Don't Think Twice It's All Right (Bob Dylan cover)

I've been practicing lately exclusively in D-A-D-F#-D-D tuning; the idea is that by restricting myself to an unfamiliar tuning, I will be forced to change my own perspective and find new ways of voicing chords and moving melodies around the neck. On this particular video, I have a capo on the second fret--making this the key of E--mainly to make that Richie Havens thumb wrap fingering of the F#7 on that second fret a little easier on myself. Anyway, there're admittedly a lot of mistakes in this video, but it is what it is and you get the idea blah blah blah...

I hate myself...

...and by "I hate myself," I mean I hate people who use their blogs to disseminate vapid pictures of pretty celebrities looking all vain and shit posing for the camera but God DAMN, Meryl Streep is super-mega, make you want to blow your brains out hot in Manhattan. That is all.

Watching this just opened up the wellspring of every tear I ever cried as a child. If you've got six minutes and a box of tissues at hand, you'll enjoy this.

Thom Yorke's DJ set at the TKOL RMX 1234567 release party:

I have infinite, forever love for Thom Yorke. Just look at that little wild man beast out.

I think I'm in love...

This girl is amazingly talented. She should be on SNL or something.

I'm a doucher

I realize that posting this makes me a huge doucher, but I can't resist. This "achievement" needs to be recorded for posterity: I just hit a mother-fucking thousand facebook "friends".

Katherine Larson :: Love at Thirty-Two Degrees

I

Today I dissected a squid,

the late acacia tossing its pollen

across the black of the lab bench.

In a few months the maples

will be bleeding. That was the thing:

there was no blood

only textures of gills creased like satin,

suction cups as planets in rows. Be careful

not to cut your finger, he says. But I’m thinking

of fingertips on my lover’s neck

last June. Amazing, hearts.

This brachial heart. After class,

I stole one from the formaldehyde

& watched it bloom in my bathroom sink

between cubes of ice.

II

Last night I threw my lab coat in the fire

& drove all night through the Arizona desert

with a thermos full of silver tequila.

It was the last of what we bought

on our way back from Guadalajara—

desert wind in the mouth, your mother’s

beat-up Honda, agaves

twisting up from the soil

like the limbs of cephalopods.

Outside of Tucson, saguaros so lovely

considering the cold, & the fact that you

weren’t there to warm me.

Suddenly drunk I was shouting that I wanted to see the stars

as my ancestors used to see them—

to see the godawful blue as Aurvandil’s frostbitten toe.

III

Then, there is the astronomer’s wife

ascending stairs to her bed.

The astronomer gazes out,

one eye at a time,

to a sky that expands

even as it falls apart

like a paper boat dissolving in bilge.

Furious, fuming stars.

When his migraine builds &

lodges its dark anchor behind

the eyes, he fastens the wooden buttons

of his jacket, & walks

outside with a flashlight

to keep company with the barn owl

who stares back at him with eyes

that are no greater or less than

a spiral galaxy.

The snow outside

is white & quiet

as a woman’s slip

against cracked floorboards.

So he walks to the house

inflamed by moonlight, & slips

into the bed with his wife

her hair & arms all

in disarray

like fish confused by waves.

IV

Science—

beyond pheromones, hormones, aesthetics of bone,

every time I make love for love’s sake alone,

I betray you.

North Korea Party Rock Anthem ft. Kim Jong Il

2

I like imagining the beginning most--before time existed, where every atom that ever was was condensed into a point of infinite density, before some spark expelled everything that would ever become anything, including our selves, ever further outward into the vast, empty loneliness of space. I imagine it inevitable the sun will, far off somewhere in our unimaginably distant, postmortem future, collapse into a neutron star, pulling us back to the start of things, together, again.

My 9/11 Anthem...

Stevie Wonder doing "Blowin' in the Wind" at the age of 16.



I love this, despite this version's omission of the third verse lines, my favorites: "how many deaths will it take 'til God knows / that too many people have died?"

Pray for peace, everyone. One love.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal does it again.

Mary Ruefle :: A Little White Shadow

Dorothea Grossman :: I have to tell you

I have to tell you,
there are times when
the sun strikes me
like a gong,
and I remember everything,
even your ears.

Horrible

This is the reason the terrorists hate us.

The Aurora Borealis...FROM SPACE!

This is what the Northern lights look like from the international space station.

Hooray Science!

Is this what it looks like to be on acid?

God Damn It

Dear reader, please don't be offended by my impending use of foul language: sometimes you just gotta use strong words to convey equally strong feeling.

