Improbably, I've come around on Pas/Cal. I am loathe to forbid letting loose the derisive Pas/Cal comments though. I did do one minor bit of surgery as the new version of Citizen's Army Uniform is an abomination and it has been replaced by the "sans muscle" version. I am writing a second entry on them, I have a fiercely negative one already completed, I will perform point/counterpoint all on my own. How exciting for me then.

Of Montreal Skeletal Lamping. Nonpareil of Favor. Some sort of baroque opening, a soft voice, less aggression already. Some have discarded new model Of Montreal while desperately clinging to their copies of Cutie Pie and Tim, I Wish You Were Born a Girl and it's true he's turned sex obsessed deviant here but besides that it is business as usual. This is a character, surely, or he's having loads of the sex, the same as the myriad others he has created on previous releases. It's brilliant. There isn't a disappointment to be found here. Ssshhh...secret somehow I've learned to like the Pas/Cal album. But I will still make fun of them. The mirror has two faces. Lovely bit of exploding dissonance here, guitars, does he still pay guitars? Drum machines, feedback, nice. So far as I can tell there are not any 12 minute confessionals on this record. It's groovy. If you liked the first single then it is pretty representative. I don't listen to the last album as much as I should. I was in the downtown are the last time I listened, back when I only worked Saturdays and not Sundays too, but really I go into work hoping to see someone's car in the parking lot now, and its frenetic pace is perfect for the urban excursion, everyone seems in slow motion while your mind races to kep up with the madness. The universe is as odd a place as ever on this album. He belongs to the indie rawk kids now. It is ok, we killed all of their indie rawkers in the previous post. Sorry. Watch the Randomnumber video, he's brilliant too. Why can't I find some place to download Modern Ambivalence anyhow? Still with the slow disintegration of the first song, planned obselescence, event horizon, etc...It's fantastic. Tinkles amidst the head rush of dizzying noise. Second song. Funk, falsetto and profanity. He plays naked now. He falls into sad indiepop mode in a lot of these songs, still. Will Pitchfork types fall for the first few albums? Perhaps Cherry Peeel but The Gay Parade? Does he play those songs live any longer? It has been a while since I have seen him. Mostly the band remains the same. This is called Wicked Wisdom. This was meant to be a radical departure. Loads of disjointed segments glued together into a whole. I suppose it is. But it still feels like a record of songs versus a collection of bits. Will this be soundtracking some of the convention events in town? Democrats have loads more sex than republicans, they will be into the salacious grooves surely. I have not yet seen a careening influx of smelly hippies and anarchists. Apparently they are staying at the homeless shelters while visiting our fine city for a bit of protest and changing the world. It really has become a profession now. They assemble dutifully, their big papier mache heads, the grammar challenged placards, the overweight lesbians who want to go topless to really express their opposition to the two party system and the communists in the background trying to organize the guy from WalMart who showed up cause his girlfriend has read No Logo. Has she read Lysander Spooner, can you be an anarchist and not have read Lysander Spooner? Hard to say. For Our Elegant Caste, surprise another song about sex. Maybe it is all metaphorical. Last record he was on about domestic violence and death and psychotropics this time it must be Cialis and priapism. What about bruxism? It could be a deviant bit of sexual athleticism intercourse with a bruxist. Our brave local newscasters have stepped away from teh Democratic convention and the breathless excitement over the Joe Biden announcement to go wire-to-wire on a tornado that almost happened here. Dedication. Joe Biden has strange teeth. Fourth song is tender and small, piano ballad, earnest falsetto. We tried to capitalize on the convention at my job, it was unsuccessful. Perhaps our potential clients thought it silly to invest when the anarchists will lose their minds once they se a McDonalds across the street from their protest headquarters in front of the capitol at Civic Center Park. When will they burn down the Nike store? Do I need to go get a pair of Nike's tonight before the conflagration begins? Will Kevin Barnes be there? it is a good place to pick up some liberal chicks surely. Put an "Obama" sticker on your Geo Metro and you will be a chick magnet. This one may be about fornication but it's pleasant and enjoyable and pretty conventional sounding. This doesn't come out until October. Sorry Mr. Barnes. I promise not to have sex with anyone until your live show here in October so that you will have all o the ladies to yourself. That's a promise I can keep. A reference to his brother. I haven't spoken to my brother in a few months. I am a terrible brother. I work all of the time. I lost my phone. If I had my phone there is only one person I would think to call but I would not anyhow. I think I know where my phone is. Gallery Piece, more sex, it's a bit clinical. he's not really boasting of his conquests, he's just letting us know how much sex he really wants to have. I wonder if these last couple of records could be used in lower level psychology courses. Was his earlier role as twee escapist fop a role he played unsatisfactorily and this is his real self represented or was he merely sick of the people who came to his concerts dressed as Rose Robert and Dr. Lecithin? I am not feeling the physicality here, it's still a head trip. The largest erogenous zone in the body is the brain after all, know what I am saying. I am unqualified to speak of sex. I don't really have any most days. This is why I am forced to watch my olympics coverage on Telemundo. Women's Studies Victims is a clever title. Germaine Greer reference, she's in a bit of a stink by claiming that all aboriginal men in Australia are predisposed to violence against women because of white Australia's racism. She could be right, but I doubt it. A few years ago she was on about having sex with boys, hairless boys, not the 30 something's whose proudest achievement is their naturally hairless chest. I rode my bike this morning and watched an old man playing basketball at 6:30 this morning. he was near my father's age. What is with the saggy old guys going shirtless in public? Later this afternoon there was an even more peripatetic soul proudly showing how his nipples can polish his shoe tops. leave them on. My father never takes his shirt off. Is it humility? It may be skin cancer. Now he's bragging about his endowment. He is not exaggerating. i could steal the pitchfork joke about his limited edition 7" but I won't. Or did I just? THis is a bit slower, more mechanistic, it's as sexy as a madonna video. Not very. So is he banging loads of chicks or what? Is he hanging out with Geraldo Rivera? Maybe this will be the entertainment just before the keynote address. it's very seventies funkadelica, I quite like the music, but he's growing tiresome. Why hasn't he given his genitalia twee names like Fifi Ferchet and Jean Claude Doume'? They could become detached from his