Glitch

"Loneliness, loneliness; such a waste of time"

 - The venerable Solomon Burke

Cultivate a callus

How 
can 
I 
ask 
anyone 
to 
love 
me
when 
all 
I 
do 
is 
beg 
to 
be 
left 
alone?

With All This Fever in My Mind

On Automobile Malfunction, Wakefulness, and Goofball Romance

Most everything you do has been done in Black & White.

And, I find, that's quite alright.
A slightly soaked girl on a sleeping night.

Je suis la belle et la bête.

Let us not self-destruct with longing and ennui. Let us not light the match of guilt and despair. Let us instead play records, turn on the fan, add ice, clean the cob of all its corn, and leave the rest to Amélie.

Rollin' Mama Blues

What is it about America that obscures all other places
almost to the point of erasure? And how is it that it can
reach you anywhere you are? Irritating, but once you've
found roots in America, all your noble aspirations toward
globalness* become severely compromised.

Yet there is life outside America, folks. It doesn't quite
sound like Kate McTell, but it's there, and it's beautiful
and it's got its own kind of blues.

I, for one, am quite pleased at the prospect of life in
a reachable elsewhere.

Every elsewhere is here to somebody.


*If you are unable to comprehend in the author's tone a fair amount
of sarcasm and self-mockery, kindly step away from this blog.
I fear it will do you no favours.

"these old tomcat feelings you don’t understand"

How could we understand? Us women, with our natural fidelity and nesting instincts; our softness, our cleanness, our patience and leftbehindness. What could we know about rambling feet and wandering eyes? About dark urges and dive bars? About prolific desire, about grit, sex and recklessness? About what it is to kick around the possibility of love as though it were a bottle of 100 proof moonshine—an enticing risk, guaranteed to intoxicate, likely to destroy.

"...part of my story has been an urgent wish to have the same shambling adventures as the men in my life. I wanted to jump off balconies and stagger through the streets of some foreign town, shirt stained with blood. I wanted to pour Bushmill’s down my throat and light myself on fire. I knew every word to the song “Pasties and a G String,” a winking, bawdy ode to the low-rent freedom of live nude girls. In the year after college, I went with a male friend to a strip club — one of those junky roadside joints — and I had this idea that I would run my eyes all over those women, I would devour them, but instead I felt strange and wrong inside, and I made him give all his dollar bills to the heavy women and the older women no one paid attention to, and I went home that night and lay alone in bed feeling so blue. (Because I wasn’t one of those women? Because they were?)" (Here.)

Yearning

There are things that make you want to want. This is foremost among them.



Brought to you by this amazing girl I know who did this amazing thing for me.

On Interruptions, Tangents, Repetitions, and Fixating on Details

I attribute to Hindustani Classical Music all my annoying conversational contortions. Listen long enough, and you may begin to hear beauty in the complexity, superfluity, exaggeration.

This revelation/self-justification is brought to you by the annual
Delhi Classical Music Festival.

Heave

(Lester Freamon gets it.)

"She had to make a supernatural effort not to die"

Dying can seem satisfactory as a response.
But let's all try to live instead.

Marquez, Bolaño and Bakshi: A Summer Conversation Series

NY3 / Oh such a prima donna sorry for myself

Something is wrong. Chain bookstores smell of seduction and
lobotomy. First World poverty being marketed as Third World
luxury. Those girls look and smell overwhelmingly like plastic
puff pastries; I forget where I am going. No one stops to listen
to the band with a bucket-bassist and ghungroo-percussionist.
My precarious envy-admiration balance is suddenly way off.
Snow is banal with sunlight and efficiency. No fruit all day.
No sign of bliss. Every sound an irritation except this:



Spicy noodles aren't spicy. I don't have a crush on anyone.
Laundromat's givin' me the weepies, and not the good kind.

In other words: look at this fuckin' hipster.

So weary all of the time

Etta Etta Etta. A voice bluesed raw. Haunted, hysterical, restless, listless, sick at heart.

Stoneking and Sal Paradise

...evaluating the hardness of the steel halls and the softness of the woman who is not there.

Marry me, Heems.

Your great grandfather
was Edgar Wallace. Mine was
some broke brown subject.

Indoors with massproduced cake

On this particular Sunday evening, there doesn't seem much point in listening to anything other than this:

For Robyn

I love my man better than I do myself.

Even feminists get the blues.

Sonic Manifesto

A minor swing's a major thing.
'specially when you're rambling.

Why I Am In New York:

"I am in New York to have a battle of wills with the apotheosis of civilization. (Or such like.) I am here to exercise a vague whim so it doesn't fester into a mid-life what-if. I am here because why the hell not? I am here to get big city life out of my system. I am here to take a last shot at being young and fun, and to find out what that even means. I am here because they speak Spanish and Urdu and Hindi on the streets. I am here because it is the epicenter of weird shit. I am here because it was as good a place as any. I am here to piss the city off with my ambivalence towards it. I am here for any number of reasons, none of which are really strong enough to hold the weight of my [nostalgia] for India, my love for Oregon and my desire for other places. But I am here, because it is an in between, a temporary, perhaps even a good story. I am here because on any given day, there may be a Mariachi band on the subway.

I am not here to Make It Big. I am not here to fuck a lot of bankers/models/heirs/suitjacketed douchebags. I am not here to wear high heels and short skirts. (Okay, perhaps SOME short skirts. But with Birkenstocks.) I am not here to become a New Yorker. I am not here for Times Square. I am not here to partake in a Nora Ephron movie. I am not here to be Carrie fucking Bradshaw."

[Excerpted, with mild modification, from my correspondence with one Jared Metzker. Yes, I did just quote myself.]

Bad-ass Boots.

The Coup, The Coup, The Coup.
One single band that can make you think, dance, lust, grieve.
Here's what I was listening to this evening: