Ballboy: Born in the USA
Sufjan Stevens: The Star-Spangled Banner
The Damnwells: God Bless America

I'll let you finger her for a dollar

A man walks into a talent agent's office with his family and says, "Have I got an act for you. We're a family act."

This family, mother, father, four kids. It doesn't matter if they're boys or girls, they're gonna be used anyway as nothing more than a hole. This is what this joke is about anyway, using your kids ... they've got a paper route, they go to school, and then you fuck 'em.

And the agent's like, "What do you do?" and the father goes, "Watch us."

He rips off his wife's bra. Then he rips off her underwear and he takes some of her pubes with it. It's awful and some blood starts dripping down her leg. He takes the tampon and throws it at the window and it sticks. They start going down on each other in all different kinds of combinations -- there's 69, there's 29 cause the kids are young, there's 9.

The father bends the kid over the guy's desk and starts taking him from behind, which isn't right. I just want to say right now: if you're having sex with your family I don't condone it. I think it's wrong. I've done a lot of PSAs. Do NOT fuck your family.

So they're all fucking each other, right.

All of a sudden the kid can't take it, diarrhea starts shooting out of his ass. It's like a hemmorhaging shit-ass. The kid starts spinning in a circle cause he can't control it. It's like Curly in the Stooges. "Moe, Larry, the cheese!" The projectile shit is just flying out of him, it's going all over the room, it's like spin-art. You don't know whether to shit or puke in this room, that's how --

laugh

What the fuck am I doing?

The agent stares at the man and says, "What the hell do you call an act like that?"

"The Aristocrats!"

(Bob Saget)

Dusty Springfield: Breakfast in Bed
KT Tunstall: My Doorbell
Magnetic Fields: All My Little Words
Heather Nova: Like Lovers Do

this thing that's like talking

When I left the South, I'd get some place like Amsterdam Holland or Tel Aviv Israel, some place like that, and suddenly it'd smell like the South.

Someone would say something or I'd see a tree or some gentle moment would sneak up on me, and I'd remember the value of what I couldn't find when I was here. Until you've walked away from it, you can't see it.

And I decided I'm gonna become a Southerner. As best I can. I will never be a Southerner. I'll be this imitation of a Southerner. But in a way I feel that brings me closer to God. 'Cause I've chosen -- it's almost a form of divinity, I've chosen my divinity, rather than my divinity choosin' me.

(Jim White)

Louis Armstrong: Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?
Iron & Wine: Southern Anthem
Sun Kil Moon: Carry Me Ohio
Silver Jews: I'm Getting Back Into Getting Back Into You
Pink: 18 Wheeler
The Dresden Dolls: Sing
Bob Dylan: Tangled Up In Blue
XTC: Summer's Cauldron

all we wanna do is make you bounce

Now cousin, here in the city we do not shout and whistle at the ladies.

(Tex Avery's City Wolf)

Monifah: Touch It
Jim White: That Girl From Brownsville Texas
Space: Female of the Species
Roxette: Joyride (MTV Unplugged)
Tom Jones: Black Betty

Add Legend Tripping to your LiveJournal friends list.

the perfect gun confers omnipotence

To emerge from isolation can be disorienting. Everything looks bright, new, vivid. The sound of the pickup flustered me. Longing for human company, I felt a foolish grin take over my face; yet I had to resist an urgent temptation to run and hide.

People hold back their thoughts in what seems to be a dumbfounded silence, then erupt with an excoriating perceptive remark. Language, so compressed, becomes metaphorical. A rancher ended a relationship with one remark: "You're a bad check."

(Gretel Ehrlich)

Jim White: Static on the Radio
Kelly Hogan: Papa Was A Rodeo (Magnetic Fields cover)
Go Home Productions: The Weather Episode (Snoop & Dre vs Crowded House)
LHB: No Transmission
MC 900 Ft Jesus: Dali's Handgun

6/6/06

All human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

(Blaise Pascal: the mathematician-physicist who abandoned both pursuits in favor of theology, following his mystical experience.)