body and roam the town as super heroes in search of excitement. one song could be about the evil villain Troy and Jan Condom. It would be brilliant! No? Is that Dotti playing the coquette? Actually he's playing both roles. His ego is out of control. I do really enjoy this. There are so many words that it is easy to let them pass without comment for the most part, the music is engaging all the way through. Now it's a bit Bloodhound Gang. Evolution! I am reading a book on theoretical biology, I wasn't aware such a thing existed before a few days ago, it's somewhat tedious to have them present list after list of what constitutes being alive. Is it the ability to reproduce, the ability to reproduce an object as complex or even more complex, is it automobility? I don't know. I am still trying to figure out the glider guns and smoke trains that are ecologically unsound even if they exist only in virtual computers. It's all head turning. Longest song on the album now, oedipus rex reference, another treatise on how much he really would like to have sex with her or anyone. Has his wife cut him off? Is he going monk? i could be first class Shaolin these days. My book doesn't have any sex, write what you know. I need to live Paul Theroux's life for a short time in order to write sex, or Germaine Greer though by rights I should be having much more sex than Germaine Greer. This album is going to sell like gangbusters at the Ritalin clinic. This could be a mystical poetic discourse on the act, like Miss Devi and Hillier in Tremor of intent where it played as some sort of erotic symphony. I was a little bothered reading it even. I have an active imagination. I live inside of my head after all. There doesn't seem to be any larger structure to this record as in foreplay, coitus, post coitus, it's all about the act. I can't understand him now, he's got creepy clingy voice, the voice he may hear inside his head while he's engaged in the act, it's the demons that try to fight back the guilt of an indie kid having sex. Indies don't have sex. Next song. This could be post-coitus, he is just repeating "I feel just like a ghost" over and over and now he sounds like Crosby, Stills and Nash. Now there's the definition of sexy! How's your liver mate. Death Is Not a Parallel Move, profound. It's tender, sounds of resignation over his aggro rants on the last record. What is the appeal f playing out your internal struggles in public on a record? But again it is probably a character. He doesn't actually mean any of this, the next record will have the sequel to Honeymoon in San Francisco surely. Strings. He's a classy lothario, straight from the Fair Penitent. Oh wait, lyrics about your sister's promiscuity and your brother's err...confusion. Video games now, more things I don't do, crystal meth, again, I live a sheltered life. Some people at work camped out to wait for the new Madden video game. I did not. This album is fantastic. It goes by in a bit of a blur, not as frantic as the last one but it's clammy and sticky and slippery and piscine. Echoes of regret in those pings? Probably not. He's a handsome young man, he should be having sex with girls with pierced labias and seventeen tattoos between their nipple and their belly button. Someone has to. My calling is Christmas. The song has moved into a segment that doesn't seem to bear any relation to what has passed before. Interesting. It's all slightly VHS or Beta. Be aware of that. Mingusings now. Is that some sort of innuendo in the title? I am so naive, it helps me retain that boyish quality. is he not just the modern version of Pat Boone then? This isn't sexy, it's neurotic sounding, it's nerdy, it's frantic and on edge You can't have sex to this. Can you? Pat Boone might do his own version of Id Engager for the Jonas Brothers crowd. It's certainly nowhere near as sexy as say a Tony Toni Tone song. It could be an accompaniment to those educational films on the science channel with the infrared porn where they zone the screen out to infrared images but you can still see the phallus at attention and Desmond Morris with his comb-over talks about how women dress more provocatively when they are ovulating, how their lips turn red when they are aroused so they accentuate with lipstick, how the act of courting involves feeding your partner to prove you are a capable partner. Nah, there's nothing that interesting here. If Desmond Morris had had a cameo ala Phil Daniels on Parklife it might have been more fantastic. It's just a groovy little kiddie pop number with your older brother who still hangs out with the kids in high school driving his grand fury behind the grandstands and smoking with the girls who look 29 but are still in 11th grade. That's kevin Barnes. Congratulations. Last song. Slow, it's the lullaby to get you to sleep after the endorphin rush of the all night festival of hedonism. Bravo. Gordon Mcintyre said it, "sex is boring", but you know this is still pretty fantastic. Better than the car crash I witnessed last evening and better than the dozen people who just drove away after witnessing it. It's better than a lot of things.

It's A Musical The Music Makes Me Sick. It starts off slightly Soda Fountain Rag. Is that her main competition then. I am pretty sure that I've only ever heard one Bobby Baby song. The chorus is surprisingly ace, her voice has jettisoned its flatness in the chorus. There is meant to be joy. I believe. There is so little joy in pop music these days. Pas/cal have brought down this plague upon us, and Math and Physics Club and Graeme Elston and their dreary compatriot merchants of morosity. It's not even morosity, that's kind, rather it's aseptic, it's lack of soul, hearts tethered. Materialism and wealth have dealt their inner beings the cruel thwack of freedom from scarcity of necessities, of friendship, of fear, it's a misrable existence to be alive in 2008 what with all of the decadent days we have spent as resentful youths and the even more fruitful days that lie ahead. It's a misery. I keep typing that. I am not unhappy. I would yearn to know unhappiness. I am not happy. I am only alive. Barely. I am going to be able to go to school for my job soon. Possibly. I had an annual review and it went swimmingly. I was previously convinced of my impending doom. I underestimate the esteem others invest in me. If I was administering Bobby Baby's annual review I'd tell her to loosen up slightly. Surely she's clever but she's got this inhibited manner about her. Which are the uninhibited in these days? Moto Boy, the fellow from Corduroy UTD, Plastic Mastery, the Leslies, desperate piners who turn their insides outsides for the world to view. The don't do silly things such as living their music, they surely don't mean it any more than Bobby Baby pretends she doesn't but they make the attempt at deception and we appreciate them for that commitment. This is actually rather lovely. I quite like it, but gosh if she invested more than a spoonful of heart filled exuberance it would then turn absolutely marvelous. I wish I could label more things marvelous. I will start to use 'marvelous' in my everyday existence. This website was once called "Marvelous Boy" but it's so trite to name your website after a pop song. I have decided, others disagree. Much better to memorialize someone with great promise that never lived up to it, no one would understand if I had usd my own name but