “It’s the end of the road. Who is going to run the mortuary!”
“All we can offer are these happy pills. Make sure he takes three of these rectally every day — one with each meal. We’re theorizing, currently, that it may be akin to giving an ADD patient Ritalin. By treating the silly with happiness, we can hope to knock them down to at least goofy.”
Voice 1: You need to secure a future. Don’t you want a wife and kids and a pedigreed dog, and a lovely little house?
Voice 2: Think of all the responsibility — imagine having to smile at neighbors and go in to do some job behind a desk week after week — and smile at coworkers and attend dinner parties. Wouldn’t it be better to scrape a living off whatever, rent a loft in Brooklyn, scribble writing by day and attend parties by night?
Voice 1: But the kids — the wife — the money — the shiny car — the lawn clippings — morning omelets — report cards on the refrigerator.
Voice 2: That’s not who you are — live on the outside — on the fringe — deal with losers and two-timers — go into dive bar after dive bar — be proud polishing a bicycle with a dirty sock. You don’t need the complications or agitation of a middle class cycle.
Voice 1: Don’t be sucked in by the sentiment of reckless youth — you have fifty years ahead of you — in another ten years you could be a father and have a successful career — not some wasted brain wishing away sorrows in some dark hive.
Voice 2: You’ll never be happy answering as an employee — you’ll resent every second of it — you’ll drive yourself insane with worry — every day you’ll think about that one week in August when you can take the family car to the ocean. Is that what you want from life? A week by the ocean and fifty chained to a loop of earning money? Let’s write stories! Let’s meet offbeat people, dream up schemes and new ways of living. New societies, new planets — build impossible buildings to alight hope in the hearts of the ones already given to drudgery.
Voice 1: Don’t settle for complacency — you need to work to be successful — to be anything in life — you have to jump through the hoops. You can’t just become a bum.
Voice 2: Living a nontraditional life is not self complacency — it’s an active pursuit of something other. Buying the house and working the 9 to 10 — that’s the self-complacency. That’s the slow death. That’s the purgatory. Uncertainty and exploration — that is living — burn the hoops. The business suits are the bums.
Voice 1: It’s not true.
Voice 2: Yes it is! The business suits are the bums!
Voice 1: Think of the fine things. Think of the humidor and the wine cellar. The expensive treadmill with a television attached.
Voice 2: Think of working towards something grand. Think of turning away from the meaningless bullshit — you could travel the world. Work as a hand on a ship and settle down on a beach somewhere where palm trees grow. You could start a farm. A vineyard. Write write write. Go to the Costa del Sol — open a used book shop — go to New Zealand and work with the film industry there. Get out! Get out! Forge your own existence. On your one terms!
Voice 1: But the family … providing comfort …
Voice 2: It’s possible here too.
Voice 1: No.
Voice 2: Yes.
Voice 1: The future is terrifying.
One rose’s petals may be untouchable in their flawlessness — the most perfectly formed rose petals to ever alight within this wistful and ephemerally delicate sphere; what constitutes worth, though, memory for memory, synapse to tear duct, are not shapely petals, but a history of rich nectar shared with a bumblebee. The buzzing bee may have no thoughts for this perfect rose — his rose may be asymmetrical and lacking in hue — but its nectar is its nectar, and the bumblebee is the one to pollinate it. This other rose’s nectar may be the sweetness the buzzing insect craves.
Though they are both fleeting lives. One as short as the other. The faded rose and the buzzing bee. And the perfect rose looks on imperiously. Though its death, too, shall be quick to thunder.
It is all alone in eternity.
The bee’s longing for its faded bloom is not as temporary as its body. Not as fleeting as a rose. It is something that endures, through the very epochs of this world. Something like the moon, hanging sentient and silent, always there.
And why, yes, the bumblebee and its faded rose have no need of time. No need of legacy. They existed together — time and place immaterial. Their universe not parallel — not apart — but singular and utterly theirs. They existed together, death no hurdle.
A kiosk of discs is no replacement / no matter how many hours of laughs they might contain / for an anonymous glance from a memorable passerby ||| how it ends? a going by and thinking one might later try? (A shelf of books is a photograph of a concept in return of an audio tape of a smile — meaningless without context)
[and scintillating style before a mirror / as if a hermit in a vacuum]
and so we smile and bridge a communicational error /
The minutemen trod on faded lace with dirty boots / there is no removing such a stain / nor mending such rends /
dirty cutlery / stale perfume in the parlor / delicate furniture — the very picture of that docility in domesticity /
where’s the place for the minutemen, in faded tapestry rooms?