The first use of zero (0) as a decimal digit (such as that preventing the date from being 6/6/6) occurs in The Opening of the Universe, a seventh century Indian poem about arithmetic. It was introduced to the West by Arabs in the same commingling of cultures that exchanged Crusades, alchemy, and pistachios. The Arabs returned to the West its ancient texts, from Aristotle to Zeno, philosophical and scientific writings that inspired the Renaissance in general and Pascal specifically.

In the centuries separating the introduction of the western zero from Pascal's mystical moment, both the common man and the philosopher were slow to adopt zero as a number, thinking of it more like we think of a decimal point or an accent mark. By Pascal's time, it had become part of normal math, nonrevolutionary math, even as the old modes of faith -- in which one argued not whether God was, but whither -- eroded. (Another troublesome i had already split the Eastern and Western churches before retiring to live a life as a square root. With the help of irrational pi, i and e finally came to terms in Euler's identity: e^iπ + 1 = 0. But by then, God was nearly dead, as announced in [the April] 6/66 [issue of] Time.) It would not be long before God took zero's place as a placeholder, a decimal digit, filling a space to prevent the confusion any other occupation would cause: Pascal's reasoned approach to theology was one of the building blocks of Deism, Enlightenment theology, pre-fundamentalist America.

Ladytron: True Mathematics

Apoptygma Berzerk: Fade To Black

Dobie Gray: Drift Away

Thirteen Senses: Into the Fire

Nina Gordon: Tonight And The Rest Of My Life

Me: SBR. This is a little -- at nearly eleven minutes, not so little -- thing I cobbled together some five or six years ago, and I never got around to revising it. It's flawed in a number of ways -- I'm not a musician even in the sense of having a good ear for things -- but there's always been something I've liked about it and it fits here.

that book by nabokov

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

(Vladimir Nabokov)

Louis Armstrong: "I Want A Little Girl"
Marilyn Monroe: "My Heart Belongs To Daddy"
Alizee: "Moi Lolita"
From Autumn To Ashes: "Lilacs and Lolita"
Marlene Dietrich: "I'm the Naughty Lolita"
Noir Desir: "Lolita Nie En Bloc"
Puhdys: "Lolita"
Serge Gainsbourg with Charlotte Gainsbourg: "Lemon Incest"
Suzanne Vega: "Lolita"
Louchie Lou and Michie One: "Don't Stand So Close To Me"

the argument

I dont remember just when it was, I was probably pretty young, when I realised that I had come from what you might call a family, a clan, a race, maybe even a species, of pure sons of bitches. So I said, Okay, okay, if that's the way it is, we'll just show them. They call the best of lawyers, lawyers' lawyers and the best of actors an actor's actor and the best of athletes a ballplayer's ballplayer. All right, that's what we'll do: every Snopes will make it his private and personal aim to have the whole world recognise him as THE son of a bitch's son of a bitch.

(William Faulkner)

Shriekback: "Bastard Sons of Enoch"
The Drive-By Truckers: "Wife Beater"
Warren Zevon: "Dirty Life and Times"
Jim White: "God Was Drunk When He Made Me"

#

First entry. I'm not a music expert by internet standards; if you're already reading five music blogs regularly, there's probably not much new I'm going to introduce you to. I'm posting music I like that fits a certain thing, a certain shape in my head -- I don't want to articulate it, because articulating's what I do for a living, and I'd rather this be for other things.

But I'll probably ... particulate it here and there.

Me, briefly:

31 years old by the time most anyone sees this, indie/alternative brat as a teenager listening to WFNX in Boston, lately into alt.country(whateverthatis) and rediscovering things here and there that aren't exactly news to the rest of the world: Television, Can, Dylan, the Byrds.

I've got some major blind spots, mostly in dance music, rap, mainstream country, metal, and anything that's been on TRL lately. I like jazz more than I listen to it, and if I named fifty favorite artists, ten of them would be people I "have to be in the mood for" or really only listen to one album by. But another twenty would be in constant flux.

Most likely no music will ever mean as much to me again as Depeche Mode in 1991 or David Bowie in 1995.