then I have become Ron. I am Keith. Third song is terrific, they do best when they blend their vocals, I am enjoying the piano, I still long for more piano pop. Why then did I start this review off so negatively? I am not sure. I had only listened once. In my car. It is headphone music. Not because it is intricate and dense but because it is small and insubstantial, the outside world tramples through the flower fields within the notes. Lovely little piano break with twinkles of keyboard interspersed. I really fancy this. Marvelous. I think he sings the next one, he has a lovingly earnest voice. Is he German or is he too an ex-pat alien to the metropolis they find themselves in. More ace piano. It is not very Soda Fountain Rag. It feels like a Morr record only in its cleanness, their junior league. It's a bit Bjork here, and I lie, it is still very Soda Fountain Rag. She's got more sass than I credited her for earlier on but there is a complexity here that compensates for her basic performance. I'd rather bands sang more of schadenfreude and less of suburban ennui clearly they should adhere to a code of important topics that have nothing to do with self-reflection. Simply because I indulge my self-absorbed tendencies here doesn't mean I want to analyze these pop songs. Another really beautiful section is playing now, they sing in unison and it sounds hopeful and warm. It's all very warm. We might have restraint but it serves as slight kindling all the same. Very Bjork in the vocals. Bjork was making music like this when she was 11. He doesn't possess any annoying Einaristic characteristics. Clever bit of sophistopop this, I take back, once again, my earlier skepticism. Quite. Next song, more piano, his voice, soft and warm and earnest and inbuilt with a heart worn edge. Another excellent song, clever cute lyrics that are circular and nonsensical. There is the joy we were searching for the small ephemera that carries love to all corners of the world in tiny packets in big hearts. More duetting in the middle section, tin pan alloy, Billy Joel, Carol King, it is nothing like any of those really but I like it all the same. He has a vague ethereal presence. I don't mind him at all. The trumpet sounds canned. Not necessary. I've never been to Scandinavia. When I was bumbling around Europe in 1998 with purple hair and a weak constitution I never thought of traveling north. I did just watch Megan Mccormick eating fish and cheese in Sweden. I was jealous. But then I am in love with Megan Mccormick. Among others. Back to Bobby Baby vocals, they do not impress, when he joins her things turn more interesting, it's a spiral moment, music in the background in a whirr while the vocals are concerned with kiddie matters. Have you not wretched over the new Smittens song? I was never able to stomach 'cuties', the overt sorts like Strawberry Story, the Receptionists, the Haywains. It was all too much. I always looked older than I was, I liked to pretend I had sense when I did not and it seemed so unnatural for twenty somethings to be in a band concerned with such things. I was sophisticated. I have regressed. This song is a bit of a drag. Less piano, more guitar, monotonic intonations. Next one has a buzzy Pipas intro but then back to the piano, horns, do do dos, a bit Majestic. Uh oh, jazz, blergh, now a tender piano ballad, very second Girlfrendo record. Has there been a Girlfrendo resurgence with the success of Love is All. Would a pitchfork loving kid get with First Kiss Feelings? Unlikely. Not unless Matt Lemay approved. There is less to this song than it appears, moe jazzy noodlings to no particular effect. It's all random fluff that doesn't compel. We can give up on this song then. We'll just type random words until it is over, decoupage, insolent, tivoli, ricin, inarticulacy, fervent, miscreant, dutiful, pusillanimous, verisimilitude, expiry, Gagarin, blah blah blah. Sci-fi opening to the next one, nice, sounds promising even when the flat vocals come in. Cheer up! It is a bouncy pop song I think you are meaning to create. Whiring effects in place of the piano, very Buck Rogers. When will Buck Rogers be updated for the youth? Could Edward james Olmos pass as Buck? Big dramatic bits now, not much of an impact really. Ok perhaps my initial inclination was correct. It is still better than Pas/Cal not nearly as good as Soda Fountain Rag, recommended if you like Soda Fountain Rag but buy the two Soda Fountain Rag records before you buy this one and then you can hide your disappointment behind the smiles that accompany the anticipation of listening to Soda Fountain Rag after this is over. Songs have the appearance of undue length. Are they.? They are. Most over 3 and 1/2 minutes, some over four, scandalous. This one is mostly about tedium. Oh no, ridiculous trumpet alert, is the guy trying to impress with his skills Now a fall back into some noodly headspace bit, gah they've really lost thir way here. Did Dave Fridmann produce this song? His creepy fingerprints are all over this. Maybe they were only projections off of records laying on the floor in close proximity but it's got that ugly sterility we fear from his records, a second deep plague spread by fleas on hedgehogs or hello kitty hair slides. Ending was pretty cool, Stereolab-by. Next one, circus music, and hey it is called The Circus, sounds like the organ grinder and his monkey. Peanuts, cotton candy, elephant ears, corn dogs. I suppose I am describing the state fair. What does state fair music sound like? Is each pop record an attempt at courting immortality? You read an Evariste Galois biography and despair that his name is memorialized among titans because eh had a brilliant spark of creativity that could not be contained, it rose out of him as if beyond his control. What of the rest of us who lack that coruscation? Are we condemned to be subjects of pas/Cal songs? or there is the hope in your genes, possibly scintillation lies deeper within your double helix to be extrapolated at a later date? But will my decomposing corpse find itself reveling in my descendants success over my failure? The circus is over, please don't kill the clowns, next one is Bad Day. Not a Daniel Powter cover. The ironic cover still seems an artifact of the indie rock era. We've killed all of the indie rockers now, they are all dead, the world is safe. The bad day is over. It was a short day. What All People Know. Robotic. It's music to soundtrack my mundane existence, perhaps this is why I can't sleep. I don't use any creativity at all during the day. My anti-imaginative microglia are satiated having consumed all of the fleeting, random brilliant thoughts that entered my mind but languished, died and became detritus to be vacuumed up. A pity. Bobby Baby could write a requiem. Last song. Tender. if only I had a mind like reflecting pool with ripples and valleys to capture all of the brilliance reflected into it from a collective consciousness that only some are privy to. And beneath the surface of this body of water a hidden world of depth or mountains and canyons to explore as if visiting a new vision of heaven where true feelings and hopes are worn on sleeves, soul laid bare, and weaklings like me are not castigated for never expressing their feelings to anyone. Obsessions would wither and fall, there would be a catalog o f delights to choose from and it would be marvelous. This song is Morr twinkly.