Remember it is silly to find dreaming silly and just take a bike to Amsterdam (Taken with instagram)
This is the debut album, “Into The Trees”, of One Little Plane, a new act out of Brooklyn. Great sound, and Colin Greenwood of Radiohead is doing some bass on it.
From The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch
+100% pneumoniaCure|||catatonic state dancing along the rim of a vase (rhyming with gauze) with committee-backed financial stability / rid the gentry of pity and contain the cartoon city bulletins / the madness is spreading, via the airwaves: perhaps you have seen, with your silver spine, the caricature of the lifelong judges projected upon the low storm cloud cover__better to return the cashed checks and void the ledgers__fudge the ghostly audit: turn inside out with thoughts of a 14 foot spear reaching from the time of Ajax (the great or lesser)__the planet has seen thousands of generations of generational-gene-beings_and still you adapt to the pleasing pleas of orgy__lordy musey kinda lumping_sexing fer the right to take the rights_pluck feather, tanning leather__they say the book burning gathering ashes are sprinkled into the jetstream.
Kettles screaming and the door’s locking — are you joking?
take a cold shower of culture__take a cold shower of culture /
The guide washed his tangled, curly hair in the brook with a few deft splashes of the icy cold flowing water. He applied a paste that smelled faintly of sickly citrus to the wet mane and threw his head back, pointing his chin towards the mountain tops. They were faintly blue-grey in the late afternoon, dying light. They loomed as guarders of the gloom, beyond the deer-picked, foggy fields.
“Who’s that there beside me?” he barked as I took a step closer to catch a better whiff of the odd, fruity scent that hung in the air from his unorthodox soap, if it was a soap of any kind, that is.
“Just William.”
“Ah, I thought perhaps it was Polly.”
“Who is Polly?”
“She was a woman I knew once.” He dropped his black hair back into the burbling water, letting it wash away the additive. There were no suds running out.
“Long ago?”
“Forever.”
I do not know his story, but he has turned to being a monk since then. He has hung up his gun and picked up a stirring rod. He stirs beer-mash at the brewery in the Burringlee Monastery on the top of Mt. Chuuring. It’s said his hair is still black, but his beard is going a bit grey.
His beard looms above the beer, as his grey mountain above the hungry deer. I’ve not heard a word from him for five years.
In a rugged land, where panthers crawl and wolves gather around the cozy cabins. Perhaps Polly is a mother and a wife, somewhere in the wooded valley, putting a kettle on the stove … in a little cozy cabin.
| Someone: | May the Fourth be with you all! |
| Me: | It's not PC to make light of jedi speech impediments, even if they've gone to the dark side of the Firth. |
Peter & Martin in Bag End
So, the story:
This morning I saw that Sigur Ros was premiering a new song on BBC radio. It was at 5:30 in the morning over here in the U.S. and I wanted to record the streaming premier for a friend of mine. I captured the audio, uploaded it to Soundcloud, and linked it to my friend’s Facebook.
Less than an hour later a Dutch blog, http://www.overmuziek.net/2012/04/stream-sigur-ros-varud/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter, linked to my Soundcloud upload of the track. From there Pitchfork Media linked to it, and it spread to dozens of music blogs and news websites from there, including the Huffington Post.
Sometime when all this was happening I went to sleep. After all, I am a college junior, and it does happen to be finals week (I’m working extremely hard, *wink*). When I woke up I saw that Sigur Ros had contacted me directly, asking a few minor edits to the info on the track. I of course had been sleeping when they requested this, so the file was hidden. I sent Soundcloud the message from Sigur Ros, and boom, the file is back up. Sigur Ros then sent me another message, thanking me for the edits I made to the track info (I specified, in the title, that it is only a “radio edit” and linked to the band’s official website: http://www.sigur-ros.co.uk/ ).
I have then, in effect, been given rights, by arguably one of the best bands in the world, to stream a track that will not be released for another month. Valtari, the album, is one of the most highly anticipated LPs of the year. Varúð sounds great — I’m really looking forward to it. If paradise has a soundtrack, it’s composed by these Icelandic masters.
So yeah, you could say I have mad indie cred.