But Jesus fucking Christ, some of you assholes are annoying the shit out of me on Facebook, and it has to fucking stop. I'm only talking to the particular subset of IQ-challenged, dumbfuck "friends" of mine who "like" pages with names like "Wonderful Heels on Sale", "Sexy Heels on Sale", "High Heels!", "Your Next Shoes", "Shoe Fetish Boutique", and well...I could go on seeing as there are approximately eleventy billion more such pages--none of whose names in the preceding list did I make up, mind you--but well, since reading isn't likely to be one of your strong suits, I imagine a little forced brevity can only help my cause.

Look, I get that in order to make it through this thing we call reality, people need to have stupid interests/hobbies/pursuits to occupy their time, lest they go crazy. Lord knows I've got my own: sports, fantasy sports, watching cat videos on youtube, and poetry, to name but a few. Christ, I've even touched on the subject of the importance of stupid interests/hobbies/pursuits on this very blog before, as I did towards the end of this essay I wrote following Sean Taylor's (rest his soul) untimely passing. But I'm not the asshole who clogs up people's news feeds with bullshit every time a God damned fantasy player of mine scores a fucking touchdown, either. I keep that shit to myself.

I grant you: you're more than likely unaware that you're being such an obnoxious fucking nuisance--but you've been duped; you're a shill and you don't even know it. This recent Atlantic Wire article talks about the scary and very real possibility that in the near future, facebook will feature even more prevalent advertising than it has already, and you're such a stupid asshole that you're basically letting shoe stores whore you into a virtual fucking sandwich board, right the fuck now, for free.

You see, Forrest, whenever your facebook buddy, good ol' Miss Shoe Fetish Boutique, "tags" you as a picture of 7 inch Louboutin stilletos made of hope and dreams, I am, as is EVERY OTHER "FRIEND" of yours, forced to look at the same God damned picture of what are in the end a terrible, terrible bastardization of the Platonic ideal of "Hey! Let's put things on the bottoms of our feet so we can move around better and not get hurt!" Did you know that wearing high heels can cause turf toe, the injury so named because it's prevalent amongst athletes who play football? Didn't think so...

Anyway, I've been on facebook so long that I remember when you could only join the site if you had an email address with an '.edu' at the end of it. And I'm tired of fucks like you doing your best to trash it up and turn it into God damned, ugly-ass myspace, lowering the hivebrain's collective IQ and shit. In closing, I'd just like to say that if I've offended you by writing this, I'd recommend doing what I do whenever I see your shoe-porn: click the little 'x' in the upper right corner of this post on facebook and select the "Hide all updates from this person" option.

Good day, madam.

Outlier's JP on Australia's Got Talent :: Down Under

As a rule, I avoid music-based reality competition type shows; I often feel like their audiences don't have too much of an idea of what "good" music actually is, and oftentimes the winners seem chosen more on physical appearance than talent. That said, it's pretty much impossible to deny the awesomeness of this guy's performance right here. Makes me want to ditch my RC-2 for an RC-50 and get my ass to practicing.

Albert Goldbarth :: Myth Studies

Myth Studies

The custodian erases whatever simple biology
lesson was on the blackboard: BIRTH.
It's only a several-seconds glimpse I've had
through a door on my way to the car, but enough
for me to think of him as the Saint
of First-Time Mothers. What I mean is,
after the walls split, and the screams stopped,
and Atlantis disappeared, another Atlantis
--the one we carry in our heads, of scented gardens
and ornate avenues--fills the emptiness.
I've seen it in my friends: the terrible
pelvis-wrenching pain is at an end, and then
some chemical washes the mind, and creates
the blankness of fresh possibility.

I Heart Miranda July

Miranda July is one of my favorite artists in the world today. I say 'artist' because in addition to her most well-known work, the film "Me And You And Everyone We Know"*--which she wrote, directed and acted in--she is also a great writer of short stories and a brave-ass performance artist who's done her shit at the fucking Guggenheim.

She has a new film premiering in DC this Friday. It's called "The Future" and though it features a talking cat narrator and an anthropomorphized moon, it looks like it'll be fantastic, at least to me it does--it's getting a fair amount of Twitter hate right now, but who cares about that, really? Anyway, I'm going to see it with a friend on Sunday, and in my excitement I've been relentlessly watching Miranda July clips on youtube, which I will now share with you.

Here is the trailer for the film...



followed by an awesome out-take therefrom about how to be creative...



and also a nice short film she made back in 2005 with John C Reilly, Mike White, and a fellow named Chuy Chavez. It's called "Are You The Favorite Person Of Anybody?"



*MaYaEWK ranks EASILY amongst my top-5 favorite films of all time. SEE IT if you haven't. It's perfectly lovely.