His Name is Alive Home Is In Your Head. I can't remember, it has been many long years in the wilderness, if I have already written about this album. It was the second best album of the 1990s. Were you aware of this? Long before there was a Pas/Cal, although not that long before there was an Asha Vida, there was a His Name is Alive and an Elvis Hitler too. Much of it is crafted as a larger suite or so my perceptions have adapted it. Sounds familiar. The suite of songs on I Was Disillusioned by Matthew, Mark, Luke and Casimer sounds half-completed, like it was tacked on at a whim at the last moment in an act of desperation. But those are my hurtful ears talking. A short introduction then a beautiful bit of pencil guitar, echoes abound, wordless vocals back from the golden age when there were 6 or 7 singers on every His Name is Alive album. We are still longing for His Name is Arrive, even if it might be racist. Third song already, gone from the gypsy caravan and into a snake charmer cum doomsday scenario with some eastern sounding vocals. Can't understand a word because it's effect more than message here. This is before Warren Defever knew his guitar intimately. It's probably common knowledge, the story of how they, His Name is Alive, were signed. He sent Ivo demos, and mr. Ivo at 4AD was not impressed. Warren persisted, he was young and idealistic, naive. Ivo eventually rejiggered the demos and made Livonia. It's a classic as well but we are not concerned with those facts here. Livonia, the city, needs an entry of its own one day. Or I could just link to its entry on Wikipedia. All of the ash trees in Livonia have been euthanized. Next song, charming clanging of pipes, the romance of industrial might, I could see the young Warren being a fan of the Einsturzende Neubaten and KMFDM and Sisters of Mercy. Yes. Elvis Hitler were more hardcore than industrial, it was his older brother that was either Elvis or Hitler. Moody melancholic momentum now, industrialism tuns to jarring technology to gentle glacial retreat. Now two singers. A chant, almost a capella, clockworks and sounds of urban paradise in the background. I went to work again this weekend. It has been a few weeks since I have had a day off, I haven't anything else to do. Even when I went out of town I was working all through the weekend. Well. This is when His Name is Alive were pious and devout or convincing enough while feigning it, their habits decollate, not their heads, hark. There were loads of biblical references, my friend Andrew would excitedly reel them towards me "Knock is open wide" is directly from the Bible! He would cry out in glee. And then I would explain all of the biblical references in the Stone Roses to my cousin Jeremy later in the summer. It was a lazy existence. We are on song number six, The Well, stunning, so so stunning. Guitar, ambience and a gorgeous vocal. I am assuming this is Karin Oliver. All of the beautiful things belong to Karin Oliver. Her voice is on level with Liz Fraser and Lisa Gerrard when comparing all time 4AD greats with formulas and hidden variables and simple groups on an excel spreadsheet, easily. Ivo was going to drop His Name is Alive after Livonia because foolish cretins cared little for Livonia but then he heard the demos for this record and changed his mind. You could, once upon a time, order the original demos, assembled before Ivo etherealized them. They are not anything to be treasured. Later came that box of balsa wood with the scraps Ivo discarded. I wonder what the demos to the Pas/Cal album sound like. Do they demo? Are there songs on the demos? They became the disappeared on their journey to the album. Next song, gothic, ethereal, brutal seeming, echoing guitar, gauzy production, nostalgia, humidity, the I-75 corridor, Arthur P, feral dogs in packs chasing civilization down the center of 8 mile, devil's night records surrendered to Newark. Beautiful. It was always a puzzle that something this gorgeous could emanate from Detroit. They were completely unknown in Detroit for the first five years of their existence. They did play live, as a three piece normally, sometimes they would assemble larger groups in their mystic moog orchestras but until the era of the whale and the electric giraffe they were unappreciated. It was criminal. This album was not originally issued in the USA, later Rykodisc released it in a reconfiguration because the original incarnation was beyond the grasp of the average American. I may have that reconfigured version in my ears now. Who can be sure. Much of the original intent was waylaid by the stench of corporate bunglers. Is Ryko really corporate? Unlikely. Melissa Eliot was in the band at this time. Oh how I swooned over Melissa Eliot. I would drive to Car City Records, mainly to stare at their wall of vinyl and search its contents for treasures like the Moles and Smiths' 10 Inch records but also to stare at their resident Dirt Eater. She had a beautiful guitar, I noticed, in between winks, in between deep draughts. it was a miserable existence. It is always a miserable existence. There are new records to be listened to. I found It's A Musical. It includes Bobby Baby, everyone loves here, perplexing really, It's a bit dull but then it is on Morr. Her story seems as if it should be brilliant as she's Norwegian or Swedish or Finnish and she now lives in Berlin and she has been writing songs since she was a young tyke and well she is not as sophisticated as she should be. It starts off great, but then I'll get to that some other time. It's better than Pas/Cal, most things are, little consolation. There's Something Between Us And He's Changing My Words. The ambience that surrounds the guitar strums is heartwarming, the lyrics bitterly morose, it's absolutely perfect. Now into the fog of romantic disentanglement, coming up Woodward leaving Ferndale discovering Birmingham, moving into the bosom of West Bloomfield. Look Matthew Jacobsen. Look, my High School. look, the school that I was kicked out of for exhibiting criminal shyness. Honest. I am not shy now. It's more the insecurity that smothers my well being. Are We Still Married? shows up on The Dirt Eaters EP. That was meant to b a Dirt Eaters album, I believe, there never was a Dirt Eaters album, ti rests with His Name is Arrive. When you can't play the guitar properly it seems you are forced to turn clever instead, all sorts of marvelous layerings of effects and moods happening here behind the semi-monotone(for effect) vocals. Perfect interlude of surreal childishness that blends into a dark atmospheric pice of low tones and ominous portents. It's a bit like a Conrad novel. A novel come to life, as a short instrumental, before a turn into the light, it is the HEart of Darkness, it is yellow Fever, it is youthful uprisings among the natives, all before the dawn. Much of this feels as a Palimpsest, you can sense the erasings around the edges of the songs, the careful sketching in of tender accompaniments and desire. Now the first rays arrive, a wheezing string section, possibly the soundtrack from an abattoir or drivers training video. Dissonance into a stunning violin played ever so carelessly, finger plucks and madness and the piles of hair in the bath tub drain. It's all made beautiful in Why People Disappear. Dramatic strums, then moe guitars, three or four, Karin Oliver comes in, husky, deathly, elegant, romantic, charming, exquisite. Everything that we wish we were but it is only pop song heroines that can possess such perfection. The end, the quickening, the last line, "so we're complicated, so what"-perfect-flute. Was this an open shop record? More samples. More random effluvia. It feels entirely undiscrete, amorphous, all of the songs could play at once and disorientation itself would align your senses into some unified impulse where all of the forces had returned to their primeval state. Chances Are We Are Mad, this is the obvious mix tape song. The semi-extreme guitar opening and then the fall into a gossamer ballad that weighs heavily still, a fiery momentum towards a substantiation, then the end, sharp pangs of electricity and nothing, it dissolves into the fabric of the whole. Just absolutely wonderful, this. Which is the best album of the 90s? Moonshake Eva Luna, no contest. I wrote about that one long ago. That entry is gone. It's brutal and extreme. This is delicate and preposterously beautiful. More random samples of industrial life. There is a steadiness to the playing but all about is a softening focus, the blood that seeps from the soil of the ones who came before. There seems to be a struggle inherent to the identity of Detroit. Contentedness always seems a mirage. It's a vanishing identity these days, everyone is abandoning hope, transplanting their dreams to a new epicenter. This music is nostalgic for a city that never existed, anglophilic and xenophobic all the same. I wonder if they desired adulation from those closest to them, perhaps they made these tender pleas to the angels. A drone now, baisc, it is turning me inside out though with its wavering crescendo, the undulating diminishment and the trailing edge. Into Very Bad A Bitter Hand. True heartbreak is difficult to outline. It's repeating riffs on an acoustic guitar, it's a sublime vocal, it's double tracked melancholy. The lyrics are artful and simple, in a grand sense of youthful idealization. The pretense of the title works splendidly, it's a goth student's dream made real, many a pained portrait of grievous emotional dictators were compiled with this as impetus. it's magical. When I left Detroit His Name Is Alive decided they were an R'n'B band. I couldn't make that journey with them. Where was the antiquing that made this record so compelling, the old soul nature or wordlessness that conveys more desire and loss than any romantic poem composed in any British summertime. A random strum here, it's ecological, there are paeans to the earth, to goddess' hidden in depths and blood nourishment for tribute. There are fairy rings and gorilla suits frozen in ice. Karin Oliver's "cousin" is now His Name is Alive singer, she sounds remarkably similar. The biblical nature of the proceedings adds gravitas where cynicism might subtract points for earnestness. Religious devotion could be a conduit to express love that you are too terrified to express to human companions. I've never expressed any deep emotions to anyone, I've never felt that I have unloaded any deeper passions, I feel them bundles in quantas in my fingertips and at the ends of my hair but I can't ever release them to the ether searching for a target to embrace. I am unembraceable myself. Outstretched. A silly martyr complex. I am not sleeping because I am condemned to a dream life of regret. There is still time, the clock is ticking "literally". The wash of guitar here is magnificent, first mirroring the ticking of a clock, my metaphor extended into the night, another guitar joins, another, mild dissonance composed into a radiant symphony. And brevity, always the tact o make your point and escape. Pas/Cal songs are all too long. Exhaustion comes only just before the sunrise. Love's A Fish Eye, this could be mix tape material, but it could only finish a side and it must be accompanied by Dreams Are of the Body. I would have daydreams of His Name is Alive performing this at an awards show somewhere somehow and the crowd awash in tears of joy over it's graceful beauty. Guitar scrapes, soaring vocals, stop, climactic finish with the ecstatic rush of guitar dissonance sculpted perfectly into a gentle farewell that segues into a moment of reflection to carry through.

Skeptics Skeptics. As promised, me, in rock mode. Hmmm..perhaps the Skeptics shall come later. They aren't that interesting really though many will claim they are. Would Walter Beaver? Cancer is meant to prove precedence. That sounds heartless. Third post in a row where cancer hangs heavy over the proceedings only this time I will keep diseases out of the main story arc. Oh and then there was Bailter Space, Bailter Space people were in the Skeptics. That makes them more rather than less interesting. Especially with the involvement of John Halvorsen and Brent McLaughlin and not Mr. Parker. A link to Adults and Children might be appropriate even afterwards. The mad half and halfling. Long Fin Killie Valentino, loads and loads of flash imagery laden p.c. lyrics. He's a brilliant performer. Sometimes his correctness gets a bit silly. How many times can you rage against the crushing and debilitating effects of patrimony before it gets tiresome? With Luke Sutherland there does not appear to be an answer, it's a quintic (look at my fancy math speak), though someone really should tell him that the music he's making with the Rot is really dull, as dull as the record that Saint Etienne made with the Rot. It may require an intervention or a disputation even, a Tartaglian dilemma. Has he done anything since? Wither Bows? Godiva is probably not meant to be sexually charged in any Will and Fatimah sense, rather it is oppression expressed through societal prejudices and bastard heterosexual men. Kitten Heels, explained from the point of view of an overweight defiant young lady, the proto-Ditto. The perils of a life in an obesity disguise. I am somewhat obese. Slightly. I haven't any kitten heels. I don't seem to have an edge even after "working" all through the weekend, work on Sunday was actually rather nice, there were brown shoulders with miniature bruises and brown bellies and the sound of soft footsteps muffled through a layer of neoprene and nylon to catch my breath unaware in between exhalations. It was the highlight of my week. I have so very little to look forward to. Please remember this above all things. There are kinder, more decent people in the world than me, easily there are 17 or 18. Some lie awake in close proximity. It is sleep that I desire. But I won't sleep. I keep my desires at bay. I will write this meaningless entry and have "head case racist jibes, sick of deep fried arteries" flowing through my head while I watch the award winning olympics coverage on Telemundo. Is Lorena Ochoa swimming for Mexico? Carlos Slim could buy Michael Phelps. Otherwise I am not certain that their medal chances are promising. These songs are making me long for a glass of water. Water is out of reach. I have a propulsive ache just behind my eyes. Oh wait, this is Kitten Heels, whoops, the sharp stabs on guitar!!! From a lone little little man. A little gay man. At work today there was a giant, with very large hands, he could have gone over to the cotonwood felled in the thurnderstorms this past friday and cast it into the sea. Second song was actually named Pele, I knew this. The footballer or the goddess? Perhaps it possesses dual meaning? This one is glammed up, I think it's about dancing and dressing like a tart because you're proud to be silly. You are subjected to Luke Sutherland's caustic observation because you probably have a tattoo because you are almost half as rebellious as everyone else is. Is it not more rebellious to be untattoo'd? I think it is. I am most rebellious of all because I don't have a tattoo and I don't look at my skin in the mirrors or within memory afraid that the moles on my torso have changed places so that they spell out secret messages to the lemurs hidden in my bathroom cupboards. Death is a small price for heaven, it's paddy the knight hidden come to rescue me. We/re going ot inhabit my teeth soon. A Thousand Wounded Astronuauts, is short, it is foreshadows of the spoken word thing he did later. Gritty, phonetic story about sneakers and hair care products and traditional English racists and then there is boring music laid beneath, well done. Now back to buzzsaws and skull hammers and drills. When one views the Olympic coverage on Telemundo you get soft focus features on people whose favorite artist to train to is Murcof. I wish. Murcof could remix the Mexican national anthem, It would be splendidly astral. There is a momentum soaked drone to Long Fin Killie. They wore their Can obsession more on the sly, in a hidden shadow outside other's obsesion with making comparisons to AR Kane. AR Kane were an abomination, it's true, admit it. Nice crescendo with loads of little person guitar, he just plays sharb stabs and echos, nice things in a row. Is the bass player using a drum stick on this one? Unlikely, it's not very percussive. They didn't mix their records that fabulously. It was the same person, always, Jamie, maybe they put the antiqued wood etching all about the room for inspirations and when they were recording the Lady Jordan of Duncanstone of Duncan of Jordanstone admired their beauty so. Last song from the first side, Valentino I remember because it was on heart etched in vinyl for the longest time. Vinyl was inexpensive. I was not rich. Spencer Tracy was never my role model, I love the line Handful of broken fingers toughs in darkened street scenes. I have this recurring daydream of holding my own disfigured phalanges. I have never broken a bone in my hands, it is why I am able to type this elegant prose. Not any of the nerve junctions or interstital spaces have been collared with rogue collagen and platelets bent on fomenting revolution and dissent and an overthrow of my corpus callosum. I've watched Mr. Valentino on Sunday Evening silent film night and I don't see "it". I was meant to be born in the 50s. My life was meant to be lived as a square, Joe Dullsville, cookie cutter letter jacket mannequin man. I was certainly not of the roaring 20s, no, in my past life I was a windscreen wiper. The music is a repeating segment of atmospheric guitar, it could pass for a riff on some days, some more fancy guitar work and the awesome droning sax comes in sugary near the end. If all saxophones were this glorious they would need not be collected and melted down to make darts and pockets. A random dissolution to end things on a disoriented note. Tomorrow I have my annual review with my boss. I don't feel like contesting anything in it, I am so tired these days, I will accept my drubbing like a man. I did get a promotion this year. Some score. More hours, same pay, much sought after possibilities of even less pay down the line, the charms of living a charmed life. Some people look elegant and delightful in brown. I wear the same pants every single day. nNext song. Some drone. Coward, a track to bridge the brook between the tender focus of Houdini and the ripping angst of this album. There's some How I Blew... here, How I Blew... how we missed you, please write long letters on tiny postcards in acrobatic script with a symmetric send off akin to STRAW WARTS. I am not rocking in this entry. I am driven to irritating levels of incoherency by my lack of REM sleep. I was watching a show on Shelter Island as I lay almost asleep for the better part of the evening. I spent an evening as Murray Gell-Man's imaginary biggest fan with someone who professed a wholesome love for Richard Feynmann. Better to side with the person that nobody likes but who can execute a spot on French Canadian accent and who could pronounce my name better than I can, in the end, isn't it. I am going to receive the list of comments on my performance by my own local worker bees, I have been yelling at people for not tucking in their shirt, for walking slowly in lockstep and for telling mud to hurry up and dry. I am allowed to operate heavy machinery when I am in this state, it is not against the law. Now the crescendo, violas, guitars, mad drumming. They removed drummer A and replaced hi with Drummer B after the first album. Which is better? I am not a drummer. Their drummer told me once that the Pram drummer is best. Perhaps it is true. Next song. Girlfreind, a great story, "half dressed in bit parts", more prattling on about weight. Luke Sutherland is a dashing, handsome young man. Is he feeling guilty over his good fortune? More sizzling violas and guitars and distorted vocals, we're building up to something now, it's the rise in intensity of musical intercourse just before the climax, bam, it's a pleasure to impact your ears on the side of your aching head over bouncing uterus' and tingling extremities. Looping lines all spun together on some lovely loom. Loose weave, pull a corner it all dissolves to AR Kane, allegedly. He has written novels. i am writing a novel. Really. It is about a nursing home, that is all I will ever reveal. I have the perfect villain, he is based on a real life person who is possibly dead by now. But then sometimes I think that someone's mother should surreptitiously ascend towards villainy but maybe she is better suited for the role of antagonist in a head shrinking daydream in the dimmer corners of my fictional landscape. Next song Matador. Elegant, very first album dreaminess, drug references and body image concerns. The bass carries the song, and the drums, machine gun drums. The most fabulous Long Fin Killie drum exhibit is on the b-side to the Lipstick single where the original version of Lipstick shows up with the living drummer level with or out competing the drum machine. It is a greek epic, or a Charlie Daniels song, the devil went down to Georgia and while he dodged the Sukhois and came to life as a Roland 5050 and a Vladimir Putin poster on his bedrom wall next to the Farah poster. Very slow now, a prairie thunderstorm in the distance, a low rumble of murderous Angels in Sturgess, the sound of a man removing another man's head on a canadian bus. Cannibalism on wax. Or not. My head is barren at the moment, no meal for even the aedes aegypti wandering among the photons and photinos. I like the "selectrino" best, it sounds like it was manufactured by Magnavox. I am reading a biography of Evariste Galois at the moment, I thought of posting a video about him on here but a lot of the information in the video contradicts what I am reading in my book. I trust my eyes more than my eyes. Was it her uncle that murdered him? One bullet/two guns? "I need all of my courage to die at twenty." Death is a small price for heaven, blah blah blah. She married later, his best friend took her hand, forever. It must be made into a Christpher Nolan movie, Frankie Muniz could play Evariste Galois, Jude Law as Abel, Matt Dillon as Legendre. Marvelous. Inspired. "Cop says if I saw a word he'll kill me", more crazy violins and blistering lyrics and rat-a-tat through the back of your skull drumming, tinny drums can make tinny explosions, it isn't a Bonham tribute. Loads of derisive pop culture references all about and this predates Naomi Klein even. Was she thus inspired? Her new book is a laugh allegedly. She has fallen off of the hit parade of public intellectuals, sadly. I have never read No Logo, I can't abide Canadians any longer. It is a short song, it rocks back and forth about an axis. Is it a normal group? Oh dear, I don't know, I tired while trying to pick up group theory tidbits and post them in the margins and ended up drawing landscapes of Brezhnev's eyebrows instead. Last song. Cupid, loud guitars, thrilling guitars, the athletic violin. When I saw them live they were magnificent. Dressed shabbily and without any sense of style they played intricate art rock like this to perfection. It was in Detroit. All of the ugliness of the near world outside had been kept at bay by the halo of these conquering heroes. It was rampant escapism. I stared at Meghan "greencoat" with the back of my head. She had smiled when I purchased the new Long Fin Killie record. I was back living with my parents briefly after my brother foolishly decided on marriage. I moved to Denver later. I never spoke to her except in proximity to a cash register, she could have been used by management as a lure, they knew my frivolous heart. But then I do keep all of my desires at a distance.

I am at risk of blowing away in the gentle breezes if I keep with the fey, effete theme that has been prevalent the past few weeks here. Next post on something that rocks! Possibly. I am searching my ipod. I don't have a lot of things that rock. But after a hard day at work, on a Sunday , I may have more of an edge. I have my annual review this week, I am thinking it will go poorly.

Ah, a new Arnaud Fleurent-Didier record is allegedly in the works. La Reproduction! He has split with Ema Derton, Emilie, so maybe that record, Ema Derton, will not ever see the light of day? I should send Pas/Cal a copy. That's rude. But I do keep making the attempt at Pas/Cal. I think the issue is there are not any songs on the album; it's all bits glued together, unglamourous inelegant bits, it's morose, it's leaden, there are piles of annoying backing vocals dropped into nearly every song, perhaps, then, it is a record for someone else. Oh well. I have so little else to look forward to.

I am meant to be reading Kavalier and Clay but I am not. I've read five books in the time I was meant to be reading Kavalier and Clay. Evelyn Waugh prose reads very quickly.

The Chills Brave Words. Morbidness adheres to Martin Phillipps, though it is normally of a pleasing sort. A willowy tone is the determinant in his voice, in his lyrics, and in the genial pallor that surrounds the Chills. It may have been an outgrowth of Martyn Bull's leukemia and tragic death at 22, his demise might have partially injected even more mortal fears into the atmosphere around the band but it was there even in their youth, in the shadowy organ led waltzes such as Satin Dolls, This is the Way, etc...and later in cliched drug habits, bankruptcy and coarse tributes from other bands that would add a existential bleakness that was no longer tempered as it had been early on by escapist tendencies of inexperience. Track one, the mood is desperate, lyrical longing, the organ a slow grind to neutralize the human emotion that only thinly resonates in the vocal. The words play as if sung from the teletype machine growing more rustic even now draped in darkness in the corner. Second song has started just now, Rain, it is one of their most magnificent and most famous songs. It's a glorious repeating riff, short stabbing verses and then a lolling repeating type chorus that is just awesome. But still, even here, as his voice yearns into semi-falsetto it can be reckoned as inalterably morose. The big sadness conflicts with the cartoon image they projected otherwise. On album covers and the like it was pipe cleaners and erector sets, claymation, bright colors and whimsy. I went to a party last evening and after getting over the shock of being at a party with people around my age and having conversations with my mad dental hygienist I found myself talking to someone who had just lost her grandmother. She had died after an 11 month struggle with cancer. My own grandmother had died of colon cancer, well one, yes, obviously I did have two. Both of my grandfather's had passed on years before I was born. One had fought in both WWI and WWII and had a serious passionate crusade to conduct against the legacy of Maurice Richard and I found myself writing a fantastic biography of him in fifth grade which was read by my teacher in parent teacher conferences to my parnets and they admitted they didn't know the man I had described, neither did I, all is fair. And, well, the other apparently spent the good majority of his days making his wife's daily being a miserable existence. This was the fate of my maternal grandmother, amazingly one of a brood of 19, the one who lived on well into my twenties but whom I knew less well than the grandmother that died when I was 6. Cancer is an abomination to endure. I was six, I knew not the call of disease but rather the exhaustion of the room, the energy it drew from everyone in attendance of its ravages, from my parent's came bursts of helplessness, a late arrival was my father's rage when i recorded over a cassette that contained the last vestiges of his mother's existence, her speaking voice recorded while she held court at a holiday part the year before. Speak for Yourself a sprightly celtic influence on this, a rollick or shout more than a singalong, it's stirring. I found this album in a Sam Goody, on cassette. I had already decided I loved the Chills before hearing a note because The Chills is just an unbelievably terrific name for a band especially one that sounded like this. And then there was New Zealand and its representation of the end of the world, the kingdom escaped from a wardrobe, people decades behind the times, reverse flow toilets and the ephemera of the Moa. The first website I ever made was a ludicrous enterprise where I assembled semi-explicit plans on how to construct a time machine. It was not an original idea. I had stolen it from Alfred Jarry but originally I had credible ambitions to accept input from dozens of friends(as if I had dozens) on its design and eventual implementation. I could claim it was a high minded metaphorical exercise but it was not. It was possibly more fruitful than spending a few hours speaking about death, time machines must be asymmetrical in order that they may slip between the crevices of spacetime and aphids are key. I surprised myself with my familiarity on the topic of death even though truly only one person near to me have died. My best friend from childhood died. It's strange still to learn of death and experience death through technology, to not have heard from someone in over two years and one day receive a phone call from her mother telling you she has died carrying groceries on a stairway, losing her footing and striking her head and dying. It's still something you expect to overcome, some day you will turn the next corner and run into her and you will excuse your clumsiness and beg a thousand pardons for not having called. There is a song called Ghost of An Unkissed Kiss that always entices memories that seem inappropriately hopeful and the nights of moonlight fishing in the center of Lake Voorheis, a dedication on the radio when being driven to the airport, the smell of curry when you walk together to a friend's hme, and the after school ritual of waiting on the curb and staring up at the bedroom window watching her recognize the exact moment you have departed. And the sadness of the tender whisper in your ear at her engagement party when she confessed that she had always imagined "it would be us getting married.". Wet Blanket. I have experienced death in strangers, more commonly. When I was 12 at school, on the last day of session, there was the traditional antics of youth in the front green and parking lot and a young girl, only a year older than me had come to school intoxicated and fell and her head laid open for everyone to see on a parking curb and she died on the spot while the revelry continued unknowing. When I ran over as a witness I don't remember feeling anything at all, i told my mother about it, I went to do my paper route and only occasionally had dreams of her riding on the back of my moped. I wasn't converted into being thoughtful or inspired by the experience, but I remember the pangs of guilt over my not having fully rehearsed to proper course grief all summer long for when we returned to school the next year it was a small dedication in the next year's yearbook, a stain on the parking lot, nothing further to be concerned over except for the fact that my life went on when apparently others had taken a pause from the ghastliness. Ghosts has begun. Martin P's more intricate dissection on the topic that seems to be preoccupying my thoughts today. i thought of someone else all evening long, a living, sentient being, I had made a conscious effort to avoid it, but chanced good intentions turn over regularly in the course of human events or something even more inscrutably vague. And so when at the aforementioned party this person who may be a close acquaintance of my mad dental hygienist with the chrysalis tattoo behind her right ear, eloquently recalled the patterns of her grandmother's needlework and dear and kind eyes, I thought only of words on a page and what they could mean outside of what they meant. My mind turned to rediscovering a kind soul's warmth and I listened with the false intention of caress but under the duress of heart confusion. House With One Hundred Rooms. In another shared with stranger's moment I witnessed a gruesome death in a car accident. Though the passing happened in secret, in a Chrysler Lebaron. We were sitting in Ann Arbor, in a restaurant cataloguing a grueling afternoon of P. Chem recitations and laboratory examintations and we were feeling the worse for it but then came a sobering tide of emotion. Like patricians in the colosseum who had entered to watch a soul cast into the darkness as if a flickering candlelight in a sudden gale across the shore. The young person behind the counter called frantically into the telephone, it's the clearest memory, the slang riddled excitability, the breathless description of the scene where this person had been thrown from a vehicle and thus lay controted, lifeless, along the side of Stadium Blvd. The maudlin elegance of this song lingers, its sounds revisiting their ghostly counterparts, their complements. It turns out it was played by those past their emotional peak, it is wan and transparent, but utterly compelling and heroic. It is a reflection. It is more than an introspection. It's always more marvelous when experienced in the evening, strange for a comic book. Nighttime is for the introverted, those who can't live without so they pour all of their emotional being into sharp flashes of imagination and false constructions darting across a vague horizon the lies between the living, the vital, and the dying, the dreamers. Hollow bones filled with extra chambers of the heart that have the muffle arrhythmic beats of weak willed artists tucked inside. Looking for a Chagall sky at dusk when all around you is the brilliance of anonymous beckons the better angels to their reward. Dan Destiny and the Silver Dawn. I was in the company of many people just after their death when I was a nursing aide. I was an excellent nursing aid. Mainly I was appreciated
because I was intensely curious, perhaps selfishly, about all of our patients. I chatted with most of them and with an innately annoying habit of asking far too many questions should I not petrified silent by your existence I weaseled my way into memories constructed around the flowery days of the youth of weathered friends. They had built the MX missiles that inspired nightmares of armageddon where I would invariably end up in the tiny bathroom in our house while the end came desperately tying to keep the fallout away by stuffing damp towels along the threshold. Others dated Elvis Presley. Some boasted of having eaten the same meal every day for lunch for 30 years. Alzheimers robbed some but still these empty vessels greeted you each morning with a wrinkled, unworried smile and later one felt regret when the families would receive only expressionless stares in response to their searching embraces. A sprite, this jangly Dan Destiny, I have the original version on a Bucketfull of Brains Flexi somewhere. In fact I have everything the Chills ever released up until some point when it didn't seem necessary any more, sometime during the Clinton era. They meant so much to me. It was not disappointment that caused my heart to stray I only let the distance become filled in with distractions and excitements of a different age. Night of Chill Blue. Is this the superior sequel to Pink Frost? On some overcast days it is their greatest song ever. A simple repeating guitar line, the garage rock opera drama of the percussion beneath the warm tones, and the climactic rush near the end, not overflowing with activity but always with a taut visceral suspension. Pink Frost has that alien emotional luminescence that perpetually retains it otherworldly nature even but NOCB has it by a hair. Next one, 16 Heart-Throbs, the oddest song on the album. It is perhaps a distant cousin to earlier born oddities such as Dream by Dream or Whole Weird World but by these moments of careerist expansionism Martin P. was well over the carefree recklessness of twee psychedelia. Mentions of corpses. Cleaning a corpse for transfer from is an initially unsettling prospect that turns peaceful and safe. You are near someone when their soul has just departed this plane of existence there is still all of the human ambience surrounding them, death could pass for sleep, their cherished photographs on the dresser next to the bed still embedded with their last mournful glances as they involuntarily discover the power of mortality and the feebleness of their appreciation for the days that passed before the days that were forgotten. The only torment remaining is the false reflexes of a body establishing an equilibrium with nature, an empty room, a naive boy. "Remember the good times with you Jane". Brave Words, the title track, has started and it is a personal made political song, perhaps a silly declaration antithetical to the yuppie lifestyle. Were there legitimate yuppies in New Zealand? Outside of Auckland, when I was there, it seemed that most inhabitants had only just escaped 1954. There were slabs of meat though, staring out from every shop window, it was the nostalgic gourmand. Nice anatomical imagery to be discovered in the lyrics. This is the sound of the South Island. Another amazing song has just begun Dark Carnival, an epic piano-led ballad. It's dramatic and pressing, not ethereal in as much as it is forcefully melancholic. Nordic. There is a new Haruki Marukami book just out and it chronicles his life as a runner. It has received a puzzling review in the Economist this week. I wonder if it is half as mad as his fiction writing, could his legs have legs carved from windmills, turning quickly the concrete aggregate to diamonds used as lenses to avoid the depths of 1000 tiny entrances to deeper wells with Otis elevators propelled by tiny copies of Michael Faraday. Or some similar sort of ridiculousness like earnestness or coherency. It did take me a while to get past my prejudice and into the lovely state of Hard Boiled Wonderland but then somehow I raced through Wind Up Bird Chronicles. Where should I turn next? To the running memoir? He details the euphoric ordeal of a 62 mile marathon. Ugh. I am the world's worst runner. I will run 17 or 18 days in a row and then not run for 19 or 23 or 87 days in a row after that. I don't know why. I enjoy running. It is only breaking through the inertia of inaction that is keeping me from world record times. Sometimes i think of some things or some persons who might inspire me to run anywhere any time but then her memory dissipates in the emptiness of rooms after exercise, the reward feels diminished. Last song, an absolutely marvelous song, Creep, it's skeletal pleading to the void, it rings back with a warm echo and caress of soft acoustics and dream warring. On the desk about me there are not any personal mementos, there is barely a single acknowledgment of my existence in anywhere that I conduct my life. I have left a sterile imprint on this world. The photos on the wall are of strangers. Each photo has been cut from a calendar. Walls are painted colors that are bright and alienating; the rug seems random and undisturbing. I need a photo of my mother somewhere. Before I live through a plane crash and search frantically through my wallet looking for the last vision to comfort me in my dying.

It is marvelous that one can watch the entire movie in parts on Youtube. Margaret Sullavan, sigh.

Update: "Gore Vidal once wrote, “Margaret Sullavan was a star whose deathbed scenes were one of the great joys of the Golden Age of Movies. Sullavan never simply kicked the bucket. She made speeches as she lay dying; and she was so incredibly noble that she made you feel like an absolute twerp for continuing to live out your petty life after she'd ridden on ahead.”"

New Au Revoir Borealis album (9/30), four songs from it posted on their myspace, lovely and wonderful things.

New Of Montreal song is fantastic. He's still rather "off", very much. Brilliant.